Writing & Democracy http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com The Riggio Honors Program Mon, 15 Dec 2014 23:59:17 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.3.33 Frontiersville http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/frontiersville/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/frontiersville/#comments Wed, 10 Dec 2014 20:38:10 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=1500 Read The Rest →]]> Frontiersville

Both a historian and a cultural critic, Dorothea Allen’s work explored the mythology of the frontier and its impact on the American psyche. Her 1961 book, Frontiersville: At the Dawn of a Golden Age, focused on the brief ascendancy of a gunman named William Robertson in Portland, Oregon as an example of liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Allen’s book was a critical success, garnering praise from such sources as The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Weekly and the now-defunct Western Quarterly. The New Yorker called it an “otherworldly tale of adventure and mayhem in the far West, wrapped in social analysis.”

Unfortunately, the book’s sales never matched its reception, and Frontiersville proved the pinnacle of her career.  As the 1960s wore on, her work fell out of favor and then was forgotten.

Recently, footage of a lecture she gave at The New School in 1962 was restored and brought to the digital age.  As work progresses on Allen’s papers, artifacts will be live-tweeted here.

Aldullah Robertson is a history student at The New School.

 

Frontiersville territory map
William Robertson slide
Oregon is Eden Ad
Harper's Weekly Pioneer cover
Around a piney bend
alkali desert
Paul Kane painting
Stephen Coffin
General Supply and Liquor
Shanghai Tunnel
The Maiden's Ball
House of mirrors
muff pistol
At the docks
Liberty fields
Piney camp
A Whistle Punk on a Skid copy
William Shanghaied
Family at crick
American Progress painting
Frontiersville 1962 Dawn of a Golden Age

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Civic Engagement / Luis Jaramillo http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/civic-engagement-luis-jaramillo/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/civic-engagement-luis-jaramillo/#comments Fri, 15 Nov 2013 10:31:21 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=1030 Read The Rest →]]> Civic Engagement
Luis Jaramillo

From The Doctor’s Wife

The sewer is finally being built, but the Doctor’s Wife and Nancy Taylor haven’t withdrawn from the public sphere. When they hear of a scheme to build an apartment complex on pilings out over the lake, they go to the county courthouse to lodge a formal complaint. It’s not that they’re against development, it’s just that you can’t just let it happen at random, with no thought to how it will impact the people and the land.

“You have to have your husband’s permission to complain,” the clerk says.

“Pardon?” Nancy asks.

“You’re not the owners of record.”

“How so?”

“You’re not on the deeds.”

“Who’s on the deeds?”

“Dr. Hagen and Mr. Taylor. There’s only room for one person’s name on the line.”

“And it just happened to be the men’s names that made it on the forms?” Nancy asks, drawing herself taller. She is very angry. The Doctor’s Wife is mad too, but she also feels herself getting the bad giggles, which in turn infect Nancy. Once the giggles strike dignity is no longer an option. The clerk looks on as Nancy and the Doctor’s Wife cry with laughter.

 

Luis Jaramillo is the author of The Doctor’s Wife, winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest, an Oprah Book of the Week, and one of NPR’s Best Books of 2012. Luis’s work has also appeared in Open City, Gamers (Soft Skull Press), Tin House Magazine, H.O.W. Journal, and Red Line Blues. He is the Associate Chair of the Writing Program at The New School, where he oversees the undergraduate curriculum and the Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy, teaches courses in fiction and nonfiction, and is Co-Editor of the journal The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food. He received an undergraduate degree from Stanford and an MFA from The New School.

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Elizabeth Gaffney in Conversation with Jessica Sennett http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/elizabeth-gaffney-in-conversation-with-jessica-sennett/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/elizabeth-gaffney-in-conversation-with-jessica-sennett/#comments Sat, 19 Oct 2013 09:36:37 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=1137 Read The Rest →]]> Elizabeth Gaffney in Conversation with Jessica Sennett

 

Both an author and an editor in New York, Elizabeth Gaffney’s work spans an exploration of both public and private space. She has immersed herself in multiple rural residency programs while focusing her material on the social urban sprawl. Gaffney combines art and realism in both her novel Metropolis and in her position as editor for the literary magazine, A Public Space. How has she used these isolated creative residency spaces to inspire democratic literary discussions in the larger international community of urban and rural readers?



Read Elizabeth Gaffney’s “Down the Manhole” and her reflection on The Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy.

Jessica Sennett is a freelance cheese educator and food project builder. She is using The New School to create a program combining food writing, the arts, and community development.
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A Trip to Hibbing High / Greil Marcus http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/a-trip-to-hibbing-high-greil-marcus/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/a-trip-to-hibbing-high-greil-marcus/#comments Mon, 14 Oct 2013 21:34:09 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=70 Read The Rest →]]> A Trip to Hibbing High
Greil Marcus

Daedalus Spring 2007

“As I walked out—” Those are the first words of “Ain’t Talkin’,” the last song on Bob Dylan’s Modern Times, released in the fall of 2006. It’s a great opening line for anything: a song, a tall tale, a fable, a novel, a soliloquy. The world opens at the feet of that line. How one gets there—to the point where those words can take on their true authority, raise suspense like a curtain, and make anyone want to know what happens next—is what I want to look for.

Hibbing_postcard1

For me this road opened in the spring of 2005, upstairs in the once-famous, now shut Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley. I was giving a reading from a book about Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” Older guys—people my age—were talking about the Dylan shows they’d seen in 1965: He had played Berkeley on his first tour with a band that December. People were asking questions—or making speeches. The old saw came up: “How does someone like Bob Dylan come out of a place like Hibbing, Minnesota, a worn-out mining town in the middle of nowhere?”

A woman stood up. She was about 35, maybe 40, definitely younger than the people who’d been talking. Her face was dark with indignation.

“Have any of you ever been to Hibbing?” she said. There was a general shaking of heads and murmuring of nos’s—from me and everyone else. “You ought to be ashamed of yourselves,” the woman said. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. If you’d been to Hibbing, you’d know why Bob Dylan came from there. There’s poetry on the walls. Everywhere you look. There are bars where arguments between socialists and the IWW, between Communists and Trotskyists, arguments that started a hundred years ago, are still going on. It’s there—and it was there when Bob Dylan was there.”

“I don’t remember the rest of what she said,” my wife said when I asked her about that night. “I was already planning our trip.” Along with our younger daughter and her husband, who live in Minneapolis, we arrived in Hibbing a year later, coincidentally during Dylan Days, a now-annual weekend celebration of Bob Dylan’s birthday, in this case his sixty-fifth. There was a bus trip, the premiere of a new movie, and a sort of Bob Dylan Idol contest at a restaurant called Zimmy’s. But we went straight to the high school. On the bus tour the next day, we went back. And that was the shock: Hibbing High.

Hibbing_HS

In his revelatory 1993 essay “When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk Revival,” the historian Robert Cantwell takes you by the hand, guides you back, and reveals the new America that rose up out of World War II. “If you were born between, roughly, 1941 and 1948,” he says—”born, that is, into the new postwar middle class,” you grew up in a reality perplexingly divided by the intermingling of an emerging mass society and a decaying industrial culture . . . Obscurely taking shape around you, of a definite order and texture, was an environment of new neighborhoods, new schools, new businesses, new forms of recreation and entertainment, and new technologies that in the course of the 50s would virtually abolish the world in which your parents had grown up.

That sentence is typical of Cantwell’s style: apparently obvious social changes charted into the realm of familiarity, then a hammer coming down: as you are feeling your way into your own world, your parents’ world is abolished.

Growing up in the certified postwar suburb towns of Palo Alto and Menlo Park in California, I lived some of this life. Though Bob Dylan did not grow up in the suburbs—despite David Hajdu’s dismissal of Dylan, in his book Positively 4th Street, as “a Jewish kid from the suburbs,” Hibbing is not close enough to Duluth, or any other city, to be a suburb of anything—he lived some of this life, too.

Cantwell moves on to talk about how the new prosperity of the 50s was likely paradise to your parents, how their aspirations became your seeming inevitabilities: “Very likely, you saw yourself growing up to be a doctor or a lawyer, scientist or engineer, teacher, nurse, or mother—pictures held up to you at school and at home as pictures of your special destiny.” And, Cantwell says, You probably attended, too, an overcrowded public school, typically a building built shortly before World War I . . . [you] may have had to share a desk with another student, and in addition to the normal fire and tornado drills had from time to time to crawl under your desk in order to shield yourself from the imagined explosion of an atomic bomb.

So, Cantwell writes, “in this vision of consumer Valhalla there was a lingering note of caution, even of dread”—but let’s go back to the schools.

The public schools I attended—Elizabeth Van Auken Elementary School (now Ohlone School) in Palo Alto, and Menlo Atherton High School in Menlo Park—were not built before World War I. They were built in the early ’50s, part of the world that was already changing. The past was still there: Miss Van Auken, a beloved former teacher, was always present to celebrate the school’s birthday. When our third-grade class read the Little House books, we wrote Laura Ingalls Wilder and she wrote back. But the past was fading as new houses went up all around the school. A few miles away, Menlo-Atherton High was a sleek, modern plant: one story, flat roofs, huge banks of windows in every classroom, lawns everywhere, and three parking lots, one reserved strictly for members of the senior class. The school produced Olympic swimmers in the early 60s; a few years later Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks would graduate and, a few years after that, make Fleetwood Mac the biggest band in the world. The school sparkled with suburban money, rock ‘n’ roll cool, surfer swagger, and San Francisco ambition—and compared to Hibbing High School it was a shack. “I know Hibbing,” Harry Truman said in 1947, when he was introduced to Hibbing’s John Galeb, the National Commander of Disabled American Veterans. “That’s where the high school has gold door knobs.”

Outside of Washington, D.C., it’s the most impressive public building I’ve ever seen. In aerial photographs, it’s a colossus: four stories, 93 feet high, with wings 180 feet long flying out from a 416-foot front. From the ground it is more than anything a monument to benign authority, a giant hand welcoming the town, all of its generations, into a cave where the treasure is buried, all the knowledge of mankind. It speaks for the community, for its faith in education, not only as a road to success, to wealth and security, reputation and honor, but as a good in itself. This town, the building says, will have the best school in the world.

In the plaza before the building there is a spire, a war memorial. On its four sides, as you turn from one panel to another, are the names of those students from Hibbing who died in the First World War, the Second World War, the Korean and Vietnam Wars—and, on the last panel, with no names, a commemoration of the terrorist attacks of 2001. Past the memorial are steps worthy of a state capitol leading to the entrance of the building. It was late Friday afternoon; there were no students around, but the doors were open.

Hibbing High School was built near the end of the era when Hibbing was known as “the richest village in the world.” A crusading mayor, Victor Power, enforced mineral taxes on US Steel, operator of the huge iron-ore pit mines that surrounded the original Hibbing. Elected after a general strike in 1913, he fought off the mine company’s allies in the state legislature and the courts in battle after battle. When ore was discovered under the Hibbing itself, Power and others forced the company to spend sixteen million dollars to move the whole town—houses, hotels, churches, public buildings—four miles south. The bigger buildings were cut in quarters and reassembled in the new Hibbing like Legos.

Iron_ore

Tax revenues had mounted over the years in the old north Hibbing; at one point, the story goes, when a social-improvement society took up donations for poor families, none could be found. But in the new south Hibbing, in a maneuver aimed at building support for lower corporate tax rates in the future, the mining company offered even more money in the form of donations, or bribes: school-board members directed most of it to what became Hibbing High, which Mayor Power had demanded as part of the price of moving the town. With prosperity seemingly assured, the town turned out Victor Power in favor of a mayor closer to the mines. Soon a law was passed limiting public spending to a hundred dollars per capita per year; then the limit was lowered, and lowered again. The tax base of the town began to crumble; with World War II, when the town was not allowed to tax mineral production, and after, when the mines were nearly played out, the tax base all but collapsed. Ultimately, the mines shifted from iron ore to taconite, low-grade pellets that today find a market in China, but Hibbing never recovered. In the 50s it was a dying town, the school a seventh wonder of a time that had passed, a ziggurat built by a forgotten king. And yet it was still a ziggurat.

When it opened in 1924, Hibbing High School had cost four million dollars, an unimaginable sum for the time. At first it was the ultimate consolidated school, from kindergarten through junior college. There were three gyms, two indoor running tracks, and every kind of shop that in the years to come would be commonplace in American high schools—as well as an electronics shop, an auto shop, a conservatory. There was a full-time doctor, dentist, and nurse. There were extensive programs in music, art, and theater. But more than eight decades later, you didn’t have to know any of this to catch the glow of the place.

Climbing the enclosed stairway that followed the expanse of outdoor steps, we saw not a hint of graffiti, not a sign of deterioration in the intricate colored tile designs on the walls and the ceilings, in the curving woodwork. We gazed up at old-fashioned but still majestic murals depicting the history of Minnesota, with bold trappers surrounded by submissive Indians, huge trees and roaming animals, the forest and the emerging towns. It was strange, the pristine condition of the place. It spoke not for emptiness, for Hibbing High as a version of Pompeii High—though the school, with a capacity of over 2,000, was down to 600 students, up from four hundred only a few years before—and, somehow, you knew the state of the building didn’t speak for discipline. You could sense self-respect, passed down over the years.

We followed the empty corridors in search of the legendary auditorium. A custodian let us in, and told us the stories. Seating for 1,800, and stained glass everywhere, even in the form of blazing candles on the fire box. In large, gilded paintings in the back, the muses waited; they smiled over the proscenium arch, too, over a stage that, in imitation of thousands of years of ancestors, had the weight of immortality hammered into its boards. “No wonder he turned into Bob Dylan,” said a visitor the next day, when the bus tour stopped at the school, speaking of the talent show Dylan played here with his high-school band the Golden Chords. Anybody on that stage could see kingdoms waiting.

Auditorium

There were huge chandeliers, imported from Czechoslovakia, four thousand dollars each when they were shipped across the Atlantic in the 1920s, irreplaceable today. We weren’t in Hibbing, a redundant mining town in northern Minnesota; we were in the opera house in Buenos Aires. Yet we were in Hibbing; there were high-school Bob Dylan artifacts in a case just down the hall. There were more in the public library some blocks away, in a small exhibit in the basement. Scattered among commonplace talismans, oddities and revelations were the lyrics to Golden Chords’ “Big Black Train,” from 1958, a rewrite of Elvis’s 1954 “Mystery Train,” credited to Monte Edwardson, LeRoy Hoikkala, and Bob Zimmerman:

Well, big black train, coming down the line
Well, big black train, coming down the line
Well, you got my woman, you bring her back to me
Well, that cute little chick is the girl I want to see
(Chorus)
Well, I’ve been waiting for a long long time
Well, I’ve been waiting for a long long time
Well, I’ve been looking for my baby
Searching down the line
(Second verse)
Well, here comes the train, yeah it’s coming down the line
Well, here comes the train, year it’s coming down the line
Well, you see my baby is finally coming home

The next day, walking up and down Howard Street, the main street of Hibbing, we looked for the poetry on the walls. “A NEW LIFE,” read an ad for an insurance company—was that it? Was there anything in that beer sign that could be twisted into a metaphor? What was the woman in Berkeley talking about? Later we found out that the walls with the poetry were in the high school itself.

In the school library there were busts and chiseled words of wisdom and murals. Murals told the story of the mining industry, all in the style of what Daniel Pinkwater, in his young-adult novel Young Adults, called “heroic realism.” There were sixteen life-size workers, representing the nationalities that formed Hibbing: native-born Americans, Finns, Swedes, Italians, Norwegians, Croatians, Serbs, Slovenians, Austrians, Germans, Jews, French, Poles, Russians, Armenians, Bulgarians, and more. There was a huge mine on the left, a misty steelworks on the right, and, in the middle, to take the fruit of Hibbing to the corners of the earth, Lake Superior. With art-nouveau dots between each word, the inscription over the mine quoted Tennyson’s “Oenone”:

LIFTING•THE•HIDDEN•IRON•
THAT•GLIMPSES•IN•LABOURED•
MINES•UNDRAINABLE•OF•ORE
—while over the factory one could read
THEY•FORCE•THE•BURNT•
AND•YET•UNBLOODED•STEEL•
TO•DO•THEIR•WILL

That was the poetry on the walls—but not even this was the real poetry in Hibbing. The real poetry was in the classroom.

AHibbingHS_brochurefter stopping by the auditorium and the library, the tours made its way upstairs to Room 204, where for five years in the 50s, B. J. Rolfzen taught English at Hibbing High—after that, he taught for 25 years at Hibbing Community College. Eighty-three in May of 2006, and slowed down by a stroke, getting around in a motorized wheelchair, Rolfzen sat on the desk in the small, suddenly steamy room, as forty or more people crowded in. There was a small podium in front of him. Presumably we were there to hear his reminiscences about the former Bob Zimmerman—or, as Rolfzen called him, and never anything else, Robert. Rolfzen held up a slate where he’d chalked lines from “Floater,” from Dylan’s 2001 “Love and Theft”: “Gotta sit up near the teacher / If you want to learn anything.” Rolfzen pointed to the tour member who was sitting in the seat directly in front of the desk. “I always stood in front of the desk, never behind it,” he said. “And that’s where Robert always sat.” He talked about Dylan’s “Not Dark Yet,” from his 1997 Time Out of Mind: “‘I was born here and I’ll die here / Against my will.'” “I’m with him. I’ll stay right here. I don’t care what’s on the other side,” Rolfzen said, a teacher thrilled to be learning from a student. With that out of the way, he proceeded to teach a class in poetry.

He handed out a photocopies booklet of poems by Wordsworth, Frost, Carver, the Minneapolis poet Colleen Sheehy, and himself; moving back and forth for more than half an hour, he returned again and again to the eight lines of William Carlos Williams’s “The Red Wheelbarrow.”

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chicken

He kept reading it, changing inflections, until the words seemed to dance out of order, shifting their meanings. Each time, a different word seemed to take over the poem. “Rain,” he would say, opening up the poem one way; “beside,” he’d say, and an entirely different drama seemed underway. Finally he came full circle. “‘so much depends / upon a red wheel / barrow,'” he said. “So much depends. This isn’t about rain. It’s not about chickens. So much depends on the decisions we make. My decision to enlist in the Navy in 1941, when I was 17. My decision to teach. So much depends on the decisions you’ve made, and will make.”

The poem stayed in the air: The loudness of the first line faded into “beside the white chickens,” not because they were unimportant, but because from “so much depends,” from the decision with which the poem began, the poem, like a life, could have gone anywhere; it was simply that in this case the poem happened to go toward chickens, before it went off the page, to wherever it went next. Rolfzen made the eight lines particular and universal, unlikely and fated; he made them apply to everyone in the room, or rather led each person to apply them to him or herself. This was not the sort of teacher you encounter everyday—or even in a lifetime.

“Bits and pieces of the Great Depression still lie about,” Rolfzen wrote in The Spring of My Life, a memoir of the 1930s he published himself in 2005—but he said, “The experiences and frightful hopelessness of one day of The Great Depression can never be understood or appreciated except by those who have lived it.” Nevertheless, he tried to make whoever might read his book understand. He went back to the village of Melrose, Minnesota, where he was born and grew up. He spoke quietly, flatly, sardonically of a family that was poor beyond poverty: “Life during the Great Depression was not a complex life. It was a simple one. No health insurance needed to be paid, no life insurance, no car insurance, no savings for a college education or any education beyond high school, no savings account, no automobile needed to be purchased, no gas was necessary to buy, no utilities beyond the $3.00 a month my dad paid for six 25 watt bulbs.” There were eleven children; B. J.—then Boniface—slept in a bed with three brothers.

His father was an electrical worker and a drunk: the “most frightening day,” Rolfzen writes, was payday, when his father would stagger home, then and every day until the money ran out. One day he tried to kill himself by grabbing high-voltage lines; instead he lost both arms just below the elbow, and sent the family onto relief. “I never saw my mother with a coin in her hand,” Rolfzen writes; everything they bought they bought on credit against 50 dollars a month. There was a family of four that boarded up the windows of its house to keep out the cold, but the Rolfzens would not advertise their misery, even if the windows sometimes broke and, before they could be replaced, maybe not until winter passed, maybe not for months after that, snow piled up in the room where Rolfzen slept.

All through the book, through its continual memories of privation and idyll—of catching bullheads, playing marbles, picking berries, working on a farm for three months at the age of sixteen for four cents a day, or the toe of a young Boniface’s shoe falling off as he walked to school—one can feel Rolfzen holding his rage in check. His rage against his father, against the cold, against the plague that was on the land, against the alcoholism that followed from his father to his brothers, against the Catholic elementary school he was named for, St. Boniface, run by nuns who “enjoyed causing pain,” a place where students were threatened with hell for every errant act—where religion “was a senseless, heartless and unforgiving practice. I still bear its scars.”

“In times behind, I too / wished I’d lived / in the hungry Thirties,” Bob Dylan wrote in 1964 in “Eleven Outlined Epitaphs,” his notes to The Times They Are A-Changin’. “Rode freight trains for kicks / Got beat up for laughs / I was making my own depression,” he wrote the year before in “My Life in a Stolen Moment”—speaking of leaving Hibbing, leaving the University of Minnesota, traveling west, trying to learn how to live on his own. “I cannot remember ever having a conversation with my dad about anything,” Rolfzen writes—but you can imagine him having conversations about the 30s with Robert. Maybe especially about the tramp armies that passed through Melrose, starting every day at ten when the train pulled in, 20 men or more riding on top of the box cars, jumping from the doors, men who had abandoned their families, who broke into abandoned buildings and knocked on the Rolfzens’ back door begging for food—”My mother never refused them,” Rolfzen writes. With whatever they could scavenge, they headed to a hollow near the tracks, the place called the Bums’ Nest or the Jungle. As a boy, Rolfzen was there, watching and listening, but he will not allow a moment of romance, freedom, or escape: “Theirs was a controlled camaraderie with limited laughter. Each man was alone on these tracks that led to nowhere . . . And so they left. More would arrive the next day. One gentleman in particular I remember. An old bent man dressed in a long shabby coat, a tattered hat on his head and a cane in his hand. The last time I saw him, he was headed west along the railroad tracks, headed for an empty world.”

Corner

This is not how the song of the open road goes—and while Bob Dylan has sung that song as much as anyone, as the road opened it also forked, even from the start. “At the end of the great English epic Paradise Lost,” Rolfzen writes, “Milton observes the departure of Adam and Eve from the Garden, and as he observes their leaving by the Eastern Gate, he utters these beautiful words: ‘The world was all before them.'” So much depends—think of “Bob Dylan’s Dream,” from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, in 1963. There he is, twenty-two, “riding on a train going west,” dreaming of his true friends, his soulmates—and then suddenly he is an old man. He and his friends have long since vanished to each other. Their roads haven’t split so much as crumbled, disappeared—”shattered,” he sings. How was it that, in 1963, his voice and guitar calling up a smoky, out-of-focus portrait, Bob Dylan was already looking back, from forty, fifty, sixty years later? “

“As I walked out . . .” With those first words for “Ain’t Talkin'”—not only the longest song on Modern Times, and the strongest, but the only performance on the album where you don’t hear calculation—Bob Dylan disappears. Someone other than the singer you think you know seems to be singing the song. He doesn’t seem to know what effects to use, what they might even be for. It’s the only song on the album, really, without an ending—and with those first four words, a cloud is cast. The singer doesn’t know what’s going to happen—and it’s the way he expects that nothing will happen, the way he communicates an innocence you instantly don’t trust, that steels you for the story that he’s about to tell, or that’s about to sweep him up. He walks out into “the mystic garden.” He stares at the flowers on the vines. He passes a fountain. Someone hits him from behind.

This is when he finds the world all before him—because he can’t go back. There is only one reason to travel this road: revenge.

For the only time on Modern Times, the music doesn’t orchestrate, doesn’t pump, doesn’t give itself away with its first note. Led by Tony Garnier’s cello and Donnie Herron’s viola, the band curls around the singer’s voice even as he curls around the band’s quiet, retreating, resolute sound, as if the whole song is the opening and closing of a fist, over and over again, the slow rhythm turning lyrics that are pretentious, even precious on the page into a kind of oracular bar talk, the old drunk who’s there every night and never speaks finally telling his story. “I practice a faith that’s long abandoned,” he says, and that might be the most frightening line Bob Dylan has written in years. “That’s been destroyed,” Dylan told Doon Arbus in 1997, speaking of “the secret community” of “like-minded people” he found in the early ’60s, a fellowship of those who felt themselves “outside and downtrodden,” a community that “spread out across America”—”I don’t know who destroyed it.”

“I know, in my mind, I’m still a member of a secret community. I might be the only one,” Dylan said then; in “Ain’t Talkin'” the singer moves down his road of patience and blood. You can sense his head turning from side to side as he tells you why his head is bursting: “If I catch my opponents ever sleeping / I’ll just slaughter ’em where they lie.” He snaps off the line casually, as if it’s hardly worth the time it takes to say, as if he’s done it before, like William Munny in Unforgiven killing children on his way to wherever he went, but that will be nothing to what the singer do to get wherever it is he’s going. God doesn’t care: “the gardener,” the singer says to a woman he finds in the mystic garden, “is gone.”

Now, Bob Dylan didn’t need B. J. Rolfzen’s tales of the tramp armies that passed through Melrose during the Great Depression to catch a feel for “tracks that led to nowhere.” Empathy has always been the genie of his work, of the tones of his voice, his sense of rhythm, his feel for how to fill up a line or leave it half empty, his sense of when to ride a melody and when to bury it, so that it might dissolve all of a listener’s defenses—and this is what allowed Dylan, in 1962 at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, at home in that secret community of tradition and mystery, to become not only the pining lover in the old ballad “Handsome Molly,” but also Handsome Molly herself.

There’s no tracing that quality of empathy to anything—so much depends—but if effects like these had causes, then there would be people doing the same on every corner, in any time. On the way to Hibbing, we stopped at an antique store; shoved in among a shelf of children’s books was a small, cracked book called From Lincoln to Coolidge, published in 1924, a collection of news dispatches, excerpts from Congressional hearings, and speeches, among them the speech Woodrow Wilson gave to dedicate Abraham Lincoln’s official birthplace in Hodgenville, Kentucky, on September 4, 1916—according to the story a young Bob Dylan was told, just weeks before his one-year-old mother was taken by her parents to see the president campaign in Hibbing from the back of a train. “This is the sacred mystery of democracy,” Wilson said that day in Hodgenville, “that its richest fruits spring up out of soils that no man has prepared and in circumstances amidst which they are least expected.”

That is the truth, and that is the mystery. In the case of Bob Dylan, as with any person who does things others don’t do, the mystery is always there. But from the overwhelming fact of the pure size of Hibbing High School, from the ambition and vision placed in the murals in its entryway, from the poetry on the walls to the poetry in the classroom, perhaps to memories recounted after everyone else had gone—or memories picked up by a student from the way a teacher moved, hesitated over a word, dropped hints he never quite turned into stories—these soils were not unprepared at all.

Robert Cantwell, “When We Were Good: Class and Culture in the Folk Revival,” collected in Transforming Tradition: Folk Music Revivals Examined, edited by Neil V. Rosenberg. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois, 1993.

When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge: Harvard, 1996. B. J. Rolfzen, The Spring of My Life. Hibbing, MN: Band Printing, 2004. Bob Dylan, “11 Outlined Epitaphs,” liner notes to The Times They Are A-Changin’ (Columbia, 1964).

—“Bob Dylan’s Dream” from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (Columbia, 1963).

—“Ain’t Talkin’,” from Modern Times (Columbia, 2006).

—“That’s been destroyed.” In Richard Avedon and Doon Arbus, The Sixties. New York: Random House, 1999. 210.

Woodrow Wilson, “Address of Woodrow Wilson at Lincoln’s Birthplace,” collected in From Lincoln to Coolidge, edited by Alfred E. Logie. Chicago: Lyons and Carnahan, 1925.



Read Greil Marcus’s reflection on The Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy, and a profile of him.

Greil Marcus was an early editor at Rolling Stone, and has since been a columnist for Salon, the New York Times, Artforum, Esquire, and the Village Voice; he currently writes a monthly music column for Interview magazine. He is the author of The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997), Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005), as well as The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (2006), Lipstick Traces (1989), Mystery Train (1975), The Dustbin of History (1995), Dead Elvis (1991), and other books. With Werner Sollors, he is the editor of A New Literary History of America (2009). In recent years he has taught seminars in American Studies at Berkeley and Princeton.

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Literature in Evolution / Lena Valencia http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/literature-in-evolution-lena-valencia/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/literature-in-evolution-lena-valencia/#comments Sun, 13 Oct 2013 22:20:03 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=1467 Read The Rest →]]> Literature in Evolution
Lena Valencia

 

Despite all the hand-wringing about the “death of the book” and uncertainty around the future of publishing, nearly a decade and a half past Y2K, many of us are still happily purchasing and reading literature, be it hard copy or on an electronic device. But how did we get to this point? And what comes next? In “Literature in Evolution,” a course led by John Reed, students set out on a hands-on exploration of the origin of story and its uses today by creating pictograms, comic strips, illuminated manuscripts, and, finally, digital narratives of their own.

One of the highlights of the course was the series of guest lectures by professionals specializing in everything from hand bound poetry chapbooks to e-books. Emily Flake shared her experience as a cartoonist for The New Yorker, while Caitlin Wheeler, an artist and bookmaking expert, led the class in a bookbinding tutorial. Fashion designer and multimedia artist Elisa Jimenez lent her own special brand of expertise to the final critique of the illuminated manuscripts, and Benjamin Samuel, co-founder of Electric Literature and the online literary magazine Recommended Reading offered advice to students in the early phases of their digital narratives. In addition to the guest lectures, the class took a trip to the Printed Matter bookstore in Chelsea, where they sifted through their vast selection of art books, zines, and chapbooks for inspiration.

The class investigated questions that continue to plague both critics and art-makers working today. What are the advantages of print media versus digital media? What is the value of the canon for readers? Publishers? Academia? Should digital art be given away for free, or hidden behind a pay-wall? They discussed memes and paradigm shifts and videogames. They looked at ways to tell a story using a hybrid of text, images, video, and more. They took these ideas and applied them to their final projects, each of which utilizes a digital publishing platform or technology (Prezi, Tumblr, iMovie, Keynote, Jilster, and various hybrids of these platforms) to tell their own stories. The finished products were unveiled in an exhibition at the New School on December 10th, and simultaneously published online on the Eliterate Tumblr created by the class.

Haley Hardin created Postcards from My Father, a Tumblr showcasing the postcards her father sent her daily while she was studying abroad in Italy in 2003. Each postcard is unique and personal, usually featuring a snapshot or simple collage with a witty caption penned beneath it. Hardin’s use of a clean, horizontal infinite scroll make the postcards easy to navigate, and the ability to zoom in on particular cards enables the viewer to get a feel for the texture of each—the sheen of permanent marker on glossy photo paper or the rough edge of a snipped and glued image in a collage—a digital exploration of a very analog process.

Like Hardin’s digital postcard album, To Colorado, Chris Pugh‘s digital scrapbook, created in iMovie, is an interactive homage to a bygone period of his life. Pugh used his own photography, video footage, poetry, and musical recordings to commemorate his time spent living in a collective with young artists, writers, musicians, and performers in Boulder, Colorado. Though the scrapbook itself illustrates the displacement of his own generation, Pugh’s creation has a timeless quality to it, and a nod to the artist’s collectives and alternative living spaces that preceded it. A black and white video of a bearded young man singing and playing harmonica and guitar while a dreadlocked girl dances behind him with a hula hoop feels as though it could have been shot at virtually any year in the past five decades.

Ariel Bleiburg used iMovie to create Giving Birth to a Pelican, a short animated fictional film about a talk show host interviewing a mystic who may or may not have supernatural powers. Pelican was live-drawn on a whiteboard while Bleiburg and his collaborators voiced the parts of the two characters. Like Hardin’s postcard project, and Pugh’s digital scrapbook, digital techniques showcase the analog process: iMovie’s stop-motion features were applied to the speed up the footage of the illustrator live drawing.

Some students turned to the city for inspiration. Zoe Rivka Panagopolous created rBan Ear, an “Overheard in New York” for 2013. “Listen to your surroundings,” reads the tagline on the site. She asks users to take the idea of “listening” loosely, and upload images, quotes, audio clips, and other media they encounter in and around New York City. She enabled the Tumblr to have infinite storage, so users can post their findings without having to worry about their size. The simple theme is ideal for using on a smartphone, making it a perfect platform for the urban explorer. Featuring snaps of clever graffiti, strange drawings on posted MTA flyers, and other intriguing miscellany, uRban Ear emphasizes the rewards of stopping and observing.

In Bricks, a short film created on Keynote and edited on iMovie, Ari Spool anthropomorphizes the bricks of 19-23 St. Marks Place to tell the history of the building. The bricks describe the building’s transition from the site of a famous mob shooting, into a Polish community center, Electric Circus, a New Age church, and, finally, a Chipotle. Though the piece is, for the most part, lighthearted and playful (and features an endearing mispronunciation of “tortilla” by one of the amateur voice actors that narrate the piece), it also raises the troubling point that corporate franchises are erasing the cultural institutions that make New York City unique.

Several of the digital works we studied throughout the course were political, and some of the students chose to create a platform for an issue they were passionate about. Bianca de Leigh‘s Hoes Who Know Tumblr presents a compendium of artwork, articles, quotes, images, and other documents in favor of legalizing prostitution in America. The most entertaining of these are a series of pro-prostitution images that de Leigh herself created by altering vintage advertisements.

Healthcare 101 by Naima Asjad

Healthcare 101 by Naima Asjad

Naima Asjad‘s Healthcare 101 is an instructional digital infographic that presents facts about healthcare using clipart. The sobering statistics set against an alarming slime green background and surrounded by retro images of smiling doctors and patients create a playful sense of irony.

Adane Byron questioned modern-day standards of beauty in the digital tabloid Freak Week he created using Jilster, an online publishing platform crafted specifically for magazines. Byron contrasts Charles Eisenmann’s photographs of circus sideshow freaks with contemporary images of fashion models. The magazine is scattered throughout with cheeky ads created by Byron. In addition to the magazine, Byron created a Tumblr called Freaks R Us with similar images and captions.

Many of the platforms we researched were also handy teaching tools. Ricky Tucker used Prezi, a platform developed as a visual aid to presentations, to create Vogue: a History, a Culture, which he used to illustrate a workshop on Runway and Vogue that he taught at the New School’s department of Athletics and Recreation. The presentation gave much-needed cultural context to a form of dance that most people only attribute to Madonna.

The most fascinating part of the class was watching these stories develop. Many of them acted out the historical trajectory of the class: what started as hand-drawn storyboards or collaged zines evolved into polished digital narratives, all of which utilized their platforms in unique ways. Whether it’s being used to document a piece of personal or social history, as a pedagogical tool, or a form of political protest, the work created by these students proved that while platforms and technology may change, the human desire to tell a story persists.

 

Lena Valencia is a Second Year MFA Fiction student at The New School. Her nonfiction has been published in BOMB Magazine, the LA Weekly, and Tor.com.

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Transmissions: The Literature of Aids / Josué Rivera http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/transmissions-the-literature-of-aids-josue-rivera/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/transmissions-the-literature-of-aids-josue-rivera/#comments Sun, 29 Sep 2013 19:41:09 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=694 Read The Rest →]]> Transmissions: The Literature of AIDS
Josué Rivera

30 years of literature inspired by living with and dying of AIDS is brought to light in a one day symposium put together by publishing collective Mischief + Mayhem and the School of Writing. Transmissions: The Literature of AIDS featured two panels exploring the canon of  AIDS literature between 1981 through the present, a reading of selected works, and a visual arts exhibition. Dale Peck, School of Writing faculty member and Mischief + Mayhem co-founder, moderated the event which featured Rabih Alameddine, Michael Denneny, Gary Indiana, Zia Jaffrey, John Kelly, Larry Kramer, Jennie Livingston, Amy Scholder, Max Steele, Sarah Schulman, John Weir, and Edmund White. Wolfman Hall held film screenings of Dan Fishback’s Thirtynothing, David Wojnarowicz’s A Fire in the Belly, excerpts from the ACT UP Oral History Project, and selections from the Visual AIDS Broadside series and Archive Project.

In the ’80s, gay communities spoke the unspeakable reality of HIV and AIDS with an incendiary desire to tear open the plastic bag which President Reagan wrapped around their heads. Public consciousness was hijacked in a homophobic malice “because fags and dykes and junkies are expendable in this country,” and “if you want to stop AIDS shoot the queers” said the governor of Texas on the radio[1]. In 1983 Larry Kramer warned about a crisis, which would rapidly transform into an epidemic devastating whole communities[2]. It was a time to turn anger, fear, and pain into action. A time of civil disobedience. A time that signaled Silence = Death. Guest speakers Larry Kramer and Sarah Schulman were writers among a community of socio-political “outcast[s] who had nothing left to lose in taking up the stigmatized subject3” of AIDS in America.


The Public visibility of the epidemic dimmed with the new decade. President Clinton stated in ’93 that AIDS was “receding in the public consciousness as a thing to be passionate about[3].” Although AIDS was not a prevalent issue for the public there were moments of creative expression and explosive activism. Pedro Zamora, activist and MTV’s Real World cast member, was particularly instrumental in reaching out to a new generation. And during the beginning of the ’90s, ACT-UP established two illegal underground needle exchanges for around 1,000 injecting drug users, thereby effectively reducing HIV transmission among that population[4]. By ’93 AIDS was reported as the fourth leading cause of death among women aged 25-44 years in the USA5. In the same year the CDC reported that the incidence rate of HIV/AIDS for Blacks and Latinos is three times as high as that of whites[5]. The following year AIDS becomes the leading cause of death for all Americans ages 25-445.

With such demographic disparity within the AIDS community, Trasmissions regrettably under represents the diversity of AIDS literature. Although the ACT UP Oral History Project presents stories from people of all races and classes, which transformed entrenched cultural ideas about AIDS and sexuality[6], I yearned for the symposium to speak about writers such as Essex Hemphill, Joseph Beam, or Sindiwe Magona, a few among many individuals whom were integral toward the empowerment of minority voices writing about living with or dying of AIDS.

The AIDS epidemic continues to ravage the world. The CDC reports that more than 1.1 million people in the United States are living with HIV infection, and almost 1 in 5 are unaware[7]. Transmissions: The Literature of Aids comes at a crucial moment when the public consciousness of AIDS needs re-ignition. The symposium offers intimate accounts from the creative minds of people affected by AIDS and HIV. The following are excerpts that encompass the often painful emotional acuity of their experiences; along side the preceding examples of visual art, literature, and media discussed.

Larry Kramer, “1,112 And Counting”

“If this article doesn’t scare the shit out of you, we’re in real trouble. If this article doesn’t rouse you to anger, fury, rage, and action, gay men may have no future on this earth. Our continued existence depends on just how angry you can get.”

David Wojnarowicz, “The Half-Life”

“If I could open up your body and slip inside your skin and look out your eyes and forever have my lips fused with yours I would. It makes me weep to feel the history of your flesh beneath my hands in a time of so much loss. It makes me weep to feel the movement of your flesh beneath my palms as you twist and turn over to one side to create a series of gestures to reach up around my neck to draw me nearer. All these memories will be lost in time like tears in the rain.”

Essex Hemphill, “Ceremonies”

“I speak for thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of men who live and die in the shadows of secrets, unable to speak of the love that helps them endure.”

Sindiwe Magona, “Mother to Mother”

“Yes, I can see how torn she must have felt. Excited and grieving. Happy and sad. At one and the same time. For the same, the very same, reason.”

 


[1] Carr, Cynthia, Fire in the Belly: The Life and Times of David Wojnarowicz, Bloomsbury USA, p. 402.

[2] Larry Kramer, ” 1,112 And Counting,” New York Native, issue 59,14-27 March, 1983.

[7] http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/statistics/basics/ataglance.html

 

Josué Rivera is a contemporary media artist, writer, and activist. He is editor and creative director for Clearly Stated, and will be publishing Minor Scale Over White Sands through New York-based independent, nonprofit publisher, ¿COLORBLIND?.

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Four Poems / Catherine Barnett http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/four-poems-catherine-barnett/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/four-poems-catherine-barnett/#comments Thu, 19 Sep 2013 07:03:30 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=1079 Read The Rest →]]> Four Poems
Catherine Barnett

The following four poems appear in Barnett’s most recent collection, The Game of Boxes (Graywolf Press, 2012).

game of boxes

Categories of Understanding

I’m studying the unspoken.
“What?” my son asks.
“What are you looking at?”
But there is no explaining,
I can only speak the way light
falls, the way the cotton sheet
lays itself over his sleeping or resting
or dissolving body, touching him with
its ephemera, its oblivion.

Chorus

We didn’t believe an elephant could squeeze into church
so we went to church and waited while the priest
kept saying listen and forgive and the animals all around us
listened, or didn’t listen, some strained against leashes,
some wore disguises that made them look like people we knew,
people we should forgive or be forgiven by,
we didn’t know which, even the elephant
looked like someone we knew, flooding the doorway
like a curtain of light, swaying from side to side.
Her hide was cracked down to her feet and her eyes,
they shone like glass before it breaks.  She looked
like she might fly but only walked down the aisle
in a dirty gown of wrinkles, so wrinkled and slow
and vast and silvery, the whole galaxy shivering.

The Modern Period

When Gutenberg figured out
how to make letters that could be
rearranged he changed us all.

Once upon a time
I laid my head on books
and was surrounded by books

and bought books and rescued books
reminding me I had only
finite years in the book of my son,

whom I almost left for books,
to whom I leave my books.

Providence

This evening I shared a cab with a priest
who said it was a fine day to ride cross town

with a writer.  But I can’t
finish the play I said,

it’s full of snow.
The jaywalkers

walked slowly, a cigarette warmed
someone’s hand.

Some of the best sermons
don’t have endings, he said

while the tires rotated unceasingly
beneath us.

All over town people were waiting
and doubleparked and

making love and waiting.
The temperature dropped

until the shiverers zipped their jackets
and all manner of things started up again.



Read Catherine Barnett’s reflection on The Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy.

Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a 2012 Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award, a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2004 Whiting Writers’ Award, the 2004 Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award and was published in spring 2004 by Alice James Books. Her poems have been published in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, the Washington Post, Barrow Street, Shenandoah, the Massachusetts Review, and the Iowa Review. Barnett also teaches at NYU, where she was recently honored with an Outstanding Service Award.

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Christopher Pugh: To Colorado http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/christopher-pugh-to-colorado/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/christopher-pugh-to-colorado/#comments Tue, 10 Sep 2013 22:10:33 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=1481

To Colorado 1 from Christopher Pugh on Vimeo.

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Animal Farm: Timeline & Bias / John Reed http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/john-reed/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/john-reed/#comments Tue, 13 Aug 2013 22:54:23 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=1016 Animal Farm
John Reed

TIMELINE:

& BIAS:

 

Read a profile of John Reed.

 

Cover Photo by Dustin Luke Nelson
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She Hath Writ Diligently Her Own Mind: Elizabeth Childers / Bean Haskell http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/elizabeth-childers/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/elizabeth-childers/#comments Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:33:35 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=670 Read The Rest →]]> She Hath Writ Diligently Her Own Mind: Elizabeth Childers
in conversation with Bean Haskell

Was it the passion in the gesture of her hands reflected in her bright red lipstick as she spoke that launched the nebulae of my aesthetic crush on Elizabeth Childers? Was it the magic of my first semester back at university after a long hiatus, this time at a school and program I liked very much (Riggio, of course)? Was it the fact that the class wherein I had the pleasure of making her acquaintance was called The Writer’s Playlist, melding music and literature and everything nice? Was it the fact that her dimples were as pronounced as the poesy of her presence was mysterious? Was it the fact that she wore a beret and a cape? Whatever the marker, Elizabeth carried around her an aura of inspiration, a sultry perfume of creative passion I wanted to drink as heartily as the fresh pages inundating the return of academic ebb and flow. And the best part is, despite having put her on this celestial dream-woman pedestal, I found that Elizabeth is down to earth, friendly, inviting, and generous with her elegant gift. Indulging my copious nosy inquiries, Elizabeth relates with gorgeous lyricism and bounce her travels, spinnings, and adventures.

Claire 3I grew up in a secluded scientific community in California.  No mall, cinema, supermarket, gas station, or street light.  Time was spent reading encyclopedias, Stephen King, Greek Mythologies, or—oh there was a great series called The Wheel Of Time I was obsessed with. We ordered books through a catalog back then.  When I wasn’t reading, I was climbing trees or pretending to be an opera singer while walking through the woods.  There were observatories where I grew up too, so there was the chance to look at the planets or far away stars.  My neighbor discovered comets.  Everything was mysterious and beautiful, but it was also totally away from any other kind of social cultural activities.  I left nerdville while I was still a teenager, dropped out of high school, and spent the next few years nomadically wandering up and down the West Coast, went to raves and goth clubs, Burning Man, backpacked in Alaska for a summer, and so on.  Basically, collecting life experiences, getting into and out of trouble, and meeting strange characters who proved that the grown-ups drawn in children’s books really did exist.  That was the mid-’90s. By 2000, I’d finally found my way to Brooklyn.  I continued to write and draw, took art and photography classes at SVA and Cooper Union, and began traveling to Europe, which had been my dream since I was a little girl in the forest.  I was working as an optician at a boutique to pay bills.  It’s not bad work, there are tons of interesting people to meet from all ranges of life.

Originally I’d been planning to attend Columbia’s General Studies program. I’d had a conversation about Columbia with a client who mentioned the New School was comparable, and, in their eyes better than the Columbia program. I was accepted to both but chose the New School because of the separation from the traditional undergrad school; as a thirty-year-old I wanted to be around other non-traditional students like me. It’s a great thing about The New School that there are university-wide programs as well as access to taking classes in the other schools (Parsons, for example).

My focus is Historical Studies, but I’ve always written creatively for pleasure. I started taking poetry/creative writing classes after two years of academic masochism; I needed to let my head breathe a bit. Everyone I met involved with the program has been full of warmth and support. I wish I’d been involved longer, more integrated with the community.

Riggio courses produce challenging and supportive environments. Everyone has a level of confidence which pushes their peers further. This atmosphere didn’t exist in any of my other classes in quite the same, effective, way. Must be the level of trust given to the students. That is to say, no one was being micro-managed (or needed to be) and that contributed to the level of creativity. Tom Healy’s class was a ton of fun and forced me to experiment with my approach—I find this maneuvering room, or the challenge, important to braking stagnation within form or themes.

Claire Writing Room

Elizabeth’s Writing Room in Berlin, Germany

I often go back to notes I’d written years or months before, for example a gibberish memory; then turn it into a poem, still sneaky abstract though. Then (usually after some block of time has passed again) take that piece and expand it into a fiction or essay. Depends on the prompts. The going back into the folders of notes and finding something inside of them to expand is a relatively newer approach; before I’d been in writing classes I just wrote—one draft, done. Doing that and working it within a structured assignment allowed me to work more on the crafting and less time on the memory or finding inspiration. In the Writer’s Playlist class we had together, we used music playlists as the boundary and it was a fresh construction to work within. I had to do more creating in terms of subject matter.

I am sad that I can’t be a part of the community now that I’m out of NYC. I’m currently enrolled in non-Riggio classes online, finishing up my degree. Unless I return, I won’t be able to produce a thesis writing project, or take advantage of any of the other program offerings. It would have been interesting to work on an independent project while here that could contribute to the Riggio program—especially under the tagline of Writing and Democracy.

Online courses are challenging and extremely time-consuming. And you miss out on a real fundamental aspect of a classroom, which are those spontaneous in-that-precise-moment discussions where students (and professors) really bounce ideas off of each other. I’ve very rarely had ‘EUREKA!’ moments with online classes—although I have had them and it’s entirely due to the quality of the professor and their grasp on the material.

I don’t envision returning to NYC. It was a good time for me to finally exit the city. As hard as it was to leave friends, and the academic community, the lure of adventure was too strong—it’s hard to turn down a chance for new life experience. And as my mum would say it, you have to live the adventures so you can write about them; how can you write about life if you’re not living it!

Last year was amazing and stressful. Part of moving to Berlin has to do with wanting a challenge, in the same way that I moved from Portland, Oregon to NYC because I wanted to be pushed more. It’s why I left San Francisco, got rid of everything except for a backpack, and went up to Alaska for a summer, for example. I think difficulty is a good thing from time to time; it breeds creativity. New York never stopped challenging me, but I got tired of what she was asking me to do.  While the city is inescapably alluring, it also fosters an intense consumer culture, and competitiveness, that were starting to seep into my way of being. I started to get the feeling that if I stayed too much longer I was going to become just another one of those jaded and neurotic New Yorkers. Living in New York is like dating an insufferable but sexy rock star; you feel good with him, you know he’s hot, but he’s way too into himself and his band.

Life now is humbler. It’s slower-paced. It’s bicycle riding through smooth streets, past green trees, and pink blossoms with warm sunshine breathing on your skin.  It’s café talks with expat friends about culture and politics and those crazy trousers worn by the man who just walked by. It’s German family dinners with kids and grandparents and cousins and second cousins and tomato sauce on everything, but who cares because there’s hearty laughter. It’s learning how to use the washing machine, which bottle is detergent and which is fabric softener, what does this insanely long word mean, why do Germans stare, and why there are so many playgrounds here. It’s going to German parties and feeling ashamed because my Deutsch is nicht so gut, and then being outside of conversations swirling by, feeling invisible.  It’s going to the Markthalle Street Food Thursdays and being annoyed by all the English spoken around, the inauthenticity of it.  It’s expat parties and being thankful for all the English, and not feeling invisible.

It’s being creative full time, which is wonderful. It’s waiting to get the floor plan for opening a breakfast café in order to estimate renovation costs, then who wants to invest. . . . Which is fine—I’m busy enough at the moment. There are some longer-term creative projects taped to the wall (I’m a bit superstitious in this realm, though, so I won’t mention what they’re about), and an academic one with my advisor, Gina Luria Walker. Gina heads Project Conitnua, a collaborative effort to restore and preserve women’s’ intellectual history in a searchable archive online. It’s an amazing undertaking, still in its early days, with many inspiring scholars involved.

I’ve been working on various new projects since arriving in Berlin—literary and visual media—which will be on my website come summertime (eachilders.com).  And in July I’ll be documenting a bicycle trip from Geneva, Switzerland to Nice, France. Three people, three bikes, five or six hundred kilometers, six days: sore muscles and sunburns!

 

Elizabeth Childers‘ poems are scattered in the abyss like petals, or messages in bottles, under varying pen names. Some of her writing has appeared in The Vanderbilt Republic, 12th Street, and Slow Travel Berlin. Her photography, drawings, and literary musings can be found on tumblr and flickr under the handle Anabelzenith.

Bean Haskell is an interdisciplinary scholar at The New School for Public Engagement. At once the gender-neutral royal figure of apologies and gratitude, possessor of an excellent self-trashing machine, and the weird stranger whom you somehow feel comfortable talking to, Bean seeks to participate in the bridging of social movements and the arts. The Brooklyn Baby Whisperer, retired. Elderly in spirit and bones and muscles, upchucking in the dance of city traversing, The Mother Theresa of Monsters has no true origin or destination.

All Photos by Claire Elizabeth Childers
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Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace / Robert Polito http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/bob-dylans-memory-palace-robert-polito/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/bob-dylans-memory-palace-robert-polito/#comments Sun, 14 Jul 2013 10:50:08 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=1043 Read The Rest →]]> BOB DYLAN’S MEMORY PALACE
Robert Polito

You could call them “covers,” these invocations of poems and novels that Dylan slips into his songs on recent recordings, and the collections are effortlessly retitled: Bob Dylan Sings the Exile Poems of Publius Ovividius Naso, Henry Timrod Revisited, Ovid on Ovid, Live from the Black Sea, and From Twain to Fitzgerald: Nobody Sings Studies in Classic American Literature Better Than Dylan.

ency0068You might also say they are performed “under cover,” as all this escalating literary traffic tends to fall among Dylan’s many covert operations. Poems and novels infiltrate his songs mostly through the camouflage of more flagrant smuggling. In “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” or “Nettie Moore,” or “Summer Days” it’s Muddy Waters, “Gentle Nettie Moore,” and Charlie Patton you register first, and then only later, if at all, Ovid, Timrod, and The Great Gatsby. Dylan’s literary stealth tilts toward the second story: a bygone Timrod rather than a celebrated Poe, Whitman, or Dickinson; Ovid’s obscurer Tristia over his Metamorphoses. So that when during “Thunder on the Mountain,” the lead-in track to Modern Times, Dylan sings, “I’ve been sitting down studying The Art of Love / I think it will fit me like a glove,” that glove is calculated to point at Ovid while also covering up the significant fingerprints here.  Of the perhaps 20 nods to the Roman poet across the songs that follow none (as far as I can tell) will touch The Art of Love, the Ovidian sleight-of-hand inside Modern Times emanating instead from Tristia, Black Sea Letters, The Amores, and his “Cures for Love.”

Poems, novels, films, and songs, whatever else they do, direct a conversation with the great dead, and Dylan’s ghostwriting on his last three CDs, Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft, and Modern Times is the most far-reaching of his career. Late in the 16th century, historian Jonathan Spence recounts, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci “taught the Chinese how to build a memory palace.  He told them that the size of the palace would depend on how much they wanted to remember . . . One could create modest palaces, or one could build less dramatic structures such as a temple compound, a cluster of government offices, a public hostel, or a merchants’ meeting lodge. If one wished to begin on a still smaller scale, then one could erect a simple reception hall, a pavilion, or a studio . . . In summarizing this memory system, he explained that these palaces, pavilions, divans were mental structures to be kept in one’s head, not solid objects to be literally constructed out of ‘real’ materials . . . To everything we wish to remember, wrote Ricci, we should give an image; and to every one of these images we should assign  a position where it can repose peacefully until we are ready to reclaim it by an act of memory.” [1]

On Modern Times, “Love and Theft,” and Time Out of Mind, Dylan is teaching us how to build a memory palace, “mental structures”—in this instance, songs—that will lodge past and present, the living and the dead. In Chronicles Volume I, his prose investigation of artistic self-invention and re-invention, he concluded his account of going inside the New York Public Library to read contemporary newspaper reportage on the Civil War with a spatial image for his memory that shrinks Ricci’s elate palace to a roadside storage unit. “I crammed my head full of as much of this stuff as I could stand and locked it away in my mind out of sight, left it alone,” Dylan writes. “Figured I could send a truck back for it later.” [2]

Echoing Aquinas, Augustine, and Ignatius of Loyola, Ricci stressed that the memory palace must not be envisioned as a passive repository, but by “incorporate[ing] these ‘memories’ of an unlived past into the spiritual present”[3] his mnemonic system was an instrument for spiritual practice with ancient links to alchemy, magic, and writing. “As for those worthy figures who lived a hundred generations ago,” Ricci argued, “although they too are gone, yet thanks to the books they left behind we who come after can hear their modes of discourse, observe their grand demeanor, and understand both the good order and the chaos of their times, exactly as if we were living among them.”[4]  Or, as Dylan sings in “Rollin’ and Tumblin’”:

Well, the night’s filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom
The night is filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom
I’ve been conjuring up all these long dead souls from their crumblin’ tombs

Making the dead available to the living, the memory palace proposes a mechanism for rendering all time—past, present, future—modern times. Since in this little verse of “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” the opening repeated phrases derive from “Our Willie,” an 1865 poem by Timrod, and the final line comes from Ovid’s poem of c. 16 BCE The Amores, and both are cut inside a blues out of Hambone Willie Newbern and Muddy Waters, Dylan manages at once here to describe and embody that mechanism.

*

As a culture we appear to have forgotten how to experience works of art, or at least how to talk about them plausibly or smartly. A latest instance was the “controversy” in the fall of 2006 shadowing Dylan’s recurrent adaptation of phrases from poems by Henry Timrod, a nearly vanished 19th century American poet, essayist, and Civil War newspaper correspondent, for Modern Times. That our most gifted and ambitious songwriter would revive Timrod on a No. 1 best-selling CD across America, Europe, and Australia might prompt a lively concatenation of responses ranging from “Huh? Henry Timrod? Isn’t that interesting . . .” to “Why?” But narrowing the Dylan/Timrod phenomenon (see the New York Times article “Who’s This Guy Dylan Who’s Borrowing Lines From Henry Timrod?” and a subsequent op ed piece “The Ballad of Henry Timrod” by singer-songwriter Suzanne Vega) into possible plagiarism is to confuse, well, art with a term paper. [5]

Timrod was born in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1828, his arrival in this world falling two years after Stephen Foster and two years before Emily Dickinson. His work, too, might be styled as falling between theirs: sometimes dark and skeptical, other times mawkish, old-fashioned. These are passages from five Timrod poems Dylan recast for “When the Deal Goes Down”:

From “Retirement”:

There is a wisdom that grows up in strife,
And one—I like it best—that that sits at home
And learns its lessons of a thoughtful ease.

From a sonnet, “I thank you, kind and best beloved friend”:

If I, indeed, divine their meaning truly,
And not unto myself ascribe, unduly,
Things which you neither meant nor wished to say,
Oh! Tell me, is the hope then all misplaced?

From “Two Portraits”:

Still stealing on with pace so slow
Yourself will scarcely feel the glow . . .

From “A Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night”:

These happy stars, and yonder setting moon,
Have seen me speed, unreckoned and untasked,
A round of precious hours.
Oh! here, where in that summer noon I basked,
And strove, with logic frailer than the flowers,
To justify a life of sensuous rest,
A question dear as home or heaven was asked,
And without language answered. I was blest!

From “A Vision of Poesy”:

 . . . and at times

A strange far look would come into his eyes,
As if he saw a vision in the skies. [6]

Dylan, I’m guessing, is fascinated by both aspects of Timrod, the antique alongside the brooding. Often tagged the “laureate of the Confederacy”—a title apparently conferred upon him by none other than Tennyson—he still shows up in anthologies because of poems he wrote celebrating and then mourning the new Southern nation, particularly “Ethnogenesis” and “Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating the Graves of the Confederate Dead at Magnolia Cemetery.” Early on, Whittier and Longfellow admired Timrod, and his “Ode” stands behind Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead” (and thus in turn behind Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead”).

p-philips-publius-ovidius-naso-known-as-ovid-roman-poetOn Modern Times Dylan shuns anthology favorites, but his album focuses at least 13 instances of phrases spread across five songs—“Spirit on the Water,” “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Beyond the Horizon,” “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” and “When the Deal Goes Down”—culled from as many as eight Timrod poems, mostly poems about love, friendship, loss, death, and poetry. (Note: “Katie” and “To Thee,” besides the six Timrod poems already noted.) Dylan quoted Timrod’s “Charleston” in “’Cross the Green Mountain,” a song he contributed to the soundtrack of the 2003 Civil War film Gods and Generals. Two years earlier he glanced at “Vision of Poesy” for “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum” on “Love and Theft.”

For “Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum,” Dylan cribbed those “stately trees” and “secrets of the breeze” from Timrod’s “A Vision of Poesy,” as well as the epigrammatic, “A childish dream is a deathless need,” and the ensuing rhyme of “need” and “creed.” On Modern Times Timrod accents texture, tone, and atmosphere. For “Spirit on the Water,” Dylan found “explain / The sources of this hidden pain” in “Two Portraits.” For “Workingman’s Blues #2” he located “to feed my soul with thought” in “To Thee,” and that rhyming “lover’s breath” and “a temporary death” also in “Two Portraits.” “Beyond the Horizon” teases out at least four Timrod poems—“In the long hours of twilight” arriving via “A Vision of Poesy”; “mortal bliss” from “Our Willie”; “an angel’s kiss” from “A Rhapsody of a Southern Winter Night”; and those chiming “bells of St. Mary” from “Katie.” Dylan often absorbs Timrod by reversing or otherwise varying the original sense—“But not to feed my soul with thought,” Timrod wrote; and sleeping “virtues” rather than sleep itself intersected “a temporary death.”[7] “I always try to turn a song on its head,” Dylan told Robert Hilburn in a 2004 interview about songwriting. “Otherwise, I figure I’m wasting the listener’s time.” [8]

The pining strains of Timrod’s inflections notably complement the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s popular singers Dylan steadily evokes on Modern Times, such as Bing Crosby, who presumably too is acknowledged here, also via that reference to The Bells of St. Mary’s. Perhaps more surprisingly, Timrod does not (as far as I can tell) grace “Nettie Moore,” Dylan’s revisiting of “Gentle Nettie Moore” (aka “The Little White Cottage”), a minstrelsy song about a young girl sold into slavery published by Marshall S. Pike and James S. Pierpont in 1857.

*

But Henry Timrod, I want to suggest, might only inscribe another deep-cover Dylan covert operation, a deflective gesture intended to divert our scrutiny from the actual priority of Ovid on Modern Times. During his sophomore year at Hibbing High School Robert Zimmerman joined the Latin Club, and once recognized, Ovid is everywhere, Tristia, Black Sea Letters, “Cures for Love,” and The Amores, all in translations by Peter Green: the early love poems, certainly, but especially the poems Ovid wrote after he was exiled by Augustus to Tomis, on the shores of the Black Sea, perhaps because of his scandalous verses, perhaps because of still-enigmatic offenses against the Empire.[9]  From “Spirit on the Water,” “Rollin’ and Tumblin’,” and “Someday Baby” through “Workingman’s Blues #2,” “Nettie Moore,” “The Levee’s Gonna Break,” and “Ain’t Talkin’,” at least seven of the ten songs refocus language, often entire lines from Green’s Ovid, and the Ovidian netting emerges as more ubiquitous than any of the Dylan websites have so far indicated.[10] Amid variations for his own metrical designs, Dylan pirates locutions no songwriter would need to steal from a Latin poet, since they sound like they already spring from old blues, country, and rockabilly lyrics—“a face that begs for love,” “am I wrong in thinking / That you have forgotten me,” “I swear I ain’t gonna touch another one for years,” “dearer to me than myself, as you yourself can see,” “you got me so hooked,” and “I want to be with you any way I can.” [11]

bobdylanDuring the anatomy of his reading in Chronicles, Dylan recalls that on the shelves of Ray Gooch’s New York library, “Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the scary horror tale, was next to the autobiography of Davy Crockett.”[12] Here, classical mythology jostles American legend. Publius Ovidius Naso was born into a landed-gentry family at Sulmo (now Sulmona) in central Italy in 43 B.C. As Green observes for his introduction to The Poems of Exile, this was “the year after Caesar’s assassination” and Ovid “grew up during the violent death throes of the Roman Republic.”[13] Ovid published a version of The Amores as early as 15 B.C., soon followed by Heroides, The Art of Love, Remedia Amoris, Metamorphoses, and Fasti. Augustus exiled him to Tomis (now Constanta) in A.D. 8. “It was two offenses undid me,” Ovid alleged in Tristia, “a poem and an error: / on the second, my lips are sealed.”[14]  One genealogical angle on the Dylan/Ovid connection is that in Chronicles he traces his own family back to the cities and towns along the Black Sea. “My grandmother’s voice possessed a haunting accent,” he reports, “face always set in a half‑despairing expression. . . . Originally, she’d come from Turkey, sailed from Trabzon, a port town across the Black Sea.” He links Odessa—the city his grandmother traveled from to America—to Duluth: “the same kind of temperament, climate and landscape and right on the edge of a big body of water.”[15]

I’m guessing that Green’s translations appeal to Dylan because Green himself is so mercurial a verbal trickster, and there are moments when Ovid even appears to be channeling early Dylan. “You better think twice,” Green has Ovid advising on the same page of The Amores where Dylan would have discovered, “Catch your opponents sleeping / And unarmed. Just slaughter them where they lie.” [16]

Dylan_2Ovid is talking about lovers and bedroom maneuvers here, and much as Timrod, he insinuates ambiance, timber, and character across Modern Times. Along with those “crumbling tombs” for “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” (or as Green blues-ily translates Ovid: “She conjures up long-dead souls from their crumbling sepulchres / And has incantations to split the solid earth.”), Dylan plucked that “house-boy” and “well-trained maid” from The Amores, albeit in a neat inversion. Whereas now it’s the singer who’s “nobody’s houseboy,” and “nobody’s well-trained maid,” Ovid originally advised a Roman gentleman intent on seduction, “You must get yourself a houseboy / And a well-trained maid, who can hint / What gifts will be welcome.” An ostensibly Katrina-esque detail from “The Levee’s Gonna Break”—“Some people got barely enough skin to cover their bones”—first appeared in Tristia amidst Ovid’s description of his own harsh life in Tomis, after his exile from Rome.  For “Someday Baby” Dylan gleaned “I’m gonna drive you from your home just like I was driven from mine” from a contrast Ovid posed between his own fate on the Black Sea and the journey of Odysseus: “He was making for his homeland / A cheerful victor: I was driven from mine, / fugitive, exile, victim.” [17]

Yet Ovid, unlike Timrod, also furnished essential structural scaffolding for songs on Modern Times, yielding transitions and key images. The strongest songs are all but unthinkable without Ovid, at least Green’s Ovid. The devastating final tag of the chorus for “Nettie Moore”—“The world has gone black before my eyes”—issues from a dream vision in The Amores. Beyond the bluesy phrases already noted, a partial inventory for “Workingman’s Blues #2” tracks “My cruel weapons have been put on the shelf,” “No one can ever claim / That I took up arms against you,” and “I’m all alone and I’m expecting you / To lead me off in a cheerful dance” back to Tristia.[18] Ovid loops through “Ain’t Talking” as insistently as the “Heart’s burning, still yearning” refrain Dylan imported from the Stanley Brothers:

If I catch my opponents ever sleeping,
I’ll just slaughter them where the lie.
They will tear your mind away from contemplation
All my loyal and my much-loved companions
They approve of me and share my code
Make the most of one last extra hour
I practice a faith that’s long-abandoned
Who says I can’t get heavenly aid?
The suffering is unending
Every nook and cranny has its tears.
I’m not nursing any superfluous fears
In the last outback at the world’s end[19]

Each of these vitalizing lines, again calibrated by elisions and reversals, arise from Tristia, The Amores, and Black Sea Letters. Ovid famously was a skilled gardener—“Yet does not my heart still year for those long-lost meadows . . . those gardens set amid pine-clad hills,” as he wrote in the first of The Black Sea Letters. So pervasive is his imprint on “Ain’t Talkng” that it’s tempting to set the song in the abandoned gardens of his country villa. “There’s no one here,” Dylan sings, “the gardener is gone.”[20]

*

From the dustup in the Times—after our paper of record found a middle school teacher who branded Dylan “duplicitous,” Suzanne Vega earnestly supposed that Dylan probably hadn’t filched the texts “on purpose”—you might not know we just lived through a century of Modernism. For Timrod and Ovid are just the tantalizing threshold into Dylan’s vast memory palace of echoes. Besides Ovid and Timrod, for instance, Modern Times taps into the Bible (Genesis, Exodus, Samuel, John, Luke, among others), Tennyson, Robert Johnson, Memphis Minnie, Kokomo Arnold, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Stanley Brothers, Merle Haggard, Hoagy Carmichael, Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, standards popularized by Jeanette MacDonald, Crosby, and Frank Sinatra, as well as vintage folk songs like “Wild Mountain Thyme,” or “Frankie and Albert.”

Still more astonishing, though, his prior two recordings Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft” could be described as rearranging the entire American musical and literary landscape of the past 150 years, except the sources he adapts aren’t always American or so recent. Please forgive another Homeric catalogue, but the scale and range of Dylan’s allusive textures are vital to an appreciation of what he’s after on his recent recordings. On Time Out of Mind and “Love and Theft” he refracts folk, blues, and pop songs created by or associated with Crosby, Sinatra, Charlie Patton, Woody Guthrie, Blind Willie McTell, Doc Boggs, Leroy Carr, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Elvis Presley, Blind Willie Johnson, Big Joe Turner, Wilbert Harrison, the Carter Family, and Gene Austin, alongside anonymous traditional tunes and nursery rhymes. But the revelation involves the cavalcade of film and literature fragments: W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, assorted film noirs, As You Like It, Othello, Robert Burns, Lewis Carroll, Huckleberry Finn, The Aeneid, The Great Gatsby, Junichi Saga’s Confessions of a Yakuza, Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, and Wise Blood. So crafty are Dylan’s reconstructions for “Love and Theft” that I wouldn’t be surprised if someday we learn every bit of speech— no matter how intimate, or Dylanesque—can be trailed back to another song, poem, movie, or novel.

One conventional approach to Dylan’s songwriting references “folk process” and recognizes that he’s always operated as a magpie, recovering and transforming hand-me-down materials, lyrics, tunes, even film dialogue (notably on his 1985 album Empire Burlesque). Folk process can readily map the associations linking “It Ain’t Me Babe” and “Go ‘Way from My Window,” or tail his variations on traditional blues triplets on “Rollin’ and Tumblin’.” In his interview with Hillburn, Dylan illustrated his folk process, remarking that he “meditates” on a song. “I’ll be playing Bob Nolan’s ‘Tumbling Tumbleweeds,’ for instance, in my head constantly—while I’m driving a car or talking to a person or sitting around or whatever. People will think they are talking to me and I’m talking back, but I’m not. I’m listening to the song in my head. At a certain point, some of the words will change and I’ll start writing a song.” [21]

Yet what about Ovid and Timrod, or Twain, Fitzgerald, O’ Connor, and Confessions of a Yakuza? It’s no stretch to imagine a writer rehearsing Timrod’s “A childish dream is now a deathless need,” or Ovid’s “I’m in the last outback at the world’s end,” on the way to a song. But the lyrics that draw on multiple Ovid and Timrod poems, and shrewdly tweak the sources? That play Ovid against Timrod, or merge the two into a single verse? Might that require books, notes, other constellations of intention? Perhaps along the lines of what Dylan said of painter Norman Raeben and Blood on the Tracks—“He put my mind and my hand and my eye together, in a way that . . . did consciously what I used to do unconsciously”?[22] Folk process probably validates Dylan in his current designs, but if those allusive gestures are also folk process, then a folk process pursued with such intensity, scope, audacity, and verve eventually explodes into Modernism. Dylan seems galvanized by the ways folk process bumps up against Modernism, and the practices of the great blues songwriters intersect the inter-textual dispositions of the Classical poets. As far back as “Desolation Row,” he sang of “Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower / While calypso singers laugh at them / And fishermen hold flowers.” His emphatic nods to the past on Time Out Of Mind, “Love and Theft” and Modern Times probably can best be apprehended as instances of Modernist collage.

If we think of Modernist collages as verbal echo chambers of harmonizing and clashing reverberations, then they tend to organize into two types. Those collaged texts, like Pound’s Cantos or Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” where we are meant to remark the discrepant tones and idioms of the original texts bumping up against one other; and those collaged texts, composed by poets as various as Kenneth Fearing, Lorine Niedecker, Frank Bidart, and John Ashbery, that aim for an apparently seamless surface. A model of the former is the ending to “The Waste Land”:

London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down

Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina

Quando fiam ceu chelidon—O swallow swallow

Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie

These fragments I have shored against my ruins

Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.

Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.

Shantih shantih shantih [23]

The following passage by Frank Bidart, from his poem “The Second Hour of the Night,” proves as allusive as Eliot’s, nearly every line rearranging elements assembled not only from Ovid, his main source for the Myrrha story, but also Plotinus and even Eliot. But instead of incessant fragmentation, we experience narrative sweep and urgency:

As Myrrha is drawn down the dark corridor toward her father

not free not to desire

what draws her forward is neither COMPULSION nor FREEWILL:—

or at least freedom, here choice, is not to be

imagined as action upon

preference: no creature is free to choose what

allows it its most powerful, and most secret, release:

I fulfill it, because I contain it—

               it prevails, because it is within me—

 it is a heavy burden, setting up longing to enter that

realm to which I am called from within . . .

As Myrrha is drawn down the dark corridor toward her father

not free not to choose

she thinks, To each soul its hour.[24]

Dylan’s songwriting inclines toward the cagier, deflected Bidart-Ashbery-Fearing-Neidecker Modernist mode. We would scarcely realize we are inside a collage unless someone told us, or we abruptly seized on a familiar locution. The wonder of the dozen or so nuggets Dylan sifted from Confessions of a Yakuza for “Love and Theft” is how casual and personal they sound dropped into his songs, a sentence once about a bookmaker reemerging as an aside on marriage in “Floater”: “A good bookie makes all the difference in a gambling joint—it’s up to him whether a session comes alive or falls flat.”[25] Not one of those “Love and Theft” songs, of course, is remotely about a Yakuza, or gangster of any persuasion.

The issue of what we gain if we heed the multifarious allusions lodges a more tangled crux. For a long time I preferred to think of the phrases as curios of vernacular speech picked up from Dylan’s listening or reading that slant his songs into something like collective, as against individual utterances, and only locally influence his designs. But after immersion in Ovid and Timrod, it’s hard to miss both grand and specific calculations. Dylan manifestly is, for instance, fixated on the American Civil War. “The age that I was living in didn’t resemble this age,” as he wrote in Chronicles, “but it did in some mysterious and traditional way. Not just a little bit, but a lot. There was a broad spectrum and commonwealth that I was living upon, and the basic psychology of that life was every bit a part of it. If you turned the light towards it, you could see the full complexity of human nature. Back there, America was put on the cross, died, and was resurrected. There was nothing synthetic about it. The godawful truth of that would be the all-encompassing template behind everything I would write.” [26]

His 2003 film Masked & Anonymous takes place against the backdrop of another interminable domestic war during an unspecified future. Dylan sees links between the Civil War and America now—the echoes from Timrod help him frame and sustain those links. Ovid too lived through the assassination of Julius Caesar, the violent Roman internal conflicts, and wrote at the start of the Pax Augusta. Even the tibits of Yakusa oral history irradiate the terrain. On recordings steeped in empire, war, corruption, masks, moral failure, male power, and self-delusion, aren’t Tokyo racketeers as apt as Charlie Patton or the Carter family? Ovid and Timrod (or Twain, O’Connor, and Fitzgerald) should not be mistaken for a high-brow alternative to the “old weird America” of Dock Boggs; they’re an extension of it.

Exile, ghosts, romantic and spiritual abandonment, wary dawn departures, an abiding death-in-life—the devastated inflections of Tristia and Black Sea Letters offer the closest analogue in poetry I know to Time Out of Mind, particularly to “Love Sick,” “Not Dark Yet,” “Tryin’ to Get to Heaven,” and “Highlands.” Ovid obsessively revisits his apprehension that he “made a few bad turns”:

. . . yet sick though my body is, my mind is sicker
from endless contemplation of its woes.
Absent the city scene, absent my dear companions,
absent (none closer to my heart) my wife:
what’s here is a Scythian rabble, a mob of trousered Getae—
troubles seen and unseen both prey on my mind.
One hope alone in all this brings me some consolation—
that my troubles may be soon cut short by death. [27]

The phantoms of Ovid and Timrod transform individual songs. Dylan’s “Rollin’ and Tumblin’” pushes past the eroticism—and erotic anger—of the Hambone Willie Newbern and Muddy Waters versions towards something like forgiveness: “Let’s forgive each other, darlin’, let’s go down to the Greenwood Glen.” The axle of that forgiveness is the sudden nod to mortality in the verse I quoted earlier about the “long dead souls” and their “crumbling tombs,” out of Ovid. Yet isn’t our alertness to mortality also deepened after we know that the prior repeated line that Dylan reshaped from Timrod, “Well, the night is filled with shadows, the years are filled with early doom,” draws on “Our Willie,” a heart-sore, self-accusing poem about the death of the poet’s son?[28] Similarly, isn’t the haunted and inconsolable refrain from “Nettie Moore”—“the world has gone black before my eyes”—still more haunted and inconsolable after we return the line to Ovid’s nightmare vision about “the stain of adultery” in The Amores? In “Workingman’s Blues #2” Dylan persistently roots his litany of the troubles of globalization in references to Ovid’s exile from Rome, as though the poet (and his poems) were only the first victims of outsourcing among the “proletariat.” “Ain’t Talkin’,” as submitted earlier, all but namechecks Ovid’s dark, bitter personal story, reclaiming his grief and anger, his vengeance and narratives of a “world gone wrong” as Dylan’s own.

When Dylan lifts from Ovid and Timrod, the phrases often occur during passages where the original poets discuss their art. That “cheerful dance” and those “countless foes” are items in Ovid’s reply to a friend who urged him to “divert these mournful days with writing.”[29] As Dylan sings, “I practice a faith that’s long abandoned,” he glances at a section of Tristia where Ovid is reflecting on the quandaries of keeping his Latin alive amidst the “barbaric” languages of Tomis:

Yet, to prevent my voice being muted
in my native speech, lest I lose the common use
of the Latin tongue, I converse with myself, I practice
terms long abandoned, retrace my sullen art’s
ill-fated sins. Thus I drag out my life and time, thus
tear my mind from the contemplation of my woes.
Through writing I seek an anodyne to misery: if my studies
Win me such a reward, that is enough. [30]

Even when Ovid exclaimed, “I want to be with you any way I can,” he was not addressing a lover but his audience back in Rome reading the new poems he was sending them from the Black Sea. Finally, Timrod’s recurrently invoked “A Vision of Poesy” traces in fanciful, mythic guises the curious route that might guide a boy born of “humble parentage” in Charleston, South Carolina, say, or in Duluth, Minnesota, to poetry.

During his incisive entry on Street Legal for The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia, Michael Gray argues that, “Every song deals with love’s betrayal, with Dylan’s being betrayed like Christ, and, head on, with the need to abandon woman’s love.”[31] On Time Out of Mind, and especially “Love and Theft” and Modern Times, art and tradition—I wish to propose—now seize the ground zero once occupied by love, and later God. Dylan always emphasized the traditional footing of his writing. “My songs, what makes them different is that there’s a foundation to them,” he told Jon Pareles. “They’re standing on a strong foundation, and subliminally that’s what people are hearing.”[32] Yet the current intensification of his allusive scale is undeniable.

Without ever winking, Dylan proves canny and sophisticated about all this, though after a fashion that recall’s Laurence Sterne’s celebrated attack on plagiarism, itself plagiarized from The Anatomy of Melancholy. On “Summer Days” from “Love and Theft” Dylan sings:

She’s looking into my eyes, and she’s a-holding my hand
She looking into my eyes, she’s holding my hand,
She says, “You can’t repeat the past,” I say, “You can’t? What do you mean you can’t? Of course, you can.”

His puckish, snaky lines dramatize precisely how one can, in fact, “repeat the past,” since the lyrics slyly reproduce a conversation from The Great Gatsby. [33]On Modern Times, Dylan veers from mediumistic—“I’ve been conjuring up these long dead souls from their crumblin’ tombs”—to self-mocking: “I’m so hard pressed, my mind tied up in knots / I keep recycling the same old thoughts.”

When asked what he believed by David Gates during a 1996 interview in Newsweek, Dylan replied, “I find the religiosity and philosophy in the music. I don’t find it anywhere else. Songs like ‘Let Me Rest on a Peaceful Mountain’ or ‘I Saw the Light’—that’s my religion. I don’t adhere to rabbis, preachers, evangelists, all of that. I’ve learned more from the songs than I’ve learned from any of this kind of entity. The songs are my lexicon. I believe the songs.”[34] Let’s presume that by “songs” Dylan now also must mean poems, such as Ovid’s or Henry Timrod’s, and novels, such as Fitzgerald’s, along with traditional folk hymns and blues.

Speaking to his 16th century Chinese listeners, Matteo Ricci affirmed the imperative of “good roots or foundation,”[35]  and conceived the memory palace he offered them inside a Renaissance visionary architecture that “not only performs the office of conserving for us the things, words and acts which we confide to it . . . but also gives us true wisdom.” [36]

*

matteo-ricciIn The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci, Jonathan Spence quotes Augustine from the Confessions, “Perchance it might be properly said, ‘there be three times; a present of things past, a present of things present, and a present of things future.’”[37]  Dylan, too, as far back as his Renaldo and Clara pressed the eternizing powers of art. “The movie creates and holds the time,” he told Jonathan Cott. “That’s what it should do—it should hold that time, breathe in that time and stop time in doing that.”[38] Or, as he again sketched Blood on the Tracks, “Everybody agrees that was pretty different, and what’s different about it is that there’s a code in the lyrics and also there’s no sense of time. There’s no respect for it: you’ve got yesterday, today and tomorrow all in the same room, and there’s little that you can’t imagine not happening.” [39]

All in the same room. Dylan’s “conjuring,” as he might say, and as Ovid did say, of the dead on Time Out of Mind, “Love and Theft,” and Modern Times stands among the most daring, touching, and original signatures of his art. Who else—or who besides classical Roman poets—writes, has ever written, songs as layered and textured as these? Sheltering the dead among the living, his memory palace tips past into present, but conjurers inevitably summon also the shadows ahead. “Whatever music you love, it didn’t come from nowhere,” Dylan recently advanced on his radio show, and Theme Time Radio Hour is another wing of his memory palace. “It’s always good to know what went down before you, because if you know the past, you can control the future.”[40]

 


ENDNOTES

 

[1] Jonathan D. Spence, The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci (New York: Penguin, 1984), pp. 1-2

[2] Bob Dylan, Chronicles Volume I  (New York, Simon & Schuster, 2004), p. 86

[3] Spence, p. 16

[4] Spence, p. 22

[5] See New York Times for September 14, 2006 and September 17, 2006.

[6] All Timrod quotations are drawn from Poems of Henry Timrod with Memoir and Portrait (B. F. Johnson Publishing Co., Richmond, 1901, and reprinted in facsimile by Kessinger Publishing). Also helpful: Walter Brian Cisco’s Henry Timrod: A Biography (Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2004).

[7] For passages where there are even minor departures between Dylan and Timrod, and when I do not quote the Timrod source elsewhere in this essay, here are the relevant Timrod “originals”: “How then, O weary one! Explain / The sources of that hidden pain?” (“Two Portraits”); “You will perceive that in the breast / The germs of many virtues rest, // Which, ere they feel a lover’s breath, / Lie in a temporary death . . .”  (“Two Portraits”); “Ah! Christ forgive us for the crime / Which drowned the memories of the time / In a merely mortal bliss!” (“Our Willie”);  “And o’er the city sinks and swells / The chime of old St. Mary’s bells . . .” (“Katie”).

[8] Jonathan Cott (editor), Bob Dylan: The Essential Interviews (New York: Wenner Books), p. 432.

[9] Green’s translations can be found in Ovid, The Erotic Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1982) and Ovid, The Poems of Exile (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). Dylan studied Latin for two years at Hibbing High School, but was Ovid among the authors he translated? During my own sophomore Latin class at Boston College High School, we read the “Pyramis and Thisbe” story from Book IV of The Metamorphoses. It was also at BC High that I first encountered Matteo Ricci, a hero for the Jesuits who taught and resided there, and during a senior year Asian Studies course we were assigned an early biography of the Jesuit missionary to China, Vincent Cronin’s The Wise Man from the West (New York: EP Dutton, 1955). Any mention of “memory” in proximity to Bob Dylan inevitably must also be indebted to Robert Cantwell’s brilliant chapter on Harry Smith and Robert Fludd, “Smith’s Memory Theater,” in When We Were Good (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).  I also benefited  from Francis A. Yates’s The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), and an anthology edited by Mary Carruthers and Jan M. Ziolkowski, The Medieval Craft of Memory (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).

[10] For two invaluable annotated Dylan websites, see http://republika.pl/bobdylan/mt/ and http://republika.pl/bobdylan/lat/.

[11] Or as these lines and phrases appear in Green’s translations: “The facts demand Censure, the face begs for love—and gets it . . .” (The Amores, Bk. 3, Section 11B); “May the gods grant that my complaint’s unfounded / that I’m wrong in thinking you’ve forgotten me!” (Tristia, Bk. V, Section 13); “Revulsion making you wish you’d never had a woman / And swear you won’t touch one again for years…” (“Cures for Love,” ll.416-7); “…wife dearer to me than myself, you yourself can see . . .” (Tristia, Bk. V, Section 14); “This girl’s got me hooked . . .” (The Amores, Bk. 1, Section 3); and “I want to be with you any way I can . . .” (Tristia, Bk. V, Section 1)

[12] Dylan, Chronicles, pp. 36-37. By referencing “the scary horror tale” (not tales) might he be conflating Ovid (Metamorphoses) and Kafka (The Metamorphosis)? Is this mention of Ovid in Chronicles an early signal of his interest in the Roman poet for Modern Times?

[13] Green, “Introduction” to The Poems of Exile, xix.

[14] Tristia, Bk. II.

[15] Dylan, Chronicles, pp. 92-93.

[16] The Amores, Bk. 1, Section 9.

[17] For the Ovid/Green sources: “Crumbling sepulchers,” etc. from The Amores, Bk. 1, Section 8. “Houseboy,” etc. from The Amores, Bk. 1, Section 8. “Barely enough skin,” etc, from Tristisa, Bk. IV, Section 6 (“I lack my old strength and colour, / there’s barely enough skin to cover my bones . . .”). “Driven from mine,” etc. from Tristia, Bk. I, Section 5.

[18] For the Ovid/Green sources: “’ . . . The bruise on her breast bears witness / To the stain of adultery.’ There his interpretation ended. At those words the blood ran freezing/ From my face, and the world went black before my eyes . . .” (The Amores, Bk. 3, Section 5). “Show mercy, I beg you, shelve your cruel weapons . . .” (Tristia, Bk. II). “You write that I should divert these mournful days with writing . . . Priam, you’re saying, should have fun fresh from his son’s funeral, / or Niobe, bereaved, lead off some cheerful dance . . .” (Tristia¸ Bk. V, Section 12).

[19] As these various lines appear in Ovid/Green: “Catch your opponents sleeping / And unarmed. Just slaughter them where they lie . . .” (The Amores, Book 1, Section 9). “I practice / terms long abandoned, retrace my sullen art’s / ill-fated signs. Thus I drag out my life and time, thus / tear my mind from the contemplation of my woes . . .” (Tristia, Bk. V, Section 7). “[L]oyal and much-loved companions, bonded in brotherhood . . .This may well be my final chance to embrace them—let me make the most of one last extra hour . . .” (Tristia, Bk. I, Section 3). “ . . . even here you’re already familiar to the native tribesmen, / who approve, and share, your code . . .” (Black Sea Letters, Bk. 3, Section 2).  “Though I lack such heroic / stature, who says I can’t get heavenly aid / when a god’s angry with me?” (Tristia, Bk. I, Section 2). “The whole house / mourned at my obsequies—men, women, even children, / every nook and corner had its tears . . .” (Tristia, Bk. I, Section 3). “Of this I’ve no doubt—but the very dread of misfortune / often drives me to nurse superfluous fears . . .” (Black Sea Letters¸ Bk. II. Section 7). “Some places make exile/ milder, but there’s no more dismal land than this / beneath either pole. It helps to be near your country’s borders: / I’m in the last outback, at the world’s end . . .” (Black Sea Letters, Bk. II, Section 7).

[20] Ovid on his garden is from Black Sea Letters, Bk. I, Section 8. But Ovid’s garden in “Ain’t Talkin’”? Or Tennyson’s (via “Maud”), as Christopher Ricks proposes? The Garden of Eden? God (or Christ) appears often in the guise of a gardener in Renaissance poems. A case can also be made that the absent gardener at the finish is the singer himself, unconscious (perhaps even dead) after he was “hit from behind” in the opening verse, and presiding over the scene as a ghost.

[21] Cott, 438.

[22] Dylan quoted by Michael Gray in The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (New York: Continuum, 2006) in his entry on Raeben, p. 561.

[23] T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land” (1922) in Collected Poems 1909-1962 (New York: Harcourt, 1991), p. 69.

[24] Frank Bidart, “The Second Hour of the Night,” in Desire (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux), p. 46.

[25] Junichi Saga, Confessions of a Yakuza (Tokyo: Kodansha International, 1991), pp. 153-4. The Dylan lines, from “Floater (Too Much to Ask),” run: “Never seen him quarrel with my mother even once/ Things come alive or they fall flat.”

[26] Dylan, p. 86.

[27] Tristia, Bk. IV, Section  6.

[28] Timrod, from “Our Willie”: “By that sweet grave, in that dark room,/ We may weave at will for each other’s ear,/ Of that life, and that love, and that early doom/ The tale which is shadowed here…”

[29] “…I’m barred from relaxation/ in a place ringed by countless foes.” (Tristia, Bk. V, Section 12). Also see above, Note 13.

[30] Tristia, Bk. V, Section 7.

[31] Gray, p. 643.

[32] Cott, p. 396.

[33] F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925). As Nick says of Gatsby in Chapter 6:

“He broke off and began to walk up and down a desolate path of fruit rinds and discarded favors and crushed flowers.

‘I wouldn’t ask too much of her,’ I ventured. ‘You can’t repeat the past.’

‘Can’t repeat the past?’ he cried incredulously. ‘Why of course you can!’

He looked around him wildly, as if the past were lurking here in the shadow of his house, just out of reach of his hand.”

[34] David Gates, “Dylan Revisited,” reprinted in Studio A:  The Bob Dylan Reader, edited by Benjamin Hedin (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 236.

[35] Spence, p. 146.

[36] Spence, p. 20. He is quoting Guilio Camillo (Delminio) on his 16th century “memory theatre.”

[37] Spence, p. 16.

[38] Cott, p. 192.

[39] Cott, p. 260.

[40] Dylan quoted in MOJO, April, 2007. p. 34



Read Robert Polito’s statement about The Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy.

Robert Polito, Director of Writing Programs; Professor of Writing, PhD, English Romanticism, Harvard University
Born in Boston, he is a poet, biographer, cultural critic, and editor who received his Ph.D. in English and American Language and Literature from Harvard. His most recent books are the poetry collection Hollywood & God, which was selected one of the top five poetry books of the year by Barnes and Noble, The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber (editor), and David Goodis: Five Noir Novels of the 1940s and 50s (editor). His other books include Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award and an Edgar; Doubles (a book of poems); A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover; and At the Titan’s Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron’s Poetry. He is also the editor Library of America volumes Crime Novels: American Noir of the 30s and 40s, Crime Novels: American Noir of the 50s, and The Selected Poems of Kenneth Fearing, as well as the editor of The Everyman James M. Cain and The Everyman Dashiell Hammett.

His essays and poems have appeared in Best American Poetry, Best American Essays, and Best American Film Writing, and numerous literature, film, and music anthologies, including Poems of New York, O.K. You Mugs, 110 Stories: New York Writers After September 11, The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan, and This Is Pop: In Search of the Elusive at The Experience Music Project. He contributed catalog essays to Manny Farber: About Face, and Patricia Patterson: Here and There, Back and Forth.

His work also has been published in many magazines, including the New Yorker, Harper’s, the Yale Review, Art Forum, Bookforum, Black Clock, the LA Times Book Review, the Boston Globe, The Poetry Foundation Website, LIT, BOMB, Open City, Ploughshares, the New York Times Book Review, AGNI, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others.

Polito judges the annual Graywolf Nonfiction Book Prize, and has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundations. He is a contributing editor at BOMB, Fence, LIT, and The Boston Review, and serves on the advisory boards of Cave Canem and the Flow Chart Foundation.

He has previously taught at Harvard, Wellesley, and New York University. At the New School, Polito is the founding Director of the MFA Program in Creative Writing, and the originator (with Len Riggio) of the Len and Louise Riggio Writing & Democracy Program and of ASHLAB, a digital mapping project involving John Ashbery’s Hudson, New York house and his poetry. Current book project: Detours: Seven Noir Lives (forthcoming Knopf).

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Ari Spool: Bricks http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/1474/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/portfolio/1474/#comments Sun, 02 Jun 2013 21:40:44 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?post_type=portfolio&p=1474

A slide-based narrative by Ari Spool, produced for the Literature in Evolution class as part of the Riggio Program in the New School Writing Department.

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Reflection: Sigrid Nunez http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/reflection-sigrid-nunez/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/reflection-sigrid-nunez/#comments Fri, 24 May 2013 04:10:09 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?p=1159 Read The Rest →]]> I started teaching in the Riggio Writing and Democracy program in 2007. My first course for the program was a seminar called “Writers on Writing.” I had never taught such a course before; I created it specifically for the Writing and Democracy program.

It had always struck me how, more than any other artists, writers are often asked to state why they do what they do. I wanted to teach a course examining ways in which writers have described their work and the writer’s place in society. The reading list for the course included manifestos, credos, journal entries, and interviews, as well as letters in which writers as mentors spoke directly to other writers about their craft and beliefs. The list began with Orwell’s essays “Politics and Democracy” and “Why I Write” and included works by Virginia Woolf, Rainer Maria Rilke, Annie Dillard, Orhan Pamuk, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Flannery O’Connor, among many others.

Students were asked to do exercises in which they wrote brief imitations of master writers in order to get as close as possible to the bone of those writers’ styles. We also did line-by-line analysis of student draft manuscript pages, discussing how to make every sentence as intelligible and effective as possible. Our main goal was to develop greater awareness and understanding of how our use of language reflects how we think and feel about the world.

So far, I have taught “Writers on Writing” three times. For me, the most exciting part of the course has always been seeing how students respond to the final assignment, which is to write an essay discussing their own reasons for wanting to write.

Here are some of the questions I ask them to consider: Can you describe what you believe as a writer? What is your idea of what good writing should be? How do you see the writer’s place in society? Do you share with Orwell the notion that there should be a political purpose in your work? What do you think of Pamuk’s idea that, because it’s about understanding and identifying with ‘the Other,’ all good fiction is political? What do race, class, gender, or nationality have to do with your writing? What doubts, if any, do you have about being a writer?

The second course I created for the program was a seminar called “Life and Story.” Most writers, especially in their early work, draw from personal experience. This course was intended to explore what happens when writers use material from life as a source for fiction-writing. How does one transform real experience into imaginative writing? How do a writer’s memories become a work of fiction? What is the difference between the self who narrates an event from the past and the self who actually lived through it? How is it possible for a work to be autobiographical and anti-autobiographical at the same time, or for confessional writing to avoid narcissistic self-absorption?

Our age has seen a proliferation of phony memoirs and literary hoaxes. Some of our most interesting “Life and Story” discussions focused on the possible social and cultural effects of the blurring of the line between fact and fiction, and what our attitude towards mendacious life-writing, particularly works that claim to bear witness to various kinds of social and political injustice, should be.

Finally, I teach a fiction workshop in the Riggio program. A number of students who have taken Riggio seminars with me end up taking my workshop as well. I am always pleased when this happens. Observing how the work done in the seminar influences the students’ fiction-writing has been one of the most gratifying experiences I’ve had as a teacher.

 

Sigrid Nunez has published five novels: A Feather on the Breath of God, Naked Sleeper, Mitz: The Marmoset of Bloomsbury, For Rouenna, and The Last of Her Kind. She has also been a contributor to numerous journals, including the New York Times, O: The Oprah Magazine, Harper’s, McSweeney’s, Threepenny Review, and The Believer.  Among the awards she has received are a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Rome Prize in Literature, and a Berlin Prize Fellowship. She has been visiting writer or writer-in-residence at Amherst College, Smith College, Sarah Lawrence College, Washington University, Baruch College, and the University of California, Irvine.  She has also been on the faculty of Columbia University and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.

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Reflection: Suzannah Lessard http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/suzannah-lessard/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/suzannah-lessard/#comments Wed, 22 May 2013 03:27:09 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?p=160 Read The Rest →]]> While my primary perch at the New School has been in the MFA program, I was immediately attracted by the idea of teaching in the Riggio Program. It was the title, “for Writing and Democracy,” that thrilled me. This is because I have long seen non-fiction especially as belonging in the arena of our public life. And yet, in my experience, the culture of creative writing programs does not include a strong sense of this, despite the fact that so many of the great forms of non-fiction, such as literary reporting and opinion writing, are directly relevant to our life as a society. Indeed, non-fiction writing is explicitly protected by the First Amendment to a degree greater than in any other nation.

My very first class confirmed a desire among students for just this connection between their writing and the sense of political and social commitment. They were excited about it, and eager to engage in a way not always true of undergraduates. Not only did the conception of the program create an invigorating focus to our workshop, but it affirmed the importance of what we were doing.

That first class was, indeed, a reporting and opinion-writing workshop. Something I noticed immediately was how suited these forms were to the young age of many of the students; how right it was for them to be thrust out into the world, asked to engage with reality, and make sense of it rather than to turn inward. It was obvious for me right from the start that in the Riggio Program, there was a brilliant match between this aspect of non-fiction writing, long neglected in creative programs, and a student interest and need.

Eventually I started teaching memoir and essay as well, forms that are not so obviously “democracy”-related. And yet, they are also protected by the First Amendment, especially in the case of memoir. Courts have held that memoirs contribute to the depth of our understanding of the conditions in our society, such as gender relations and the struggle to resolve differences between traditional backgrounds and American life, making us better able to participate as voters and citizens. Essay writing is often whimsical and creative; but it is also a form of thought with its own standards of precision and its own unique capacity for probing life. It is especially so for illuminating those personal aspects of life that are also held in common. Teaching these forms in the context of the Riggio program and the idea of “Writing and Democracy” has given a breadth and depth to my approach that would have been hard to achieve on my own.

In the course of this, my own predilections and instincts about the deep political meaning of even the most creative and intimate work have been outwardly affirmed in a way that has encouraged me to go forward. I have, for example, just finished a book that is, in effect, a kind of reportorial essay in which the most vastly public issues, such as climate change, are connected to quirky personal experience. This follows a kind of logic quite different from the usual approach to public subjects. Our society suffers from a kind of compartmentalization in which our public issues are discussed mainly within coordinates that exclude the rest of life, crippling us at a time when the unprecedented nature of the conditions we face require the widest possible reference in our “conversation.”  The Riggio Program, by accentuating that breadth, by connecting creativity to societal responsibility, has established an important forum, encouraging experimentation and development of that principle.



Read Suzannah Lessard’s “Homage to Bill McKibben.”

Suzannah Lessard began her career as a writer/editor for the Washington Monthly and was a staff writer at the New Yorker for 20 years. In 1996, she authored Architect of Desire: Beauty and Danger in the Stanford White Family, published by Dial Press. In recent years, her articles have appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Architectural Record, Architectural Digest, the New Yorker, and Wilson Quarterly. She has taught writing and led master classes at Columbia School of the Arts, Wesleyan University, The New School, George Mason University, George Washington University, and Goucher College, and has co-taught a seminar on Trials in Literature at Georgetown University Law Center and Fordham Law School. She recently received an Anthony Lukas Award to write a book about the decentralization of the American landscape (to be published by Dial Press).

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Reflection: Catherine Barnett http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/catherinebarnett/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/catherinebarnett/#comments Tue, 21 May 2013 19:13:05 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?p=95 Read The Rest →]]> We were a motley and fragile bunch. One student spoke so quietly we had to keep the windows closed and lean in whenever she spoke. The hurricane had blown through us all. It was our penultimate class and each student had brought in a new poem to revise. As a kind of warm-up to the hands-on work of revision I’d planned for the session, I spontaneously decided to ask the students to try to shout their poems. (I’d just had the pleasure of visiting Craig Teicher’s MFA workshop, where Dottie Lasky had been a guest and had explained why she shouts her poems: “No one could hear me or no one was listening when I read,” she’d said. “I think they were always waiting for the dudes, so I got mad and just started shouting to get people to pay attention.”) I wanted the students to step outside their comfort zones and begin to listen more carefully to their own work and strengths. To counter the resistance, I promised that my wonderful TA, Eli Nadeau, would also give it a try, as would I, though I’ve never in my 15 years of college teaching done such a thing.

One by one the students stood up and walked to the front of the tiny classroom. Gathered themselves. And somehow—I think because of the emotionally challenging nature of the semester and the privilege of having a small but mighty and utterly original group of individuals so radically different from one another, each one unpredictable, iconoclastic, and brilliant—the work took on a whole new and utterly unexpected dimension of yes urgency, but also a counterintuitive gentleness of great emotional force. One student, already accustomed to performing his work in a confident boom, didn’t pause for a moment but read as he usually read, at the end of which I asked him to read his poem over again, at a whisper.

In each case, asking the student to change the delivery of his or her work taught us all about the enlivening tension between text and subtext, the sayable and the unsayable, the ineffable lodged in the wild and the repressed and the suppressed and the silenced. This was just one way—a potent unexpected way—to make real the power of the vast untapped regions in each of our voices both on and off the page.

As promised, I got up and gave it a try. Like one of my students whose music too often boxes him inside, I could not shout. Or, more accurately, I couldn’t inhabit the shout—not yet. I have so long inhabited a poetics and music of understatement that I couldn’t step outside it. This failure was just one of the many gifts given to me by the Riggio students I’ve had the privilege and pleasure of teaching. The risks taken and honored in each Riggio classroom epitomize, for me, one part of the Riggio ethos, risks that are always both political and personal, as it turns out—



Read four poems by Catherine Barnett.

Catherine Barnett is the recipient of a 2012 Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award, a 2006 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2004 Whiting Writers’ Award, the 2004 Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers, and a Pushcart Prize. Her book, Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, won the 2003 Beatrice Hawley Award and was published in spring 2004 by Alice James Books. Her poems have been published in Gulf Coast, Pleiades, the Washington Post, Barrow Street, Shenandoah, The Massachusetts Review, and the Iowa Review. Barnett also teaches at NYU, where she was recently honored with an Outstanding Service Award.

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Reflection: Elizabeth Gaffney http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/elizabeth-gaffney/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/elizabeth-gaffney/#comments Tue, 21 May 2013 19:11:00 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?p=92 Read The Rest →]]> From Herman Melville to Haruki  Murakami, from Lorrie Moore to Philip K. Dick, my students have loved and hated the stories and novels I’ve given them to read. They’ve written works that are real literary triumphs and turned in some awfully big messes. I sometimes think I like it best when they hate the texts we read together—what passion, what ruthless analytical insight! And I definitely love it when they take the gigantic risks that sometimes lead to flops—what vision, fresh forms, and wonderfully weird ideas! For when can one chisel out one’s own taste and style, when can one be as outrageous as one must to be an artist, if not in college? And where if not at the inspiringly named Riggio Program for Writing and Democracy?

If I do my job, which I see as preaching the gospel of the written word and its use in manipulating other people’s minds, my students come away from a semester of reading, writing, and repeated rounds of editing with a renewed faith that literature matters—because it can sometimes, at its very best, change a reader’s life. And the great thing is, every time I teach a Riggio class—every time I read my students’ work, every time I try to unravel with them the workings of a great story we’re reading together, I am rewarded with the same thing: a reinvigoration of my own belief that because words are how we communicate with one another, the very matrix of our society, every act of literature has the potential to make another person—or one’s self—see the world anew, and thus to alter that world.



Read Elizabeth Gaffney’s “Down the Manhole,” and watch an interview with her.

Elizabeth Gaffney is the author of the novel Metropolis, which was a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers selection.  She has translated three books from German, and her stories have appeared in many literary magazines.  She worked as a staff editor at George Plimpton’s Paris Review and currently is editor at large of the literary magazine A Public Space.  Gaffney has been a resident artist at Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Blue Mountain Center.

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Reflection: Rene Steinke http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/rene-steinke/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/rene-steinke/#comments Tue, 21 May 2013 03:23:20 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?p=158 Read The Rest →]]> The students in the Riggio Program are unique and uniquely talented. Many of them have had unusual life experiences prior to coming to the New School, and they often express a kind of urgency and passion for their education—these students do not want to waste time.

I became a member of the Riggio Honors Program faculty in the Spring of 2007, and it has been one of the richest, most rewarding teaching experiences in my career. The students are devoted to writing, and their thinking about language on the larger political/social stage not only deepens classroom conversations, but it helps to form community among them.

As the Faculty Advisor for 12th Street, the Riggio Program’s award-winning literary journal and website, I have worked with the students to teach them hands-on editing and production skills, and the journal staff is an especially tight-knit group of students. Most recently, during Hurricane Sandy, the students sent dozens of concerned emails back and forth about the state of their homes, their friends’ and families’ homes, the city. As the time went on, there were questions about the use of the word “looting” and interrogations of the media’s coverage of the devastation, and wry notes about how no power encouraged them to read by flashlight and write. Now, several weeks later, there are a series of vignettes published on the website, which depict several different students’ experiences during the storm.

Creative Research, one of the writing workshops I’ve taught in the program, asks students to create a common historical archive around a New York City place and time. Then, as a class, we discuss the research and use various approaches to the material in fiction. I’ve always been impressed by how seriously the students take the research and the sharing of it, effectively helping each other to become experts within a few weeks on, say, the rock club, CBGB’s in the 70s, or a hotel in Harlem, during the 60s.

Students often continue conversations outside of class, going off together to have coffee or meals at local cafes. They are familiar with one another’s writing styles and subject matters; and their support for one another’s work is bolstered by the student reading series and by the publications of 12th Street. Even as undergraduates, they have a sense of themselves as serious writers, working alongside their peers. Because community is so crucial to the Riggio Honors Program, I’m including a brief, annotated list of some of the individual members of this community (past and present):

Mario Zambrano had a former, successful, international career as a ballet dancer, and he applied his deep understanding of one art form to his newly adopted one: writing. I was often astounded in class when he explicitly made a careful analogy between a choreographed movement and movement in prose. Mario also grew up in Houston, Texas, which became the setting for a novel, also his thesis, a story told through the Mexican Lotería, a card game about a troubled family in crisis. Mario was a student in my fiction workshop, and then worked on 12th Street for three years, first as a Reader, then as Fiction Editor, and finally as Editor-in-Chief. After he graduated, he was awarded one of two fully-funded fellowships to the prestigious Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. HarperCollins recently bought the rights to his novel.

Zoe Miller was a kindergarten teacher for many years, and her gift for working with children was immediately apparent. (When I brought my five-year-old son to readings, he always wanted to sit next to her.) Zoe wrote both poems and fiction, and her lyrical, hard-edged vision of Los Angeles, where she had spent time earlier in her life, was often her subject matter. Zoe was a student in my workshops, and also worked on 12th Street for three years—first as a Reader, then Fiction Editor, then Editor-in-Chief. Zoe was quiet and thoughtful, a bit shy, but always struck me as particularly confident and independent. Zoe oversaw the event at Barnes & Noble that launched one of the journal issues. She gave a beautiful reading and helped usher the evening through its various presentations. Afterward, her father, who had been in the audience of nearly 100 people, told me that the Riggio Program had given Zoe a haven in which she’d been allowed to blossom, and he thanked me. Zoe went on to be awarded a prestigious fellowship in the Creative Writing program at the University of Michigan. She’s now teaching Freshman Writing there, while she completes her degree. After one of her students told her that her class was his favorite and thanked her for how much he’d learned from her, she posted a generous tribute to her teachers in the Riggio program on Facebook.

Jeff Vasishta, the son of parents who immigrated from India, grew up in England. After spending much of his life as a successful music journalist, and later, as a real estate entrepreneur, Jeff came to the Riggio Program. In addition to being a talented writer, Jeff is a songwriter (with a hit on the Billboard charts); a journalist publishing book reviews and profiles of writers; a nutrition consultant; a blogger on business and investments; and a father of two. His incredibly varied work experiences contribute to the subject matter for his writing. Currently, he’s at work on a novel (his thesis), which follows the compelling story of a music journalist who fakes the most important interview of the decade. It’s his best work yet.

Luke Sirinides, an Editor at 12th Street for two years, previously worked on a newspaper in Philadelphia. While studying in the Riggio Program, he supported himself as a New York City tour guide. If we coaxed him at meetings or readings, we could sometimes convince him to perform his impromptu talk on the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building. For his thesis, Luke wrote the beginning of a novel with a story grounded in an invented, closed religion, similar to that of the Mennonites, but completely his own. His storytelling instincts are impeccable, honed no doubt from his practice in keeping the attention of an audience. He is currently completing his MFA in Creative Writing at the University of New Orleans.

Rebecca Melnyk, a student from Canada, worked at the St. Mark’s Poetry project while a student in the program, and while she served as the Poetry Editor for 12th Street. Her access to the New York poetry scene offered insights to her fellow students, and also allowed the journal to interview Amiri Baraka, who gave an amazing reading at the Barnes & Noble launch.

 

Renè Steinke is the Faculty Advisor to 12th Street and has previously taught in the Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy. Renè has recently been named the Director of the MFA program in Creative Writing, where she continues also her role as Professor of creative writing and literature. She is the author of the novels The Fires and Holy Skirts, which was a finalist for the 2005 National Book Award. Her writing has also appeared in Bookforum, Vogue, the New York Times, and TriQuarterly. She lives in Brooklyn.

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The ‘Double Life’ of Journalist-Turned-Actor Conrad Yama (Hamanaka) http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/the-double-life-of-journalist-turned-actor-conrad-yama-hamanaka/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/the-double-life-of-journalist-turned-actor-conrad-yama-hamanaka/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 08:22:57 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?page_id=1124 Read The Rest →]]> The ‘Double Life’ of Journalist-Turned-Actor Conrad Yama (Hamanaka)
From the Nichi Bei Times Weekly May 29, 2008
By GREG ROBINSON
Nichi Bei Times Contributor

 

Recently I had the happy surprise of uncovering the “double life” of a remarkable Nisei. It was not that he had a secret identity, like one of those spies who appear to lead tranquil suburban lives. It was simply that he moved from one field of endeavor, political activism and journalism, to another, theater and movies, and in the process changed his name.

Still, the upshot was that K. Conrad Hamanaka and Conrad Yama, two Japanese Americans whose very different work I admired, were in fact the same man.

Fresno-Born Conscientious Objector

Kiyoshi Hamanaka was born in Fresno, California in 1919. After attending Fresno High School, he enrolled at Fresno State College, where he majored in speech and psychology, and became interested in acting.

Inspired by his reading of Tolstoy, he absorbed himself in socialist and pacifist ideas (he took the English name Conrad because it sounded like “comrade”).

In July 1941, Hamanaka was called under Selective Service. He asked to be excused as a conscientious objector, stating that he did not believe in using “arms to kill human beings to solve world problems.” His request was refused, and he was sent to Jefferson Barracks, Missouri, and confined in the stockade.

As the sole Nisei C.O., Hamanaka’s stand was not well received by Japanese Americans desperate to prove the group’s loyalty. Issei leaders pleaded with him to withdraw his opposition to military service, and he was informed that his mother was suffering from his actions. To resolve the situation, he agreed to a compromise, and accepted induction in a noncombatant role as a medic.

After serving seven months, he was released on February 12, 1942, and immediately returned to Fresno State. However, a week later Executive Order 9066 was issued. Hamanaka was forced to repack his bags and move with his family to the Fresno Assembly Center.

At Fresno, Hamanaka threw himself into activity. He taught drama classes, acted as scoutmaster, and organized discussion forums for adults. He also ran membership drives for the ACLU.

Camp Newspaper Editor

After being named editor of the inmate newspaper, the Fresno Grapevine, Hamanaka stood up for free speech. When a talk by an outside speaker was banned and editorials were censored, he ran the newspaper with black boxes where the excised stories would have been, and sent on the censored stories and speech text to outside supporters, notably Socialist leader Norman Thomas and ACLU attorney Ernest Besig (Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy denied that there even was a Fresno Grapevine, whereupon Thomas sent him the evidence!).

Perhaps in retaliation, government officials separated Hamanaka from his family and sent him to the Jerome camp. (He also allegedly quarreled with his family, who objected to his dating an “eta” or “burakumin” woman). At Jerome, Hamanaka was named editor of the camp newspaper Denson Tribune.

After registration was imposed on inmates, Hamanaka felt a dilemma. He was loyal and wished to leave camp, but he felt that his status as a conscientious objector meant his allegiance was by definition qualified, so the only honest response to Questions 27 and 28 was “no.”

Although Hamanaka avoided being sent to Tule Lake, he languished in Jerome for a year, during which he had multiple leave clearance hearings (one examiner offended him by asking repeatedly why he was not a Christian). He met a woman in camp, with whom he fathered a child. Meanwhile, with editorial help from Norman Thomas, he drafted an article on Japanese Americans and the “loyalty” question. He criticized the questionnaires as meaningless and punitive, noting that the provisions asking Nisei to “foreswear allegiance” to Japan presupposed that they had a previous allegiance. Thomas tried, without success, to place the article with various magazines. (A version of the text ran in The Pacific Citizen in 1945).

In December 1943, after Hamanaka received an official discharge from the Army, he decided to bring suit against the government, at which point he was promised a leave permit. He applied to the University of Chicago to pursue a degree in psychology, and was accepted. However, the promised permit was held up through administrative means, despite repeated efforts by Ernest Besig to push the War Relocation Authority (WRA).

In May 1944, he suddenly received notification of leave clearance. It is conceivable that officials intended to trap him, since as soon as Hamanaka and his new wife arrived in Chicago he was arrested for draft evasion — government lawyers insisted that his C.O. status and discharge had been wiped out by the reinstitution of conscription on Nisei. It was only after heroic efforts by Besig and intervention by WRA director Dillon Myer that he was freed.

In the years that followed, Hamanaka moved to New York, where he attended the New School and immersed himself in Manhattan intellectual and bohemian circles (according to his family, Hamanaka was close to the circle of Beat writer Jack Kerouac, and may have provided one model for Kerouac’s Japanese characters).

He had two daughters, Lionelle and Sheila. (Sheila Hamanaka has become a notable author/illustrator of children’s books on Japanese Americans and other subjects).

From Hamanaka to Yama

At length Hamanaka decided to become a professional actor, and took the name Conrad Yama. In 1958 Yama received his first break when he was cast in the original production of Rogers and Hammerstein’s musical “Flower Drum Song.” He received glowing reviews for his performance as Dr. Li, the immigrant Chinese father of Miyoshi Umeki’s heroine. He remained with the play throughout its Broadway run, and continued in touring productions thereafter.

His next years were less successful, although Yama had guest shots on “The Naked City” and “The Patty Duke Show.” In 1964 he opened on Broadway as a Coney Island concessionaire in the short-lived musical “I Had a Ball,” starring Buddy Hackett. (An early experiment in racially integrated theater, the play featured a multiethnic cast directed by an African American, Lloyd Richards).

In 1968, Yama scored a notable coup. Based on his resemblance to Mao Zedong, he was cast as Mao in Edward Albee’s avant-garde play “Box-Mao-Box,” which premiered in Buffalo and opened on Broadway in October. As a result, he was cast to portray Mao in the film “The Chairman.” Although the film, a rather silly thriller with Gregory Peck as an American scientist spying in China, was not a success, Yama was hailed for his performance — and even was hired to portray Mao by advertising agencies!

He played a similar role in “The Virgin President,” as a Chinese prime minister. (His real-life daughter Lionelle portrayed the character’s daughter). Yama’s work soon led to his casting in other movies, including “Midway,” “The King of Marvin Gardens” and “The Taking of Pelham One, Two, Three” (he even had a bit part in “The Godfather,” as a fruit seller!).

He likewise continued his theater work. In 1974, Yama starred opposite Pat Suzuki in Frank Chin’s “Year of the Dragon” at the American Place Theatre, playing Pa, a domineering Chinese patriarch who speaks English with luscious malapropisms and refuses to understand Caucasians. He repeated the role in a TV production in 1975, with George Takei as his son. Yama returned to Broadway in Steven Sondheim’s “Pacific Overtures” in 1976, and provided comic relief as a Burmese Ambassador in David Hare’s off-Broadway drama “Plenty” in 1982.

Conrad Yama has been retired for many years. He lives in New York.

 

Greg Robinson, Ph.D., the author of “By Order of the President: FDR and the Internment of Japanese Americans,” is an associate professor of history at the Universite de Quebec a Montreal. He can be reached via e-mail at robinson.greg(at)uqam(dot)ca.

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Mourning Poem by Robert Hayden / Natassja Schiel http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/mourning-poem-of-the-queen-of-sunday-by-robert-hayden-an-introduction-natassja-schiel/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/mourning-poem-of-the-queen-of-sunday-by-robert-hayden-an-introduction-natassja-schiel/#comments Sun, 19 May 2013 06:31:46 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?p=1097 Read The Rest →]]>

“Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday” by Robert Hayden is a narrative poem about a gospel singer that takes her own life. Hayden does not use straightforward language to communicate the narrative, yet the reader understands what has happened and can personally feel grief. We mourn the loss of the singer. It is as if she were someone that the reader was close to. The emotive quality of this poem showcases Hayden’s gift as a writer.

Robert HaydenThe poem was first published in the 1949 poetry issue of 12th Street. Robert Hayden was not well known at the time of this publication even though his first collection of poems, Heart Shape in the Dust, was published in 1940. Years later, Hayden became a renowned poet and was elected to the American Academy of Poets in 1975. The next year he was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, the first African-American to hold that position. In 1985 he became the Poet Laureate in Poetry to the Library of Congress.

Hayden grew up in a Detroit ghetto nicknamed “Paradise Valley.” He was teased and ostracized by his peers because he was extremely near-sighted and wore thick glasses. As a result, he became absorbed in reading and writing. He attended Detroit City College with a scholarship and went on to study writing under W.H. Auden at the University of Michigan, obtaining a masters degree.

Hayden was a professor at the University of Michigan for many years. He went on to publish other volumes of poetry. The most recognized—A Ballad of Remembrance (1962)—includes a revised version of “Mourning Poem for the Queen of Sunday.” The original version, published in 12th Street in 1949, is republished here.

Hayden poem

 

Natassja Schiel is a singer/songwriter and storyteller.

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Reflection: Amy Kurzweil http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/reflection-amy-kurzweil/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/reflection-amy-kurzweil/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 19:41:33 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?p=1054 Read The Rest →]]> If Bob Dylan (via Professor Greil Marcus) taught me anything, it is that what we create is more powerful than who we are. What we create becomes who we are, or at least how we are remembered. This fall, I had the pleasure of serving as a TA for Greil’s class, “Old Weird America: Folk Music and Democratic Speech.”  The course exposed my class of 24 curious undergraduates to murderous folk ballads, dense music scholarship, and post-modern novels, among other engaging, shocking, and, at times, obscure artistic outputs. For the “Muse Project,” students were to find a character from Bob Dylan’s Chronicles and create a piece in their own art form that artistically emulated their chosen figure. Music students composed songs in the style of Lead Belly and The Carter Family. Fashion students designed clothing lines and accessories for Bobby Vee and Mike Seeger. One student built a guitar for Woody Guthrie out of broken plates, and another, taking the assignment into her own hands, created an iPhone app that staticized all the references to all the characters in Dylan’s memoir. My “Muse Project,” the illustration included here, is not nearly as quirky or creative as the art of my students, but it communicates the kind of “folk philosophy” I took away from Greil’s class: how we change, manipulate, and edit what we are given may be more valuable than anything else. This is why I love teaching. My instruction doesn’t matter nearly as much as what my students are empowered to do with it.

dylan hands_final copy

 

Amy Kurzweil completed her MFA in Fiction at The New School in 2013.  She is currently working on a graphic novel.  Check out her website at www.amykurzweil.com.

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Riggio Selects http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/riggio-selects/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/riggio-selects/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 19:09:25 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?p=1053 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/riggio-selects/feed/ 0 Riggio Event Archive http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/riggio-event-archive/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/riggio-event-archive/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 19:05:20 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?page_id=1049 Read The Rest →]]> Spring 2013

Riggio Forum: Sean Howe
Wednesday, February 6
Sean Howe is the author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story. He is the editor of Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!: Writers on Comics, the Deep Focus series of books on film, and former editor and critic at Entertainment Weekly. Howe’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Spin, and the Village Voice. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Marco Roth
Wednesday, February 13
Marco Roth is the author of The Scientists: A Family Romance (2012, FSG). His awards include the 2011 Shattuck Prize for literary criticism and a Pew Fellowship of the Arts. Roth is the co-founder and editor of n+1, a literary magazine that publishes social criticism, political commentary, literary reviews, and fiction. His work has appeared in numerous journals and newspapers including Dissent, The New York Times, The Times Literary Supplement and The Nation. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: William Gaddis
Wednesday, February 20
A celebration of Conjunctions’ and Dalkey Archive Press’s publication of the letters of William Gaddis. With Samuel R. Delany, Ben Marcus, Rick Moody, Francine Prose, and special guests. William Gaddis (1922–1998) is one of America’s most highly regarded writers, described by the New York Times Book Review as “a presiding genius . . . of postwar American fiction.” He is the author of the novels The Recognitions, J R (both Dalkey), Carpenter’s Gothic (Penguin), A Frolic of His Own (Scribner), and the posthumously published Agapē Agape (Penguin), as well as the 2002 essay collection The Rush for Second Place (Penguin). Both J R and A Frolic of His Own won the National Book Award; the latter was also a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Gaddis received a MacArthur award, and his work has been the subject of numerous critical studies.

Riggio Forum: Write What You Know with Victoria Brown & Amber Dermont
Monday, February 25

Victoria Brown, the author of Minding Ben was born in Trinidad and at sixteen came alone to New York, where she worked as a full-time nanny for several years. After attending LaGuardia Community College, she majored in English at Vassar, read Post-Colonial Literature at the University of Warwick, and earned an MFA in Fiction at Hunter College. She teaches English at LaGuardia.
Amber Dermont is the author of The Starboard Sea and the short story collection Damage Control. She is the recipient of a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts as well as fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference. Dermont’s work has appeared in the anthologies Best New American Voices, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, as well as numerous journals including Tin House, American Short Fiction, and Crazyhorse. She currently serves as an Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Agnes Scott College. Tiphanie Yanique, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Tom Lutz
Tuesday, February 26
Tom Lutz is the author of, most recently, Doing Nothing: A History of Loafers, Loungers, Slackers, and Bums; American Nervousness, 1903; Cosmopolitan Vistas; and Crying: A Natural and Cultural History of Tears. He has also written many shorter works in a variety of genres. He currently serves as editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and teaches at University of California, Riverside. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Lowell Handler
Monday, March 4

Lowell Handler will be reading from his e-book Crazy and Proud. www.crazyandproud.com. As the star, narrator, and associate producer of the Emmy-nominated PBS television documentary Twitch & Shout, Handler set the stage for his 1998 memoir, Twitch & Shout: A Touretter’s Tale. He is a former Black Star contract photographer-journalist whose pictures have appeared in Life, Newsweek, The (London) Sunday Times, The New York Times, and The Boston Globe among others. His other written work has appeared in The New York Observer, Health, and the American Psychological Association’s Contemporary Psychology. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Write What You Don’t Know with Kiran Desai and Laren McClung

Monday, March 11
Kiran Desai is the author of The Inheritance of Loss, which won the 2006 Booker Prize. Her first book was Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. She’s been published in the New Yorker and Mirrorwork, an anthology of 50 years of Indian writing edited by Salman Rushdie. Laren McClung is the author of Between Here and Monkey Mountain. She’s been the recipient of a Goldwater Hospital Teaching Fellowship, a Teachers & Writers Collaborative Van Lier Fellowship, and a Veterans Writing Fellowship at NYU. McClung is coeditor of the anthology Inheriting the War. Tiphanie Yanique, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Lisa Cohen
Tuesday, March 12
Lisa Cohen is author of All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012). Her essays and poems have appeared in Fashion Theory, Bookforum, Vogue, Ploughshares, Boog City, Barrow Street, Lit, The Paris Review Daily, Newsday, the Voice Literary Supplement, and other journals and anthologies. Her interview with the biographer Michael Holroyd is forthcoming from The Paris Review. She teaches at Wesleyean University. Honor Moore, moderator.

Riggio Forum: The Inquisitive Eater
Monday, March 18
In celebration of The Inquisitive Eater’s one year anniversary, contributors to the online journal will read. This event is funded by a grant provided by the Dean’s Collaborative Fund. Hosted by the School of Writing. http://inquisitiveeater.com. Luis Jaramillo, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Marie Chaix and Harry Matthews
Thursday, April 4
Marie Chaix is the author of The Laurels of Lake Constance, translated by Harry Matthews. Born in Lyons and raised in Paris, she is the author of nine books, seven of them autobiographical, two of them novels. She became famous at the appearance of her her first work, The Laurels of Lake Constance, in which she retraces the life of her collaborationist father and that of her family during the postwar years. The Summer of the Elder Tree, a memoir and meditation on the theme of separation, was published in Paris in 2005, her first book to appear in fourteen years. The mother of two daughters by a first marriage, Marie Chaix is married to the writer Harry Mathews and spends half of each year in America and half in France. Born in Manhattan, Harry Matthews moved to France in 1953, and now spends half his life there and half in Key West. He is a poet and the author of six novels, and has translated three works by the French author Marie Chaix, his wife of many years, as well as Goerges Bataille’s Blue of Noon, Jeanne Cordelier’s The Life: Memoirs of a French Hooker, Raymons Roussel’s The Dust of Suns, and Georges Perec’s Ellis Island. Honor Moore, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Wayne Koestenbaum
Wednesday, April 17
Wayne Koestenbaum is the author of many books, most recently, the poetry collection Blue Stranger With Mosaic Background, as well as the nonfiction works The Anatomy of Harpo Marx and Humiliation. He is the winner of the “Discovery”/The Nation poetry contest, a recipient of a Whiting Writers’ award, and was nominated for the National Book Critics Circle award. He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center. Mark Bibbins, moderator.

Fall 2012

Riggio Forum: Stanley Crouch
Wednesday, September 12
Columnist for the New York Daily News and author of Kansas City Lightning, a biography of Charlie Parker. Greil Marcus, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Carmen Boullosa
Monday, September 24
The author of Leaving Tabasco and many other novels in Spanish. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Hilton Als
Wednesday, October 10
Theater critic of the New Yorker and author of The Women. Greil Marcus, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Leigh Stein
Tuesday, November 6
The author of The Fallback Plan. Luis Jaramillo, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Ann Powers
Wednesday, November 14
The correspondent for NPR music and author of Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America. 
Greil Marcus, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Marybeth Hamilton
Wednesday, December 5
The author of In Search of the Blues: Black Voices. Greil Marcus, moderator.

Spring 2012

Riggio Forum: Eileen Myles
Tuesday, February 8
The author, most recently, of Inferno (a poet’s novel). Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: James Miller
Wednesday, February 16
James Miller’s most recent book is Examined Lives: What We Can Learn from the Eminent Philosophers. He is a Professor of Political Science and Liberal Studies, The New School for Social Research. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Jill Lepore
Monday, February 28
Historian and New Yorker staff writer, Lepore is the author most recently of The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History. Linda Tvrdy, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Dexter Palmer
Thursday, March 3
The author of The Dream of Perpetual Motion. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Susan Rosenberg
Wednesday, March 23
The author of the memoir An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country. Jackson Taylor, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Tiphanie Yanique
Monday, March 28
The author of How to Escape From a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Michael Gray
Wednesday, April 6
The author, most recently, of Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Heidi Durrow
Wednesday, April 27
The author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, the host of the podcast Mixed Chicks Chat, and co-founder of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Fall 2011

Riggio Forum: A.O. Scott
Wednesday, September 7
Film critic of The New York Times. Greil Marcus, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Gerald Early
Wednesday, October 12
The editor of The Sammy Davis Jr. Reader and author of The Culture of Bruising; Merle King Professor of Letters, Washington University, St. Louis. Greil Marcus, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Lynne Tillman
Tuesday, October 25
The author of Someday This Will Be Funny, and faculty member, Riggio Writing & Democracy honors program. Luis Jaramillo, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Dana Spiotta
Wednesday, November 9
The author of Stone Arabia: A Novel. Greil Marcus, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Lee Smith
Wednesday, December 7
The author of the short-story collection Mrs. Darcy and the Blue-Eyed Stranger. Greil Marcus, moderator.

Spring 2011 

Riggio Forum: Eileen Myles
Tuesday, February 8
The author, most recently, of Inferno (a poet’s novel). Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: James Miller
Wednesday, February 16
James Miller’s most recent book is Examined Lives: What We Can Learn from the Eminent Philosophers. He is a Professor of Political Science and Liberal Studies, The New School for Social Research.Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Jill Lepore
Monday, February 28
Historian and New Yorker staff writer, Lepore is the author most recently of The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History.  Linda Tvrdy, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Dexter Palmer
Thursday, March 3
The author of The Dream of Perpetual Motion. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Susan Rosenberg
Wednesday, March 23
The author of the memoir An American Radical: Political Prisoner in My Own Country.Jackson Taylor, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Tiphanie Yanique
Monday, March 28
The author of How to Escape From a Leper Colony: A Novella and Stories. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Michael Gray
Wednesday, April 6
The author, most recently, of Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Heidi Durrow
Wednesday, April 27
The author of The Girl Who Fell From the Sky, the host of the podcast “Mixed Chicks Chat,” and co-founder of the Mixed Roots Film & Literary Festival. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Fall 2010

Riggio Forum: Mary E. Davis 
Wednesday, September 22
Author of Classic Chic: Music, Fashion, and Modernis, short-listed for the Costume Society of America’s Millia Davenport Publication Award.  In conversation with Greil Marcus.

Riggio Forum: Rattapallax 10th Anniversary
Friday, September 24
10th Anniversary celebration includes readings by Edward Hirsch, Eileen Myles, Rachel Zucker, Edwin Torres, and Idra Novey as well as a screening of poetry-based films from Cannes, Sundance and Berlin Film Festivals. Hosted by editor Flavia Rocha.

Riggio Forum: Bárbara Renaud González
Monday, September 27
The author of Golondrina, why did you leave me?, and an award-winning journalist, and activist. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Walter Mosley
Wednesday, October 13
Author of more than thirty books, most recently Known to Evil, in conversation with Greil Marcus.

Riggio Forum: Yunte Huang
Thursday, October 14
The author of the recent biography of Charlie Chan, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History. Brenda Wineapple and Robert Polito, moderators.

Riggio Forum: Greil Marcus
Monday October 18
The author will read from his most recent book Bob Dylan Writings 1968- 2010.

Riggio Forum: John Edgar Wideman
Wednesday, October 27
The author of more than 20 works of fiction and nonfiction, including the award-winning Brothers and Keepers, Philadelphia Fire, and most recently the story collection God’s Gym. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Luc Sante
Wednesday, November 3
The author most recently of Folk Photography: The American Real-Photo Postcard 1905-1930 in conversation with Greil Marcus.

Riggio Forum: Gabrielle Calvocoressi
Monday, November 15
The author most recently of Apocalyptic Swing. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Mary Gaitskill
Wednesday, December 8
Acclaimed author, most recently of the story collection Don’t Cry in conversation with Greil Marcus.

Spring 2010

Riggio Forum: Elizabeth Strout
Monday, February 8
The author of Olive Kitteridge, winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in fiction. Helen Schulman, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Pinsky, Poetry and Jazz
Friday, February 19
Robert Pinsky reads from his poems accompanied by jazz musicians.

Riggio Forum: Anne Waldman
Tuesday, February 23
Co-founder of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Colorado, and author of over 40 books of poetry, including most recently Manatee/Humanity. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Women in Letters and Literary Arts
Monday, March 1
A reading and discussion with Cate Marvin and Erin Belieu, co-directors of WILLA(Women in Letters and Literary Arts) and Barrie Jean Borich, Amy King, Kekla Magoon, Natalie Bryant Rizzieri, Laurel Snyder, Susan Steinberg, and Anne Townsend. Mark Bibbins, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Cave Canem Celebrates National Poetry Month
Monday, April 12
Featuring award-winning poet Ed Roberson, along with emerging poets Kyle Dargan and Wendy S. Walters. Camille Rankine, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Gary Giddins
Wednesday, May 5
The distinguished music, film, book critic and author most recently of Jazz and Natural Selection. Robert Polito, moderator.

Fall 2009

Riggio Forum: A Conversation with Samuel R. Delany
Wednesday, September 16
Among many awards for his writing, Delany won the Stonewall Book Award for the novel Dark ReflectionsGreil Marcus, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Sean Wilentz
Monday, October 26
Wilentz is the author of The Age of Reagan: A History, 1974-2008 (2009), as well as a contributing editor at the New Republic and essayist for Newsweek and Rolling StoneGreil Marcus, moderator.

Riggio Forum: A New Literary History of America
Wednesday, November 11
In celebration of the publication of A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors. With contributors Farah GriffinAnn MarloweRobert PolitoJohn Rockwell, and Stephanie Zacharek.

Riggio Forum: A Conversation with David Thomas
Wednesday, December 2
Thomas is a singer and the founder of legendary avant-rock band Pere Ubu. Greil Marcus, moderator.

Spring 2009

Riggio Forum: Cave Canem Poets on Craft
Tuesday, February 3
Award winning poets Myronn Hardy and Cathy Park Hong read from their work and engage in a lively conversation on craft. Camille Rankine, moderator.

Riggio Forum: 2nd Annual Ghana Writers’ Conference Reading
Tuesday, February 17
Colin ChannerBinyavanga Wainaina and Thomas Sayers Ellis will appear along with other acclaimed writers. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: George Packer
Monday, March 2
Author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq and a contributor to The New YorkerHelen Schulman, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Kevin Prufer
Tuesday, March 10
Author of National AnthemMark Bibbins, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Michael Dumanis
Tuesday, April 14
Author of My Soviet UnionHonor Moore, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Robert Polito and Guy Maddin
Monday, April 20
Robert Polito, reading from his new book of poems, Hollywood & God, with special guest film director Guy Maddin, who will be reading from his new book My Winnipeg.

Riggio Forum: Kyoko Mori
Wednesday, April 29
Author of A Dream of Water: A Memoir and Polite Lies: On Being a Woman Caught Between Cultures, and Shiziuko’s Daughter, a novel for young adults. Honor Moore, moderator.

Fall 2008

Riggio Forum: Ed Pavlic and Tyehimba Jess
Wednesday, September 3
Ed Pavlic, author of Winners Have Yet to Be Announced and Tyehimba Jess, author of leadbellyJeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Inequality and American Democracy
Monday, September 8
A conversation with Lewis LaphamThomas Frank and Hamilton Fish.

Riggio Forum: Eisa Nefertari and Michael Thomas
Wednesday, September 10
Eisa Nefertari Ulen, author of Crystelle Mourning, and Michael ThomasMan Gone DownJeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Allan Michael Parker
Monday, October 13
Author of Elephants and ButterfliesRobert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Caryl Phillips
Tuesday, October 21
Author of ForeignersJeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: John Yau
Monday, December 1
Author of A Thing Among Things: The Art of Jasper JohnsRobert Polito, moderator

Riggio Forum: Phillip Lopate
Tuesday, December 9
Author of Two MarriagesRobert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: State by State
Thursday, December 12

Spring 2008

Riggio Forum: Peter Cameron
Monday, March 3,
Author of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You. Helen Schulman, moderator.

Riggio Forum: John Edgar Wideman
Monday, March 10
Author of Fanon. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Terese Svboda
Monday, March 24
Author of Black Glasses Like Clark Kent. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Elizabeth Samet
Tuesday, April 8
Author of Soldier’s Heart. An evening devoted to the subject of Poetry and War. David Lehman, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Nathaniel Mackey
Wednesday, April 9
Author of Four for Glenn. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Cave Canem Presents Cornelius Eady
Thursday, April 23
A reading/signing of the poet’s new book, Hardheaded Weather.

Riggio Forum: Cave Canem Presents The Ringing Ear
Tuesday, April 29
A reading by Black poets on the South.

Fall 2007

Riggio Forum: David Thomson
Tuesday, September 25
Thomson, film critic, historian, and author mostly recently of The Whole Equation, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, and Nicole Kidman. Greil Marcus, moderator.

Riggio Forum: M.G. Vassanji
Wednesday, September 26
Vassanji, author of The Assassin’s Song. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Carrie Brownstein
Tuesday, October 2
Brownstein played guitar and sang in the band Sleater-Kinney. She is a writer, producer, and Oregon Humane Society volunteer of the year. Brownstein will read some recent writing, talk about music and culture, and answer questions about dog behavior. Greil Marcus, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Michael Lesy
Tuesday, October 9
Lesy is a photographic historian and archivist and author of Murder City: The Bloody History of Chicago in the Twenties, Wisconsin Death Trip, Long Time Coming: A Photographic History of America, 1935-1943, and Angel’s World. Greil Marcus, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Joan Acocella
Monday, October 15
Acocella, author of Twenty-eight Artists and Two Saints, and staff writer for the New Yorker. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Harlem Writers Guild
Thursday, October 25
Grace Edwards, author of Do or Die; and Gammy Singer, author of A Landlord’s Tale, and K.C. Washington, author of Mourning Becomes Her.

Riggio Forum: Sasha Frere-Jones
Monday, November 5
Frere-Jones is a pop music critic for the New Yorker. Greil Marcus, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Nina Khrushcheva
Wednesday, November 7
Khrushcheva, author of Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics. Robert Polito, moderator.

Spring 2007

Riggio Forum: R.J. Smith
Wednesday, January 24
Author of The Great Black Way: L.A. in the 1940s and the Lost African-American Renaissance.

Riggio Forum: African Fiction in America, American Fiction in Africa
Bayo Ojikutu, author of Free Burning; Mohammed Naseehu Ali, author of The Prophet of Zongo Street and Doreen Baingana, author of Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe, read from and discuss their work. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Madhur Jaffrey
Wednesday, February 14
Author of Climbing the Mango Trees: A Memoir of a Childhood in India.

Riggio Forum: Richard Zenith
Monday, February 26
Translator of the poetry of Fernando Pessoa.

Riggio Forum: Lynne Tillman
Monday, March 5
Author of American Genius: A Comedy. Roberto Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Peter Orner and Kiran Desai
Monday, April 9
Authors of The Second Coming of Mavala Shikingo and The Inheritance of Loss, respectively.

Riggio Forum: David Shields
Wednesday, April 25
Author discusses his forthcoming book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, in which he argues for the excitement of works of indeterminate genre.

Riggio Forum: Luc Sante
Monday, April 30
Author of Kill All Your Darlings: Pieces from 1990-2005 and translator of Novels in Three Lives by Felix Feneon reads from and discusses both books.

Fall 2006

Riggio Forum: Michael Gray
Tuesday, September 5
Author presents the speech “Bob Dylan and the Poetry of the Blues.” Gray is the author of The Dylan Encyclopedia. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: September 11, 2001, Five Years Later
Monday, September 11
An evening of conversation and readings focused on the 5th anniversary of the events of September 11th, 2001, in collaboration with the National Book Foundation. Bob Kerrey, President of the New School, and member of the 9/11 Commission, Robert Polito, the director of the Writing Program, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon, the co-authors of The 9/11 Report : A Graphic Adaptation, and Jay McInerney, author of The Good Life, among other writers and artists, and featuring the NBA nominated books, The 9/11 Commission Report: Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, and 102 Minutes: The Untold Story of the Fight to Survive Inside the Twin Towers.

Riggio Forum: Mary Gaitskill
Wednesday, September 13
Author of Veronica. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Francine Prose
Thursday, September 14
Author of Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for those who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them.

Riggio Forum: Calvin Baker
Monday, September 25
Author of Dominion. Jeffery Renard Allen, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Richard Siken
Tuesday, September 26
Author of Crush and winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award. Deborah Landau, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Edward Field
Monday, October 16
Author of  The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, and Other Intimate Literary Portraits of the Bohemian Era. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: A Celebration of Marjorie Williams
Wednesday, November 1
Friends and admirers read from and discuss late Marjorie Williams’s book The Woman at the Washington Zoo: Writings on Family, Politics, and Fate.  Helen Schulman, moderator.

Riggio Forum: David Kamp
Monday, November 13
Author of  United States of Arugula: How We Became a Gourmet Nation. Helen Schulman, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Richard Zenith
Monday, November 27
Translator of the poetry of Fernando Pessoa. Robert Polito, moderator.

Riggio Forum: Readings from Paul Schmidt’s At the Stray Dog Cabaret
Wednesday, December 6
Honor Moore and others read from At the Stray Dog Cabaret, translations of Russian Modernist poems by Paul Schmidt.

Riggio Forum: David Truer
Wednesday, December 13
Truer reads from Native American Fiction, a book of essays, and The Translation of Dr. Apelles, a novel. Robert Polito, moderator.

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Reflection: In the Fields of Light / Luis Jaramillo http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/reflection-in-the-fields-of-light-luis-jaramillo/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/reflection-in-the-fields-of-light-luis-jaramillo/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 10:35:58 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?p=1033 Read The Rest →]]> When we interview TA applicants for the Riggio program we ask applicants to teach a ten minute close reading lesson on a short piece of text. We (usually Laura Cronk, a current TA, and I) pretend to be undergraduate students. There are many ways for the lesson to go badly—the applicant lectures us rather than asking questions, the applicant declines to bring copies for us to mark up, the applicant tries to cram a discussion of a 20-page short story into the allotted time, the applicant tries to lead us into one particular reading, or the applicant gets a little snippy with one of us. These mistakes bring out the bad student in me. I feel bored, or angry, I want to be contrary, or, maybe worst of all, my mind just leaves the room; I make to do lists, I worry about an discussion from earlier in the day, or I have a fit of hypochondria.

This is why it’s such a relief when a close reading lesson goes well. When someone teaches us how to look at language and what to look for, everything else falls away—our anxieties, nervousness, discomfort, and even the fact of the awkward situation we’ve all put ourselves in. All that’s left is the text.

A teacher is someone who is able to focus the mind of the student on one object, and that kind of concentration yields immediate results. Understanding comes bit by bit, and it helps when there is a classroom of students tasked with providing whatever information they have available. We all have different associations and knowledge about words, syntax, and allusions. We notice and can analyze patterns in different ways, and we bring with us knowledge about vastly disparate subjects. If all contributions are valued, students of different abilities and interests can participate equally. And in a classroom characterized by openness and attention, this shared knowledge inevitably leads to a deeper understanding of a text for everyone in the room. But it’s not just the understanding that’s valuable.

One of the founding books of the program is Rueben Brower’s The Fields of Light. The title comes from the preface to Henry James’s The Golden Bowl, an essay made up of sentences jammed with clauses, asides, and seeming non sequiturs. It is not possible to skim, making it the perfect kind of thing to close read. James writes about art and how one role of the artist is to capture “the how and the whence and the why [the] intenser lights of experience come into being and insist on shining.”

Close reading leads to these fields of light, where reader and writer come together outside of time.

 

Luis Jaramillo is the author of The Doctor’s Wife, winner of the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest, an Oprah Book of the Week, and one of NPR’s Best Books of 2012. Luis’s work has also appeared in Open City, Gamers (Soft Skull Press), Tin House Magazine, H.O.W. Journal, and Red Line Blues. He is the Associate Chair of the Writing Program at the New School, where he oversees the undergraduate curriculum and the Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy, teaches courses in fiction and nonfiction, and is co-editor of the journal The Inquisitive Eater: New School Food. He received an undergraduate degree from Stanford and an MFA from The New School.

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Profile: Greil Marcus / Ashawnta Jackson http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/profile-greil-marcus-ashawnta-jackson/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/profile-greil-marcus-ashawnta-jackson/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 10:02:32 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?p=1020 Read The Rest →]]> In a recent interview with Columbus Alive, writer and Riggio Honors Program: Writing and Democracy faculty member Greil Marcus had this to say about how he approaches music writing, “I’m really more interested in how does a performer or just a song develop a language that’s different, and how do we learn that language? How do we respond to it?” This idea, that music has a language, a specific and important language is one that’s worth exploring. The sounds of blues guitar or the thumping bass of electronica are all speaking not just the language of beats and rhythms, but of the cultures that create them. Music, like writing, is an avenue that gives voice to people who might otherwise not have their voices heard. This connection between the two is one of the reasons Marcus’ work aligns so well with that of the Riggio Program.

One of the main goals of the Riggio Program is develop our writing while at the same time, developing a writing community. Extending this idea of community to the musical world isn’t hard. It’s there already. It’s the bodies moving in sync to the drum beat; it’s the emotion felt among the crowd when hearing the right note played in just the right way at just the right time; it’s the song that represents a movement, a call to arms, a salve; it’s the deviation from the norm in the development of a genre, music creates community all the time. A piece of music can connect us to one another in ways so similar to the ways that literature does. It provides a common language for understanding our world, a rhythm for our experiences. It’s not just that music  It’s also very simple to connect this to democracy, the other headline item in the Riggio program.

Music has often played a role in democratic action. It’s not just the soundtrack for revolutionary acts, but it’s often the vehicle in which these acts are performed. The folk groups who sang about freedom, the soul singers who told about the change that was coming, the hip-hop poets telling the  truths of their neighborhoods, of their lives through their words are all a part of the democratic pulse of music. Folk, soul, rock, hip-hop all speak to particular experiences, particular moments in our histories. The civil rights movement marched with the beat of traditional hymns; anti-war activists took up guitars along with placards; punk found the disaffected, the outcasts and gave them a family. These are the communities that have mattered in my life and undoubtedly in the lives of so many others. I hold on to John Coltrane records and dogeared copies of James Baldwin. I’m just as likely to recite Marvin Gaye as am Langston Hughes. I hear the history of this country in the music collected in Harry Smith’s anthology, history that is like mine, different from mine, but still part of mine. There’s a commonality among these arts, the way that they speak to who we are as a nation, our past and our future.

Marcus talks about this idea in his book The Old, Weird America, the concept of creating music in which “certain bedrock strains of American cultural language were retrieved and reinvented.” Although this book is focused on Bob Dylan’s work, I think this idea applies broadly to not only many musical styles, but to the very idea of the Riggio Program. Here, we are constantly working to contribute to and redefine our cultural vocabulary. We struggle to place the words in just the right order, with just the right emotion, to speak to a larger truth. We argue and craft. We write and rewrite. Page after page, we are trying to create the lexicon for our own cultural experiences. We wield words like instruments to create stories, to speak a new language.



Read Greil Marcus’s “A Trip to Hibbing High” and his reflection on The Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy.

Ashawnta Jackson is a perpetual student who occasionally tries her hand at the literary arts.

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Reflection: Greil Marcus http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/greil-marcus/ http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/greil-marcus/#comments Fri, 17 May 2013 08:49:56 +0000 http://riggio.americanvanguardpress.com/?p=81 Read The Rest →]]> I joined the Riggio program in Writing and Democracy in 2007, and with the exception of 2008 have taught in the program every fall semester since. My main responsibility has been the ULEC undergraduate lecture course “The Old Weird America—Music as Democratic Speech, from the Commonplace Song to Bob Dylan.” The theme of the class, which enrolls between 90 and 100 students, with the participation of four to five Writing Program TAs, is the American folk song—including ballads, blues, blackface minstrelsy, and so-called folk-lyric compositions, where hundreds of floating verses or single lines move from tune to tune, combined by the performer in his or her own way—the sort of song that, regardless of actual provenance, has entered vernacular culture as authorless, with specific origins either lost or forgotten, so that it becomes the common property of anyone who chooses to address it. As such songs are at once traditional and subject to subtle or radical revision by the performer (compare the basic version of the “Titanic” ballad with the 1927 version by the New Orleans street singer Rabbit Brown, where the traditional lyrics are completely transformed by the manner in which they are sung, to Bob Dylan’s 1966 “Desolation Row,” where the Titanic appears along with a host of other cultural signifiers), thus providing the singer access to a shared field of conversation while allowing him or her to say what has never been said, in a manner that has never been heard.

Through readings that include novels (Colson Whitehead’s John Henry Days, Lee Smith’s The Devil’s Dream, Percival Everett’s Erasure), essays (Luc Sante on Bob Dylan and blues, Robert Cantwell on the 60s folk revival and the history of the song “Tom Dooley”), and historical studies (Michael Lesy’s Wisconsin Death Trip, Bob Dylan’s Chronicles, Volume 1, the anthology The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad), as well as films, videos, old and new audio recordings (especially those collected on Harry Smith’s “Anthology of American Folk Music”), live performances, either by students or invited guests, and appearances by artists whose work makes up part of the course (over the years, the filmmakers Christian Marclay, Todd Haynes, and James Marsh, the musician Jon Langford, and the novelist Lee Smith), the course is meant to dramatize the notion of the American folk song, ancient and modern, as a form that allows a citizen access to a language anyone can speak and that anyone can understand while at the same time offering the citizen the opportunity to speak altogether as himself or herself, at once attaching the speaker to a common story and allowing the speaker to transform it. The form is democratic; the results are democratic; the form allows the citizen to step out of Tocqueville’s crowd—in this case, history—say what he or she has to say, and then return to anonymity or take his or her story as far as it might travel, in terms of time, space, and audience.

The course encourages students to rewrite and re-envision folk songs discussed in detail in the class, to compose their own and record or perform them, in any medium. In discussion sections, each student takes a character, real or fictional, from life or from a song, mentioned in Bob Dylan’s Chronicles—a vast compendium of such references—and presents that character (which can be a person, a city, a ghost, a story) to his or her section, telling its history, offering an historical representation of it (a photograph, a painting, a recording), and then translating the character into a representation of the student’s own choice (an animated video, a collage, a wardrobe, a painting, a performance, a poem, a short story, a new song). This has, over the years, produced extraordinary and unforgettable results, with the most striking work presented during lectures to the entire class.

Here is a video by Gabi Degirolami (2012), whose TA was Amy Kurzweil, of the 1958 Link Wray recording “Rumble,” cited by Bob Dylan as central to his own “numerical” understanding of the nature of musical communication.

Gabi Degirolami, “Rumble”

 

Sara Beck, “Ballad of Kate Malone” (2011).  Sara was a TA in my first year, in 2007.  As Lee Smith’s The Devil’s Dream, one of the novels central to my course, begins with the lyrics to an invented ballad about the first main character in the book, which is set, in a blind manner, to the melody of the folk song “Black Jack Davy,” I have, each year, asked a different person—a TA, a student—to work up an arrangement of the song based in that melody and perform it as part of the lecture keyed to the novel.  Sara recorded this version for use when no other candidate presented herself or himself.

 

In 2009, Madelyn Deutch (TA: Mary Elizabeth Frandon) sang the song. Here, from her final paper, is her account of her performance:

Madelyn Deutch, “Life’s a Bitch, Duck,” comparison between “Black Jack Davy” and “Pretty in Pink”

How can you compare a four-minute song to a major motion picture? It took a writer to pitch, a studio to finance, a director to direct, actors to interpret, a cinematographer to film, a crew of PA’s and grips for the nuts and bolts, an editor to cut, and audience members to view—in order for those emotions to be transferred and the story to be told. It just requires a singer and a guitar, who are willing, to tell the tale of Black Jack Davy. Or in my case, just a singer. I can say with all certainty that “Black Jack Davy” is incomparable to “Pretty in Pink.” Just as neither subtracts from the other, neither goes further or deeper. I know because when I sang in the lecture that week, I felt all of the things that I felt watching the film: sadness, despair, greed, triumph, elation. Even though I was singing different lyrics, I heard the story of Black Jack Davy on a reel in my head. And besides, a melody is a beautiful thing. It’s like sense memory. If you feel one thing while hearing a melody, you feel it again the next time you hear it. And so as I walked up to the front of the room, the last ounce of daylight seeping in through the big rippled windows, I felt the classroom melt around me. The walls became an expanse of forest, with huge pines popping up in corners of the room. The dry wood floors beneath my feet turned to soft earth that gathered up under my heels. I could see fireflies darting in and out of the fol- up chairs that had become tree stumps, overgrown mushrooms, and beds of wildflowers. The cold winter air became misty, as hot and damp as it would have been on a late summer’s eve. I turned to face the audience and I saw a modest cabin, tucked behind the largest pine. A wife, her baby, and a loving father were drifting off to sleep on the porch. I heard the enchanting tune of “Black Jack Davy” dancing in my head, coming closer into the woods. As I slid over notes, bending to sing the sorrow, I watched the cabin go up in flames while the wife followed the tune, utterly hypnotized. But who knows—maybe the next time I sing “Black Jack Davy” I’ll see Duckie flailing and dancing on the staircase in ‘Trax’ and Andie perched by the cash register rolling her eyes. The real beauty in all of this is that, even if I had taken the lyrics I sang in class (“The Ballad of Kate Malone”) literally, it would still complement Pretty in Pink. In the “Malone” version of “Black Jack Davy,” Kate Malone falls in love with a preacher’s son, he promises her salvation, and then she[I’ll check quotation and embed.] loses “her merry laugh… was like to lose her beauty… tied back her hair of purest gold, bore three babes out of duty . . .  It would be the equivalent to the wife staying with the husband, avoiding Black Jack Davy, and being miserable. A little known fact is that the original ending for Pretty in Pink had Andie ending up with Duckie instead of Blane. So it seems that “Black Jack Davy” and “Pretty in Pink” are endlessly connected! And there appears the beautiful phenomenon that there are no coincidences in this world.

 

In 2007, Nina Torr created “Tom Dooley Animation,” a video scored to the Kingston Trio’s 1958 version of the folk song, several versions of which were part of the class, that enacted a tall tale from Constance Rourke’s “American Humor: A Study of the National Character” (1931), which was part of the required reading that year.

 

Here, from 2010, is Jesse Valentine’s discussion-section essay “How to Write an American Folk Song,” as later read to the whole class (TA: Jaclyn Lovell)

Jesse Valentine (Jaclyn Lovell) reads “How to Write an American Folk Song”:

First, make a list of the list of the parts of your body that no longer work. Put it in an envelope. Mail it to your mother. Have her write the name she would have given her next child across the top of it. Have her mail it back to you. Every night before sleeping, kneel by your bedside, hold it your hands, read it aloud.

Second, track down the girl you loved in the eighth grade. Give her a mix CD of all your favorite songs from 2003. Ask her to learn the words to each one, and to record herself singing them a capella onto a tape recorder. Have her send you that tape. With a black magic marker write memories across it. Keep it in your car. Make it the only thing you listen to when you drive.

Third, become a terrorist. Hide a box-cutter in your shoe and board an airplane, but don’t do anything. Just know that you could be in control and you’re choosing not to be. Think about what that means. Write a poem about it. Send it to The New Yorker, and don’t ever throw away the rejection letter.

Fourth, start smoking again. Who are you trying to fool? You know you’re going to start smoking again anyway, so why not start again now? On each one of your rolling papers, write the name of the town where you were born, so that every time you smoke you can watch it burn down. Call this forgiveness.

Fifth, find a field, dig a hole, get inside it. Pile the dirt back in on top of yourself. If you get down deep enough you can talk to the dead. If you see your grandfather tell him you’re doing okay, even if you’re not. It’s all he wants to hear. Give him that.

Sixth, don’t let go of my hand. Climb a tree with me. Sit on a branch. Walk by the water with me. Throw me at the waves like a fisherman’s prayer. If I tell you I don’t believe in God anymore, tell me you still do.

Seventh, buy a banjo. Learn a chord. Take all of these things and turn them into a song. Record it. And makes sure no one listens to it till long after you’re dead. Rest easy, someday it’ll be all that’s left of you.

 

Brianne Bowers, “Like a Rolling Stone” and “The Coo Coo” by Be Good Tanyas—in 2010, this student made two videos for the class, the first based on the idea that the inspiration for “Like a Rolling Stone” was the Warhol superstar Edie Sedgewick, the second on the 2000 version of “The Coo Coo” by Be Good Tanyas, before knowing that I planned to build my lecture on the song around that version:

 

 

Also in 2010, Sofia Falcone created this depiction of the verse in “I Wish I Was a Mole in the Ground,” an axis of the course, that runs, “I don’t like a railroad man / No, I don’t like a railroad man /A railroad man, he’ll kill you when he can / And drink up your blood like wine,” in the form of an LP jacket.

Sofia Falcone Mole in the Ground

Sofia Falcone, “Mole in the Ground”

I could include many more papers, and there is visual work I have not been able to convert or that is unavailable on the Internet. But this should give you some idea of the kind of undergraduate work that has come out of the class.

The effect of student work on my own work has been incalculable. I learn (over and over again), what I don’t know, what I haven’t seen. Songs that I have heard hundreds of times and written about in great detail are explicated or dramatized in ways that make it seem as if I have never heard them at all, and the same is true for the reading in the course, whether essays or novels. Most of all, I discover that the premise of the course, explained most fully and explicitly in Dylan’s “Chronicles” (“A folk song has over a thousand faces and you must meet them all”) is more true than I could have ever imagined: that there is no limit whatsoever on what folk songs can say, where they can go, who can sing them, and what secrets they contain.

My experiences in the Riggio program have affected my teaching by leading me to be more experimental, improvisational, to take little for granted. Given the pedagogical nature of the class, in terms of the American folk song as a field for expression, I have always thought that the purpose of the class was to lead students to find, value, and use their own voices, certainly never to offer a particular point of view for their agreement, and I hope that I pursue this more vigorously each year.

And finally, from 2012, Pavla Kostich, insect-infested dress inspired by “Wisconsin Death Trip” (TA: Carrington Alvarez)

And finally, from 2012, Pavla Kostich, insect-infested dress inspired by Wisconsin Death Trip (TA: Carrington Alvarez)

As part of my charge in the Riggio program, I also curate a lecture series each semester. Four people in the arts, or in various fields in the humanities, are invited to give a public talk on culture, audience, tradition, and transformation. Speakers in 2012 included the jazz critic and biographer Stanley Crouch, the theatre critic and biographer Hilton Als, the music critic Ann Powers, and the blues historian Marybeth Hamilton. Previous speakers have included the novelists Walter Mosley, Mary Gaitskill, and Dana Spiotta, the critic and historian Luc Sante, and the musician and writer David Thomas.

This year, in a partnership between the Writing Program and Liberal Studies, I also taught a graduate seminar component of the “Old Weird America” course. Fourteen graduate students attended the lectures, and then after a short break we discussed the readings that make up the body of the class, along with music and films, from completely different vantage points than the lectures explore. It was a close-knit group of students of varying backgrounds—with people very vehement about their backgrounds, and the value of different frames of reference in any discussion. There was one student from South Africa, two from Norway, one from North Carolina, one from rural West Virginia, and on from there—a very disparate group of people who very quickly came to trust each other as adventurers in a common quest. From the start, students were bringing in music, videos, and even performing their own work in order to make arguments and raise questions. Their writing, in the first assigned paper, was so superb—experimental in form, daring in argument, carefully written, resistant to conventional wisdom, sometimes coming out of deep familiarity with the material of the class, sometimes with none—that I assigned a full paper every two weeks, and the quality improved every week. Often the papers—which the students began circulating among each other before I was about to suggest it—formed the basis of discussions, but sometimes a single comment from one student would occupy the entire 90-minute class. Except for one graduate seminar at Berkeley, this was the best class I have ever had. It was not about Writing and Democracy, it was writing and democracy, in action. I would happily provide more student work, from different years, if that would be useful. I am attaching a piece that, I hope, is fitting for the theme we are attempting to bring out to the full. It has been my great privilege to be part of the Writing and Democracy program and I hope it continues in full force for a very long time.



Read Greil Marcus’s “A Trip to Hibbing High,” and a profile of him.

Greil Marcus was an early editor at Rolling Stone, and has since been a columnist for Salon, the New York Times,ArtforumEsquire, and the Village Voice; he currently writes a monthly music column for Interview magazine. He is the author of The Old, Weird America: The World of Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes (1997), Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (2005), as well as The Shape of Things to Come: Prophecy and the American Voice (2006),Lipstick Traces (1989), Mystery Train (1975), The Dustbin of History (1995), Dead Elvis (1991), and other books. With Werner Sollors, he is the editor of A New Literary History of America (2009). In recent years he has taught seminars in American Studies at Berkeley and Princeton.

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