Isak

Writing Detroit

New Center, Detroit. My neighborhood.

 

Late last week, Detroit declared bankruptcy. I reacted to it elsewhere, and wanted to share the brief bit of writing here:

Let me tell you something true. I didn't know Detroit when I moved here. I was curious. I loved Michigan. I knew Boston wasn't my home. I have learned so much and loved so hard here. Detroit is where stories happen. Real ones, not sheen. I have written my brains out in the six years I've lived here. Very often about Detroit, this provoking and inspiring city. But not always. Detroit is making a storyteller of me. And now that Detroit city is at its most vulnerable -- just wrenching with complexity and pain -- it has something else to teach me. You might know that over the past year or so, I've been thinking and writing a lot about vulnerability and shame. It's my growing edge. My struggle. What Detroit teaches me is that even when your most challenging, hurtful, awkward, and unseemly self is seen... you are loved.

I needed that too, Detroit.

Now, off to put my fun essay on Krazy Kat on hold, to go write about this mad city.

As well: my quick turnaround piece on the news for Pacific Standard magazine: "The 4 Things You Need to Know About Detroit's Bankruptcy."

This seems, also, a moment to revive a few other pieces, offered to the great collective act of Detroit storytelling:

Even banks were walking away from homes: At the Columbia Journalism Review, we broke down The Detroit News' great investigation on the ciy's property debacle.

What can urban planning do -- or not do -- in Detroit? Writing in Next City earlier this month, a long look into on-the-ground visioning. (Excerpts here and here.) I also took a grassroots vantage on the same purposeful work.

In Architect Magazine, this fall, another longread on the urgency and messiness of "mapping Motown."

In Grantland, Ty Cobb as a way of seeing Detroit.

"Welcome to Your New Government: Can Non-Profits Run Cities?" In Next City, or, if you prefer, in Salon.

Labor Day in Detroit, starring President Obama.

"Detroit's Least Bad Option." In The New Republic, reflecting on the tricky ground of emergency management arriving in the big city.

"Detropia's Hymn to Ambivalence." Talking cinema and cities in Next City.

On Dreams

The running cliche is that listening to other people explain their dreams is boring. What I mean to say about my dreams is that I can't explain them at all. Maybe they would indeed be boring for you to hear, but you and I never get to the part where we find out.

What I can tell you is that I experience dreams intensely, that I remember them with my imagination, with the mood I awaken into, and with the tension or relaxation of my body -- in fact, particular ways my body moves in its sleep are common chords for common dreams. Fearful dreams will find me awakening as if I were an animal: lying on my belly, my body heat high, elbows bent, hands clenched into fists that are tucked below my shoulders, my fingernails marking tiny red curves on the skin of my palm.

Sometimes I'm sad about not being able to narrate my dreams to others. Extraordinary creatures and journeys materialize in that heart-open space; I want to blink awake, turn to my side, and speak its colors. Other times, I've envied dreams, the fantastical stories a friend or lover is able to chronicle once they are awake, spirals and all. It moves me. It softens me. I want to offer my dream in exchange, so that I too will be known. But I find sand on my tongue. Though language is in my dreams, it hooks loosely, and leaves me behind when I awaken. Wordless empty spaces fill up the room, finally, even as it is heated by the hallucinations of my own mind.

But I've come to see the inexplicability of my dreams as a blessing. I'm prone to articulation, if you haven't noticed. I write constantly. I talk, often on an intellectual, let's-break-this-down plane. I narrate what unfolds before me as if were prose, turning a family reunion by the river, say, into dialogue and paragraphs that click away in my mind like so much type. I experience my emotions as if they ran on the through-line of a story -- a true enough experience of their arc, but this is a tendency I must bat back when it begins to calcify into expectations for how the story will "end."

The universe has gifted me dreams that pull me out of the bounds of narration. There is no explaining myself. Nothing to discuss. I'm pushed into the intensity and confusion and ambiguity and power of wordlessness ... and the lack of language is beside the point of the experience, which, finally, is for me to keep for myself. There is another way of being. I know it. I am it.

Poem: "why some people be mad at me sometimes"

why some people be mad at me sometimes
By Lucille Clifton

they ask me to remember
but they want me to remember
their memories
and i keep on remembering
mine.

 

Boston Love Letter

On the steps of the Boston Public Library looking out at Copley Square. Half a mile from my old home, and right around the corner of the Boston Marathon finish line.

When I lived in Boston, I spent every Marathon Monday hanging around Copley, struck by the crackling emotion, power, and vulnerability alive at the finish line. A rare and gorgeous community emerged each year, so real you could practically put your hand upon it. That it has been split open today makes my knees week in sorrow. The familiarity of this ground, as this brutal story unspools in even international papers, makes me feel sick. I know this place. I lived there. People I love live there. I hung out on this very stretch of Boylston just last month and got all nostalgic about it. Now, it's rendered as a setpiece for harm.

What is heartening: tremendous first responders, including journalists at, for example, The Boston Globe, who have done an amazing job reporting the story. Information matters, and journalists too are among those who move into the risk in times like these. Certainly they have our attention; they also need our support.

As I type, visiting the paper's website directs you automatically to its full and complete ongoing live coverage. It is the Globe that also set up the Google Docs where people are requesting help and offering their homes to displaced runners and others. Thousands are coming through, their hands offered in help. This is what is real.

Copley Station, the entrance outside the Boston Public Library. Now closed until further notice.

Hospitality, both a simple and radical thing, in practice:

"I don't live in the city--but can come get anyone who needs a place to stay"

"I will come pick up anyone who needs a place to stay. I have a spare bedroom with a queen sized bed. I am located about 15 minutes from the Franklin MBTA stop and 20 minutes from the Providence airport. I will do whatever I can."

"Can pick someone up. Have extra bedroom and private bathroom. I'm a good cook."

"We have food, water, blankets"

"Ashland is pretty far out of Boston -- very close to the starting line -- but if by chance anyone is out this way and needs a place to stay, I have several extra bedrooms. I can also drive to pick people up."

"I have a couch, love seat, and could probably offer my roommates bed if necessary."

"Mit fraternity house (zeta psi) in cambridge with plenty of couches to crash on and hot showers"

"I live in an MIT dormitory. Not much space, but am happy to offer what I can."

"Take the commuter rail to walpole and we can pick you up at the station"

"We are less than a half mile from the Marathon finish line in a South End brownstone. We have a spare bedroom that could sleep two people in a queen bed for the night."

"On corner of Harvard and Commonwealth Ave. If you know where you are, I'm happy to direct you/meet you. Have room to sleep multiple people, or just feed you until you get your bearings."

"I work late but can be home quickly, so call, email or text and I will head right home."

"Call me and come stay."

"Will drive in to bring anyone who needs a place about an hour north of the city"

"I am a student with a comfortable couch. We have plenty of food, showers, etc."

"Anything you need: food, comfy couch to sleep on, and even some wine and a cat to hang out with for as long as you need"

"I live in an apartment on Mass Ave about three blocks away from the Boston Medical Center. There are three people staying here (me, my girlfriend, and my roommate) and I have a large living room with couches and an air mattress. Praying for all those hurt by this tragedy."

"Apartment at BC, living room open to whoever needs a place to sleep!"

"iphone chargers, cupcakes, blankets, pillows & 2 couches!!"

"Random Hall dorm, MIT Campus. Please email first."

"I live in an MIT undergraduate dorm, but I'm always willing to give up my bed for them to sleep in."

"plenty of room"

"We have a little baby at home, so the house is kid friendly. There's ample parking on the street and the neighborhood is safe and easy to get to."

"Full-sized bed, shower, free food!"

"(we are at) Instead Feminist co-op on Wellesley College campus"

"We are on the commuter rail line (Middleboro-Lakeville). We speak Spanish and Portuguese."

"I work in hotel sales for the Northeast... Happy to feed any runners and help find and transport to hotels outside of Boston if need be due to evacuations in the city. Thinking of everyone."

"Gay couple. Kid and dog friendly. 2 rooms with double beds available."

"food, pull out couch, love and support."

"You can come here!"

"Have a guest bedroom and happy to host whoever needs!"

"We have one double bed, a couch, and an air mattress. Can reasonably fit 5 people. Food, water, beer, and moral support also available."

All of you in Boston: I love you.

You Are A Home To Me

 

Years ago, I realized how powerful it is to know that there are places in the world where I have lived and loved and explored, and to name them as homes. Some homes I created for myself out of sheer force of will. Upon returning to them, even after long absences, trees sing to me. Rivers speak as narrators. Stories tumble down like snow from the windowsills, dusting my shoulders. I wrote a bit about this feeling when I visited Boston in March and sensed "that personal combustion and creation spilling in the streets like an ink stain, marking me again."

Today, though, I am thinking about homes I have in other people. Those others whose bodies are dwelling places for parts of my soul. In turn, I keep theirs in me. You could think of it as a variation on the horcruxes in the Harry Potter series: yes, my soul is split. Not endlessly, though, and I am not diminished, but built. I stretch and I glow, like an ember fanned, when I come into the light of their presence -- this morning, for example, while celebrating with two dear friends, who baptized their son today. Watching this old ritual of water and community, my skin was alert and and alive; I kept wiping my eyes. I felt light-headed. So grateful am I to be present for and with their lives.

But this is what startled my thinking down this way. When I unexpectedly encounter a person who is a home to me, even though we have not seen or spoken to one another in many long years, even when our time of closeness was grated with ache and hurt, it is heartening to feel the warmth of recognition pass between. A kind of clatter: this person at once a stranger and kindred. Yes. There: a place I once lived. Thank you. Thank you for my life.

My slow understanding of the multiplicity of homes necessarily depends upon separateness. It was right for me to leave Boston after a few years. It had been hard there, and I knew all along I would not stay. It was right for me to come to Detroit, and to leave for Kenya, and then to return to Detroit. I found my way to Ann Arbor at a crucial moment, and stayed until I knew it was time to go. Turning to the mountains of Asheville changed my life, albeit on the even beat of twice-a-year writing residencies. My relationship with my hometown on the Lake Michigan shore has taken surprising shapes as I've grown older. And yet, homes to me they remain, all of them, whether I am there or not.

This texture of separateness mirrors how I experience the homes I have in other people, and the homes I keep for them. Sometimes separateness is inevitable, or urgent, or wanted. And yet, homes to me they remain, all of them, whether I am there or not. It upends the ideas of absence and presence. This quiet, fluid collectivity undercuts feelings of loneliness or isolation that wash over me. It echoes a scene from Kim Stanley Robinson's marvelous Mars trilogy that stayed with me: Wherever you go, there we are.

What constellations we are. Made of stardust, certainly; our pictures drawn and redrawn among the great and gorgeous fires alight beside us in the dark.

 

For more on the above image, taken from the Hubble telescope, see here.

Poem: "Signs"

Signs

By Larry Levis

All night I dreamed of my home,   

of the roads that are so long

and straight they die in the middle—

among the spines of elderly weeds   

on either side, among the dead cats,   

the ants who are all eyes, the suitcase   

thrown open, sprouting failures.

   2.

And this evening in the garden   

I find the winter

inside a snail shell, rigid and   

cool, a little stubborn temple,   

its one visitor gone.

   3.

If there were messages or signs,

I might hear now a voice tell me   

to walk forever, to ask

the mold for pardon, and one

by one I would hear out my sins,

hear they are not important—that I am   

part of this rain

drumming its long fingers, and   

of the roadside stone refusing   

to blink, and of the coyote

nailed to the fence with its

long grin.

And when there are no messages   

the dead lie still—

their hands crossed so strangely   

like knives and forks after supper.

   4.

I stay up late listening.

My feet tap the floor,

they begin a tiny dance

which will outlive me.

They turn away from this poem.   

It is almost Spring.

Originally published in the poet's collection, The Afterlife (1977), and collected in The Selected Levis (2000). 

Benjamin Franklin's Perfect Day

In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the author and wearer of many other hats laid out his ideal rhythm for the day.

 

Public Libraries and the Conscience of Community Living

I found a treasure a few weeks ago, on the shelves of used books at Source Booksellers on Cass Avenue. It's a sturdy, like-new, hardcover copy of Parnassus on Main Street by Frank B. Woodford ("a former newspaperman") -- a 487-page history of the Detroit Public Library, with two-tone illustrations and think creamy pages, published at the library's centennial in 1965. While this might sound like so many cobwebs to you, the book turns out to be an extraordinary testament to literature for literature's sake, and the public good. It carries the whiff of paternalism while nonetheless standing as an exultation for those who create, sustain, and adapt free libraries where every person is welcome.

 

 

In that spirit, I'm excited to share with you some of the most interesting stories to emerge from this book in an occasional series here on Isak. Let me begin by quoting one of the old bookplates once pasted into the cover of each book in the city's public library:

This book is the property of the people of Detroit, and must be taken special care of, and not allowed to lie around where injury may happen to it.

For damage done to the books of the Library the following fines will be imposed: For each grease spot, 5 cents; for each ink spot, 5 cents; for each leaf torn, 10 cents; for each leaf turned down, 5 cents; for writing in a book, from 5 to 10 or more cents; and for other damages, including soiling the book or injuring the binding, proportionate fines up to the full value of the book, where seriously injured. For self-protection examine the book and report imperfections when drawing a volume from the Library.

 

 

While it began as a public reading room, opened at the behest of a state law requiring the city's board of education to do so, the Detroit Public Library is today the twentieth largest library system in the country, comprised of the Main library and twenty-three branches across the city. (This number is diminished: seven branches have closed over the decades.) The Main library was designed by the same guy who designed the United States Supreme Court; new wings were built in 1963, ahead of the centennial.

In the book's forward, Ralph R. Shaw details the radical underpinnings of the library idea. (Shaw was an innovative librarian and publisher, who founded Scarecrow Press in 1950. The American Library Association used to give out the Ralph R. Shaw Award for Library Literature. Read here about how he created the school for library science at the University of Hawaii.)

The concept of a public library was pioneered in Detroit which continues to provide leadership in its development as a people's university. ...

... The Detroit Public Library picked up the thread of history just as our nation was moving from the concept of libraries as storehouses of books -- considered as precious physical objects for the use of the few -- to the conception of books and libraries as people.

The ultimate magic of the American Public Library rests upon recognition of the fact that books are people. A book or a pamphlet, or a magazine article, or a film is really a person in recorded form. In this form, if we want to know what Matthew Arnold thought about predestination, we can ask him -- long gone though he is -- by consulting what he told us in Sohrab and Rustum. At another end of the scale, if we want to know how to line a blast furnace or how to grease a Stanley Steamer, we can, at our convenience and our will, consult the expert in these field through their writings. ...

The Detroit Public Library had its beginnings just as the industrial revolution was getting into full stride; when we had begun to think of using conveyers and lifting devices for handling materials instead of using man as a beast of burden. This freed man to use his mind instead of his back. But minds needed nurture if they were to be used effectively. So the concept of man as an intellectual being grew, and with it grew greater need for understanding and compassion and wisdom, for opportunities for continued intellectual growth for every man. Here the free public library provided a unique medium for supporting the growth of each literate human being. It provided opportunity for him to develop in any direction he chose, at his own pace. He was free to have intimate contact with all the people who could help to contribute to his aspirations and his achievement -- whether or not they lived in his town or in his time.

There is another facet of the concept of books as people speaking to people. It is the idea of librarians as people who recognize the need to bring the people of books and the people of the community together. It is this factor ... that has made the Detroit Public Library a great exemplar. The dream needs dreaming -- but it also needs doing.

{...}

In the early part of the century Mr. (Henry M.) Utley (head librarian) started the great work of carrying books to people by developing relationships with the schools that helped to enrich their curricula and produce a generation that knew books as part of their heritage. Mr. (Adam) Strohm, the great idealist and builder, carried the library's facilities out to the neighborhood. Mr. (Ralph A.) Ulveling went a long step farther in making the library a part of the fiber and conscience of community living, with the library accepting responsibility for participation in community affairs.

 

Keep reading (so to speak):

The great contribution of the Detroit Public Library in the current generation has not been single-shot spectaculars; nor has it been simply that the library has participated in community affairs ... Its contribution has been in the intellectual resources it has made a part of every man's way of life. Where other libraries were content to have readers' advisory service (if they had it at all) as a small and very special privilege for a few people at the main library, Detroit designed it into all of its branch outlets. Where most libraries have been content to hide their books under conventional classifications schemes which librarians understand but the public does not, Detroit has pioneered in reader-interest classification to organize books in a system which would encourage people to use them and use them most fully. While other libraries have provided group services and have turned out booklists, in Detroit the library's involvement with people, singly or in groups, is a way of life.

With the evolving patterns in our complex society the Detroit Public Library has realized that it must not only spread general reader services of high quality throughout the city and provide stimulation and reading motivation in every level of society and to every type of citizen, but also it has realized that it must develop subject literature in depth. ... We are now seeing changes which further reduce the necessity for routine work on the part of human beings and require higher orders of knowledge and ability by people who design and operate an automated, mechanized civilization. These people require access to specialized information to meet the needs of our society and of the people living in a great metropolitan complex such as Detroit. The development of subject departments with collections in depth and a staff capable of evaluating and servicing specialized materials is a modern contribution in public libraries which bids fair to set an example for the rest of the country.

What the automobile has done for the economic and physical life of the people of Detroit and the country, its library has done for its cultural and intellectual life.

 

Related:

• This Place, Chosen
• After 43-day Sit-in, Chicago Parents Get A Library For Their Children
• Ray Bradbury Believes in Libraries
• Requiem for a Community's Memory
• Cutting Papercuts
• And in Other News...
• Amelia Bloomer Project
• An Open Letter from a New York Librarian

 

Image Credits: 1) via Skyscraper City; 2) personal image; 3) personal image; 4) via TPEPost.

Speaking: Lucille Clifton

 

 

"Poetry began when somebody walked off a savanna or out of a cave and looked up at the sky with wonder and said, "Ah-h-h!" That was the first poem. The urge towards "Ah-h-h!" is very human, it's in everybody. People express it in different ways, and I think the world is beginning to recognize that the urge in themselves is also poetry. Unfortunately, we've been taught that only certain things are poetry.

{...}

"... You cannot play for safety and make art. You have to get past your own fear. It's all right to be afraid, but if you draw back from what frightens you, then you may as well stop writing because, in a way, everything is frightening. Every morning you wake up to the unexpected, to what might kill you, but you have to do it anyway. Once you decide, "I will see clearly, I will speak clearly, I will say what I see, then you have to do it all."

 

-- Lucille Clifton, speaking to Bill Moyers in The Language of Life: A Festival of Poets. The book had a corresponding eight-part television series, some of which you can view here. See also the riches in the "pure poetry" collection of "Moyers & Company"

Literary & Media Indulgences - 2/10/2013

 

-- The death of the Timbuktu manuscripts has been greatly exaggerated. More of the story at Harper's: "How Timbuktu Saved its Books."

-- "Peddling 'democracy' as if it were a popularity contest..." A really interesting look at the radical renovations of the New York Public Library.

-- This is 13-year-old Elvis Presley checking out a library book.

-- A mystery donor rescues rare books at the Boston Public Library.

-- Doctors in England will soon start prescribing books to their patients suffering from anxiety and depression.

-- Meet HIPPO Reads: "Think of us as TED Talks for readers."

-- Tagore and the poetics of modern India.

-- Listening for the Jabberwock: The tendencies of literary translation.

-- Charles Baudelaire translated Edgar Allen Poe into French, and you can't imagine how giddy I got when I learned this.

-- Fifty years ago, the modern Welsh language movement began when activists shut down a bridge.

-- The bones of Richard III: On the shape of a spine and the shape of a life. Wonderful Stephen Greenblatt writing in The New Yorker.

-- Encoding Shakespeare into DNA.

-- How did I not know until this weekend that Ai's collected poems are newly published this month?!

-- Not unrelatedly: on the worth of memorizing poetry.

-- Jamaica Kinkaid read all poetry until she was ten years old, then read her first novel (Jane Eyre). Makes perfect sense. See also: "10 questions for Jamaica Kinkaid."

-- What does it even mean for a writer to retire?

-- The phantom bookstores of Manhattan.

-- Fill the Shelves: this is fun. H/t Katha Pollitt.

-- A new cover for The Bell Jar for its fiftieth anniversary inspires online parodies; hilarity ensues. H/t Bill Shea. See also, in the London Review of Books: "Silly Covers for Lady Novelists."

-- What's up with the backlash against Kwani?, the Kenyan publisher and literary agitator?

-- Chika Ugikwe, who just won a $100,000 Nigerian literary prize, is interviewed in Vanguard. Of interest, she is working on an update of the Igbo dictionary. "It's a labour of love." Via The Literary Saloon.

-- "In Praise of the Language Police."

-- "Torture and Taboo: On Elaine Scarry."

-- Via the Boston Review: Latin American constitutions established some of the most significant guarantees of human rights. So why is the on-the-ground reality of those rights so often distorted?

-- "Evil is one of the most interesting themes for me." Jorge Volpi, interviewed at The Quarterly Conversation.

-- Jessica Valenti is interviewed on NPR about the fiftieth anniversary of The Feminine Mystique. (Here's the Isak review of the 1963 revolution-in-a-book.)

-- On the myth of women's ascendence. This is a great book review. H/t Jina Moore.

-- Rebecca Solnit: "What we don't talk about when we talk about gender."

-- This is what the reclamation of Detroit looks like.

-- My pal Amy's haunting and gorgeous photo of Detroit is National Geographic's Photo of the Day. For more of her work, look here.

-- You don't have to be superhuman to commute by bicycle.

-- "The Lost Wolves of New England."

-- I just love Tom Ashbrook.

-- The Rumpus interviews comics artist Natalie Dee.

-- "All of your book reviews are just advertisements for Amazon, says Amazon."

-- A startling wintertime image of the town where I grew up.

-- The forgotten legacy of three Swiss writer-travelers.

-- "Jews are best understood as a people with a shared literary history."

-- The library press gets hot.

-- Edwin Mellen Press sues a librarian for libel.

-- An Idaho state legislator introduced a bill that would require high school students to read Ayn Rand. See also the NPR take.

-- Sister Arts: The provocations and promise of the friendship between Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde.

-- Vi Hart: A music box, Bach, and a Möbius strip.

-- The Smitten Word: Writing sex.

 

About the Image: The public library in Montrose, Scotland.

New Chapter For Detroit Bookstores

The cover story of today's "Play" section in the Detroit Free Press is my feature profiling ten great bookstores in metro Detroit, including Ann Arbor. I tell you, I consider myself pretty good about this sort of thing, but reporting this piece led me to discover thriving places I never knew about, like New Horizons in Roseville (pictured above) and Old Village Bookshop in Plymouth. And of course, the favorites are spotlighted here, too: old friends like The Book Beat, Nicola's, and John K. King.

From the introduction to the piece:

The staid realm of reading is in revolution. With the rise of online reading and e-books, there is an unprecedented diversification of how we find and read books. Bookstores are caught in the headwinds, but while the headlines focus on those that close -- even Borders and Ann Arbor's Shaman Drum couldn't make it -- there has been less attention on how booksellers are carrying forward by carving out niches.

Independent booksellers in particular are digging in their heels at what they're best at: deep literary knowledge, vibrant book events, community partnerships, friendly banter and creating cozy and distinctive spaces designed to match readers with books that will delight. The idea is to offer an experience that simply cannot be replicated elsewhere: not on a screen, or in any other bookstore.

Many are offering uniquely curated book choices; others have a remarkable store space; still others cultivate literary culture by hosting book clubs and author signings.

Sensing that there is still a hunger for the three-dimensional experience, despite the conveniences of online reading, independent booksellers are taking the leap: Literati Bookstore will open in Ann Arbor this spring, and Source Booksellers in Detroit just this month moved to a larger space.

I really hope you pick up this one in print: the design is much nicer, and I love the cover photo (which doesn't appear online).