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ERIC LARSEN, FOUNDER & PUBLISHER |
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A SUMMER PROPAGANDA SAMPLE: LYING'S AS EASY AS BREATHING | |
Not too long from now, the
first part of a three-volume  work by Eric Larsen will be appearing. All three parts of the book will be called The Skull of Yorick: The Emptiness of American Thinking at a Time of Great Peril, a title that we'll explain at a later point. Let it be said, though, that a great part of the book's concern will be the widespread substitution lately of propaganda for truth. For the propagandists, lying is apparently as easy as breathing--a terrible thing for Oliver to see, since, as you know, Oliver lives to favor truth and to oppose lies, lying, deceit, fraud--and propaganda.
The idea arose of providing occasional examples netted from the veritable and mucky oceans of the stuff swirling all around us. In the New York Times, for example.
Here's the bottom line: If we want to end our oil addiction, we, as citizens, need to pony up: bike to work, plant a garden, do something. So again, the oil spill is my fault. I'm sorry. I haven't done my part.
Oh, great. Just about how many years too late is this sweet and well-intended but mostly phony idea? Sixty? Eighty? A hundred? So it's Us the People's fault that Poppy ("Oil-Boy") Bush declared that "The American Way of Life [OIL! OIL! OIL!] is not negotiable" and acted accordingly?
Give me a Pollyanny-Pickin' minute to get myself off the floor. But Friedman makes it all okay. Yup, says he, it's all our fault, this cataclysm, but "we're also the solution--if we're serious." Catch this:
Look, we managed to survive 9/11 without letting it destroy our open society or rule of law. We managed to survive the Wall Street crash without letting it destroy our economy. Hopefully, we will survive the BP oil spill without it destroying our coastal ecosystems.
We WHAT? What Ichabod Crane under-world has Friedman been living in for the past decade? The economy's NOT destroyed? Take a look at, say, this peach of a piece and then tell me so again. And we've STILL GOT "our open society [and] rule of law"? That's even bigger news to me. Do you suppose Friedman has even heard of Paul Craig Roberts? In "A Plague Upon The World: The USA Is 'A Failed State,'" Roberts writes a bit differently from the cherubic Friedman: The war on terror. . . destroyed the US Constitution and the civil liberties that the Constitution embodies. The Bill of Rights has been eviscerated. The Obama regime has institutionalized the Bush/Cheney assault on American liberty. Today, no American has any rights if he or she is accused of "terrorist" activity. . . . .When the Constitution was destroyed, the US ceased to exist.
Or how about Karen Kwiatkowski, the Air Force Lieutenant Colonel now active writer, chronicler, and truth-teller? Do you think Friedman has ever heard of her? What would he make of this, from "Gazan Survivalism": Gaza's continued existence, living on the edge, refusing to die and refusing to surrender in the face of angry Israeli state domination is, in itself, instructive. Americans who are alarmed at our own growing surveillance and lock-down state, endless war abroad, legalized murder of American citizens at the whim of a sitting President, continued contraction of liberty and a future of massive government-induced poverty really ought to take a look at how the Gazans live and cope. Their story informs our story.
What can Friedman conceivably think? He must think this: That his job is to make things "nice" for people in regard to the most destructive, dangerous, appalling, fearsome, malignant truths of their world--and that his job is to do this how? Well, by suppressing, hiding, denying--by routinely and plainly LYING about them.
Well, that's not what Oliver is for. Oliver takes the tiny minority position and sides with truth and the strengths it alone can and will bring. Here's something you can be sure of: Thomas Friedman would NEVER get a book accepted for Oliver's list, not even if he bent over backward and walked on his elbows. |
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OLIVER, GREGORY MARSZAL, AND THE STATE OF POETRY |
Oliver had planned to take Gregory Marszal's exceptional and brilliant new book of poetry down to Poets (they seem to oppose apostrophes) House to be a part of that literary institution's "display of all the poetry books published in the U.S. in the last year!" (They also seem to like exclamation points, as do I.)
But, because of the enormous size of Oliver's staff, confusion arose as to exactly whose task it was to run this worthy errand, and the deadline got missed. A lucky thing, as we'll now reveal.
On July 7th, the New York Times, byline Amanda Petrusich, ran a piece on the poetry-book show called "Collecting the Relics of a Poetic Year." This year's display included "close to 2,200 books of, and about, poetry," said the article. But imagine Oliver's astonishment at learning that even if one of Oliver's dozens of staff members HAD made the trip downtown to Poets House, the trip would have been wasted. Why? Well! Just listen: "Maggie Balistreri, the Poets House librarian, is careful to avoid vanity presses (which publish books at an author's expense)," says the article.
Bolts from blue heaven! Guess who THAT would include! THAT WOULD INCLUDE THE OLIVER ARTS & OPEN PRESS! Even if someone HAD carried Greg's masterpiece, I Am Not Dead, down there, Maggie Balistreri would have been "careful" to reject it, careful not to display it, and, who knows what? To hide it? Burn it?
What gets me about this bit of news is the vile and hypocritic ugliness that lies at the bottom of it. Do I get this right, then, that it's MONEY that makes a piece of art valuable or not valuable, interesting or not interesting, truth-revealing or deceit-pandering? And, moreover, this MONEY can and must come from only one certain kind of person, a gatekeeper called an "editor" or a "publisher," the only kind of person in the whole wide world who can transform a book into being worth anything? How strange this reasoning is, when you think about it--especially when you ask the one central question: "What exactly is it that interests this gatekeeper in one book over another if it's not that he or she hopes that in paying MONEY for it, he or she will get more money BACK than went out in the first place?"
Please answer me that, dear and (I'm sure) well-intended Maggie Balistreri.
So an author's money isn't as good as the money of some craven capitalist and gatekeeper? Come on: Money is money, coin of the realm, unsentient and fungible. And that's it. Seems to me that when it comes to poetry the only thing that matters is the value of the poetry, not the value of the money that may or may not be thrown at it for reasons that may sometimes have to do with the poetry's poetic value but that far, far, far more often have to do with its investable, craven, fungible, money-making value.
And lo and behold, just look what happens next, when it's the money of gatekeeper-capitalists that "validates" poetry instead of poetry being validated by the poetic aspects and values that reside within the art itself. In her next breath, after citing that Maggie Balistreri is "careful to avoid" all poetry that doesn't have a gatekeeper's price tag on it (it might be catching, that other kind of poetry), Amanda Petrusich writes in apparent praise that Balistreri "embraces the pliable notion of the book as an art object, playful and tactile: poems are hidden in matchbooks, wrapped in cloth, rolled to resemble cigarettes, or, in the case of Dana T. Lomax's 'Lullaby,' curled inside a plastic prescription bottle."
Oh, goody, goody! Toys! Fun stuff! Cuteness! Tchotchkes!!!
There you are, the free market at work, poetry getting turned into gelt and going all cutesy and dead on us, the kind of thing Laura Bush would just love, while Greg Marszal's poem "You," very possibly the greatest poetic nature-within-self meditation since Wordsworth's "The Prelude" ends up in the New York Sanitation Department can behind Poets House's back door.
"A good chunk of the exhibition's appeal is its tangibility, an increasingly precious commodity in an era of virtual consumption," writes Petrusich, referring to the matchboxes and pill bottles and things. I don't doubt that she's right, but I wonder what she means by "in an era of virtual consumption." I guess it means "an era of people WATCHING stuff."
Maybe that's part of the trouble--that people would rather watch stuff than read things. Well, even so, it's still a pretty crummy if not fraudulent message for Poets House to be sending out--let alone a pretty anti-poetry thing for Poets House to be catering to.
Gregory Marszal's poems are a million times more interesting, exciting, and moving than a matchbox or pill bottle, let me tell you. My own advice is to skip the gatekeeper cash-- don't "follow the money"--and get to the verse. If you want to see some money-metered poetry, go yet again to the New York Times. On the Op Ed page for July 11, under "Hot Type, Poems for Summer," you'll find six poems (by Tony Hoaglund, Carl Phillips, Robert Pinsky, Edward Hirsch, Sarah Lindsay, and Claudia Emerson) that you could call twice-paid poems, once by the gatekeeper and once by the Times.
Be careful with these fellas. I know, because I've been through all of 'em, word by word, line by line. They're the genuine thing, these ones are. DO NOT read them at the beach unless you're accompanied by a personal guardian or another adult at least as big as you are, so that the other person can move you into the shade once the sun starts angling in under the beach umbrella. Otherwise you'll BURN, because these six are the real true thing, every one of 'em--gatekeepered, shaved of thorns and bumps, their make-up applied to perfection, every molecule of life sucked out of them so that they won't begin to smell or sweat if left too long on the shelf or, unlike you, out in the sun: True, real snoozers, the model of poetry's gatekeepered future. Oh, except for the toys. Speaking of the toys, just think of the market potential for Valentine's Day! All the way from mini-vibrators to condoms-with-printed lyrics. Hail, the future of American poetry! What a display that one'll be down at Poets House! |
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WHAT'S COMING UP? |
 Keep your eyes open for ABLONG, a first novel by ALAN SALANT. What does Oliver say about it so far? How about this:
"By Alan Salant, Ablong, a comic-serious masterpiece in a class of its own: A winningly textured novel, set ostensibly in academia, but with a depth, charm, resonance, profundity, wit, and hilarity-with-pathos that set it leagues above the usual gown-and-ivy rollick."
And keep a watch out, too, because here comes Adam Engel's I HOPE MY CORPSE GIVES YOU THE PLAGUE: MY LIFE IN THE BUSH ERA OF GHOSTS. Oliver's estimation?
"From the irrepressible Adam Engel, a clock-stopping, head-spinning, hilarious, absolutely outraged collection of satiric essays, all once posted on the most influential political sites on the internet: I Hope My Corpse Gives You the Plague: My Life in the Bush Era of Ghosts."
BOTH BOOKS WILL BE AVAILABLE SOON
FROM ALL BOOKSTORES,
ELECTRONIC OR OF OTHER PERSUASION
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