by Ahmad Saidullah

The Letters of Sylvia Beach. Edited by Keri Walsh. Foreword by Noel Riley Fitch. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. 347 pp. $29.95.

Sylvia Beach was an independent bookseller, a publisher, a literary agent and promoter. Noel Riley Fitch dubbed her “the midwife of literary modernism.” She opened Shakespeare and Company, “a little American bookshop on the Left Bank,” in a disused laundry on rue Dupuytren in 1919 on her third trip to Paris. Drawn by the cheap franc like other expats at the end of World War I, she chose the City of Lights over New York and London.

She was also drawn to Adrienne Monnier, owner of a literary bookstore La Maison des Amis des Livres in the Odéon quarter. In 1921, she moved Shakespeare and Company to 12 rue de l’Odéon, a few doors down from Adrienne’s shop. They would share their personal and professional lives until Adrienne’s death from an overdose of sleeping pills in 1955.

This was a remarkable turn for the daughter of a Presbyterian minister from “a leafy, flowery park [more] than a town,” as she described Princeton, New Jersey. Sylvia had not been to college or university and had grown up in an age before women got the right to vote in the US (she was active in the suffrage movement) and when chemists still sold Pink Pills for Pale People.

Culled mostly from the Princeton and Yale collections with some additions from the British Library, Keri Walsh has buttressed Beach’s letters with short biographies of 51 correspondents and a chronology. Beach’s life spanned two world wars, the Jazz Age, the Great Depression, and various social upheavals—what the Russian poet Tyutchev called “the fateful ages” of the world—but her letters, cautious as they are even those to her close friends Marion Peter and Carlotta Welles in the States, rarely give away any secrets.

Her early efforts seem guileless. She sports a light, humorous touch with a few lapses into tweeisms (Sylvia used “somepin” for “something” throughout), like her quicksilver wit and turn of phrase in conversation. We learn how Sylvia and her sisters Cyprian and Holly were encouraged in the arts by their mother Eleanor who felt distant from her husband’s calling. The letters testify to their love of culture but the independence of the Beach girls shocked the parishioners. The Beaches were fond of travelling to Europe.

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by Edward B. Rackley

Once departed, many dictators are reviled and forgotten. Others are respected, even loved, long after their demise. Strange perhaps, and all the more so as their degree of popular endearment isn't always linked to their political deeds while alive, good or bad. A regular surprise in formerly autocratic states that I visit, the public estimation of departed dictators is more often arrived at through comparison with whatever political dispensation fills the void left in their wake. Few seem concerned by the human costs of a demagogue's quixotic quests or the excesses of his unreconstructed id. However Orwellian their experience, people tend to remember the good, not the bad.

In today's multi-polar world a full-blown autocrat is a rarity, although during the Cold War they multiplied like so many mushrooms. In Serbia, the jewel in the Yugoslav crown, Josip Broz Tito (1892-1980) is today neither despised nor idolized. Far greater concerns preoccupy the Serbian political imagination. With two former leaders in The Hague (Milosevic never left), a virulent nationalist movement and its stubborn denial of Kosovo independence, Serbia's ghosts are never quiet. Despite progress towards EU membership and greater economic integration of its ethnic minorities, a stable and prosperous Serbia is still very much a work in progress. While Tito cannot be blamed for Serb aggression and its ethnic cleansing campaigns in the 1990s, the breakup of the Balkans is directly related to the how and why of Tito's pursuit of a unified communist Yugoslav state.

And yet on Tito's birthday last week in Belgrade, I witnessed the malleability of national memory as public spectacle. Tito fans converged to celebrate the achievements of their former leader and to indulge their fondness for the cultish kitsch that accompanied his reign (1943-1980). In a large garden on the grounds of the former headquarters of the National Youth League, we were led to benches in the sun, and limitless beer. Trumpets blared and the Yugoslav flag was raised. No one stood as the former national anthem was sung, but all were smiling and singing along. A Tito impersonator bounded onto the stage, launching into a series of tongue-in-cheek speeches. “Everything is changing, except we who remain the same,” he declared to shouts, laughter and applause.

I too could be comrade for a day at this annual reminiscence, an indulgence my Serbian colleagues called “Yugo-nostalgia.” For revelers, the commemoration was more an expression of disappointment with Serbia's inability to meet popular expectations than a wish to resurrect the former Yugoslavia. For everyone there, some of whom were too young to have known Yugoslavia at all, it was a chance to toast the idealization of a warm, fuzzy, and less complicated era. But if life in contemporary Serbia was 'the morning after', life under Tito had been a prolonged honeymoon of state excess and exalted cult of personality–a powerful opiate of the masses in its own right. Given the bloody ordeal of Serbia's recent turbulence under Milosevic, the rosy afterglow of Tito's stewardship was an analgesic for a nation's wounded psyche.

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by Evert Cilliers (aka Adam Ash)

Let's start with a smattering of metaphors. The world needs the US like a fish needs a bicycle. Or rather: like a virgin needs a rapist.

There was a time, a century ago, when Turkey was known as the sick man of Europe. Today America might be called the psychopath of the planet.

Or a beehive collapse disorder in the ecology of politics.

Let's try an extended metaphor. America is like Heidegger being a Nazi: how could the begetter of Sein und Zeit, a man of supernatural intelligence, his head full of great ideas … how could he have fallen for all that Germanic-destiny-embodied-in-Der-Fuhrer claptrap? How can we Americans, our heads full of ideas of greatness, our hallowed constitution enshrining the freedom of the individual … how can we go forth and kill foreign individuals by the thousands on a pretty regular basis?

How could Heidegger have thought that ancient Greek and his German were the only languages worth thinking in? How can we think our country is the only indispensable nation worth emulating?

We happen to be the dark id of nations, yet we imagine we're the shiny superego.

We happen to drop more bombs on people than anyone, yet we believe we're crop-spraying the manna of freedom.

We happen to be Darth Vader, but we think we're Luke Skywalker.

Heck, while we're at it, let's carry our metaphors to a vulgar extreme: for the US to have a foreign policy is like putting a vagina on a rock. It seems like an interesting idea, and it softens the idea of a rock, but in the end, a rock is a rock, and who wants to sex it up with a rock?

President Obama is the vagina on our rock. He talks pretty, and looks pretty, even to the hard cases out there, but in the end, America is still a hard rock, whose foreign policy consists of nothing less than killing foreign civilians by the thousands via bombs, drones and guns, or devastating the world economy via Wall Street. Plus we've got over 800 military bases all over the world — staging places to make it easier for us to kill foreigners.

I'm just trying to stick to the facts here. I'm trying to avoid reification — creating a thing out of an abstraction. I'm throwing out metaphors to head-butt our language into the Ding-an-Sich of what we do. We talk about America being all for promoting human rights and freedom — abstractions, abstractions, metaphors, metaphors — but the actual scientifically verifiable real-life strictly-data facticity of our foreign adventures, the realpolitik behind the screen of metaphors, the concrete here-and-now specificity of our being-in-the-world, comes down to this and this alone:

Thousands of dead bodies laid out in the morgues and graves of foreign lands, put there by our soldiers and their weapons.

Our foreign policy is to kill foreigners.

That's it.

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During the last year or so of the seemingly endless health care debate, there has been a lot of hand wringing and yelling about what’s needed to fix the health care system in the US. The funny thing is, if you read anybody who really knows anything about these things, who has thought deeply about these issues, there is a pretty simple, general consensus about the main thing that is wrong with health care in the US, and most of the world over – it isn’t based on outcomes. It’s a fee-for-service system that doesn’t reward anyone, doctors or patients, for better health outcomes. If that system were changed to some kind of pay-for-performance system with more accountability all round for the actual value derived out of the health system – cost relative to quality – this would be a really great first step in curing what ails us. Part of this paradigm shift is to put the patient at the center of their own health care, utilizing technology innovations to move towards “care anywhere” networks where the patient gets the care they need, where and when they need it.

Thinking and reading about this subject recently made me think about education and whether any of these concepts could be applied to this other broken US system. I’m particularly thinking about it this month as a lot of my local school boards vote whether or not to approve their budgets, budgets that have already been stripped down to the bare bones as services are canceled and any class or activity extraneous to the state testing regimen is threatened.

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Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, the premiere journal of the eponymous genre of writing that combines the literary techniques of fiction with the reality of life itself. With its spring 2010 issue, it’s undergone a radical revision in look, feel and sensibility, shifting from academic journal to wider-interest magazine. He’s also the author of many books that fall under the creative nonfiction heading, exploring subjects like baseball, transplant surgeries and robotics. In Vanity Fair, James Wolcott dubbed Gutkind the “godfather” of creative nonfiction. His latest, the father-son memoir Truckin’ with Sam: A Father and Son, The Mick and The Dyl, Rockin’ and Rollin’, On the Road, comes out this summer. Colin Marshall originally conducted this conversation on the public radio program and podcast The Marketplace of Ideas. [MP3] [iTunes link]

I'm looking, right in front of me, at these two issues: one of the journal Creative Nonfiction and one of the new Creative Nonfiction magazine. These two could not look more different; for the same publication, the difference is striking in every dimension. What could've brought out such a radical change?

What brought about the change is the fact that the entire genre of creative nonfiction has changed over the past fifteen or sixteen years, and in fact the publishing industry and the writing community has changed as well. Everything is different. When I started Creative Nonfiction as a journal, the whole phrase “creative nonfiction,” hardly anybody'd ever heard of it, and when they heard of it, they made fun of it like James Wolcott did. It was something new.

It was especially of interest, but also of great resistance, in the academic world: writing programs, creative writing teachers or writers who worked in creative writing programs. People were interested, but they didn't quite know what it was, and didn't quite know if they wanted to buy into it. There were many literary journals that published scholarly essays, good fiction and terrific poetry. Some of our best fiction writers and poets started their careers by being published in literary journals. I thought, “Okay, why don't I start a literary journal featuring only narrative nonfiction — or 'creative nonfiction' — and that will give it some distinction and great deal of credibility.”

That's what I did fifteen or sixteen years ago: I started the journal, and in fact it helped a great deal, giving the genre credibility in the entire academic world. The thing about the academic world is, it is growing like crazy. The creative writing programs are, in many respects, the cash cows of English departments these days. As it turns out, the nonfiction programs are the leading producers in most writing programs and English departments. It was the right thing to do. The timing was right at that moment. Now, almost every literary journal publishes creative nonfiction. There are about 70 MFA programs giving degrees in creative nonfiction in the United States. Creative nonfiction is increasing in popularity throughout the world. I thought, “Now's the time to continue to publish really terrific essays, but also to start a magazine that can discuss the genre.”

Half of the new magazine is essays, and half is a collection of ideas and columns by terrific writers about what we're doing in this whole creative nonfiction world. Secondly, if I can go one step further, I wanted to take the journal idea and push it beyond just writers and editors and academic reading creative nonfiction. I want the world to read creative nonfiction. A magazine to readers who aren't necessarily writers is much more accessible. That was the the plan, and that's what we're trying to do.
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We imagine that there are areas of life beyond critical engagement. Stepping across boundaries of sanctity elicits outcries ‘in defence of custom’, as Tom Paine said. Drawing these lines, we imagine that no one would dare step across them to poke or prod with crude, manmade rationality at these things we view with sickly admiration. And it is sickly because often these things do not deserve admiration at all. The only explanation for this continuing admiration, I would venture, rests in our irrational adherence to tradition – that horrid notion that deserves to go the way of smallpox. Within the well-oiled machine of tradition, we find the family unit; each member a cog that is slotted in as soon as it exists; the machine rolls on, puffing and sprouting the smoke of diffusive uncritical activity. Many issues of current contention raging on the borderlands of sanctity, such as euthanasia and abortion, all find their irrational and dogmatic views birthed from this machine. I do not wish to sing the old, tired Orwellian yarn of breaking free from the tyranny of ‘the System’; but I do wish that we view our spheres of sanctity, maintained by mere assertion, with objective criticism. Not only do I see no axiomatic reason to adhere to ‘traditional family-values’ – marriage, monogamy, children, love – but once we do away with labelling these things ‘sacred’, we can progress in our discussions on them. At the moment we go in circles because many of us – including those who consider themselves liberal – refuse to see them as anything other than sacred and, therefore, good. Everything is sacred within the family: marriage is (a) sacred (duty), monogamy is sacred, children are sacred, love is sacred. When people say these things, they are not using ‘sacred’ as a synonym for ‘valuable’ or ‘admirable’; they appear to be taking the idea much further. And this, unfortunately, is not restricted to discussions on the family. The most hampering discussions are those working from the belief that life is sacred: not only do I think life is not sacred, according to what sacred actually means (as will be shown) but, once again, labelling it sacred causes numerous moral quandaries which increases suffering (for example, in viable cases of people wanting euthanasia, where their lives are unbearable). However the case for ‘unsanctifying’ life will not be the topic of this piece.

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