The Rake Magazine

Tag: literature

  • Paying for Crime

    The Minneapolis City Council proved itself to be more politically adept than the Minneapolis Library Board in early December when it warded off the pleas for permanent funding of the Minneapolis Library system. Instead of the hoped-for permanent budget increases that had been dangled before the Library Board, the Council instead gave them one year’s worth of funding to keep open three libraries that had been proposed for closing—that and the promise from Mayor Rybak to lobby the Legislature for more. 

    Given the previous record of Rybak at the Legislature, I wouldn’t hold my breath. If I were on the Library Board, (disclosure: I am on the Friends of the Library Board) I wouldn’t give the Council the political cover they seek, either. Keeping those libraries open for a year while Rybak begs for state money just lets the Council off the hook. They, not the Library Board, determine the library budget. If the Council wanted to find permanent funding for libraries, they could. Instead, we get funding for more liquor license inspectors (to speed approval of licenses for Council candidate donors,) and an aide for education policy for Mayor Rybak, although the Mayor’s office has nothing to do with the schools.

    The most maddening component of the debate was the Council’s concerted positioning of permanent library funding against funds for additional police officers. To paraphrase the Council’s argument: do you want three more libraries, or forty-three more police officers? Putting it more vividly, Council Member Don Samuels, representative of Minneapolis’s most-likely-to-be-murdered-in ward, said this: “When you are a person at the other end of a gun … the only use for a book is to throw it at them, or block a bullet with it.”

    Is the choice really books or cops? Perhaps the Minneapolis Council could call their counterparts in St. Paul, who, in their budget passed in early December, somehow found funding both to hire more police officers and to expand Library hours. Of course, St. Paul has a strong mayor system, and Minneapolis has a weak mayor system. Given that context, Chris Coleman and R.T. Rybak both seem to be ideally suited to their roles. Coleman gives St. Paul open libraries; Rybak gives Minneapolis Bonnie Bleskachek.

    In June 2005, Rybak made the following statement about how he was addressing increasing crime: “We need to remember that these recent murders have been driven by people living high-risk lifestyles: kids buying and selling drugs and guns. Minneapolis is a safe city for people who are not engaged in buying and selling drugs and guns.” Minneapolis didn’t become an “unsafe” city until a few other things happened. First, Rybak’s opponent in the 2005 mayoral race, Peter McLaughlin, started making points by calling for more cops. Then, Michael Zebuhr was murdered in Uptown while walking with his mother, and Alan Reitter was killed in Downtown while walking with his fiancée. So, as long as the “high-risk lifestyle” meant “African American high-risk lifestyle,” we didn’t need more cops—but when white people walking on the street get killed, we’re just going to have to close some libraries and address the crime problem head-on.

    Minneapolis needs both more cops and more library hours. It’s particularly unfair to the police and disingenuous in the extreme to make it an either/or question. The Minneapolis Police Department, just like the Library Board, has been handed an impossible task since the city began to lose Local Government Aid funding from the state in 2002. Police staff levels declined just as precipitously as library hours. After a decade-low number of forty-three homicides and 1732 aggravated assaults in 2001 (when there were over 900 Minneapolis cops), the numbers of both crimes have ticked up to the point where, as of this writing, we have had fifty-nine murders and over 2700 aggravated assaults in 2006. When the forty-three cops authorized this year are added to the force, on top of the seventy added as a result of last year’s campaign promises, Minneapolis will be back up to 893.

    According to Deputy Chief Rob Allen, the restoration of the force will allow more “proactive and preventative” police work. For example, he expects that the Juvenile Crime Unit, which had been disbanded for lack of manpower, will be restored. He also hopes that the investigative squad will restore the ten detectives who had been cut. “Case loads are overwhelming,” he said.

    Without being asked, Allen volunteered, “We’re conscious that the city has made the sacrifice to bring back the police department [staffing levels]. It’s critically important that we’re putting our officers where they’re needed, and that we’re efficiently using our people, otherwise that sacrifice is in vain. I don’t like being pitted against library hours, and it’s important for people to know that our officers are aware of that.”

    We do know that. And we also know that no sentient person thinks we need fewer cops in Minneapolis. What we do need is less cynical manipulation of budget priorities by the Mayor and City Council. Don’t hold your breath for that, either.

  • The Sixties—Dead By Self-Inflicted Gunshot

    The moment flickered past while I realized that the last of them was gone, the last of the sixties counterculture iconoclasts, those world shakers and rainbow revolutionaries: Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, John Lennon, Abbie Hoffman, Edward Abbey, Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Hunter Thompson—all gone, the last by his own hand.

    I met Thompson once, but I barely remember it. Part of it is time. Part of it is that in those days—the early nineties—the aging revolutionaries of the sixties were my mentors, my heroes, and I emulated them. The key to their genius, I thought, was their excesses, without understanding that their excesses were mostly countermeasure to the pain of genius. My memories from those years are washed with a psychoactive rose-colored tinge—fleeting, gossamer—like cheesy wedding photos.

    Hunter Thompson, like his heroes Ernest Hemingway and Mark Twain, was an American journalist turned fiction stylist, another who fearlessly made himself a character in his own myth-making, carefully fictionalizing his own persona. When Hemingway killed himself, Thompson was twenty-three, still a young, ambitious, and undiscovered writer. He traveled to Ketchum, Idaho, to see the place where his hero stood in the foyer of his home, lifted a custom-made, silver-inlaid shotgun from the rack, put the muzzle to his head and tripped the trigger. Thompson saw a rack of elk’s horns hanging outside above the doorway. He took them, a figurative torch-passing, a talisman.

    Thompson’s journey to Idaho was not unlike my own to Eugene, Oregon. In 1990, I went to the town of my hero, Ken Kesey, to find a torch. In a classic illustration of why we must be careful what we wish for, Kesey passed one to me.

     

    I enrolled in a novel-writing course Kesey taught at the University of Oregon. True to form, he taught by doing. His approach was to co-author an actual novel with thirteen creative-writing students. (Our experimental, collectively written book was published as Caverns, by O.U. Levon—U.O. Novel, spelled backward.) Kesey’s nature, like Thompson’s, was to up the ante, to increase the stakes, to imbue the mundane with the mythical, to inflate, magnify, and intensify.

    The motives of both writers were pure, almost childlike and naive; they were simple seekers of truth, like modern-day Huck Finns. Mix this with thirty years of fame, pursuits by police, pundits, and groupies, some jail time, and harsh literary critique. Boisterous in public, Kesey and Thompson were professional introspectives, molding myths with id and ego. As a consequence, they had to live up to their creations, which became golems that lumbered behind, pursuing and ultimately consuming them.

    I didn’t understand this when I met Kesey. I wanted fame. But Kesey certainly knew the monster pursued him. He intimately recognized my desire, “those burning eyes,” as he called them, and so he allowed me to tag along a on number of celebrity-sprinkled adventures so I could write about them. My tape deck, notebook, and camera in tow, I rode with Kesey and the Merry Pranksters down to the Bay Area for a 1991 sequel to The Original Acid Tests. Among other things, we pranked the Smithsonian Institution, who wanted Further, Kesey’s famous multicolored schoolbus, for an exhibit. We campaigned for Wavy Gravy when he ran for mayor of Berkeley. I tried to write about it all, but the articles didn’t sell. Kesey gave me a job as a farm hand at his spread in Pleasant Hill, Oregon. Generous.

    One day he called and told me that Hunter Thompson was coming for a University of Oregon Cultural Forum gig. “Bring your tape deck; get what you can get.” The fantasy was to pick up Hunter Thompson in Further, its interior tricked out like a Las Vegas casino. There would be Tiffany lamps, topless waitresses, chips, ice, Chivas Regal to complement other neurological ordnance, and a green felted eight-seat poker table—in short, everything needed to welcome the good Doctor of Gonzo and to hold an incredible high-level summit between two of the sixties’ highest minds. That was the fantasy. The reality never jibed.

    Kesey published a calendar a year later, in 1992, with Thompson’s face on a monitor at the center of the poker table with the Thompson quote: “They dragged me aboard that bus . . . forced me to drink alcohol and gamble . . . then after I won, the twisted swine stole all the money . . . ,” which is pretty much what happened.

    My role as observer put me outside the action, an uncomfortable place. I was not adding to Kesey’s story, but taking from it, energizing the monster that pursued him. Even writers that bestow immortality on their subjects—think of Jack Kerouac, who immortalized Neal Cassady in On the Road—are fashioning little golems that shadow their subjects the rest of their lives.

    Thompson’s official appearance was like a political stump speech without a campaign. Fans called out questions and comments and Thompson rambled. The Pranksters called the night after a few hours, loading Thompson onto a gurney and whisking him from the hall. Swirling behind us was a vortex of local journalists and politicians, wide-eyed groupies and students, drunks and freaks, bikers, and Mad Dog-crazed trolls out from under their bridges to toast their knight and champion, many of whom climbed onto the bus and rode out to Kesey’s farm.

    The trolls took bottles from the kitchen and faded out into the swamp in the first hour. The other reporters and students folded about 2 a.m., the groupies lying prone on the DayGlo bean-bag chairs scattered around the living room. The politicians, more familiar with madness and depravity, left shortly after 3 a.m.

    It wasn’t until after 4 a.m.—after a brief incident with an old eight-gauge shotgun with side-by-side barrels like three-foot Coke cans, a goose killer that, happily, Kesey had no shells for; after the vodka, Wild Turkey, and Chivas bottles were empty and a bottle of cheap cabernet was still hopefully half full; after Thompson had requisitioned Kesey’s old Mercury for an early morning roundup of the cows, who lowed and bawled over the roar of the over-revved engine, loud and abusive in the early-morning quiet, which also stirred the iridescent, aggressive, and ill-mannered peacocks that Thompson had once given Kesey to serve as watchdogs, which in turn riled the neighbor’s roosters, and then their neighbor’s neighbors, creating a circle of unrest spreading like pond ripples in still black waters—it was after all this that Kesey and Thompson turned to their diplomatic and cultural negotiations. I switched on my tape deck and took out my notepad.

    We sat at the Kesey’s kitchen table, which was decorated with sixties relics, baby pictures, and lurid DayGlo swirls, all preserved under layers of yellowing shellac.

    It was February 28, 1991, the day after President George H.W. Bush ordered a cease-fire pending Saddam Hussein’s acceptance of terms. The heady, triumphant end of Desert Storm. Bush rode high in the polls. The other team.

    Kesey: We really have suffered a bad blow these last few years, you know it. A lot of people fought a real battle and we thought we could beat them.

    Thompson: We were fools.

    Kesey: We were fools. We’re in for five bad years. Maybe a whole lot more, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred.

    Thompson: It feels like a long time. Sure, a hundred years.

    Then the talk turned local. The week before, the Grateful Dead had been banned from playing Autzen Stadium at the University of Oregon. A stunning thing. An insult personal and targeted, as close as you could get to banning the local team from their home field. The psychedelic mayhem that trailed the band was no longer welcome at one of the most liberal, hippie-dominated enclaves in the United States—as sure a sign as any that the sixties were finally and completely over. That President Bush’s New World Order reigned.

    Kesey: It’s all about religion. It’s not drugs, it’s religion. These people don’t want heads getting together and feeling a way that is outside the boundaries of any kind of recognized religion. That is the threat. The Grateful Dead have amassed a real bunch of followers that are following them, really, for religious reasons. They really work hard at it.

    Thompson: Jerry Garcia is the one that gets it.

    Kesey: Yeah, he is just a very, very

    enlightened guy.

    Thompson: Jerry is a hard warrior.

    Kesey: Plus, he is a very, very intelligent, hardworking man, working with the best tools he can find at this period in history. And we are privileged to run around in this same time.

    Kesey, who was standing, looked at Thompson and laid a hand on his shoulder. Thompson had just published two books in the last year, and had been getting into his usual trouble with the authorities; earlier that year, his home had been raided and he was charged with five felonies and three misdemeanors, mostly related to illegal substances and explosives.

    Kesey: And the same with you, old timer. Goddamn. You’re a real warrior, and each time I read this stuff of yours, I read it and read it, and read over it and go back to it and look at it and I’m just amazed at it. And I’m the only one who really knows how good it is, I think.

    A crowd from the barn swirled into the kitchen at this point, friends of Kesey’s. They were arguing about the poker winnings.

    Thompson: There was about forty dollars in there.

    Kesey: I had to pay that last guy eight dollars to leave.

    (Laughter.)

    Thompson: So that’s thirty-eight dollars to me.

    Kesey began to do sleight-of-hand tricks with a coin, the quarter flashing across his knuckles, disappearing from one hand and reappearing in the other. He kept talking as he performed the magic, and the group at the table fell silent watching him.

    Kesey: Someone told me, “You have to support your leaders.” And I said, “No! I ought not to support my leaders. That’s not my job. My job is to always go against my leaders.”

    Thompson: No, your job will be to go down in history as a card cheat.

    (Kesey’s concentration was broken. He dropped the coin.)

    Kesey: I would be good at that.

    Thompson: Yeah, but is that the way you want yourself known, he cheated at cards?

    Kesey: I cheated well at cards.

    (Kesey flashed the coin, making it jump from one hand and appear in the other.)

    Kesey: But I always have maintained that this is what literature and art, what everything is about. It’s about that moment when your mind goes boink. That little tiny moment of magic.

    Thompson: Magic is when you get people to think you’re doing something else than what you’re doing with your hands . . . which is just cheating.

    Kesey: Of course! Of course. But cheating is magic.

    Their bravado, this many years later, can be mistaken for vanity, or the bloviations of faded superstars. But what these men had written, and their actions, had made them targets. And they had paid the price, again, and again. In Kesey’s finest novel, Sometimes a Great Notion, the main character grows up with a sign his father nailed above his bed, “Never Give an Inch.” And Kesey never did. Thompson either. Neither of them were political; they were radical, lived radically, wrote radically, and died young. I once asked Kesey what had happened to the sixties. Why the movement lost its steam. His eyes went wide at my naivete. “They threw us all in jail. Every one of us.” I pressed on— maybe their lifestyle had brought the thing down. He took on a harder tone—teacher to student. “If you stand in the spotlight for too long, someone will draw a bead on you. What didn’t you get about John Lennon?”

    That night, Kesey continued the lesson, as the writers talked about spending time in jail, and the cost of being a critic of powerful institutions—the feeling of being watched, even when you’re free.

    Kesey: The job of the writer is to stand out there alone and hammer these things home because nobody else will do it. And most of us writers have stopped. Thompson, you haven’t stopped. Burroughs has not given a goddamn inch. But that all draws heat. They just tried to bust you for it.

    Thompson: These last ten years have seemed like a hundred.

    Kesey: More and more I feel like that is our job. We must not become partisan.

    Thompson: Who “we”? You we, me we or what? Who are we?

    Kesey: You know it’s gotten down to this. Forget what’s just, forget what’s righteous, forget all that stuff, forget everything except the survival of a certain limited small bunch of people that carry the light. So—I made a sign.

    Kesey digs through some of the posters and artwork that lines the wall. He pulls out a sign.

    Kesey: When the war came down, a bunch of people went to the Federal Building in our hometown. Usually you see them out in front of 7-Eleven. They don’t have anything else to do. They beg money and try to pick up dope. They are the peace side. Then over here on the other side are the goddamn redneck, big old bearded sons of bitches and they’re all yelling and waving the flag. So I drove by with this sign.

    (Kesey held up a STOP sign.)

    Kesey: I sat out in the middle of the street, between the two with my sign, and I made enemies of them all.

    (Thompson stabbed his long cigarette in its holder at Kesey.)

    Thompson: He’s the same bastard that tried to persuade me, on the telephone, to call up the Hells Angels. That I could make peace between the Berkeley peace freaks and the Hells Angels.

    Kesey: We came close.

    Thompson: Ahh, no. No, we got to get them together.

    (Laughter.)

    Kesey: Creativity is the only thing that will see us through. Nobody is going to see us through. The fault always has to lie with the poets. When a poet presents a really great vision, the people will follow. You cannot expect the politicians or people in the media to supply the vision. It has to be the poet’s domain.

    The writers talk more about heroes and villains, dying hopes.

    Kesey: But we’re not going to move things like I thought we were back in 1968. I thought we were going to grab the tail of the dinosaur and flip him over on his back, and cut him open, and eat his entrails.

    Thompson: We did pretty good, though. Flipped him hard and he’s still trying to get us for it.

    Kesey: Yeah, we got him on his back, but we couldn’t put the knife in and we didn’t really want to eat his entrails anyway. We just wanted to flip him over, play.

    Thompson: Just flipping him over was fun. And surprisingly easy then. But battle made the monster hard.

    Kesey: There’s two ways you make the world work, with a whip or a carrot. We carry carrots.

    And that is where my tape and notes ended early in the morning of March 1, 1991. The carrot has become an even less effective weapon than it was fourteen years ago, and the duo’s ugly, addled prophesies have played out. Jerry Garcia died in 1995; Timothy Leary in 1996; Allan Ginsberg and William Burroughs in 1997. Kesey died in 2001. And Hunter S. Thompson, sitting in his writing chair, full glass of Chivas at his elbow, his son and grandson in the house, his wife on the phone, put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger on February 20, 2005. He, like his hero Hemingway, ended his life as if it were a fiction, and he the author. Last week, in a private ceremony, he had his ashes shot from a cannon at Willow Creek.

    Before I left his farm for good, in search of my own path, Kesey gave me an I Ching and some coins. I decided to throw the Ching as a meditation on this passing:

    There is no water in the lake;

    The image of EXHAUSTION

    Thus the superior man stakes his life

    On following his will.

  • Can the Public Library (and Democracy) Survive?

    On the third floor of the temporary library in downtown Minneapolis—a retrofitted office building that once housed the Federal Reserve Bank—a skinny man with a shock of white hair paced hurriedly up and down the aisles carrying a bouquet of roses wrapped in a wad of shredded newspaper. He looked disheveled, a little like Sam Shepard on a bad day or, maybe, Hume Cronyn on a good day. Though I hadn’t set foot inside the main library for years, I recognized the man immediately as one of the usual cast of unusual characters that inhabit the downtown branch.

    What the man was doing with the roses was a source of speculation, as was his reason for walking back and forth, over and over, past the same aisles of books. And then, finally, he darted right and disappeared. The man, it turned out, had been waiting for an open seat along the floor’s west wall, where large windows overlook Cancer Survivors Park, with its pathways and small grove of birch trees. Along the wall, apparently cherished among library regulars, there is a row of tables and chairs where mostly men sit and read newspapers or books about collecting baseball cards or negotiating real estate contracts. Everyone with their passions and projects and secret missions. Two mustachioed friends, maybe brothers, spoke Spanish over a vocabulary book. At another station, a would-be professor with white paint splattered on his jeans worked feverishly on a series of handwritten documents, a dense manifesto. Beside a stack of yellow legal pads, there were a packet of Kleenex, a driver’s license, and a Social Security card aligned perfectly with the edge of the table. A few places down, the man with the roses sat erect and gazed outside, flowers in hand. He watched as working men lowered windows from the roof of the new Cesar Pelli-designed main library across the park, just a block away. He leaned in slightly for a sniff.

    As I looked down the line, at the faces gazing out the window or nosing through books, it struck me that none of these people would have been sitting here, would never have enjoyed such a pleasant view, when the temporary library was still the Federal Reserve Bank. The opportunity to gaze down at birch trees, to watch myriad passersby, would have been reserved for managers and executives. Higher-ups. Bureaucrats. But at the library, things are more democratic.

    In fact, the library is the ultimate democratic institution. A person, with or without a library card, can hang around all day long, assuming her beverage has a lid on it, without buying anything or being subjected to a single ad. There are no greeters at the door to acknowledge and assess incoming patrons. On the contrary, library staffers understand that this is your place as much as it is theirs, and you may go about your business fully ignored, which ought to be every person’s right. Unless, of course, you need assistance in finding a book about kite-building, or the ownership tentacles of General Electric. Then, you will have at your disposal a dozen experts, better versed than Google in locating what you need from an enormous store of books, magazines, newspapers, DVDs, videos, CDs, pictures, government documents, pamphlets, websites, and even microfiche. If you don’t remember microfiche, it’s the silent film of information technology, crooked photographs of documents that existed before electronic databases and must be viewed through a special, old-timey machine. There is no keyword search in a microfiche document, no clicking down. Just a reel that sends the pages scrolling by at various speeds.

    Libraries are the face of government as it existed before we started hating government and, therefore, ourselves. It is munificent in the way public agencies simply aren’t anymore. A librarian isn’t going to arrest you. Nor is she or he going to tell you, thumb driving back like an umpire’s, two years and you’re off welfare! There is no punitive or moralistic aspect to the library, only trust and goodwill. The library says, Here, please take any of our millions of volumes for free. We trust you to make good use of them. We trust you to bring them back. All you need is an ID and maybe a phone bill and you’re in.

    These are places for people who want to know; libraries nationwide have seen a steady increase in patronage since at least 1990. They hold a special and sentimental place in the minds of the citizenry and are widely regarded as institutions where browsing and borrowing lead to meaningful knowledge. According to a 2003 study from the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, ninety-four percent of Americans rate their local public library as “very valuable” or “valuable.” The majority even said they’d pay more taxes to support libraries—an average of forty-nine dollars more per year. Currently, taxpayers spend around twenty-five dollars per person, the approximate cost of one new, hardcover book.

    Despite that kind of passionate support, libraries everywhere are falling on hard times. The American Library Association (co-founded back in 1876 by Melville Dewey, namesake of the venerable Dewey decimal system) reports budget cuts of up to fifty percent in at least forty-one states. That means reduced staff and operating hours, and fewer new books on the shelves. In John Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, California, the city’s three libraries will soon close their doors altogether. Minnesota, long a state that prioritized education and literacy, has hardly taken an enlightened view. Across the state, libraries are paring back essential services, thanks to reductions in state funds to cities and counties.

    In 2003, Governor Tim Pawlenty dramatically reduced local government aid in response to a projected state budget deficit. This, rather than violate a no-new-taxes promise he made during his gubernatorial campaign. Those cuts directly impacted libraries, in some cases brutally. When local governments are forced to cut services, libraries seem like an easy target; people get a lot more exercised about police and firefighters and schools. It’s a pattern in nearly all fifty states, and throughout Minnesota. St. Paul, to secure future funding, created a library board and a dedicated city property tax. Ramsey County closed its North St. Paul branch and, in 2003, saw a forty percent reduction in its book budget. Hennepin County, until recently, kept six of its libraries closed on Fridays.

    Minneapolis was hit especially hard. Because the city’s library board operates independently of the City Council, its budget is less flexible than, say, that of the Public Works Department. Up until the cuts, more than forty percent of the library system’s $20 million budget came from local government aid. Now, some branches are open only three days a week. Money for new books was reduced dramatically: from $2.6 million in 2000 to $1.9 million in 2004. Minneapolis must now rely more heavily on less predictable private funding sources, along with the determined efforts of Friends of the Library organizations.

    “I think libraries are very invisible,” said Minneapolis Library Director Kit Hadley. “I think they have been taken for granted. There have been people who support libraries, but it’s nobody’s big cause.” Yet, she continued, sounding more ardent than your stereotypical librarian, “Libraries are fundamental institutions in a democracy. We talk about the value and importance of libraries in promoting the information necessary to active self-governance, the notion that this kind of availability and discourse is necessary for democracy to be alive. And all of us on the staff feel very strongly about that.”

    It’s easy to be discouraged by the notion that nobody seems to read anymore. There is a distinctly anti-intellectual atmosphere circulating in a country that has a tradition of skepticism toward high-minded ideas. These days, more than ever, being American means making decisions with our guts, not our heads. It has culminated in a president who brags about not reading newspapers and is referred to in international circles as the “Texas twit.” In 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts produced a study that showed a dramatic decline in the reading of literature, with fewer than half of American adults bothering to pick up a novel. NEA Chairman Dana Gioia, sounding a little like Kit Hadley, said, “This report documents a national crisis. Reading develops a capacity for focused attention and imaginative growth that enriches both private and public life. As more Americans lose this capability, our nation becomes less informed, active, and independent minded.”

    No doubt there is a relationship between the decline in reading and the increase in societal fear and jingoism. As a person learns more about the rest of the world, enlightenment and tolerance tend to follow. Higher levels of education mitigate prejudice and increase the support for civil liberties. “These are not qualities that a free, innovative, or productive society can afford to lose,” said Gioia.

  • Judith Guest: Ordinary Person

    Renowned author Judith Guest
    talks about “the terror of chance,” taking what you want, and falling in love with your characters.

    I can vividly recall my first reading of Judith Guest’s Ordinary People twenty years ago, in the bleak midwinter of my sophomore year of high school. When the book’s main character—the mortally depressed teenager, Conrad—fends off the world by narrowing his eyes to “blend everything to gray,” he was speaking right to me. Conrad’s melancholy was achingly familiar, and, like millions of others, I loved him for being frail and angry and strangely brilliant. And so I’m somewhat awed to be in Edina, knocking on the door of the author’s stately brick-and-stucco home.

    Judith Guest’s combination of courage, talent, timing, and luck has reaped rewards that are reserved for a very few. Yet Judith Lavercombe (she publishes under her maiden name) doesn’t throw the weight of her fame around. Many Twin Citizens don’t even know that she is a fellow resident, which is odd, considering that she and her husband, Larry, have lived in the same home in the Browndale neighborhood of Edina since 1975. Still, her national recognition, especially for someone who is not considered a prolific writer, is impressively enduring. “The story of you is a remarkable event,” Studs Terkel told her during a radio interview almost thirty years ago. This August, Slate magazine put her on its list of America’s most prominent novelists. But Guest is reluctant to talk about her fame, and she is downright sensible about the fairytale success of her first novel.

    Since its publication in 1976, Ordinary People has sold close to ninety thousand hardcover copies and over half a million paperback copies. It’s a standard selection on high school reading lists and an equally likely entry on banned-book lists. It won the Janet Heidegger Kafka Award for best first novel and it brought Robert Redford to the author’s front door looking for a chance to make his directorial debut—which resulted in a film that won four Academy Awards in 1980. And all of this happened to a forty-year-old first-time author with three kids and no agent. Maybe that’s another reason I’m so curious to meet her.

    Guest opens the kitchen door and shoos her cat away as she ushers me in. After pouring us some coffee and moving into a shaded front room, she curls into an oversized chair, her suntanned legs tucked aside. Dressed casually in denim shorts and a white sweater, she is strikingly youthful for a woman of sixty-eight-years. Her good fortune is almost palpable. This spacious home, with its intimate stained woods and turn-of-the-century windows, has that lovely and lived-in quality of a place where children were raised comfortably and grandchildren visit frequently. Bobby, a large, scruffy dog with good manners, settles herself at my feet, keeping a protective eye on Guest.

    After a bit of small talk about her three sons, her grandchildren, and everything there is to love about Minneapolis, I bring up the question of Guest’s phenomenal success. Immediately, she gets down to what seems to be one of the main points she wishes to make with this interview. “My success is not who I am,” she says, setting down her coffee mug. “I’m not terrifically comfortable with even thinking about what I’ve accomplished in relation to who I am and how I relate to other people.” Bobby raises her ears at the tension and looks up at me warily. “Of course, sometimes I’m forced to think about it, because the person I’m talking to is giving it back to me, which is upsetting and discomforting to me. I would just as soon not be what I do,” Judith explains, picking up the coffee cup again. “I do it, it’s my job. I’m glad I’m successful at it, because it’s allowed me to live very well financially, and give my kids a lot of things. It’s enabled me to do stuff that I otherwise wouldn’t be able to do. But it’s not who I am.”

    Perhaps it’s only natural that the issue of fame touches a raw nerve, as Guest has recently returned from a demanding book tour promoting The Tarnished Eye, a mystery novel based on the real-life mass murder of an affluent Michigan family in the sixties. This tour was tiring, especially for someone who doesn’t particularly enjoy them in the first place. “When the publisher says, ‘OK, we’re flying you here and there, and can you drive here and there,’ I get this sinking feeling in my stomach. I think, ‘Oh my God, why do I have to do this?’ And then my next feeling is, Oh, you’re so ungrateful! Here they’re willing to send you to all these places and help you sell your book, and you’re acting like you don’t like doing it!” she says.

    What writer likes the anxiety of not knowing what to expect when she walks in the door of a Barnes & Noble? “If you go thinking there are going to be ten and there are a hundred, it’s scary.” Guest raises her palms and sighs. “If you go expecting a hundred and there are three, it’s aaarrrgh.” She laughs out loud, and then goes on to describe showing up for a television interview in Milwaukee only to discover that the studio had no record of her scheduled appearance. In between segments, the unfortunate host went behind a curtain to madly flip through a copy of The Tarnished Eye. “It’s just totally stressful,” she says. “Sometimes you are being interviewed by someone and you think, if I knew this person they’d be my best friend. Other times you’re being interviewed by a complete jerk.”

    Like many writers, Guest finds it disorienting to talk at length about herself. “It’s maddening,” she says. “It’s alienating. I’m constantly standing next to myself, saying, ‘Is that true? Why are you saying that? That seems like a weird thing to say about yourself.’ There’s no way around it. I can’t imagine anyone talking about him- or herself that much and not feeling self-alienated.” Somehow Guest is able to say these things without making it seem like she’s terribly uncomfortable with this very interview at this very moment, as her husband Larry moves about somewhere in the other room, the dog keeps watch, and leaves float through the air in the window behind us.

    Instead, it seems as if she is relieved to speak plainly about the odd stresses of being a public figure. “I notice when I’m on these trips, I read like mad. It’s the only thing that seems to center me, bring me back to remembering who I am. Or forgetting who I am! It’s more like forgetting. Not being so doggone conscious of everything you’re saying.” This self-consciousness is a burden that was predicted by a best friend of Guest’s, whom she’s known since second grade. When Guest telephoned her to announce that a publisher had accepted Ordinary People, her friend burst out in laughter. “Now you have to be really nice to everyone,” she said. “To prove that you haven’t changed!”

    Has Guest changed, given the enormity of her success? Not really at all, say those closest to her. “We didn’t move, we didn’t buy anything significant. This is the way my mom is,” said her oldest son, Larry, a local realtor and screenwriter who was in high school when Ordinary People was published. “I didn’t suddenly have a car, and we didn’t suddenly have a boat. I don’t even know that she made that much money on Ordinary People at the time. She was a first-time author, and she was signed to a very boilerplate kind of book deal which didn’t have a giant advance. They didn’t know it was going to become a movie. But even when more money came, it just made things easier. She is very generous with me, with all of her sons, I think.”
    If she keeps fame at arm’s length, Guest surrounds herself with relationships steeped in the bonds of history and continuity. For example, when she received the Mailgram from Viking accepting Ordinary People, she ran to share the news with her new next-door neighbor Linda Lew, who broke out a bottle of champagne. The two remain close friends. “She is very modest,” Lew told me over the phone. “I tout her name more than she does.”

    Guest sees herself as someone who prefers the company of friends to the adoration of strangers. “With my friends, I don’t feel pressure to be someone other than who I am,” she says. “The people who really know you—who know your faults and your prejudices, your little weird foibles and your quirks—those are the people who are the easiest to be with, because you don’t have to fake it and you’re not even tempted to fake it. It’s always obvious to me when someone is looking at me with an idea of who I am and hoping that that’s the person I’m going to be. No matter how subtle it is, it’s there, and you want to give them who they really want. But it ain’t me.” Guest still writes most every day. She craves the solitude of being immersed in her work, and during the hustle of her book tour she found that she missed the sustenance that writing offers. “The fame part doesn’t nourish in that way,” she says. “The problem is that it feels kind of good for a few minutes a day, so you keep wanting more of it. But it’s like eating carbs. The more you eat them, the more you want to eat them. If you don’t eat carbs, you don’t get hungry.” She bursts out laughing at her analogy before abruptly concluding: “There. That’s it. That’s all I’m saying about this subject.”

    When morning turns to afternoon, Guest and I move from the front room to the side porch, where a breeze flows through the windows and sounds of traffic and children filter in from the nearby avenue. The topic has shifted too, from fame to ideas about ancestry and the bonds between people over a span of time—themes that recur in conversation with Guest as well as in her writing. When she wrote Ordinary People, she was trying to explore the inner workings of a family—their “everydayness,” as she has said. She was also trying to examine the anatomy of depression, with which she has struggled at times. A key question in Ordinary People was how a family might pick itself up and carry on after unthinkable tragedies: One son drowns and the other slashes his wrists.

    Themes of overcoming pain and loss thread through her subsequent novels, as well. In Second Heaven, Guest probed the possibilities of an unlikely fresh start for an abused child; and a mass murder comprises the central plot line of The Tarnished Eye, whose detective protagonist is wading through the emotional debris caused by his infant son’s death from SIDS. Readers often assume that the author, in revisiting these themes, is diving in and out of the wreckage of her own biography. When I suggest that many people would expect Judith Guest to bear a close resemblance to Mary Tyler Moore’s portrayal of the cold, controlling Beth in the film Ordinary People, Guest guffaws. “That’s amazing,” she says. “But I think I know what you mean. One time, soon after I had moved here, I had to give a reading. A whole bunch of people were reading that night. I didn’t want to go by myself, so I called up my neighbor Linda. We listened to Michael Dennis Browne, Tom McGrath, Phoebe Hansen—a lot of interesting local writers whom I didn’t know at the time because we hadn’t lived here that long. And then I got up and I read from my second novel, Second Heaven, about when this kid is in juvenile hall. Afterward, Linda told me how a lady sitting next to her turned and said, ‘Oh, what a life this poor woman has led.’ So you just don’t know how people are going to identify you with your characters.”

    Guest admits she has been lucky. She spent her childhood in Detroit and the surrounding area with her parents and four younger siblings—two sisters and two brothers. “We moved around a lot,” Guest says. “I went to a lot of grade schools in Detroit. Dad had many interesting reasons for moving. When I was eight, we moved to Oscoda, Michigan, because he had started a paper company—cutting down trees and making and selling a special kind of saw. I don’t know what ever happened to that saw as a business. But anyway, Mom didn’t like it up there; she said she was a city girl. So we moved back to Detroit. We lived with my grandparents, then we moved to an apartment, then we bought a house. But through it all, we had this family cabin that my dad built on Lake Huron, and where we always spent summers with our mom. We still own it, we five siblings. Now I have my own cabin about twenty miles down the road, but I still go down there all the time whenever any of them are there. It’s like the ancestral home.”

    Guest seems a master at keeping tradition going, at staying in touch, and sticking with pursuits over long periods of time. She keeps close ties to her siblings, her children, her grandchildren, her childhood friends, her neighbors, her editors, her former editors, her pets. She and a friend have led the same annual women’s retreat for eleven years. She holds a writing seminar every year with Rebecca Hill. She goes on a yearly vacation with her sister and a few friends, each time picking out a place in Michigan they’ve never been to before. She is a founding member of a small, distinguished group of seven who call themselves the Women of Pilford Pines—a shrouded reference to the way the group originated with four women “pilfering” small pines for their own gardens from areas of dense overgrowth in the woods. Subsequently, the group mandated that in order to join the Women of Pilford Pines, new members had to steal something that would enrich their lives in some significant way, and feel no remorse for doing so. Like the other members of Pilford Pines, Guest is a passionate gardener of the rough and natural genre. She’s also devoted to sewing and opera and cooking and reading and traveling. And, lately, politics.

    On the day of our interview, Guest has been writing a response to a request from Slate magazine, on her opinion of the presidential candidates. She gets up to fetch the official request and read it aloud: “There’s an election coming up, and Slate would like to know what you think about it. Our staff has drawn up a list of about fifty prominent American novelists—I went, ‘Well how can you turn that down, you’re one of fifty prominent American novelists!’—and we would like to hear your frank response to the following question: Which presidential candidate are you voting for and why?”

    Guest thinks she just wants to say how she feels: that she loves this place, her country, and is surprised that so many people in it feel differently than she does. Most of her friends are Demo-crats, but some very close ones are not. “And I don’t know how to talk to them about politics anymore,” she says, looking into the distance, then snapping back. “It’s not just, ‘oh well, you like to-may-toes and I like to-mah-toes.’ It’s not like that for me anymore. It’s way more important than that. So we just don’t talk about it, basically. I’m not about to change friends after forty years of friendship. I’m not. But I don’t understand how people can vote for a man who’s so arrogant and so dumb and so scary.”

    “Ours was not a political household, when I was growing up,” Guest’s son Larry told me. “But now, for better or worse, it’s a topic of conversation a lot in my family. I think my mom’s political activism simply comes straight from who she is and how she encounters the world. In Ordinary People, Conrad says at a certain point, ‘Life is a big deal.’ I think he’s responding to something the therapist is telling him, to relax, not take everything so seriously. And I think that is how my mom is feeling about the political world right now—she is not happy about the attitude that some people take, that this is a contest that’s kind of fun, it’s our side against your side and I hope we beat you guys and you wanna place a bet on it? I don’t think she understands that, and, frankly, I don’t either.”

    “In a way, I’m grateful,” Guest muses as she ticks off everything she feels is nefarious about our current administration, which has catapulted her to a new level of political action. “It’s like, well, it’s about time. I’m sixty-eight years old. I should have been thinking like this for a long time. I feel as if I have to say what I think,” she says. “And it’s not always comfortable or easy. You can be in situations where you’re going to tear the social fabric if you say something. I’ve never been one to tear the social fabric. Now I feel like, well, you’d better do it. You’d better stand up for what you believe and say what you think. So that’s what I’ve been doing. I put a lot of money into the Kerry campaign, I read everything I get from MoveOn.org, and I do about a third of the things they ask me to do. My sister Marjorie said to me once, ‘I know you don’t like being this famous person, but you are, so how about just hanging out your coattails and letting people ride, ride, ride.’ And that is fine. That, to me, is what fame ought to be used for.”

    Guest’s latest novel is about murder at its grisliest, with a protagonist sheriff, Hugh DeWitt, whom Guest claims to have “fallen in love with.” The story itself is a satisfying blend of genres, dark but artfully restrained, with enough character development and emotional substance to draw me in and with enough crime and mystery to satisfy my Agatha Christie-addicted daughter. The Tarnished Eye isn’t climbing the bestseller lists at the moment, but, like Guest’s other post-Ordinary

    People novels, it has been praised by critics and—if the public commentary on Amazon and other bookseller websites is any indication—it’s been enthusiastically received by readers. All in all, this is something of a surprise, considering that crime writing seems a leap for the author best known for her insightful rendering of everydayness.

    In fact, Guest has long been fascinated by murder. In that 1976 radio interview with Studs Terkel, she talked about the “tyranny of chance” in considering whether the victim of a particular murder could just as well have been the person who reads a report about it in the morning paper. When I remind her of this statement, she says, “I might have said that, but it doesn’t sound original; it doesn’t seem like my thought. I was probably thinking of Iris Murdoch. She has a phrase that goes, ‘There is no order in this world, there is only chance, and the terror of chance.’ Now, that seems very true to me, and very compelling.”

    Also compelling is the question of what pushes an individual across the line. “The idea of why a person would commit a murder still draws me to read every single article about murder in the newspaper,” Guest tells me. “I just try to figure out what drives people to that extreme of behavior, to that point where they can’t see any other options in between. My friend Rebecca, with whom I wrote Killing Time in St. Cloud, did a book tour with me. And people would ask us, ‘You guys are straight novelists, what would ever make you want to write a mystery novel, a murder mystery?’ Rebecca would say, ‘Well, our other novels are about people who try to solve their personal problems in any way they can short of murder, and in this book we just decided to go right to the whip.”

    The Tarnished Eye draws its title from a line in the novel Diana of the Crossways, by George Meredith, and its plot from the unsolved 1968 murders of the Robison family—Richard, his wife, Shirley, and their three sons and daughter—at their summer cottage in Michigan. Their corpses were discovered about a month after the killings, which were particularly brutal. Guest remembers reading about the killings at the time. “I was so fascinated with the case, and still am. I just needed to figure it out, and the fact that no cops ever did was intriguing,” she said.

    During the Robison investigation, police made connections between the oldest Robison son and John Norman Collins, a clean-cut and suavely good-looking Eastern Michigan University student who was eventually convicted for the murder of eighteen-year-old Karen Sue Beineman, an EMU freshman. Collins, known at the time as the “Ann Arbor Co-Ed Killer,” was implicated superficially in fifteen murders and, as outlined in the book The Michigan Murders, is considered by authorities to be responsible for at least seven and probably nine horrifically brutal murders of young women between 1967 and 1969. “When I heard that those two were roommates, it just clicked for me,” says Guest. “How strange is it that a serial killer who has murdered all these women is also the roommate of this son of the family that was murdered at the same time? How likely is it that there would be no connection, that it would be pure coincidence?”

    In 1970, Collins was sentenced to life with a twenty-year minimum behind bars. Guest thinks he ought to be questioned now about the Robison killings, since he’s incarcerated and thus readily available. “The lawyer from Scribner [her publisher] asked, ‘Hopefully he’ll be in for a long time?’” Guest recalls. “I said, ‘yeah, hopefully.’” Indeed, one has to hope that Collins’s history of attempted escape by tunneling out of prison will help to eliminate any possibility of parole. “They tried and convicted him for the last murder, because they knew they had enough evidence to convince the jury on that one. But they are totally convinced that he murdered those other girls.” For her part, Guest is convinced that Collins also killed the Robison family. Meanwhile, the publication of The Tarnished Eye piqued the interest of many others close to the real case. Guest notes that the Robison investigation focused on the father and the suspects who knew him. “It just didn’t make sense to me,” she says. “So in my book, the wife is having an affair, and the guy she is having an affair with becomes one of the main suspects. I’ve already heard from people who knew the Robison family who are saying, ‘You’ve slandered her name! She would never have done that, she was a wonderful woman.’ And you have to keep saying, it’s a novel, it’s a novel, I’m not writing about the real Robisons. It’s a tough distinction for people. It’s tough for me sometimes, especially having gotten to know Tom Mair like I do.”

    Tom Mair lives in Traverse City, Michigan. “I was Randy’s best friend from age two,” he told me, referring to the twelve-year-old Robison boy who was killed. “I had been invited to go with the family on the same trip north when they were murdered.” This is just the sort of terror of chance that has fascinated Guest for decades. “Tom was actually supposed to have been on this particular vacation,” Guest tells me, but his dad was a steelworker, and the steelworkers in Detroit were on strike at the time, and so instead of taking their vacation in August like they usually did, they decided to take it in June.

    Mair first heard that Guest had written a book based on the case when a reporter from the local paper called him. He immediately ordered a copy online and purchased another from the local bookstore. It took him a couple of days to pick it up and start reading. Once he did, he took it in small bites. “I was cautious because I didn’t know where she got her information, or how the story would be told in fiction. The point she makes in her book—that the infamous Ann Arbor co-ed killer was connected—shocked and surprised me the most. Partly because this angle had appeared before, and partly because she hadn’t disguised it much. I wasn’t sure this book would help or hurt the investigation.”

    Mair eventually contacted Guest through her publisher, and the two set up a breakfast meeting in Traverse City while Guest was on her book tour. “I came to the bookstore the night before and introduced myself,” Mair said. “I only stayed long enough to hear her speak a few words. It was emotional for me to hear her speak. There was a crowd of people, strangers, who would be hearing a story I was close to. I left. But then at breakfast, there was a certain level of knowing about the case that was a sort of intimacy. We had both looked in on another family and we saw how ordinary and how naive people can be. This story still scares me.”

    Mair’s website, UnsolvedHomicides.com, contains information about the actual crime and the status of the investigation, and it offers a reward for tips. “He really hopes the book will help someone remember something or come forward with something new,” says Guest. “He’s so intense, and that made me feel very intense about it, too.”

    She finds that the notion of the Robison murderer being locked up in prison without anyone looking closely at him is eerily sad. “I thought it was so amazing that Tom reached the same conclusion I did. They really limited the search immediately and only focused on Mr. Robison and his acquaintances and his business connections.” Guest asked Mair if anyone had ever confronted John Norman Collins about the Robison murders. “Tom said, yes, and what Collins said was, ‘A) I’m not talking to anybody until I can talk to my lawyer, and B) I don’t want to talk about that case.’”

    Guest is more than a hundred and fifty pages into her next novel—a roaring start for a writer who’s known to take her time (after the tenth year of writing Errands, her fourth novel, she finally stopped counting). White in the Moon, whose title comes from a poem by A.E. Housman, will be a follow-up to The Tarnished Eye and will again feature detective Hugh DeWitt. “I love Hugh,” says Guest, fetching a folder containing a stack of green paper that is her work in progress. She offers to share the Hausman poem, but happily agrees to read from the novel as well. She flips through the folder to a particular scene, where DeWitt is complaining to his wife, Karen, about their adolescent daughter’s boyfriend:

    “Bad enough he’s a biker, now he’s a Catholic biker.”

    She turned from the sink to look at him. No words, just the look.

    “Karen,” he said patiently, “we’re not Catholic.”

    “We’re not anything. We’re lapsed Lutherans. We don’t get to be prejudiced.”

    “I’m not prejudiced,” he said. “It’s just…fish on Fridays, Catechism on Saturdays, Mass on Sundays. It’s too much organized religion on a daily basis. That’s all I’m saying.”

    “Is what you learned about it in grade school all that you know? They don’t eat fish on Fridays anymore, not since Vatican II.”

    “Oh, great. That’s a relief. Do they still go to confession? Do the girls still have first communion and dress up in fake wedding dresses with veils so they can marry Jesus?”

    “Becky isn’t marrying Zach,” Karen said. “Or Jesus.”

    In the next room, Larry can tell we’re wrapping up. When I’m gone, the Lavercombes will take a nice afternoon bike ride together. Maybe later, Guest will work a little on White in the Moon. When that’s finished, she can return her attention to the sequel she had once begun to Second Heaven. “It’s kind of nice having that going and having this going. I’ve got my work cut out for me for the next ten years. And I like that.”

    It’s odd, in a way, that this attractive, fortunate, highly regarded writer looks forward with such chipper anticipation to the chance to spend her next ten years in fictional worlds of carefully constructed chaos rife with violence and dysfunction. But it makes perfect sense to Guest, who can’t leave alone the inexplicable variations in how one individual or the other deals with the terror of chance in a world without order. “I think human beings manufacture order, because we need it. We manufacture religion, because we need it. You need something to get you through.”

    What about Guest, who manufactures disorder, but whose life looks from all angles to be one in which most everything has fallen neatly and blessedly into place? “I think living the blessed life is the luck of the draw,” she says. “You don’t get control over the cards you’re dealt—whether it’s fatal illness, death, accidents—but we do have control over how we face those odds, how we play the cards. Some people with awful cards can be successful because of how they deal with the tragedies they’re handed, and that seems courageous to me. That’s what interests me, more than the fate of the blessed life.”

  • Robert Bly’s Greatest Hits

    Selected Poems, 1986
    A “best of” anthology of a kind, these are really good poems—and the mixture of work sheds light on Bly’s stylistic and topical meanderings. You’ll find “Counting Small Boned Bodies” and other lamentations on Vietnam, as well as more than a hundred examples from three decades of work. The prose poems from This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977) are beautiful and show off Bly’s command of the unwieldy form.

    Sleepers Joining Hands, 1973
    To understand how Bly got to be so Blyish, look back to some of his earlier work. His third poetry collection is filled with vigorous incantations on the good, the bad, and the ugly, and it is punctuated with a long discourse on the Great Mother. The essay makes a good primer for Iron John and The Sibling Society.

    The Night Abraham Called to the Stars, 2001
    This is Bly’s most recent collection. If you’ve joined the current Rumi rediscovery trip, you’ll have a better appreciation of why Bly seems to be jumping all over the place—that’s part of the beauty of this old Islamic form (ghazal). He’s trying to get your head to stretch some great distances, to make those “psychic leaps.” Even without knowing anything about the Battle of Ypres, you can easily appreciate Bly’s incredible energy, insight, and wit.

    A Little Book on the Human Shadow, 1988
    This is a highly readable collection of essays that offers up “the philosophy of Robert Bly” in less than one hundred pages. He explains his connection to Jung and gets into the feminine, masculine, and then some.

    The Sibling Society, 1996
    It’s an artful diatribe on our moral decay and the dominance of American popular culture. But unlike other polemics of this ilk, Bly digs deep and blames our own selfishness for squandering the knowledge of how to live in community. The result: permanent adolescence. Be prepared to look in the mirror.

    Iron John, 1990
    Read it and you’ll be able to start an argument at nearly any party. If you want to understand it, though, you may want to take a few classes in psychology, mythology, classics, sociology, anthropology, women’s studies, and men’s studies. It’s heavy stuff, and it’s very easy to get lost in the forest. Bly is extremely blunt and often his take on male-female relations can sound harsh toward women. No good pickup lines here. We’re supposed to embrace our differences before we can enjoy our sameness. For some that’s not so easy to swallow.

  • Repetition Compulsion

    “We have to speak up about this war. Now we don’t even count the bodies. We only count the American bodies. Woo-hoo. That’s even more self-obsessed. We kill hundreds and hundreds of Iraqis, and we don’t pay any attention to how many there are. We don’t call up the hospitals; we don’t call up the morgues. Let’s count the Iraqi bodies over again. Maybe we can bring them over to this country. Prop them up at some of Bush’s speeches, so we know what the money is going for. Americans want their money’s worth.

    “It’s so interesting that Canada doesn’t have anywhere near our percentage of murders. Why is that? Maybe it’s because we were the ones who had slaves and killed the Indians. After the civil war, we let men go and some went west. Martine Prechtal has said that many of these men had untreated trauma just as many Vietnam veterans had. Imagine what that was like after the civil war. Unbelievable, the brutality of that. We sent them right out West, where they became the Indian fighters. We have the stupidity typical of a country that doesn’t realize what the killing of war can do to a human being. We just send them out. That’s called the repetition compulsion. We have to look for more Indians and kill them. If we didn’t learn anything from the first killing of the Indians, every ten or twelve years we have to do it again. Bush, of course, that coward, was never in the war at all; he sneaked out. It’s not as if you have to be in a war to want the repetition. Now repetition is built into the American culture.

    “The invasion of Iraq is the biggest mistake this country has ever made. The most dangerous and greatest confrontation is between twentieth-century capitalist fundamentalism and eleventh-century Muslim fundamentalism. I’ve translated much Islamic poetry and I admire the Islamic culture. We have no idea how great their poetry is, but you’re also looking at a social culture frozen by the mullahs, frozen in the eleventh century. That’s the worst thing we could possibly do, to get into an antagonistic relationship, and that is exactly what Bush did. Bush Sr. was intelligent enough to pull back and not go on towards Baghdad. There’s nothing we can win in this war. Our new war is a war against the terrorists, but Bush Jr. has created ten thousand new terrorists.

    “Bush and Wolfowitz and Cheney are repetition compulsion people. It’s wrong to give into them. We have veered off our own path completely. We’re pouring billions into Iraq, and Oregon has just taken nineteen days off the school calendar.

    “Lincoln and Douglas had debates. They’d go on for four hours in the afternoon, then they’d take a break and come back for two hours more in the night. You could say that people in the audience were watching them speak to see if their words fit their bodies. Is this the real person? But on television no one is real. They’re all being someone else. The entire American nation has lost that ability to decide if those words are genuine. That’s why Bush won the election. He never would have gotten near winning an election in the nineteenth century. They would have seen immediately that his words and his body don’t fit.”

  • Robert Bly: The Dude Abides

    In his seventy-seven years, he has established himself as a world-class poet, teacher, social critic—and founder of the controversial “expressive men’s movement.”

    Standing in his studio—a nineteenth-century stable behind what was once a lone farmhouse atop Lowry Hill—Robert Bly is surrounded by books, papers, and icons. This is a monk’s cell. In one nook stands a simple bed. There is a prayer room, where gatherings of chanting and drumming are held for a regular group of initiates who sit cross-legged on Persian carpets.

    Bly himself is a tall and solid man. On these wintry days, you’ll find him cloaked in an enormous overcoat and black ushanka hat. He looks like a bear just out of the forest. Though he’s just embarked on his seventy-seventh year and his thick hair is frosty white, he displays a youthful vigor that reminds you he has lived a very active life.

    Like the heroes of so many fairytales he has told, Robert Bly is an archetype in his own history. Such mythic journeys require tasks that prove fortitude, and Bly has duly tilled the soil, fought with dragons, and lived as a hermit. He is legendary for banging down institutional doors and tackling giants. As an outspoken poet, philosopher, and societal gadfly, he has written the laws of the world as he sees them, and he’s gotten himself into plenty of trouble for it. Most people are more familiar with Bly’s opinions than his poetry. Many don’t know much of either. It’s not easy following his mystical lead. Yet his longevity and conviction have earned him the begrudging respect of many critics, even on the nasty battlefield of literature.

    As a studious pupil of many teachers, he learned the scholarly ways. He has been a supplicant in the church of Jung and knows the songs of Abraham, Muhammad, Shiva, and Odin. Bly has faced his share of demons along his far-flung path. Today he meets with me between his engagements as a still-active writer, speaker, and babysitter for his nineteen-month-old grandson.

    Although he is an accomplished poet, a renowned translator of poetry, and a National Book Award recipient for his 1967 collection The Light Around the Body, Robert Bly is probably best known for his role in the men’s movement. It has been a long path, but suffice it to say that by the eighties, Bly’s studies of Freud and Jung and the world at large had led him to see the struggle of human consciousness as the result of a breakdown of our masculine and feminine sides. Not only were they at odds, they were largely lost. He took up these themes in his writing and in his activism, and in so doing he became the subject of at least as much ridicule as admiration.

    Bly’s work with the men’s movement was inspired by his previous exploration of the Great Mother as a poetic theme, and by watching his two sons confront the cruelties of life. “My daughters were older than my sons. Daughters have a self-regulating mechanism. But sons are a problem. The world has so cuffed them about with such fantastic cruelty that becoming an adult male is a huge problem. Once I was with a thousand men at the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. I had an idea that overnight we cut up like two or three thousand pieces of red cloth and then I said, ‘I’d like all of the men here who have a wound on their body to tie a piece of cloth around their wound.” Bly shakes his head in sadness. “There were men with eight of those ribbons on their bodies. Motorcyle crashes, fights, war, everything.”

    The “father consciousness” needed tending, Bly decided, and masculine roles were rooted in violence. “It’s easier to socialize a young man into being a warrior than to be a father. You can do that in the Marines; men are geared for that in some way. But to socialize them into being fathers is a different matter.” Bly started the Minnesota Men’s Conference in 1984 near Sturgeon Lake, mixing teachers, poets, psychologists, and musicians. “In the seventies we were doing workshops with men and women. I’d always used the story theme of fairy tales, which is the old Jungian way to do things—but when I decided I wanted to teach a fairy tale to men, I didn’t have any. I read through the whole Grimm Brothers and finally found ‘Iron John.’ It is clearly a way of a man overcoming his shame. After all, he’s in the bottom of the lake.” Thus the “Expressive Men’s Movement” was born. When Bly put his work into book form in 1990, Iron John became an instant bestseller that inspired a competing reaction of acclaim and disdain.

    Feminists were livid. Women Respond to the Men’s Movement, edited by Kay Leigh Hagan, collected several highly charged reactions from writers of merit, including Bell Hooks, Laura Brown, and Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver expressed dismay. “When I try to understand the collection of ideas and goals that has come to be called the men’s movement, what disturbs me is that it generally stands as an ‘other half’ to the women’s movement, and in my mind it doesn’t belong there. It is not an equivalent. Women are fighting for their lives, and men are looking for some peace of mind.”

    Activist Hattie Gossett was perhaps the most reactionary, when she spat, “Well, what do they mean? What’re they going to the woods for then? Oh? Really? Sensitive? Does that mean they’re against rape now? When they come back from the woods do they issue statements against child abuse, wife battering, incest, lesbian battering? Do they pledge that, the next time one of their street-corner or health-club buddies is running off at the mouth about how he snatched him some pussy then kicked that bitch in her ass? These guys who paid all this money to go to the woods with what’s-his-name, will they silently organize a small group to take their brother for a little walk and show him some tongue- and penis-restraint exercises guaranteed to permanently clear his mind of all thoughts of ripping off pussy, or bitches, or kicking ass?”

    Susan Faludi swung back hard in her 1991 book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women. She painted Bly as a particularly fiendish perpetrator of the suppression of feminism, calling him the “general of the men’s movement.” She wrote, “The true subject of Bly’s weekends, after all, is not love and sex, but power—how to wrest it from women and how to mobilize it for men.” Her tome dedicates several pages to what today seems a hateful attack.

    Bly looks quizzical and a little sad. “The women thought that the men’s movement came up to try to combat feminism. On the contrary, it was like a planned growth. It appears at a certain time. A tree doesn’t grow up because there’s another tree nearby. It’s got its own growth pattern. Women used to think of me as a huge enemy and attack me all the time. But now I find that a lot of women stop me in airports and tell me, ‘I’ve been reading Iron John. I can’t tell you how helpful that is in dealing with my own male side.’”

    Whatever the verdict, the hubbub brought Bly a measure of celebrity that still lives. The highly respected Bill Moyers produced A Gathering of Men for PBS, bringing Bly and his Wild Man into our national living room. Spin-off books by spin-off Jungians, shamans, and visionaries flooded the media. A cottage industry of men’s conferences of innumerable stripes flourished from church basements to Fortune 500 boardrooms.

    Dialogue was lost in the shouting of standard-bearers who had climbed into their opposing towers. Even politically motivated Jungians pecked at Bly’s interpretations as conservative. People took from Iron John whatever suited their own agendas. Feminists who were nervous in 1990 could point by the middle of the decade to scores of highly conservative and chauvinistic new men’s groups. It doesn’t take a psychic leap to guess that organizations like the Promise Keepers drew some of their energy from what Bly had started. Even worse, Iron John made for some of the best lampooning material in years. Men crying en masse, drumming, and chanting; it was all so easy. The image of a herd of naked white men plunging through the forest still comes to mind.

    Yet, fourteen years later, Iron John’s drum can still be heard. Bly offers a grandfatherly smile. “The Minnesota Men’s Conference will celebrate its twentieth year in September. I think men have been helped somewhat. I was over at Powderhorn Park one day and I saw a lot of men there playing with their sons. My wife said, ‘That’s part of the work that you and the others did, that many more men are taking part in raising their children.’”

  • Does Poetry Matter?

    Being a poet in America makes as much sense as a butt full of pennies. That’s one of the pleasures of being a poet in America. There’s something wonderful, something perversely subversive about being disconnected from the world of goods and services and John Maynard Keynes, if only for an hour or two every now and again. It’s freedom. Poetry is an uncharted wilderness along whose margins capitalism wilts like arugula in the Wedge parking lot on the Fourth of July. Inside its borders, the mind blooms and the imagination yields a bumper crop, yet the marketplace rejects poetry. One given to daydreaming might wonder why, and the answer might be found in the dump of discarded possibilities. This is the predicament American Poetry finds itself in: stranded in the closeout bin of our cultural supermarket because of poor management—management that has chosen to make poetry an unwanted specialty item rather than a staple.

    There is an economics to poetry, of course, and even a poetry to economics, yet the numbers don’t add up. (The poetic colossus Wallace Stevens, the insurance executive of Hartford, wrote, “Money is a kind of poetry,” but it’s not a kind of poetry most poets are familiar with.) The nonsensicality of a career in poetry can be explained by the laws of economics. To paraphrase Adam Smith, the founder of classical economics, a livable wage shall be retained if a good or service is provided in a supply that does not exceed demand. Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, might say the demand for poetry is soft, while the supply is robust. If home ownership, retirement, a cabin by the lake, prestige, and self-esteem mean anything to you, or if you’re practical, pragmatic, cautious, or otherwise uncourageous, please be advised to follow your muse elsewhere. Poetry and economics make a profoundly odd couple, sort of like Sylvia Plath and Milton Friedman.

    Poetry registers barely a blip on the national radar, and when it does make the news, there’s often a certain wackiness quotient factored in. During the past 18 months, poetry has experienced a relative media bonanza—which might indicate either a spark in interest or a surge in wackiness. Most recently, a new Robert Lowell collection sent pop-culture commentators scurrying to their keyboards, suddenly writing about poets and poetry. This lavishly praised collection anoints Robert Lowell the potentate of poetry, the latest in a long line—symptom of a perennial compulsion, unique to poetry, to name a figurehead.

    It’s not all Ivy Tower cogitation either. In recent months, news of the weird has emanated powerfully from the world of tweed and elbow patches, too: Amiri Baraka, poet laureate of New Jersey and subsidized revolutionary, wrote a god-awful poem that made itself worse by suggesting the Israelis had foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks. New Jersey officials tried to have him decommissioned. In Washington, D.C., the White House indefinitely postponed a literary symposium sponsored by First Lady Laura Bush for fear some poets might take advantage of the occasion and spout antiwar, anti-George rhetoric. Poets cried foul, claiming this was yet another example of the Bush administration’s hostility toward dissenting voices. (Ironically, many poets are intolerant of dissenting opinions among their own ranks.) And possibly strangest of all was the news that Ruth Lilly, the nutty heiress to the Eli Lilly pharmaceutical fortune, donated $100 million to Poetry magazine. Poetry is a well-respected journal but is neither the best nor the most important literary magazine in America. It certainly doesn’t know what to do with $100 million. Who would? To put Lilly’s donation into perspective: According to the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses, 261 magazines belong to the association and 175 of those have budgets under $10,000. As I say, money is a rare kind of poetry.