Time to Travel and Time to Work

These are the long days, the lengthening days, the days of late spring or early summer (depending on your point of view), and time for some of us to go into high work gear while others go on vacation. That’s okay: our playtime will come later, and right now Nature is working hard, too, making flowers, forming fruit, producing young. Here is a promise--raspberries soon:



My first work of the morning is outdoors, at home, watering gardens and hanging laundry out to dry in the sun. My only peony should open sometime today. Before I go home to see it this evening, there's an afternoon at the bookstore, continuing with some of the always-ongoing rearranging of books. Where to put them all? Which ones need to move? And where?



This Saturday is the Wine Festival in Leland. We're only one week away from the Friday, June 19, concert at the NCAC in Northport featuring the Leelanau Children’s Choir and Youth Ensemble, and the day after that, Saturday, June 20th, is the Maritime and Lighthouse Festival and Fish Boil in Northport, so if you’re anywhere near Leelanau, it’s time to start marking your calendar for the season’s big events. If you’re traveling far from Michigan, I have another idea to share. The item below appeared in my “Shelf Awareness” newsletter on Thursday morning.

The Gainesville Sun observed that "local book stores are alive and well--and destinations for area book lovers and collectors" in its report on regional used and rare bookshops.

"I still have customers who want to pick up a book and open it before they buy it," said O.J. Brisky, owner of Brisky's Books, Micanopy, Fla. "I also have customers who stop by when they are driving south in the winter and stop by again when they are heading north in the spring."

This article reminded me that a lot of people will be setting out on summer travels and that it’s a good time for me to give a reminder about bookstores David and I discovered or revisited on the road this past winter. Before that reminder, I should first note that you have to get off the highway and go into the town centers to find these and other small town gems. You won't find either small town America or independent bookstores out in Generic Big Box Expressway Land.

Okay, here they are, the winners, our bookstore discovers, from South to North:

Rainy Day Editions in Inverness, Florida

Poe House Books in Crystal River, Florida

O. Brisky Books in Micanopy, Florida

A Novel Experience in Zebulon, Georgia

Well Read and Well Fed, in Americus, Georgia

Viewpoint Books in Columbus, Indiana

Lowry’s Books in Three Rivers, Michigan

Stray Dog Books in Three Rivers, Michigan

When you stop in and browse and buy, before you leave tell the booksellers that Dog Ears Books in Northport, Michigan, sent you their way.

A Start to Catching Up

Days after the fact, still euphoric from the inauguration, I'm starting the catch-up game with our trip.


This was one of the most inviting of my pictures from A Novel Experience in Zebulon, Georgia, and somehow I missed it in the post with that story. Also missing that day were any photographs of the house style I was trying to describe (I also forgot to include the possibility of dormers as a variation on the theme), so below are some examples. Former President Jimmy Carter’s boyhood home outside Plains is in this style, also.











Arriving in Americus, Georgia, in time to visit the on Habitat for Humanity Global Village last riday afternoon, we gave ourselves the self-guided outdoor visit, winding first through a narrow, winding recreation of a street through a typical Third World slum (the image here shows a slum school room as seen through a broken window) and then out into a series of Habitat-built family houses, their style and materials varying according to country. (Children taking the tour can have a “passport” stamped in each house, i.e., country, they visit.) When we reached the house built in Botswana, with its bright blue trim, I was happy to recognize from my reading the reason for the color: blue is the color of the national flag of Botswana, and people there often paint the doors of their houses blue out of national pride. (This, I confess, I learned in the Alexander McCall Smith novels featuring the lady detective, Mma Ramotswe.) The cost of sponsoring a Habitat house like this in Botswana, where nearly half the population lives in poverty and unemployment can reach 40 percent, is only $4,100. Cost in other foreign countries ranges from below $3,000 to over $12,000; Habitat houses in the United States would obviously be more expensive to build.



Next morning in downtown Americus, a little before nine o’clock, the café-bookstore called Well Read and Well Fed frustrated us with a vision through the windows of books and tables and a sign on the door saying the place would not be open until ten o’clock, so we got a coffee to go at a gas station and took the road toward Plains. The young woman working in the gas station, I noticed, switched back and forth from English to Spanish as if both were native languages for her, and for some reason that made me very happy and made up for the disappointment downtown. Eight miles out of Americus, we found the Plains Trading Post, one of our regular stops, open for business and visited a while with Philip, the proprietor, buying peanuts, gospel tapes and postcards before heading over for breakfast at Mom’s Kitchen, where we’ve had Sunday dinner on our other three visits to Plains. This time, at Saturday breakfast, we were told that if we were to stay over, Jimmy would be teaching Sunday School in the morning, as usual, before leaving for the inauguration in Washington, and we could have our picture taken with him. I asked if people in Plains would be getting together to watch the inauguration, and it was as I thought it would be: the old auditorium in the former high school, the school Carter attended and which is now a museum, would be the official gathering place on Tuesday. What a great place to be! (In some ways even better than Washington, I couldn’t help thinking. My heart is always at home in a small town, and I have a particular affection for Plains.) We had been on the road for a week already, however, and, many motels down the line from Michigan, were still miles from our Florida destination. Staying through Tuesday would have meant four more motel nights and restaurant dinners. So….

So on we went, approaching Suwannee by sunset, by nightfall sharing a dinner of fresh-caught fish with friends, and the next day enjoying 65-degree temperatures while strolling through flea markets, buying fresh tomatoes and grapefruits, a cap for me and a toy for Sarah.

Sarah can’t get over the exciting smells—first Georgia, now Florida. When David and I watch a movie set in a foreign country, he often says to me, “We’re someplace else!” As I read Sarah’s mind today, that’s what she seems to be thinking.

Out With the Old, In With the New

"Table!" is an agility command that translated well to this forest stump.

Since winter arrived (or this season's version of winter, anyway, which hasn't been all that wintry in terms of snow), Sunny and I go out a couple times a day for half an hour to an hour on what I call a walk -- she does a lot of running, which I’m happy to leave to her -- and New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day were no exceptions. Before I get into those days, though, I want to back up in time. If you read my 12/28/23 post, you already know that Sunny was invited with me to the home of friends for Christmas Day dinner and that she behaved very well (i.e., amazingly well, which is to say, she amazed me!). My reason for turning back so far in the 2023 calendar is not to repeat myself, but to focus on one of the ornaments on our friends’ holiday tree. You might not see it if you didn’t look closely. 

So much to notice on one tree!

But here is the dragon.

There, you see? I don’t recall the artist’s name who made this ornament (Marjorie would have to remind me), but isn’t it perfect for my first post of the new year, the Year of the Wood Dragon? (I would have put it at the very beginning, except that Sunny thought she deserved top billing.)

 

A day or two later, I had another invitation that included Sunny, and while I wouldn’t have time to get her out for a lot of hard exercise before we went to the home of these friends, our hostess promised a walk on the beach – and, as I say, a “walk” off-leash for Sunny means she gets to run -- and run she did! She had a glorious romp, and sunset was glorious, too! Dinner conversation was so lively that Sunny didn’t start barking until she noticed her reflection in the windows. 

Barbara leads the way.

Happy girl!

Glorious sunset --

So not only did I have an unusually social week, but so did my dog, and that made me happy! 

Without any big plans for ushering in the new year, I asked friends if I could bring them cheesecake on New Year’s Day afternoon, and they graciously agreed. Then, out of the blue, I had an invitation to a New Year’s Eve party that was scheduled to run from 7:30 to after midnight, hosted by old friends I hadn’t spent time with for quite a while, so while I have never been much of a “party animal,” I resolved to attend and enjoy myself. 

 

Driving the back roads of the township after dark, I was visited by ghosts of years past, remembering Basil S. back when he still did car repair at his place; Louis R., an old Barb’s Bakery regular; Ellen B., who drove her big car much longer than she should have been driving. Driving out of my way at one point and, turning around, seeing cattails in my headlights, I thought of Ellen going off the road and into the swamp, where she stayed overnight until someone discovered her. (That must have been before cell phones.) I remembered the parents of my host of the present evening, too, and sitting next to his mother at a New Year’s Eve dinner years ago….

Old trees make way for the young.

Now we – my host and hostess, her brother and sister-in-law, and I – are the old folks. There was a moment in the evening when the younger people fell silent while we oldtimers belted out Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” but otherwise we were the quiet generation, and that was fine. I looked around the living room at everyone gathered there and felt a surge of tenderness for all, tinged with a bit of melancholy, of course (because in years past, the Artist and I attended this NYE party together), but I was happy to be there, even at that.

 

I’d spent most of the day on Sunday making a big pot of hoppin’ john and a pot of rice to go with it so on Monday afternoon took a couple containers up to my neighbors, as well as, later, a container of each with the cheesecake to my Northport friends. Another good visit, comparing notes on one another’s lives past and present and our hopes (mine very modest) for the year to come.

 

(Two nights coming home in the dark! Really, I guess, it was all the same day, first at 12:30 a.m. and then around 6 p.m.)

 

I finished out my 2023 reading year with two books of fiction, both first novels by authors I hope to see more from in future: from Detroit, Shifting Through Neutral, by Bridgett M. Davis, and from Idaho, Winter Range (a novel set in rural Montana), by Claire Davis.

 

On the last day of the year, I began what will be the first title on my Books Read 2024 list, a memoir by Susan Straight entitled The Country of Women, and I cannot say enough about this author. I did say a bit back on November 2, but since then I have read another of her novels (Mecca, her most recent) and have been devouring her memoir, a long love letter addressed to her three daughters, telling them everything she knows about previous generations on both sides of their family.

Now, with Bonnie Jo Campbell’s new novel, The Waters, coming out in only days, something that strikes me, despite their different worlds, is how much Campbell and Straight have in common. Both of them are content to live in what “sophisticated” people on the East and West Coasts (or even in the higher echelons of academia in any part of the country) would probably see as poor, backwater communities. Straight was asked in one of her writing classes why she kept turning in stories about working-class people, and Campbell’s fiction has been labeled “rural noir” or “grit lit.” I just shake my head. These women are both brilliant writers, and they make, of their overlooked neighborhoods and neighbors, fiction that rings true and important for the same reasons that any fiction rings true and important: the characters are people whose lives are fraught with challenge, who are sometimes (not always) noble even in failure, families that are, as much as any other, Americans, all of them together making up not a melting pot but a rich, many-flavored stew -- vivid characters who come alive on the pages and live in our minds and hearts after we close the books. I should probably add that Straight and Campbell’s works are also noteworthy for portrayals of strong women. So whatever your gender or orientation, if you are weary of the women in Henry James or Ernest Hemingway, or if you simply want literature that includes more layers of complex and diverse humanity, make 2024 the year that you discover Bonnie Jo Campbell and Susan Straight. 

 

Make it also, please, a year of enchantment, if you can. Pick up a pencil or paintbrush or a flute or guitar, go for a walk in the woods or on the beach or just around the block, and leave the to-do lists in a desk drawer. Get lost, if only in a dream. Explore, if only with a paper map. 

We won’t always be here. Don’t overlook the wonderful in ordinary life. Today we are alive, and that is beautiful.

Home, Sweet Home

Postscript: 

 

I’ve gone back mentally over my holidays and decided they definitely deserve a higher rating than I’d been giving them. When people asked, I was saying, “Not bad.” Well, the time was much better than “not bad.” 

 

From the people I fed to the people who fed me, from the bookstore customer who brought his tools to put one of my bookcases back into working order to friends who invited my dog to their homes, from quiet hours cooking in my “Paris kitchen” to outdoor rambles in the countryside that has seen so little snow that I haven’t had to have my driveway plowed a single time yet. Messages of holiday greetings to and from distant loved ones. People who found their way from faraway to Dog Ears Books. My own reading at home. Those peaceful, dark country roads with occasional outdoor holiday lights on homes passed. The dog park and the beach. My little Charlie Brown tree on Waukazoo Street and my much tinier tree at home. And so much more!

 

My holidays were good. As for this new year just begun, it’s a wonderful life, and I don’t want to waste it, so my friends, let us be light to one another.

"When it's cold outside / I got the month of May...."

Post-postscript:

Interview with Bonnie Jo Campbell here.
Interview with Susan Straight here. 

Many more to be found online -- just search for the authors by name.

Of Prayer and Fishing

 

Tying flies brings the composure of prayer. It is a composure that begins in the fingertips. The composure of angling is different, where equanimity comes through the eyes, the angler concentrating on her float or her fly, anticipating the take. The composure that comes from tying flies does not begin in sight. It begins in blindness….

 

…The anchor of the well-tied fly is the thread, and the anchor of the tranquil mind is the tension in the thread. No matter how scattered my spirit becomes during a day of wayward winds, the tying of flies gathers it together. Tying readies it for prayer.

 

- John Gubbins, Profound River

 

Such are the satisfying ruminations of a 15th-century gentlewoman, narrator of John Gubbins’s novel Profound River, a character whose lack of dowry helped her decide to enter the Order of St. Benedict in a convent near the town of St. Albans where she eventually rose to the rank of prioress. 

 

The fictional Dame Juliana is all the more fascinating in that her character is based on (although some doubt has been raised) an actual person. Called the “Mother of Fly Fishing,” the historical Juliana Berners, born in 1381, invented and perfected during her lifetime the art of “fysshing wyth an angle,” using that art for years to feed her sisters in the convent. (You see which side I am taking in the historical controversy!) Her written work on the subject, moreover, her Treatyse on Fysshing Wyth an Angle, interposed in the treatise on heraldry in The Boke of St. Albans, published by Wynken de Worde (who had apprenticed as printer to the iconic William Caxton of London), was the first printed book in the English language on fishing, and the entire book was probably her work.

 

The town of St. Albans in the 15th century, as the author has his narrator describe it, depended largely on what we in northern Michigan today would call tourism, although in that earlier time and distant place the tourists were pilgrims. Having come often long distances to view and pay their respects to the bones of St. Albans, Britain’s first martyr to Christianity, once in the area they had perforce to be lodged and fed — and they were also plied with plenty of drink and religious memorabilia for sale. Pilgrims and sheep, we are told, were the backbone of the economy of St. Albans, and Gubbins brings a welcome liveliness to complicated details of religious, secular, and royal claims to property and independence.

 

But it is the passages on fishing and on Dame Juliana’s personal history and reflections that rightly take center stage -- lengthy and enthralling riverside scenes as the prioress makes endless minute observations on hatches and weather, effects of light on water, and the habits of insects and fish. The language is specific, and we are transported far beyond the page to the out-of-doors of centuries ago, a world so changed in some ways and yet changeless in others. Dame Juliana has seen many changes in her own lifetime, in the natural as well as in the political world, and so the author has her musing generally on faith and earth’s abundance -- “Our sense that we belong in the world is more ancient than our faith”— and reflecting on the world’s “extravagant generosity,” all of it taken as gifts from God. 

 

Our ancestors counted on the annual runs of thousands upon thousands of salmon, wilderness forests forever rustling with coursing deer and boar, soaring flocks of geese and ducks blotting out the sun, gushing pure springs of water, and so many other signs of God’s interest in us. …Such signs bolstered our ancestors’ faith in the divine….

 

Dame Juliana speculates on how the diminishment of such plenty, which has evidently already begun in her lifetime, may affect a human sense of being at home in the world. She sees religious liturgies built up in compensation for that earlier sense of belonging and importance. 

 

When these signs [of God’s interest in us] dim and disappear, when air and water threaten us, when wilderness forests are leveled to a bleak horizon, then our sense of security will disappear altogether. And we shall overtax our faith to salve our profound loneliness.

 

Some might find the character’s musings on a diminishment of nature as evidence of “presentism,” a sin historians commit when they inject sensibilities and ideas from their own time into events long past. In a lesser writer, the accusation would find a readier target, but such are the obvious intelligence and independence of the narrator Gubbins has created that we readily accept her taking a longer view of history than would most of her contemporaries. There is the matter of the audience for this book, also, which Gubbins no doubt considered. Published in the United States in 2012, and in Utah, part of what once seemed, to some, America’s “limitless” West but now a region where the limits of natural resources are only too obvious and subject to competing interests, the novel's passages on diminishing plenty are entirely appropriate. 

 

Descriptions and stories about hunting and fishing have always lent themselves to metaphor. When Juliana tells us, “Difficult fish are the angler’s best master,” because the angler’s mind tends to see patterns and seek predictability, whereas “each river, each pool in that river, and each and every fish” offer individuality, we can be fairly certain that the lessons she takes from the old trout under the bridge will serve her well in resisting the abbey’s greedy desire to rob the convent of its independence.

 

Serendipity put this novel in my path. I can account for it no other way. And as I read, fly-fishing friends past and present come to my mind, along with gardeners and hikers, artists, pilgrims, those who practice meditation in one way or another, devout religious friends, and, finally, anyone who appreciate not only history but also beautiful writing. And joy. 

 

My day courses with feeling. I would never banish a one, and as a follower of Holy Benedict, I am not asked to banish any….

 

The hours with their psalms order my affections. Countless small joys – the breath of the morning breeze carrying the fragrance of roses, the moist smell of a riverbank, soft drops of rain on my face, our voices changing as one the hour’s psalms, the smiles on my sisters’ lips, a well-turned stitch, a countryside shrouded in fog, a heartfelt prayer – all become a river of feeling, transforming by the hour my deepest affections.

 

Nature not to be mistrusted or felt as alien, but to be loved as a river of gifts. As Wendell Berry has written, it all begins with affection. 

Postscript 11/12/2021

 

In this morning’s wee dark hours I came to the last page of the novel, Profound River. Going on to pursue the author’s fascinating essay, “Who Was Dame Juliana Berners?” at the end of the book, I found myself falling back asleep and reawakening several times, as happens so often in my early dark reading; during my waking spells, however, I was closely focused on the essay (which, by the way, won a national award from no less than the British Studies affiliate of the American Historical Association), happy to have such a strong argument for the historical reality of the author’s strong character. So that was all good. 

 

A glossary precedes the historical essay, and following it is a single page of suggested readings. – And then comes the final “About the Author” page, where I learn to my delight that “John Gubbins lives with his wife, Carol, alongside the Escanaba River in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan”! (I guess if I'd read the Acknowledgements at the beginning of the book I would have known this from the start.) He lives in Michigan! Surely we have friends and acquaintances in common! Suddenly I am overcome, thinking of so many dear friends, living and dead, but all of them alive and lively in my heart and mind. 

 

Did my friend, the late Chris Garthe, know John Gubbins?

Then, too, there are more books by John Gubbins, including one very recent, and that is always any writer’s best gift to readers.

How I Am (Already) (a Little) Like a Farmer

Contented cattle

 I lay awake most of the night, tossing restlessly, quizzing myself on prices and inventory, worried whether anyone would even shop with me or appreciate the food that I’d worked so hard to grow. At the same time, I worried that we might be so busy I’d need to serve two lines at once. The uncertainty only fueled my anxiety. 

 ...  

...Filled with nervous energy, we speculated about what the customers would think of us and reminisced about how far we had already come. I couldn’t ignore the butterflies in my stomach.  

-       Forrest Pritchard, Gaining Ground: A Story of Farmers’ Markets, Local Food, and Saving the Family Farm

The quotes above were Forrest recalling the first time he and his father trucked grass-fed beef, pastured chickens, and fresh eggs to market, hoping to realize a profit. A few chapters later he recounts his experience at another market in a different town, where two women asked innumerable questions about the pullet eggs for sale, growing more and more amused by the minute.

The two of them enjoyed a long laugh, leaning against each other as they walked away from my stand. They didn’t buy anything. I ended up selling about sixty dollars’ worth of food that day, including three cartons of Itty Bitties [the pullet eggs] at a dollar apiece. I could have turned more of a profit selling grape slushies at the local convenience store.

Last Friday morning, when I woke in the dark with more than enough time to do my morning tasks and got up to read a while first, Forrest’s stories brought tears to my eyes. It wasn’t that I felt sorry for him (and they were certainly not tears of laughter) but that I recognized from my bookselling experience what he must have felt: Here are my precious offerings, invested with my time and energy – with my life! – and people are just walking on? Entertained?  Ah, yes! I'll probably never forget the well-dressed woman who asked so many curious questions about my business and then turned to her well-dressed husband and exclaimed in delight, "What a cute hobby!" And they bought nothing.

But while some people have simply walked by – or driven by – or strolled in and out again empty-handed – enough visitors to Dog Ears Books have become customers that, five locations and 21 years later, I'm still in business in Northport. As Pritchard realized early in his farming career, it isn’t enough to raise high-quality food -- or, for me, to stock high-quality books. In order to stay in business, one must have buyers. 

My customers of the past 21 years, though, have been much, much more than merely buyers. Many of these loyal independent bookstore patrons have become good friends. Some live nearby, while others visit only once a year, but our various connections and reconnections through books and dogs and other common interests discovered in conversation mean a lot on both sides -- even (I'll be honest here) when we can't immediately recall one another's names.

Friendships with writers have flourished in the bookstore, too. (And yes, writers buy books, too!) I had a few writer friends back in Kalamazoo days but have met many more through my bookstore than I would have come to know without it. What marvelous people they are! So appreciative! So generous!

Poets! Poetry! In 1993, in the little shed down the street where the huge bowling alley and bar/restaurant complex now stands, on those summer days that always began, back then, with butterflies in my stomach (oh, Forrest, I know those butterflies well!), over and over again I was surprised and pleased at the number of people who asked, “Do you have a poetry section?” And yes, we did!  So having 13 poets (a baker’s dozen) on Friday the 13^th of June, anticipating by a few weeks our official July 4 anniversary, seemed an appropriate way to celebrate our 21 years in business. Here is post #1, in case you missed it, and here is post #2, for a closer introduction to each poet with us on Friday.

What could be more special? Anne-Marie Oomen, Mary Ann Samyn, and Teresa Scollon have done readings with me in recent years past (follow links for each name to revisit their visits to Dog Ears Books); the other guest writers I met on Friday for the first time.

Friday the 13^th, 2014, was a day that will shine in my memory as a once-in-my-lifetime event. Many superlative Michigan poets and an appreciative, standing-room-only local audience. Truly, it seems reality, and not mere wording, to say that Dog Ears Books has come of age this season, 21 years to date from our modest beginning. 

Faith, hope, hard work, and appreciative customers: these are what save family farms and independent bookstores alike.

Managing My Blood Pressure

Warning: My post today may be like a confusing tennis match, back and forth between economics and poetry, my blood pressure rising perilously and being brought back to the level. But if you can't be dragged kicking and screaming into a discussion on economics, just scroll past those parts and take in the poetry breaks. They are the real meat, anyway.

The Perils of Economic Realism

Not for the world would I give up reading serious nonfiction, but sometimes the difficulty is as much -- or more -- in the effect of the reading on my nerves, shall we say, as in comprehending the ideas. For instance, recently I’ve been reading a book that sends my blood pressure soaring. It was published in 2012, and I can only imagine what the author, Hedrick Smith, would say if he were writing Who Stole the American Dream today. What do YOU think is responsible for the enormous and widening chasm between the growing pool of Americans in poverty and the hyper-rich at the top of the heap? Is it simply the result of technological growth and “progress,” the “Invisible Hand” of classical economics at work? Do differences in education across socioeconomic strata account for the gap? How about financial irresponsibility at the bottom and deep wisdom at the apex of the social pyramid?

Hedrick Smith believes it’s none of the above. He points to 1978 as the turning point, for it was then, he says, that large corporations across America joined forces and began their own very interested political activism, pouring money into campaigns and subsequently, with their successes, reversing the growth of the middle class seen in the previous three decades. A secondary cause, in Hedrick’s view, was a new corporate ethos. No longer were business and workers seen as having common interests. Now a CEO was focused (and continues to focus) almost exclusively on short-term gains for shareholders. In the glorification of predatory capitalism, ruthlessness is admired as strength, and it pays off in CEO pay, bonuses, and “golden parachutes.”

It makes sense that a CEO would be compensated at a higher rate than a worker on the line. Of course. The boss gets paid the most. Who would argue? From 1978 to 2013, however, inflation-adjusted compensation for CEOs increased 937 percent, double the gains in the stock market for the same period and in marked contrast to wages, which gained only 10.2 percent. Contrast this to 1965, when the CEO to worker pay ratio stood at 20:1.

The standard argument for colossal CEO compensation packages is that a CEO is responsible for the growth and success of his or her (usually his) corporation. Nonsense, says Hedrick Smith. First of all, they receive the same compensation whether they succeed or fail to enhance the price of stock. Second, compensation packages are awarded by boards generally composed of other CEOs and former CEOs. Third, every company wants to look good, and if their CEO’s pay is below average, they believe their company image will suffer, so for corporate image’s sake a CEO must be richly rewarded. Cutting jobs, closing plants, shipping those jobs and facilities overseas where costs are lower – all cut costs in the short term and fuel the vicious cycle of increased unemployment and poverty at the bottom of the pyramid at the same time that the apex ascends ever higher.

Take a Break for Poetry!

But I can only read a few pages at a time and take some sketchy notes before I need a break. It is just so discouraging, the power of money to pound everyone else into the ground! I spent Sunday like an invalid, relaxing with a couple of totally “fluffy” novels (between yard work sessions) but began the new week stronger, with poems and essays of Philip Levine, Detroit native and U.S. poet laureate in 2011. Oh, heaven, this Michigan voice! I stretch out on the front porch after supper with The Last Shift and read and breathe. And it is enough.

Nose Back to the Grindstone

Okay, but what about tax cuts for the wealthy? What do you make of the claim that such tax cuts will translate into business investment and new startups, creating jobs and lifting all boats? Experience, history, and numerous economic studies fail to support the claim. More money left in the pockets of the rich does not trickle down. Hedrick cites analysts who agree that “high concentrations of wealth correlate with poor economic performance in the long run,” and he writes of the years “2009 to 2012 as evidence that offering low tax rates to promote investment did not work.”

Even former Fed chairman Alan Greenspan was moved to comment in 2011 that Corporate America was sitting on nearly $2 trillion in idle capital. Greenspan asserted that the reluctance of business leaders to spend on new plants and equipment and on hiring more workers “accounted for almost all of the rise in unemployment” from 2007 to 2011.

Go back and re-read that quote above, after reminding yourself that Alan Greenspan was the darling economist of Ayn Rand, hardly a friend to taxes on wealth. There is a radio announcement these days for a firm specializing in “wealth management.” The firm promises to keep and grow your family wealth, and whenever I hear it, I think of the old ads for Stop-Leak. Know what I mean? Why would the wealthy want their fortunes trickling down?

A Poet’s Life

Time for another cooling-down period. Reading an entire volume of Philip Levine’s poetry, cover to cover, I knew I would be coming back to it in quiet moments and savoring more slowly the individual poems, but for now, my busy season of the year heating up faster than expected (and my blood pressure soaring from that economics reading), I turn to Levine’s memoir essays, My Lost Poets: A Life in Poetry. The first line of the title essay, for me, instantly stops the rush of time. “I composed my first poems in the dark.” Isn’t that wonderful? That sentence is a poem. I smile and breathe and continue.

The poet-to-be was fourteen years old, a Detroit boy, son of immigrants, and he did not yet know poetry, but it had already found him.

In truth I never thought of these early compositions as poems: I never thought of them as anything but what they were: secret little speeches addressed to the moon when the moon was visible and when the moon was not visible to all those parts of creation that crowded around and above me as well as those parts that eluded me, the parts I had no name for, no notion of except for the fact they were listening.

What Levine writes of his first attempts at writing poetry, without having a name to give to his “speeches addressed to the moon,” instantly made me think of another Michigan poet, Diane Seuss. She too – and this was years ago, long before My Lost Poets would be published – said that she didn’t know, when young, that the pieces she was writing were poems. She had no name for them, either. It’s a different way of coming to poetry, very different from growing up in a home filled with serious literature and wanting to do what the writers in those books did.

A high school teacher introduced Philip Levine to “Arms and the Boy,” by Wilfrid Owen and loaned him a collection of Owen’s work.

I could lie and say those poems changed my attitude toward and my understanding of the importance of poetry. No, what it changed was my attitude toward myself.

And isn’t that a great and important gift to receive from poetry, a gift from a poet who had more to give than his own reflection?

At the first poetry reading young Philip Levine attended, in Webster Hall at Wayne University [not yet called Wayne State], he was bowled over by the first line read by a fellow student, Bernard Strempek. Strempek was one of Levine’s “lost poets” in that he died young, leaving only “enough poetry for one tiny, posthumous collection of satiric, hard-edged poems....”The line that so dazzled Levine on that first reading, “When in a mirror love redeems my eyes,” did not appear in the posthumous volume and may “live now only in this essay.” Stop and think what that means: a young, aspiring poet reads his work to a small audience, and another young, aspiring poet is so struck by the first line that he never forgets it, and later, in an essay, he shares the line with the world, crediting the friend of his youth, now deceased, whose name we would not otherwise know.

Shakespeare wrote, “So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” How much more fitting for a poet than a graveyard tombstone, to be immortalized in the written word!

Gathering Up My Courage Again...

The picture of a CEO sending manufacturing jobs overseas (while his own personal wealth skyrockets) is already a somewhat old-fashioned figure, because today’s American economy is not all that focused on making anything. Financial markets are the big thing now, finance overtaking manufacturing in the late 1980s, its profits accounting for 46 percent of total U.S. corporate profits in 2005. And this making of money is built on – can you guess? Debt. There are huge profits to be made by servicing debt, as we are all becoming more and more aware. Glass-Steagall (the Banking Act of 1933, inspired by the Crash of 1929) was repealed in 1999. We all know what happened in 2008. Now Congress is poised to repeal the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010. It seems our memories grow ever shorter as time goes on....

Better Late Than Never to Meet a Poet

My husband knew poet Philip Levine slightly. I wish I’d known him. From what little I’ve read, he sounds like a wonderful guy. A Michigan poet, Detroit native, poet laureate (2011), and David knew – how could I have missed reading him for so long, only to “discover” him now, after his death?

It’s all right. Many a reader is unknown to a poet whose works the reader loves, and many a time it is just that, the time, when a poet’s work enters one’s life that matters deeply. And poetry, my friends, is the real world, too. The money runs out, the poets and the financiers die, but the poems live on.

Where Did the Good Times Go?

Who Stole the American Dream? Part II

[Find Part I of my book review here.]

From virtuous circle to vicious, our road did not reverse direction overnight in a180-degree hairpin turn. The direction change for the American public was gradual, a long, slow curve, easy to miss at its beginning. But a beginning there surely had to be, and Hedrick Smith locates the opening salvo in 1971.

History often has hidden beginnings. There is no blinding flash of light in the sky to mark a turning point, no distinctive mushroom cloud signifying an atomic explosion that will forever alter human destiny. Often a watershed is crossed in some gradual and obscure way so that most people do not realize that an unseen shift has moved them into a new era, reshaping their lives, the lives of their generation, and the lives of their children, too. Only decades later do historians, like detectives, sift through the confusing strands of the past and discover a hitherto unknown pregnant beginning.  

One such hidden beginning, with powerful impact on our lives today, occurred in 1971, with “the Powell Memorandum.” 

What were you doing in 1971 when Lewis Powell issued his corporate manifesto? I was the mother of a toddler, living quietly—without television, by choice--in a modest middle-class neighborhood on the west side of Traverse City, Michigan. I tended my first vegetable garden (my toddler son planted beans at random) and a grape arbor, we had neighbors with lots of kids, and I walked two blocks to a little neighborhood grocery store, pulling my son in a wagon or sled or holding his hand as we walked together. I guarantee you, Lewis Powell’s memorandum was not on my radar; potty-training and Scrabble were high bidders for my attention that year.

In Lewis Powell’s view of 1971 America, the business community, albeit thriving, was the victim of government regulation, trade unions, and consumer activism, and he was fed up. Hedrick Smith writes:

Political mutiny [on the part of business] had been brewing for some time. By the early 1970s, the free market fundamentalism of economist Milton Friedman, a Nobel laureate from the University of Chicago, was giving new legitimacy to pro-business laissez-faire economics in academic circles.

But the academic world is one thing, the business world another, and it was Lewis Powell’s rallying cry that energized business leaders, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, to pool resources, raise additional funds, and organize to change the climate for business in Washington, DC. And that was the beginning of the end of bipartisanship in Congress. What we have now began then.

Is it only coincidence that Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was first published in 1957? For a time Milton Friedman, I happen to recall from my days as a subscriber to Rand’s newsletter, was one of her darlings (bitter breakups were a feature of her life, it seems: she did not tolerate disagreement), and Rand’s fiction and philosophy continue to attract adherents in the 21^st century. Her philosophy is consistent and simple: Selfishness is good. Among online sources, I see in one place her characters described as “larger-than-life heroes and villains.” As a former fan and a lifelong reader of fiction, I would say a more accurate reading would be that hers are larger-than-life heroes and smaller-than-life villains.

But let’s move along for now and come back to later to Ayn Rand.

Aside from the national business community and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the road for the rest of us takes only a slight bend in 1971, and along the way the scenery doesn’t seem to change much. Americans continue to fly flags, pay taxes, vote, purchase cars and homes, and, when they can, send their kids to college. Throughout the 1970s we are all, that is to say, “going forward,” as today’s ubiquitous phrase has it, which means no more than moving into the future, which means no more than that, as human beings, we cannot escape time. The question isn’t whether or not we will “go forward” but into what kind of country are we going? What future are we preparing, we free people, what kind of society are we choosing (if only by default), for our grandchildren?

In Hedrick Smith’s book, Part II, “Dismantling the Dream,” examines in depth and great detail how America’s labor force was cut off from its natural home in America’s companies. Union-busting, layoffs, and plant closings did not put companies out of business or hurt their bottom lines: plants and jobs simply moved offshore (initially to Mexico, later to Asia), where a much cheaper labor force translated to bigger profits and higher investor returns. Nothing else counted. Nothing else mattered. And that entailed another shift in thinking on the part of American business.

The legal ‘personhood’ of a corporation is one of the great moral questions of our age. My generation was taught that with rights come responsibilities. Cliché, right? Well, within the word ‘responsibility’ is a small, vital core: ‘response’. We are instructed to respond to others. Response is part of the meaning of responsibility.

Read now a statement from Milton Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom (1962), quoted in Hedrick Smith’s book:

“Few trends could so thoroughly undermine the very foundations of our free society as the acceptance by corporate officials of a social responsibility other than to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.”

Responsibility to loyal workers? To customers of their products? To a community that provided infrastructure and, very often, tax breaks? Responsibility to the future? “Subversive,” says Friedman, as Ayn Rand applauds. A corporation’s only responsibility is “to make as much money for their stockholders as possible.”

Obviously, no single person bears sole responsibility for dismantling the American dream, but Ayn Rand and her acolytes and followers, Milton Friedman among them, certainly did their part, and Rand’s providing a justifying philosophy, within American literature, cannot be underestimated. It is a seductive message for adolescents to hear--You don’t owe anything to anyone; there is no such thing as ‘duty’--and I fell under its spell myself in my late teens and early twenties, as “Who is John Galt?” appeared on university blackboards between classes. What a siren song!

As a writer of novels, Ayn Rand had no interest in literary realism; romanticism served her philosophical purposes much better. I find it interesting, however, that her handsome, iconoclastic, willful and gifted protagonists share an important trait with homo economicus, the abstract individual of classical economics, a rational actor pursuing always his own interests.

In classic economic theory, from Adam Smith onward, individual pursuit of self-interest, if unhampered by government interference, somehow results in everyone being better off. Rand made classic economic theory the bedrock of her moral philosophy. Selfishness, she argued, is the primary human virtue. And so her protagonists are of heroic stature, their enemies little, scurrying vermin who preach altruism only to cover their own incompetence.

How does the Smith/Rand model work out in practice in a global economy? What kind of world do we create when we grant legal protections of ‘personhood’ to corporations and then hold them to only a single responsibility, that of making as much money as possible for stockholders? Poor Ms. Rand! She envisioned men and women driven by inner standards of excellence. She did not anticipate a CEO culture funding its own golden parachutes with a flood of ever-cheaper goods manufactured overseas.

Not all Americans lost their jobs, of course, and some who lost jobs found new ones. But not all jobs are equal. Companies began dropping health insurance for employees, and employers found huge savings in shifting the remaining American workforce from company pensions to 401K plans, a shift that is a story in itself. Businesses claimed pensions were costing them too much.

But digging into the records, Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Schultz found that wasn’t really true. In fact, pension plans were moneymakers [my emphasis] for many a big company. In the bull market of the 1990s, America’s blue ribbon companies did so well investing their employee pension funds that many built up huge surpluses, above their obligations to employees, without contributing a cent of company cash for a decade or more [again, my emphasis added]. ... 

What’s more, some of America’s largest corporations were able to shift pension fund gains indirectly to their profit lines and, Schultz reported, a few legally took advantage of loose and poorly enforced accounting rules to siphon off money from their employee pension funds to finance portions of their corporate downsizing, restructuring, and mergers and acquisitions [my emphasis again].

Debt, bankruptcy, “easy” credit—the 1990s were rife with bright red danger flags, but in the excitement of the “dotcom bubble,” who wanted to be a naysayer? Wasn’t the reinvention of self within the reach of every American? Couldn’t anyone with brains get rich? Wasn’t poverty simply a result of failure to work hard and/or take risks?

Well, that’s enough for today. Our brains, like that frog in the pot of water on the stove, are beginning to simmer dangerously, aren’t they? We need to cool down and come back to this story another day.

Thanks to everyone who managed to read my entire post today! Comments, questions, corrections, and objections are all welcome.