On the Stewart / Colbert Rally

I wasn't there. I know quite a few people who were, but I couldn't get down there. So, no rundown from yours truly. That's alright. The event was symbolic, so another “who-said-what” recap doesn't matter. What's most interesting is the number of interpretations there are of the rally. Normally, or at least in my experience, there are two version of every activist happening in DC, one wildly over-optimistic and one dryly conservative.

There were roughly 200,000 people at The Rally to Restore Fear / Sanity this weekend — nearly three times the number of people at Glenn Beck's totally un-ironic rally to restore fear this summer.

Gen-X blogger Mark Ames is annoyed: “it’s an anti-rally, a kind of mass concession speech without the speech–some kind of sick funeral party  for Liberalism, in which Liberals are led, at last, by a clown.”

The Washington Post sums up the rally with a soundbyte from Stewart: “At a news conference after the rally, reporters asked Stewart what message he had sent to his constituency. ‘We don't have a constituency,’ he insisted.” The article implicates liberal ineffectuality with that.

Joshua Green at The Atlantic had 17 impressions, the last of which were: “15. Mood was heavily ironic, slackerish. ‘Enthusiasm,’ such as it was, didn't seem voting-directed; 16. Didn't get the sense too many people understood the purpose of rally (me either); 17. Or care (meaning ‘all still had a good time’).”

At Slate, Christopher Beam is more positive: “The Rally To Restore Sanity and/or Fear, held on the National Mall Saturday afternoon, ridiculed the whole idea of a political rally. But it also managed to send a message about the broken political system, how the media abets it, and why it's OK to care — even for professional ironists.”

So, what event did we have on Saturday? It seems that getting out the vote wasn't a key concern — that's somewhat disappointing (voting, as one person says in the Slate article, is indeed a civic duty). 

Tuesday! Get Out & Vote!

Near-Complete Success is Not Enough

“The Obama administration cut taxes for middle-class Americans, expects to make a profit on the hundreds of billions of dollars spent to rescue Wall Street banks and has overseen an economy that has grown for the past four quarters.”

In response to near-total success the Democrats are, very likely, about to lose Congress. I say near-total because, to the chagrin of progressives, we do not live in a perfect society. And to the great vitriol of the radical conservatives, they are not in power / we still live in a free & democratic society. And because conservative economic policies were such a dramatic, almost fatal, disaster, people who are still unemployed are going to . . . reinstate those failed policies. Is this a: #democracyfail ? Not if you reward success, punish failure, keep accountability alive, and Vote Blue!

You Must Vote

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Last Page of the Internet: Christine O'Donnell, Michael Jackson, Angelina Jolie, Barack Obama

A few days ago, Scott Esposito responded to a post by Stephen Mitchelmore at This Space. Stephen asks at one point why his very thoughtful, long-form reviews aren't being picked up by more than a few hundred readers per day. [NB: The Wooden Spoon gets a few dozen hits per day.]

Scott, in turn, responds: “the method of building a literary site with high amounts of traffic is not mysterious. Go have a look at the Huffington Post books section, where every week you can find gossip about celebrity memoirs and counter-intuitive lists along the lines of ‘10 Most Outrageous Outfits From New Book “Critical Mass Fashion” (PHOTOS).’ Just make sure to have enough important names within your h1 header, say something contentious but not terribly complex that will generate a billion links, and keep it all short and with a lot of photos. Copy that with your own stable of writers, and you too can build a fairly well-trafficked site. This is not rocket science.”

This is true. We are not rocket men.

Then, at the end of his post, Scott recommends a book that ought to be near at hand whenever one thinks critically about the relationship of art, artists, and literature to the economic marketplace: Theodore Adorno's The Culture Industry. The importance, or rather, the prescience of this collection of essays cannot be overstated. We live as if he had produced us, in the sepia tint of Adorno's critique.

Further back, the critic Adam Kirsch published an essay in Poetry Magazine on the importance of ego and recognition to a writer's motives. He wrote, in regards to Keith Gessen's now-forgotten novel, “The author had claimed recognition, the critics wanted to deny it — it was as simple and passionate as that. Inadvertently, they had exposed literature for what at bottom it really is — a power struggle.”

All these wires are dangling and I want to say something about an h1 title line crystallizing the uncanny nature of internet authority, that the end of our reliance on web popularity will come at the moment of this quintessential epiphany, that there will be a revulsion to the tool's influence on our own processes of understanding — but it's not in me to concentrate right now. It's late right now. There are probably thirty people who will read this.

Short Notice; Big Excitements

Dark Sky Books has just announced next year's Spring poetry must-have!

TREES OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY (Poetry) Stephen Sturgeon’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Boston Review, Harvard Review, Jacket, Tuesday; an Art Project, Typo, and other journals. He is the editor of Fulcrum: an Annual of Poetry and Aesthetics.

Pub Date: 3/1/11

Django & the Duke

On Citizens United with Lawrence Lessig (via Boston Review)

This event was co-sponsored by Boston Review and the MIT Political Science Department as part of the Ideas Matter series. The next installment will be held one week from today, October 28th, at MIT, and the topic will be “Iraq and Beyond,” featuring Andrew Bacevich, Nir Rosen, and Barry Posen.

Pritchard, Hilbert, & Coyle: November 11th

Ladies and gentlemen, the Boston Poetry Union and the Wooden Spoon Blog are proud to present “Yet Another Damn Poetry Reading at The Pierre Menard Gallery in Harvard Square.” YADPRaPMGiHS, for short. Ernest Hilbert, author of Sixty Sonnets, former editor of The Contemporary Poetry Review, and inspiration for Johnny Depp's character in The Ninth Gate; Bill Coyle, teacher, poet, translator, and winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize; and Daniel E. Pritchard, little-published poet in charge of marketing at Boston Review, will read their work on:

Thursday Evening, November 11th at 7:00pm
in The Pierre Menard Art Gallery
10 Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
Harvard Square stop on the Red Line

There will indeed be FREE WINE.

Well, if that didn't convince you to come then nothing will.

Maybe this poem by Pritchard, in the early style of Milton:

“There once was a maiden from Woodstock
as easy to read as a Swiss clock.
   And when she ran loose
   the bachelors would use
oh, hell — you all know where this is going.”

Street Cred from Dan Green

“If serious critics, facing the likely demise of newspaper and magazine reviewing in the not distant future, turn to the cyber/blogosphere as an available substitute, literary criticism will flourish well enough. Such book reviewing sites as The Quarterly Conversation and The Critical Flame already demonstrate that online reviewing can be just as credible as print reviewing.”

Dan Green, “The Literary-Industrial Complex”
from The Reading Experience 2.0

Poetry of Whose Time?

12:30 p.m. Cloud Place
Elizabeth Alexander, Edward Hirsch, Ellen Doré Watson (Host: Lloyd Schwartz)

Poetry of Our Time
Three acclaimed poets read poems of detail and delight, of our struggles with mortality, with love, with the profound and the mundane. Edward Hirsch, author of How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry, reads from The Living Fire. He is joined by Elizabeth Alexander, author of Crave Radiance and “Praise Song for the Day,” which she composed for President Obama’s inauguration, and Ellen Doré Watson, Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College and author Dogged Hearts. This is contemporary American poetry at its best. Hosted by Harvard Professor and poet Stephen Burt. Sponsored by Mass Poetry Festival.

--

I'm just saying. 1970 was four decades ago, and all of these poets remember it. Whose “time” are we discussing here?

Returning

“We advocate nothing, then, but a return to inconclusiveness. A century of ‘refutations’ is salutory at least in emphasizing the fact that art has not been ‘refuted’. For the rest, the artist's ability to express himself in art would be enough, in most instances, to keep him at his vocation, though he felt it a positive offense against mankind. Art needs nothing by way of ‘sanction’ but the neutralizing of its detractors. It needs no ‘dignity’ beyond the mere zero of not being glibly vilified. To the artist, the belief that the ways of influence are devious and unpredictable, and that ‘anything can happen’, should be sufficient justification for devoting himself to his purely aesthetic problems, solving them according to his lights, and letting all other eventualities take care of themselves.”

— Kenneth Burke, “The Status of Art,” from Counter-Statement

Joel Burns: It Gets Better

A Key to a Poem Read Some Time Ago

for Ben Mazer

Denial is Murder

CNN reports on homophobic bullying:  “For Joey Kemmerling, it was his decision to reveal his sexual orientation that triggered relentless bullying at school. ‘I came out of the closet as gay in eighth grade and ever since I've been bullied. I was, for lack of a better word, and still am, the school faggot,’ the 16-year-old Joey recently told CNN's Anderson Cooper. The Pennsylvania native said his decision to come out to classmates not only evoked a firestorm of vicious taunts but also led to a threat on his life. “There was a point where a kid had a knife on school premises and said, “I'm going to kill him. I want that faggot dead.” And I had to transfer schools,’ Joey said.”

While I was in St. Paul this weekend, I heard an anchor on Fox News say that Tyler Clementi's suicide had nothing to do with his anxiety over being outed. The anchor blamed, almost laughably, the internet and Facebook — kids today have no sense of privacy! That may be so. We put too much of our lives online. But taping someone during a sexual encounter, and outing him like that, is not about a lost “sense of privacy.” Tyler did not choose that. Aside from its being a felony, that act was about shame. It was a manipulative act, aware that there is still enough bigotry in accepted society to shame this poor kid for being who he was.

We blame the conspirators who taped Tyler. We blame the bullies who threatened Joey. And they deserve it. But punishing them will not stop more children from dying. A few individuals did not do this. Deniers did this. Fox News did this. Bigots did this. Parents and teachers did this. Pastors and Priests did this. Good people who remain silent to it in high schools and colleges, in every day life, allowed this to happen. Made it happen.

Do not let it happen in your community. You are also the solution.

One Cartoon Meets Another

Getting With[out] the Program

Ages ago now, the great and powerful Nora Delaney reviewed Mark McGurl's The Program Era for The Critical Flame:

“It would take a very naïve individual not to realize that these programs have fared so well in universities for marketing reasons. Creative writing classes are a big draw at both the undergraduate and graduate level, and students are willing to shell out big bucks to take them and leave with the a B.F.A. or M.F.A. The prize-winning published novelist in the faculty — and many are prize-winning — is just another sparkling gem to draw students in, like the multimillion dollar gyms and swimming pools savvy institutions make sure to include in their package.”

Recently, the London Review of Books finally caught up with us:

“The brilliant insight in McGurl’s chapter on Oates and Carver is the determining role played in their work by shame. Shame engenders both Carver’s taciturnity and Oates’s graphomania, which is really a compulsion to restage the outcasts contest, doing everyone justice, and constituting a proof that writing, too, is real work. I disagree with McGurl, however, that the shame shared by Oates and Carver is produced by the writing programme in particular, or school in general.”

The Rumpus took their shots:

“Even with all this know-how, a seeping suspicion begins to enter the minds of final-year MFA students. As we get closer to graduating, we might start to think that perhaps we have not actually learned that much. That maybe we were better writers before we entered The Program, and that we’ve actually just had a vacation with our student-aid money. It will have to be repaid! In our worst moments, we begin to wonder whether we’ve destroyed our genius by subscribing to this institutional mind-meld.”

And then Mark McGurl responded to the LBR:

“As for our colleagues who live on Planet MFA, my experience has been that they are exceptionally well read, though the language they use to talk about their reading is different from (and for the vast majority of the public, infinitely preferable to) that heard on Planet PhD. Most writing programmes require students to take several academic literature classes along with their workshops, and the work of John Barth, Robert Coover, Charles Johnson, Michael Cunningham and many others is as intimately conversant with literary history as one could wish. That there are many postwar writers who have suppressed knowingness in search of a more immediate or ‘innocent’ purchase on contemporary experience only supports one of my broader claims, which is that the familiar revulsion at writing programmes so energetically reprised by Batuman is a weak foundation on which to build a scholarly account of the programme era.”

Enough to Go Around

Slate has an article today running down the responses to President Obama's recent speech, in which he implores Democrats (and liberals who are party un-affiliated) to “Buck up.” Reaction was, shall we say, mixed — heavy on the negative and not as quaintly-phrased as the term “buck up.” This is not entirely the fault of his 1950s wording, or the timing, or of his [let's face it: outstanding] work as President. Reaction to speeches like this, vying for support from the broad base of progressives, is always mixed. Some number are always critical, because some part of the collective is always unhappy. One part of that conglomeration of overlapping interests which is the Democratic Party — from civil and gender rights to environmentalism and liberal economics — uses vulnerable moments like this to deal retribution for perceived slights and oversights.

And in most cases, they are being ignored. Or at least, their interests are not being as well attended to as others. Certainly, for example, there has been dissatisfaction with Obama's hesitant (generously speaking) stance on gay rights. And there has been a backward slide toward acceptance of homophobia. The lack of progress is enough to lose their support, because that is the whole of their lives. It is their most important issue. Fair enough. Gender Rights are not being supported as strongly as they ought to be, and retribution is lukewarm support, critical reactions, and withholding funds.

Incumbent Democrats often find themselves in these untenable positions. Particularly for Presidents. They find support neither across the whole base of their own party, nor, obviously, across the aisle — or, more accurately now, over the barbed-wire wall.

This is the heart of conservative success over the three decades prior to 2008: as simple as “divide and conquer.” Each battle over a particular progressive issue is not fought against an equally staunch, similarly-sized opposition to that initiative. This is not sport, where the field is even and the teams regulation and the better side wins. This is war. Every new progressive advance opens up another front against that monolithic, well-trained, wealthy and powerful enemy: the Republican Party. Each new attempt at reform or progress makes the incumbent vulnerable to attack.

Dividing resources across too many fronts is certain failure; thus some part of the party is going to be overlooked at any given time, and then incumbents lose support within the base. So they lose in either scenario. They lose for trying at all. For being progressive. In the case of President Obama, he will lose Congress for being the most successful progressive President since FDR. This is the source of anger regarding the "Professional Left" — not just independent bloggers but outlets like The New Republic and The Washington Post as well. They attack the opposition, but they attack progressives with equal aplomb. It causes dissatisfaction and indifference within voters that Democrats desperately need to win. With friends like these, who needs Fox News?

So, for the good of every progressive cause, for the very possibility of positive change: relent in your disappointment. The Democratic Party is an imperfect choice vastly superior, in every way, to the alternative. Take up the banner. Stand together and we will make progress. Work together and the country will thrive. Remember our common cause and we will approach the dream that is a free, just, and democratic society. It exists already in our unspent labor, the work that lies ahead of us, but will remain a dream as long as our labor is withheld.