Racial Segregation in Baltimore and Beyond

1.

Many years ago, when I first moved to Baltimore, I was walking back to the house we had just bought on Wickford Road.  It is a block filled with Tudor-style houses, all built around 1930. I doubt if they were called town houses when they were built, much less townhomes, but that's what we'd  call them today.   Each of the large structures consists of two peaked-roofed end units wtih two smaller dwellings in between.   The section of Baltimore where we live, with the exception of my family, is  an exclusively white neighborhood, an upper-middle class section of the city, adjacent to the far wealthier neighborhoods of Guilford and Roland Park, to the west and north of us, adjacent to the less wealthy sections of Hampden and Medfield, to the south and west.  All these neighborhoods are, you guessed it, white.  (The city as a whole is over 60% African American.) Approaching our house from the other side of the street, I noticed a car had stopped in front of me, as I was about to cross over.  A young man rolled down the driver's side window and asked me the following question, "My wife and I are thinking of buying a house in this neighborhood.  Could you tell me if any blacks live around here?"  "See that house across the street?" I said, pointing to an end unit easily visible through the windshield.  "A black person lives there."  Before waiting for a response, I added, "By the way, I live in that house as well."  He drove off without saying another word.


2.

"Blacks should be quarantined in isolated slums in order to reduce the incidence of civil disturbance, to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the nearby White neighborhoods, and to protect property values of the White neighborhoods."

Who said that?  Some crackpot fanatic?  David Duke?  A member of the Alt-Right?

No, it was the Mayor of Baltimore, with the full support of the city council and the vast majority of Baltimore's white residents.  '

The time was the early part of the past century.  In 1910, a Yale-educated lawyer had the temerity to "pollute" a wealthy Baltimore neighborhood by moving into it.  The Mount Vernon area of Baltimore was the most exclusive Baltimore neighborhood at the time; at various times, the Cone sisters, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and the Duchess of Windsor all lived there.  The inhabitants were outraged at the possibility of integration; they demanded action.  They got it.  A law was passed that if a block was 50% or more white, no black could live there, similarly, if a block was 50% or more African American, it would be illegal for a white to live there.  The mayor got his wish.  Baltimore, already segregated, became even more segregated.

Worse: The New-Deal era Federal Housing Administration was set up to foster home ownership--to whites.  The law from 1934-1968 forbade the provision of mortgages to blacks.  Blacks could only purchase a house through the so-called "contract system."  The methods devised by these white loan sharks were truly despicable. The cost of a house financed through the contract system was outrageously high.  The loans were not amortized, so if one payment was missed, the house would be repossessed and "flipped" to another black family.  Many African-American families worked several jobs in the desperate effort to meet payments.  They were forced to sublet.  They could not afford repairs.  The black neighborhoods soon devolved into ghettos.  During this entire period, African-Americans were unable to amass wealth from property values, the root of the vast discrepancy between black and white wealth to this day.

In short, federal, state, and local policies are responsible for deliberately creating every poor black neighborhood in Baltimore.

"They're lazy." "They don't want to work." "They're violent." "They have lots of children and live off welfare," etc.  These views and others like them, are nothing more than variations of the heinous words the mayor of Baltimore said so long ago.


3.

In 1967, Lyndon Johnson appointed the Kerner Commission to determine the cause of the recent urban riots.  It asserted that, "Our nation is moving toward two societies one black, one white--separate and unequal."  New legislation was passed to counter this trend. After 1968, bureaucrats by law could no longer red-line districts.  (Previously, they had actually colored in red, black neighborhoods on their maps, so their racism could be performed in a more efficient manner.) The Fair Housing Act of 1968, however, designed to break down patterns of racial and local segregation, had done much good but has done little to counter segregation.  Nearly all subsidized housing occurred in poor neighborhoods, where poor schools, dreadful transportation, and lack of jobs continued to be rampant.  A recent Harvard study demonstrated that when poor people move into better neighborhoods, their children are much more likely to attend college, and better colleges.

Recently, the Obama administration took the Fair Housing goal of "affirmatively furthering" integration more seriously. Julian Castro, the current head of HUD,  has proposed that sums provided for housing vouchers would vary by zip code, and that any landlord who was a recipient of federal funds could not refuse housing vouchers.  Thus, voucher recipients of poor communities would get more support if they moved to an area where rent was higher.  There would also be "mobility counselors" to encourage moves to the suburbs.  HUD would supply states with neighborhood maps designed to increase integration.  Castro viewed these measures as essential, since the Fair Housing Act goal of integration was not being implemented.

This was the first significant attempt to integrate neighborhoods in a long time.



4.  

Edward J. Pinto, a housing specialist of the conservative American Enterprise Institute has this to say about the new measure: "This is just the latest attempt by HUD to social engineer the American people...The goal is to get the suburbs to look like the cities.  It's presumptuous of HUD to think that someone in Washington D.C. should decide all this."

Conservatives always want smaller government.  I, however, contend that government should be as small as necessary.  If the majority had been fair to minorities during the course of American history; if they hadn't actively "socially engineered" segregation and black poverty, no intervention by the government would be necessary.  Government intervention, often clumsy, should always be the last resort. If you want small government, America, be fair. The treatment of fellow Americans who are black has been abominable; two of its legacies, segregation and poverty, is so widely accepted that it is thought by many to be the natural order of things.  It is obvious to any fair-minded person that they are not.

If the country had acted according to the Golden Rule, no rules and regulations would be necessary. The only solution to the race problem in America is integration.  Many cities across America, Baltimore among them, are more segregated than ever. Something needs to be done.



5.

Two coveys of ants,
each color in its own Pompeii--
The volcano wakes


6.

The President-elect has nominated Ben Carson as head of H.U.D., replacing Julian Castro.

Dr. Carson, as everyone knows, is a retired neurosurgeon.  When I worked with the Johns Hopkins Community Services, I referred many patients to him.  One of my patients had a benign brain tumor, which Dr. Carson successfully removed.  His parents named their next child Carson.

One day, while my son was an elementary-school student, he came home from school elated.  He had just heard Dr. Carson give a talk at his school.  "He was great!" my son  beamed.  "I didn't know black people could become doctors."  (My son was the only black student in his class.)  He admired Dr. Carson very much.

His enthusiasm has long since waned. along with mine.  Oh, Dr. Carson, you should have left well enough alone!

He believes being gay is a choice.  He does not believe in evolution.  He believes that "political correctness" has stopped conservative politicians for "saying it like it is."  Is there no such thing as truth?

In a July 23rd 2015 editorial in the Washington Times, he wrote the following:

"To be fair, white flight was not exclusively the consequence of forced integration policies.  Other private and public housing policies such as redlining, restrictive covenants, discriminatory steering by real estate agents and restricted access to private capital--all attempts at social engineering--(my italics)--exacerbated the suburban segregation in the 1970s and '80s."


"...These rules, (Obama's new regulations), come on the Supreme Court decision narrowly upholding the use of "disparate impact" analysis in determining whether municipal housing policies have a racially discriminatory effect, whether intended or not."

"These government-engineered attempts to legislate racial equality create consequences that often make matters worse...entrusting the government to get it right can prove downright dangerous."

Dr. Carson, the neighborhood structure of the United States, did not arise by accident.  Whether a given municipality has a discriminatory intention doesn't matter.  The very existence of exclusively white neighborhoods is the product of discrimination, whether those living there acknowledge this or not.

Dr. Carson, your equating years of severe and deliberate racial segregation by white society and by the federal government with President Obama's measured means to help correct it is abominable.  In your mind, both are examples of social engineering--as if they were morally equivalent!

Black students were denied access to integrated schools and universities for generations.  Integration did not come about voluntarily.  Was Brown vs. Board of Education just another heinous example of social engineering?

The two great problems in the United States, racism and economic inequality, are intolerable.    If politicians and those who elect them  don't like government intervention,  they should be making significant progress in creating a society in which  such intervention is not needed. The lava of racism continues to flow. Something needs to be done!

7.

If not now, when?

Sea Turtles and Democracy

1. The Green Sea Turtles

The highlight of our recent trip to Costa Rica, (December, 2016), was a visit to Tortuguero State Park, situated on the Caribbean coast of the country.  “Tortuguero” literally means “turtle catcher”; the term refers to the days when hired locals would turn over the giant turtles onto their backs, where they helplessly remained until Spaniards came and killed them.  

An adult sea turtle weighs up to 1500 lbs; an average adult yields 75 lbs of meat. They're called green sea turtles because their flesh is green, due to the color of the vegetation they eat.  Their eggs were a  delicacy once, and in some places of the world, they probably –and mostly illegally—still are. Once in danger of extinction, sea turtles, thanks to the work of dedicated conservationists, are a protected species in most countries where they are present.  With continued vigilance, sea turtles will still be around to delight future generations of their very distant relatives, us.

Wise Costa Rican politicians (there were many horribly unwise ones as well in the history of this small Central American nation) have designated thirty percent of the country's land mass as national parks, a percentage that ranks among the highest in the world.  (An amazing fact: this land, the size of the U.S. state of West Virginia, is a very tiny fraction of the total land mass of the world; nevertheless it contains 5% of the world’s biological diversity).

Although Tortuguero is only 86 kilometers from our starting point, San José, the capital, it took us, counting breaks for breakfast and lunch, just about the whole day to get there.  There are no highways in Costa Rica; there isn’t even a direct route to the park: the  main roads zigzag across the country and thus make only slow progress in either the northern or southern direction.  In addition, about half of the route from San José to Tortuguero has to be covered by boat.

The beautiful, pristine beaches of Tortuguero State Park constitute  an important area in the life cycle of green sea turtles.  Every month, female sea turtles return to the same place where they were born—how they manage to do this is a mystery, at least to me.  Once on land, they dig a hole in the sand in which they lay about 120 eggs.  (August is the peak month of their nesting in Tortuguero; we didn’t see any adult turtles during our December visit.)  The eggs hatch two months later.

The local population of humans has learned that they can  make more money from tourism than they would from slaughtering sea turtles or from robbing their nests of its eggs.  Our guide works with a young man who takes tourists to nesting sites.  He knows knows where the ones with mature eggs lie.  He does this for ten dollars per head, which we—at least most of us—willingly paid.  (You know what he’d be doing if he couldn't make a profit in an ecological way.)  

After we agreed to hire him, he poured water over a nesting site; this simple procedure causes mature eggs to hatch.  By the time we got to the beach, scores of little critters were scurrying toward the ocean, a few hundred meters beyond the site of their birth.

Life isn’t easy for sea turtles. Only about one per brood makes it to adulthood.   While we watched them—it is not easy to hurry towards water when one’s means of locomotion is a pair of tiny flippers—vultures circled overhead.  None of them swooped down to snatch them—they, of course, feared more than hunger the most vicious predator of all, human beings.  With much effort,  the baby turtles eventually reached the sea.  We saw some being whacked back to shore by waves; none of these setbacks was permanent, however.  Every one reached the ocean, then quickly disappeared into it.  This is a photo I took of one, about halfway in its struggle to come to the end of dry sand: 

Their trials don’t end once they reach the liquid environment in which all life on Earth began.  Crabs and fish await them.  I hope the one in the photo is still alive!

As many of you know, we now live in the epoch called The Anthopocene Age, in which human beings, for the first time in natural history, are able to significantly alter the environment.    In this age of mass extinction, which began around 1950, turtles still must face the most vicious predator of all.  Human beings kill them in various ways, mostly indirectly now.  Some of these amazing reptiles get trapped in fishing nets; others become sick from  pollution. There is, for instance, a swirling mess the size of Texas in the Pacific Ocean; the mess consists entirely of garbage.  Plastic does not degrade.  Many sea turtles, mistaking balls of plastic for jelly fish, die a slow death after swallowing  a meal of shimmering, diaphanous, unnatural junk.

All human beings, of course, are not vicious predators.  The majority of nesting areas throughout the world are now protected sites.  Many natural scientists continue to dedicate their lives to studying these sublime creatures, with the goal that they thrive, or at least don’t become extinct.  They are apparently succeeding.

(If I had my way, I would let natural predators have their way as well. I believe vultures should be vultures, crabs should be crabs and fish should be fish. When humans act like vultures, crabs, or fish, however, that is another matter.)

Back in the United States, I am filled with joy whenever these magnificent creatures swim about freely in the oceans of my mind.  (There is garbage there also, but I’m doing my best to remove it.  I wish everyone worked as hard to remove outer pollution as well.)

2.  An American Nightmare

I am a poet, images and music are my business.  It’s thus not surprising that I wrote many haiku in Costa Rica, even though I hardly ever write haiku.  The images of all the live wonders I saw there—sea otters, a rare chestnut-bellied heron, jacaras, caimans, iguanas, etc., seemed to me to be almost demanding to be captured and preserved in haiku.  To each his own: while my fellow tourists took pictures, I wrote poems—fourteen of them, in fact, during the course of our stay.  One of them, as you may have surmised, has baby sea turtles as its subject:

Birds of prey above;

Hatchlings scurry toward the sea—

Crabs and fish ahead.

Life is precious as it is precarious.  The best human institutions can become extinct as well, a horrifying thought. The fragility of existence, especially of human existence, more than now and then weighs heavily on my mind.

One night, after our return, I had a nightmare.  I saw a giant sea turtle, which, in my dream, represented American democracy.  I have always thought, although it lumbered clumsily toward its goal and got stuck sometimes, that our giant democracy was invincible. Yes, it could be injured and had many scars from wounds of the past, which were mostly self-inflicted--It was, however, far too big and strong to be killed.  Suddenly, the huge turtle behind my closed lids transformed into a newborn, faced with a gauntlet of creatures ready to devour it. For the first time in my life, I realized that democracy in my country was in serious danger, threatened by a demagogic vulture, corporate crabs and a sea full of ignorant fish.

As I woke up, this haiku came to mind:

Democracy must

Struggle toward equality—

Vultures overhead.

It’s a bad haiku, but, unfortunately for all of us, it is also distressingly true.

Notes from the Poetry Workshop of José Garcia Villa, 1970 Part ll

This is the second of a multiple-part series containing the notes I took during a poetry workshop taught by the renowned poet, "The Pope of Greenwich Village," José Garcia Villa, (1907-1996). José, whom I got to know well, was a great teacher, who dedicated the latter decades of his life to the teaching of the art of writing verse.  He intended to publish a book about this subject, but it never materialized.  This makes the publication of these notes, imperfect as they are, all the more important;  scholars, poets and lovers of poetry might well find something of interest here.

                                                                 February 11, 1970

Inlearning: expanding knowledge of the interior
Endopoetics: regarding the essence within
Outlearning expanding exterior knowledge
Exopoetics: technical knowledge
Poema/Logos
Exopoetics, not logos, is what makes a poem art.
Next three weeks: "inlearning" of poetry
Roethke on prosy poems: "These wings are from the wrong nest."
François Mauriac: When a writer has style, it doesn't matter what he has to say.
Eliot: "Ulysses is the most important expression modern times has produced."
Joyce: Intellectual narrowness, but possessed an extreme gift for writing.
Art doesn't require intellect; it requires intelligence.
Ideas merely "show off" in art.
Art doesn't require intellect because its problems can be solved--and only thus: by intelligence.  Doesn't need rationality
Poetry catches meaning unintentionally.
Valéry: It's the lack and the black which create.
Stevens: knowledge of poetry is part science and part theory.
Scholars generalize, artists individualize.
Ned Rorum: "I don't really know anything about music!"  Inner, intuitive knowledge.
Blake: Are artists' rules to be drawn from fools?
Pound: The greatest barrier is set up by teachers who know just a little more than the public.

What follows is José's versification of the February 4th assignment, which he presented after we presented our versions.  I do not know the source of this quote.  I did not record any student version. 

       Give Coleridge one
       vivid word from an old
narrative--
               Let him mix
it with two

       
         in his thought: "out
         of three sounds he will
frame, not
                 a fourth sound,
but a star."


                                                   February 18, 1970


Marshall Mcluhan: The medium is the message.
Loving the medium is what is most important.
When the medium is effective, so is the content;
when the medium is not effective, content has no effect either.
Content is a fractional medium of larger, formal medium.
The medium in which the subject moves is what is most important.
Subjects as such are not literary.
Literary qualities: effects in language
Poetry exists as music, but in the form and medium of language.
Anything can be a subject
Language in itself is anonymous and without personality.
Bad poets practice alchemy in reverse: they touch gold and turn it into lead.
Valéry: the execution of the poem is the poem.
A good poem sometimes surprises with unintentional, metaphysical significance.
The medium is concrete, although what it has produced is not concrete.
Without the success of the concrete medium, there is no expressiveness.
Stevens: One of my ideals is to make everything expressive.  I want to get out of line.
Poetry readings are like trying to win a beauty contest by sending the judges a recording of your voice.
Ned Rorum: Taste, touch, smell are for sex; eyes and ears are for art.
Prose content of poem is not an art factor; not the real meaning of the poem--It is a springboard, like the score of a musical composition:
Transfiguration and magnification of values in performance.
Even when Johnson announced good news it sounded like bad news.
The most expressive writers are the ones with deepest content, but it's the expression that makes it great.
Development and detection of expressiveness is a lifelong task.

The session ended, once again, with our "found poem" versification assignment.  Here is José's version:

       Each flower
owes it to itself
to fade
       for the sake

       of its fruit;
the fruit, unless it
fall and
       die cannot

       assume new
blooms: spring itself
rests on
       winter's grief.


(Source unknown)


To be continued

The Small Hands Blues

Like many people I know, I got ‘em bad.  

November 8, 2016, the date during which American citizens decided who would be their next president, was, at least in Baltimore where I live, a wonderfully crisp fall day. Several hours after I voted, as the results were starting to come in, I noticed that two of the three of us gathered before the LCD screen—my wife, Nirmala, and my nephew, Ranji--looked a little nervous.  I, however, remained calm.  “Hillary will definitely win, don’t worry—The American people will not elect a pathological narcissist with non-existent impulse control and with very little to offer, other than hyperbole and populist blather."

I was wrong, very wrong, about the result.  The orange-coiffed populist lost the popular vote, but won the election nevertheless. I hope I will be wrong about Trump's presidency as well, but I seriously doubt that sanguineness would be appropriate here.

Since then, I carry an inner sadness wherever I go.  This does not mean that I don’t laugh, or get absorbed in work, or celebrate family life or get together with friends.  I do all that, but when I’m alone again, sadness returns, a sensation of mournfulness similar to the recurring sorrow I felt for a long time after a friend of mine died.

I do not believe that Trump has the temperament or ability to take on the most difficult and powerful job in the world.  Maturity? Integrity in a man who was the head of the disgraceful birther movement for years before he took that photo-op ride down an escalator, thus beginning a terrible reality show which people who don’t watch terrible reality shows cannot turn off, because it’s now part of their lives? How did we all get sucked into the other side of the screen?  Four years of bad programming without a break—even a commercial for the latest drug to unplug the impacted would look good now.

Someone far less mature than Dorothy will soon be challenged by Putins and Palins and ISIS's dares--oh, my! I admit it, I'm scared. (I predict that after two or three years, perhaps even earlier, his base, the white working class, will be so enraged at his failure to "make America great again" that a majority of those who supported him will have a severe case of voters' remorse.  Worse things than that can happen, and likely will.  I also predict, however, that we'll all get by somehow, diminished, yet alive).

I refuse, however, to spend more time than necessary sleeping on a comfy bed.  I intend to spend many waking hours standing up for what I believe in.  My motto: I’m too old to argue and too young to give up.

I’m retired and shy and have very little influence and power.  (I hope you, dear reader, are in a position to do far more important things than I--Please proceed!)  Still, in this public excerpt from a private diary, hoping to inspire insects and eagles to fly a little higher, a wounded yet ardent believer in the butterfly effect promises the following:

1. From now on, I’m a White Ambassador—If I ever hear anyone who looks like me denigrate anyone who doesn’t, I will politely and vociferously disagree.

2. I will reserve time to work as a volunteer to do some good for others.

3. I will contribute to charities that support neighbors threatened by Trump’s transient regime.

4. I will not demonize any group, including that of the white working class, out of which I came.   

     

S  Since people who think like me will be singing the blues for the next four years,  I’ll be playing the blues on the piano as well.  Lots of practice--and reading and writing--ahead.  (I’ll be posting my attempts on YouTube to keep a record of my progress.  You’re kindly invited to ignore them all.)

La lucha continua—Sin armas y sin rencor!

First Example of The Small Hand Blues, November 27, 2016

After the November 2016 U.S. election, I realized that I will be singing the blues for the next four years--so I might as well play them as well. Every two months or so, I will record and post an edition of "The Small Hands Blues." The present recording gives ample evidence that I am terrible at blues playing at the moment, and need lots of practice and training. Let's see what progress four years can bring. The last sentence can be applied to presidential progress as well. I'd like to be optimistic; I'd like not to have full confidence in Mr. Trump's lack of ability.and lack of civility. Even since he led the birther movement, however, I've believed I have his number, and it's very close to zero. What to do? Practice: you're gonna be playing the blues for a long time!

From the Poetry Workshop of José Garcia Villa, 1970--Part l

1.

José Garcia Villa, a leading poet during the 1940s and 1950s and still read today, (his collected poems were published by Penguin in 2008).  His three major books, Have Come Am Here, published in 1942, Volume ll, published in 1949, and Selected Poems and New, published in 1958, have a prominent place on my bookshelf to this day.  His work received great acclaim from critics and poets alike.  According to Dame Edith Sitwell, “The best of these poems are amongst the most beautiful written in our time.”  He was also the recipient of many awards and was for many years the nominee of the government of The Philippines for a Nobel Prize in literature.

In 1957, he  published a long poem in the Times Literary Supplement entitled, The Anchored Angel.  It was supposed to be followed by Part ll, which, unfortunately, was never completed.  José never wrote a poem again, although he lived for forty more years.

He hardly remained idle, however.  He turned his talent to teaching, just as he turned from painting to the writing of short stories,(Footnote to Youth, 1933, was championed by Sherwood Anderson); from story writing to poetry; and finally, from writing poetry to teaching young authors the essentials of this essential, essentially non-paid profession.  It was clear to us all, that despite his abrasive personality, it was indeed a privilege to be in his class. He was a truly outstanding teacher.

I first met him when my brother, who was an avid admirer, took me to one of his classes at the New School in, I think, 1969.  Villa left teaching at the New School a few years thereafter.  He also taught students at this apartment; these sessions were designed for those  who had more than a passing interest in the composition of poems.

Recently, I found the notes I took during one semester in 1970.  We all thought that he would eventually publish a book about the technique of writing poetry, but this never happened.  Since Villa is still the subject of university study, I thought publishing these notes would prove to be of some interest.  Although some of the material might appear to modern students of poetry to be somewhat outdated, there are still many lessons to be learned from him today.  This is the second (and the major reason) I decided to make them public, namely, those interested in poetry will find, I believe, gems that have been buried in my notebook for nearly fifty years.  (Readers are invited to google an essay of mine, The Poetry of José Garcia Villa, for more background material.)

2,

This is the historic photo taken on November 8, 1948 at the famous Gotham Book Mart on W 49th Street in New York City. (The book store is no longer there.) José is in the back row next to W.H.Auden who is standing on the ladder.  Most of the writers in this picture are still very well known.

3.

José lived in Greenwich Village, on Greenwich Avenue.  I don’t know when he first began renting his apartment there, but by the look of the faded paint on the walls, it had already been a long time before I took my first course with him there in 1970.  (The apartment management periodically offered to paint it, but José would have to move the furniture and clutter around the walls first, which he always declined to do.) It was basically a first floor studio apartment, consisting of a large oblong room with a small kitchen off to the right and a small bedroom off to the left. The room was nearly filled with a large table, around which students sat, with José at the table’s head.  Aside from the chairs around the table, the furniture consisted of two inexpensive brown couches that had seen better days.  I remember a very weird statue to the left, a gift that some artist had given him.

We took turns bringing a bottle of Seagrams gin to each session.  It was placed on a counter in the kitchen; José supplied the paper cups.  We entered the kitchen whenever we needed a drink--which was often.  We always drank it neat.

We begin with my notes from a session in 1970.  I must admit that my notes do not give an accurate indication of the dynamism of the classes.  My mind sometimes wandered; I often doodled on the margin of the page.  This was not José’s fault; I was easily distracted in those days by my own thoughts. I had, of course, no idea that I would be entering my notes into a computer nearly fifty years later.  (Personal computers were the stuff of science fiction in those days.)  I wish my notes were better, but some idea of the sessions comes across nevertheless.  

We begin with the first entry, which is undated; I presume it occurred on February 4, 1970, since my notes for the following weekly session are dated February 11, 1970.

Notes from the Workshop                            
Session One: February 4, 1970

Robert Frost: Poets need a special kind of courage for a special type of punishment. José: it entails more fun than punishment.

Techne=Art

Technique is the means to accomplish this.  Art is greater than technique

For this class, technique is the goal; a poetic constitution; poetics, poetry’s Magna Carta.  The theory of the poem; technical poetics.  Principles underlying art: the how.

Dylan Thomas: The lines of poetry are pieces of poetry moving toward a poem.

Sontag: art reinvents language.

William Faulkner: the goal of the artist is to arrest motion by artificial means.

Technique has to be learned.

Student to Robert Graves, “What is bad poetry?” Graves’s response: “Yours!”

There is good bad poetry, and bad good poetry.  (If really bad, the poems become classics of their kind, as found in “The Stuffed Owl,” a collection of bad poetry.)

Bad good Poetry—good form but should be prose due to content.

Synthetic poems: costume jewelry instead of real gems.

There are many unnecessary poems written by unnecessary poets.

The good poet knows when he fails.

The artist is the cool scientist serving the subtle dreamer.

Valéry:  a poem is a marvelous little crystal system.

Some poems struck terror into Mallermé because they were so beautiful.

Behind bad poetry is the genuine emotion of the bad poet.

Emerson: people don’t deserve good writing because they like bad writing so much.

A poet is expected to do the impossible.

Two basic problems in poetry: 1.Technical; 2. Linguistic

Gide: Every work is a problem solved.

Ortega Y Gasset: writing entails considerable risk—like bull fighting.

The medium is not only a vehicle, but also an obstacle—Mastery and helplessness.

Poetry moves only in harness; a poet wants it to be difficult.

One needs natural facility and acquired difficulty.

Carl Ruggles: if no obstacles, watch out.  Stumbling blocks must become stepping stones.

Lead yourself into chains then try to get out of them--Dance in your chains!

Thomas: Thank God writing is daily more difficult.

Notes: José often ended the class with a “found poem”—José was a true master in this genre, as we shall see.  Here, in the first class, he informs the students about a regular class assignment.  He will write on the board a poem needing correction, or a piece of prose for us to versify.  We had to versify it for the next class, paying special attention to the movement of the lines.  We weren’t allowed to edit the assignment, although some words could be omitted to tighten up the language  He demanded “not just visual order—lines must have the right movement.”  Many of the classes ended with an exercise in versification.  We would write our version on the board; fellow students would then comment.  As one might expect, José revealed the master version, his version, at the end.  He was indeed a true master of versification.  At the end of the first class, he gave an example of one of his "found poems", which follows. I did not record the original source of the prose.

     

                   Light was blue

                        with the color of this bird

                        going through it—

                   And he, between

                   his wings easily

                         turned bluer, where water

                        was, where fish

                   were in water:

                   Where blue coming

                        through blue became something

                        other: became

                   light in circles

                  without stopping

                      until one circle was

                     abruptly his

                 wide, white eye.

(To be continued)

President Trump--What a Nightmare!

1.
Then again, maybe I'm wrong.

"Inequality is a problem."  Maybe not.  "Climate Change is the major challenge of our time,"  You whine. "Women deserve equal pay, equal say, and the right not to be groped."  Nope.  "Racism is horrible.  We must overcome."  God, you're dumb. "Reasonable gun control is important."  You should be shot.   "Citizens United undermines democracy."  Why not try theocracy?  "Every worker deserves to receive a living wage."  For a prince, yes, but not for a page. "We need to keep calm."  We need to bomb.  "We need to fight for human rights!"  Especially for whites.

No, no, no.  All those responses sound like translations from a foreign language--quite possibly Russian.

2.
What went wrong?   The Democratic Party believes in inclusiveness.  But maybe it hasn't been inclusive enough.

I saw the electoral maps on TV.  In many states, nearly all the counties were colored red.  A few islands (where the cities are) were colored  blue.  The reds were rural and white.  The people who lived in the red sea demanded that the waters be parted so that a new Moses could lead the chosen people to the promised land.  Trump, the new Moses--OMG!

The Democratic Party practiced identity politics.  Many whites, especially working-class whites, felt powerless and left-out. Those are dangerous emotions, both for them and for the rest of us.  Their brains had been programmed by years of Republican manipulation: memes replaced analysis; anger replaced sobriety.

The white working-class was dismissed by many liberal pundits as a bunch of racists who couldn't accept diversity.  Lord knows, that is indeed a major part of the problem.  But the root cause of their despair is a feeling of powerlessness and decline, intensified by memories of the "good old days."  When people feel helpless, they seek scapegoats.  Since racism is in our drinking water, it's not surprising that they have tried to quench their thirst with that corrosive-filled liquid that is even more destructive than Flint's

I think the Democrats should have stressed that they were on the side of the white working class as well.  Instead, they largely ignored them. We all will be suffering from that omission for a long time.

Why should Democrats reach out to a group that is so full of hate?  I will give you an analogy.  When I practiced  pediatrics, I was confronted over the years by many cases of child abuse.  A child with a broken arm was found to have healed fractures in other bones, indicating abuse.  You of course react with anger, but you do your best to hide it.  Let's say, as is frequently the case in very young children, that the mother did it.  Before the child is returned to the mother--most abused children, by the way, eventually return to the care of their parent or parents-- you do your best to see to it that the mother's life is improved.  Get the child in day care, for instance.  See to it that the mother has opportunities for herself, time to unwind, counseling, educational opportunities, etc.  In short, when you make the mother happier, you are doing a lot to ensure the safety of the child.

Demonizing the white working-class as a bunch of racist rednecks was a grave mistake. Ignoring them almost amounted to the same thing.

3.
After finding out that Trump had won, I went to bed.  When I got up, I couldn't find my slippers.  In the dark, I stepped into a pool of cat vomit.  As I cleaned off the muck, I thought to myself, "What a perfect way to begin the first day of Trump's triumph."

4.
Too many of us are getting news off the internet.  Too many of us listen to those who share the listeners' anger.  Too many of us don't read.  Too many of us spend far too much times watching TV or streaming movies or playing with mobile devices.   Is this the way we get the government we deserve?  Yes, indeed.

5.
Has our politics degenerated into a reality show?  Maybe it's even worse.  Maybe we're part of a minor recitative in a major opera.  In Bellini's opera, Norma, the eponymous Druid princess is asked to lead a rebellion against Rome.  This being an Italian opera, the audience knows that she is secretly in love with a Roman.  She is reluctant to fight against her lover's homeland, and tells the Druid warriors  the following:  (My translation.)

I am able to read the books of fate,
the name of Rome is written
on the pages of death.
Rome will fall one day,
but not through you--
Rome will be brought down by its own vices;
consumed by them Rome will perish.
Await the hour, the fatal hour
when the grand decree will be accomplished.

I never thought that Norma's warning could apply to us.  Although I still hope it doesn't, I am no longer sure it won't.

6.
That's all for today.  I need a drink.

Osher Essays: 1. Keats and Religion

1.

On a day in May, many years ago, I decided to rest, and perhaps even meditate, in one of Christopher Wren’s fine churches—I forget which one.  I had been walking in London for several hours, when body and spirit informed me it was time to sit down.  The church, aside from me and one or two others, was empty.  I appreciated the silence, but it was not to last.  A voice over the church’s loud speaker soon announced that it was Pentecost,  commemorating the day when, according to legend, the Holy Ghost descended upon the disciples of Jesus.  (A rather tasteless bit of spooky music, which indicated, presumably, the advent of the Trinity’s third person, accompanied the disembodied voice that informed the three or four of us in the church that it was indeed Pentecost).  After a minute or so of information about the all-but-forgotten holiday, the voice proclaimed the following prayer:

Almighty God, the fountain of all goodness,

We humbly beseech thee to bless

Philip Duke of Edinburgh, Charles Prince of Wales,

And all the Royal Family,

Endow them with thy Holy Spirit;

Enrich them with thy heavenly grace,

Prosper them with all happiness;

And bring them to thine everlasting kingdom

Through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen

They’ve got to be kidding, I thought to myself.  Can anybody take this prayer seriously anymore?  Poor Prince Charles, brought down to the level—or perhaps even below it—of an average citizen by the scythes of the popular press! Perhaps some would defend such claptrap with one word: tradition. But a tradition without substance (regarding the royal family) reduces all those words about God to a tradition without substance as well.  

In Keats’s day, “Charles Prince of Wales” in the above-quoted prayer would have been replaced by “George Prince of Wales,” who served as Prince Regent (hence the term Regency England) from 1811 to the year of Keats’s death, 1821, after which he reigned as George lV.  (His father, King George lll, had been declared incompetent, due to illness.) 

If Keats, a liberal, sympathetic to the Whigs, had heard that version of the prayer, or something similar to it, (which he probably did), he would hardly have sunk to his knees.  (He wouldn’t have been in church in the first place).

Royalty-bashing didn’t begin in the twentieth century.  When a conservative newspaper declared the fat, fatuous, and philandering Regent to be “the Glory of the People,”  and an “Adonis of Loveliness.” Keats’s good friend, Leigh Hunt, felt he had to set the record straight.  He wrote in his influential journal, The Examiner, that the Prince was “a corpulent man of fifty, a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, and the companion of gamblers and demireps.” For this Hunt received a two-year jail term, albeit under such comfortable conditions that would enrage the likes of the redoubtable Sheriff of Maricopa County, Joseph Arpaio, who, I doubt, knows anything about  Keats’s poetry or the times in which the poet  lived. (We Americans can indeed be proud of the First Amendment, the strongest guarantor of free speech in the world.  Even today, it is much easier to sue for libel in the United Kingdom than it is in the United States).

Yes, the liberal Keats would have scorned the aforementioned prayer.  But what if the references to the royal family were taken out?  What was Keats’s view of Christianity?

2. 

The seventeenth century was the swan song of religious dogmatism—at least among artists and scientists.  (True, the deeply religious Bach died in 1750, but he composed, largely unnoticed at the time, in a cultural backwater, where Lutheranism was practiced in a more or less unchanged way for over a century.  Bach, at the time of his death, was considered to be quite old-fashioned; music had changed, as evinced by the compositions of his sons, as well as the intellectual Zeitgeist, which had yet to trickle down to ordinary citizens.  And trickle down it did.  Conventional religion has been losing ground to reason and science ever since, a process which continues apace in Western culture.  Would Bach have written traditional, albeit glorious, music if he had been born a century later?  A rhetorical question!

The Age of Enlightenment, which took place, roughly, during the eighteenth century, emphasized two worthy adversaries of conventional religion, reason and science.  One of the towering figures of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant declared that one could never know the "thing in itself," since all our knowledge is obtained through the senses.  Our senses could be wrong—therefore, we can never be sure of any revelation supposedly coming from beyond them.  When the great scientist La Place was asked by Napoleon whether God had any place in his world-view, he replied, “I have no need for that hypothesis, Your Majesty.”   Scientists and secularists, in increasing numbers, have given variations on this response ever since.

Keats was hostile to the traditional religion of his culture, The Church of England, for a variety of reasons.  First, Keats, a liberal from the working class, had little use for a church that was so strongly linked to the conservative aristocracy.  Second, although Keats was a “monk of the Imagination” he was also grounded in reason.  He once wrote in a letter, “You know my ideas about Religion..I do not think of myself more in the right than other people and (I think) nothing in this world is provable.”  Spoken like a true son of Kant!  Why should Christian dogma be correct and not the myths of Ancient Greece--a paraphrase of a quote from Keats.  Third, as we have seen, The Church was becoming increasingly out of touch with contemporary culture; it was, in Keats’s mind, a harmful atavism that should and would be left behind.

Keats said it best in a sonnet of his from the year 1816:

Written in Disgust of Vulgar Superstition

The church bells toll a melancholy sound,

     Calling the people to some other prayers,

     Some other gloominess, more dreadful cares,

More hearkening to the sermon’s horrid sound.

Surely the mind of man is closely bound

     In some black spell; seeing that each one tears

     Himself from fireside joys, and Lydian airs,

And converse high of those with glory crown’d.

Still, still they toll, and I should feel a damp,--

      A chill as from a tomb, did I not know

That they are dying like an outburnt lamp;

    That ‘tis their singing, wailing ere they go

     Into oblivion;--that fresh flowers will grow,

And many glories of immortal stamp.   

Not so fast, John Keats! Like many of your contemporaries, you believed that reason would solve all our problems—albeit only eventually.  It didn’t turn out that way.  In addition, although the Church of England is a moribund institution in Great Britain, Christianity remains a potent force in Africa, the United States, and elsewhere.  Its traditions might be waning in Great Britain and elsewhere, but other religions, notably Islam, are thriving. Scientists are overwhelmingly secular, true—but most of the rest of the world’s population, especially those of us who are less educated or use religion as a means to gain political control, are not. 

Keats, like ever-increasing numbers of Westerners of all classes, was not religious—at least in the conventional sense.  What about in a non-conventional sense?  That is the question we shall attempt to answer in the next section.

3.

A friend of mine once told me that what is bad for the Jews is good for Judaism, and, conversely, what is good for the Jews is bad for Judaism.  In other words, during periods of persecution and resultant stress, one often turns to one’s religion for consolation; one also tends to ignore one’s faith during good times.  Did Keats become religious in a conventional sense when confronted with death?  Let us examine this possibility now.

Keats rarely talked about his early life, and it is easy to see why.  His father died in an accident when Keats was six; his doting mother abandoned him shortly thereafter only to return years later, dying from tuberculosis.  Keats, her eldest child, was the caretaker of the family; he took care of her until she died.  Keats was only fourteen at the time of her death.  After that, Keats and his siblings lived with their grandmother, Alice Jennings, where they remained until she died at the age of seventy-eight in December, 1814, several weeks after her grandson, John, had completed his twenty-fifth year.  She was a good woman, and provided  much needed stability and love.  Her passing affected the young poet deeply, as is demonstrated by the following sonnet which he wrote shortly after she died:

As from the darkening gloom a silver dove

    Upsoars, and darts into the Eastern light.

    On pinions that naught moves but pure delight,

So fled thy soul into the realms above,

Regions of peace and everlasting love;

    Where happy spirits, crown’d with circlets bright

    Of starry beam, and gloriously bedight,

Taste the high joy not but the blest can prove.

That thou or joinest the immortal quire

   In melodies that even Heaven fair

Fill with superior bliss, or, at desire

   Of the omnipotent Father, cleavest the air

On holy message sent—What pleasures higher?

   Wherefore does any grief our joy impair?  

Did Keats return to the arms of “the omnipotent Father,” having had a conversion experience after his beloved grandmother’s death?  If he did, it certainly didn’t last.  It is more likely that, confronted by the death of a loved one, Keats was in desperate need of consolation and wrote a poem in which death is not final, the finality of which he simply couldn’t accept at the time.  “And then an awful leisure came/Belief to regulate” is how Emily Dickinson referred to the time of intense mourning after a loved one’s death.  After his “awful leisure,” Keats’s “omnipotent Father” once again disappeared.

Keats didn’t share this poem with anyone; he undoubtedly read this deeply personal poem of poetic consolation many times when the loss of his grandmother was acutely felt.  It is not one of his best sonnets; I find it deeply moving nevertheless.

Among Keats's siblings, the ardent bibliophile, Tom, Keats’s younger brother, was closest to him in temperament.  Dying from tuberculosis, the family curse, Tom was lovingly taken care of by the poet, until the former died at age 19, when the later was 21.  Keats was reported to have been desperately seeking a spiritual consolation as the “awful leisure” returned, but couldn’t find one.

Four years later, Keats lay dying from the same disease; he was far away from family and his betrothed, sent abroad in a futile attempt to stem his illness by a sojourn in sunny Italy.  Although no one knew the nature of tuberculosis at the time, Keats by now was all too familiar with what lay before him.  Desperate for a consolation that didn’t entail magical thinking, he asked for several books, namely Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Living and Holy Dying, Pilgrim’s Progress, and a translation of Plato's works, but his friend and companion, Severn, could not find any of them in Rome,  a little over two and a half centuries before one click on the internet could have provided Keats with these books, and many more as well. As told by Aileen Ward, in her excellent biography of Keats, John Keats, the Making of a Poet, (page 392), Keats was in despair: “In his anguish he groaned against the 'malignant being' which denied him faith—that 'last cheap comfort, which every rogue and fool may have."'  His friend, Severn, was appalled by these words.

Keats directed that his tombstone should contain an image of a broken lyre, under which these words were to be chiseled in stone: Here lies a man whose name was writ in water.  He did not want his name to appear on it.  He died a terrible, painful death,  slowly drowning in his own secretions, without loved ones to ease his mental suffering and without any drug to ease his physical pain. 

Who could have expected anything else but despair from a very ambitious young man, who feared that he might cease to be before he wrote the great poems that were in him?  How poignant—and completely wrong—was his summation of his life as he lay dying: “I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make friends proud of my memory—but I have lov’d the principle of Beauty in all things, and if I had had time I would have made myself remembered.”

But his understandable despair at his impending death certainly did not reveal his true attitude toward life.  For him the experience of beauty had been a truly transcendent experience.  As he had written earlier: “What the imagination discovers as Beauty must be Truth—whether it existed before or not.”  This belief is best expressed by the immortal words that end a famous ode written in 1819: “'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,'—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” God could no longer be found in prose; in poetry, however, the God-like transcendent reality of Beauty was very real for him, and did not need any dogmas to confirm its existence.  In this sense, Keats was very religious indeed.

If Keats had been old at the time of his death; having lived a life dedicated to Beauty, I am convinced that a Spanish proverb would be very applicable, which I now paraphrase:  When you are born, you cry while everyone smiles; if you die after a full life, everyone cries while you smile.

Keats, a deeply spiritual person and a great poet, was denied that smile.  I really hope he is smiling somewhere now; I doubt it, but I undoubtedly hope it is true.

Rezension: Aller Tage Abend, ein Roman von Jenny Erpenbeck

Eine Rezension vom deutschen Literaturkreis, Baltimore, Maryland, USA

Aller Tage Abend

Von Jenny Erpenbeck

btb-Verlag, Tasdvhenbuchausgabe

München, 2014

283 Seiten

Auf dem Deckel dieses Romans, “Aller Tage Abend,” steht die Meinung eines Kritikers : « Dieses Buch wird bleiben. »  Ich aber nehme diesen Satz nur so an, dass, wie die Physik behauptet, Materie,  unter normalen Umständen, weder geschaffen noch zerstört werden kann.  Nur in diesem Sinne wird das, was diesen Roman ausmacht, noch in irgendeiner  Form bestehen, längst nachdem wir Zeitgenossen ichlos sind, meine ich.

Obwohl der Roman in Teilen interessant ist, bleibt er als Ganzes eine Stillgeburt—er lebt nicht.  Jenny Erpernbeck erzählt die Geschichte einer Familie, die der ihren ähnlich ist.  Die Grossmutter Erpenbeck war die bekannte DRR-Schriftstellerin und Schauspielerin, Hedda Zinner, die 1905 in Lemberg in Galizien geboren wurde und 1994 in einem deutschen Pflegeheim starb.  Im Buch kommt die Grossmutter 1905 in Galizien ans Licht; 1990 stirbt sie in einem Pflegeheim in Berlin.

Der Roman bietet einen Blick in die erschütternde deutsch/österreichische Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunders an, eine Zeitspanne, die auch den Lebensjahren der eigentlichen Grossmutter und der quasi-fiktiven Grossmutter des Romans entspricht.   Eins der Hauptthemen des Romans ist, in Erpenbecks Worte: “Wer enscheidet mit welchen Gedanken die Zeit erfüllt wird?”  Wahrscheinlich niemand.  Was geschieht, könnte anders geschehen.  Diese Erkenntnis kommt im Roman immer wieder vor; es ist der Grund warum so viele Konjunktivformen der Zeitwörter vorkommen, wie zum Beispiel:

Wäre die Grossmutter nur eine halbe Stunde später von zu Hause fortgegangen…oder wäre die des Lebens müde junge Frau nicht nach rechts…eingebogen…; oder hätte die Verlobte des schäbigen Mannes erst einen  Tage später die Verlobung gelöst;…ja, wäre sie dann ausgerutscht, hätte sich sogar ein Bein gebrochen, dann wäre…

                                                                   S. 135

So geht der Satz, drei Seiten lang.  Also, wenn eine dieser Möglichkeiten wirklich geschehen hätte, so hätte die junge Frau nicht sterben müssen.  Das erste Mal kommt dieses Stillmittel dem Leser interessant vor, aber es wird im Roman zu oft benutzt und bald  eher langweilig wirkt.

Der Vater von Jenny Erpenbeck ist der bekannte Physiker, John Erpenbeck.  Wie jeder, der für die Wissenschaften interessiert ist, weiss, spielt der Zufall in der Quuatumphysik eine führende Rolle.  Erpenbeck hat diese unheimliche Tatsache wohl von Jugend auf gewusst.  Das spürt man gut; das Zufällige ist gleichsam die Hauptfigur des Romans. In einem Teil stirbt die Grossmutter/Tochter; im nächsten steht sie auf und lebt weiter, vom Zufall erettet.  So was hätte geschehen können, aber so was ist nicht geschehen, usw.

Um das unpersönliche Quantumhafte der Welt zu betonen, kommen im Roman kaum Namen vor; nur sachliche Benennungen der Personen lesen wir, die die Beziehungen zueinander darstellen, wie,  zum Beispiel, “die Mutter,” “der Vater,” “die Grossmutter,” usw.  Beim Lesen bekommt man den Eindruck, dass in unserer Quantumwelt König Zufall herrscht; wir Menschen sind nur Blätter, die der Wind hin und her treibt.

Das ist eben das Problem.  Erpenbeck wollte oder wahrscheinlicher konnte nicht Charaktere schaffen.  Ideen sind wichtig, aber in der Literatur sind lebendige Figuren noch viel wichtiger.  Rauch ohne Feuer erstickt. 

Sympatie hat man mit den Charakteren keine.  Am Anfang ist die Mutter seitenlang  trostlos, als ihr Kind mit acht Monaten stirbt.  Aber wir kennen die namenlose Mutter nicht, und kann also Mitleid mit ihr nicht teilen oder selbst verstehen.  Nach dem Tod der Tochter im Konjunktiv; nach dem Tod der auferstandenen Tochter im Konjunktiv; nachdem die DDR-Schriftstellerin ausgerutscht ist und noch einmal stirbt, aufersteht sie noch mal im letzten Teil, um dann mit 90 Jahren in einem Pflegeheim endgültig zu verschwinden.  Ihr Sohn ist auch, wie die Mutter in Galizien, seitenlang trostlos.  Aber wenn ein Schattenriss ausradiert ist—was geht das den Leser an?

Im Roman geht hundertjahrelang alles schief.  Wenn etwas Gutes den Hauptfiguren geschehen hätte—und kein Jahrhhundert in der Wirklichkeit verläuft--selbst in Siberien—ohne mildere Tage, erfahren wir es nicht.  Nur Misere, nur Tod, nur Pech verfolgen uns, fast auf jeder Seite.

Hier ist der letzte Satz des Romans:

Viele Morgende wird er in dieser Frühe, die ganz allein ihm gehört, aufstehen und in die Küche gehen, und dort wird er so weinen, wie er noch niemals geweint hat, und dennoch wird er sich, während ihm der Rotz aus der Nase läuft, und er seine eigenen Träne verschluckt, fragen, ob diese merkwürdigen Laute und Krämpfe  wirklich alles sind, was dem Menschen gegeben ist, um zu trauern.

                                                                                                                                                                 S. 283

Für Erpenbeck betrübt das Leben pausenloses Rotzwetter, dessen traurige Tropfe  aus den Nasenlöchern des Zufalls auf die Menschen fallen, die man, mit seinen eigenen Tränen vermischt, verschlucken muss.  Ekelhaft-traurig sind die dicken Rotzwolken, durch welche die Sonne nie bricht—eine lange Reihe von solchen Tagen drückt den Leser so sehr, dass er gleichsam ein Fenster vor einer besseren Welt öffnen muss, um nach frische Luft zu schnappen.

Ach, diese Deutschen mit ihren trüben Ideenromanen, sagte ich mir.  Wie ein bekannter ungarischer Schriftsteller behauptete, kommt oft in deutschen Romanen nur der Kopf vor.  Wo ist das Herz? Wo ist de Leidenschaft? Völlig verheimlicht, mit Ideen bedeckt!

Ach diese Deutschen mit ihren Kopfwerken!  Aber da habe ich Unrecht.  Nachdem ich diesen Roman beendigte, nahm ich “Ich und Kaminski,” einen Roman von Daniel Kehlmann zur Hand—Dieser von Kopf und Körper geprägter Roman lebt von der ersten Seite an!

“Ich und Kaminski,” das unsere Gruppe demnächst liest, bespreche ich in der nächsten Rezension, die ich kurz nach unserem nächsten Treffen am 11. Dezember 2016 posten werde.  Ich lade Euch ein, ihn mitzulesen, und freue mich auf Eure Kommentare.  Jene Rezension wird positiver als diese sein, das verspreche ich Euch!

Anmerkungen

Mein besonderer Dank gilt Mary Upman vom Deutschen Literaturkreis in Baltimore.  Sie hat diese Rezension vorsichtig korrigiert and verbessert  Vielen Dank, Mary!

Weitere Artikel auf deutsch von Thomas Dorsett (Googeln Sie den Titel und dem Namen, Thomas Dorsett)

1. Jakob der Lügner, von Jurek Becker
2. Die Weisheit und das Alter
3. Ruhm von Daniel Kehlmann
4. Die letzte Welt von Christoph Ransmeyer
5. Die Herrlichkeit des Lebens von Michael Kumpfmüller

6. Nacht ist der Tag von Peter Stamm
7. Amon von Jennifer Teege und Nikola Sellmair