Report from Cleveland Heights Oct. 6th

A bookstore-sponsored reading! Two small independents, Macs Backs and Apple Tree, combined for a session with cider and ginger snaps at the Coventry branch of the public library, a wonderful old-and-strong place of dark wood shelves and big windows. With its books, it’s been there for longer than I’ve been alive and could stay just as long into the future. There was a “discussant,” Joyce Kessler (a professor at the Cleveland Institute of Art), who teaches a course on novels of the sixties.
Had no one else shown up, Joyce and I could have talked for a long time, but people came – including a contingent of Cleveland Movement people who remember the historical events in my book. The conversation veered into what had been accomplished by the Movement, lasting contributions such as a Food Co-op, a Free Clinic, and the Welfare Rights Handbook published and used well into the seventies(in Riders on the Storm, Jane is working on it). In comparison to the work of these people, which continues, anything I may have done was small.
The next morning I woke at 5:00, remembering questions I should have asked, comments I should have made. A reason to write the book was the deeply disturbing SDS split of '68 and '69. The organization imploded with the Weatherman expulsion of Progressive Labor in July '69, but in Cleveland we saw the beginning with a paper named after a Bob Dylan song shortly after Chicago. Distrust built, along with the sense of violence as both seductive and terrifying. Decades later I was still in anguish as violence encroached from within as well as outside, but even more as language increasingly corrupted thought. So I wrote about the Movement with mixed feelings, and was very glad to see good folks keeping up the struggle uncorrupted.
Next reading Thursday, at the University of Findlay. Who knows what new concerns will rise?

Link to a Book Newsletter

Found a smart, literate newsletter to recommend, Meredith Sue Willis's BOOKS FOR READERS: http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/booksforreaders.html Latest isssue has a discussion of DANIEL DERONDA, one of my favorites. Earlier issue includes a review of RIDERS ON THE STORM.

Art Historian's thoughts on The Thinker

Allen Farber, a fellow student at Case Western Reserve, was an art history major when the real bombing of Rodin's Thinker took place in March 1970. Now a professor of Art History at SUNY Oneonta, he has written about seeing the fallen statue and the damaged entrance on his way to class as part of an on-line essay on Politics and Art. Most interesting to me, he offers a way to understand why people (say, the fictional Ivy Barcelona, who loves art) would participate in the bombing. Ivy's little explanatory note (see below*) is written with the limited vocabulary and reflection of a stressed out 20-year-old in a hurry. Allen Farber discusses (among other things) a selection from Sir Kenneth Clark's Civilisation (a BBC series and THE authoritative text on Western culture, published in 1969).
Some changes in the past forty years: I can't use the word "civilization" (or the British spelling with an s) without putting it in quotation marks. I can't believe I took Kenneth Clark's version of the world for truth.
Here is Prof. Farber's website. Read. http://employees.oneonta.edu/farberas/arth/arth200/art_politics.html

*What Ivy wrote, in the heat of her moment, from page 371 of Riders on the Storm:

Rulers know who they are, and they can no longer deny they are complicit in the oppression of a majority of people throughout the world. The Art Museum, its very size and shape based on centuries of European imperialism, its marble walls, staircases, and statues asserting the insidious principle of white supremacy and the power of the ruling classes, can no longer pretend to be benign. We repudiate cultural elitism.

Did people really write like that in 1968-69? I'm afraid so.

Seasonal change

Back at the college with a schedule of classes and four rosters of students:
Did I really mean to write for months about the storms of becoming a novelist with a book titled Riders on the Storm? No wonder there's been no news since July. Had I written in August I could have told you that thunderstorms on the Colorado Front Range inspire mostly joy, and that there are two new novels in the works if you picture "the works" down in the basement of the psyche.
The published novel is in fact getting some road time (see website list of events) and some on-line time:
There's a short version of the Yellow Springs News review published on Meredith Sue Willis's Books for Readers -- a wonderful newsletter: http://www.meredithsuewillis.com/booksforreaders.html . I'm not just saying it's wonderful because my book is mentioned; all of Books for Readers is a pleasure to skim, with delicious bits to bite into.
The first blog interview is published by Case Western Reserve (okay, the English Department of my Alma Mater) and you can read it here: https://sites.google.com/a/case.edu/department-of-english-the-annex/alumni/carpenter-interview.
AND I found more on the Thinker. See next post.

From the Emporium in Yellow Springs

The steel-drummer plays a Baroque tune on the sidewalk outside the Emporium, and I’ve just had a drink and a conversation with filmmaker and friend Julia Reichert, who bought a copy of my book next door at Dark Star Books. I’m at the Emporium (officially Emporium Winds and the Underdog Café: http://www.emporiumwines.com/ ) with coffee; I come here often in Yellow Springs because the coffee’s good, because there’s wifi, and because I see people I know, from Julia to Ed Davis (http://www.davised.com/ ) whose most recent book is The Measure of Everything, a story based on how Yellow Springs citizens saved a farm and stopped urban sprawl. We just talked for a couple of hours. Twice in the last ten days Dave Chappelle has shown up, parked his motorcycle, come into the Emporium and played part of Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven) on the piano here. Interesting, but not as nice as the woman whose name I don’t know (she has gray hair and a pretty face and goes barefoot often) who played piano rather well for about half an hour one Sunday morning while I had breakfast and read The New York Times with Jeanne Lemkau (http://www.lostandfoundincuba.com/ ) whose website is named after her memoir, Lost and Found in Cuba.

Well well. I started out to write about the pleasures of vacationing in my home village and ended up social networking! They say you must learn to navigate Facebook and “the blogs” (Which blogs? As many as you can find!) to sell your novel, so I’m doing the best I can. Hence the epithets and the links above (I suppose I should have added Julia Reichert http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0717064/ and Dave Chappelle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dave_Chappelle ) and now this blog is looking like I’m in a cyber-space hot spot.

Which is not true. I’m in a little village café with battered furniture, yellow walls, and a show of with ceramic art. When Jeanne was in Cuba, her friends posted a map of the country on the wall here so they could follow her travels when they met over coffee. One half the ceiling is painted black. The other half is painted blue and white – clouds in blue sky. I sold one copy of Riders on the Storm in the parking across the street and another at the Farmer’s Market. Both copies went to friends. The book is in Dark Star Books, a couple of doors south of here, along with Jeanne’s and Ed’s and a thousand other authors. (http://www.darkstarbooks.net/ )

End of social networking for the day. I’m leaving for the house, where the maples are full and shady. Deer cross the yard often now that the apples are beginning to fall. We’re invited to friends’ this evening; they want to hear the book read aloud. That’s a form of off-line social networking.

The Thinker Lives

Couldn't resist adding the cartoon that came in the mail from my friend Meredith (thank you!).
Learning to get images and links into this blog, I've added to the informational post on the Cleveland Museum of Art's damaged Thinker, below, in the May archives. Check it out, for those interested in the known facts of the case and some good photos of the real thing.

Book Report

Just finished reading Chris Hedges' Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle. It's a smaller book than its title would suggest. It also stirs up anger: I had to take breaks from reading (especially after the chapter exposing the porn industry). Not a page-turner, a mind-turner. Hedges is a journalist who's written from fiery centers in Gaza, Eastern Europe, and Central America.
I'm writing here because Empire of Illusion reveals what my 1968 people called "the system" and what other more current writers call "corporatocracy." We weren't sure what the system was; we felt it. A young reader said, of Riders, "When they talk about The System I think of The Matrix."
Hedges writes, "Power no longer lies with the citizens of the United States, who, with ratios of 100 to 1, pleaded with their representatives in Washington not to loot the national treasury to bail out Wall Street investment firms. Power lies with the corporations. These corporations, not we, pick who runs for president, Congress, judgships, and most state legislatures." This is a conclusion at the end of many pages of information. Does it still seem too general? I think so.
I'll keep the book for its bibliography, for its researched details on Halliberton, NAFTA, Andover, and many other works of "the ruling class" -- another term of my 1968 characters.