It was from my cellmates behind bars that I heard that my University of British Columbia philosophy professor, Bob Rowan, was protesting our arrest in front of the station with other placard-bearing members of the BCCLA.

The rumour about the usually undemonstrative Professor Rowan, who I knew was one of the founders of the BCCLA, demonstrating against the forces of dubious law and too much order may be apocryphal (I’ve managed to keep forgetting to ask Bob about this for three or four decades now). In terms of demonstrativeness, I was the hot-headed radical who burst into Rowan’s classroom one morning to announce that “Thrasymachus was right!” Thrasymachus, in case you’ve been away from school for too long, is a character in Plato’s Republic, the ancient Athenian classic we were calmly reading that semester in Rowan’s class, while campuses around the world (including ours) were engulfed in protests, speeches, and heated arguments.

I regarded good ol’ “Thras” as a proto-Marxist rebel in the ancient Athens of Socrates and Plato. Thrasymachus was the one who saw through the power ploys of the local ruling class, and also saw through the academic jabbering of Socrates and his pals, as they diverted attention from the real problems of the day by abstractly searching for knowledge and truth. Professor Rowan took my brilliant discovery about the real meaning of The Republic with surprising calmness, standing, as was his habit, at the windows of the classroom, aimlessly twiddling with the cord attached to the windowblinds, and picking imaginary lint from his trousers, his leg hoisted onto the radiator to facilitate the task. Rowan suggested we talk about it – about Thrasymachus, political power, ideology, ruling classes, knowledge, truth and all the rest. Which we did, for the next several weeks (and years), interrupting our academic discussions only to occasionally go into the streets to right the wrongs of the world.

That’s how I got to Courthouse Square. The Vancouver mayor of the day, Tom “Terrific” Campbell, a lawyer and one of a long line of real estate promoters who ran the funky but financially ambitious West Coast provincial city, was, for some reason, infuriated by “hippies.” The object of the mayor’s wrath was mostly young people who had made the pilgrimage to Vancouver from Quebec, and were now sitting, or lounging, or “loitering” on the steps of the Courthouse at noon hour, getting in the way, according to the authorities, of innocent, “decent” office workers who were also hanging around the square, as was their custom at that time of day, rummaging in their brown paper lunch bags for sandwiches neatly wrapped in waxed paper.

The mayor also had some local hippies to worry about. Some of them had launched a weekly newspaper, The Georgia Straight, which was apparently in favour of such arcane ideas as free speech and other rights, but not in favour of the mayor. Some of them were teaching in so-called “free schools” that had clever names like Knowplace and the Free University of Canada in Kitsilano (the acronym of this mythical institution was apparently not printable in local “family” newspapers). Others were providing “alternative” social services, such as attending to psychedelic drug overdoses, through such organizations as Kool Aid.

Others were living in “communes” and planting gardens instead of mowing their lawns. Some of them were smoking dope. A few were playing “rock n’ roll” music. And all of them, the mayor and other “decent” folk were certain, were engaged in a continuous sexual orgy. There was even a Town Fool garbed in harlequin costume and plying his trade on a government grant. No wonder Mayor Tom Terrific dubbed these lazy, unemployed, loitering types a “scum community” who were making life unpleasant for “decent” (“decent” was an important word in the mayor’s vocabulary) people, decent citizens, and decent families.

I may as well confess I was guilty of most of the above crimes. A founding member of the hippie newspaper, a volunteer teacher in a nearby free school, an “acting mayor” of a loose civic coordinating group known as the “Alternate City Government”: portrait of a youthful activist. What’s more, I was dwelling in a beachfront Kitsilano commune (the rent totalled $225 for the seven of us), writing the lyrics of romantic rock songs for a group called The French Hand Laundry (our big hit was a marijuana song titled “What’s in the Doctor’s Bag?”), and attending Professor Rowan’s political philosophy courses and several other academic offerings, as well as working at a part-time job and doing a good deal of campus politicking.

Somehow, I managed to find time in a busy schedule (this was the era before digital day-planners slowed you down) to take my free school class to the Courthouse Square in order to deliver a talk about the history of colonialism in Canada, with special emphasis on the role of the Hudson’s Bay Company. We went to the square because the Hudson’s Bay department store, kitty-corner across the street from the square, provided a vital visual aid to the lecture (this was also the era before PowerPoint tools). It was the day, we had learned in advance, that the mayor had decided to send in the local constabulary, armed with anonymous “John Doe” warrants, to clear out the square. I was soon rounded up.

Whether the story about Professor Rowan and the BCCLA demonstrating outside the local lockup is apocryphal or not, my connection to the association was soon made formal when then BCCLA president Sid Simons, and his associate Joe Woods, volunteered to represent the loiterers in court. Eventually, Simons and I appeared before a magistrate as a “test” case (charges against the others were stayed) and I was offered a conditional discharge. The condition was that I sign (and pay for) a bond pledging to keep the peace. In my best Thrasymachean manner, I pointed out that I was already keeping the peace, and that it was the foul-mouthed mayor and his police, enforcing arcane laws, who were disturbing it. The magistrate dismissed this bit of sophistry and shipped me off to Oakalla provincial prison to think it over. Armed with my copy of Henry David Thoreau’s “On Civil Disobedience” and a toothbrush, I was duly carted away.

Since I was making a point rather than defending a principle about peace bonds or attempting to display “contempt of court,” I remained in Oakalla only long enough to declare myself a one-person Blue Ribbon Royal Commission inspecting prison conditions and to write a couple of columns for the Georgia Straight. In the interim, we received maximum sympathetic media coverage and the local top radio DJ, Terry David Mulligan, even dedicated a rock song to me that perked up my spirits as I listened to it in my prison cell. Once the point had been made, I checked myself out of the hoosegow, a privilege not available to most other denizens of ancient Oakalla, except the flocks of birds who flew into and out of the atrium around which the floors of cells were stacked.

In due course (“due course” usually means several legal light-years), the flimsy “loitering” and “vagrancy” laws by which the mayor sought to stifle freedom of assembly, speech, and the right to be a pain in the butt came under judicial scrutiny, thanks to organizations like the BCCLA and lawyers like Sid Simons and many others who contributed their time and skills, “pro bono,” to defend a notion of “public good” that’s almost always under threat. And, for a while, laws originally designed to control the poor and harass prostitutes, but occasionally also used to handle political dissidents, were either repealed or rendered obsolete. (Still, craftily updated versions of such decrees are regularly hauled out even today against poor people and sex workers.) Eventually, the mayor retired to private life and, much to his credit, never again uttered a public word about anything. He died in 2012.

In further due course, I grew up, became a philosophy professor, and was dragged onto, er, elected to the board of directors of the BCCLA, thanks to the urgings of then BCCLA president John Dixon, who, coincidence of coincidences, had been a classmate of mine in Professor Rowan’s political philosophy class where we had discussed Plato’s Republic all those years ago. As students, Dixon and I were shipped out for a stint with Rowan’s teacher, Joseph Tussman, at the University of California at Berkeley. And, almost inevitably, we were introduced by both Rowan and Tussman to the works of Tussman’s own teacher, Alexander Meiklejohn, a philosopher, educational reformer, civil liberties activist and the most powerful proponent in the U.S. of the notion that citizenly education and free speech in the public forum were at the core of any viable democracy. Thus, by luck and accident, Dixon and I were among the inheritors of a civil libertarian legacy and lineage, or as Dixon likes to put it, We’ve been living off the crumbs from their table ever since.

As the association celebrates its 50th anniversary, I find myself inclined not so much to reminiscing (although, as you can see, I’m willing to do that, too) as to, in the spirit of good civil libertarians everywhere, worrying. I find myself thinking not so much about our accomplishments as about both the limits of civil liberties and what lies beyond, the broader field of our political and cultural condition.

Since I want to, in part, ponder what civil liberties can’t do, I should, to forestall accusations of apostasy, preface my comments by declaring that I’m pretty much in agreement with all the major positions of the BCCLA. Not only am I in agreement with the association’s ideas on such matters as prostitution, polygamy, free speech, abortion, civil disobedience, and most of the rest, but I’ve also had a chance to throw in my two cents and raise my hand when it came to devising those positions about freedom in a democratic society over the last quarter century.

Here’s some of what I mean about limits: there’s a “Twilight Zone” type community in British Columbia called Bountiful, B.C., home to about 1500 stranded souls. It’s run by a breakaway fringe group of the Mormon Church, and it endorses the concept of polygamous marriage, especially for the male church leaders. It not only endorses such practices, it also more or less successfully indoctrinates its young female members to believe in and abide by this holy doctrine.

There’s a Canadian law that criminalizes polygamy. It bans not only multiple marriages but any form of polyamorous relationship. After considerable hemming and hawing, the government of B.C. decided to enforce this law against the leaders of Bountiful. Naturally, the church leaders claimed that the law was unconstitutional, a violation of their freedom of religion. When the challenge to the law headed to court for some judicial scrutiny of its constitutionality, the BCCLA promptly intervened to help the court’s deliberations, as it has done over the decades.

The civil liberties view about Canada’s anti-polygamy law is that it’s unconstitutional. It violates the section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms that protects our liberty and the “security of the person.” As the BCCLA’s pro bono lawyer put it, the anti-polygamy law “invites the state to inspect the bedrooms… of consenting adults who find fulfilment in plural relationships.” An association press release added that the BCCLA believes “individuals should be free to make the life choices they wish so long as those choices do not harm other people and they engage in them with free, informed and full consent.” As for claims of child abuse and sexual interference alleged to be associated with polygamy in Bountiful or anywhere else, the BCCLA favours vigorous investigation of criminal activity, and rigorous enforcement of sexual abuse laws by the police, rather than intrusive anti-polygamy laws.

As it turned out, the judge in the case disagreed with the BCCLA. He decided that polygamy in itself causes harm and that the anti-polygamy law is constitutional and probably a good idea. And there matters stand for the moment. The law is upheld and might be used anyday. Civil libertarians like me think the judge is wrong and are wary of laws that tell people how to live their private lives (remember those old laws against mixed marriages, homosexuality, etc.?). And meanwhile, life in the Twilight Zone, aka Bountiful, B.C., goes on.

So while I think the civil libertarian position is morally and legally right, I’m worried about life in the Twilight Zone. I know just as well as the next person that what goes on in Bountiful is wingnut brainwashing of young girls, and a whole bunch of other dubious practices. But I doubt that I could prove it in a court of law. As with other religious and political cults, you can seldom find members of the cult or anyone else to provide evidence that there was brainwashing, absence of consent, or abuse of any kind. Sometimes it’s suggested that we protect Bountiful by means of education. Since Bountiful, like all other communities, is required to live up to B.C. school laws, all we have to do is send our school inspectors in and prevent brainwashing. Except, in practice, it just doesn’t work.

It’s certainly reasonable to favour liberty when it comes to interpersonal relations, up to and including genuinely consensual polygamy. But it doesn’t solve the difficult problem of what actually goes on in places like Bountiful. And that, it seems to me, is a limit of this particular civil liberties position. We could say, I suppose, well, we have a sensible position about individual liberty; as for what goes on in the Twilight Zone, we should send in the police if we have grounds for believing a crime has been committed, and if we don’t have good grounds, gee, that’s unfortunate. Or perhaps we can say, We have a sensible position about polygamy, and while we think something bad is happening in Bountiful, we don’t know what to do about it or how to get at it legally. And we might add, We already know about the limitations of the civil liberties position, but we try. We try.

Something similar can be said about prostitution and pornography legislation, issues that the association has been actively involved in for a quarter-century or more. The BCCLA’s position is that actions between consenting adults that don’t cause direct and measurable harm to others should not be forbidden, or otherwise interfered with, by the Canadian state. In Canada, prostitution is legal, but the activity is hedged in by a series of laws preventing brothels, or living off the avails of prostitution, and that prohibit communication in a public place for the purposes of soliciting for prostitution. The BCCLA opposes all those subsidiary laws on the grounds that they’re unconstitutional, and endanger the lives of sex trade workers. As recently as this year, we’ve intervened in court on behalf of the rights of such people to individual liberty and safer working conditions, and we’ve even made some progress.

At the same time, civil libertarians, like other citizens, are aware that the world of prostitution is rife with violence, drug addiction and exploitation. What’s more, heterosexual prostitution especially engages the larger question of sexism against women. What I notice is that all our ponderings about what to do about prostitution – whether to decriminalize it, fully legalise it, or regulate it by means of the state –- do little to undercut the real exploitation, violence, and associated criminal activities that permeate the activity.

We’re also aware of more extreme possible remedies. For instance, the Swedish state is currently attempting to extirpate prostitution in Sweden by criminalising and arresting the customers of prostitutes, on the theory that the very act of prostitution is itself harmful to the prostitutes. But we think this description of paid sexual services is a partial rather than accurate account, and that arresting the mostly male customers is a dubious moral proposition, even though it’s the sincerely held view of a certain segment of the feminist movement as well as the Swedish state. Even if substituting the evil of the curtailment of liberty for the evils of prostitution could conceivably produce an improved human condition, we retain our doubts. In the end, while not abandoning our view that consenting adults who aren’t causing harm to others should be allowed to do as they please, we also have to dispense with any illusion that our upholding of civil liberties in this instance does anything more than mildly alleviate an unsolved social problem. Again, most civil libertarians are already aware of the limitations of our interventions. Still, better to intervene than to do nothing. We try. That’s the battle cry that provides what small comfort is available to the liberal enterprise.

Finally, there’s the issue that is more at the heart of civil libertarian endeavours than almost any other: free speech. The BCCLA holds the view that free speech ought to be pretty much an absolute in democratic society, excepting only speech that incites immediate harm, false and harmful advertising (such as that for tobacco products), and libellous speech that deserves punishment. Civil libertarians have fought the good fight, with some success, to protect the expression of unpopular views, the right of artists to experiment with discourse, and the broadest speech rights possible in the political forum.

Yet, what I think of as the “Antinomy of Free Speech” is perhaps the most insoluable of all present problems. Here I think there’s something different from the recognized practical limitations of our specific efforts to improve the lot of both ordinary citizens as well as oppressed and/or unpopular people in our polity.

I want more or less absolute free speech in a democracy and yet it’s also free speech that produces a dangerously dumbed-down, commercially obsessed, distracted and devalued society. Here, I’m not thinking about merely false, harmful commercial advertising or the heavily-financed “negative” political advertising that distorts contemporary election campaigns; we might be able to do something about such things through laws prohibiting false, harmful advertising, and limiting spending for campaign advertising.

Rather, I’m thinking of the much broader categories of normal communication that undercut education, public intelligence, and critical thinking in the democratic forum and everyday life. In a sense, we have a surfeit of speech these days. The current technological revolution ensures that people are incessently chatting, texting, tweeting, Facebooking, blowing up stuff on video games, and filling their heads with the musical messages imparted by an endless soundtrack of iTunes. Speech these days is both banal and apocalyptic. (Yes, yes, I know: so it ever was.) An ad for the latest violent video game offers as its voice-over punchline, “The end of the world never looked so good!”

It is the competing messages conveyed by speech that produce, at present, a cultural, political and moral condition in which serious book reading is in decline, especially among the young, as well as a diminished capacity to read with understanding or to write competently. What’s more, this qualitatively reduced literacy is correlated to “knowledge deficits” in history, geography, politics, science, the arts and civic participation. Actually, when it comes to competing messages, there’s not much competition. The messages that might counter the erosion of intelligent public-mindedness are pretty much drowned out by the commercial wisdoms of the day. Instead, there is vast “ignorance in the desert,” as one social critic put it, and this ignorance flourishes in a society that has achieved the broadest degree of free speech in history.

As should be apparent by now, I’m not really talking about civil liberties but about the condition of our minds in contemporary society. Those minds, and what they pay attention to, or are distracted from, are shaped by a very complex ensemble of factors that constitute our intellectual context. There’s an extensive data base of empirical evidence in support of the rather grim interpretation I’m offering of our intellectual state, but this isn’t the place to rehearse the facts and figures.

What to do about it? Well, in The Republic that we studied in Bob Rowan’s classroom long ago, Plato had a proposal for a utopia. As my longtime colleague and friend John Dixon remarks, “And what a dangerous utopia The Republic offered, with its glorification of a garrison state sustained by lies, censorship, eugenics, arranged marriage, the rigid enforcement of a class system, and… relentless indoctrination from birth to grave.” Worse, as Dixon adds, “Plato explicitly attacked democracy as the next to last station on the road to political and cultural perdition, just short of tyranny… One of the principal points of his Republic is that democracy puts freedom and power in the hands of people who don’t know what they’re doing.” Despite all that, Dixon and I agreed that The Republic, which puts education at the heart of public life, is, with a bit democratic tweaking, one of the more sensible proposals to date of how to organize a society.

For those of us who are attracted to, and despair over, the democratic commitment, the people, in whose hands democracy puts freedom and power, more than ever “don’t know what they’re doing.” But our remedy for the erosion of public intelligence and consequent ignorance has long been and still is the institution of education. Yet that institution is itself under siege by a prevalent ideology that seeks to make education merely instrumental to job training. Not only are we assailed by commercially generated trivia, we are also told that you don’t need to know anything except what’s technically necessary to secure employment. As a society, we have little appetite for focusing education on citizenship, cultural enlightenment and critical thought, though we pay perfunctory lip-service to those values.

An antinomy is a description of an irreconcilable condition that by definition doesn’t admit of easy, or perhaps any, remedy. That condition has to be of vital concern to civil libertarians since it renders irrelevant much of our effort.

None of this exploration of civil liberties and beyond is a recommendation to retreat from any of the ideas that organizations like the BCCLA have advanced. Rather, it’s a recommendation to be diffident in the face of what may be insurmountable difficulties. Perhaps Thrasymachus, as I thought upon first reading, really was warning us about the dangers of mindless political power and the intellectual distractions of the day. If so, he may not have been completely right, but he had a point.

‘

Berlin, May 12, 2012.

“Then again, this sort of thinking that once occupied a few momentarily idle minds, say, back in the 50s or 60s, is currently only the purview, only the stuff of wispy, glassy-eyed seminarians on a cookie drive for the church. And now we are led, by way of Literary Thug #1 to the august pages of Dooney’s, of dooneyscafe.com, which it is a blog site; which it is not a blog site because it is edited, which it is – well, which is it? – a bird, a plane—But in any case, some of its pages as of the moment seem to have to do with whether or not CanLit is dead, and if dead, who killed it, and so forth and so on. And it is supposed that anyone who appears to have less than half of an articulate response to said question is probably a comfortable white guy, perhaps even a war criminal this side of paradise or Prince George, B.C.—And there you have it – the triple-triple guessing on everything PC or non-PC, depending on who in what cultural niche got out of the wrong side of bed whenever it was their whim to so rise from pillow talk. For all that, the pages to which I was directed, those of a Mr Harris, seemed to make some sense to me in which the question is put: why should a poem willynilly have more value than a menu or a laundry list? And my answer, just off the top of my head, if you please, is of course it should have more value. The question ought not to have been entertained in the first place, but that it did points to the obvious fact that culture in general is diseased and has been so for some time, and I mean ‘culture’ in a much larger geographical and spiritual sense that that which is CanLit specific, which, God knows, was, way back when, an honest enterprise, if nothing else, before it became a parlour game for hucksters. A bookseller once said to me, rough paraphrase here: lose your faith in art and the making of it and you will have lost faith in everything. Poets who have lost their love of poetry (and they are out there and I have seen them and I have heard them) are not going to be up to much when it comes to poetry, and they can dress this loss of love (so as to disguise this loss) in any kind of political, theoretical, post this-and that costume they wish, it does not alter the fact they are simply unable to say they are sick to death of poetry and novels and all related written words as such. Why not just say it and have done with it, as per one of Robert Johnson’s homicidal blues lyrics? It would have the virtue of clearing the air and one would know with whom one was dealing. Unlikely to happen. Would spoil the fun—To be sure, there is nothing more absurd than to want to be a poet and then to continue being a poet even after the absurdity of it all has become excruciatingly apparent. Just that I, for one, am not going to let the usual gaggle of hacks go so easy on themselves as they sneer away at what it is they themselves can’t bring off and never could. Who killed CanLit? From a certain point of view, yes, as per Mr Harris, and one is aghast to hear of it, writers, as too many of them have been coached into allowing themselves to be caught up in special appeals and little else.”

This piece of heavily mannered, evidently unedited and moderately circular, um, commentary, is excerpted from a more or less daily blog written by Norm Sibum called Ephemeris at http://normsibum.com.

The passage was preceded by a reference to the Roman historian Appian of Alexandria commenting on the Roman general Lucius Cornelius Sulla; an unquoted reference to Corinthians 13:2 (And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing); along with a half-dozen more arcane allusions one would have to be inside Sibum’s brain to source with any confidence.

My attention was drawn to the quoted passage by John Harris (the “Mr. Harris” Sibum cites), who was bewildered by its circularity, and knew that I’m familiar with both Sibum and his writing. What could Sibum possibly intend with it?  Harris’ instinct was that he’d been somehow slapped on the back and punched in the face at the same time, which I explained was a familiar experience for anyone who’s spent more than half an hour with Sibum—and that I’d get back to him when I’d figured out what Sibum was trying to say.

So, first, who is Norm Sibum?  Let’s try the biography on his website, thus:

Born in Oberammergau in 1947, Norm Sibum grew up in Germany, Alaska, Missouri, Utah, and Washington. He has been a Montréaler since 1994. Along with Bruce Serafin, he founded the Vancouver Review in 1989 and published several collections of poetry in Canada and in England with Carcanet Press. His Girls and Handsome Dogs ( Porcupine’s Quill, 2002) won the Quebec Writer’s Federation A.M. Klein Award for Poetry. “The Pangborn Defence” (Biblioasis, 2008) was short-listed for the same award.

This leaves a few things out, and contains a fairly egregious inaccuracy. He didn’t really co-found the Vancouver Review any more than I did. He was merely in the area when it was born, and Serafin bounced ideas off him. The first run of the Vancouver Review was all the vision and labour of Bruce Serafin, but the remarkable Serafin, unfortunately now dead, can’t argue his ownership papers. Sibum also leaves out the 20 years he lived in Vancouver. He became a poet there, and developed the eccentric persona that seems relatively unchanged today.

Here’s my alternate biographical notes:  Norm Sibum is a tall, skinny, dour dude with a droopy moustache, a man rarely spoken of without an adjective attached—with the adjectives ranging from “weird” to “brilliant”. He is, if I recall this correctly, an American army brat, which explains his exotic birthplace better than he does. He’s an American who loathes and romanticizes his native country at the same time, and disdains the provinciality of his adopted one, Canada. He’s a man disaffected from his tangled roots in about six or seven profound ways, most of them self-inflicted. He’s an autodidact, a poet of wildly asymmetrical erudition who writes a lot, revises little, and publishes only occasionally (not counting the blog); and he has a unique way of treating everyone as either out to get him or assault his sensibilities.

As a social being, he used to be an Oedipal jumble who, while he lived in Vancouver, seemed unable to keep from insinuating himself between whoever he socialized with, whether it was husband and wife, two poets discussing the best way to describe a sunrise, or minor Roman historians arguing over the barbarism of the Gauls—all of which appeared to have roughly the same reality value in his mind.  He had a knack for getting couples fighting with one another, and was the occasion for several broken relationships if not quite the cause. I don’t think his insinuations were intentionally malicious, and they were certainly never effective. He may have wanted people to fight over him but instead, they ended up scrapping with one another, usually without understanding they’d been set up. The most profound influence on him during those years, literary or personal, was William Hoffer, the sometimes crazed, sometimes eccentric, occasionally brilliant antiquarian bookseller and prophet of cultural doom.

A couple of years ago in Toronto Sibum revealed a new social talent, that of Back-biting Dinner-Guest-From-Hell. I’d run into him while George Bowering was in town, and invited Sibum to a dinner party I was hosting for George.  Sibum accepted the invitation as if he was doing us a favour, arrived late without a bottle of wine or flowers, obliquely criticized everything that came up at the dinner table (including the food and wine) as beneath his standards, and then went home to Montreal and wrote a critique of the “scene” at the dinner table in so hilariously ungracious a way that the piece could serve as an illustrative model for the phrase “let no good deed go unpunished.”

Sibum has been writing poetry since the 1970s, and is one of the few poets I’ve ever encountered who writes and reads every day. He does it not so much to refine his lines, improve his craft or extend his knowledge as to feed the interior conversation that is his personality. One suspects there is a mountain of notebooks somewhere, (now online as a blog) all filled with that intense but haplessly interior conversation, which is never quite about the subject under scrutiny so much it is about the poet’s stance in relation to the hostile world beyond the stance: if the poet can keep the persona and stance solid, the conversation going—and unresolved—then the hostiles won’t get him.

The odd fact here is that I like Sibum as a person and have for a very long time despite his chronic treachery and bad manners. He’s oddly charming, maybe particularly when he’s at his transparently self-involved worst, which is as often comic as it is disagreeable. And I to continue to respect his work ethic even if it rarely produces anything—possibly because of his aversion to serious editing and revision, which he can’t do because it is an inherent insult to his intelligence and erudition, which is, you know, greater than yours and mine.  I liked him in his Vancouver days, too, but we were never close friends because I knew I couldn’t turn my back on him without getting something jammed between my ribs. Usually it was an obscure shard of contempt because I hadn’t read enough Catullus, dismissed Josephus as a liar or didn’t think Charlie Potts was as important as Allen Ginsberg, or else I’d been dismissive of some woman he was involved with (usually in his own mind) or I was catching for the local writer’s baseball team and wasn’t sufficiently admiring of how well he’d played centre field in a game where I got two more hits than he did. Back then our respective approaches to baseball told more about us than we could have: As a catcher I was in the game second by second, pitch by pitch—and impatient with the game’s mythology and its ballet. Sibum  was in the outfield, ignoring the game unless it came to him, at which he would glide over gracefully to snag a fly ball, toss it back to the infield, and tune out again until something else forced itself on his solitude.

Sibum’s brand of treachery, I came to realize,  wasn’t so much a consequence of him taking himself seriously—which  no poet can survive for long without doing because god knows, the world doesn’t take poets seriously anymore—as an absence of self-irony, and a parallel absence of playfulness. Any writer without a solid streak of fun in him (or her) is an uneasy animal. When the lack of ease is grounded in interior conversation so uncertain of its legitimacy that it tries to kneecap every intrusion across its borders, it engenders treachery.

Sibum has been what he is for 40 years. At one level his simple persistence is an achievement. But at another it’s a waste, particularly when the conversation, in its public expression, contains plenty of brilliant moments, but ultimately always sinks back into that impenetrably circular interiority in which mannerism supplants articulation. One could point to Sibum as a man who’s figured out that the ultimate camouflage of the 21st century is to wear an ascot and a mackinaw at the same time, and ridicule the absurdity of it. But still, one must also respect his singlemindedness and work ethic.

I want to approach him a third way. If I go back to the passage I ask readers to parse and try to parse it, myself, I get a man excusing the uneditedness of his blog by making backhanded attacks on everything that seems to challenge it: dooneyscafe.com, in particular. Dooneyscafe.com, now in its 12th year, has been an edited site since its beginning. The two principle posters, Stan Persky and I,  early on worked out an effective way of editing one another.  One of us will post, the other will go in and correct any obvious errors of grammar, spelling and syntax, and notify the other if something is factually incorrect or the writing is impenetrable or sloppy. Everyone else who posts goes through an edit process—sometimes rigorous, sometimes not—before the piece is uploaded.

The key sentence in Sibum’s quoted passage is therefore this one: “And now we are led, by way of Literary Thug #1 to the august pages of Dooney’s, of dooneyscafe.com, which it is a blog site; which it [sic]is not a blog site because it is edited, which it is – well, which is it? – a bird, a plane—But in any case, some of its pages as of the moment seem to have to do with whether or not CanLit is dead.”

The sentence is key because it is so typical of Sibum’s writing methods.  First, “we” weren’t “led” to dooneyscafe.com by anything in the previous sentences, nor is it clear who “Literary Thug #1” is, unless it is Sibum, who really isn’t much of a thug. And the sentence is, as so much of Sibum’s blog is, somewhere between a backhand and a sideswipe: there’s the oblique insult of the adjective “august”, the confusion of “Dooney’s”, which has no pages because it is a website, and is anyway one and the same thing as “dooneyscafe.com”. Then there’s an egregious bit of garbled syntax (one reason to have a edited site): the phrase “which it is a blog site” doesn’t make sense. Similarly, Sibum seems unaware, when he raises the issue of why a poem should automatically have more value than a menu or a laundry list, that Harris was quoting Robert Lecker, not offering his own opinion, and that it is the boys at the John Metcalf-inspired CNQ that were doing the hand-wringing over whether CanLit was dead, not Harris.

Thus we’re at the heart of the matter: high end rhetorical prose that’s grammatically and expositionally sloppy. The last time I talked with Sibum on the phone, I noted that he ought to run his stuff past an editor before he uploaded it to his blog—and then mentioned that everything on dooneyscafe.com is edited before upload. There was a silence on the other end as he figured out I wasn’t inviting him to bring the blog across to dooneyscafe.com, (and I pondered the nightmare of trying to disentangle his musings on a daily basis)—and then he backed away from what might have been an interesting argument and went on to whatever else was on his mind: U.S. politics, the character of Barack Obama, the influence of David Solway on the poetry coming out of Montreal.  I suspect Sibum has, characteristically, been stewing about editing and non-editing ever since, and thus the backhanded insults. That’s what he does, see? He treats everything said as a possible insult, and then stews about it—which is how he took my suggestion. Is it the mackinaw or the ascot doing the stewing? With him, you’re never sure.

Take these lines of poetry from the beginning of a sectional poem on his site called “Everything and Nothing”:

Listen: all is everything. It’s nothing, too:
What signifies to me may signify so much less to you.
A thought for all or a smaller piece of heaven
Might occupy the mind of a sullen nation
Were it mindful, the August sun spilling light
Between cumular columns in the sky.

Anyone see an argument there? I see some juxtapositions followed by a relativism followed by an overblown image “a smaller piece of heaven” that might “occupy the mind of a sullen nation/were it mindful”. Anyone out there able to define what a “sullen” nation might be, or provide an example? That’s what I thought. And can nations be “mindful?” Just exactly what does “mindful” entail? And so on.

It’s entirely too easy to get lost in a Norm Sibum sentence or stanza of poetry, and there’s a reason.  Both are usually jumbles of over-rich declaratives; too-weighted fixations on adjectives like “sullen and “cumular”; poufter nouns like “mindful” that sound portentous but don’t connect firmly with anything. Together they leave the poet, who is genuflecting with his mackinaw or his ascot in some mirror only he can see, adrift in both the self and language. And it leaves the reader, despite his or her good will, bewildered and—this is important—on the outside wondering what’s going on.

It is, I think, both telling and typical of Sibum that there is no search engine on his website. This is a poet who desperately needs a search engine so he can track his thoughts—whether they are ideas, images, or word choices. This absent search engine leaves him with no way of casting back across his blog to find out if a thought on one day, postured out, might have some connection with something he said a month or a year ago. They could also track words he uses (or misuses) frequently, and ideas or people he obsesses over.

I certainly wouldn’t mind a search engine on the blog. Every few months I’ll get an e-mail or phone call from Sibum, letting me know he’s mentioned me or dooneyscafe.com, and what do I think?  Or, I’ll get a query from another reader, as happened with John Harris, puzzled at what Sibum has stuck in his craw. Mostly the notices come while I’m busy or demoralized enough that I don’t want to deal with a minor attack on my kneecaps or my grip on reality, and so I set them aside for another day. But if I leave it for five or six days, it moves beyond the blog’s page (where Microsoft’s search function can locate it) and it is gone to the unsearchable archive.  And that’s a shame, because Sibum is often onto something interesting, notwithstanding the little insults and sideswipes and pointlessly erudite asides you have to wade through to get at.

My dislike of blogging is well known. Because it is unmediated and without research standards, it supplants both art and discourse with public diaries: bull moose honking in the swamp, up to their ears in mosquitos, wanting love or sex or merely relief from the bugs. Blogging is the Internet’s Trojan Horse, because it seems to offer freedom of expression and democracy of discourse: magnificent aspirations sought by Western artists and intellectuals for 200 years. Yet we’ve arrived on their shores to find the frameworks of coherent thought and expression disemboweled. Freedom and democracy in isolation are empty, particularly when they’re conferred on the fourth or 40th floor of the Tower of Babel, surrounded by lunatics shouting in languages they’ve made up for themselves.

Thus I have some suggestions for Norm Sibum, which I’ll offer without the slightest hope that he’ll listen. 1.) Can the blog and kill the diary. We’re here to make sense of language and experience, not swirl our capes (or our mackinaws) at the general darkness and/or the untrustworthiness of other people’s minds. 2.) Get an editor and (since you won’t stop blogging just because I’ve advised it) install an search engine on the blog so others can track what you’re trying to say.  3. Stop flailing at everyone’s kneecaps. Even if it doesn’t hurt much, it builds scar tissue, and John Harris has better things to be thinking about.

 .

3350 words, May 10, 2012

Gunter Grass, 84, Nobel Laureate for literature, Germany’s pre-eminent writer, author of The Tin Drum and much else, published a 69-line poem, “What Must Be Said,” in the Suddeutsche Zeitung, a Munich-based national centre-left newspaper on April 4, 2012.

Grass’s “op-ed” poem, as one reader dubbed it, is more of a political statement couched in a hybrid verse form than a traditional poem. It criticizes the current Israeli government’s persistent belligerance toward Iran, particularly its threats to launch a pre-emptive military strike on the basis of the so far unsubstantiated claim that Iran is developing a nuclear weapon. As well, the piece bluntly recognizes that Israel is already a nuclear-armed state, something infrequently mentioned; furthermore, it’s a nuclear power “beyond supervision or verification, / subject to no inspection of any kind.” Finally, Grass chides the German government for selling submarines to Israel that are capable of delivering nuclear-tipped missiles. These are all sentiments seldom publicly expressed in Germany, a country firmly allied to Israel for both historical and ideological reasons. 

“Why only now, grown old, / and with what ink remains,” Grass asks, “do I say: / Israel’s atomic power endangers / an already fragile world peace?” He replies, “Because what must be said / may be too late tomorrow.”

“Why have I kept silent, held back for so long?” Grass asks himself. And the answer, as everybody in Germany knows, is that public criticism of Israel is a politely forbidden topic in German discourse, and even the whisper of such criticism is likely to get you labelled as one of those dreaded “anti-Semites.” In fact, Grass anticipates all that in his op-ed poem, remarking that “the verdict ‘Anti-semitism’ falls easily,” and recognizing once more that his “own origins” are “tarnished by a stain that can never be removed.” Nonetheless, the taboo is momentarily broken. As a New York Times headline ten days later reported, “Once Taboo, Germans’ Anti-Israel Whispers Grow Louder.”

The volume level of the whispers had to be turned up a bit, or else they would have been drowned out by the cacophony unleashed by both PM Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultra-conservative Israeli government, and much of the German intellectual establishment. “Bibi,” as the PM is nicknamed, immediately condemned Grass’s poem as “shameful” and not too subtlely hinted that the 1999 Nobel Prize winner was really still a Nazi. Netanyahu was alluding to the fact that nearly 70 years ago, in the last days of World War II, the 17-year-old Grass had been conscripted into an SS-Waffen unit, a subject that Grass himself discussed in his 2006 autobiography, Peeling the Onion. It was “perhaps not surprising,” said Netanyahu, that Grass portrayed “the one and only Jewish state as the greatest threat to world peace.”

The Israeli embassy in Berlin immediately issued its own “what must be said” statement. “What must be said is that it is a European tradition to accuse the Jews before the Passover festival of ritual murder,” the embassy statement ominously began, ratcheting up the accusations from there, before more temperately adding, “What also must be said is that Israel is the only state in the world whose right to exist is openly doubted.”

Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman charged that the Grass poem was the expression of the “egoism of so-called Western intellectuals who are willing to sacrifice the Jewish people on the altar of crazy anti-Semites for a second time, just to sell a few more books or gain recognition.” In short, Grass is a crass careerist.

By the end of the weekend, the already overheated reaction in Israel was topped by Israeli interior minister Eli Yishai who declared Grass persona non grata and barred him from visiting Israel. The German author could no longer cross the Israeli border because of his “attempt to inflame hatred against the State of Israel and the people of Israel, and thus advance the idea to which he was publicly affiliated in his past donning of the SS uniform.” So, Grass is not only a publicity-seeking careerist, but a Nazi anti-Semite. Gee, those Israeli officials really know how to kick a guy in the kishkes, as we used to say as kids in the Jewish-Irish street-fighting neighbourhood in Chicago where I grew up. Given that Israel is frequently praised as the only democracy in the Middle East, we should reflect on what a charming democracy it’s turned out to be. No doubt, its persona non grata policies are verifiably kosher, too. By Easter Sunday, you could be forgiven for thinking that Grass was a likelier candidate for crucifixion than Jesus.

This reprise of the commentary only provides a minuscule sampler of the river of ink and digital bytes flowing through the Israeli and German print media and cyberstream in the space of 10 days. The German establishment was almost as appalled as the Israelis, if for different reasons. The doyen of German literary critics, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, 91, an old opponent of Grass, called the poem “disgusting.” Soon, everyone in the country was turning into a literary critic (including some literary critics). About the only person who kept her head during the Sturm und Drang was conservative chancellor Angela Merkel who wisely murmured that it wasn’t the business of politicians to comment on artistic endeavors. She probably also sighed, “Oy vey.”

By the second week of the controversy, tempers had cooled a bit. Grass admitted in a newspaper interview that he didn’t mean to attack Israel, but rather Netanyahu’s policies. “I should have also brought that into the poem,” he said. Although the conservative wing of the German intelligentsia relentlessly berated the Nobel Prize winning author, by then a few people had come to Grass’s aid. Jakob Augstein, publisher of the progressive weekly Freitag, said that while Grass’s piece was neither a great poem nor brilliant political analysis, the famed author “should be thanked” for starting a German debate about the threat Israel poses to peace. Social Democratic Party (SPD) leader Sigmar Gabriel also thought Grass deserved thanks, and refused to disassociate himself from the longtime SPD supporter, even though he disagreed with most of Grass’s analysis in this instance.

Commentators in both Israel and Germany sharply criticized Israel’s decision to ban Grass. Critics of Grass’s poem, such as Israeli historian Tom Segev, also criticised the Israeli decision to formally forbid the writer admittance to the country. Interior minister Yishai seemed to be offering an Israeli olive branch in newspaper headlines reporting his proposal to meet the German writer in a “neutral country.” But once one looked at the fine print preconditions Yishai was suggesting, it was obvious that this wasn’t exactly a sincere offer: “If Grass puts down his pen and stops writing anti-Semitic poems, then I would be pleased to explain to him in a neutral state why a German who voluntarily served under Heinrich Himmler in the SS has no right to visit the country of the people he once wanted to exterminate.” Grass replied that the last time he’d been barred from a country, it was by the Stasi-run East German regime. In short, don’t expect any immediate Grass-Yishai get-togethers in neutral Monaco. Finally, when the press checked the Facebook universe 10 days after Grass’s quasi-literary pyrotechnics, they discovered that blogging and tweeting Germans largely agreed that Grass had blurted out thoughts that were not only more than half-true, but ones that many people endorsed, albeit silently prior to Grass’s public utterances.

Now that poetry “made something happen,” let’s see if we can sort out what happened.

Let’s get the aesthetics out of the way first: Okay, “What Must Be Said” is not a great poem and probably doesn’t bear a formal “close reading” in your local graduate studies in literature class. You can Google up an English translation of the poem published by The Guardian in Britain if you’re interested. Not a great political poem, but I’ve read worse. What most of the instant critics didn’t mention is that Grass is not a bad poet (see his “Words in Farewell,” written on the death of his longtime editor, Helmut Frielinghaus, also available on the Guardian website).

More important, the critics tended to slide over Grass’s literary and political accomplishments, although every article dutifully mentioned that he wrote The Tin Drum and won the Nobel Prize. The perfunctory mentions, however, only served to obscure the fact that The Tin Drum is not just any old bestseller, but one of the half-dozen great novels of the second half of the 20th century, one that is doggedly anti-Nazi as well as literarily innovative. What’s more, Grass is among the leading postwar anti-fascist intellectuals who, over a lifetime, helped Germany confront its Nazi past. His role as a “conscience of the nation” is one of the reasons people listen when Grass says “what must be said.”

Next, there’s the minor matter of personalities. A lot of Grass’s critics regard him as a self-centred opportunist desperate for attention, a self-righteous hypocrite, a fading Ancient Mariner tugging at the public sleeve. Although Grass long ago admitted to his Hitler Youth past, he didn’t reveal his conscription into a SS unit until late in life, another subject of loquacious controversy in Germany. Most of the critics have never forgiven Grass for a lifetime of social democratic political activism. Those of us who think otherwise are mostly focussed on the greatness of his half dozen major literary works, and admire a lifetime of speaking truth not only to power, but to silence, hypocrisy and moral cowardice.

Finally, in terms of political analysis, “What Must Be Said” gets mixed reviews. While Grass notes in the poem that Iran is a dictatorship run by a “loudmouth,” more needs to be said about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s regime, including its Holocaust denials and casual threats to wipe Israel off the map, as well as its alleged nuclear weapon ambitions. That said, Grass’s explicit condemnation of the Netanyahu government’s dangerous nuclear sabre-rattling (and its oppressive occupation of Palestinian territories) is indeed among the things that “must be said.”

As at least some of us recognize, the debate about Israel is lost in the fog of rhetoric, even when it doesn’t immediately threaten to be lost in the fog of war. International pro-Israel lobbies and the Netanyahu government are quick to reject almost all political criticism of the “one and only Jewish state” with knee-jerk accusations of anti-Semitism and worse. The right wing Republican Party presidential aspirants in the current U.S. election campaign have all uttered blood-curdling threats to go to war with Iran.

Nor have matters been helped by the dismal performance of the other side of the political spectrum. International Leftist organizations frequently offer accounts of Israel that are not far removed from global conspiracy theories that resemble the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”

Somewhere in all the fustion, it’s useful to recognize that Israel is a historical fact of realpolitik; that its claims to be under existential threat are not mere imaginings; but that its behaviour toward its Palestinian neighbours over the last half-century has been morally and practically shameful. It also helps to recognize that the Palestinians, while clear victims of oppression, are not solely unblemished freedom fighters; that their leadership has repeatedly blundered in the “peace” negotiations; and that its authoritarian regional allies bear their own share of infamy.

Though Grass, a competent visual artist, could have chosen a finer brush to paint this bleak scene, I think that his openly saying that nuclear-armed Israel is also a danger to world peace is something that “must be said.” What a lot of people I talked to in Berlin in the last couple of weeks quietly noted is that while Grass’s poem may be politically incorrect as well as flawed, enough of what he said is also true and needs saying. In this instance, a heretofore repressed political discussion in Germany has happened, or at least gotten underway, thanks to a less-than-great op-ed poem by one of the country’s most distinguished writers. It’s also worth reiterating that “what must be said” must be said now because it “may be too late tomorrow.”

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Berlin, April 17, 2012

Sometimes a book requires putting it and its author under a microscope, particularly when the contents of the book are revelatory.  That’s the case with Terry Glavin’s Come From the Shadows, published in the fall of 2011. If what Glavin has to say about Afghanistan and the effects of the NATO force that ousted the Taliban is correct, then virtually everything we’ve heard from the Canadian government and the mass media in the last five years is a misrepresentation.

The idea that the war in Afghanistan is fundamentally different than the Iraq war was widely accepted a few years ago. The Iraq war was a unilateral imperialist misadventure conducted by an ill-prepared and possibly corrupt presidency on behalf of, well, the Haliburton Corporation—or, if you’re being generous, on behalf of some poorly thought-out ideas about American-style democracy. The Afghanistan war—or rather, mission, was a NATO project carried out by 40 countries backing a U.N. resolution, and it was aimed at overthrowing an ultra-violent and deeply misogynist regime of Islamic fundamentalists who were harboring the international terrorist organization that perpetrated the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in September 2001, and to then rebuild democratic institutions within the country.

The central hub of what Glavin has to say is that the Afghanistan mission has been substantially successful in its goals, and that this is neither being reported in the mass media nor are governments acting as if it is. Here’s his view of it, in a nutshell (from Open Book):

When the clouds parted after September 11 and the world looked back down on Afghanistan, it was a country utterly destroyed by barbarism and war. Just to look at the basic infrastructure of the place, it was worse than Europe after VE Day in 1945. It was worse than Somalia, its people were more brutalized than North Koreans and it was as poor as the poorest countries of sub-Saharan Africa. Women were slaves. A quarter of the population was living in refugee camps in neighbouring countries or wandering the world homeless. There was no currency, nothing even resembling a police force, and the people had been reduced to eating rats and grass. The place was run by a multinational joint venture in sadism called the Taliban and al Qaida had the run of the place.

The distance the Afghan people have traveled over the past decade is absolutely staggering. The GDP has tripled, the economy is growing faster than anywhere else in South Asia. Afghanistan has a freer press than any country in Central Asia, a dozen universities, millions of girls in school and on and on.

There’s considerable reason to trust Glavin on this.  He’s been to Afghanistan a number of times since 2008, and he’s among the very few journalists to go there unembedded, which means that he didn’t see the country from the protection of an armoured NATO vehicle, and didn’t get his information sitting around inside a NATO base briefing room reading military and Karzai government press releases. He traveled the country with an Afghani-Canadian named Abdulrahim Parwani, and, characteristically, he didn’t spend much time talking to the Official Suspects. He talked to people on the ground, and at eye-level.

There’s also considerable evidence suggest we can trust Glavin as a writer and investigative journalist. His credentials are impeccable. He’s written a number of books on native issues, notably Death Feast in Dimlahamid (1990) and Nemiah: the Unconquered Country, (1992) and several more on B.C.’s Fisheries, along with several brilliant volumes of essays on environmental and local rights (This Ragged Place (1996) and Waiting for the Macaws (2006). All of his books have been remarkably free of conventional political or environmental wisdom, likely due to his career-long habit of basing his judgments on eye-to-eye conversation with whoever happens to be closest to the consequences. He also writes well enough to have had B.C.’s Lieutenant-Governor’s Award for Literary Excellence conferred on him in 2009, along with a raft of other awards. He’s what I call an Orwell leftist, which is to say, not tied to any political or environmental faction, openly skeptical of ideology, and loyal only to whoever or whatever is getting screwed.

Come From the Shadows is a very angry book, and Glavin is an angry man. Several things are making him angry. The prime source derives from his fear that NATO, and maybe particularly Canada, are about to abandon the people they went into Afghanistan to liberate: those elements of Afghani society that support democracy, and women, the latter of whom were the Taliban’s biggest victims, and are likely to become so again should the country be abandoned to the Taliban once again—or, for that matter, the Karzai government. He’s also angry that the most vociferous  pressure to get out of Afghanistan is coming from precisely the elements of Western societies that claim to have progressive political and social values. In Canada those are the social democrats, whether they’re in the NDP, the Liberals, or further to the left.

After several months of research of my own occasioned by Glavin’s contentions, I agree with him more or less completely that it would be immoral for NATO to abandon the Afghanistan mission, even though it is becoming increasingly plain that as a military exercise it is unwinnable, and that as a social development exercise it is unlikely to be decisively successful. The choices aren’t attractive: if the West walks away, the Taliban are likely to regain power, and even if they don’t, the profoundly corrupt Karzai regime isn’t about to offer transformative democracy and will be nearly as oppressive to women as the Taliban have been. But if we’re not prepared to watch a bunch of crazed fundamentalists oppress every woman in the country and quite likely massacre the best and most vocal of them, we can’t walk away. None of the options open to the West, therefore, are attractive. We walk away, enable human rights atrocity and quite possibly a massacre of people who hold values that are central to Western democracy, or we continue on with a war of attrition we have no way of winning, at least in a foreseeable horizon, and NATO personnel, possibly Canadian, are going continue to get killed. The moral choices for Canadians are as complicated as the political and philosophical ones. If we leave, a lot of women will be plunged into a degree of misery and oppression few Canadians can imagine let alone live with. If we stay, some Canadians might die.

Thus there are two questions Glavin poses with this book: How and where has the Afghanistan mission been successful, and who are we if we abandon it?

I’ve come to agree that Glavin’s answers to the first question are correct, although the way he has presented his arguments and structured the book leaves him vulnerable to anyone disposed to disagree with him, and sometimes needlessly aggravates those disposed to agree with him.

Glavin locates the enemies of progressive democracy in Afghanistan in several different quarters. One is Iranian Shia clerics trying to impose their brand of theocratic fundamentalism on Afghani Shias and Sunnis alike. A second is global media presenting a picture of the country that is nearly always distorted, sometimes by political ideologies, sometimes by market ideology, sometimes by real politik issues that are inadequately understood, and sometimes by the simple laziness of those reporting on the situation. A third enemy, and the one at which he directs most of his anger, are the first world social democrats and progressive liberals who have, in clamouring for unilateral withdrawl from all of what they regard as Western imperialist enterprises, played into the hands of the Iran-based clerics and the Taliban.

What Glavin can’t admit is that the country is indeed an irresolvable morass in which the dark elements are unusually oblique to one another and even to the progressive and bright elements. Were he to admit this, he would give comfort to his enemies. Thus he tries to connect them all with the books weakest cipher, calling the morass “Absurdistan”.  Absurd it may be, but it is a pretty lethal strain of absurdity, and tying the various elements together convincingly is often impossible, failing most often when they bifurcate into the particularity of a given situation. And he is, occasionally, betrayed by his anger at the first world progressives who, given that they range from Noam Chomsky with his Oedipal hatred of anything American to Jack Layton angling for a larger  share of Canadian voters at election time without a serious idea between his ears, are very hard to hold together as a unified group with common intentions. That said, Glavin’s identification of the left’s obsession with Western imperialism as the chief source of all evils and the first to be attacked, and for profoundly that obsession has wandered from the original values of social democracy, is well taken.

One of the services he does provide, and very early in the book, is to undermine the view that Afghanistan has always been a choking thicket of backward and crazed fundamentalists and misogynists for whom counterinsurgency is a permanent condition. He makes it clear that the country had been relatively peaceful for more than fifty years prior to the Soviet invasion in 1979, and that the current morass is the result of that, the rise of radical Islamicism, and the West’s generally ill-planned interventions. When the Taliban took over the country in 1996 there were women working in a wide variety of professions, and women were no more—or less—oppressed than elsewhere in the Middle East.

Glavin’s long-standing instinct that truth is best found at close range or face to face serves him well in his depiction of the complexity and range of Afghani progressives, and his account of his travels within the country are convincing and frequently moving. It’s where I bought into the book; I was convinced that the Afghanis aren’t any damned different than we are, and that the Glavin’s wider argument—that abandoning Afghanistan will be an inexcusable betrayal of crucial Western values—is valid and essential.

Which brings us to the argument Glavin has with the First World left, which is an issue nearly as prominent in the book as Afghanistan, and over which Glavin’s anger is nearly as great. The problem is that it isn’t nearly as focused an argument, and, maybe because the documentation isn’t nose-to-nose, more patchy and less successful. The core of it appears in Chapter Five, “If Ever a Country Deserved Rape”, which is a partial quote from an ill-considered 1980 diatribe about Afghanistan from Alexander Cockburn, who should have known better. The first half of Glavin’s chapter is a thoroughly successful rant about the assinities of current leftist politics, focused most acutely on Noam Chomsky and the left’s shift to Chomsky’s strain of anti-imperialism in which all evils are ascribed to the United States and everyone else, however loony or murderous, gets a pass. Chomsky has gotten away with this sort of intellectual malfeasance again and again. He supported the genocidal Khmer Rouge for nearly three years while they were exterminating a quarter of Cambodia’s citizens, and he did much the same with the Taliban in the early days of the Afghanistan mission. Each time he eluded culpability with counter-barrage of ludicrous procedural rationalizations and the half-truths of which he is a master. Glavin nails him about as thoroughly as ever seen it done, and it is no small accomplishment.

And within the rant there are several brilliant analytical parcels, including this passage:

“Out of the ashes of the twentieth-century’s great anti-fascist struggles there arose a standard: human rights are universal rights. Many peoples, one humanity. All people, one. From the age of flags, this was the one banner still flying. But by the 1990s, in the newly comfortable districts of Europe and North America, the solemn internationalist obligations that arose from that standard had been “problematized” by identity politics, counterculture exhibitionism and post-colonial “theory”. Instead of rising to the challenge of universal emancipation, the West’s formerly Marxist left retreated almost wholly into the nihilistic morass that usually goes by the name of “cultural relativism.” Borrowed from anthropology, the politics of cultural relativism is a jumble of white guilt, identity politics and a weird insistence on a kind of equivalence among cultures and their various claims to truth.

“If you can’t criticize or even properly comprehend “other” cultures by applying universal criteria, you will hardly be allowed to offer so much as a low opinion of fascist cultures that celebrate the public stoning of women or religious belief systems that nurture the death cults of suicide bombers. But you don’t need to trouble yourself with any of that anyway, because to qualify for membership in the latter-day left, Nick Cohen writes, it had come to this: ‘All you must be is against your own government, and against America.’”

The difficulty Glavin faces is that the left in the 21^st century is utterly without cohesion, either of values or practical intentions. Thus he has to encompass Noam Chomsky’s monofocus on American imperialism and Jack Layton, who was little more than a parliamentary opportunist with some occasionally decent sentiments. There are simply too many factions within the left that deserve a mulligan to get to, and I think he gets distracted by the sheer numbers as the chapter progresses, and doesn’t draw it together.

Instead he goes back to nose-to-nose encounters—interesting enough—and concludes the book with a complicated and not entirely successful plea for us to see Afghanistan as our era’s Spanish civil war, which the Western democracies and the organized left fumbled so badly in the 1930s that the Second World War became inevitable. I’m tempted by the analogy, but I don’t think the lens is big or sharp enough. I don’t think history is going to repeat itself the same way, and I’m not completely convinced that what we’re facing is the re-emergence of a newly malevolent fascism. What seems to be evolving, both in Islam and in the West, might actually be more intractable and harder to combat.

That said, I think it is more appropriate to point to the urgency of what Glavin has taken on, and to the courage and resourcefulness with which he’s done so than to get snotty about where it fails. This is an important book by a gifted and decent writer, and what it has to say is as important as anything I’ve encountered in a book in a long time. Everyone should buy and read this book. And we should be grateful that we have writers like Terry Glavin to put such crucial issues in front us.

2500 words, April 6, 2012

But poets duking it out in gangs? Aren’t poets supposed to be flighty poufters who spend their social energies looking poetical, networking like a herd of downscale MBAs, dreaming up schemes  to make themselves famous in an uncaring-for-poetry culture, or devising ways to make themselves appear more sensitive than the poets around them?

There’s quite a lot more going on in Prince George these days. The poets are fighting over what people are allowed to imagine and speak about, and why. And because that is the central cultural battle going on all across Western civilization right now, it matters, and not in a small way.

Prince George happens to be my home town, so this conflict and who gets hurt by it matters to me personally, even if it won’t to the local city council, or to the unemployed loggers trying to make their traditional living in a landscape that is getting very short of trees. A poetry war in a small town might not seem worth taking seriously to most outsiders, but like I said, these are global stakes in microcosm, and so I’m going to try to explain who the players are, what they’re fighting about, and what the stakes actually are, global and local.

The first thing you should know is that Prince George has had an active poetry scene for about 40 years now. It was touched off in about 1970 by the arrival of Barry McKinnon, who is now regarded as a major Canadian poet with a precision-tuned sensibility that is as tough-minded as it is generous, but he was then not much more than a pencil-necked recent university grad getting his first teaching gig. From the beginning, McKinnon was full of all the right kinds of energy: he loved teaching poetry, wasn’t interested in power, prestige or an academic career, and more or less instantly felt at home in Northern B.C.. The scene was boosted when John Harris, now regarded as among the most original prose writers British Columbia has ever produced, moved to the city in 1972 to teach at the College of New Caledonia with McKinnon.

McKinnon was educated at UBC and Sir George Williams (now Concordia University) in Montreal, where he took classes from, among others, Irving Layton. McKinnon used a deceptively simple method of making it work: he created books. Folk hero and developer Ben Ginter had donated an old letterpress to the college, which Barry discovered in one of the college out-buildings.  He got it working and turned it into a teaching device, and then, when the college began to move itself toward industrial development stupidities of one sort or another and found McKinnon’s activities morally worrisome and administratively irritating, he found another letterpress in Barkerville, which he moved into the basement of his house. Whenever a poet came to town, McKinnon—usually with the physical collaboration of the poet and his students, would print up small letter-press monographs or broadsides for the occasion.  Many were beautifully produced, and all of them were interesting. The students learned that poems were made, that both composition and production were linked, and most of them went away enlightened, whether they turned into poets themselves, or went out in the world to do other things.

Vancouver-born Harris came from an impressively Canadian but more conventional academic background, doing undergraduate work at UBC with Bill Schermbrucker and a PhD at McGill under Louis Dudek and Hugh McLennan. He was more influenced by Northrop Frye and the conventional canon of Canadian Literature than Mckinnon was, at least before that was shredded by the universities as they turned literature departments into remedial writing facilities to serve the literacy needs of the college and universities’ ascendant science, MBA and industrial job-training programs. Harris, who is arguably more self-deprecating and academically unambitious than McKinnon, was also a different sort of intelligence, less interested in poetry, more interested in personal and public truth, and in narrative. People used to joke that Harris was incapable of not telling the truth as he saw it, a personality trait that had him permanently on the wrong side of the college administrators. It created fascinating tensions in his fiction as well, because it forced him to write fiction by recounting, as laconically as he could, exactly what had happened in the real world. Let me explain it this way: when, as part of one of his books, he had to invent a pseudonym for Barry McKinnon, he gave his character the name “Larry McKinnon.” Harris arrived with a press of his own—not using letter-press technologies—called Repository Press. The list of Repository publications over the years, which has included a succession of poetry anthologies and some very useful hiking guides for the North, is startling and deeply relevant to life as it is lived in Northern B.C.

What both McKinnon and Harris have written themselves, from the mid-1970s to the present, constitutes an accurate if slightly accidental record of what happens when you try to live a thoughtful life in Northern B.C.. Someday,  if there’s any justice, this record will be treasured as an alternate history to that of the blind boosterism that characterizes the public record of northern aspirations. Both McKinnon and Harris have retired from teaching—Harris in 2006, McKinnon a year later.  But the interest in poetry and the unfiltered way it perceives the world has become permanent amongst the people they taught, and a legacy—or, as the administrators see it, an attitude problem—that several of those who were their contemporaries and those who have succeeded them have been infected with.

Not long after his arrival in the city, McKinnon started inviting poets from all over B.C. and the rest of Canada to Prince George. An astonishing number accepted his invitations, and the result was a series of highly memorable cultural events few cities the size of Prince George have enjoyed. It culminated in a poetry conference in 1980 that had Robert Creeley, George Bowering and Robin Blaser headlining, practically every poet working in B.C. at the time playing second fiddle, and a surprisingly large cross-section of local citizens, only some of them students, enthusiastically participating. The conference created a ferment that reverberates to this day.

The list of poets who came to Prince George at McKinnon’s invitation included Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje,  Al Purdy, Earle Birney, George Stanley, P.K. Page, George Bowering, Sid Marty, Sharon Thesen, Michael Turner, Robert Creeley, Lissa Wolsak, Robert Harlow, Pierre Coupey,  Patrick Lane, Robert Harlow,  bp nichol, and Robin Blaser, along with dozens of other major and minor figures in Canadian poetry. The list of local people drawn into poetry by the McKinnon-Harris “machine” is less famous, but no less impressive for its range within the local community. They included, in the early days, the wonderful ecologist/poet Alice Wolcuk, local realtor /poet Barb Munk, who came from a local pioneer family, Bill Bailey, Harvey Chometsky, Shirley Weese, Meryl Duprey, John Oscroft, Randy Kennedy, Sharon Stevenson, Larry Calvert, and Maureen Morton.

From the mid-1980s through to McKinnon’s retirement from the college, the local presences were (in no particular order) Paul Shuttleworth (via Mackenzie and San Francisco), Lee MacKenzie, Virginia Marsolais, Richard Kaulback, Ken Belford, Bob Atkinson, Paul Strickland, Stan Shaffer, Bev King, Donna Kane and Vivien Lougheed, whose recent head-crackingly clear expose of the dinosaur bones industry, Sidetracked: The Struggle for BC’s Fossils might actually help to resolve the unproductive conflict between amateurs and professional fossil hunters in the North.

The current front-line generation of poets and prosewriters, (with many of the longtime players still around and active, including Harris and McKinnon), seem to be Matt Partyka, Alex Buck, Graham Pearce, Arianwen Goronwy-Roberts, Greg Lainsbury and Andy Johnson, all of whom seem to possess both the sense of humour and the attitude problem that have become a local tradition.

McKinnon’s poetic and intellectual base was lodged in what’s come to be known as “The New American Poetry”, named after Donald Allen’s 1960 counter-culture anthology that brought focus to a generation of dissident American poets like Allen Ginsberg, Charles Olson and Robert Duncan. Most of the poets of New American Poetry were male, many of them were gay, and nearly all were culturally and socially—and intellectually—disaffected from the finely-crafted “feelings” that had come to characterize English language poetry, and, not incidentally, middle class values as they were practiced in the 1950s and 1960s. The New American Poetry, as a cosmopolitan social and artistic movement, was centred originally in major American centres like Boston, New York City, and San Francisco. But within a few year of the anthology’s publication, Vancouver, B.C. had become a major nexus, largely due to the presence of Warren Tallman at U.B.C., and after Robin Blaser’s immigration to Canada in 1966, Simon Fraser University. McKinnon, and nearly ever other writer on the Canadian west coast caught it there, and through George Bowering, who returned to B.C. in 1969 after several years teaching at Sir George Williams in Montreal.

Everyone involved with the New American Poetry has shared two things, whether they were the original poets in Allen’s anthology or the several generations of poets and writers since, including a fairly sizable group living in, or passing through, Prince George, B.C.. One of those things is a sense, often more pervasive than directly articulated, that there is something wrong with the mainstream—wherever they encounter it. It has been an apprehension of civic and artistic misrule powerful enough that the poets are permanently in search of the smoke pipe that those in authority are either waving around to obscure the human and environmental damage being inflicted—or have shoved, as the saying goes, in their sensory orifices to keep them dazed at the thought that they’re in the control room. At the root of this “apprehension” is the cosmopolitan sense that the local and the global are intimately connected, and that there is no excuse for the global predations upon the local.

The second thing all of these poets share, particularly those in Northern B.C. where the global screwup is an oppressively plain presence in everyone’s lives, is a sense that what is amiss can’t effectively be countered with righteousness or ideology, and that the most effective instrument of struggle is an open-minded phenomenology fuelled by focusing on local particularities and being willing to laugh. Call the willingness to laugh “gallows humour” if you like, but there is thus an extremely acute sense of irony at work and a willingness to laugh, even when—maybe particularly when—levity is deemed inappropriate by the supervisors of both the economy and the culture.

It’s worth noting that the current generation of McKinnon/Harris-influenced Zeitgeist-hostile writers and poets seem to be centred around the College of New Caledonia where McKinnon and Harris taught, and around Graham Pearce, an iconoclaustic live-wire who is an instructor at the College. For the past few years Pearce has been running a carefully irreverent reading series in the city called Postnorth, teaching creative writing and English to an enthusiastic (judging from the uniformly glowing student evaluations he gets) new generation of students trying to pierce the fog that passes for public discourse in the North: business boosterism, hand-wringing about dead pine trees, and cockeyed industrial development schemes (none of which are likely to work any better than the notorious and short-lived chopstick factory that was the main accomplishment of the administrators in McKinnon and Harris’ heyday).

Life in the North has changed since the 1970s, and one of the positive changes has been the opening of a university in Prince George: The University of Northern B.C.  It is a genuine, degree-granting institution with a good library, logical local specialties in boreal forestry and aboriginal issues, and a medical school.

But like all contemporary universities, UNBC’s faculty has its share of the generation of humourless academic entrepreneurs who call themselves post-modernists and post-structuralists.  These are narrowly-trained people for whom history is a relic of European intellectual chauvinisms of one sort or another, and Western society itself a binary of oppressors and victims they see themselves as personally charged with delivering overdue rewards to.  Like the discourse at most universities today, theirs is crudded with a personal rights-obsessed self esteem-seeking censoriousness, over-determined by discredited Marxist intellectual methodologies and by an unadmitted moral certainty that imposes cultural relativism on everything but the owner/operators’ often-neurotic fixations, along with self esteem-building and correct consciousness-building programs for those they claim, Bolshevik-style, to represent. These neo-Bolshevist academics are people so certain that they’re right about everything that they are prepared to rearrange the lives and behaviors of the living without their consent and to revise the testimonies of the dead to secure moral and intellectual comfort for themselves and the people they have arrogated the right to supervise.

Please note that this malaise is no more virulent at UNBC than at other universities, and that it has largely supplanted the Liberal Arts vision of the university as a place where students are there, while they receive specialist training of various sorts, to acquire the cognitive tools of competent democratic citizenship. The infection, in fact, may well be less pervasive and extreme at UNBC given that northern B.C. has always had a way of imposing common sense and punitive practical realities on extremisms of any kind. Nor is the description of these people I’ve offered one that they would acknowledge or even recognize. Moral sincerity is a camouflage that confuses both its wearers and those they seek to confuse—or ambush—with the unstable mix of ideology and radical morality sincerity inevitably seems to result in.  These princes and princesses of academia have neither the self-awareness to recognize their intentions, nor do they have any detectable sense of humour with which to process such recognitions. In their defense, this is because the moral goals they pursue are worthwhile. They believe men and women should be treated equally, that systemic social, political and psychological injustices should be corrected, that racial and class distinctions are odious, and that we should stop tearing the planet apart if we want to continue to live on it. Exactly what John Harris, Barry McKinnon, Graham Pearce and a solid majority of Prince George’s population believe, in other words.

But in action, they are practicing a latter-day strain of Bolshevism—which is the presumption that virtue of purpose can confer on the virtuous the right to represent or constrain others without their consent, and that the end justifies the means. I’m not suggesting that their Bolshevism is identical to the Soviet strain that eventually resulted in about 20 million people being starved to death, worked to death in Siberia, or shot in the neck by the several generations of Soviet secret police. It isn’t. But the moral certainty is similar, and the situational tactics share a similar crudeness, censoriousness and inflexibility.

The leadership of the censorious side of the Prince George poetry war seems to reside in two academically ambitious people. One is an American-born UNBC English professor named Robert Budde, a rotund Vegan who arrived in Prince George shortly after UNBC opened. He’s published four volumes of verse, three volumes of fiction, and has several anthologies to his credit, one a selection of Al Purdy’s verse that I’ll examine in more detail later. The volume of Budde’s verse I’m most familiar with is Finding Fort George, a somewhat odd quest given that the 18th century Fort is long gone and wasn’t much to look at while it was there. Budde seemed to be more intent on discovering Barry McKinnon in various postures (a “gunslinger”, etc.)  few would recognize as typical of the notoriously unassuming McKinnon.

Budde’s website, robbudde.weebly.com indicates he has four university degrees, including a English PhD from the University of Calgary for which he submitted, as his thesis, a novel titled Misshapen, which was written under the supervision of Aritha Van Herk, a close associate of the censoriously protestant patriarch of CanLit, Rudy Wiebe, and herself the author of the somewhat dubiously famous novel Judith. Eva Tihanyi, in Books in Canada, described Misshapen this way: there is a forced quality to the whole book, as if it had been cobbled together with great effort and under some duress. Its short chapters—many only a page long—suggest the self-consciousness of writing exercises. Budde also wrote a volume of verse for his MA under Dennis Cooley at the University of Manitoba, although his CV states that his PhD candidacy had course work in “Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, American Women Poets, Feminist and Postcolonial Theory”.

I’ve always found Budde perfectly pleasant to deal with and his writing relatively easy to follow, even though I have as little idea what Postcolonial means as Prince George city council does, and almost certainly will disagree with him over how to define the empire we are the escaped colonists from—not to mention my doubts about any sort of teleological theory as a means of apprehending human reality. I must admit to also having a few doubts about how a guy intent on teaching Canadians in Northern B.C. how to write would deploy an expertise in American Women Poets or Feminist Theory, but I’m sure I must be missing something on that.

The other major  leader of the Bolshevik faction a woman named Si Transken, which I’m told is, in true Bolshevik tradition, a non de plume. Her entry in the UNBC faculty website is difficult to parse. It offers, somewhat curiously in a publish-or-perish environment, no trackable account of her publications, and very little about her educational background, which I had to trace through a second UNBC website. It does have three photographs of her, one of them an attractive colour photo nearly as large the space given to text. Part of the text is a rather strange note about someone that she’s attracted to, a sentence that defines heterosexuality uncategorically as a form of oppression, and the following somewhat opaque description of, I think, her goals as an educator: “Together with her clients she attempts to fully reclaim women’s hope, creativity, vision, and empowerment. When Si facilitates workshops on women’s issues she likes to leave them laughing, coloring, drawing, singing, playing because they already know how to suffer.”  Again, I must be missing something. Aren’t wanting to leave people “laughing, coloring, drawing, singing, playing” generally the educational goals at a daycare centre?

Trying to get hold of Transken’s poetry is tricky, although she regularly distributes it at poetry readings and consciousness-raising workshops under titles like “Our Group Poem About Dicks”.  She appears to be mainly an editor of anthologies, but the only one I could actually locate on Amazon.com is from a  publisher called PressForward, whose website seems to be offering academic self-publishing facilities from a residential address that Googlemaps locates on a gravel road about 15 kilometres west of Prince George, and Canada 411 has listed to someone named Mark Maillot. The only other solid pieces of information I have on Ms. Transken is that she’s an associate professor in the university’s social work program, has shown her paintings of her vagina at group poetry readings at UNBC, and that she is recently married to Ken Belford, who has been, over the years, the other widely acclaimed poet Northern B.C. has produced aside from McKinnon. A peer review of Belford’s latest book of poems can be found on this website, here.

Let’s go back to one of Rob Budde’s works, which is a selection of Al Purdy’s poems he edited in 2006 for Wilfred Laurier Press University Press in Waterloo, Ontario. In that selection, Budde went out of his way to select certain poems of Purdy’s—and to exclude others. Here’s his explanation for the way he selected them:

I find some of Purdy’s poems – “offensive” in the sense that they have the potential to cause harm and to misrepresent.  They contain, in short, racist and sexist elements.  This is not surprising coming out of the 1960’s in Canada, but it is something that requires comment.  I have chosen not to include many poems that are considered Purdy’s best because of these racist and sexist elements.

…[Frank]Davey cites “The Cariboo Horses” as an example of Purdy’s tendency toward damaging images.  It is the title poem of Purdy’s Governor General Award winning book and is often anthologized.  It is a brilliant poem in many ways, but an entire stanza is devoted to comparing “Beaver or Carrier women maybe / or Blackfoot squaws” (as if the distinction didn’t matter) to horses.  Davey rightly describes the representation of Aboriginal women in the poem as “as extreme and lamentable as any in our literature”.

Purdy’s sexism is clearest perhaps in his “Song of the Impermanent Husband” which addresses a “maddening bitch”  without much self-awareness.  There are other examples, but that is not what this introduction is for.  I think readers and students should look into this systemic racism and sexism in some of Purdy’s work because it is indicative of prevailing thought that still exists in contemporary writing and needs revision.

Budde’s bowdlerized selection from Purdy’s opus, coming as it does from an academic university press, is a teaching text aimed at student readers. The selection, instead of presenting Purdy, a poet who captured the vernacular language and common values of his era more precisely than any writer in Canada, as an historical figure in a specific context, simply removes whatever poems that contain language that offends the editor’s sensibility, and condemns Purdy for not sharing his values and moral vocabulary as if it was Purdy’s duty, in the 1960s and 1970s when most of his great poems were written, to figure out what Rob Budde finds morally agreeable in 2006.

The anthology therefore fails not just as a representation of Purdy’s intelligence and poetic range, it fails as a teaching vehicle. If Budde, as the selecting editor, wanted to show that Purdy had some ideas that were acceptable in his time but have since fallen out of fashion, he should have provided evidence for it in the form of the texts of the offending poems—and then argued for his moral vocabulary over Purdy’s with his students. But, see, this is not how academic Bolshevism operates. It is so certain of his moral correctness, it can remade Al Purdy in its own image (or that of the book’s editor) and—I don’t think this is incidental—find Purdy comparatively less correct than Budde.

This is a kind of intellectual thuggery worthy of—you guessed it—the Soviet revisions of history during the Stalin era, when politicians and writers were routinely removed from the Bolshevik canon whenever they were found to be out of synch with the capriciously-altering correct party line. The only difference is that in Stalin’s Soviet Union, anyone removed from the canon was nearly always shot in the back of the neck or invited to walk to Siberia in the middle of winter after being given 30 minutes to gather food and clothing for the trip. One wonders what we’d have gotten had Budde been asked to select the poems of Allen Ginsberg, or the prose of Raymond Carver, where “the potential to cause harm and to misrepresent” might appear in every second line.

A couple of weeks ago, this website published an explanation by Graham Pearce of his Postnorth reading series and why he’d felt compelled to mount the series. You can find it at http://www.dooneyscafe.com/archives/3003. As part of his defense of the series he offered the following description of an encounter with Budde: … I attended a reading at the Prince George Public Library dedicated to landscape poetry featuring Dr. Rob Budde.” Pearce writes. “After the reading, we were stuck with the image of Budde wearing a heavy poncho weaved by his father that he explained “represented” the prairies. Sigh. It also said, “I’m so much more sensitive than you are.”  I left the reading feeling like the prairie-poncho was a sign of what was absent at this and most other recent readings: risk. The poncho was also a sign of the political situation poetry had found itself in: the father weaved a poncho for his son/ said poncho represents childhood and father/ said father is a weaver and son is a poet/ no harm done here. …I believe there is room for landscape poetry and its prairie ponchos; equally, I believe there is room for a measured response.”

Now, Pearce was clearly needling Budde here—rather gently, to my mind. I’d have been on about the poncho-weaving traditions of Minnesota, asking where the sombrero and the Clint Eastwood cigarillo was, or wondering aloud about how useful a poncho might be in snowstorm. Pearce, instead, is trying to make a couple of serious points about how poems are constructed, and tacitly opining that a full and uncensored range of materials and modes of expression is particularly crucial to meaningful poetic communication. He’s also acutely aware that most poetry readings are among the dullest cultural events in our civilization, particularly those deploying poetry-as-self-declamation-and-therapy, where most of the listeners in the room can reduce the poems performed to a single line: “I’m so sensitive I can’t stand it.”  The reality is that most audiences can’t stand it either, which is why so many people fall asleep during poetry readings. A morally-earnest poetry of wound-healing self-legitimation may have therapeutic value, but it also has the intellectual rigor and entertainment value of an AA meeting.

I suppose it’s also true that a large portion of what is usually called “language poetry” has similar problems. I once witnessed Steve McCaffery read a poem that featured the first syllable of every name in the Invermere, B.C. telephone book. It was fairly amusing until about the letter C, but McCaffery went through the whole alphabet. But the end of it, seven of the eighteen victims in the audience were unconscious, most the rest were close and I was muttering to myself about never going to another poetry reading. A year later I put my money where my mouth was: I stopped publishing poetry. I’ve given a single reading of my poetry in the 28 years since then, even though I haven’t stopped applying the skills I learned from it in other kinds of writing.

I think what Pearce is getting at is that poetry is supposed to have responsibilities. One of them is to present a world other people can see, feel, hear and otherwise relate to—which is to say, not quite the enterprise of securing an hermetic inner reality with one’s own language. The second is be enough public fun that the people listening are not rendered comatose.

Postnorth’s readings have, I understand, drawn substantial audiences from the beginning, and Pearce got mostly positive responses to his Dooney’s article from readers in Prince George and elsewhere. He also got one very strange response, not from Rob Budde, but from a graduate student Budde is unusually close to. The note said that the sender would be formulating some sort of official complaint against Pearce on the grounds that Pearce is guilty of bullying Budde, which the note defined as “making fun of people for what they wear,” adding that the complainant no longer felt safe or secure around Pearce as a result. I’ve had to piece this together from memory, because Pearce didn’t reveal either the name of the complainant and didn’t think it was ethical to forward me the note. He did mention, with some chagrin, that the note contained four fairly egregious spelling errors, including misspelling “academic” as “acedemic”. I thought bullying was an issue among elementary school and high school students. If it is now being charged in the midst of university level discourse by adults of consenting age, the future of that discourse isn’t very promising: Everyone with a non-conforming opinion will sooner or later be accused of “hurtful bullying” and placed before a tribunal. How Bolshevik!

Absurd as it sounds, this sort of thing, along with an apparently irresistible urge to supervise the language, thought and actions of those around them appears to be normal practice for the Bolshevik side of the poetry war, as is boycotting any poetry reading—or person—they think might have the potential to cause harm and to misrepresent. And if this degree of intellectual fundamentalism is sweeping the Western world, as it seems to be doing, most of our democratic institutions are in jeopardy, not just our artistic freedom. Though I confess to having had a lot of fun in this essay making merry with the absurdities of the situation, I don’t think what these people are doing is ultimately very funny. It scares the hell out of me.

So let me be serious for a moment, and tell you what I think poetry is about, and what conditions its composition and dissemination require.

In Thinking the Twentieth Century, which is the remarkable record of a series of conversations historian Timothy Snyder conducted with Tony Judt while Judt was dying of ALS in 2009, I found the following exchange between the two men. Judt was the author (among a number of remarkable books) of Postwar, which is generally regarded as the best and most complete history of Europe from 1945 to the margins of the present, and Snyder is the author of Bloodlands, which offers readers, for the first time, a competent account of what went on in Byelorussia, the Ukraine and Poland between 1937 and 1945—arguably the darkest years and the darkest location of the 20th century.

The exchange begins with Snyder: “History’s fundamental ethical responsibility” he says, “is  reminding people that things actually happened, deeds and suffering were real, people lived thusly and their lives ended in such and not other ways. And whether those people were in Alabama in the 1950s or Poland in the 1940s, the underlying moral reality of those experiences is of the same quality as our experiences, or is at least intelligible to us, and therefore real in some irreducible way.”

“This rather obvious job description” Judt answers, “is actually quite crucial. The cultural and political current flows in the other direction: to efface past events—or exploit them for unrelated purposes. It’s our job to get it right: again and again and again. The task is Sisyphean: the distortions keep changing and so the emphasis in the corrective is constantly in flux. …we have a second responsibility. We are not merely historians but also and always citizens, with a responsibility to bring our skills to bear upon the common interest.”

If you remove the word “historian” and substitute “poet”, you have the way I see the intellectual and citizenly responsibilities of poetry. The difference is that poets have an additional responsibility, one that rests in the realm of language rather than factual events. We’re supposed to act as the janitors of language and human perception, charged with enabling both fact and intelligible nuance. And we’re supposed to, I think Graham Pearce would add, enable stories that don’t put people to sleep.  None of these goals can be accomplished while we’re neck deep in moral prescriptions and proscriptions, nor can they be accomplished if our main goal is to stroke ourselves and our supervisors’ prejudices, or somehow articulate while we’ve got our heads jammed up our emotional behinds. We simply can’t move fast enough to apprehend human and natural reality in those restricting postures. In particular, poetry and moral supervision are natural enemies, and should be recognized as such.

I don’t think this is something that can be compromised, despite the comforts of moral certainty, which are also the enemies of poetry. That’s why I’m behind Barry McKinnon, John Harris, Graham Pearce and whoever else is on their side of the war.  I don’t think they’re winning, and everyone—and I don’t just mean everyone in Prince George who writes poetry—is going to be in trouble if they lose.

5084 words  April 4, 2012

I should state from the beginning that I have the utmost admiration for people who take the time and make the effort to learn a second language. Born into a Franco-Ontarian family, I don`t count myself among these people since I was not aware that I was learning a second language.  I grew up in a mainly English-speaking neighborhood and was oblivious to the fact that I was gradually displacing my French mother tongue.  I have often felt envious of Francophiles who were more proficient in French than I was.  Two such people were the late Barbara Godard and the late Robert Dickson.  It was fascinating to watch Barbara do simultaneous translations at mind-numbing speed. Robert Dickson, who was born into an English-speaking family, was a professor in the French Department at Laurentian University, taught and wrote in French, and won a Governor General’s award for one of his poetry books.  I was very fortunate and grateful for his outstanding translation of my first novel, Frog Moon, but it remains a source of regret that I wasn’t able to write it in French in the first place.

Thanks, in great part, to the Quiet Revolution and to the sovereignty movement, it’s been a while since Anglophones living in Montreal have dared tell a Francophone to speak “white” as in the Michèle Lalonde poem of the same name, written in the 60’s;  or, as in the 70’s, when a waitress informed me that she wouldn’t serve me unless I spoke English; or when I was told by a real estate agent in the early 80’s that I wouldn’t want to look for a house in Montreal’s Outremont district because I wouldn’t want to be surrounded by “Pepsis.”  The epithet “Pepsi” derives from the belief by Quebec Anglos that their French-speaking counterparts drank Pepsi because they couldn’t afford Coke, which was marginally more expensive in Quebec.  It was also understood that the slur applied to those same French speakers because a bottle of Pepsi was empty from the neck up.  The fact that this also applied to Coke or any other soda bottles didn’t seem relevant.  You can imagine the real estate agent’s stupefaction when I informed her that I was, in fact, one of those “Pepsis.” Once she recovered, she gave me the usual, sheepish response: “But you speak English so well.”

I suppose I speak English well enough, sometimes with a slight accent, and I do get along fine in French. I always spoke French with my parents and still speak it with relatives, friends and acquaintances from Ontario, Quebec, France.  Writing in French, however, is another matter.  I become aphasic.  Words and thoughts disappear.  Doubt besets every sentence, every turn-of-phrase.  What if I should make mistakes?  In my own mother tongue?  I suddenly see myself cast in Michel Tremblay’s Les Belles-Soeurs, trapped within a limited vocabulary, frustrated by my inability to fully express myself in what should be my first language. Which doesn’t happen as often when I write in English.  Robert Dickson related to me once that he had had the same experience when asked to fill in for a colleague who taught Canadian Literature in English.  He too became aphasic before the class. The words and ideas were simply not there.

A few decades ago, it wasn’t unusual for Anglos to tell a Franco Ontarian that they understood and spoke French, but only the “Parisian kind.”  Does anyone remember that old canard?  Supposedly, the French that Franco Ontarians and Québécois spoke was simply not up to standard.  What was especially irksome was the authoritative and proprietary way in which this was related.  At a neighborhood party once, I overheard the host say that he had a wonderful handyman who had a delightful if peculiar way of expressing himself in Ontario French which was not “really a language.”  I wondered how those poor Franco-Ontarians managed to communicate.

If, as a young woman, I was too easily intimidated to confront a waitress, I have since grown impatient with a more insidious phenomenon. Strangely enough, it has to do with English-speaking people who proudly see themselves as “Francophiles.”

Several years ago, my pronunciation of the marketplace “Les Halles,” enunciated without making the liaison between the “s” and the aspirated “h” was corrected by an Anglo Francophile.  No sooner had I spoken the two words than this self-proclaimed expert raised his eyebrows a few centimetres and corrected me with “Les (Z)alles,” making the liaison as if the “h” was “muet.”  For those who do not know, or may have forgotten, when a French word begins with an aspirated “h” it is treated as if the word began with a consonant and does not require the liaison.  However, when a word begins with a mute “h” it is treated as if it began with a vowel and a liaison is made.   The list of mute “h” words is much longer than the aspirated “h” list and, as is usual with French grammatical rules, there are exceptions to both.   I don’t always know the reasons behind those exceptions, but in this case my first language comes to the fore, and I just know the correct pronunciation.

The correction from my Francophile friend was done with such authority, that for a brief second I doubted myself.  I felt the same way as when I had been told by a waitress to speak English if I wanted to be served.  But only for a brief second.  I overlooked his obvious scepticism. Les Halles, I reassured him, was pronounced without the liaison, without the “z” sound.

A similar occasion happened when my pronunciation of the rue Malesherbes–this time pronounced with the “z” liaison–was corrected by a Francophile who regularly spends long periods in France.  Again, this was conveyed with such authority that it sent me to the proper names section at the back of my Larousse: “MALESHERBES, [malzerb] Chrétien Guillaume de Lamoignon, magistrat et homme d’État français, etc…”  As if this wasn’t sufficient proof, for the next few weeks, whenever I took a taxi in Paris, I asked the driver the correct pronunciation of rue Malesherbes, and each time, the answer was the same. “Malzerb” they all replied.  All of them French-speaking.

Twice I`ve been corrected on the name of Marguerite Duras, once by an Anglo Francophile, and once by a German. I pronounced the “s” at the end of “Duras” but was informed that I shouldn’t.  In which case, several interviewers on French television would be wrong. Bernard Pivot, the excellent commentator/interviewer of such long-running programs as Apostrophes and Bouillon de Culture, favorite programs of mine, who interviewed Marguerite Duras several times, always pronounced the “s” at the end of “Duras.”  Furthermore, Duras herself is known to have requested that people pronounce the “s” in her surname.  But what does she know?  It’s only her name.

Unfortunately, some Francophiles’ authority is not relegated only to spoken French. Too often, when English Canadian writers pen more than three words in French, one of them is bound to be wrong.  A year or so ago, I was very pleased to receive in the mail a copy of Stephen Scobie’s The Measure of Paris, published by The University of Alberta Press. Scobie’s interest, appreciation and knowledge of the city have always impressed me.  He was, as far as I was concerned, a true Francophile who relied, as he himself admits several times in his book, on his “expertise of the flâneur” when in Paris.

It was clear from the beginning of Measure that much of it revolved around the writing of expat writers who had spent time in Paris, and I looked forward to visiting various landmarks as experienced by these writers.  It didn’t take long to realize, however, that it wasn’t necessarily other writers’ experiences of Paris that I would be visiting.  The measure mentioned in the title is mainly Scobie’s as he uses each writer’s experience of Paris to frame his own.  He is the standard by which other people’s writing of the city is measured.  Fair enough, I thought, and read on.

For the most part, Scobie’s book is anchored in a past gleaned from books and from what he calls “the persistent trope” about Paris.  His geographical markers begin with boulevard Haussmann, named after Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann, the well-known figure responsible in the mid-1800s for the Second Empire transformation of the city, considered the birth of modern Paris.  Except for a few contemporary Canadians, Scobie’s literary references are also mostly from the past: Glassco, Joyce, Hemingway, Stein, Benjamin, Baudelaire Proust, etc…  All of which provide easy and comfortable associations, not unlike those explored in Woody Allen’s film, Midnight in Paris, albeit Scobie’s are more literary, theoretical and analytical.  I must admit I was seduced, once again, by the opening shots of Paris skylines and famous landmarks in Allen’s film, but I also recognized that the postcard shots were intended mainly as clichés.  It’s also clear that only the very rich can afford to live in Woody Allen’s Paris.

What I didn’t find in Scobie’s book is an impression of life in Paris today.   He refers, in passing, to the traffic, the bustle, recent elections, exhibitions, films, but one never feels a present-day connection with the city.  He keeps reminding the reader that he “keeps a cautious distance,” that he is “a solitary man” or that he is “detached from everything” around him.  He writes that he has decided to “take care of himself,” which is all very well, but one is tempted to ask if taking care of one’s self is the most important aspect of writing a book about another culture’s city.  In fact, Scobie’s repeated references to the flâneur, the cliché so many writers have used in writing about Paris, invariably quoting Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, a primal history of nineteenth century Paris, does indeed reinforce Scobie’s sense of detachment.  He is the observer glaringly aware of his own observing.  As such, his self-imposed flâneur rarely manages to break through to the other side of his detachment, to the Other as differing from himself.

This was not meant to be a critical review of the mournful and chronic nostalgia that permeates Scobie’s book.  Too many of us are guilty of the same transgressions when writing about Paris, including myself.  What confused me however, given the book’s authoritative tone, were the basic errors Scobie makes when he uses French.  He doesn’t, in fact, use much French, but the tone is so self-assured that when he does use it and makes errors they are all the more jarring.   When he writes about a steak “cuit au point” and tells us that it is a steak cooked to perfection, he errs both grammatically and presumptively.  It should be a steak “cuit à point” which is not, as Scobie states, a steak “perfectly done.”  A steak “cuit à point” is a medium-cooked steak.  People who prefer their steaks rare or well-done would not consider a steak “cuit à point” perfectly cooked.   It is a minor mistake that could be quickly forgotten if he hadn’t done an entire riff, a play-on-words on it, all based on an error. Other examples are his use of articles, “le” when it should be “la” or vice versa, as “le plage” which should be “la plage” or “La Zénith” which should be “Le Zénith.”  “Muguet du bois” should be “muguet des bois.  “Jour née” should be “jour né” although that would destroy another play-on-words of “journée” as a newly born day.  He doesn’t make any distinction between certain words such as “le baiser” which means “the kiss” and “la baise” which means—there’s no other word to use here—“fuck.”   According to Scobie these two words are interchangeable and create ambiguity.  In fact, these two words are not interchangeable, other than in Scobie’s mind, and the ambiguity is entirely of his making. This is particularly problematic for me since it applies to a section of one of my novels and saddles it with an unfounded interpretation, again based on an error.  There are more examples, but I think I’ve made, even overstated, my point.  I once read that Paris was the capital of illusionism. Perhaps, for some writers, basic definitions and grammatical rules don’t play a very important role in the detached world of illusions.

I recently received from the poet and food critic, Gerry Shikatani, an invitation to contribute to a series he was planning on food which he would name “Les Délices du Table.”  Why, I answered, would he give a French name to his series, especially given the fact that it is grammatically incorrect?  It should be “Les Délices de la Table.” But more importantly, why use a French title at all?  Will it be a French series on French food?  I presumed not.  Is it to give his series more cachet?  How could it if the title itself was grammatically wrong?  Is it another case of exploiting a stereotype?

I’ve recently read Shikatani’s latest collection of poems The Port’s Seasonal Rental whose setting is a cottage on Lake Erie, published by Mercury Press & TekstEditions. Scattered throughout the collection are thirty short French poems. Admirable, an English reader might say, but not so to a French reader.  There are in these thirty brief poems as many errors, basic mistakes which I’m not going to bother listing because I find this kind of cavalier attitude towards language disheartening.  In his acknowledgments, Shikatani thanks an Acadian writer for “his faultlessly perceptive work as editor” of his French compositions which is rather perplexing given the number of mistakes. You can only guess that either this editor didn’t bother editing the texts, or that the poems were printed from an unedited copy.  In either case, Shikatani did not have enough command of the French language to notice the errors himself.  In my response to his invitation to write a piece on food for his series, I suggested that given how most poetry books are printed on demand these days, perhaps he should have his book re-edited.

It isn’t unusual for an English press to make errors when printing texts in a language other than English. When my collection of poems, ‘sophie, was published by Coach House Press in 1988, before the days of computer editing, the blue lines I was sent were replete with typos/errors, mainly in the half-dozen French poems.  I corrected the blue lines, but when I received my author’s copies of the book two days before the launch, I discovered that they had been printed from the uncorrected proofs.  To Coach House’s credit, enough copies were reprinted in time for the launch. One typo remains, an apostrophe was omitted, but perhaps one is more acceptable than dozens?

Many successful writers have chosen to write in their second language. Many of them have claimed that doing so has given them fresh perspectives on a language and a culture that were not primarily theirs. I believe this to be true.  The books mentioned were written by English-speaking Francophiles mainly for English readers who may not notice errors and inaccuracies. For those who do notice, however, the errors seriously undermine the work of these writers.

Speakers rarely wish to be misunderstood and writers rarely wish to be undermined.  If only for CanLit`s sake, and for the sake of a supposedly bilingual country, writers and publishers who are not fully bilingual and who insist on writing and publishing in a language that is not their own should make sure they get proper editing from qualified editors.  Otherwise they should limit themselves to their own language or, at the very least, learn to be a little less authoritative about someone else’s.

2633 w. April 5, 2012

At the old Art Academy near Hansaplatz (there’s also a new snazzy post-wall Art Academy just behind iconic Brandenburg Gate), February weekends were given over to a dozen Cage concerts that included piano, string quartets, violin, percussion, and voice performances, featuring some of the city’s best contemporary musicians, such as pianist Steffen Schliermacher, and the Pelligrini Quartet. The following month, the annual Maerz Musik festival offered a spectrum of Cage events, and you can hear scattered Cage pieces everywhere from the posh Konzerthaus to the funky avant-garde recitals at the “Unheard Music” series (in German, the word for “unheard,” unerhort, can also mean “outrageous”). So, around here, no shortage of Cage (1912-1992).

Until now, I had heard very little of Cage’s music. However, as a near-child, I was once taken by a supervising adult, poet Robin Blaser, to a Merce Cunningham dance performance in San Francisco, where David Tudor and Cage played “prepared” pianos, and Robert Rauschenberg did the costumes and sets. I can barely recall any of the music, but I knew I was at an unforgettable evening starring Cunningham who, although I didn’t know it at the time, was Cage’s companion and mate for several decades.

Cage was the most renowned experimental American composer of my young adulthood. Yet, while I was aware of him (and his fame), I knew almost nothing about his music until now. Once more, I find myself reflecting on how much of my life is devoted to belatedly catching up with, and thereby changing, my past. I didn’t get to post-WWII existentialism until Sartre was an elderly gent; I missed most of post-modernist Theory (and didn’t begin to read Roland Barthes until 1980, the year of his death); and, as Kurt Vonnegut famously but annoyingly put it again and again, “So it goes” (I didn’t get around to Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five ‘til 30 years after the fact). This is the sort of thing that my friend Blaser meant by his remark, “A lot of people lived in the 20th century without living in the 20th century.” That is, lots of people who have easy access to their times remain oblivious to the culture, thought and politics of their era.

One of the virtues of current German culture is its memorializing character. Of course, Germany’s got a lot of horrific 20th century history that’s burned into memory. But it’s got a lot more history than that, and the country pays attention to it. Germany commemorates birthdays, deaths, centenaries, and events with particular fervour. In a time of much forgetting, Berlin remembers: whether it’s the streetnames of famous thinkers — say, the intersection of Kant and Leibniz Streets in my Berlin neighbourhood — or plaques on building walls to denote the residences of prominent authors — the one I like on shady Nollendorf Strasse marks the 5-storey walk-up where Christopher Isherwood, author of Goodbye to Berlin, looked out the window and announced, “I am a camera…” When a notable musical date rolls around — last year it was the hundredth anniversary of the death of composer Gustav Mahler — the city reminds us by performing, in Mahler’s case, just about all of his major works. In the instance of Cage’s birth centenary (he died 20 years ago), the occasion provides the opportunity to reassess the artist’s work, and reputations accordingly rise and decline in the course of a season’s performances.

The work on display ranges from Cage’s earliest songs, including setting a few Gertrude Stein poems to music, to the very late “103” (1991), a 90-minute orchestral performance by 103 musicians positioned throughout the concert hall and accompanied by an abstract light-and-shadow film. Since I had little sense of Cage’s music prior to this season of Cage, I can’t say that his work rose or fell in my estimation. However, compared to the 20th century composers I most like to hear — a panoply that stretches from Gustav Mahler to Alfred Schnittke, with stops along the way for Berg, Bartok, Webern, the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Scelsi, Shostakovich, Piazzola, Kurtag and Stockhausen — Cage, while interesting and almost “necessary” to the contemporary history of music composition, sounds to me too abstract, too chance-determined, too determined to avoid emotional expression to satisfy my understanding of what the point of music is. At the same time I recognize that the minimalism, conceptuality, and effacement of the composer are precisely what Cage intends.

In “103,” for example, Cage lays down an undulating sound field, created mostly by string instruments — a rising and falling humming – punctuated by chance-determined short bursts of horns, strings and percussion, sustained for an hour and a half, accompanied by a black-and-white film in which light and shadow shapes emerge and dissolve. The sound effect is an always-on-the-edge tenuous feeling that one expects to “resolve” (into something), but never quite does. The result is “sort of interesting,” not unpleasant, not even boring (although some might find it so) and it’s pretty much what Cage was aiming at. The piece acquires some poignancy in that it occurs so late in Cage’s life, and you’re aware as a listener that this is what the almost 80-year-old composer was thinking about toward the end.

That’s not the only version of Cage there is. I found a hilarious Cage performance on YouTube, which preserves the segment of a 1960 popular TV show called “I’ve Got A Secret” on which the then 48-year-old composer appeared. The “secret” is that Cage is going to perform a piece of his music. The show’s host dispenses with the usual guest panel attempt to uncover the secret and moves directly to a little set-up interview with Cage. The composer is wearing a suit and narrow tie, his hair is close-cropped, and he maintains a faint but genial near-smile. When the host warns him that the audience may laugh at him, Cage coolly replies, “I prefer laughter to tears,” which elicits the intended audience chuckle of approval. Cage makes the host admit that the five radios in the piece can’t be used as intended because the show’s stagehand unions couldn’t agree on which one of them had the right to plug in the radios, and therefore Cage, instead of randomly turning the radios on and off, will simply bang on them and eventually knock them off the counter on which they’re sitting.

At which point the curtain rises, and Cages performs his “Water Walk,” a 6-or-7 minute Rube Goldberg-esque piece involving various sound-making things, including a Mixmaster for grinding icecubes, a pressure-cooker hissing away, a watercan for watering a vase of flowers that’s been placed in a bathtub, plus various whistles, pipes and other soundmakers, along with the aforementioned radios which get banged upon and knocked to the ground. Cage cheerfully moves quickly among the crowded stage-set of improvised instruments he’s created, and the thing is, it all works. It’s rhythmical, musical, funny, and there’s clearly an idea behind it which is successfully enacted in the performance. The audience of course loves it and is infused with the false notion that maybe all this weird modern music ain’t so bad, and the heretofore obscure except-to- the-avantgarde Maestro Cage has goodnaturedly appeared among the masses and their mass media “in living rooms across America,” as people were fond of saying back then.

In an odd way, Cage’s life is more interesting, and hectic, than his music, as is made clear by the most recent and readable biography of the composer, Kenneth Silverman’s Begin Again: A Biography of John Cage (2010). When Los Angeles-born Cage was one-year-old, shortly before World War I, his father, John Sr., became briefly famous by inventing the most advanced submarine to date. Cage’s inventor father, who dabbled in everything from cold remedies to night vision devices, may be a key to understanding the temperament of the son, whose approach to music displays a similar innovator’s curiosity.

Silverman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer who has written about such disparate figures as Cotton Mather and Harry Houdini, isn’t a musical specialist, so his book will likely leave music professionals unsatisfied by the technical account of Cage’s work. For the rest of us, this gossipy life of an avant-garde artist will suffice. Silverman is a bit sketchy on how a bright but conventional high school valedictorian is transformed seemingly overnight into a modernist artist. There’s a European grand tour, where the teenage Cage acquires a boyfriend. Once back in California, Cage becomes a student of exiled German-Jewish composer Arnold Schoenberg, and much of the rest is musical history. As some reporters are said to have “a nose for news,” Cage seems to have had a nose for the new and swam with ease in the more advanced cultural currents.

There was much slogging along the way, which ran from dishwasher-type odd jobs to a lot of plunking piano accompaniment for young dancers at their lessons. Eventually there was a music school job in Seattle, the invention of the “prepared” piano (the insertion of bits of material between the strings yielding a spooky sound), and meeting dancer Merce Cunningham in the 1940s. By mid-century, Cage had turned to the use of chance in composition. As composer John Adams, writing in the New York Times Book Review about Silverman’s biography notes, for Cage “the act of composing was always a matter of careful process and method rather than the romantic one of spontaneous inspiration and self-expression.” However methodical, it also involved the hocus-pocus of using the I Ching, an Asian book of divination to determine the course of the music. Not everyone was enthralled. As Lou Harrison, a fellow composer Cage had befriended, quipped, “I would rather chance a choice than choose a chance.”

Cage’s life story is a tale of knowing everyone and being everywhere, mostly at the right time. He plays chess with Marcel Duchamp; stages art “happenings” with poet Charles Olson at legendary Black Mountain College; is devoted to the theories of architect Buckminster Fuller; discusses the Zeitgeist with ‘60s thinker Norman O. Brown; is close to the Fluxus movement in art; gets macrobiotic diet advice from Yoko Ono; and even becomes a mushroom expert, livening up the proceedings of the New York Mycological Society (it’s something like Vladimir Nabokov and butterflies). Cage also became the pre-eminent member of a New York group of modern composers that included Morton Feldman and Christian Wulf (both of whom he taught for free, as Schoedberg once did with him) and was in contact with composers around the world, from Boulez to Stockhausen.

When not writing music, Cage was writing words. John Adams, who read Cage’s 1961 book, Silence, as a young composer, “found that what Cage had to say about the nature of noise, about how we listen (or don’t listen), and about how tradition and habit threaten to deaden our capacity for discovery, [was] the musical equivalent of the young Martin Luther’s nailing his theses to the door of the Wittenburg church.” In practice, the sounds and the silences included the notorious “4’33”,” a silent piano piece performed by his friend David Tudor, as well as elaborate combinations of sound and theatre Cage referred to as “musicircus.”

Cage’s initial and enduring musical influence was the French composer Erik Satie, echoes of whose work can be heard in Cage’s early and elegant piano compositions. Intellectually, he was stimulated by a wide range of thinkers and writers, from the 19th century American transcendentalist Henry David Thoreau to contemporaries like Fuller and Marshall McLuhan. The work of James Joyce, especially his Finnegans Wake, was a major touchstone for Cage, who composed a “Roaratorio” honouring the Irish writer. Oh yes, and don’t forget Carge’s large array of graphic work, some of which is on display at various gallery sites in Berlin. Simply composing music for and doing much of the organizational work to keep the Merce Cunningham dance company running might have been enough for one artist. Not Cage. He was a genuine polymath, with seemingly inexhaustible energy who was working away to his last breath, just weeks before his 80th birthday.

John Adams notes the difficulty of “finding critical balance” when it comes to Cage. “He has gone from being unfairly considered a fool and a charlatan to an equally unreasonable status as a sacred cow,” Adams observes. This season in Berlin, not only is spring in the air, but so is the music of John Cage.

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Berlin, March 26, 2012

This issue of CNQ (as the magazine likes to be called) is useful for two reasons. First it airs a fairly wide range of writers’ concerns about the circumstances in which literature is presently written, reviewed, taught and marketed in Canada. Second, it shows a broad spectrum of responses to these concerns, from the panicked to the pointedly casual. 

It’s the same for writers all over the English-speaking world, it seems. In the 3 February 2012 Times Literary Supplement, Allan Massie, reviewing a book by Adam Kirsch about Lionel Trilling, lists the present concerns of American Writers: “Local bookstores are closing; book reviews are disappearing from newspapers, or the space allotted to them is shrinking. There is, according to Cynthia Ozick, ‘no undercurrent or . . . infrastructure of literary criticism.’ In university English departments, lectures on such topics as ‘the evolution of Batman’ are advertised ‘alongside posters for a Shakespeare conference.’ A survey by the National Endowment for the Arts says reading is ‘in dramatic decline.’ Even the book itself, the physical object, is an endangered species.”

These are among the problems CNQ deals with in the context of Canada. Massie also notes that writerly unease about such matters was registered by Trilling as long ago as 1952: “We are all a little sour on the idea of the literary life these days . . . . In America it has always been very difficult to believe that this life really exists at all, or that it is worth living. Hardly a year goes by without a novelist, poet, or critic coming forward to express this sense of sourness, which is actually a compound of despair and resentment. Despair, because every department of literature seems to be undergoing crisis, a multiple organ failure of the kind that leads inevitably to death; resentment because of the contemporary American writer’s sense that he has been like the final investor in a Ponzi scheme, having bought into the venerable enterprise of literature only to discover that it is on the verge of default.”

Kirsch’s book explains that Trilling was concerned about what he saw as a contemporary loss of faith in literature and about its retreat from the consumer marketplace as well as its disappearance from school and university curriculums. In fact, this sense of crisis goes back still further, among liberal-humanist critics and professors like Trilling, to the 1920’s, to Irving Babbitt and the Great Books movement, and was registered in Trilling’s time too by writer-teachers wondering Why Johnny Can’t Read (a 1955 classic by Rudolf Flesch), a concern augmented in the 1970’s by the release of university-entrance, literacy-test scores. The fear that Johnny’s failure in English would result in a shrinking of the audience for poetry and novels isn’t, in other words, a recent phenomenon.

It’s 2012, and Johnny still, apparently, can’t read. Never mind that he’s continuing to turn into first-rate physicists, brain surgeons, etc.. Word is now that the Internet, interactive video games, and social media as well as television have put paid to the chances that he will ever crack a Canadian novel, let alone write one.

In Canada through this time, three different but related concerns were being voiced. First, the influx of British and American professors hired to fill tenure-track positions in English and Creative Writing departments from the mid-1950s on was thought to bode ill for CanLit in particular, Canadian Culture in general. Second, an influx of shoddy American literature that was meant only, as Margaret Atwood put it at the Toronto “Writer and Human Rights” congress in October 1981, “to entertain and divert,” was being foisted on the country from increasingly dominant, foreign-owned corporations, and was thought to be pushing out “serious” Canadian literature. Third, the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994) threatened to bring what Atwood called “the Disneyland of the soul” even closer.

Behind the schools and universities, which are ostensibly responsible for educating citizens and creating a literate audience, is the government, which holds the ultimate responsibility for curriculum. In Canada, the federal government is also responsible for the promotion and protection of national culture. Canadian writers and critics (especially those who teach) have blamed the government for acceding to the demands of science, applied science and commerce faculties that the English Department wean itself from the shapely teat of literature and teach students how to write—using methods derived from the study of rhetoric, linguistics, philology and cognitive psychology.  In the recent past, Canada’s federal government has been praised for “cultural industries” legislation that protected and subsidized publishers, magazines, bookstores, distributors and writers almost as generously as it did resource-based and energy-focused industries. Presently, however, the government is perceived to be retreating from its duty to shelter cultural industries, and is being accused of complicity with the monetarist/Republican agenda. Behind all of these accumulating threats to the English Department’s view of human reality — from science, television, and social media —a single culprit is usually identified: corporate capitalism.

I’m conscious that in recommending this issue of CNQ as a broad and fair treatment of these important issues I could encounter skepticism. That CNQ would thoroughly cover the issues would surprise no one who reads it. “Fair” is a different matter. In its general responses to cultural issues, CNQ has always made easy resort to the panic button. The magazine in fact seems meant for readers who enjoy the vicarious pleasures of paranoia, panic, innuendo and verbal flagellation, and for writers who specialize in generating and applying same. Its General Editor, John Metcalf, when he took on the magazine in the late nineties, expressed the following ambition for it: “With our reviews, profiles, interviews, and essays we wish to intrude rudely on the bland mindlessness of Canadian literary life.” It might be expected, then, that CNQ would ask a leading question like “Who Killed CanLit?” with its silent assumption that the object of concern is dead and its implication that anyone unaware of this is either a moron or ipso facto complicit in its murder. The question sounds like an invitation to a lynching, and who needs that, especially when the suspects are said to be extremely powerful if not omniscient—and when you yourself could be named by some eloquent hothead as an accomplice?

It’s not easy, either, to assume that the point of Metcalf’s editorial policy would be the noble one of spewing insult, smashing icons and proclaiming the End as an incitement to meaningful action. Metcalf, though he is a notable writer of short stories and memoirs and an anthologist of short stories and polemical literary essays, has little credibility as a provocateur. He’s still best remembered for the “Tanks” campaign of the 1980’s when he served as UnterFuehrer to crazed Vancouver bookseller Bill Hoffer in the battle against what the two called “distortionist” state intervention in CanLit. The “Tanks Are Might Fine Things” attack focused on the Canada Council, but it suffered ignominious defeat in a 1987 Vancouver debate during which Andreas Schroeder and David Godfrey delivered the decisive blow simply by showing that Metcalf had been sleeping—and egregiously so—with the object of his hate. The campaign was so protracted and outrageous, so easily defeated, and so quickly abandoned by Metcalf after the debate that Metcalf was widely suspected of wasting everyone’s time, crying wolf in order to get personal attention.

However, while four of the nine feature articles on the question “Who Killed CanLit?” are close to panic, that is not a bad ratio for Metcalf, and may actually (considering Massie’s list and Trilling’s comments) reflect the present mood among writers. Three of the articles are pessimistic and two are optimistic, all five providing ways out for CanLit. The two optimistic articles convey the Pollyannic but hard-to-resist idea that story and song will out, will circulate, will be heard and read, will be discussed, and cannot ultimately be affected for good or ill by governmental or corporate ideologies and practices.

It seems that Metcalf personally invited the contributors of this wide range of responses, so he may be changing. His latest crusade, conducted through CNQ and another periodical called New Quarterly, is aimed at a distortionist corporate offense to CanLit, namely the Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (2007), and is being conducted mainly in terms of critical appraisals of the contents of the book and the establishment of a salon des refusés, an “alternate” anthology (in special editions of the two magazines), that readers can compare to the “establishment” one, and then arrive, with appropriate coaching, at their own conclusions. And in this particular issue of CNQ Metcalf steps back from the question about CanLit’s demise.  Instead, Alex Good, the latest in a series of CNQ sub-editors chosen from Metcalf’s all-male stable of vigorous polemicists (Good, Stephen Henighan, Carmine Starnino, Zacharia Wells, David Solway, Steven Beattie) asks the question. And he chooses in his introduction to ask it through CNQ’s cartoon-mascots Hudson (notes) and Stanfield (queries).

Hudson is represented on the CNQ coat of arms as earthy and huggable, a short, rotund, bearded man wearing a toque and mackinaw shirt. Stanfield is tall, skinny, sartorial and stuck-up — he sports a tuxedo and top hat. The two have been around CNQ for a couple of years, and in their conversations and actions serve to express the magazine’s concerns, attitudes and insecurities. What could be considered an off-putting question coming from Metcalf or Good — a question likely to lead only to more baseless assumptions, useless conjecture, and endless diatribe — seems non-threatening coming from Hudson and Stanfield, more like an invitation to have some fun — an invitation to be entertained, rather than shocked, into awareness.

Here’s how the invitation is extended. Hudson and Stanfield are seen entering a dark, garbage-strewn alley, Hudson in the lead. He holds a magnifying glass and has discarded his toque for a Sherlock Holmes cap. Stanfield holds a lantern. Good’s narrative indicates that they have located the body of CanLit, clothed in rags, in the doorway of a long-defunct, downtown bookstore. They conclude that CanLit died of “natural causes,” not being able to “make ends meet.” Hudson points out a startling fact: “The average author makes considerably less than the living wage.” Now the two are checking the immediate area for clues. Though they don’t suspect murder, Hudson thinks that “some negligence” was a factor in the death. He intends to find out “who was most responsible.” He proposes a forensic investigation run by a CNQ Royal Commission. Note: no murder, no posses, no lynchings – assuming of course that Hudson can keep his team under control.

In summarizing the reports of the 9 members of Hudson’s Royal Commission, I’m going to rearrange them so I can group similarly inclined reports together. Seven of them deal with three prominent suspects in the death of CanLit: the school/university system, the globalist corporate agenda, and the Internet and interactive media. The government is fingered as an accessory in each case. I’ll deal with the three suspects in the order I’ve listed them. I’ll bracket them with two reports that hold that CanLit is alive and well, and faces a promising if (as ever) difficult future. I’ll make no comments until the end.

Mike Barnes, a regular contributor to CNQ and a multi-faceted, mid-to-bottom-list writer (the covers of his two books of poetry, two of stories, two novels and one memoir are displayed on the pages of his article) decides to take himself as a typical representative of CanLit and submit to a self-examination in order to find out if Hudson is correct about the impossibility of CanLit’s “making ends meet.” Barnes calculates his earnings over 32 years to be $99,255. These earnings include royalties, honoraria, library and photocopy payments, and grants – $62,000 in grants. It seems that Hudson is correct: Barnes should be dead. Obviously there aren’t enough readers out there, not enough grants, and not enough writers-in-residencies and other paid literary gigs to enable Barnes to keep writing.

But Barnes affirms that he has kept writing and, in his opinion, writing well. Or at least he can’t see how he’d write better if he didn’t have to hold down a job – which is tutoring English students in their homes – or if he had more respect or adulation. When he switches from demand-side (blame the reader) analysis of the literary marketplace to supply-side (blame the writer), he finds that he’s doing quite well, can’t see how he needs or deserves better: “When I think of what connection there might be between greater material success and greater artistic success, the signs seem to point both ways.” In fact, Barnes thinks that his rewards “seem remarkably generous.” This includes his rewards from the Canada Council, which he praises not just for buying him time when he needed it but also generally for having forestalled a future where “what appeared on the display tables of big box stores really was all the books published.”

So, according to Barnes, CanLit writes well while holding down a day job as the main way of making ends meet. Had Hudson and Stanfield looked closely at what they assumed was a corpse, they might have found that CanLit was alive and well and only in disguise and resting after a long day of gathering material for a grant-supported realistic novel about the lives of street people.

They might have noted, too, that under the rags CanLit might have been wearing an academic gown. The next three members of Hudson’s Royal Commission are writer-teachers: Darryl Whetter, W.J. Keith and Michael Carbert. Whetter and Keith are at the university, in Creative Writing and CanLit respectively, though Keith is now retired. We’ll deal with the profs first. While both believe that their subject matter is important to CanLit, both feel that the university failed to train readers and writers of sufficient quality in sufficient quantity.

Whetter summarizes Mark McGurl’s “compelling” argument that: “We’re long past the To-MFA-or-Not-To-MFA debate. In the past two decades, writing in North America has shifted from the untutored ethos of rock-and-roll to the formal accreditation of a classical music education.” In short, the “professionalization” (as Whetter calls it) of writing, through Creative Writing courses, is a reality whether it works or not, and anyway seems to work when taught properly. In support of the English Department, Keith presents the standard liberal-humanistic argument — the one put by Trilling in his book The Liberal Imagination (1950) — that literature is a sort of secular scripture, a “guide to life” — that it is, as Trilling’s hero Matthew Arnold said, a replacement for religion, which has been discredited by science. Teaching the great books produces thoughtful, ethical, loving people who are good citizens of democracy. They also buy and read serious books.

Creative writing and literature, however, according to Whetter and Keith, have been taught incorrectly—which is to say, thematically, thus causing the death (Keith) or debility (Whetter) of CanLit. As Whetter has it, the blood has been sucked out of CanLit by “vampirish” English departments that offer “hybrid English/CW programs . . . run by English scholars, not other creative writers.” These are “still the national norm despite the new MFA programs” that are dominant in the US and that, in Whetter’s view, produce better writers. The hybrid Canadian programs reflect “our national preference for logic over emotion,” and our “national disrespect for creativity.” Whetter adds: “hybrid programs are like a military education that trades an enabling commodity for a fixed tour of duty (in literature seminars where candidates will write essays, not stories). Hybrid English/CW students spend (or squander) as much as two-thirds of their course work time, sweat and money in writerly hothouses like ‘Pathological Forgetting in Canadian Literature,’ ‘The Human and Its Others’ . . . or, no joke, ‘Further Peregrinations,’ a ‘course in ambulatory signmaking’.”

Instead, students should be studying “character, narrative arc and plot.” A transfusion of these, administered by the Faculty of Fine Arts, would, Whetter says, bring CanLit back to health. That is not likely to happen, though, because Creative Writing, as the only growing program in the English Department, is a good source of departmental revenue. So Whetter proposes an alternate solution. If the Department insists on continuing to offer its MA in Creative Writing, it should at least “play it through to the end” by offering the PhD as is done in Britain and America.

Whetter explains that, so far, the only Canadian doctoral program is in Calgary, because most English departments in Canada regard Creative Writing as lacking any serious disciplinary base. But if English profs could get over this and offer the program everywhere, American statistics show that this would increase enrolment in both MFA and MA programs everywhere — MFA enrolments at roughly six times the rate of MA enrolments. Many students want PhD’s, so they will have a better chance at university employment. Finally, Whetter argues, since the Social Science and Humanities Research Council generously funds graduate writing candidates, writers could make more through each year of their longer stay in grad school than they would make after graduation unless of course they do right away pick up full-time university jobs.

As Keith has it, the university long ago abandoned the humanities, its responsibility to help students “develop the capacity to respond to the great achievements of the western tradition (or, more widely, Matthew Arnold’s best that has been thought and said in the world).” Literary studies, including the study of CanLit, were downplayed in favor of science and technical courses. To prove this, Keith cites F.R. Leavis’s English Literature in Our Time and the University (1967), another liberal-humanistic tract — this one directed at British Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s science-inclined university reforms. Downplaying literature, Keith affirms, has cost CanLit a dedicated and trained audience.

The English profs themselves, Keith says, hastened the departure of literature, including CanLit, from the curriculum. They made two errors. First, they taught literature thematically, in CanLit falling “back upon the all-too-conspicuous and well-advertised crutch of Margaret Atwood’s Survival (1972), a notorious example of thematic criticism. This approach, Keith affirms, confuses students and desensitizes them to the real (aesthetic) value of literature. It trivializes the study of literature and so of composition, since students are trained to find social issues in poems and novels rather that to appraise them as aesthetic objects. Keith says that profs use the thematic approach because “it’s much easier to identify and isolate a theme in a work of literature than to assess its artistic qualities.”

The second error, in Keith’s opinion, was that profs adopted what he calls the “allied” but “equally treacherous moral approach.” This also is too easy. Students are set to “search for politically incorrect racist elements.” Keith identifies this approach as “postmodernism” and adds the further complaint that “postmodernist theorists habitually employ a professional jargon not only impenetrable to the uninitiated but presented in so concentrated a fashion that the sentences are cacophonous and mind-closing. . . . To offer this kind of writing to students . . . sets a bad example to coming generations not confident enough to recognize gobbledegook when they encounter it.”

All these evils happened to CanLit in the course of Keith’s university training and his career, which covered “the last forty years or so of the twentieth century.” “I seed de beginning, en now I sees de endin,” says Keith about CanLit, quoting (with a nod to the double irony thereof) from The Sound and the Fury.

Keith’s apocalyptic version of the death of CanLit — it was killed by the government and by its supposed curators and promoters in the English Department — is shared by Michael Carbert, but Carbert sees the university (and the public school system where he once taught) as aided and abetted by two other big and powerful culprits. These are “the Internet and the digital revolution,” and “the Chapters/Indigo monolith.”

Carbert, actually, is ambiguous about the digital revolution. He lists it, and implies that it has a deleterious effect on the attention spans of young people, which makes it hard for teachers like him to make them literate, but then he argues that there’s nothing “innately deficient” in his students. About the school system he agrees with what Keith says about the universities: “Our schools are not keenly interested in literature [and] no longer place an urgent emphasis on the written word.”

Carbert says that, in the past, the government has countered this, ensuring that CanLit is “holding its own.” However he sees that government is pulling back from its cultural legislation, and funding, across the spectrum. In addition, he suggests, alluding to Metcalf’s “Tanks” argument about government intrusions into culture, that there is a “high price to be paid for this protection, namely the ‘façade’ I referred to earlier, the government-created illusion [of intense and comprehensive literary activity] and all its necessary critical distortions.” One such distortion is the difficulty of applying for government publishing grants, a process so complex that it is almost not worth it. Carbert knows about this because of his “brief tenure as the managing editor of a small literary press.” “It is comforting,” Carbert says, “to embrace the idea that the state will always play a role in encouraging and making viable the enterprise of Canadian literature. But in truth the government has little sympathy for what we do, and in many ways is our active enemy.”

For Carbert, whatever actions are taken now are too little/too late. Like Keith, he sees an apocalypse in the making. His analogy is environmental degradation and global warming. With the digital revolution and Chapters-Indigo working against CanLit, and the inability of the government and the school system to deal with these threats, CanLit, like the polar bear, the swift fox and the five-lined skunk, is about to go extinct.

Alex Good and Stephen Henighan agree with Carbert and Keith that CanLit is facing the End. Good sees it coming through a “digital apocalypse” or “great erasure,” and Henighen through a neo-con conspiracy that includes Chapter’s/Indigo, Bertelsmann (the German company that owns McLelland & Stewart, and the Random House bloc of publishers) and Jack Rabinovich (Vice-President of Trizac Corp) and Scotiabank who together use the Giller Prize to convince the public that a profit-generated-and-generating internationalist literature is superior to a publically funded nationalist one. The Giller is run by powerful representatives of “a social class that is hostile to national culture.”

As Henighan narrates it, to carry out their plan the neo-cons had to conscript literary icons (like Atwood, Richler, Munro and Gallant) and manipulate them to sit on juries by offering them an interest in the outcomes. They had to manipulate both the rules and juries over and over to guarantee their preferred outcomes.  For instance, critics began to object to the shortlists that, for four years running, included only books from the four large presses owned by Bertlesmann. A few smaller-press books turned up in the next couple of years, and a decade or so later small presses have become well represented and, in the past few years, have sometimes won the prize.

To further legitimize the Giller, Henighan’s neo-cons made it into a big media event and publicized that event in ways meant to prove that privately funded cultural institutions like the Giller are superior to publicly funded ones like the Governor-General’s Awards. As part of the publicity, Henighan says, Rabinovitch milked his wife’s death to create “piece of sentimental myth-making” that would work as advertising. He staged, even, at the 2010 banquet, “the sepulchral resuscitation of the far-right journalist Barbara Amiel, who had not appeared in public in Canada in years, and, by extension, of her felon-financier husband Conrad Black.” In Henighan’s opinion, the Giller is becoming a spectacle, the symbolism of which is obvious to the audience: “internationalist” trumps “nationalist” culture most times.

At the root of Good’s argument for the death of CanLit due to the “digital apocalypse” is the assumption (mentioned by Carbert) that the human brain (especially the softer, youthful one) has been swamped by a series of digital tsunamis and has washed up face-down into a tidal pool of narcissism: “Digital forms of entertainment train our brains to respond to ever faster forms of stimulation, reducing our attention spans and making it harder and harder for us to re-enter, in Walter Benjamin’s phrase, the exacting silence of a book . . . .  The Internet has become a seamless web of self, a standing pool of Narcissus that we are now drowning in.”

Good’s argument has been made, in a milder way, by Stan Persky in his recent Reading the 21st Century (2011), a book cited by Good in his article. Good’s argument—although not entirely Persky’s—is that the interactive media that now pervade society cause short attention spans and render sustained reading impossible. Good cites sources on this that are also discussed in Persky’s book: The Shallows: What the Internet is doing to our Brain (2010) and You Are Not a Gadget (2010). These titles seem to indicate that tests have been done to find out what is happening to the brain, the organ of thought, due to digital technology.

But Good and Persky are interested in other ways of proving that social media pose a threat to CanLit. Persky proposes the examination and evaluation of the content and use of the new media, as opposed to the content and use of books, as a way of finding out what is happening. Persky puts it this way: “I’m formally (and personally) indifferent to the form of books . . . . My concern is [their] content . . . and use . . . . I’m particularly interested in texts that can provide a sufficiently sustained reading experience that makes possible informed engagement with the political, cultural, and moral issues of our time.”

Persky cautions that our extrapolations on the effects of social media must consider the fact that, even though book reading is, as statistics show, in decline, “there’s plenty to read . . . and there will continue to be worthwhile books being written for the foreseeable future.” These worthwhile books can appear as e-books or, as some of the chapters of Persky’s book did, in e-mags like The Tyee. Persky also supports and curates dooneyscafe.com on which he posts reviews, literary articles, and commentary. In other words, so far as Persky is concerned CanLit and world lit, as well as the analytical criticism that accompanies them, are alive and well in print and on the web, but only for an unspecified “time being.”

While Good too is interested in comparisons of content and use, he doesn’t heed Persky’s call for caution. He has already decided that the form of books and other media determines their content, and that “content, on the Internet, is crap. Everybody freely produces it; nobody thinks it’s worth very much.” Good cites a London Review of Books article by Colin Robinson. Robinson points to the drop in readers in America and the huge increase in titles published, many as e-books, and says: “If anyone can publish, and the number of critical readers is diminishing, is it any wonder that non-writers – pop stars, chefs, sports personalities – are increasingly dominating the bestseller lists?” Robinson concludes, “In an increasingly self-centred society a premium is placed on being heard rather than listening, being seen rather than watching, and being read rather than reading.” Good concurs, and adds that this tendency is illustrated too by the growing popularity of Creative Writing courses.

When Good cites Persky as to “the paradoxical dilemma in which writing flourishes, which is just cause for celebration, but book reading is in decline,” he interprets “flourishes” to mean “proliferates,” whereas Persky obviously means that as well as “reaches high standards.” Persky says he is “heartened by the abundance of good work” available to him. But he might affirm that Good is mistaken only for the near term. The cornucopia of brilliant books that Persky analyzes might just be the afterglow, an Indian summer, of book culture. Persky himself says that his book could be seen as proof of this – but admits that it is not really representative as he prefers books by persons of “pensionable vintage.”

A. J. Somerset and Steven Beattie both accept as fact the public’s shrinking attention span, due to social media and the Internet, by way of explaining the disappearance of book reviewing – Somerset dealing with CBC and Beattie with print. Somerset explains that CBC’s Canada Reads’ facebook and twitter literary poll was seen as a way to break into (interconnect with) the expanding online community. The poll came up with The Best Laid Plans, by Terry Fallis, as “the essential Canadian novel of the past decade.” The novel is crap, Somerset says, showing the intellectual level of those who twitter, and the panel-of-experts discussion of the results as they came in was no substitute for the reading on air of poems, stories and analytical literary commentary. But these older formats had lost their audience and the contest was popular, so what can be done? Somerset concludes, “We have twitter to keep us occupied . . . we can’t blame the CBC for the decline of the national attention span – but we can fault the CBC, as a public broadcaster, for its happy embrace of that decline. ”

Beattie in his essay about magazine and newspaper book reviewing argues that it’s “largely though not entirely” the case that “book coverage is migrating online” to “uncurated environments” like blogs and Facebook. In these environments, as Ronan McDonald puts it, ‘we’re all critics now’.” As a result, “personal effusion stands in for reasoned thought and ahistorical amateur voices have replaced experts with a deep knowledge of literary history.” This is similar to Good’s argument about the proliferation of amateur writing on the web and social media. The “democratization of culture brought about by the Internet” is, further, as Beattie has it, part of a long-term and pervasive “strain of anti-intellectualism that, in the words of American critic Maggie Nelson, ‘characterizes thinking itself as an elitist activity’.”

Back, finally, to the optimistic side. Paul McNally, long-time owner of the McNally-Robinson chain of bookstores on the prairies, observes that the “corpse” of CanLit, though it may appear dead, is actually breathing and even, really, as Barnes suggests, quite lively. McNally, working from the demand side just like Hudson, contradicts everything Hudson says. “CanLit . . . is a robust young plant,” he affirms, perhaps making an allusion to the Canada Council icon. He attributes CanLit’s health to decades of state intervention in the old print-book supply chain – intervention in the form of writing and publishing grants, postal subsidies, and publishing/distribution-company ownership rules.

Some of these shelters have lately been withdrawn, while others are threatened by, well, governmental lack of enthusiasm. NAFTA protects cultural industries but allows the government to review these protections on a case-by-case basis. McNally suggests that allowing Chapters/Indigo to monopolize the retail book business, and Bertelsmann to monopolize publishing, may have been a mistake: “I am not an ideological supporter of government regulating industry and restricting access, but to see what cultural imperialism can do in a small nation . . . is to understand that there is a place for intervention when fostering cultural industries.”

However, because of its state-nourished but now inherent strength, McNally says, CanLit will meet the challenges ahead even though the “subsidy shelter” is subsiding. A major challenge is “blockbuster imbalance,” caused by the tendency of conglomerate publishers and booksellers to commission/purchase books from a small stable of “proven” writers and to promote the hell out of them. Large advances are paid, expensive advertising purchased and lavish promotional events set up. McNally argues that this sort of editorial and marketing policy makes it hard for new and mid-list writers to squeeze in. “These are tough times for up-and-comers,” he admits.

But McNally goes on to say that the new technologies will foster micro-publishing and international sales, righting the balance. Also, “creative writing courses may well take the place of first editors, Internet exposure may well substitute for bookstore placement, and . . . literary festivals provide audience exposure, networking opportunities and income supplement.” Independent bookstores (like his) have re-created themselves, offering local books produced by writers themselves or local micro-presses, and staging a variety of reader-meet-writer events.

McNally’s independent store in fact is one of those described in Quill & Quire, January/February 2012, as “tech-savvy” and energetic enough to be at the forefront of the selling of e-books, one of the few brick-and-mortar stores to arrange with Google to participate in its Canadian e-bookstore, which opened in November 2011. McNally recommends that same entrepreneurial spirit to writers. “Writing,” he concludes, “is a deeply entrepreneurial career choice – writers tend to do what they have to do, grumbling eloquently as they go.”

So what are we to make of Hudson’s “forensic investigation,” his “Royal Commission?” “Forensic” implies the use of scientific analysis in law and public discussion. A Royal Commission accumulates and studies testimony and arrives at recommendations to government. I’ll deal with the recommendations first, then the quality of the scientific analysis.

Carbert, Keith, Beattie, Somerset and Good assume CanLit’s life to have no value whatsoever now that its audience has disappeared. Once Canadians became infected with attention-deficit disorder through contact with digital technology, once they passed through school without learning to read, CanLit was dead. For obvious reasons, no recommendations were made by these testifiers, and they would regard the recommendations of other members of the Royal Commission to be irrelevant.

There is a minor exception – Beattie, as we’ve seen, recommends that the CBC resist making appeals to people who use Facebook and twitter. Presumably there is still a small audience of real readers out there who would appreciate this. And there are also some implied recommendations from the others. Good specifies an ideal period for literature, when readers could access its power “to educate, elevate, delight and even change life.” That time was the nineteenth century. Presumably if he thought it worthwhile to make recommendations, it would be to recreate the circumstances of that period. Keith, judging by his affection for Arnold, would probably agree.

For Whetter and McNally, CanLit is a money-making industry, and their recommendations are meant to increase its profitability. Whetter concerns himself only with the manufacturing end of it: literature gets read and makes money when it is manufactured by writers in MFA programs. His recommendation, consequently, is that the English Department get out of the Creative Writing business or, failing that, offer the doctorate in Creative Writing, which will boost enrolment in both MA and MFA programs. Statistics from the US show this. His reasoning seems to be that, while there will be more MA writers failing to write well, there will also be many more MFA writers succeeding, a net benefit to CanLit.

McNally deals with the supply chain. He seems unaware of the fact that MFA writers produce a more marketable product, and assumes there’s plenty of good product available. But there are problems in the subsequent steps of the supply chain.  He believes, though he doesn’t like government regulation, that manufacturing and distribution may have to be subsidized and distribution may have to be regulated. The present situation of one dominant publisher and one dominant store should, he thinks, have been prevented. But he makes no specific recommendations to that effect, because he believes that the digital revolution will subvert monopoly control so long as writers, small publishers and small bookstores become tech-savvy and occupy the Web. His specific or implied recommendations all pertain to taking advantage of digital technology.

For Barnes and Henighan there’s a problem with seeking merely to improve the profitability of CanLit. They see CanLit as Atwood saw it back in 1981, as an alternative to Disney. CanLit is of a higher quality, it seems. Henighan refers to its special quality as an expression of national character. If the monopolies of Bertelsmann and Chapters are not broken up, if the anti-CanLit promotional events like the Giller are allowed, readers will not get to experience the special quality of CanLit. Whetter and McNally would wonder how CanLit could be threatened by a flood of foreign print-on-paper or e-books, especially if they are mostly garbage. Presumably consumers would go for the product that appealed to them most. But Barnes and Henighan would probably explain that readers, while they may not be looking for CanLit when they buy books, are attracted to it when they find it. They will realize that it speaks for and of them. Clearing away the American garbage will make it easier for them to stumble onto the real thing.

While making no direct recommendations pertaining to this, Barnes delivers a spirited defense of the Canada Council. Henighan makes no specific recommendations either, but looks back with nostalgia at the Canada Council and the older version of the Governor General’s Award. They represent, for him, a golden time when “hard-earned cultural institutions” fostered “an active national culture.” Presumably he would recommend rebuilding those institutions, but considering the neo-con threat as he describes it this would require class warfare, which he stops short of recommending.

In the cases of those who regard CanLit as dead (Keith, Carbert, Beattie, Somerset and Good), or those who feel it’s under extreme threat (Whetter and Henighan), vested interests or cherished faiths appear to erode the scientific nature of their analysis. Obvious facts are ignored.

Whetter’s claim — that there is no longer any serious debate that “the professionalization of art and creativity” through Creative Writing courses is a good thing — is false. By way of showing why the English Department won’t turn its much less effective hybrid English/CW programs over to the Fine Arts faculty, Whetter quotes a “memorable” Harper’s article by “American author and semi-reluctant writing professor Lynn Freed” on the fact that creative writing programs are now the “cash cow of the humanities.” He doesn’t however quote her on why she is a reluctant professor of the subject. Here’s what she says in Harper’s (July 2005): “When the classroom is so present in my life, everything I write begins to sound like a teacher writing — intended, crafted, lifeless, and too clever by half  . . . ‘There are many forms of stupidity,’ said Thomas Mann, ‘and cleverness is the worst.’ This cleverness, this stupidity — is the creative equivalent of an autoimmune disease. And it is ongoing. It lasts right until I emerge from the classroom . . . and sometimes longer than that.”

In short, Freed doesn’t think that Creative Writing courses are good for either students or faculty. She refers to creative writing as a “Gulag.” Of course Creative Writing is a popular extension course for beginners and hobbyists, an attractive elective to students going on to be engineers etc, a fairly common majors and honors subject for teachers who will be teaching “language arts” in the public schools (though school districts still prefer the BA and MA to the BFA and MFA), and a discipline for those who wish to be profs. But does it do what it claims to do: teach students to be writers? Or does it actually do harm?

Freed is not the first to have doubts. Writers have been having them since the first program was set up in Iowa seventy-five years ago. When Earle Birney started the first Canadian program in the UBC English Department in the early 1960’s, he sent advertising for the program to Robert Bly, editor of the magazine The Sixties. Bly, who had taken Creative Writing at Iowa and Harvard, refused to publish the ad, saying, “I still think there is something revolting about poets teaching creative writing, and no amount of reasoning can do away with it. There is some degradation of the poet involved. I was at the Iowa Workshop, directed by Paul Engle, which was a grotesque farce, but I also took courses at Harvard under MacLeish, for one. They were directed by serious men, but they were absurd. The whole atmosphere of a university is the exact opposite of the delicacy of poetry . . . Most creative writing courses do much more harm than good . . . .” Many writers still agree with Bly. Metcalf himself has detailed in his memoirs the futility of teaching Creative Writing courses, and compares them to “Fondue Cooking, Macramé for Beginners and Creative Flower Arranging.” Future writers, he thinks, should stick to studying the classic works of literature.

In his book Poetry and Ambition (1988), mid-ranked American poet Donald Hall, one of those bloodsucking members of the English Department who taught creative writing, argues against the MFA approach, speaking of “the disastrous separation, in many universities, of creative writing and literature.” You don’t know what literature is, he says, unless you study it. This attitude among English profs is why the doctoral programs that Whetter recommends to the Department, as an alternative to turning creative writing over to Fine Arts, are all hybrids. The other reason is that students doing doctorates are, as Whetter acknowledges, looking to become professors of graduate-level Creative Writing — professors of future professors. The Department would argue that these candidates need to know more than how to write. They need to know how to teach future teachers, which involves explaining what literature and language are. They need theory, in other words.

The advertising of the one program in Canada, at Calgary, specifies: “At all levels degree students will be expected to carry a comprehensive program of literature courses as well as writing workshops.” All of the American PhD programs specify that, at the doctoral level, theory will be the main subject of study, with literature. Some even prohibit the teaching of writing lore at that level, and some are researching the phenomenon that Lynn Freed describes. They call it “workshop writing” (Hall calls it “McPoetry”), and they expect to prove that it is generated by the teaching of personal “lore” by published writers in workshops. “Voice” is lost to technique or in imitations of the professor’s writing.

It’s very likely that in professionalizing the PhD through the disciplines of linguistics and cognitive psychology, the English Department will move to declare the MFA inadequate as preparation for the doctorate. Whetter’s plan, in other words, could backfire, and students could start avoiding the MFA, just as they tend to do if heading into school teaching. It seems that Whetter is fighting for the overall expansion of Creative Writing courses even if it might mean giving the English Department a whole new set of victims. It seems that he might be willing to sacrifice his academic principles for job security and those small, convivial classes of doctoral students that are the dream of all profs. It seems that he might be conflating his own interests and those of CanLit.

Henighan’s testimony suffers not from vested interest but from commitment to a left-of-center ideology. It also could be that he just likes stirring things up. However, his Giller scenario, while one of the most enjoyable essays in the issue, featuring as it does gossip and insults about Atwood, Richler, Barbara Amiel etc, seems unlikely to incite action against the rich. First of all, the neo-cons conducting the Giller as a plot against CanLit most often act like the Keystone Cops; they can’t, if they are as Henighan describes them, be a threat. Second, everyone knows, as Henighan says, that prizes mean little when it comes to identifying great literature. So the neo-cons seem to be fighting for a prize that has little symbolic value to the public. Those who do, say, buy The Polished Hoe because it won the Giller, and then try to read it, will quickly realize they have been ripped off, and anyone who knows anything about Amiel would know that she long ago shelved thinking for preaching the gospel according to her husband and thus never amounted to much as a writer. Finally, Atwood, Richler, Munro et al are not stupid people; obviously they don’t see themselves as lending credence to a serious right-wing conspiracy. And, as Henighan admits, they have worked to open the prize up to small presses and unknown writers — for better or worse.

Good’s absolute certainty that the digital universe rots minds suggests Ludditism. If it can be considered an ideology, Carbert, Beattie and Somerset also share it, though not as obviously.  At any rate, it makes their testimony relatively useless. They don’t have their facts right. First, the idea that content on the Internet is “crap,” as Good puts it, is not exclusively true. Persky has a much clearer sense of this, and McNally has a point in suggesting that the Internet promises much to readers. Masses of e-books by classic authors are available free on the web. New e-books are being produced for computer, tablet, and smartphone platforms by digital-publishing ventures like Byliner, Atavist, and Amazon—notwithstanding the spotty economic model involved. Many blogs and e-mags welcome what’s now called long-form non-fiction and criticism – most contemporary poets live on gigantic blog sites like Silliman’s and Poetry-Quebec, finding the criticism, biography, history and book-and-reading announcements that have been disappearing from print-on-paper periodicals and newspapers. It’s likely that poetry especially will do far better on the web than it has been doing in the print-on-paper book market.

Second, the whole theory that the Internet and social media have mind-altering effects is based, thus far, on anecdotal evidence. Good’s comparing of CanLit’s fate to environmental collapse fails here. A lot of scientific evidence has been produced, and a broad consensus established regarding the environment. No such basis of fact or consensus exists regarding social media. Writers like Good, Beattie and Somerset need to avoid despair and collect evidence by real content comparisons – literary criticism in effect – directing readers as they do to the real thing. It’s essentially unhelpful to simply affirm that Internet content is crap. Meanwhile the scientists and product researchers at Sony, Apple etc can do their CAT and MRI-scans and find out about brain activity when subjects are on computers or cell-phones or playing video games for long periods of time, as compared to when they are sitting near the fire reading Crime and Punishment.

As part of their content comparisons, Good, Somerset and Beattie need to consider the question of how bad writing drives out good.  This is the third assumption of Good’s argument, and it is part of the arguments of Barnes and Henighan. There’s never been a case presented for Atwood’s “Disneyland of the soul” –the idea that writing that successfully entertains and diverts will drive out writing that is “a mirror held up to life.” This would suggest that Arnold Bennett was a threat to Joseph Conrad, J.K. Rowling to Atwood herself. It is just as easy to argue that the popular writer creates an audience for the serious one.

The premise behind the testimonies of Keith and Carbert, that the teaching of a literature is essential to CanLit’s health because it generates a literate, sympathetic and informed audience, is flawed. First of all, for every member of the “Dead Poets’ Society” who was brought into literature by a beloved public school teacher or professor, there are ten people who claim that studying literature in school ruined it for them. Tom Wayman, a prominent Canadian poet and an English/Creative Writing prof at Calgary, makes this point. T.S. Eliot dedicated a famous essay, “The Frontiers of Criticism,” to the question of what happens to literary appreciation in “a situation in which many critics are teachers, and many teachers are critics.” Eliot generally liked the work of the teacher-critics, but noted that it was written for a small, specialized audience and was based on some fallacious premises – that there was always one best interpretation and that that interpretation was what the writer intended. The teacher-critics believed you could separate understanding and enjoying, when really “to understand a poem comes to the same thing as to enjoy it for the right reasons.”

Second, the idea that literacy is best taught through literature, by using poetry and fiction as a model and subject matter for composition, has pretty much been given up in the schools and universities, especially the universities. Those mandatory Freshman English courses that pay the Department’s bills are more and more focused on writing research essays on public-issue topics researched in magazines, government documents, and books of history, political science etc. Sophomore technical and business-writing courses, also a source of money, use discipline-specific samples and exercises. Nobody studies literature anymore unless they choose to do it, and that means that the “English Studies” segment of the Department, which used to be the largest and most powerful, is now much smaller. It will certainly continue to exist for those who intend to be critics and curators of the canon, but it will not be in the business of teaching masses of young people how to write and think.

Carbert and Keith don’t seem to understand this, which is curious because both men taught through the period when the decline of literature in the curriculum began to accelerate. The decline started as early as the 1920’s, when other faculties, Engineering and Commerce at first, forced on the Department a series of what came to be called “service” courses that, more and more, shed literature as their subject matter. The process of shedding literature was painful but it was endured almost entirely by graduate teaching assistants and new faculty appointees. George Woodcock’s experiences at UBC in 1956 (his first year) are instructive and (for anyone who has taught) comical. They show the final stages in the Department’s attempts to stand by literature in the service courses: “I was involved in a quixotic experiment of bringing the humanities to engineering students . . . . The project was a course in utopian literature; a parallel, it was thought, might be drawn between political and mechanical constructions . . . . I taught two seminars — one to a group of mechanical engineers who were entirely impenetrable, and the other to a group of metal engineers with whom I did establish a kind of jesting rapport, though even they regarded the whole exercise as a waste of their time — as I did of mine — and showed at most a polite interest in the austerities of Plato’s Republic or the aesthetic felicities of News from Nowhere.”

Woodcock’s anecdote about attempting to inflict his scholarly specialty on the Engineers makes the impatience of other faculties easier to understand. By the 1980’s, these courses, entirely by that time discipline-specific, plus non-literary Freshman courses with ancillary remedial courses usually connected to literacy-competence tests, made up seventy percent of the Department’s workload. A sub-department took shape over these years, at first made up of teaching assistants and younger profs, then of regular faculty as the TA’s became young profs and the young profs got tenure. By the late 1960’s the English Department, at those universities with large Applied Science, Science and Commerce faculties, was providing courses for graduate students who, seeing the demand in that area (whereas specialists in Tennyson were not needed), had decided to become what is now called “compositionists.” They published papers and wrote theses on the use of the passive voice, on sexist language, on rhetorical structures. Having taken the Department away from English Studies, the compositionists are now making a move on Creative Writing, which they regard as a natural part of Composition. Thus Whetter’s problems.

Keith blames the death of CanLit in the Department on the prevalence of thematic criticism and writing and on the postmodernists. In reality, these did create  problems for literature, but minor ones compared to the demands of other faculty regarding service courses, and of the public and school administration regarding literacy scores. Thematic criticism became prominent because it was easier, as Keith says. What he doesn’t say is that critical analysis had to be simplified for the masses of school and undergraduate students who had to write tests and essays about poems and novels. It became a habit that extended itself into university teaching.

The theme of a high-school, freshman, or sophomore literary essay is seldom that this poem or novel is good or bad (it is always assumed that it is good), and seldom about technique (rhyme, meter, metaphor, paradox etc), but mostly that the poem or novel is about something: politics, sex, the role of women, abortion, drugs etc. In the BC school public school curriculum guides, materials (Joy Kogawa’s Naomi’s Road and Obasan, Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club, Michael Ondaatje’s Anil’s Ghost, Suzanne Gilles The Hunger Games) are recommended to generate “appreciation of the enlightenment values of a common humanity, democracy, and scientific progress” as well as a more modern appreciation of “environmental, ethnic and women’s issues.” UBC’s multidisciplinary Department of Language and Literacy Education (an amalgamation of English, Education, Creative Writing and Library Studies) produces materials for what it calls “today’s multicultural classroom.” Materials listed include historical fiction, children’s books and popular novels describing children’s experience of immigration, prejudice and war.

Postmodernism, as Keith says, simply reversed the nature of thematic approaches, switching them from the humanistic to the politically correct. Every poem or story shows in its style, characterization, plot etc., the sexism, racism, colonialism and logical reductionism of western, liberal-democratic civilization. This is also an easy concept to grasp, though more likely to freak out students and their parents. It may have contributed to the decline in humanities enrollments in universities and colleges after the early 1980’s. However, postmodernism diligently imposed its own canon even as it queried existing canons. Its influence is seen in the BC-school-curriculum-list of themes connected to feminism, the environment and ethnicity, and in compositionist concerns about politically correct language.

Thematic criticism, the discovery of liberal themes, was justified by the ideology Keith refers to when he quotes Arnold and refers to Leavis as an ignored prophet at whose side he is proud to stand. It is the ideology of liberal humanism, and it was used too to justify, to the general public, literature’s centrality in the curriculum. The BC curriculum guides show this. The defenders of liberal-humanism were famous English profs like Babbitt, Trilling, Leavis, Allan Bloom, and others, each one stepping up to the plate anytime there was a major threat to literature.

Mostly, that threat, as I’ve noted, came from other university faculty. Secondarily it came from the modernist writers (ironically the ones generally taught in Freshman English). Keith’s argument about how studies of the “best that has been thought and said” help to create “literate, articulate, well-rounded persons,” collapsed in the face of twentieth-century literature where major writers like Yeats, Eliot, Pound and Lawrence attacked liberal democracy and promoted fascism. Trilling, who loved modern literature, refused to teach it, not wanting to become “a corrupter of youth.”

Thirdly, “rhetorical” theories of criticism resulted in the decline of the liberal-humanistic argument for the prominence of literature in the curriculum. Keith puts his finger on postmodernism. While he was mastering, teaching and writing his books about CanLit, his colleague Robert Lecker at McGill was saying this: “Once upon a time we thought that Canadian literature represented [our cultural] heritage and that Canadian criticism could allow us to find it, but today, who knows? Maybe a book about wrestling . . . tells us a lot about the culture that produced . . . . Why should a poem have more status than a restaurant review? Why is a novel a higher form of writing than a well-written travel guide?” But even the New Criticism, to which Keith evidently adhered, denied Arnold. Its famous adherents, John Crow Ransom, Allan Tate, and Cleanth Brooks, all from a southern conservative background, distrusted “liberal” messages and emphasized paradox and ambiguity, favoring close textual analysis capped with open-ended psychological interpretations, after their hero Coleridge.

Finally, the general public was never very impressed with the liberal-humanistic argument, recognizing that it was in essence elitist and thus anti-democratic. A response from Tim Nau in the Times Literary Supplement, to an extract from Martha Nussbaum’s Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities(2010), indicates this opposition to the liberal-humanistic argument, stating that there’s little data to support the idea that a humanities education is especially salubrious morally: “Her reaction is based on the idea that people with a liberal arts education are better at self-government than others . . . . This proposition is terrifically insulting to university graduates in mathematics, engineering, medicine and the natural sciences. Their disciplines require them to be logical, to weigh evidence carefully and to build detailed arguments in a rational way – all vital skills for citizens in a democracy. As far as I am aware there are no empirical data showing that scientists make poor citizens.”

In my opinion Keith’s testimonial comes closest to answering Hudson’s question, Who Killed CanLit? But Keith doesn’t really have a clue what actually happened because he seems not to have examined his liberal-humanism in the light of new thinking. It seems to me that the insecurity felt by writers since Trilling’s time has been generated in writers not by the changes in information technologies and politics — writers have always, as McNally implies, in their scrounging for customers and patrons, had to keep up with evolving tastes and technologies — but by the failure, registered but not explained by Keith, of the English Department to maintain literature in the curriculum. That failure resonated with writers because, through the twentieth century, the Department became their major employer; in Canada about 80% of poets in the major anthologies, and 50% of fiction writers, are profs. The Department was in effect a massive experiment in teaching literacy (and, in line with liberal-humanistic ideology, virtue and good citizenship) through literature — an experiment that, on the evidence, failed. Of course literature can be used as subject matter in literacy training, but it seems that it can’t be used exclusively or even predominantly, as the Department once argued, without torturing students and teachers and debasing both literature and literacy training. And of course it’s useless as a model in teaching professionals how to write expository reports in standard English — an English that uncategorically eschews metaphor, ambiguity and paradox.

Fortunately for writers, it’s as natural to teach rhetoric and grammar as it is to teach literature – maybe even more natural. But a shift has to be made back to these ancient disciplines, and that is unsettling. Unsettling too is the failure of the liberal-humanist English profs to argue effectively for the high status of writers in society. Many writers came to accept this status as a matter of course, especially if they were in the Department and engaged in justifying professional development projects and educational leaves and arguing their way out of Freshman and Technical English into Creative Writing classes and graduate seminars. Now respect has to be fought for in the consumer marketplace and, as in times before the book became the first mass-produced product and main platform for art, among the patrons of literature. These are, nowadays, voters and their governments. They are looking for entertainment (of which enlightenment is an incidental part) and a sense of national pride that their writers, like their hockey players, musicians and artists, can go the distance. When they read criticism, they want to know if a book is worth buying and what it’s about. Interesting gossip about the writer is good too, but not essential.

Trilling’s simile about writers feeling like they’ve been ripped off in a Ponzi scheme actually reveals the literal truth. The Bernie Madoff, in the case of literature, was the English Department. It upped, quite unintentionally and with the best of intentions, but with an eye to its addiction to reading poetry and fiction, writers’ expectations. Literature would be at the center of the school and university curriculum. It would be the secular scripture of western civilization, curated and preached by a massive clerisy of teachers and profs, among whom you as a writer could be welcomed should you need a regular or part-time job. The congregation would be, mainly, the masses of young people in schools and universities, who would be forced to purchase and read poems and stories (some of them yours maybe), many of them appearing in Department-published literary magazines and professor-edited anthologies. The public — many of them having studied the national literature in public school and Freshman and sophomore English courses  — would hear the sermons too, picking up these periodicals and anthologies in book and magazine stores, reading the critic-profs in book review columns of newspapers and listening to them on radio, rushing out to buy books.

Who wouldn’t buy into a scheme like that?

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10,163 words, March 26, 2012

More than one teenager growing up prior to the gay movement, as I did, at some point believed (or feared) that he had personally invented homosexuality. Certainly, there was scant public evidence that it existed and, if it did, it was sick. Worse, in high school life, the mere suspicion that you were a queer or a fruit or a fag was total social death. That’s still true in some North American high schools today. Once you reached legal drinking age, you could explore a furtive world of gay bars, but they were subject to random reputation-wrecking police raids. If you happened to be in the military (I did a hitch in the American Navy), you had to operate with the discretion of “special forces” troops and, even then, you flirted with dishonourable discharge if not brig time. It’s difficult to convey, a half-century later, what a dirty, dangerous secret homosexuality once was.

So, when Christopher Bram begins his history of contemporary gay writing in the U.S., Eminent Outlaws, with the bold declaration that “the gay revolution began as a literary revolution,” it has an odd ring. A revolution sparked by mere words? After all, as gay poet W.H. Auden put it, “Poetry makes nothing happen.” Bram’s novel claim (offhand, I can’t recall anyone else having made it) at first glance seems dubious, but upon reflection, it turns out to be surprisingly accurate.

Much more than the concurrent civil rights, women’s, students’ or anti-war movements of the 1950s to mid-1970s — though all generated significant writing — the gay movement was unusually dependent on books, journalism, theatre, and screenwriting to spread its message, both to others and itself. That was so for a very simple reason. Unlike women, African-Americans, and other activists, homosexuals, except for the stereotyped sub-culture of flamboyant “queens,” were mostly invisible to each other, and even to themselves.

The only tolerant sanctuaries available to young gays were to be found in the world of art and a handful of ghettoized occupations. Still, “the love that dare not speak its name,” to recall the phrase associated with Oscar Wilde, began, after World War II, to write that name in fugitive books and hastily scribbled notes. Bram’s account, combining social history and literary criticism, “is the history of fifty years of change shaped by a relay race of novelists, playwrights and poets,” and their writing, as Bram says, “was the catalyst for a social shift as deep and unexpected as what was achieved by the civil rights and women’s movements.” Surprisingly, “the story of these men has never been told as a single narrative before.” The one near-predecessor to Bram’s work is Reed Woodhouse’s Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945-1995 (1998), a book of feisty and intelligent readings, though less concerned with the social narrative than Bram’s history.

Bram, 59, is a gay novelist probably best known for Father of Frankenstein (1995), which became the acclaimed movie Gods and Monsters. Given his story-telling talents, it’s perhaps not surprising that Eminent Outlaws is thoroughly readable, as well as useful and timely. It brings together into coherent form what had been little more than scattered anecdotes and half-forgotten memories, and it appears at pretty much the right momet. The largely successful struggle for gay equal rights in North America and parts of Europe has turned into “post-gay,” while its history remains within the living memory of an elder generation. (It should be duly noted that in other, darker places of the earth, homosexuality is still subject to punishment up to and including death.)

Eminent Outlaws is unpretentious, appropriately gossipy (lots of who slept with whom), and while unburdened by literary Theory (with a capital T) is punctuated by shrewd judgments about books and writers. The last may merely be a way of saying that I mostly agree with Bram’s opinions about such writers as Gore Vidal, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood and Edmund White. Of necessity Bram is selective (he’s not writing an encyclopedic survey), he isn’t attempting to establish a gay canon (although he’s not shy about telling us what he thinks is good), and he properly doesn’t attempt to take on lesbian writing in the same era (which requires its own history and historian).

The story, which stretches from just after WWII to the near-present, begins with Gore Vidal. In 1946, the handsome young military veteran from a well-heeled, prominent political family (his grandfather was a U.S. senator), precociously published, at age 19, an early WWII novel, Williwaw. It was hardly of the stature of the blockbuster war novels of a few years later, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead (1948) and James Jones’s From Here to Eternity (1951), but sufficiently interesting to attract the attention of the New York publishing world and to land its author an editor’s job. Vidal circulated in the bohemian literary circle of Anais Nin, an experimental writer whose name was associated with that of the scandalous Henry Miller. Later at night, Vidal followed his own scandalous inclinations in the gay zones of Times Square. It was at Nin’s salon that he met other young (and gay) writers, including Truman Capote and poets James Merrill and Robert Duncan.

In conversations with friends and editors, Vidal discussed the phenomenon of a gayer post-war society and was encouraged to write about it. Nineteen forty-eight, the same year as Mailer published his bestselling war novel, was a sort of annus “mahr-velous,” if not mirabilis, for the public discussion of homosexuality. Within short order, Vidal published his unambiguously gay novel, The City and the Pillar; Truman Capote’s homo-suggestive debut work, Other Voices, Other Rooms appeared (as did the suggestive Capote himself); an influential essay by literary critic Leslie Fiedler, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey” argued that homoerotic, interracial and intergenerational relationships were deeply embedded in the core of American literature; and perhaps most important of all, sexology researcher Alfred Kinsey published Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, which reported that as many as a third of American men had had homosexual experiences. In terms of social impact, it was Kinsey’s controversial findings that reached the largest segment of the general public.

Early gay writing and writing about gays had a double function. It told gay readers – the people who bought books by Vidal, Capote and, shortly, James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room (1956) — that while they might be invisible, they weren’t just making it up. For gay readers, those early novels had the function of newspapers, presenting dispatches from the front. Second, all of these works provided the occasion for larger circulation mainstream media to talk about homosexuality as a phenomenon and/or “problem,” thus generating public awareness. This was one of those instances where all publicity, good or bad, was good publicity.

Vidal’s City and the Pillar is not a great book, marred as it is by what Christopher Isherwood called the “Tragic Homosexual Myth” (Vidal revised it a couple of decades later), but Bram credits it with putting the issue of homosexuality on the literary table as well as authentically describing proto-gay life. It was greeted with mixed reviews, or in the case of the New York Times’ book pages, conspicuously ignored, and Vidal retrospectively regarded it as near career-suicide. Nonetheless, it as well as Capote’s book sold enough copies to put them both on the Times bestseller list for a few weeks.

It was only somewhat later, after success as a TV and Hollywood screenwriter, that Vidal developed into a first-rate historical novelist, and the country’s pre-eminent essayist of the era, writing pieces that frequently discussed homosexuality and its bigoted opponents in waspish but always witty tones. Vidal took the interesting position that there was no such thing as homosexuals, only homosexual acts. His point is technically true — our identity shouldn’t be reduced to our identification with our sexual preferences — but at least for a time, during the period of “gay liberation” and the subsequent AIDS epidemic, homosexuality was so high up on the list of many gay men’s identifications that it provided an identity, as well as energetic arguments about whether there were gay writers or just writers who happened to be gay. Vidal objected to the watertight binary definitions of gay and straight, pointing out that desire was far more bisexually fluid than was generally allowed, as Kinsey had demonstrated in his surveys of sexual behaviour.

Bram next focuses on Allen Ginsberg and his remarkable book of poems, Howl (1956), which announces its Whitmanic scope in its famed opening line, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” Bram rightly emphasizes “what Ginsberg and others have said: this was a coming-out poem. There is nothing coy about the homosexual imagery.” It’s also a poem about politics, America, culture, capitalism and an emerging “Beat Generation,” but as Bram observes, it’s the homosexual thematic that tends to be downplayed in critical accounts.

Yet, for its early readers and for the subsequent censorship trial that unsuccessfully tried to ban the book as obscene, Ginsberg’s open declaration of homosexuality as a legitimate sexual desire was a large part of what made it shocking, and distasteful to many. John Hollander, an established poet of the day, called it “a dreadful little volume,” and proto-neoconservative critic Norman Podhoretz, writing in the pages of The New Republic, used Howl to attack the Beat Generation for embracing “homosexuality, jazz, dope addiction and vagrancy,” in order to rebel for solely nihilistic purposes, a notion popularised by the James Dean movie, Rebel Without A Cause (1955).

Bram has his doubts about the quality of much of Ginsberg’s poetry, but not about his role as a gay public figure. It’s a point that deserves to be underscored. For more than a decade prior to the Stonewall demonstrations — those several nights of resistance to police harassment by the patrons of a New York gay bar in 1969 that are now seen as the official commencement of “gay liberation” — Ginsberg was the sole artist, or public figure of any sort, to present himself openly as a gay man, one engaged in cultural and political affairs as much as sexual politics. When people publicly asked him why there were so many homosexual references in his poetry, he replied, “Because I’m a homosexual.”

As the 1960s unfolded, the extent of Ginsberg’s influence grew. He addressed himself to an emerging youth culture (including a massive protest movement), presenting gay desire as something “hip,” or “cool,” as we would say today. For the Sixties generation, gathering at political rallies and attending Ginsberg’s own poetry readings, he was a role model for an alternative idea of living one’s life, one that included the right to sexual preference.

There’s another gay-relevant context in which to discuss both Ginsberg and post-war American poetry that Bram doesn’t quite get around to, but which is worth mentioning. Ginsberg was singular as an “out” cultural leader, but he was simultaneously part of a movement known by the title of its 1960 anthology, The New American Poetry, a book edited by the discreetly gay Don Allen at Grove Press. The movement consisted of overlapping circles of poets across the U.S. who saw themselves as writing a new kind of oppositional verse that put them in sharp contrast to the American poetry “establishment” and its institutions. Among its many characteristics, the New American Poetry was gay-friendly, and many of its prominent figures were gay. In addition to Ginsberg and other Beat writers, a group of San Francisco poets, led by Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer and Robin Blaser, as well as circles of New York and Boston poets, including John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and John Weiners, were substantially gay, and the aforenamed gay poets were as prominent as heterosexual poets in the movement.

The absence of homosexual taboos was of course only an indirect feature of the new poetry, but what it meant for younger gay writers was not simply a social sanctuary but an educational site where the history of poetry that was informally taught to neophytes included, in their appropriate place, gay poets. I can recall Ginsberg, who, along with his partner Peter Orlovsky, I knew since I was a teenager, reciting Hart Crane for us and, when we were in Paris (c. 1960), directing me to the English translation of Jean Genet’s Our Lady of the Flowers, which was still sold at the Kroch and Brentano’s Paris branch from under the counter. Similarly, one learned from Jack Spicer in San Francisco about Rimbaud and Garcia Lorca (Spicer’s After Lorca appeared in 1957, only a year after Ginsberg’s Howl). At San Francisco State College, where I studied in the early 60s, I remember writing essays about Whitman as a gay poet long before it was an acceptable scholarly topic. Not only were you not alone, you were part of an historical tradition. This literary oasis of sanity in an otherwise sex-panicked American landscape saved me, I think, from the hours of psychiatric treatment described by writers like Edmund White and historian Martin Duberman.

Bram devotes considerable attention to the theatre world, especially postwar gay playwrights Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee, whose writing dominated the American theatre (itself a milieu suffused in a gay ambience) from World War II to the mid-60s. Their work didn’t directly address gay issues, but they were read by both gay theatre-goers and anti-gay critics as covertly registering gay nuances. There was even a mid-60s backlash from critics, that Bram carefully charts, complaining that Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1962) and other works simply tricked out their secretly gay protagonists in heterosexual drag. As Bram describes the dilemma, “Gay writers could not win for losing. If they wrote about gay life, they weren’t universal. But if they wrote about straight life, they were distorting what they despised or didn’t understand.” The canard about Albee’s Virginia Woolf wasn’t put to rest until Mike Nichols’ 1966 film version of the play, when famously heterosexual actors Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor easily persuaded viewers that Albee’s play wasn’t merely a matter of homosexual bitchery.

Not until Mart Crowley’s The Boys in the Band (1968) did gay threatre come out, a year before the Stonewall riots. The first explicitly gay play was controversial, even among many gays who regarded its tones of camp and bitterness as a distorted portrait of gay existence. Still, it enjoyed a thousand-performance run. For those of us living outside New York’s theatre district, we only became aware of Crowley’s play through William Friedkin’s 1970 film version. Bram offers a substantial and deserved nod of recognition to Crowley, but I recall the movie of Boys in the Band being unfavorably contrasted with a better film the following year, gay director John Schlesinger’s Sunday Bloody Sunday (1971), in which Peter Finch plays a middle-aged, middle-class Jewish doctor in England having an affair with a mid-20ish bisexual artist who is simultaneously involved in a part-time relationship with Glenda Jackson. Bram doesn’t mention Bloody Sunday, a made-in-England film that lies outside his U.S.-bounded purview. The movie featured the first ever homosexual screen kiss between Finch and actor Murray Head, a gasp-producing moment that sucked the air out of many movie theatres. Later asked about the kiss, the heterosexual Finch quipped, “I did it for England.”

The other pre-gay movement literary work of special note is Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man (1964). Bram is particularly good on the transplanted-to-California British-born Isherwood (1904-1986), who emerges as one of the quiet heroes of this narrative. Isherwood’s 1939 book of linked stories, Goodbye to Berlin, about the rise of Nazism in Germany, was already understood by gay readers as a gay-inscribed text. But it wasn’t until A Single Man, about a day in the life of a gay middle-aged, British-born professor teaching in a California college, still mourning the recent death of his long-time companion, that gay writing produced, at least arguably, a literary masterpiece. Like the later Sunday Bloody Sunday, Isherwood’s novel doesn’t succumb to the Tragic Homosexual Myth, but instead presents a gay man living an interesting if mundane life that doesn’t require a sensationalized denouement to fulfil any imagined moral requirements. Nonetheless, the Los Angeles Times headlined its review of the book, “Disjointed Limp Wrist Saga,” which says more about the anti-gay temper of the times than Isherwood’s elegant prose.

Bram, as do I, thinks that Isherwood is underrated, compared, say, to his famous friend, poet W.H. Auden. Bram makes a strong case not only for A Single Man, but especially for Isherwood’s previous gay-themed novel, Down There On A Visit (1962), as unjustly neglected. Bram also favourably and extensively discusses Isherwood’s post-gay lib memoir of 1930s Berlin, Christopher and His Kind (1976), in which Isherwood is able to talk openly about what really happened in the gay bars of Berlin.

Another virtue of Bram’s history is his tracking of the interwoven friendships and rivalries of the authors he’s writing about. The relationships, both intellectual and occasionally sexual, between Vidal, Williams, Capote, Isherwood and others are carefully traced. For example, Isherwood’s late Berlin memoir was greeted at the time with a finely crafted review-essay in The New York Review of Books by Gore Vidal, who had known and worked with Isherwood in the sometimes acidic vineyards of Hollywood, and was the writer to whom Isherwood had dedicated his Single Man. One footnote to the Isherwood-Vidal friendship is that it was Isherwood who in 1948 provided a blurb for Vidal’s City and the Pillar, but at the same time wrote Vidal a private letter criticizing not the book’s subject matter, but its unnecessary melodrama.

The central literary figure of the post-1969 era in Bram’s account of gay writing is clearly Edmund White, a young writer who was present at the Stonewall riots. Whereas Vidal, Ginsberg, Baldwin, Capote and their heterosexual counterparts, Mailer, Jones, Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller were all born in the 1920s, White (b. 1940) represented a new generation whose work was rooted in the political and cultural upheavals of the 1960s. Writers like Baldwin, Vidal, and Capote had multi-faceted roles and concerns, and were only peripherally involved in the new gay movement, but White and many of his contemporaries could plausibly be seen as primarily gay writers, with respect to the subject matter of their work. Of the older writers, Ginsberg and Isherwood, both of whom embraced the gay movement, were exceptional.

The flourishing of gay fiction in the 1970s and ‘80s was dependent, as Bram demonstrates, upon a national infrastructure of gay bookstores, newspapers, and the interest of a literate readership, all of which burgeoned as an organized gay political movement quickly developed. If at first gay writing was news from the front that assured its readers that they existed, gay writing in the ‘70s addressed the question of what gay existence meant. Bram tags 1978 as his candidate for gay writing’s miraculous year. It saw the publication of Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, Larry Kramer’s Faggots, Armistead Maupin’s Tales of the City and an early experimental novel by Edmund White.

Kramer’s book, a fairly crude satire directed against the sexual promiscuity of gay culture itself, “an erotic novel that denounces sex,” as Bram puts it, was the most confrontational of the books that year, and its author soon turned out to be equally volatile, to good and bad effect. I think that, in literary terms, Holleran’s Dancer, an elegiac portrait of desire in the all-night gay club-and-beach scene of New York and nearby Fire Island, is the best of these books, though Bram is inclined to award the palm to Maupin, whose Tales of the City began life as a Dickensian serialized novel in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle, eventually growing into a best-selling multi-volume saga. As for White, his best work lay just ahead of him.

White, whose day job was at Time-Life Books and who had written a couple of artsy early novels, discovered himself, oddly enough, as the co-author, with his former psychiatrist, Dr. Charles Silverstein, of a sex guide, The Joy of Gay Sex (1977). The book, a follow-up to Alex Comfort’s Joy of Sex, was a success, part of the general “Sexual Revolution” of the period, as well as evidence of a large, untapped gay reading market, something proved by the sales of the following year’s novels. As for White, he followed up his sex guide writing with a gay travelogue, States of Desire (1980), followed by an autobiographical coming-of-age novel, A Boy’s Own Story (1982). Between his early artistic experiments and his commercial writing, White melded the two into a distinctive style, at once beautiful, and yet effective at moving the story along. It was a style that gay readers first, and then others, quickly identified as one of the recognizable literary voices of his generation. White’s gay-coming-of-age book drew favourable comparison with J.D. Salinger’s classic adolescent novel, Catcher in the Rye.

Over the next quarter-century, White’s autobiographical story – to which he added The Beautiful Room Is Empty (1988), The Farewell Symphony (1997), and The Married Man (2000) — grew into the defining gay Bildungsroman of his generation; his lengthy stay in Paris in the 1980s yielded a massive biography of French gay writer Jean Genet which won the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award; and along the way, there were volumes of short stories, essays, and memoirs (the best of which, I think, is My Lives (2005)). Although Bram offers some thoughtful reservations about White’s sizeable oeuvre, and appears to be more drawn to the work of Armistead Maupin and playwright Tony Kushner, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Angels in America (1993), I suspect that when all is said and read, White will be judged to be the major writer to have emerged from the gay movement.

The concluding sections of Bram’s account are understandably more diffuse than the earlier part of the book. There’s a substantial survey of the politics, culture and sheer horror of the AIDS epidemic as it affected the gay community. Much of the literary side of the story is given over to the political and theatrical activities of Larry Kramer, the author of Faggots, whose “manic, high-octane, punching-in-all-directions voice,” as Bram describes it, for the next several years outshouted everyone engaged in the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, to recall the name of the New York AIDS organization that Kramer helped found at the outset of the epidemic. Nonetheless, Bram gives Kramer his due as a crusading gay journalist, political activist, and the author of The Normal Heart, the widely-seen AIDS play that galvanized public attention about the illness that struck like a plague.

There’s also an epilogue to bring us up to the present. In Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Dance, one of the characters advises writers to “keep the chapters short… no one has a very long attention span anymore, and that’s why the world is so unhappy.” If that was true in the ditzy disco days of the late 1970s, you can imagine what the state of mind of the digitalized present is like. Gay readers moved on from novels to Facebook and YouTube, just like everyone else. The gay bookstores mostly shut down (but so have other bookstores). The gay newspapers that survived became less political, more social, and the Gay Pride parades have become ethnic celebrations, fully integrated into the local tourist industry. If the gay movement started out as a revolutionary proposal about human relationships, its success has mellowed it into something closer to the Rotary Club. What most gays wanted, it transpired, was what everybody else wanted, marriages, mortgages and good credit ratings. It can be argued that homosexuals are almost the only category of Americans who take marriage completely seriously these days. No wonder gay marriage drives “social conservatives” crazy. Finally, somebody more Family Values than thou. Still, gay normality is better than the terrifying pre-gay equality period.

Although the initial reviews of Eminent Outlaws were generally favourable, they struck me as slightly grudging in their praise. The notable exception is a generous Washington Post review by Isherwood biographer, Peter Parker, who likes Bram’s “breezy” combination of lit-crit and social history, and his “pleasantly relaxed and always very readable style.” My favourite New York Times regular reviewer, Dwight Garner, finds his reaction to Bram’s book similar to that of theatre producer Joseph Papp’s first reading of Larry Kramer’s play about AIDS, The Normal Heart: “This is one of the worst things I’ve ever read,” Papp said, but the play so moved him that he added, “and I’m crying.” Garner appreciates Bram’s “often resonant” arguments, “lit from below by a gossipy wit.” The book’s power, he says, “is less sentence by sentence than cumulative. You don’t realize how much the details of these writers’ books and difficult lives have touched you until the book’s final chapters.”

John Leland, author of Why Kerouac Matters, writing in the Times Book Review section is dubious about what he sees as “mainly a reverie for a time past, seen through a romantic lens.” Leland lists a score of writers Bram misses or slights, finds his view of gay culture rather naïve, and chides Bram for inexplicably not connecting gay lit “to the broader sexual revolution.” (The last charge is simply a mistake; Leland missed Bram’s direct comment in the text about general changes to sexual mores.) He grants that Bram’s book deserves “a prominent place” in the window of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, the first gay bookstore in New York, but cattily adds, “alas, the store closed in 2009 — once vitally necessary, now made obsolete by its own success.” The implication is that Bram’s book is similarly unnecessary.

I’m not quite sure why there’s less generosity than might be expected. Perhaps it’s because Bram isn’t a professional literary historian, or that he doesn’t offer up the sort of theory that is currently found in Cultural Studies programs. Leland thinks Bram underplays the possible worth of the writing itself in favour of its role in political triumphs. As for Leland’s claim about missing significant writers, Bram makes clear at the outset that he’s not doing a who’s who catalogue. The only substantial absence that I would argue ought to be remedied is that of Dennis Cooper. Cooper and a group of like-minded “transgressive” writers who were briefly known as the “New Narrative” group (c. 1990), represented the singular strain of experimental prose in gay writing. Cooper himself explored DeSadean subject matter that a lot of people found more than distasteful. But writing is not merely a matter of taste, but a question of quality and importance, and there’s a case to be made for Cooper. All in all, Bram covers most of the ground, and does so intelligently.

Now that the story is mostly history, how does it feel for those who remember it as life? Well, in one sense, for those of us who were participants, it turns out that an adolescent’s imagining of having personally invented homosexuality is not so far from the truth. Those isolated teenagers — and a thousand books, a thousand demonstrations, and a million like-minded agemates — really did invent a different kind of public homosexuality that significantly changed American society. But it’s also true that the past is Another Country (to recall the title of a James Baldwin novel) glimpsed from across the River Styx. To have lived through, within a single lifetime, the transformation of the understanding of the concepts and realities of women, black people, and gays must be something like what it felt like to live through the Reformation in the early 16th century. Or perhaps gay writing of a particular period is akin to the writing of Eastern European dissidents before the collapse of communism. Once the regime changed, there was gradual freedom and attention turned to normal life. There are still books, movies, and even TV sitcoms with gay characters, but there is less necessity for specifically gay writing, and there is a general diminishment of a public attention span that makes reading possible. What remains is what Wilde said about moral or immoral books. There’s no such thing, only books that are well-written, or badly-written.

Berlin, March 18, 2012