Laureates, Poetry Aversion Therapy, and a Note on Progress vs. Pluralism

A couple of evenings ago I found myself hanging around the big modernist caverns of the Arts Club of Chicago, munching on scallops wrapped in bacon, eyeballing the Kandinskys and Motherwells, and jawing with some of the local literati — Calvin Forbes, Simone Muench, Mike Puican, Chicu Reddy, Suzanne Buffam, Fred Sasaki, and others, including my colleague Josh Corey.  We’d been summoned down to see Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Awards, a ceremonial giving-out of glory and cash in the form of the Children’s Poet Laureateship and the Ruth Lilly Award.  For me, the big attraction was getting to hear David Ferry (the Ruth Lilly winner) read.  Well, that and the hors d’oeuvres: the Arts Club food is always credible. 

Having inflicted a book called Laureates and Heretics on the world, I’ve probably spent more time thinking about the meaning of laureateships than anybody should, and I certainly have my share of preconceptions about what such laurels mean.  The roots of laureateships lie in societies quite different from our own, and the idea of such an award certainly sits more easily in times and places that are more formally hierarchical and less culturally diverse than the United States in the early 21^st century.  In England, the poet laureate used to have to swear an oath of loyalty to the monarch, since his words were in some sense the official verse of the nation — John Dryden, the only English laureate ever to be kicked out of office, was so booted because of his refusal to take an oath to the protestant William of Orange (Dryden had converted to Catholicism some years earlier).  But the notion of the laureate as the official literary spokesman of the realm was already wobbling in the Romantic era, when the winds of democratic reform and social leveling were blowing across the Channel from France: Byron was clearly joking when he wrote that the laureate Robert Southey was “representative of all the race.”  In our own time, the laureateship of the U.K. has seen a reduction in status, with the former life appointment done away with in favor of ten-year terms.  Britain may still knight people for life, but the laureateship now rotates, albeit slowly, so as to accommodate a greater variety of aesthetic and social constituencies: a typically British moderate adaptation of old institutions to newer, more diverse and democratic times.

But what about the laureateship in the United States?  It's sort of like a Palladian villa in the hills above Los Angeles: it pretends to be older than it is, and fools nobody.  That is, we’ve only really had American poets laureate for 25 years, after Ronald Reagan signed off on a law changing the older position of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, which has been around since the 1930s, into a laureateship.  Some poets bemoaned the development (the poet Michael Anania told me his first thought was “well, now no one interesting will ever get the job").  Others gnashed their teeth at the idea of hierarchy and official culture.  Many more began polishing their resumes, hoping for a shot at the illusory immortality one gains from being enshrined in a footnote to literary history. 

Right from the start the position was a sort of weird mish-mash of various American impulses.  There was, of course, a dash of England-envy, a desire for the sexy otherness of titles, pomp, and an archaic past.  It was, after all, the 80s, and all the wannabe princesses of America still turned their yearning eyes to Charles and Diana.  But that was really just a veneer behind which lay both a populism — at odds with the yearning for titles and pomp — and a strong dose of Rotarian style boosterism, or even hucksterism.  When the American laureateship came into being, the Brits were still appointing laureates for life.  But in the U.S., the job was conceived of as a one-year gig, so that it would rotate among representatives of different social and aesthetic groups, a principle observed more in the breach than in actual practice.  Additionally, the laureate was given a charge to promote poetry — a kind of glorified sales job, really.  Some poets ignored that part of the role, or went at it impractically: Joseph Brodsky, for example, would issue demands that anthologies of poetry be placed in all hotel rooms, like Gideon Bibles, but do so without any follow-up in terms of fund-raising, editing, or schmoozing with hotel tycoons.  Others took to the role as if they’d been born for it.  Robert Pinsky spent three terms barnstorming the country, delivering speeches and readings and launching the “favorite poem” project, which sought to promote the poetry that non-poets knew and loved.

You’d think the biggest problem with an American laureateship would be the inherent contradiction between an office with a title that links it to hierarchy and official culture, on the one hand, and a non-hierarchical country without a unified cultural tradition, on the other (of course we have all kinds of hierarchies in America, but officially we don’t — and when you leave the world of the super-rich, who know where they stand in relation to the populace, and the world of the righteously irate intellectual, where you and I live, damn near everyone insists that they are middle class).  But the complaints I hear about the institution tend to echo that of Anania: that the poets selected for the job aren’t aesthetically interesting or challenging.  Maybe that speaks about the crowd with whom I hang.  I think, though, that it says something about the way the populist demands of the position — that it be given to someone willing to promote poetry to a large public — are at odds with the socio-cultural position of most American poets.  Most poets, now, produce for other producers: they live in a world of academic specialization, and write for other specialists.  I don’t think of this as a good or a bad thing: it’s simply something that has come to pass, for reasons larger than the whims of any poet, critic, or any single cultural institution (my short version of how and why this came about is in an essay called “The Discursive Situation of Poetry” in Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher’s book The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics; I’m still working on the long version, a book called Power and Poetics).  Anyway: it’s hardly surprising that an office that comes with a populist mandate would end up disappointing a group of people whose tastes are formed by non-populist principles.

My own sense of laureateships, for what it’s worth, has been not to take them particularly seriously, except as cultural phenomenon that can reveal a bit about the social position of poetry, in all its contradictions and complexities.  At a gut level, I’ve generally been kind of against the things, in part because of my general Jacobinism: I don’t like titles or hierarchies of any kind.  I even wince when my colleagues call themselves “doctor” or put bumper stickers indicating attendance at prestige universities on their cars.  I mean, it’s just a short step from that to wearing little lapel ribbons indicating membership in the legion d’honneur.  And I’ve also thought that laureateships encourage poets in the direction of the wrong kind of ambition: the desire for prominence and recognition.  Isn’t that kind of ego-gluttony exactly the sort of thing that the best parts of every religious tradition from Catholicism to Buddhism, and every philosophy from Stoicism to (pre-Nietzschean) German Idealism tells us will make us into unhappy, envious wretches? 

So those were my preconceptions when I walked into the Arts Club.  But a funny thing happened midway through the speech by J. Patrick Lewis, the newly-anointed Children’s Laureate.  Lewis, who seemed a very sincere man, and was quite clearly a guy who would appeal to children, talked about how much he enjoyed the many visits he’d made to schools to read from his books and talk about poetry.  “Children,” he said, “approach poetry as they approach people: with no preconceptions whatsoever.”  Fair enough, I thought, from my seat in the back row of the auditorium, where the local poets had clustered.  And it was a point to which I could relate, not only as the father of a two-year-old daughter, but as a person with no knowledge, let alone preconceptions, about children’s poetry.  I’ve got plenty of opinions about poetry for adults — sometimes those opinions are even strong enough and weird enough and wrong enough to get people angry with me.  But I couldn’t name a half dozen contemporary poets writing primarily for children.  And here’s where the value of an institution like a laureateship — even a foundation-sponsored, non-federal laureateship like the one bestowed upon Lewis — dawned on me.  I mean, think of it: it won’t be long before I’ll want to get some children’s poetry into my daughter’s hands, and I really don’t know where to begin at all.  Now, at least, I know a name: J. Patrick Lewis.  I may not know his work, I may not know exactly how strong or interesting it is in comparison to the work of his peers, but I do know that some people who care about children’s poetry thought he was worthwhile.  It’s not exactly a divine guarantee of absolute and timeless awesomeness, but it’s not nothing either.  It’s sort of like the kind of movie criticism Siskel and Ebert used to do back in the 80s, when they’d get together and give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to movies: it’s hardly the be all and end all of film criticism, but for an otherwise uninformed audience, it’s something, a place to start.  In a sense, the official United States laureateship has a similar value: not for poetry professionals, but for people in the wider world.  For all of my general griping about laureateships, I can recognize that.

*

Several of Chris Wiman’s remarks, as he introduced David Ferry, touched on the condition of the poetry professional.  Chris mentioned that he and Don Share have been editing an anthology of poems drawn from the last century of Poetry magazine, which meant he’d recently read some 300,000 poems, a task, he told us, that might just make him start banging his head against his podium like a woodpecker at any moment.  I sympathize: if Chris and Don split that number of poems up, each taking on half of the reading, and spent, say, five minutes with each poem, that would still mean more than 200 hours each of reading: five solid work weeks each, nine to five, assuming they kept the pace up all day and skipped lunch — all this on top of regular jobs consisting, in large measure, of… reading large numbers of poems.  This, I thought, would be a good way to learn to despise poetry, at least temporarily: the process resembles nothing so much as the kind of aversion therapy parents used to practice on children caught smoking, when they’d make the child smoke cigarette after cigarette until the poor kids turned green and couldn’t stand to anywhere near tobacco smoke anymore.  Chris seems, somehow, not to have succumbed to his particular round of poetry-aversion therapy, but his patience with the most common kind of poetry written by younger poets — which he described as “willed eccentricity, even willed grotesqueness” — seems to have become a bit strained, his attitude seeming to have become, at least for the moment, a version of “not that there’s anything wrong with that sort of thing, but…”

*

The evening closed with David Ferry reading from his works, including, much to my delight, his translations, which I’m not alone in seeing as his best work — though history may disagree with me: as Chris Wiman pointed out, “for many years Ezra Pound was best known as a translator.”  When it was over, Calvin Forbes and I agreed that, if either of us give a reading like Ferry’s when we’re pushing 90, we’ll be damned proud of ourselves.  We also both noted that everything, even the translations (which featured a fine version of the journey to the underworld in The Iliad), was about death.  “When I heard Archibald MacLeish read as an old man,” said Calvin, “it was all about looking at pretty girls.”  So often poetry at old age seems to get down to sex and death: Yeats’ “Politics” or his "Cuchulain Comforted.”  You know, the fundamentals.

*

In other Poetry-related news, Marjorie Perloff and I have been in touch regarding my review of her study Unoriginal Genius.  I stand by what I wrote — especially what I said about Perloff being the best and most prominent spokesperson for a whole range of poetries — but after we’d corresponded a little, I asked if I might reproduce this note, since it allows Perloff to clarify her sense of things:

Dear Robert:

I wanted to thank you for your long detailed review and say that I think you’re right that there’s no ‘progress’ in poetry; if I gave that impression, I’m surely wrong. The fact is, I don't believe in a progress model but that poetry, like furniture or clothing, cannot ignore its own time.  "A

mythology reflects its region."  Not that poetry gets better —far from it — it just gets different.  My own preference as you must sense is for the Moderns, no one can beat Yeats or Eliot or Pound in my lexicon!  And by the way, I start with Eliot and his citations so where did you get the idea that I ignore TSE and EP?

But I should have made my own view of literary history clearer and as a result of criticisms of Unoriginal Genius, I am doing that in various new things I¹ve been writing‹specifically a long essay ‘corrective’ on Duchamp that I hope you¹ll see some time.

You make many salient points and I hope we can discuss them some day before too long.  I'm a big admirer of your writing!

Thanks, Robert and all the very best,

Marjorie

The Great Debate: Progress vs. Pluralism

If you check out the latest issue of Poetry, you'll find a splendid array of features, from Fanny Howe's poems to Clive James' thoughts on product placement in poetry.  Marring  this smorgasbord is my own contribution, a piece about Marjorie Perloff's Unoriginal Genius and the late Reginald Shepherd's A Martian Muse (edited by Robert Philen).  It begins like this:

**


Imagine yourself settling into a seat at the back of a crowded auditorium to attend a debate between two speakers, each known for his wit, intellect, and the striking novelty of his argumentation. They will debate the nature of poetic history. On the stage stand two lecterns, and behind them hangs a banner with the title of the evening’s events: “Poetic History: Progress or Pluralism?” The first speaker takes up his position behind the lectern to the right, taps the microphone, and makes his opening salvo:

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry.

This, you think, must be the “progress” side of the debate. The speaker has boldly dismissed the disjunctive kind of poetry we’ve come to think of as cutting edge, declaring it passé. It has waddled out of the forum of relevance like a jump-suited, late-period Elvis, and the next phase of poetry is upon us, in the form of a new kind of intertextualism. This all seems very exciting, but you make a mental note to sell your copies of In the American Tree and American Hybrid on eBay before the price drops too far. The next new thing has already arrived. Or has it? The other speaker has stepped to his lectern and has already begun to speak. You’ve missed the speaker’s opening sentences, but you catch this:

Compared to the art world where, after Duchamp, anything can be art, there’s a sense that in poetry world—even within more innovative camps—that certain things are poetry and that certain things are not. Coming from the art world, this strikes me as an untenable & unsustainable stance, both aesthetically and historically and one that is bound to implode any moment.

He makes a good point, this art world refugee. The notion that some things (like disjunction) can stop counting as poetry when something else (intertextualism, say) starts counting does seem unsustainable, both aesthetically and historically. Maybe it’s not the price of your anthologies of disjunctive poetry that’s about to implode, but the notion of poetic history as a kind of progression, with new forms rendering old forms obsolete.
At this point, you notice something funny. The two speakers look like identical twins. And they both seem remarkably familiar to you, longtime reader of Poetry that you are. And then it hits you: they’re both Kenneth Goldsmith.

**

The whole piece can be read online here.

The Conservative Director of the Spectator Fouls the Breeze: T.S. Eliot and Mass Media

I'm at least two weeks behind in my email, I've got three stacks of essays to grade, three exams to write, two writing deadlines to meet and a Gordian knot of editorial hoo-hah to untangle.  So the only rational thing to do is to hole up in a coffee shop with good internet access, paw through the Selected Writings of Jules LaForgue, and blog about the things I've been reading on the commuter train.  And those things have been the poems of T.S. Eliot.


Last time I blogged about reading Eliot on the train, I let the juxtaposition of Eliot's urban street scenes and the glimpses of greater Chicago I'd had out the window of the train dictate the direction of my thoughts.  This time I'm letting the fact that I read Eliot surrounded by commuters immersed in various newspapers, magazines, Kindles, and iPads point me in the direction of Eliot and the mass media of his day.  There are a surprising number of references to the mass media in his poetry, and I think I see what it means to him.  It's a part of his critique of the modern world, with its social atomization and its failure to communion with the timeless, the life-forces of fertile nature, or true community.  In fact, we can find in Eliot's representations of the mass media in his early poetry a kind of dress-rehersal of the main themes of that miraculous poem, The Waste Land.


Consider the deeply underrated little poem called "The Boston Evening Transcript," from the 1917 volume Prufrock and Other Observations.  It opens with a depiction of the mass-media audience:


The readers of the Boston Evening Transcript
Sway in the wind like a field of ripe corn.


Right away we get one of the most common criticisms of the mass media, then as now: the notion of the passivity of the audience or readership, blown helplessly hither and yon, without the wherewithal to resist the power of the public word.  It's an idea as old as Plato's "Ion," or book ten of his Republic, and it will probably be with us as long as we have intellectuals ready to feel contempt for the real or perceived intellectual passivity of others. 


But this isn't just any mass media outlet being criticized.  Eliot has singled out the Boston Evening Transcript.  Why?  In part, I suspect it's because of the way the name of the paper scans: BOS-ton EEEEEV-en-ing TRANS-cript: there's a certain wonderful drawl to it, a falling rhythm with a good long vowel stretch in the middle, depriving the phrase of energy and allying it with a kind of lifelessness that echoes the passivity of the newspaper readers as Eliot depicts them (scansion, of course, is a performance, so your reading of those syllables may vary).


There's more, though, to the selection than a love of the scansion and a desire to represent for Boston.  The Boston Evening Transcript had a very particular place in the media culture of Boston in the early years of the twentieth century.  First of all, it was venerable, even then, having been founded in 1830.  Secondly, it was an icon of middlebrow, respectable literary taste: it had for many years in the nineteenth century been edited by the poet Epes Sargent, founder of the literary magazine of the Boston Latin School, contributor to the Harvard Advocate, and writer of such well known poems as, uh... well, writer of some poems.  Around the time Eliot was writing Prufrock and Other Observations the paper was publishing poems by Hazel Hall, who was to become a favorite poet of needlepoint enthusiasts looking for Uplifting Phrases to frame and put on a wall over a pianola or potted dieffenbachia.  Thirdly, it was stuffy to the point of snobbery, becoming well-known for its column on bridge and, especially, its weekly feature on genealogy, a field of immense importance in brahaminical Boston.  The stuffiness was truly legendary: in fact, some have argued that the etymology of the term "fuddy-duddy" can be traced to allegedly humorous little dialogues in The Boston Evening Transcript between two characters, one named Fuddy and the other Duddy.  This one appeared in November 1895:


Fuddy: So Miss Dandervecken is going to marry an Englishman.  A lord, I suppose?
Duddy: Well, no, not exactly: but I understand that he's often as drunk as a lord.


This dire attempt at humor — clearly the product of a mind fed only on Unitarian tracts and watery chowder — is not something I  made up.  The paper was actually pitched at that level of squareness.  One can almost see the heavy lace curtains hanging sadly by the china cabinets, hear the slow, somber ticking of the grandfather clock, and smell the faint, lilac odor of inner desolation floating over the tea cups and saucers.


It's the association of this particular newspaper with stifling respectability that gives additional resonance to that cornfield image, especially when we read it in conjunction with the next three lines:


When evening quickens faintly in the street,
Wakening the appetites of life in some
And to others bringing the Boston Evening Transcript,


The juxtaposition between those with life-appetites and those who subscribe to the Transcript gives a certain ironic tinge to the earlier image of the paper's readers as blowing in the wind like a field of ripe corn.  One can certainly see in the ripeness of the corn a kind of ready-to-be-reaped, end-of-life quality.  But ripeness is a funny thing: simultaneously an end and an apex, it can read as death-ready or as filled with the juice of life, as a kind of primal fertility.  So along with the windblown passivity of the readers, we get two more ideas attached to them: death-readiness and life-fullness.  But the lines that follow the initial couplet cue us to view the life-full sense as ironic, as something distant from the actual lives of the readers.  The life-full sense of ripeness is called to mind in order for us to see how far from its pagan, fertile vitality these Transcript readers have fallen. Eliot will go on to use imagery this way throughout The Waste Land, where a fertile and glamorized elsewhere is juxtaposed to a lifeless and debased here-and-now.


The critique of mass media takes a different form in the next few lines, where Eliot juxtaposes the world of the newspaper with another kind writing ecosystem altogether:


I mount the steps and ring the bell, turning
Wearily, as one would turn to nod good-bye to Rochefoucauld,
If the street were time and he at the other end of the street,


Who's this Rochefoucauld?  He's Francois, the sixth Duc de Rochefoucauld and the Prince de Marcillac to you, bro.  He's famous as a writer of pithy little maxims, and as a habitue of some of the finest literary salons in seventeenth century France.  If the newspaper is devoted to the moment, maxims were thought of as being little nuggets of wisdom that endured forever, touchstones to which generations might gratefully return.  And if the readers of the Transcript live in stifling bourgeois Boston, Rochefoucauld makes their lives seem petty and repressed indeed: he cut a swaggering swath through a world of glittering intellects and dallying ladies.  So there's a great doubled feeling to that street image: on the one hand, the speaker treats Rochfoucauld the way a tired, respectable Bostonian on the way home from the bank or law firm might treat a neighbor, with a curt, none-too-warm nod.  On the other hand, we get a sense of the distance — all the way down the street of time — of the present repressed world of isolated, respectable newspaper readers and the more lively and glamorous world of the salons.  Salons, after all, are places of face-to-face interaction and sparkling wit.  Newspapers are just things you hide behind in the parlor so your maiden aunt wont bore you with tales of her dying ficus.


The real kicker comes in the final line, though, where Eliot's speaker himself becomes the vehicle through which the lifeless, graceless, passive world of the newspaper enters the home:


And I say, "Cousin Harriet, here is the Boston Evening Transcript."


There's that great complicity thing we see so often in Eliot — it's there in "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" — Prufrock knows all about his condition, his failure to enter a world of active, fertile, human association, but he can't make himself do anything about it, so he remains in the lifeless passivity and stodgy formality of a world much like that of the readers of the Boston Evening Transcript.  I think it's something Eliot gets from Jules LaForgue.


Another relatively unsung poem early poem of Eliot's, "Le Directeur" from Poems (1920), presents a similarly dark take on the mass media, this time in the form of a depiction of the editors of a magazine. Although the poem is set in London, and the magazine is The Spectator (not Addison and Steele's worthy journal, but the nasty right-wing publication founded by the Barclays in 1828), Eliot wrote the poem in French, and the rhymes in that language are wonderful to quote along with an English version of the poem.  It starts by presenting The Spectator as a kind of curse hovering over the Thames estuary:

Malheur à la malheureuse Tamise

Qui coule si preès du Spectateur.

Le directeur

Conservateur

Du Spectateur

Empeste la brise.

Evil to the unhappy Thames

Which flows so close to The Spectator.

The conservative

Director

Of The Spectator

Fouls the breeze.

But what, other than the afflatus of the editor, constitutes the accursed nature of the publication?  We'd do well to remember the nature of the publication before we proceed.  Under the editorship of John St. Loe Strachey, who published and edited the magazine in the early years of the twentieth century, The Spectator was already taking on the self-consciously provocative right-wingery it retains to this day.  In the 1930s it would become associated with the journal Everyman, a Fascist publication, and in our own time it continues to run the anti-black, anti-poor, openly anti-semite screeds of one Taki Theodoracopulos, who has said that he wishes he could have been a Wehrmacht officer in the 1940s — I am not making this up.  (Theodoracopulos, it is worth noting, is one of the founders of The American Conservative, a journal associated with many current members of the Republican Party and several right-wing think tanks, including The Heritage Foundation).  So let's bear that in mind when we read the next lines:

Les actionnaires

Réactionnaires

Du Spectateur

Conservateur

Bras dessus bras dessous

Font des tours

A pas de loup.

The reactionary

Shareholders of the

Conservative

Spectator

With folded arms

And stealthy step

Encircle.

There's a strange, menacing kind of ritualism here, as if the stakeholders of the right-wing media were a kind of cult, or a coven of warlocks preparing a spell.  They present a strongly unified little group, secretive (those folded arms) closed to the world, and working stealthily to project their schemes upon it.  But what of the world outside the circle of monied shareholders and their editorial mouthpieces?  Well, here it is:

Dans un égout

Une petite fille

En guenilles

Camarde

Regarde

Le directeur

Du Spectateur

Conservateur

Et crève d’amour.

In a gutter
A little girl
In rags,
With flattened nose
Looks at the
Conservative
Director
Of The Spectator
And starves for love.

Well, "starves" isn't quite right.  "Bursts with love" might be more like it.  Anyway: how to interpret this?  Clearly the editors and shareholders don't care for the well-being of this girl.  She's an outcast, a product of the atomized urban society Eliot so despised, and the editors feel no sense of community with her, no desire to nurture her as part of a communion of fellow humans.  But she, from her position of isolation and poverty, looks with love and longing on the spectacle of the mass media, as represented by these men.  I'm tempted to say the relationship is much like that between the cynical people running Fox News and the economically and socially threatened people in the Tea Party movement: those people turn their yearning eyes toward a media empire that, in actuality, supports a monied class that doesn't give a damn for their wellbeing.  Eliot was no leftist, but his particular form of conservatism was all about community and communion, about people feeling for, and caring for, their fellow humans across space and time (there were limits to this: step outside Christianity and you leave Eliot's circle of sympathy).  The kind of right-wing media represented by The Spectator could only seem as malevolent to him as the worst excesses of the media seem to many of us today.

My Third Places

“The Towertown 3 Movie Theater, in the Sterling Towncenter Shopping Mall of Sterling, Virginia.  Right at the intersection of Route 7 and Dranesville Road.  That was my Lapin Agile.  My Factory.  My Elaine’s.  My CBGB.  My Studio 54.” — Patton Oswalt

No, people, despite what the title may lead you to believe, I’m not about to regale you with tales of how I got the regional bronze medal for shot put in high school, or would have won the third-grade spelling bee if it weren’t for those tall-ass Croatian twins whose hyper-intense parents drilled them on the difference between ‘complacence’ and ‘complaisance’ every night. It’s of the ‘third place’ in the sociological sense that I sing.  Ray Oldenburg is the high priest of the cult of the third place, and his book The Great Good Place is the sacred text.  It’s here that he tells us of a fundamental social need for a space that is neither the home nor the workplace, but instead a place where people gather for gathering’s sake.  A bar, a coffeehouse, a diner, some corner of a park — the particular location isn’t terribly important, really.  There has to be a where, but it’s the who, the why, and the how of the gathering that matters, and that makes for a true third place.

If you check out the Wikipedia entry for “third place,” as I did just now when I was feeling too lazy to head out to my secret backyard writing dojo and pull Oldenburg’s book off the shelf, you’ll see that the characteristics of the third place include: that it be “free or inexpensive”; that “food and drink, while not essential, are important”; that the place should be “highly accessible: proximate for many (walking distance)”; that it should “involve regulars – those who habitually congregate there”; and that it should be “welcoming and comfortable.”  All that’s true, but it misses the real core of the third place, so I’m going to have to pry myself out of this chair and fetch the book from the dojo after all.  Hang on.

Okay! I’m back.  So.  The essential thing about the third place, the thing missing from the Wikipedia entry, is that you can drop in there, unscheduled, and expect to meet some people you know.  It’s a hang-out, a joint with regulars, but it’s important that these regulars don’t just arrive there when they’ve scheduled a meeting of some kind..  It’s only really a third place if you’re likely to run into some of your peeps without having planned to so do.  As Oldenburg puts it, there must be “lack of scheduling and organization, looseness of structure, and fluidity in the composition of those in attendance at the third place.  A resulting uncertainty surrounds each visit.”

Another important thing about the third place is that it’s a venue where the entertainment is provided by attendees themselves. “That entertainment has deteriorated almost entirely in the United States is a great pity,” says Oldenburg.  “We take it passively, we take it in isolation, and we frequently find it boring.” But in the third place, “the sustaining activity is conversation which is variously passionate and light-hearted, serious and witty, informative and silly.  And in the course of it, acquaintances become personalities…” It’s true, too.  When we think of any of the great third places, we think of the great conversations.  We think of the café culture of France circa 1911, when the cramped living space of Paris made a welcoming set of public spaces (gardens, markets, cafés) necessary, and out of that necessity came a deluge of chatter, and the blooming of a hundred political movements, a thousand literary, art, and philosophy movements, and high tolerance for surly waiters.  All this is passing from France, sadly, as the place starts to look a bit more like America circa 2011 — a time and place of private luxury and public dearth, including a dearth of genuine third places.

There are political and psychological consequences to the dearth of third places.  The relative heterogeneity of the crowd in third places, as compared to home or work, makes for an importance place to meet and talk to people unlike ourselves.  “As the third place constituency is more varied,” says Oldenburg, “so also is its agenda of conversational topics.”  And the removal from contexts like home and work, where one has responsibilities, matters.  Third places are places of play, and such places, according to Johan Huizinga (whom Oldenburg quotes) are “forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain.”  This removal from the rules and responsibilities of the home and workplace allows for a certain liberation and catharsis: “the timidity which the workplace imposes upon those with families to support does not extend to the third place,” says Oldenburg, “here one may bellow like a street preacher or wail like a new widow, boast with gusto or assume the authoritarian pomp of a high court judge.”  I have to think back to a pre-tenure existence to feel the truth of that statement, but it’s a real condition Oldenburg describes.

While some environments are richer in them than others, third places seem to exist in some form almost everywhere: from the Roman forum to the café rich culture of France in the early 20^th century to neighborhood barbershops to the bench in the mall where the retired guys meet first thing in the morning, people find a way to hang out.  And when they don’t, people tend to feel the lack of such a place and such a community, though some don’t know that the root of their quiet desperation is the lack of a place to hang. 

The story of my own third places begins, like yours, with a pre-history of tree houses, “forts,” and alleys behind 7-11s where a miscellany of kids would meet between school and home to mess around with skateboards, yo-yos, and slurpees before moving on to the more hard-core world of games like ‘truth or dare,’ ‘spin the bottle’ and ‘hey I stole this one beer from dad, let’s share it and convince ourselves we’re totally drunk.’  But I suppose the story really begins in the mid-80s, my high school years, with a bar called Clancy’s.  This was in Canada, where the legal drinking age was 18, so you could start working your way into bars with a fake ID at 16.  I maintained then, and maintain now with even greater certainty, that the Canadian system is superior system to the American model and its puritanically lunatic drinking age of 21.  Like much of the stupidity in America, the high drinking age seems to be predicated on the assumption that if you ban, repress, and deny something, it won’t become a problem — a system that has failed in every field to which it has been applied (abstinence-only sex education, alcohol prohibition, marijuana prohibition, don’t-ask-don’t-tell, you name it).  Of course these prohibitions create the very kind of problems they’re designed to suppress: gay bashing in the ranks, unprotected teen sex, death from alcohol poisoning, and the creation of environments where weed can become a gateway drug, simply because it involves exposure to people who can push harder things your way.  And in the case of the drinking age, you get a college culture of moronic binge drinking: the forbidden fruit becomes glamorous, and the partaking takes place in unregulated environments where no bartender, watchful of his license, can cut off a drunken imbecile.


But I digress.  I was about to talk about Clancy’s, a bar whose very characterless, suburban strip-mall vibe proves that a viable third place need not be remotely cool or interesting to function exactly as Oldenburg describes.  I could drop in there at lunch, between classes, or after school, with or without my reprobate friends in tow, and expect to see a mix of other fake-ID-having young idiots, work-dodging city workers, and guys who spent a lot of time customizing their Mustangs.  The music seemed designed for this last constituency, consisting almost exclusively of Booker T and the MG’s “Green Onions,” Golden Earring’s “Radar Love” and the occasional Deep Purple track.  There, by the dart board and the neon of the Foster’s Lager sign, we talked our way through all the necessary banalities of high school life, downed our drafts, and felt like big swaggering men of the world, since we operated without the scrutiny of parents or teachers.  We more or less kept to our own peers, though, since encounters with the other, older, mid-day drinkers had a hard-to-define discomfort to them, a discomfort I think I can now see as our aversion from the whiff of failure that kind of hovered around the older regulars like a sad grey haze.  I mean, we were young, drunk, and acting stupid in a soulless suburban strip-mall bar, but we were bourgeois enough to know that if we were still doing this when we were their age, we’d have let down all the teachers and parents from whom we were hiding, and let them down pretty badly.  And I don’t think, spiky hair and Sex Pistols tee-shirts notwithstanding, any of us really wanted that.  If any of us ever got a tattoo expressing our true sentiments, I don’t think it would have said anything like “Death Before Dishonor.”  “Hoping for a Good Internship” or a big heart with “Merit Scholarship” written in gothic script would have been more our speed.

If I had to grade Clancy’s as a third place, I’d say this was about right:

Unscheduled Encounters.  A.  You could always walk in and find people with whom to hang.

Conversation.  B-.  I mean, there’s only so much you can do with high school angst and teen male braggadocio. 

Varied Constituency. B-.  Those older guys were more like a haunting presence of possible failure than people we knew.  And we were a pretty homogenous bunch of white and Asian suburban kids from the same university-centered suburb.

Thanks to the aforementioned superiority of Canadian drinking laws, I’d more or less had it with drunkenness by the time I started university, and the nature of my third place changed accordingly.  The vast, provincial university I attended had all sorts of designated hang-outs: nicely kitted out lounges for all the different faculties, coffee shops, restaurants, parks with river views, talk-friendly study areas, the student union bar.  But none of that could compete with the charms of a bunker-like windowless concrete cube of a room lit only by a single bare bulb in a little wire cage.  This was the retreat, the redoubt, the Alamo, for a small group of regulars hiding out from the world.  Of all the third places I have known, this one most resembled Huizinga’s “forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain.”

Due to the positively Siberian conditions of winters in western Canada, all of the university’s buildings were linked by an elaborate network of underground corridors, which ranged in character from shop-and-café lined underground streets that could have been mistaken for shopping malls, to dank, water-stained cement hallways lit by flickering neon — the kind of spaces that made Brutalist architects blanche and tremble.  As the son of a professor, I’d been spelunking down these corridors for years before I became a student, and knew all the secrets, the service hallways and air ducts and cubbyholes.  So one day, when a girl in a many-zippered leather jacket and one of those asymmetrical 80s New Wave haircuts approached me after class, saying, “I need to get high – know where we can spark this jay?” I knew exactly where to go.  Off one of the lesser-traveled tunnels under some of the science buildings was a grey door leading to a long, empty, dark cement corridor, at the end of which was another door.  Behind that door was a flight of stairs that led to the little concrete bunker with the one light bulb in its wire cage.  Other than the bulb and the stairs leading up to the room, the only feature was a pair of heavy steel doors leading outside, to a concrete pad where, presumably, some mighty dean had once hoped to see another laboratory building constructed.  The building was never built, though, so the corridor was a kind of campus road-to-nowhere, forgotten by the administration, ignored by the students.  But it was ideal for our purposes, me and the asymmetrically coiffed joint-bearer.  The doors to the outside world opened from within, but were locked from the outside, so the only approach was through the long, echoing corridor leading to the stairs.  You could perform whatever illicit acts you wanted to in the bunker, safe in the knowledge that you’d hear anyone coming long in advance of their arrival, and you had an immediate escape into the outer world through the steel doors if you needed it.  And so was born a new third place: as word traveled through the campus grapevine, the bunker became a little autonomous hang-out zone, complete with graffiti, milk-carton furniture, and an ambience of perpetual ditch-weed haze.  When you’d march down the corridor, you’d shout out “it’s cool, it’s cool,” to alert the out-hangers that you weren’t there to bust them, and drop in on a grim, dark, industrial looking cube of a room that was so incredibly foreboding it might have passed for a high-end New York nightclub of the era, the sort of place you where you might find Brett Easton Ellis snorting coke out of Grace Jones’ belly button.  It was great.

Grades for the bunker:

Unscheduled Encounters.  A-.  Sometimes the place was empty, which was a bit lame.  But generally there’d be some kind of deviant wacko to talk to, even if you showed up alone.

Conversation.  A+/C.  We felt alternately like we were the wittiest banterers since the heyday of the Algonquin Round Table, or like we were carrying out dialogue worthy of My Dinner with Andre.  But I’m pretty sure that, were I to hear a recording of our conversations without the benefit of chemical enhancement, I’d cringe at the giggling and drooling jibber-jabber of it all.

Varied Constituency. A-.  I met a lot of grad students this way, especially anthropologists.  And a ton of pre-meds from India. 

When I left Canada for grad school, I ended up with two new third places, the first being the coffee shop in Notre Dame’s O’Shaughnessey Hall.  You can see it in the unbelievably shitty movie Rudy: a little rectangle of a place with high-backed wooden booths, huge chunks of Irish soda bread for a buck, and no pressure whatsoever to get the hell out in a timely manner.  I don’t have much to report about the place, except that it’s where I first met the philosopher Alistair McIntyre, and it’s where I had a blood-pressure-spike-inducing argument with one of the cretinous crypto-fascist loons from the Opus Dei hierarchy.  It was also a place where, if you were meeting someone for the first time, you’d invariably ask, “so, what department are you with?”  I felt terrible about asking this once, when a fellow grad student brought a townie guy she was seeing in with her — he was self-conscious already, and I think in the movie that was playing in his brain I must have seemed like the stuffy bastard in the blazer with a crest on it who snorted at seeing someone “not our sort” in the ivory tower.


The second new third place was one of two businesses located across from the big old rundown house I rented: a used book joint in a similarly big old rundown house called Pandora’s Books (the other business, also in a rundown Victorian, was a crack house, with the quietest, most midwesternly-polite crackheads you could ever hope to meet).  Pandora’s was the best.  One of the clerks was a grad student at Notre Dame who’d go on to work for Oprah, the other was a kind of 300-watt downstate redneck genius bohemian who seemed always to be somehow turned all the way up on the ontological dial, his very being set off the scale, past the maximum level of 10 to a Spinal Tap level of 11.  I later learned he’d been a bounty hunter for a few years before studying theater.  I’d shuffle over to the place, bagel in hand, when I woke up around 10:30, and commence hanging out for two or three hours every day.  There was a crowd of regulars and irregulars: a mad biologist from Mississippi who soon moved into my house, a historian of Sumeria, a crackpot libertarian gravedigger who could quote Genet’s plays and gave me hell for not reading Hölderlin, a radical African-America woman working for the some Catholic charity, a guitar-playing junkie with whom I never got along, and a liquor store owner consumed with conspiracy theories that sounded a lot like the plot of John Grisham’s The Firm.  And all this in a place whose magazine rack included both Hustler and The Paris Review.  It was great, and I’m still friends with both of the clerks.  But I can’t stand the fact that the place has been knocked down and replaced with a non-insect infested, glass-walled building where they seem to actually sell the occasional book.

Grading wise, I’d say it’s got to be something like this:

O’Shaughnessy Coffee Shop

Unscheduled Encounters: B+.  You’d always find people you knew, but it was almost too predictable who those people would be.

Conversation: I wish I could give a higher grade than a B, but I can’t: the good stuff was too cut-through with our grad student whining. 

Varied Constituency: Tough call. There’s a kind of homosociality to these hyper-academic environments, but then again, there were theologians, Marxist historians, poets, and the occasional scientist: a kind of intellectual diversity.  Let’s go B+.

Pandora’s Books

Unscheduled Encounters: A.  It was a kind of human Sargasso, with all sorts of flotsam and jetsam drifting in.

Conversation: B+.  There was some amazing shuck-and-jive, but when the small town libertarian conspiracy nuts showed up, you kind of wanted to go in the back room and read Philip K. Dick alone for a while.

Varied Constituency: A+.  I mean, come on.

The thing about living in South Bend, Indiana, though, is that you really have to have some stones to hack it.  And stones I did not have, people.  So I split South Bend a couple of years into grad school and moved with the lovely and talented Valerie to Chicago, where we shacked up in a tiny Lakeview apartment overlooking a quiet courtyard while I tapped out my doctoral dissertation on what would now seem a comically archaic laptop computer.  Here my third place was another used book joint, a place called the Aspidistra Bookshop. The name is sort of witty, but only if you’re one of the three people to have read George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying.  I had, which is probably why the owner offered me a job when I came in and commented on the name.  I took the job, which would normally mean the place couldn’t qualify as a third place, away from home and work.  But Aspidistra was by no ordinary definition a place where work was done, not in any way recognizable to the square community.  My job consisted of showing up around 11:00, letting myself in, opening the till and taking out enough money to go down the street and buy two fried chickens and a six pack of Guinness.  I’d have these ready on the counter when the owner, a semi-brilliant, highly educated, pissed-off Vietnam vet, would stumble in, unshaven and with a good two inches of ass showing above his sagging and bedraggled trousers.  He’d turn a tiny black and white television set on to the coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial, pop open a beer, offer me one, and, between bites of chicken, we’d argue about the novels of Jeanette Winterson, Julian Barnes, and Martin Amis (once, a few drinks into the afternoon, he had me phone Amis’ agent to settle one of our disputes).  But the real conversation would click in when the regulars started to drop in later in the afternoon.  These included the owner’s three sons (the hair-gel one, the hair-down-to-his-hips one, and the one with a real job); his Ron Jeremy-looking lawyer, who had no office and needed to use the store’s fax machine for the owner’s endless legal entanglements; the owner’s partner, a hippie who’d written a master’s thesis on Yeats; and a miscellaneous array of glorious oddballs, like Startouch the Astrologer, with his giant Afro; the septugenarian New Orleans jazz drummer called Snowman; Burkhardt the old beatnik artist; some people from Blacktop records; a guy who’d run as vice president on the existentialist party ticket back in the 60s; and other giants of unregulated awesomeness.  I first met Jean-Luc Garneau when I worked there — later I’d join the faculty at the liberal arts college where he’d been professor of French since the 60s, and we’d translate Belgian Surrealist poetry together (it’s in a bunch of journals now: Drunken Boat, Action Yes, and Poetry, among others).  Part of me wishes my gig down there had never ended, and I’m sure working there was as big a part of my education as grad school itself.  I mean, grad school offered depth, but this place offered breadth.  It’s where I learned about phenomenological literary theory (too out of fashion to be on the grad school syllabus), it’s where I learned about the Cathar heresies, where I learned how Chicago’s city government actually worked, and where I learned about Eddie Harris, one of the greats of Chicago jazz.  Also, I learned that what looked to my sheltered eyes like a constant state of financial, familial, sexual, pharmaceutical, and legal crisis was just a modus vivendi for people less uptight than myself.  It was great.

Grade wise, it pans out as straight A’s. 

Since my move 30 miles up the road from Chicago to the Gatsbyesque world of the North Shore, my third place has shifted back into the world of grubby bars (as it did during my sojourn in Sweden, where I hung out at a pub called The Londoner with a bunch of British ex-pats with names like "Pints" and "Geordie Norman" — straight out of a Guy Ritchie movie, really).  And the grades for these places remain high in all categories.  But I’m keeping the particulars on the lowdown: if I didn’t, I’d be compromising the nature of third places as the “forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain” that Huizinga described.  But if you’re up this way and you find me guffawing with a crowd of idiots over a black & tan, you’ll know you’ve wandered into that hedged-round place.  And unless you're young and callow enough to consider the sight of middle-aged men laughing in a bar a sign of failure, you can pull up a stool and buy the next round.