I've constructed this blog on my PC. I believe it can be viewed easily on your PC or Tablet. I'm not quite as certain about its appearance on Phones. I would appreciate your comments on this subject as well as any of the pieces below sent to edcoletti(at)gmail.com.
Several blasts from the past!
II.
And thank you also, Lin Marie DeVincent for most of these photos from our June 2023 Sizzling Summer Poetry Festival where a warm and very enjoyable time was hadby one and all!
Phyllis Meshulam
David Beckman
Terry Ehret
Dowd: As AI grows, it’s no time to kill the humanities
By the time I took off my mortarboard two weeks ago, my degree in English literature was de trop. Instead of a Master of Arts, I should have gotten a Master of Algorithms.
As I was pushing the rock up a hill, mastering Donne, Milton, Shakespeare, Dickens, Joyce and Mary Shelley, I failed to notice that the humanities had fallen off the cliff.
It was as if the bottle of great wine I saved to celebrate my degree was bouchonné.
The New Yorker ran an obit declaring “The End of the English Major.” One English professor flatly told Nathan Heller, the writer of the 10,000-plus-word magazine piece, that “the Age of Anglophilia is over.”
The Harvard English department handed out tote bags with slogans like “Currently reading” and dropped its poetry requirement for an English degree. But it was too late for such pandering. Students were fleeing to the hotter fields of tech and science.
“Assigning ‘Middlemarch’ in that climate was like trying to land a 747 on a small rural airstrip,” Heller wrote.
In a world where brevity is the soul of social media, what practical use can come from all that voluminous, ponderous reading? Would braving “Ulysses” help you pay the rent the way coding could?
I wish I could adopt the attitude of Drew Lichtenberg, who has taught theater history at Catholic and Yale universities. “We should hail the return of the arts and humanities to bohemian weirdos,” he said. “It began as something for which there were no career opportunities or money to be made, and thence it will return. Like Gertrude Stein’s circle in the Jazz Age. Or like Baudelaire, Rimbaud and the symbolist poets in the fin de siècle.”
But I find the deterioration of our language and reading skills too depressing. It is a loss that will affect the level of intelligence in all American activities.
Political eloquence is scarce. Newt Gingrich told Laura Ingraham that the secret to Donald Trump’s success is that “he talks at a level where third-, fourth- and fifth-grade educations can say, ‘Oh yeah, I get that.’”
My most precious possession from my time at Columbia University is a green Patrón box stuffed with slips of paper on which I scribbled the new words I learned.
Limerence. Peloothered. Clinchpoop. Chthonic. Sillage. Agnation. Akratic. Leptodactylous. Chiasmus. Caesious. Pythoness. Pettifogger. Paronomasia. Dithyramb. Propugnaculum. Adumbrate. Remembrancer. Meridional. Prehensile. Aeternitatis. Scrupulosity. Supererogatory. Anagnorisis. Spatiotemporal. Sialoquent. Alterity. Floccinaucinihilipilification.
And who is a better guide to covering presidential politics than Shakespeare? Reading his history plays should be mandatory for anybody with a dream of power.
Strangely enough, the humanities are faltering just at the moment when we’ve never needed them more.
Americans are starting to wrestle with colossal and dangerous issues about technology, as artificial intelligence begins to take over the world. And we could use an army of thoughtful English majors to help sort it out.
“There is no time in our history in which the humanities, philosophy, ethics and art are more urgently necessary than in this time of technology’s triumph,” said Leon Wieseltier, the editor of Liberties, a humanistic journal. “Because we need to be able to think in nontechnological terms if we’re going to figure out the good and the evil in all the technological innovations. Given society’s craven worship of technology, are we going to trust the engineers and the capitalists to tell us what is right and wrong?”
It is not only the humanities that are passé. It’s humanity itself.
We are at the mercy of lords of the cloud, high on their own supply, who fancy themselves as gods creating life. Despite some earnest talk of regulation, they have no interest in installing a kill switch. AI is their baby, hurtling toward the rebellious teenage years.
Is this really the moment for lit departments to make “Frankenstein” and “Paradise Lost” obsolete?
Elon Musk said his friendship with Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, fractured when Musk pressed his case about the dangers of AI and Page accused him of being a speciesist who favored humans.
AI can be amazing; it just discovered an antibiotic that kills a deadly superbug. But it may also eventually see us as superbugs.
We can’t deal with artificial intelligence unless we cultivate and educate the non-artificial intelligence that we already possess.
It is not only the humanities and humanity that are endangered species. Our humaneness has shriveled. The dueling Republican clinchpoops, Trump and Ron DeSantis, are nasty and pitiless, “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable,” as Oscar Wilde described fox hunting.
Republicans have consecrated themselves to a war against qualities once cherished by many Americans. Higher principles — dignity, civility, patience, respect, tolerance, goodness, sympathy and empathy — are eclipsed.
Without humanities, humanity and humaneness, we won’t be imbuing society with wisdom, just creating owner’s manuals. That would be a floccinaucinihilipilification.
Maureen Dowd is a columnist for the New York Times.
IV.
(Thanks Terry Ehret for the denim image)
I don't relish being a downer, but I do believe that it's necessary to be realistic, especially with students and readers who aspire to become materially successful writers. Thus the title of my ongoing blog, "No Money In Poetry." The following article tells it like it is. Bottom line comesfrom Lynn Steger Strong inThe Guardian article which follows
A dirty secret: you can only be a writer if you can afford it
"There is nothing more sustaining to long-term creative work than time and space – and these things cost money"
Let’s start with me: I’m not sure how or if I’d still be a writer without the help of other people’s money. I have zero undergrad debt. Of my three years of grad school, two of them were funded through a teaching fellowship; my parents helped pay for the first. The last two years my stipend barely covered the childcare I needed to travel uptown three days a week to teach and go to class and my husband’s job is what kept us afloat.
I got connections from that program. I got my agent through the recommendation of a professor. Nearly every year since I graduated from that program, I have been employed by them. The thing I’m most sure I had though, that was a direct result of my extraordinary privilege, is the blindness with which I bounded toward this profession, the not knowing, because I had never felt, until I was a grownup, the very real and bone-deep fear of not knowing how you’ll live from month to month.
Other versions of this story that I know from other people: a down payment from a grandpa on a brownstone; monthly parental stipends; a partner who works at a startup; a partner who’s a corporate lawyer; a wealthy former boss who got attached and agreed to pay their grad school off.
Once, before a debut novelist panel geared specifically to aspiring writers, one of the novelists with whom I was set to speak mentioned to me that they’d hired a private publicist to promote their book. They told me it cost nearly their whole advance but was worth it, they said, because this private publicist got them on a widely watched talkshow. During this panel, this writer mentioned to the crowd at one point that they “wrote and taught exclusively”, and I kept my eyes on my hands folded in my lap. I knew this writer did much of the same teaching I did, gig work, often for between $1,500-$3,000 for a six to eight-week course; nowhere near enough to sustain one’s self in New York. I knew their whole advance was gone, and that, if the publicist did pay off, it would be months before they might accrue returns.
I did not know what this writer, who I thought was single, paid in rent, or all the other ways that they might have been able to cut corners, that I, a mother of two, could not cut, but even then, it felt impossible to me that this writer was sustaining themselves in any legitimate way without some outside help. I thought, maybe, when they said “write” they might be including copywriting or tech, as some others that I know support themselves.
I knew all these aspiring writers, though, heard this person say this and assumed that there was a way to make a living as a writer, that they thought this person was “making it” in ways they hoped one day to be. I don’t know this writer and don’t know how, actually, they lived. What I do know is, when the panel was over, I wanted to take the microphone back and say loudly to the students that what this writer said was, at least in part, a lie.
On Instagram and Twitter there are writers who “write full time” also. They post pictures of their desk or their pens and talk about “process”. Maybe, two years ago, they sold a quiet literary novel to an independent press. For my students, for all the people I see out there, trying to break in or through and watching, envious, I want to attach to these statements and these Instagram posts, a caveat that says the writing isn’t what is keeping this person safe and clothed and fed.
According to a 2018 Author’s Guild Study the median income of all published authors for all writing related activity was $6,080 in 2017, down from $10,500 in 2009; while the median income for all published authors based solely on book-related activities went from $3,900 to $3,100, down 21%. Roughly 25% of authors earned $0 in income in 2017.
I would argue that there is nothing more sustaining to long-term creative work than time and space – these things cost money – and the fact that some people have access to it for reasons that are often outside of their control continues to create an ecosystem in which the tenor of the voices that we hear from most often remains similar. It is no wonder, I say often to students, that so much of the canon is about rich white people. Who else, after all, has the time and space to finish a book. Who else, after all, as the book is coming out, has the time and space and money to promote and publicize that book?
There are ramifications, I think, of no one mentioning the source of this freedom when they have it. There is the perpetuation of an illusion that makes an unsustainable life choice appear sustainable, that makes the specific achievements of particular individuals seem more remunerative than they actually are. There is the feeling that the choices that we’ve made outside of writing: who we married, whether or not we had children, the families we were born to, will forever hinder our ability to make good work.
When students ask me for advice with regard to how to “make it as a writer”, I tell them to get a job that also gives them time and space somehow to write; I tell them find a job that, if they still have it 10 years from now, it wouldn’t make them sad. I worry often that they think this means I don’t think their work is worthy; that I don’t believe they’ll make it in the way that they imagine making it, but this advice is me trying help them sustain themselves enough to make the work I know they can.
Like most other American systems and professions, delusions around meritocracy continue to pervade the writing world. Those of us who are not bolstered by outside sources, those of us who are but still struggle, and say it out loud, often run the risk of seeming whiny or ungrateful; maybe we worry we will just be thought not good enough. To be a writer is a choice, after all, and I continue to make it. But perpetuating the delusion that the choice is not impossibly risky, precarity-inducing, only hurts the participants’ ability to reconsider the various shapes their lives might take in service of sustaining it and them.
It allows a system that cannot sustain most of the producers of its products to continue to pretend it can.
Lynn Steger Strong is the author of the novel Want, to be released in July 2020
V.
All About Blurbs
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Having Aged Gradually As Trees Do by Ed Coletti
Having Aged Gradually As Trees Do
I’ve begun telling people I’m old
doling activity sparingly as napkins
from small restaurant owners.
She wants nothing yet to do with aging
Fatigue the silt of activity
dawdles in moments wantonly spent
On my black leather couch
where black dog on my blue
jeans sleeps content.
Today’s fortune cookie my sacramental:
Act as if it were impossible to fall
That’s the way I first read it
through rapidly failing eyes
There a mountain me climbing
gravity-stuck/falling impossible
With my eyeglasses retrieved
its meaning diminishes to
impossible to fail,
Proof indisputable that metaphor
carries more of reality than
human experience easily imagines
Or according to Novalis,
Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason
But what here of wounds when per Kerouac
no one falls off mountains and
Acting as though failure is impossible
each of us remains a rooted oak
Until such time as rivers from the sky
cascade down over and through us,
and roots rot, loosen and finally fail.
*
Ed Coletti is a poet widely published internationally. He is a graduate of Georgetown University and holds Masters Degrees in Creative Writing and in Business Management. Ed also is a painter and middling chess player. Previously, he served three years as an Army Officer, college English instructor, then as a Counselor and later as a Business Consultant. He has published a dozen books. Journals include ZYZZYVA, Volt, Spillway, North American Review, and The Brooklyn Rail. Ed curates the blog “No Money In Poetry.” https://edwardcolettispoetryblog.blogspot.com/
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