Danger on Vampire Trail. This was the first Hardy Boys book I ever read. I believe I was in second grade when my next-door neighbor and I each decided to read one of the blue-spined mysteries that sat on his older brother’s shelf. The books were remnants of the older brother’s grade-school reading, I suppose, which he had never bothered to remove from his walls and pile into boxes in the basement (or sell for a dime apiece at a garage sale, or foist off on Goodwill, or trade in for Tom Clancy novels at the used book store), being altogether too engrossed in programming his Atari 800 computer, and other important high school things that would certainly never involve the brothers Hardy. He had apparently never become terribly interested in Frank and Joe, even in his pre-Atari days; he had only five or six Hardy Boys books and—embarrassingly—a few assorted Bobbsey Twins adventures. I could never understand why he had these facile, yellow-spined things with unarresting titles like “Mystery at the Seaside” or “The Missing Pony.” In fact, I could not fathom who would be at all interested in the series, which seemed to be merely the Hardy Boys, Jr., a concept which had no place in the cosmos occupied by both the Hardy brothers and Nancy Drew. The Hardys were for boys, Nancy for girls; for whom were the Bobbseys meant? Preschoolers? Maybe. But unsurprisingly, the name of the “author” of this doomed series escapes my memory, while the names Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene come promptly to mind.
These authors’ names relate to an important benchmark in any Hardy or Drew fan’s reading life. It took me four years or so before I finally admitted to myself that neither Mr. Dixon nor Ms. Keene were real people, that in fact the eighty or so adventures of Bayport’s finest (eighty death-defying adventures crammed impossibly into Frank and Joe’s high school years) were not all written by the same person. The single-author theory seemed entirely plausible at first, when my experience with the Boys encompassed only a few books which, though somewhat dated, still contained copyright dates in the 1960s. Mr. Dixon, then, was an aging but still prolific man, who perhaps got up early every morning at his home on the east coast (yes, that seemed right—he should be able to look out at the ocean while orchestrating Frank and Joe’s escape from an elaborate death trap in Egypt, a locked magician’s box in Scotland, a tiger in India) to write five chapters or so. My faith began to crumble, however, as I checked out older editions of the books from my grade school resource room, editions with yellowing paper, which lacked the familiar blue spines and were bound instead in beige covers with brown lettering and, on the front cover, an iconic silhouette of two Hardy Boy-ish figures crouching with flashlights, a sad substitute for the exciting, customized illustrations that graced the newer editions. These editions contained even more outdated language than the blue-spines, using passé terms for African Americans that seemed to place the stories in the 1930s. Indeed, a glance at the copyright page confirmed this estimation.
The single-F. W. Dixon theory was seeming less likely. Even if he had begun writing the mysteries at the age of 20, the secretive (there was never an “about the author” at the end of the books) Dixon would still be in his seventies, much too old to be writing at the rate at which the Hardy novels were churned out. Finally, I came to the uneasy conclusion that there may have once been a real Dixon in the ’20s or ’30s, but he had since passed away, and his series had been edited, updated, and continued by a panel of ghostwriters at Simon & Schuster (I threw out theories which included a single ghostwriter or a Franklin Jr. carrying on his father’s tradition) who used the pseudonym for any number of reasons: to preserve the continuity of the series for youngsters who would be wary of a Hardy Boys tale told by Brian Reynolds or Suresh Desai, or to ensure that all Hardy Boys books would be shelved together in both library and bookstore, rather than scattered about by zealous alphabetizers.
With this decision (this all took place long before the current era in which one can merely Google Dixon’s name and learn that he was never anything but a pseudonym) I passed into a more mature appreciation of the series. I recognized that I was in some way being deceived, but I accepted the deception, as the theater-goer accepts the deception that what he or she sees on stage is real; I knew that there was no wizened Hardy patriarch writing the books somewhere on a misty coast; I knew they were most likely written by some guy in a suit and tie in a cubicle in a glass office tower, or maybe by a team of such people, brainstorming about where the next book should be set, about what should be stolen or who should be kidnapped. I knew this, but it didn’t really matter, and I didn’t think about it too often, aside from the occasional reverie about what it would be like to write Hardy Boys novels myself (and never getting credit for it). It might not be that bad as a career. Though creativity would be somewhat stifled by the formulas that must be employed in writing the books, it would still be rewarding to see my own episodes sitting in a line with all of the others (I could look at a shelf in the bookstore and say, “I wrote numbers 27, 45, and 78”) and think that maybe at least one of them was the personal favorite of some avid young Hardy reader.
I must say, however, that Danger on Vampire Trail would not be included in my list of personal favorites. I remember nearly nothing of the book, except that it involved vampire bats (though these were not central to the plot; in fact, I think I remember feeling vaguely exploited by Mr. Dixon, who obviously chose an exotic title to invite readership of a book which was in actuality not at all fantastic) and a camping area full of recreational vehicles. This seemed to be the trend among the first set of Hardy Boys novels: exciting titles, intriguing cover art, the promise of an exotic location and the threat of death (clearly an idle threat: I do not recall anyone dying in those blue-spined Hardy adventures, not even villains; though the Hardys may be locked in a trunk in the basement of a burning building, their survival is never in doubt, no matter how many chapters end with “We’re trapped!”)—all designed to lure readers to rather boring, outdated stories probably written several decades earlier (though with this disclaimer on the copyright page: “In this new story, based on the original of the same title, Mr. Dixon has incorporated the most up-to-date methods used by police and private detectives.” But what did that mean? Perhaps a few glaring anachronisms eliminated, or an added chapter in which Frank and Joe dust for fingerprints or reconstruct a suspect’s face using their very own police sketch kit).
To be fair, the trend does not really start until around the tenth installment of the first set of Hardy books. Witness some titles from those first ten: The Tower Treasure, The House on the Cliff, The Shore Road Mystery, The Secret of the Caves. Nothing to falsely arouse a youngster here. These early titles matter-of-factly relate what the story is about; they are not advertisements.
This matter-of-factness disappears with the tenth Hardy mystery. It assails the potential purchaser with the irresistible question of What Happened at Midnight. Like a science fiction novel that propels the reader through 600 closely-printed pages by the promise of a spectacular revelation at the end, #10 impels the reader to purchase or borrow the book to find out what indeed happened at the witching hour. And thus began the titillating tease of the blue-spines. I myself was taken in by #11, While the Clock Ticked, and by its terrifying cover, which depicted the teenaged detectives bound and gagged in a dimly-lit room, straining frantically, sweaty-faced, looking wide-eyed at an insane, white-haired man—presumably their captor—emerging from a secret room behind a grandfather clock. The book was not carried in my local B. Dalton; I ordered it, and my anticipation was almost unbearable the day the store called to tell me it had arrived. Though I finished the book in two days, the normal period required to polish off those unfailingly 170-page-long volumes, it left me disappointed. The details of the story escape me, but the routine was all too familiar: the brothers track down a criminal in Bayport, are placed by the criminal in an unnecessarily elaborate death-trap, but they manage to escape in Chapter XX, just in time for an amusing epilogue and a look ahead to their next case, conveniently plugged like so: “The boys laughed, and gazed up at the huge clock. Silently, they wondered when another case might come their way. Sooner than they expected, they were to find out, when Frank and Joe spotted strange footprints under the window.”
Though I must have read 30 or 40 of the original blue-spined books, not one retains a bright spot in my memory. F. W. Dixon tried his best to innovate and add new elements to the tales. He sent his protagonists to exotic ports-of-call—war-torn Central America in The Mark on the Door, Scotland in The Secret Agent on Flight 101, India in The Bombay Boomerang, Africa in The Mysterious Caravan, and the depths of the Yucatan in The Jungle Pyramid. But no matter where the Hardy siblings traveled, I found their adventures invariably lackluster. Though they may have engaged a pre-teenage boy in the late 1960s or early ’70s, they were hopelessly insufficient to leave me any permanent pleasant memories. I would never stay up until one in the morning reading The Mysterious Caravan.
Happily, however, the executives at Simon & Schuster must have realized the dwindling audience for F. W. Dixon’s original series, and with #59 the Hardy Boys entered a new era. The last of the fifties—Night of the Werewolf—launched the brothers onto a more exciting trajectory. The post-58 bunch, written in the late 1970s and early ’80s, satisfied my desire for a more contemporary thrill, and I soon devoured the entire set. The covers presented Frank and Joe in modern coiffure and wardrobe, though they continued to change their features after each adventure (perhaps to avoid recognition by paroled crooks from past episodes): in #63 the boys appear as trim, intellectual sweater-wearers, while in #64 they wear tight short-sleeved shirts, are shaggy-headed with a hint of hair on their slightly exposed chests; still stranger, in #77 they seem to be neat yuppies out on a company picnic (though an out-of-place tiger growls menacingly from a rock behind them). Perhaps Simon & Schuster hoped to appeal to a wide range of white males and changed the Hardys’ appearances to approximate those of their readers. (I myself had a more definite resemblance: the first name of the elder Hardy sibling.)
Despite the variability of the boys’ appearance, their adventures became consistently entertaining. I still fondly recall such gems as Mystery of Smugglers Cove (#64), which took the Hardys into the backwaters of the Everglades after being wrongly accused of stealing a valuable painting. In the seventy-third Hardy adventure, strange happenings at a local Bayport theater combine with a plot to hold the president of the United States for a Billion Dollar Ransom. Who could forget the snowy intrigue and danger of #78, plainly entitled Cave-In, with a cover depicting the brothers hanging perilously from a cable over a snowy Lake Tahoe slope, a Sno-Cat creeping menacingly towards them? The Four-Headed Dragon actually did keep me up until one in the morning, with its gripping tale of a mysterious mansion in the woods surrounding Bayport, of criminals bent on using a newly-developed laser gun to sever the Alaskan pipeline.
Unlike their predecessors, these new adventures always lived up to the thrills promised by their titles. The Demon’s Den delivered a devilish plot hidden in the placid Canadian timberlands—a diabolical scientist (see the terrifying illustration on page 190) bent on creating a race of supermen to compete in the Olympics for an unnamed eastern European country. These ubermensch, named “Alpha,” “Beta,” and “Omega,” allude to history and literature both: the eugenic schemes of Hitler and the fancies of Aldous Huxley in Brave New World. Clearly the ghostwriters at Simon & Schuster were getting more ambitious. Even titles like The Roaring River Mystery concealed, behind their bland covers, compelling tales of bank robberies and foul play on the white-water rapids of Maine.
But the zenith of the Hardy middle period (for we have not yet come to the final incarnation of the adventures, the sexy “Hardy Boys Casefiles”) came in my favorite of the books: Revenge of the Desert Phantom. Though abnormally brief—only 157 pages and 15 chapters—this book packed in all of the elements which later made the Casefiles so appealing: foreign countries (France, along with a fictional African nation called Zebwa), beautiful foreign heroines (Niki—the daughter of the assassinated leader of Zebwa), villains who had committed murder and were prepared to do it again (previous bad guys, though always vowing, “I’ll get you, Hardys,” never seemed quite serious about it), technology (the book puts the Hardys at the helm of an armored car, called the Rhino, which can also float), and Agatha Christie-like plot twists and surprises (the real assassin turns out to be Akutu, the leader of the loyalist forces). However, at the end of this book we can see the ridiculous direction in which the series is headed; from Chief Collig of the Bayport police the boys receive a van which they will soon equip with surveillance equipment and other gadgetry inappropriate even for the far-fetched Hardy series. The Hardys could never be the Scooby-Doo gang with its Mystery Machine, nor have a Hardymobile in which to pursue criminals. These developments surely offended other Hardy purists as much as they offended me; as the old series wandered off into outer space (literally; in #85, The Skyfire Puzzle, Frank and Joe man a space shuttle flight), a new beginning was clearly needed; the slate needed to be wiped clean.
Before revealing (to those unfamiliar with the first of the Hardy Boys Casefiles: Dead on Target) exactly whose slate was wiped clean, a brief note about the supporting cast of the Hardy adventures. First, the Hardy family: famous father Fenton, the brilliant but frequently absent detective-dad; slender and attractive Laura Hardy (whom one can imagine as an older but no less perky and vivacious Laura Petry from The Dick Van Dyke Show), hardy, hearty Hardy mom, undaunted by the many nights of sleeping alone while Fenton solves crimes in New York City; and lovable Aunt Gertrude, “a stern, angular woman,” Fenton’s spinster sister who often stays at the Hardy home. No matter what dangers the Hardys may encounter, they always have this warm trio to support and love them.
But the Hardys are no homebodies; they have plenty of chums. Perhaps their best friend is stout Chet Morton, a “roly-poly youth who preferred eating to danger,” but who often joins in their adventures and provides comic relief by dropping a bowl of batter on his head, sitting on a pin, or merely driving by in his memorable yellow jalopy. Frank and Joe are friends with the jocks as well (and find time between their many cases to play for Bayport High’s baseball team): lanky, rangy Biff Hooper, tackle on the Bayport High football team, whose heavy fists can always be counted on to assist the Hardys should their adversaries get physical. The Hardys’ diverse group of friends has room for “olive-skinned” Tony Prito, whose father owns a construction company and who himself owns a motorboat called the Napoli, and even for Phil Cohen, a quiet Jew, “dark-haired and slender,” who “enjoyed reading as much as sports.”
Finally, no discussion of the Hardys’ social lives can omit their steadies (though it must be difficult to have a maturing relationship when one’s age remains fixed at seventeen or eighteen, as do Joe and Frank’s, respectively). Fortunately, their girlfriends remain similarly stuck in time. Frank’s favorite date is the blonde, brown-eyed Callie Shaw, and Joe finds himself hopelessly devoted to the “vivacious, dark-haired” Iola Morton, slimmer sister of Chet. These girls appear in the early stages of an occasional Hardy adventure, just long enough to participate in a beach party or barbecue, perhaps make an insightful comment or two (blushing as they do so), but infrequently enough to imply anything more than chaste, healthy relationships with the opposite sex.
Nevertheless, powerful emotions are shared between the Hardys and their wholesomely attractive gals. The degree of that power is demonstrated, tragically, in the inaugural volume of the new, sleeker Hardy series. “Get out of my way, Frank!” Joe screams at his brother in the first line of Dead on Target as he hopelessly lunges towards the flaming wreckage of the Hardys’ yellow sedan, the explosion of which the brothers have just witnessed in the parking garage of their local mall. His suicidal struggle towards the burning car is a desperate attempt to save the life of Iola, with whom he had recently quarreled, and who had, with horrendous misfortune, retired to the sedan a few minutes before the explosion. As Callie notes later in the book: “I guess he really did love Iola, in spite of his wandering eye.” In any case, what a beginning for the new series! The violent death of a main character—in the first chapter no less—signaled a dramatic change of direction for Simon & Schuster’s teenage gumshoes. I remember the day after I purchased Dead on Target and Evil, Inc. (the second in the new series). It was April Fool’s Day, so when I told one of my fellow fifth-grade fans that the Hardys had been reincarnated, he refused to believe me and was put out that I would so cruelly toy with his emotions. He soon acknowledged the veracity of my claim, however, and came to love, as I did, the stylishly designed, compact Casefiles, with their titillating titles—Deathgame and Edge of Destruction were later examples—and stories that always made good on the titles’ promises. Under each title was an added bonus: an epigraph which wittily hinted at the thrills to come. “Revenge is always a personal matter,” noted the cover of Dead on Target. Other standouts: “A murder contract is always binding”; “Terror has many faces—all deadly”; “In the cult of the Rajah, death is a way of life.”
The Hardys had modernized, inside and out. Whereas a beach party was the hippest thing the Hardys and their friends could think to do in the past, they now listened to Led Zeppelin, hung out at diners until well past midnight, and traveled to locales more exotic and exciting than ever before. In trying to avenge Iola’s death, the brothers become involved with a secret government agency called the Network and end up battling international terrorism, represented by an Arab assassin named Al-Rousasa. In Evil, Inc. the brothers go undercover to bust an organized crime ring in France. After reading this pair of adventures, I feverishly anticipated the next installment—Cult of Crime—a excerpt from which had been included at the end of Casefile No. 2.
Cult of Crime. The very title spooked me, calling to mind images of Jonestown, of Satanists who kidnapped children and engaged in midnight acts of bestiality in storm drains. Even the cover of the book exceeded my expectations. Frank and Joe flee from a pack of torch-bearing cultists, one of whom fires a gun in their direction. I was so taken with the image that I even considered getting my hair cut like Joe’s.
The new Franklin W. Dixons (I imagine top management at Simon & Schuster laying off the old stale Dixon crew and bringing in a fresh batch of Franklins, recent graduates of Ivy League schools who were ready to pour their intelligence and energy into making the Casefiles the Hardy books they themselves never had as adolescents. However, S&S must have given the stale Franklin W.’s some severance work, because the middle series perpetuated into further idiocy; clearly all of the publisher’s real energy was thrown into the Casefiles.) were not taking their job that seriously, however. The relative realism of the third installment contrasts sharply with the science fiction of The Lazarus Plot (No. 4), in which the Hardys get their first hope that, impossibly, Iola Morton may still be alive. As it turns out, the Iola the brothers see is only a clone created by a laboratory staffed by “the most diabolical team of scientists ever assembled.” The book was good, though, and the college grads went on to turn out a series of classics, from Edge of Destruction, in which the Hardys traipse through the sewers of New York City to thwart an organized crime boss who threatens to unleash a deadly virus upon the Big Apple, to Hostages of Hate, in which a group of terrorists takes hostages, Callie Shaw among them, on an airplane in Washington, DC. Callie performs admirably under this immense strain and, while on television delivering the terrorists’ demands, sends Frank a secret message using the personal sign language the two have developed to talk to each other during class. Thus Frank, by watching Callie’s blinking patterns, receives messages like “Only two on plane,” and “Bomb real.” Apparently Callie is not the airhead she appeared to be at all those beach parties.
Sadly, the creativity of the new series did not last. After the unexpected dullness of The Borgia Dagger and its successor, No. 14, Too Many Traitors, I lost interest in the series. It is hard to say whether I simply outgrew it or the Ivy League Dixons had burned out. My parting with Frank and Joe was neither bitter nor regretful; we had been tight pals for several years; indeed, I was at least as faithful as Biff, Tony, Phil, or Chet—but we had now grown apart, and I was beginning to move in different circles, spending late nights with the Stephen King-Dean Koontz crowd. The Hardys, as always, moved to the beat of their own drum, however repetitive a pounding it may have been. Inertia kept the long line of Hardy adventures on the top level of my bookshelf until I finally packed them all in a box and packed the box down in the basement, exhumed only when I decided to eulogize the brothers here.
In truth, though, the Hardys need no eulogy; in a used book store I came across Casefile No. 101. I forget the title (it looked unsurprisingly banal), but even the cover was a bore: instead of a drawing which re-imagined Frank and Joe’s appearance and fashion sense, this one featured only a photograph of two 90210-looking males, supposedly the legendary boy-gumshoes, and an enthusiastic note encouraging us all to catch the new Hardy Boys television show. The Hardys and I have clearly parted ways, and while I’m tempted to re-read a few of the old Casefiles for nostalgic value, such a reunion would not be quite valuable enough to spend the time on, so our paths continue to diverge.
My path and that of my neighbor, I believe, first began to diverge as I read Danger on Vampire Trail. While I devoured Danger in a day or two, my reading partner and friend plodded along with his installment, and I don’t think Dave ever finished The Secret of the Lost Tunnel. As I moved ahead, purchasing some of the books, borrowing others from the library, above all reading them, Dave confided to me that he simply didn’t like reading. While I ordered Night of the Werewolf from the Scholastic book order form we were offered at school, Dave stuck to Choose Your Own Adventure books, Hot Dog and Dynamite magazines, and posters of action figures and cute pets. When I moved on to King, Koontz, and Co., Dave concentrated on computer games, reading only what was required for school. Whereas for Dave the Hardys were a passing, boring diversion, for me they became a habit. The Hardys were like training wheels, easy and enjoyable exercises that helped me develop the balance necessary for a lifetime of reading books. Though I probably would have been better off practicing on more classic childhood favorites—Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Chronicles of Narnia, and so on—I turn to the third-to-last paragraph of Too Many Traitors, the last Hardy book I ever read, for reassurance:
“It’s okay,” Joe replied. “We met girls, we went swimming, we went boating, we saw a lot of scenery and sights. I’ve had enough vacationing for a lifetime.”
Normally, residencies are funded by a combination of public funding and private donors and foundations that support the arts. The nation’s oldest residency program is the MacDowell Colony, founded in the early 1900s by composer Edward MacDowell, who noted to his wife, a pianist, that in their summer location on their bucolic farm in New Hampshire, he produced better — and more — music. The MacDowell Colony was born out of the desire to share this experience, and various artists, including writers, visual artists, composers, and choreographers from all over the world travel to Peterborough, N.H., to sleep in communal quarters, eat wonderful food, and work without distraction in a studio out in the woods. Work that has come out of this one place has shaped the American cultural landscape — e.g., Thornton Wilder wrote Our Town there; over the years, the Colony has dispensed this gift of time and creativity to artists as varied as James Baldwin, Aaron Copland, and Meredith Monk. This gift is made possible in part by public funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Ah, Mall of America… ! *Shudder*. It was 1995 and I had returned to the US, with First Wife, after 5 years in Europe, to get First Wife a Green Card. I had saved enough for us to live for about 18 months (staying at a friend’s house near Lake Calhoun) but, as it turned out, I *had* to get a job (any job) in order to get her the Green Card…
Cut to: Payless (emphasis on the first syllable) Shoe Source, in the Mall of America. Quite an adventure. The only thing more impressive than the fact that the M.o.A. is so big that it has its own weather (moisture in the upper atmosphere, under the roof, condenses and you get sun showers) is the weight- capacity of the elevators: it seemed as though the average American had gained an average of 150 pounds in the five years I’d been gone.
I was writing quite a lot, so I was an *unofficial writer in residence*, but, if polemic is a minor literature, polemic against the patrons of the Mall of America is even worse. I didn’t get my Muse back until First Wife got the Green Card and we escaped to Southern California, where she took (like a duck to Exxoned water) to the basest elements of So Cal life. I got *so* many (scars and) stories out of that… but… I digress…
It goes without saying that any piece of writing, coming out of a corporate sponsorship, that, miraculously, happened to be *actual Literature*… would not be deemed “appropriate” by the sponsors. Unless, of course, you’re talking about a corporate sponsorship in a hemisphere that doesn’t contain a shopping Mall so big that it has its own weather.
One of America’s greatest failings (beyond the transformation of its armed forces into the world’s most well-funded terrorist squad and utter inability to fathom universal healthcare) is its total disinterest in funding the arts, which is what every other Western nation does. The arts cannot be easily monetized like war, healthcare and now education, though, which is why bureaucrats mock its role in society. Pathetic.
“The Winner’s ongoing work may be displayed in almost-real time on a large monitor at the workspace. The work product may scroll continuously throughout the day for passersby to view.”
You could make a case for this aspect of the week as a sort of performance art opportunity, although my recollection is the Mall wants to exercise control over what the writer has to say for the big “almost real time” screen. So what this is not is a residency or a fellowship, and the copyright aspect is exploitative in the extreme. I have entertained doomed hopes that the Mall would reconsider its terms. If other prospective benefactors ( a word that, alas for me, inevitably conjures Mr Brocklehurst) are inclined to set up arts funding, I hope they will look to organizations like Atlantic Center for the Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Yaddo, MacDowell etc for guidance.
For all the disdain directed toward the mall, with fair terms I believe this could be a great opportunity. So many public spaces (malls, train stations, hotel lobbies, public libraries) are ideal places to work and draw on the environment and fabulous people-watching opportunities to create. Look at the hordes of writers hunkered down in coffeehouses or applying for the Amtrak residency.
Thanks for writing this piece, I am going to click on through to your NEA article.
beamish13:
What facts do you have to back that up? What’s the evidence that in the US there’s less public and private non-profit support for the arts than in, say, Germany or the UK? Keep in mind that states and local municipalities have their own programs for funding the arts, that private non-profit and charitable institutions (McArthur, etc.) have gigantic budgets, and that a lot of funding is done through publicly-funded universities.The NEA is but a small fraction of support for the arts in the US. The US has hundreds of literary magazines, and practically all of them are publicly-funded in one way or another. How many does Sweden have, per capita? Got numbers?
Also, where’s the evidence that more money = better art? No, it’s not obvious or self-evident. One could argue that many young writers are stifled by too much support (e.g. MFA, followed by a writing residency) so that they don’t get to live life. As a result, their writing is sterile, solipsistic, limited. There are many young writers nowadays who have never had a real job precisely because there’s too much support.
“Also, where’s the evidence that more money = better art? No, it’s not obvious or self-evident. One could argue that many young writers are stifled by too much support (e.g. MFA, followed by a writing residency) so that they don’t get to live life.”
There’s a tricky balance to strike. Too much support (aka coddling) and decadence sets in. Too little or no support, on the other hand, means little or no writing gets done.
When I went through a phase of working long hours at physically-demanding jobs (eg house painting or deck-building), all I wanted to do, after getting home from work, every day, was eat directly out of a pot, read, pass out, groan up out of my dreams before the crack of dawn, stagger off to work, repeat. The first few months of that I was able to get writing done on the weekends, but, as I discovered, after more than a year of this routine, it’s as though the accumulated hours of back-breaking just pile up into a black mountain of bleakest Reality, looming derisively over the twee golden fantasy molehill of Writing. Any sane Writer, in these circumstances, starts questioning the point of the practise.
In other words, it’s not just the fantasy on the page that matters; the Writing Life itself requires a safe space in which to nurture the primary fantasy that Writing *matters*, that it’s a legitimate thing for an adult to do with her/his time. Especially in a pathologically materialist culture. A *bit* of support from the Government (in any concession to the notion that Culture is a serious pursuit) is both a necessary easing and a nod of assent.
I lived in Stockholm, for a while, at the turn of the century and I met some unknown Writers there who were supported by the Gov with the solicitousness you’d expect to be shown to scientists developing advanced weapons systems, which did wonders for those Writers’ self-confidence. This is especially important if the work being done by a Writer is not *commercial*; the so-called Free Market may indeed support the efforts of the (slick) commercial talent, but the Weirdos, experimenting with the Challenging and Difficult, definitely need subsidies from *somewhere*.
I never got (or applied for) grants/stipends/retreats but I moved to a city in a country where Literary Culture is still discussed and debated on prime time TV and where the rents/ groceries/ discos are cheap and one doesn’t feel a fool for Writing. Which is all I need, really. I have (Weirdo) readers and a sense of the usefulness and *sanity* of the practise. Perfect.
People expect “real Writers” to keep on writing, regardless, but I don’t think it usually happens that way. Youthful Enthusiasm catapults one onward to 20-something Inspiration and thence to 30-something Endurance shading to Sheer Cussedness… but then what?
If a few crumbs from Gov saves the endangered species of the talented, forty-something, Weirdo House Painter/ Writer, I’m all for it. Because *those* voices are going to be more interesting, as you point out, for having lived a bit.
By the way, I can’t get over the fact that a published novelist is writing sentences such as “This paradise for the mind is also free or minimal cost, they sometimes come with stipends for lost wages.” None of my eighth-grade tutees would dare send a sentence like that across my desk.
It’s really easy to rip on the “Megamall” – the jokes practically write themselves – but for lifelong Minnesotans like myself the mall we love to hate is an inextricable part of our lives. My father worked on the construction of the original mall; decades later I worked on another project there. Camp Snoopy, the original amusement park, was better than it needed to be; I’ve probably ridden the many iterations of the Log Flume more than any other ride at any other park. I’ve been to the mall for birthday parties, stoned-teenager movie viewings, a prom dinner (inexplicably), a crazy long night with my wife in the 4th floor bars; I’ve seen the wide-eyed wonder of my children as they gaze upon marine life at Underwater World; I’ve played hooky from work to build a stuffed animal with my oldest daughter on Toddler Tuesday; I’ve been baffled by the size of crowds on a random Tuesday morning in April. I remember the enormous Sam Goody and the memorabilia shop on the first floor (home to the most expensive retail space in the state) and the island-themed restaurant on the 3rd.
So, sure, the Mall is capitalism run amok – it doesn’t have its own weather (lol Steven) but it does have its own zip code. Yet the Mall has employed tens of thousands of people over the years. Hearty Minnesotans may sneer at the suckers who do their Christmas shopping there (so expensive) yet almost all of us have made a last-minute trip there (if you can’t find a gift at the Mall…) It is an incredibly diverse place, which makes it the premier place to practice the fine art of people-watching. It draws visitors from around the globe (Japan in particular, for reasons I haven’t quite nailed down), which is the only place in Minnesota that can claim that.
All of this is to say that there are GREAT stories to be written about the Mall. Some sort of “oral history” project would be fascinating. An hour of people-watching in the Rotunda or one of the food courts would provide inspiration for a terrific short story or three. The labyrinthine back-of-house areas – loading docks, mechanical spaces, administrative offices – would be a terrific setting for a murder mystery. It’s too bad the Mall folks are viewing this purely from the PR lens. By giving a solid writer a true residency, there’s no telling what would come out of it – but like the Mall itself, it could not avoid being interesting.
Toad!
I found the place lethally-tacky (and embodying everything wrong, and environmentally toxic, about the “Biggest is Bestest” approach), though maybe it became a domed Greenwich Village, c. 1966, after I left…
…but I *did* get one really useful experience out of it: riding to work one morning, I sat behind a couple who began chatting about what they’d do with the money if they won that week’s Bigass Lottery. It was a long ride, and by the end of it, the chat had become a vicious verbal punch-up, with the lady of the couple changing her seat, the two each then muttering solo, at opposite ends of the bus, for the rest of the ride. Because the gentleman had declared “If I won that money, I wouldn’t give *any* of it to *you*.”
Steve, don’t get me wrong, I’m not calling it some sort of hidden paradise by any means – again, the vulgarities are so obvious they need not be mentioned. My only points were 1) the place is a major part of the culture of the region, like it or not; and 2) there are plenty of great stories to be told from there.
Toad!
Were you stationed out in Bloomington or closer to St Paul/ Mpls? If the latter (depending on your vintage; I bet these places are long gone) ever have a “Red Earth Breakfast” at the Seward Cafe? Or buy records at Positively Fourth Street (or OarFolkJokeOpus)? Feeling some guarded nostalgia…
It appears that Ms. Lee and, evidently, The Millions, just don’t get it. The problem with taxpayers funding NEA, NEH, and CPB is that these organizations ARE the “propaganda content factories” that Ms. Lee and, evidently, The Millions, are so concerned about. If they were not, already, off-the-chart-left-leaning, they would not be on the chopping block. The potential demise of taxpayer funding for NEA, NEH, and CPB has nothing to do with President Trump’s business acumen. It has everything to do with NEA, NEH, and CPB being the propaganda content factories the left.
Frank:
More broadly, the problem with taxpayers funding the arts is that once you fund something with your tax dollars, you feel (rightly) that you have the right to control it. Remember the “Jesus Piss” scandal in that museum in Brooklyn about a decade ago? The left whined about censorship and religious coercion, but the right had a valid point: what right do you have to offend me using my tax dollars? Use your own money to do so.
But the left doesn’t get that. It wants public funds AND the freedom to do with them what it wills. Tax dollars with no strings. And that doesn’t work.
“And that doesn’t work.”
Well, not under America’s current grid of guiding principles. This is an except from William Osborne’s “Marketplace of Ideas: But First, The Bill”…
“As an American who has lived in Europe for the last 24 years, I see on a daily basis how different the American and European economic systems are, and how deeply this affects the ways they produce, market and perceive art. America advocates supply-side economics, small government and free trade – all reflecting a belief that societies should minimize government expenditure and maximize deregulated, privatized global capitalism. Corporate freedom is considered a direct and analogous extension of personal freedom. Europeans, by contrast, hold to mixed economies with large social and cultural programs. Governmental spending often equals about half the GNP. Europeans argue that an unmitigated capitalism creates an isomorphic, corporate-dominated society with reduced individual and social options. Americans insist that privatization and the marketplace provide greater efficiency than governments. These two economic systems have created something of a cultural divide between Europeans and Americans.
“Germany’s public arts funding, for example, allows the country to have 23 times more full-time symphony orchestras per capita than the United States, and approximately 28 times more full-time opera houses. [1] In Europe, publicly funded cultural institutions are used to educate young people and this helps to maintain a high level of interest in the arts. In America, arts education faces constant cutbacks, which helps reduce interest.
plus
“In its purest form, America’s neo-liberalism would suggest that cultural expression that doesn’t fit in the marketplace doesn’t belong at all. For the arts, the alternative has been to maintain a relatively marginalized existence supported by gifts from corporations, foundations and the wealthy. A system similar to a marginal and elitist cultural plutocracy evolves. This philosophy is almost diametrically opposed to the tradition of large public cultural funding found in most of Europe’s social democracies.”
http://www.osborne-conant.org/arts_funding.htm
This seems like a response to my earlier comment asking for evidence, not to my later one. My point remains: if you want taxpayers to support your art, you have to be willing to put up with the taxpayers regulating your art. Lee demands that tax dollars be taken from taxpayers and given to her, but she’d be the first to complain that the same taxpayers who gave her the money want her to do with it x rather than y.
“My point remains: if you want taxpayers to support your art, you have to be willing to put up with the taxpayers regulating your art. ”
Not sure why that should be axiomatic… if the tax payers *understand and value* Culture (in the sense of The Arts). If the TPs think Culture is just another grouping of commodities and/ or services, that’s a deeper problem than the lack of funding for it. And they often do. And it is. There’s more to Life than money and more to the notion of Value(s) than quid-pro-quo transactions, no?
Not that I want to go around and around on the topic (I know the ideological divide is unbridgeable in either direction), I just wanted to register another POV for the sake of any residual American Bohemians out there, in hiding, reading this, tremulously, in some attic with a secret entrance… (laugh)
Steven:
You’re babbling, and I’ve no idea what you’re saying. My point is very simple: those adults who want to live with their parents have to live by their parents’ rules, no matter how foolish these rules may be. Lee wants the public to fund her art, but she won’t have the public regulate or control her art. She wants to have it both ways. She can’t. So let her get a real job, or let her take that Mall of America residency.
This is why the right wants to cut the NEA: it’s not the money but the principle. Conservatives don’t want spoiled brats to take taxpayers’ money and then whine that their writing space isn’t quiet enough, especially when many of these conservatives are blue-collar workers who actually earn a living the hard way. If I were working in a factory 40 hours a week and then had to read Lee complaining about the inhumanity of having to clock in for a writing gig at a mall, I’d be calling my congressman immediately and ask him to axe the NEA.
Besides, all that whiny “I need a safe, quiet space, complete with a stipend, so I can write” nonsense. What delicate flowers these MFA kids are! Let them work for a living. I’m not saying they have to go all out Eugene O’Neill or George Orwell and eat the wallpaper, but it won’t hurt them to earn a buck.
Sorry, Liam. I tend to babble when I’m bored.
Liam,
Your arguments are boring and fatally unoriginal. You seem to belong to that group of people whose intellectual arsenal consists of about six buzzwords (such as “delicate flower”, “real job”, “safe space” – you forgot “snowflake” “politically correct” and “libtard”) which you rearrange to build whatever windmill it is you are chasing. This is why arts funding is necessary – critical, independent thought is important!
Liam, I didn’t want my tax dollars to support the war in Iraq, or the massive expansion of the prison system, but they were used for those things and will continue to be funneled into similarly morally bankrupt enterprises whether I like it or not. So I’m comfortable with you inadvertently funding a painting or a novel that offends your sensibilities to the tune of two cents a year.
Liam,
As a writer, please direct me to all this sweet free money you speak of. I want to never work again!
Oh, right. This is just bullshit you’re making up. Guess I’ll move back in with my fambly!
I’m sorry, toad, if my reasoning is not up to your standards, but perhaps you could still try to understand my point, which so far has cruised over your head: public arts funding does not lead to that independent thinking you’re dreaming of because it comes with very tight strings attached. And if I may return the favor, “give more money to the arts” is itself somewhat boring and unoriginal. Perhaps “This is how more money would make the arts better” would be more interesting and original, but I’ve yet to see anyone make it. Care to try?
Coulier: the free money I speak of is the money Lee wants the federal government to give her, the money that is supposed to save her from the horror of the mall residency.
anon: my sensibilities, you may be surprised to note, are very similar to yours. But you don’t fix one giant evil–military and war–by sniveling about a far smaller evil not getting bigger.
I urge all of you to take a look at the situation in Israel if you want to see what happens when artists clamor for state funding and the state says, “Here’s the money, and here are the strings. Knock yourselves out”. Google “Miri Regev” and you’ll see the NY Times article on the first page. This is exactly what you people are bringing us to: the arts serving the state and its wars, nationalism, racism, and militarism.
Liam
“public arts funding does not lead to that independent thinking you’re dreaming of because it comes with very tight strings attached.”
This is just demonstrably false. I don’t know how to help you better understand this. For an introductory list of artists who have benefited from public funding, I would start with reading this article, particularly the 3rd to last paragraph.
However, I think you would best benefit from a formal understanding of the NEA, specifically its grant program for writers. https://www.arts.gov/grants I suppose if submitting an application and, if selected, a few progress reports are “tight strings”, well, then, we have different definitions of “tight strings”.
toad:
The wind of condescension you keep breaking my way rings somewhat odorless when it comes from a commenter who consistently fails to understand what amounts to a very simple argument. No, the strings attached are not the application forms, but thanks for the informative link. Now take out that stick and read about Miri Regev and her attempt to subvert art to the service of nationalism, etc. It happens there and it could happen here, and it will if the NEA here is as strong (read: well-funded) as the Ministry of Culture is over there. Strings, see?
Liam,
So, let me get your “very simple argument”: the culture minister in a foreign country is a nationalist, which means if an analogous American cultural agency, which is .002% of the budget and on the chopping block, becomes too powerful (which it never has in its entire existence, no prominent politician has ever cared about, and no one is clamoring for anything different), the writers lucky enough to receive modest grants from this agency (who are by your own admission all lazy lefties) will be forced to churn out nationalist propaganda?
Are those winds ringing stinky yet?
Where did I say that all NEA grantees are lazy leftists? You’re incapable of arguing like an adult, so you make things up. You’re angry, so you shoot in all directions without reading the comments you’re responding to. I’m sorry, but your dispirited artist’s frustration is not my fault
Have a nice weekend.
“Let them work for a living”
“Earn a buck”
“Delicate flowers”
“Get a real job”
“Spoiled brats”
“Whine/whiny”
My childish point is that NEA funding, and taxes in general, do not work the way you claim they do, and that your “aggressive arts funding leads to increased militarism” white-hot take is not a danger to this country. Have a nice weekend.
You know, toad, I’m in such good mood this morning that I’m inclined to be nice even to you, and even after you’ve collected sentence fragments that were targeted at specific individuals and assigned them, on my behalf, to all NEA grantees.
Whatever. I woke up today and discovered in my mailbox a note that my play had been accepted for production, even though I wrote it over nights, with airport-grade earmuffs to combat ambient noise, and with the horror of the visual clutter of power lines staring at me from across the street. So on this lovely Saturday* morning, I say, can’t we all just get along?
Now, have a REALLY good weekend. I know I will.
* Us working people assign a special meaning to that day. Ask around.
I know a lot of people who work Saturdays; it’s not a special day. Liam, you romanticize too much.
Liam, congratulations! Do tell where and when we can see your play.
I must say, old chap, you are obsessed with work. You would be shocked to know that I, too, have a job. It’s really quite amazing, eh? Two people, with jobs. Not only that, I also manage to write in my free time, without a view, a thousand miles from NYC! It’s perfect! I don’t want or need any grants or residencies. I suppose the only difference between you and I is that I don’t expect a medal for it, and I don’t presume that my circumstances should apply to everyone else.
Anyway, I’m off to seek out some “workers” with whom to discuss the concept of “Saturday”. I’m humbled by how much I have to learn. Cheers!
@Steven Augustine
“A system similar to a marginal and elitist cultural plutocracy evolves.”
And where is it different? Osborne’s analysis makes for good paper and lousy policy, conflating as it does, artistic production with artistic performance.
More “full-time opera houses” by a factor of 28? Means what? That America, not Germany, is the home of “conspicuous consumption”? That “there’s no such thing as too much of a good thing” as long as it’s opera? Or, to the point, that the world is in paradigm shift as a result of the cultural influence of German opera? Soldiers laying down their weapons because of the the 21st century equivalent of the Ring Cycle?
We don’t even need to look at any statistics to see who’s going to hear all that opera performed in Die Muttersprache. We don’t even need to look.
It’s all capital, art-loving friends. The only difference: who’s laundering the funds. Britons launder theirs through the National Lotto – 40-billion pound sterling per annum to be sure St Martin-in-the-Fields never fails to perform Bach at Christmas. Germans put the squeeze on poor EU relations to make sure every province has an “opera”. And Americans do what they do and still manage to lead the entire world (save China, who, admit it, is pirating American production) in books published. Are any of these models – indirect public tax, direct public tax, hybrid – ideal? The question should be more pragmatic: where is the good writing coming from? The era-defining visuals? The groundbreaking sound?
***
Private residencies are a great thing, if you can lasso one, but the MoA residency sounds like a trainwreck. “The artist is given time to ‘social network'” and “scroll his work on a big screen in real time”? I live in the land of government funded art, and my experience is that THAT system attracts “artists” who are as adept at sniffing out grants as they are mediocre at “making art”. Liam has a point: you MAKE somebody contribute to support the arts, he’s going to assume some aspect, albeit tiny, of “the patron”. Under those conditions, the threat of self-censorship is ever lurking, and any artist who says it’s not at the back of his mind is fibbing.
@Il’ja
I’m not going to formulate a point-by-point rebuttal of an interrogation of someone else’s words (what’s in it for me?), the gist of those words being: a little more of America’s fiscal War Budget could and should go to support The Arts… I think it’s more useful to compare the America of the near, and almost-near, Past, to its Present, regarding the topic. Also, if we cast the net of this discussion too broadly (re: Capital, Capitalism, Capitalismitis and the CIA) we’ll ignite one of those raging off-piste fests, familiar from the days of yore (and is this topic/thread really worth that…?)
(sidebar: Liam only has a point to the extent that Reaganite Reactionaries like Liam cowed the NEA into being the shriveled organ it is today, but read the excerpt, below, for more on that…)
So, let’s focus on the controversial idea of Gov support for the Arts (however dirty the support-money is) and look back at the good old days, before the Reagan Revolution declared ketchup a vegetable and High Culture a drug in need of stricter regulation:
“The NEA was a fundamental part of democracy’s expansion. Its Literature Program had two distinct but overlapping goals: to sponsor more exciting, experimental writing and to democratize the field of literary production. The fellowship program, founded in 1967, was the most important means it used to achieve both of these aims. Agency administrators recognized that writing fiction or poetry requires resources—time, money, childcare, travel—that few citizens could afford.
“As poet and program director Carolyn Kizer put it, the fellowships to individual writers—totalling $205,000, roughly a quarter of the Literature Program’s budget in 1967—were designed to “buy time.” As Kizer’s words suggest, the NEA de-commodified time, granting it to writers who needed it most. Grant winners with dependents received more money than those without—this was especially important for women, who were often saddled with domestic work. Between 1967 and 1971, the NEA sent talent scouts around the country, looking for writers who might not have access to the traditional avenues for publication. “Discovery Grants” were awarded to these unknowns, including a young West Coast fiction writer and poet named Raymond Carver. With these efforts, the NEA reshaped literary production, transforming the conditions under which talented citizens lived and worked.
“These state-funded writers, many from marginalized populations, experimented with literary form. The inaugural class of fellowship winners, who received two-year grants in 1967, included two socialist-feminist fiction writers, Tillie Olsen and Grace Paley. A former Young Communist, Olsen in particular revolutionized the writing and teaching of literature. Her fiction and essays about the American working class married unconventional, modernist form with radical leftist politics. In the years before and after she received the NEA grant, she clamored for revised university reading lists and increased financial support for women, writers of color, and members of the working class. She called these would-be writers the “silenced people” who, “consumed in the hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life,” rarely had time to produce creative work. How much great writing, she asked, has been lost to history? The NEA shared Olsen’s concern with amplifying historically silenced voices, just as it shared her belief that these voices would speak—would write—in radical, resonant ways.
“For the NEA, this ambition led it to seek and support writers who lacked market appeal. In addition to granting fellowships to individual writers, the agency funded small, independent presses and avant-garde literary journals. When the agency compiled an anthology of American writing in 1968, it drew largely from the “little magazines,” literary journals that published work by young and unknown writers. One reviewer commented approvingly that the anthology mainly included “non-commercial” work, by fledging writers and by controversial figures such as Allen Ginsberg and Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones). The NEA provided writers with several different ways of circumventing the literary marketplace, freeing them to write fiction and poetry that was difficult, politically radical, or both.
“Despite its penchant for niche literature, the agency flourished during the 1970s. The number of grants awarded increased each year, as did the money for each creative writing fellowship. By October 1977 the agency’s budget had increased from $2.5 million to nearly $124 million, thanks largely to the politicking of chair Nancy Hanks. During these same years, the government provided direct grants to some of the nation’s most contentious and innovative writers, including John Ashbery, Charles Bukowski, and Ishmael Reed. The literary climate favored experimentation: the decade also saw the publication of Toni Morrison’s debut The Bluest Eye, a novel that used wordplay to critique racist standards of beauty, and the rise of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, an avant-garde, politically leftist movement that challenged the conventions of lyric poetry. Though the era had its share of battles (the deputy chair once had to visit the offices of forty-six members of Congress to explain why a seven-letter poem deserved $750 in public funds), the 1970s were a high point for the NEA and for experimental literature as well.”
So far so good… until the good times hit a wall when, essentially, during the ’80s and ’90s…
“the NEA met with increased resistance to its grant programs. The agency came under siege for funding (often indirectly) formally challenging, politically radical art by feminist, queer, and non-white Americans. With the support of fellow politicians from his own party, Republican Senator Jesse Helms launched a multi-year campaign against the NEA, charging it with funding “obscene” art by Robert Mapplethorpe, Andres Serrano, and Karen Finley. The controversies surrounding these artists as well as several performance artists prompted the agency to experiment with a short-lived loyalty oath. More importantly, these difficult years led to the elimination of all grants to individual artists—except for grants to writers. Today, the NEA still awards $950,000 in individual fellowships for fiction, poetry, and translation, all of which are drawn from diminished public funds.”
Even worse, in time:
“Castigated by the right for its irrelevance and indecency, scorned by the left for its cowardice in the face of prejudice and supposed philistinism, the NEA has lately turned to the market for guidance and started placing a few safer bets. In its first decades, the agency served as a literary bellwether, funding unknown writers, often at early stages in their careers. Though it still funds such writers, it also funds successful writers, who receive their NEA grant after winning major awards or writing bestsellers; such winners were more rare in the 1970s. Recent grant winners have included Jonathan Franzen, following the publication of his prize-winning and best-selling The Corrections; Cristina García, after she wrote the National Book Award nominee Dreaming in Cuban; and Jhumpa Lahiri, who, by the time she received her fellowship, had already won a Pulitzer for Interpreter of Maladies, a book that sold 15 million copies worldwide. Lesser-known writers still dominate the awards list, but the presence of writers like Franzen insure the agency against charges of idiosyncrasy.
“Money that goes to a best-selling writer is money diverted from the writers who need it most—young, marginalized, politically radical artists who may never find market success, or who may not even desire it. On the whole, today’s writers are less materially secure than those of previous generations. They are more likely to be saddled with student debt, from undergraduate as well as graduate education. They are less likely to find day jobs that provide enough income to pay off loans, never mind to support creative work. The “hard everyday essential work of maintaining human life” has only gotten harder today, when healthcare, housing, and other essentials have become unaffordable for many.”
******
The entire article is interesting reading. The main point being: things weren’t always this way (this awful way), and Gov support of The Arts, handled tastefully (without an eye to The Bottom Line), can be a very good thing. Yes, American Civilization was once so advanced that they could decouple the notion of State Sponsored Support for the Arts from the Philistine requirement that the supported Artist becomes, therefore, a hireling of some sort. The monies involved, after all, were just crumbs from the table.
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/who-pays-writers-welfare-state-literature
PS “We don’t even need to look at any statistics to see who’s going to hear all that opera performed in Die Muttersprache.”
The last time I attended the Opera, here, in Berlin, at least half of the people in the audience were wearing jeans; maybe a third couldn’t have gotten into a mid-level nightclub in Chicago, the way they were dressed. Cultural differences.
“…at least half of the people in the audience were wearing jeans…”
When a ticket for Tannhäuser at the Berlin Opera goes from 53€ to 169€ the fact that half an audience is in jeans – dressing down or cheap signalling? – tells us, in comparison, very little.
What the left, (yes, I’m among it) doesn’t seem to grasp in this flareup over .01% of the budget comes across in both your cursory dismissal, i.e. “Cultural differences” and the article’s assumption that statements like “Money that goes to a best-selling writer is money diverted from the writers who need it most—young, marginalized, politically radical artists…” should just be accepted as fait accompli.
Who needs it most? What does a “politically radical” writer sound like in 2017? Is it the same as in 1980? Who determines this? Has the environment of private arts funding / retreats / etc. improved or worsened since Reagan et al. took the knife to it? A writer who leans to the right should just shut up? Put down the pen because this is not intended for you? The particular taxonomy of this is getting dangerously close to a course of events that I think we both agree is unacceptable. But the perception is out there that the Left is unaware of how shrill, how fascist, how bankrupt it has begun to sound exactly because of issues like this one.
To make this practical: WHICH of the following do you think Trump would appoint to head the NEA? Rush Limbaugh or Toni Morrison. And do you think that appointment would legitimize the work of the NEA? Would we be happier if he appointed Rush and then put $10B into the Agency?
We are in agreement. That a nation with a $14T budget should ignore, or worse, attempt to commoditize, the humanities is disgraceful. Where we disagree – I assume – is that the bourgeois-flavored models of arts funding in Europe’s social democracies provide much, if any kind of workable example to follow.
Clearly, anyone interested in seeing Opera cheaply in Berlin should consult me before consulting you, Il’ja; here’s one quick reference, slightly dated (2011):
“Deutsche Oper:
The West Berlin opera is a mammoth black box of acoustic wonder. Nosebleed seats are €14, and as the theater is much bigger than the other two, you may actually struggle to see everything from up there. Students under 30 get 50% off all tickets one week before the performance, and pay no more than €13.50 one hour before performance.
Extra cheapo tip: Sometimes your opera ticket doubles as a public transportation ticket from and to the theater, so check the fine print on the ticket. If you have Berlin Welcome Card, you also get 25% off certain tickets at all of the three operas.”
more recent info:
“If you are under 30 years old and are planning on seeing several productions during your visit, you should invest in a Classiccard, a wonderful scheme that costs 15 euros to sign up for an annual membership. It entitles you to the best available seats at any of the three opera houses and various other orchestras and musical groups (the Berlin Philharmonic is the notable exception) one hour before curtain at the evening box office for 10 euros (again, cash only). 1 ticket per Classiccard unless a special offer is on.”
“If you are sadly not 28 years old or under, you can still get into the Philharmonie either with a Podiumplatz, which is a seat on the onstage bleachers in back of the orchestra, or a Stehplatz, which is standing room. Of the two, the podium seats are easier to score, but they aren’t offered when a choir or extra-large / usual instrument ensemble is required. They go on sale at the beginning of the week for that weekend’s concert series (typically the same program will be given on Thursday, Friday and Saturday) and cost 16 euros.”
How much does it cost to see the “Hulk vs Thor vs Trump” movie in Manhattan…?
But, back to The Topic; here’s an article, from 2014, that doesn’t mention Opera:
“Culturally Impoverished: US NEA Spends 1/40th of What Germany Doles Out for Arts Per Capita”
“1. Germany: Germany’s cultural budget was approximately $1.63 billion USD in 2013. According to Ian Moss, research director of Fractured Atlas, Germany’s art funding in 2007 equated to roughly $20 per German citizen, which “dwarfs the 41 cents per red-blooded American provided by the NEA. What artist wouldn’t want to live there?” Moss told Huffington Post.”
http://www.alternet.org/culture/culturally-impoverished-us-nea-spends-140th-what-germany-doles-out-arts-capita
****
The vast majority of my friends and acquaintances are Expat Artists, enjoying the superior conditions, for Artists, over here.
Even my health insurance (which is *amazing*) is special health insurance for Artists; incredibly cheap, with access to absolutely topnotch care (our Daughter, who was born in a high-tech birthing salon hot tub, before we all spent the night in a private birthing suite, cost me no more than the equivalent of 200 dollars being born, including months of birthing classes and a follow-up house call from the doctor!). This is not an abstract or hypothetical debate, for me. I lived (all over) the US my first 30 years, and I’ve lived in several countries in the EU thereafter, and the reality of “State Sponsorship for the Arts” in the US has to be examined through the dirty lens of the US’ Gulag (or cattle farm) mentality when it comes to the 99%.
Not that creeping NeoLiberalization isn’t trying to degrade the rest of the West to the same Feudal standards….
But to circle back to the question of private sector funding for the Arts, and the M.o.A.’s generous (and typical) offer to some lucky Writer to be a sideshow attraction at one of Mammon’s bloodiest Colosseums for a working week…
““The Winner’s ongoing work may be displayed in almost-real time on a large monitor at the workspace. The work product may scroll continuously throughout the day for passersby to view.”
How could writing, produced under such conditions, be anything other than cat shit in a sealed baggie on a hissing radiator?