Halloween + Literature = Edgar Allan Poe, right?

If you would like to get to know the author better this weekend, you have an astounding number of options, as there are restored Poe houses in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City (the Bronx), and Richmond, Virginia. And if that phrase—“The Poe Houses”—sounds odd, then go ahead and pronounce it “The Po’ Houses,” because all were poor houses in Poe’s day, and remain modest houses in poor neighborhoods today.

David Simon made this connection in Season Two of The Wire, when he has a scene of a white tourist asking some guys on a stoop where the Poe House is. “Poe house? Look around you, every house ’round here is a po’ house,” they answer.

The day I visited the West Baltimore Poe House on 203 Amity Street I was clearly the only white lady driving around the streets in a rental car, slowing down to check for street names. A cop car sat outside the house the entire time I was inside.

The house is open a few afternoons a week, and a sign on the door asks visitors not to give admission money until they get inside the house. It also requests that visitors not encourage panhandlers, and refuse any solicitations. The curator strongly advises against walking to the house from the downtown tourist attractions.

Once inside I paid my nominal admission fee and wandered about the tiny five-room house Poe lived in with about five other family members from 1832 to 1835. While residing in the house Poe wrote “MS Found in a Bottle,” which won him a $50 prize from a Baltimore newspaper for best short story. He also married his wife Virginia. But in 1835, his grandmother died, and since she had been paying the rent through her pension, the family had to move.

The tour includes a fact sheet that answers some common questions. Just reading them gives you a sense of the place:

Why does the Poe House have that “old” house smell?

The Poe House is an old house and with the age comes the tell tale odor which only an old house has. Even with limited air conditioning this odor will appear and then vanish. It is most noticeable after it has been raining.

Is the house haunted?

Some people have strong feelings about ‘ghosts’ and other related subjects. They are deeply offended by these claims due to religious beliefs. A historic site that claims to have had “ghostly” events also stands the chance of beings accused of making up stories to bolster attendance. For these and other reasons the Poe House has a policy of not discussing supernatural events that may or may not have occurred during its past history. Any soft whispering that you may hear coming from no visible source is your imagination.

Or, of course, your fear of being accosted, a fear that is probably grounded in some truth, but is also stoked by the warnings posted on the door. What spooked me about the house was not this fear but the repetition of poverty: the poverty of the Poe family when they lived there, and the poverty of the neighborhood today.

The house was almost torn down in 1941 so the city could, ironically, build Poe Homes, a public housing project. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore saved it, and today the house is run by the City of Baltimore.

Something of the same experience awaits you at the Poe House in Philadelphia. It is in a state of “arrested decay.” That’s what they call the home, which is preserved as a ruin. The National Park Service runs it, and the curators keep the Philadelphia house, in a struggling North Philadelphia neighborhood, also the site of public housing, unreconstructed, bare, and cold. The museum is as uncomfortable as life was inside the house in Poe’s time. You wander around empty rooms, imagining what it was like when Poe lived there. You have to fill in the blanks. It is an evocative experience, to be sure.

Paying homage to the spooky Poe during Halloween can be ghoulish fun, a way to learn about literary history, or a way to understand contemporary America. Because of their connection to Poe, houses that otherwise would have fallen apart are preserved and open to tourists. So on our way to learning about the history of an author we end up in neighborhoods other tourists skip. And then we can get a short course in the history of American poverty. Certainly worth the price of admission.

What could we gain by abandoning the test’s timed essay? Better writers.

“Although most people’s goal is to be happy at all times, being constantly satisfied and untroubled can actually prevent people from changing for the better. After all, why go to the trouble of changing if one is content with the ways things are? On the other hand, discontent often motivates people to make necessary changes. What revolution was not caused by widespread discontent? Who among us has not vowed to make a change because we are unhappy with some aspect of our lives?

Now, plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your readings, studies, experience, or observations. Please write legibly. You have exactly twenty-five minutes.

Is discontent often the first step to action?”

The above writing assignment came from the College Board’s ScoreWrite: A Guide for Preparing for the New SAT Essay. For the past four years, college aspirants have been required to write an impromptu, timed essay as part of the SAT. The College Board claims the essay will provide colleges with a reliable indicator of student success and signal to high schools that they need to put increased emphasis on writing instruction.

All this new essay requirement accomplishes is more iterations of that already ubiquitous academic exercise, the five-paragraph essay: an introduction that concludes with a thesis statement, followed by three body paragraphs with supporting examples and a conclusion. Asking students to answer “Is discontent often the first step to action?” on a high-stakes test takes time away from other more active, engaged learning, and leaves incoming college students even less prepared for college-level writing.

What college writing experts know is that to improve writing, students need time to plan, reflect, and revise, something timed essays don’t allow. Further, students must feel connected to the topics they write about; writing for the sole purpose of demonstrating competency rarely produces strong prose.

Learning to write is not like learning to ride a bike. As contexts and audiences change, writers must learn new knowledge, new rhetorical strategies, and new structures. That’s why high schools can never do what colleges yearn for them to do. They can only teach high school students to write for high school, because that’s the community in which the writing occurs. Only colleges can teach undergraduates how to master our codes or academic discourses. High school and college writing differ, as does business writing from journalism, and technical prose from creative writing.

Originally administered in 1926, the SAT began as a noble experiment to create a Jeffersonian natural aristocracy, an intellectual elite drawn from the best and brightest, regardless of race or class background, through neutral testing. But it never realized that perhaps unattainable goal. Numerous studies have proven that the test is biased against minorities and low-income students. According to FairTest: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, the average verbal score for African Americans in 2004 was 430; for whites, it was 528. Those whose families earned between $20,000 and $30,000 per year averaged 459; those whose families earned above $100,000 averaged 553.

All Americans should have the chance to be admitted into college. However, high-stakes standardized testing such as the SAT will not help achieve this goal. Just as high schools will never prepare students well enough for colleges, these tests will never measure student ability regardless of educational experience or family background.

If we really want to prepare students for civil society, we should give them the tools they need to think and learn and offer them meaningful, honest contexts for writing. One idealistic Jeffersonian ideal is still alive, if limping, in our country today: universal access to publicly funded K-12 education. What might we accomplish—what gains in knowledge and learning might ensue—if the energy, money, and talents used to create, modify, administer, prepare for, complete, defend, and critique the SAT and its revamping were instead directed toward improving the educational quality of our public schools? What, for instance, if we found a way to offer all students a chance to write, and write more often, on matters of importance for real audiences, and what if we provided them with teachers who had the time and training to offer them humane, individualized feedback?

Time that could be spent wrestling with big ideas and playing with language is now spent preparing all-purpose, highbrow examples and fancy vocabulary words for the SAT essay. Let’s hope the millions who will take the test this year will find a way to “express their discontent through action.” Maybe they’ll discuss their unhappiness with the SAT, and suggest reforms.

Is the combination question mark and exclamation point a sign of the times?

On Monday I discovered the interrobang, and I have been thinking about it all week. And no, not because I am a grammar nerd, but because I think ‽ may just sum up something about our clever yet confused culture.

The interrobang is a combination of a question mark and an exclamation point. Many of us use this punctuation when we type ?!, but a real interrobang is a merger of these two symbols: ‽

Punctuation expresses an attitude, an idea, and slant. Often we relegate punctuation to the background, deeming it a mere convention or formality. But with each colon, we make a point: one idea explains a previous one. Cause and effect. Sometimes we signal connections between ideas; punctuation can refine relationships between points. Although words can make an impact, punctuation, clauses, and syntax do a lot of work, too.

Punctuation has a history, and we can learn about our past by learning about the lives of punctuation marks. The interrobang is, I think, the only punctuation mark invented in the twentieth century.

Martin K. Speckter is credited with inventing the interrobang in 1962. He was an advertising executive, and needed a better way to express rhetorical questions in his copy. He designed the punctuation, and then solicited suggestions for what to name it. He chose interrobang, which combines the Latin for question (interro-) with a proofreading term for exclamation (bang).

So very Don Draper, circa Mad Men Season 2, no ‽

The interrobang was popular in the 1960s, and Remington added an interrobang key to some typewriters. Then it fell out of favor, and did not rise to the level of a comma, or other standard forms of punctuation.

When my friend said to me, on Monday, “Do you know there is a word for ?!” I was amazed. And smitten by the little fellow (though it took some research to realize a true interrobang superimposes the question mark and exclamation point). I tweeted my new fact,  and it was new to many a follower. But then I met with some undergraduates, and to my surprise they had all heard of the interrobang. ‽

Is the interrobang having a revival, I wondered? Why do the young ‘uns know more about obscure punctuation than English professors and bookish types? I learned it is a popular mark in comic books, which are arguably the literary form of our age. Googling about more, I found an interrobang subculture of sorts. Did you know there  is a place that sells handbags and accessories on Etsy called “Interrobang: Young, Indie and Grammatically Correct” ‽

It has got me thinking, this punctuation. Might we describe our current cultural zeitgeist as surprise superimposed over curiosity,  mixed together with attitude? Is the interrobang a 1960s, type-based version of WTF?  A certain informal, witty, knowing, WTF way of approaching the world? Many clever Facebook status updates and comments could be defined, as Wikipedia does the interrobang, as “A sentence ending with an interrobang (1) asks a question in an excited manner, (2) expresses excitement or disbelief in the form of a question, or (3) asks a rhetorical question.”

Could the interrobang be the punctuation mark for our age‽ Guy Debord coined the term “Society of the Spectacle” to describe the late 1960s, and slacker took off to define the 1990s. Might we use the interrobang for ourselves?‽ Aren’t we at once curious and cynical, world-weary yet bemused, and always pretty darned informal?

One of the most talked-about TV shows of the past few years is about advertising executives in the early 1960s. These are the guys who put ‽ on the keyboard. Is the interrobang why we love Mad Men so?

Richards Powers wrote his new novel by dictation. Does that affect the quality?

Richard Powers’ new novel, Generosity, was published this week. I am a huge fan of Powers, and I loved the novel. But not all had the same reaction. James Wood wrote a lengthy article critiquing Powers and his latest novel in this week’s New Yorker. Wood argues that Powers’s novels lack convincing plots and characters. Fair enough—we are entitled to disagree. But in the middle of his essay he makes a comment that reveals an odd literary prejudice.

The main character of the novel, Russell Stone, is a failed writer. Since “Stone is himself a failed writer, perhaps Powers thought that mimetic fidelity compelled him to compose a failure, too.” Ouch: a novel about a bad writer is badly written on purpose. But then Wood goes on to give what he deems a more reasonable explanation for s the novel’s weakness: “A less postmodern explanation might be the now reasonably well-known fact that Powers has for some time been writing fiction by dictation, with the help of speech-recognition software.”

And he leaves it at that. No explanation, no warrants to explain the assumption, no claims, supports or data to back up this explanation. The fact speaks for itself, Wood assumes: the novel is bad because Powers dictated it.

Huh? Is it a truth generally acknowledged that writers who talk are inferior to those who scratch or tap? I think not. I know not.

Henry James dictated many of his novels. So did Mark Twain. Socrates and Homer? Well, you get my drift.

There is no logical, historical, cultural, aesthetic, or cognitive reason why dictation is a poor way to write. As Powers himself said of his use of voice recognition software a few years ago: “Writing is the act of accepting the huge shortfall between the story in the mind and what hits the page. … For that, no interface will ever be clean or invisible enough for us to get the passage right.”

I would argue more of us should dictate than do now. I have seen how much fun my 10 year old son has when he gets to dictate his creative writing assignments for school to me. Freed from trying to find the “p” on the keyboard or remember to cross his “t,” words flow. Sentences, even, with clauses. Every so often he says out loud: “Return.”

Not all of us have the gift of composed speech, or speaking to write. I do not. I am a cut-and-paste revising maniac—never the first time will do for me, and I never know where I am going to go next. But just as anyone can be trained to write, anyone can be trained to memorize.

In his textbook on rhetoric, the Insituto Oratoria, Quintilian describes how to build a memory palace, a form on mnemonics in which orators picture a structure they know well—a palace, a house, and imaginatively furnish it with objects. Each object is then used as a symbol for a point the orator wants to make. Thus when giving a speech a speaker can simply take a virtual walk through the structure and remember what he wants to say.

In other words, there are all ways to get from conception to execution, or from God’s lips to your ears.

Faulty assumptions about writing are everywhere, from “do not start a sentence with ‘And’” to “never end a sentence with a preposition.” Now, I guess, some believe one should “never dictate novels.” None of these dictates has good reasons to support it. Why this insistence on rules, protocols, right and wrong ways? It is all very ungenerous. Unscrew the locks form the doors already, so we can all try to get closer to what we mean.

Collage by Will Etling

Tina Brown’s new imprint will focus on fast books. Can they stack up?

Speed writing seems to be the flavor of the week. First we were graced with the news that Sarah Palin’s memoir, Going Rogue, is to be published in November, a short four months after she began working on it. Readers seem unconcerned that the quick turnaround may dilute the quality of the book—it is already the number one selling book on amazon.com. Then came the announcement that Tina Brown’s The Daily Beast will start a line of book imprints that focus on quickly penned titles.

The Beast’s books will be on timely topics, and will run short, about 150 pages long. They will be for sale as e-books first, and then be released in print. Freelancers for the site will write the books, and will be given advances to cover the one to three months they will be given to produce a final manuscript. Brown explains the reason behind the fast clip this way: “There is a real window of interest when people want to know something…and that window slams shut pretty quickly in the media cycle.” Brown also noted that there is “a gap between online writing and full-length books that was no longer being fully met by a dwindling market for magazines.” (Ouch).

As a writer, I am conflicted about these speedy books. Palin’s memoir is ghostwritten, of course, which helps explain how a non-writer could compose her life story so quickly. But should writers cheer or lament the Daily Beast’s new model?

Sometimes, when I am following a complicated news story—online, in the papers, and on television—say the Afghan election or the discovery of Ardipithecus ramidus—I think: “This is very interesting and I want to understand it better. I cannot wait for the New Yorker article to come out.” For such topics, a short book might be a great alternative. On the other hand, I value rigorous research, in-depth reporting, and carefully wrought prose. I worry that an emphasis on speed will diminish depth and style. After all, would we want The Decline and Fall of The American Empire to be written in a day?

Ezra Klein offers a refreshing perspective on my anxieties, and provides context for understanding why we might be capable of writing faster now than before—and not because we are all stupider, lazier, worse readers than we used to be, the oh-so-predictable response. In “Fast Books!” he notes that some writing is, indeed, easier:

People tend to assume that blogs are a product of technological advancements in publishing content. But the writing of constantly-updated political blogs is a product of the falling time cost for finding information. You can now get all your polls on pollster.com, and all the op-eds from every newspaper, and all the archives from all these newspapers, and all the info on other blogs, and so on and so forth.

That’s why I can publish 15 posts a day. Writing doesn’t take very long. Quoting doesn’t take very long. But assembling information used to take an awful long time. It required a lot of phone calls and microfiche and faxes and walking over to Brookings and paging through newspaper archives and begging a source at Gallup. Now it doesn’t take much time at all. That allows me to be the equivalent of a very fast columnist, and there’s no reason it won’t allow others to become very fast book authors.

It took me seven seconds to copy and paste this into my word document.

The piece of Klein’s argument I hesitate to endorse is this one: “Writing doesn’t take very long.” Sometimes one can write quickly, sure. But often writing takes a very very long time. It depends upon what kind of writing you are doing, and what kind of writer you are. If you have experience doing research, if you have trained your mind to think critically, and if you have a facility with words—then you can put together an argument, analysis, blog post, and even a book quicker now than you used to. But there are a lot of “if” requirements, and without these foundational skills, writing becomes gobbledygook, and the writer will have a monster Google-induced headache.

So maybe I can get behind a speed writing movement, and train the young ‘uns to increase their posts per minute. But it would need to be accompanied by a Slow Writing one, to borrow a term from the foodies. I suspect Klein has quite a bit of education and training under his belt—and that that training took a good number of years. It takes a lengthy apprenticeship to become a master blogger. (And, thus, the compensation for such blogs and books should be higher than it is for those who take longer to produce.) We do not want to unloose just anyone into the world of fifteen posts a day, or a one-month turnaround book author.

Phew! That was quick. Already done with my column! Now, back to slogging through revisions of a book I have been writing since the twentieth century. The next one, I promise, will be faster. (Tina—call me!)

Some say 2009 will be the novel’s best year ever—no thanks to The Lost Symbol.

What makes literary news? A new Dan Brown novel! Brown, the ginormous bestseller, published his long-awaited follow-up to that most-cited book on “what did you last read?” online profiles, The Da Vinci Code. I do not have the heart to search for numbers of copies of The Lost Symbol sold, so let’s just leave it at “more than one million.” Even better, the book was going cheap. Against any logic I can muster in my musty artsy brain, The Lost Symbol was offered for 50 percent off the day it was released.

The mega-book series Harry Potter announced another blockbuster, too. A new ride, “Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey,” will be unveiled at Universal’s Island of Adventure in Orlando next spring. It will cost $200 million dollars to create Hogsmeade station, Zonko’s, and Honeyduke, “where you can purchase an array of jokes and gags and sweets.” Hogwarts will be the “Parthenon of Orlando,” said the art director. The castle will not be a Disney castle, he continues, but “very real, based in fact” (huh?). A literary themepark is not a new idea—you can already jump on the “Great Expectations Boat Ride” at Dickens World in Kent.

Everyone covers these literary spectacles: CNN, New York Times Book Review, US Magazine. Brown and Potterworld may be middlebrow forms of conspicuous consumption, or they may be release valves that siphon off the pressures of cultural elitism. They both probably deliver on their promises of a good ride.

What I dislike about the press surrounding these events is the sanctimony that often accompanies what is, at root, an exercise in money-making. Somehow, because The Lost Symbol and Harry Potter are books, they are seen as somehow better, purer even, than, say, a network sitcom or unsponsored roller coaster. And news of their release eclipses other new books.

You wouldn’t know it watching the news, but a glut of incredible novels have been hitting the shelves all fall. This embarrassment of riches has led some, such as the Vroman’s Bookstore blog, to claim 2009 as the “best book year ever.” Better, even, than 1953 when Invisible Man beat out The Old Man and The Sea and East of Eden for the National Book Award.

Here is a partial list of excellent 2009 titles that aren’t by Dan Brown:

Lorrie Moore’s A Gate At The Stairs

Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply

E.L. Doctorow’s Homer & Langley

Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice

There are more to be published later this month and in October (just wait until Richard Powers’ Generosity comes out). The literary world is not lying down and giving in to easy reading. The contrary—the fall heavyweights seem to be lined up and ready to defend their corner. Bring on the Dan Brown. The American literary novel is alive and well—if not on CNN.

While we rethink the future of writing, let’s not forget the people behind the scenes.

Last week I opined about some ways publishers might market themselves during these uncertain times of print. I proposed building brand loyalty, but others believe getting rid of publishers entirely is a better way to go. According to this logic, publishers are simply middlemen who have been rendered unnecessary during these self-publishing, self-promoting times.

The question of whether we need publishers to serve a gatekeeping function misses the mark. Publishing houses are not gatekeepers. They do more than act as a shuttle between the genius an author writes on her laptop and an eager reader. And whether a review is published on paper or in pixels is irrelevant.

What does matter, and matters very much, is editing. Good writing is, more often than not, produced through a collaboration between writer and editor. Many good editors work for online sites. Many poor editors work for print publications. The question is not platform. The question is: Who has good editors?

As I read stories about the death (and future) of print (and writing), it always amazes me how rarely editors are mentioned. Perhaps the paucity of discussion of editing has to do with our conception of editors as invisible enablers. Perhaps it is because good editors are being laid off in horrifying droves. Perhaps it is because currently employed editors worry any such case would be seen as self-serving. Whatever the reason, I wish we would discuss editing more, lauding those who do it well.

A recent controversy over the works of Raymond Carver is instructive. Carver is known as a minimalist, writing in a spare style that helped create the “dirty realism” of the 1980s. His editor was Gordon Lish, a well-known, much respected writer and editor whose work with Carver—as well as Richard Ford, Amy Hempel, Tobias Wolf and others—undoubtedly influenced contemporary American literature. Some claim that Lish wielded his red pen too severely, and against the wishes of Carver. Whichever side you take, the debate highlights the role editing plays in shaping writing. (To see editing in action, read this New Yorker comparison of the first and final version of a story here.)

Sometimes overzealous editing may delete to the detriment of literature, but that is the exception. The rule is that no matter how great a wordsmith you fancy yourself to be, your writing will be improved by a knowing, adept editor.

There are few courses one can take in editing, and few adolescents grow up hoping to become a great editor. Those who have mastered the art of editing, then, are uncommon creatures. I envy them their skill and am enormously grateful for their gifts: I am never more relieved than when my writing lands in the hands of a competent and caring editor, someone who shows me how to rethink ideas and restructure prose. The writings I have published as a result of a strong writer/editor collaboration are my best work, measured both by my satisfaction with them and by reader interest.

So I do not give a whit whether we go all e-booky and internetty with words. I do care, however, that we cultivate and value editors. (Not to mention employ and pay them).  For this reason, I am wary of self-publishing and internet start-ups that throw content up on the site willy-nilly.

Writing is too much with us right now. There are too many sites, too many small publications, too many comments upon comments. We did the growing of the web; now we need to do the pruning. The time has come to cull and to prioritize our sites, our publishing, our venues for smart writing. Dare I say our moment is one crying out for editing?  To enter the Age of the Edit, we need, well, editors. Now more than ever.

When it comes to books, we Americans have author loyalty (I can’t wait to read the new Lorrie Moore novel), and bookstore loyalty (I will only shop at local independent bookstores, like Visible Voice or Mac’s Backs). Both forms of faithfulness offer perks, often intertwined. You can, for instance, hear your favorite author read at your local bookstore, buy a copy and have him sign it (and if you are really lucky, join him in a book club discussion of his novel, as Clevelanders can with Dan Chaon’s Await Your Reply).

But we do not have publisher loyalty. I have no idea who is publishing the new Lorrie Moore novel, or who is putting out E.L. Doctorow’s Homer and Langley, just published to great reviews. This hazy disappearance of the producer of books from reader consciousness does not happen in most other forms of culture and entertainment. We often connect movies with studios (especially ones like Dreamworks or Pixar), television with stations (think Bravo and HBO), music with labels (Deutsche Grammophone), visual arts with galleries (Leo Castelli). But only the most in-the-know publishing insiders can tell you what makes a piece of fiction a “Random House title” as opposed to one from Scribner’s, say.

Small, independent presses, which should have more cultish followers, lose out as a result. Few of us identify as an “indie book” sort of reader, though we all know those who say they are lovers of indie film or music. I would wager that people would be happy to have a convenient shorthand for their literary tastes as well. (Interestingly, a new form of brand identification is rising: platform loyalty. Do you read on a Kindle, Sony e-reader, use Scribd or refuse to do any of the above? This question will be asked more and more.)

Book clubs, however, are a time-tested way that readers identify with a larger reading community. Back in the day, leading critics and writers like Lionel Trilling and W.H. Auden selected books for a club called the Reader’s Subscription (for more about this interesting experiment, read this excellent book), and wrote newsletters about their choices. That club appealed to a more literary community than do the Book of the Month and Oprah’s Book Club, both of which are still popular today.

One way publishers might generate interest and brand loyalty is to offer a subscription model that works like a book club. McSweeney’s has done so successfully, and they are the one exception to my rule. “I read McSweeney’s” is a fine way of telling someone about your taste while flirting at a coffee shop. (And by the way, the next title in McSweeney’s club could not be more exciting—a big furry edition of Where The Wild Things Are!)

Powell’s Books is also trying out the model with their recently launched subscription club called Indiepensibles. For $39.95 every six weeks, they send you a signed first edition of an independent title. They add in some bonus materials too—always a surprise (log on to their blog to find out how they assemble each shipment). Indispensables makes me even more of a fan of Powell’s, but again, they are a bookstore—not a publisher.

Perhaps publishers could use the economic downturn and the supposed death of print to their advantage, and convince consumers to band together into a subculture based on retro-cool cache, akin to the revival of vinyl. Book club selections, after all, would be delivered via the post. How fun might it be to sit around waiting for the mailman again? I can see the Penguin T-shirts now.

Why aren’t there more novels about America’s workers?

When I am looking for a smart discussion about literature in the books blogosphere, my first stop is Mark Athitakis’s American Fiction Notes. Earlier this week, Athitakis posted about an under-discussed topic in contemporary fiction, the role of class. In the brilliantly titled “The Grapes of Mild Outrage,” Athitakis wonders why there are not more depictions of the working class in contemporary American fiction. As he writes:

Perhaps it’s not so much that there’s a shortage today of good writers with working-class backgrounds—there’s a shortage of good writers from any background, after all—as a shortage of writing about work itself, and about what ‘working class’ means today. Blame it on a hobbled American manufacturing base, or a fear that any writing about labor will become The Jungle; or, most likely, that work itself is a dull subject to write about. Regardless, American fiction about work is often fiction about finance and offices.

Athitakis notes some exceptions, including Stuart Dybek and Richard Price, and links to a great roundtable discussion by some notable authors from working-class backgrounds.

One the beauties of the blogosphere is that if you make a simple, smart observation like Athitakis has, one that follows the “Why are there so few X’s in Y?” rhetorical template—you will garner examples of Xs in Ys. (Other examples of question that follow this model would include: Why are there so few women in Congress? Why are there so few movies about Jews directed by gentiles? Why are there so few low-fat doughnuts?)

A byproduct of pointing out a regrettable scarcity is a list of valuable resource. We turn the original question on its head, scratch our heads, roll the memory tape, and come up with items. Slowly, exceptions, which must be ancillary to the main issue—heck there are not enough books about working-class folks—get their moment in the sun. And thus without further ado (who could take it anymore?), here are three great recent novels depicting the contemporary American working class:

Last Night At the Lobster, Stewart O’Nan. Set in a Red Lobster about to close down during a gray, cold winter.

Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock. An extraordinary book of stories about hard characters in a hardscrabble Appalachian town (Population: 0). The Cleveland Plain Dealer described it as a “great read about a bad place.”

American Rust, Philipp Meyer. About—you guessed it—a run-down steel town, and two men trying to figure out whether to stay or skip town.

Uh oh. This list, darn it, only makes me ask another “why are there so few x’s in y?” question. You guessed it: Why are there so few working class novels about or by women? We are back where we started, but that’s okay.

“Feral houses” and other indigenous species of the rust belt

I live in the rust belt and have always found beauty in urban decay. So it will not surprise you that I am transfixed by Detroit photographer James Griffioen’s shots of “feral houses”. Nature is up to bat in Detroit as it is in my home, Cleveland.

For those of us trying to figure out how to understand these places in which we live, metaphors are important. Griffioen chooses “feral” wisely. Feral houses are no longer domesticated, having reverted to a different state, like horses in the west who roam free of any rider, stable, or whip. They have transmuted into a different state of being, yes—but they do be. They are not, nor are their neighborhoods, as many like to call them, “dead.” (When Forbes published a list of the cities that have lost the most people this decade, they called them the “fastest-dying cities”—Cleveland and Detroit are on the list.) These cities, as Griffoen shows us, are teeming. Growth is everywhere.

And whither that growth? What happens next? What promise do these newly feral houses have? What might be next for these neighborhoods that no longer need to fulfill their original purposes?

Civic leaders and artists are coming up with some interesting ideas, and often the line between the two groups is blurred. The perfectly-named Unreal Estate Agency in Detroit is aimed at showcasing “new types of urban practices (architecturally, artistically, institutionally, everyday life, etc) that came into existence, creating a new value system in Detroit,” including helping people purchase and rehab a home for under $5,000. In Cleveland, the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture is working on an initiative called “From Rust Belt to Arts Belt” (the second symposium is September 17 and 18). Cleveland artist Don Harvey leads a tour of the “Natural Flats” that shows the “evolving natural environment” of a warehouse district downtown.

Julia Christensen, the author of Big Box Reuse and a colleague of mine at Oberlin College, is exploring these themes in mixed-media. One project, “Rust Belt/Bayou” is about the similarities she finds between Cleveland and New Orleans. Christensen was struck, after moving to the Cleveland area soon after visiting post-Katrina New Orleans, by “the same feeling of exhaustion seeing the devastation” of both cities. “What happened in New Orleans overnight has been happening in Cleveland for fifty years,” Christensen notes.

Given my nagging scholarly bent, I asked Christensen which readings have helped her think through these issues, and what she teaches to students in her courses such as “Land Arts in An Electronic Age.” She cited the work of both pioneering theorist Robert Smithson, singling out his A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, NJ, and a more recent book, Atlas of Radical Cartography which is as fun as it is smart (fold out maps!)

Just this week, Time magazine bought a house in Detroit to house reporters working on stories about the city. Now this sounds like a small boon to Detroit’s housing market, but I find the decision unfortunate. There are plenty of writers and artists making their home right here in the Rust Belt. We can tell you all about it. Come find us.

Photos from James Griffioen’s project Feral Houses.