Sing an Owl Dance Song for George Chandler

George Chandler, Two Elks, my Gros Ventre uncle, died last week. He was 87 years old. He lived most of his life on the Fort Belknap Indian Reservation in Hays, Montana.

He died on Monday, June 1. That Thursday I flew from Detroit to Great Falls with Dianne, my wife, and my brother Dick. We rented a car and drove up to Hays.

Fort Belknap is the tribal home for both the Gros Ventre (Ah-A-Nee-Nin) and Assiniboine (Nakoda) people. It is located in north central Montana close to the 49th Parallel, which marks the U.S. border with Canada. Native People called this the Medicine Line because U.S. troops wouldn’t pursue them across the border. In 1877 the U.S. army caught up with Chief Joseph, who was on his way to join Sitting Bull in Canada, near here. The last battle of the Nez Perce War took place at the Bear Paw Battlefield.

It has been 20 years since I last visited Fort Belknap and the constellation of emotions, stories and memories I carry about this place are associated with my father and my childhood. I’ve always been interested in the way place resonates in the mind, how we connect to the physical world, how our memories are embodied in the land and then unlock as we pass through it. I don’t think these memories are mine alone. They include what my father remembered, which he passed on to me and my brothers. And there are the stories told to him by people from this reservation.

I had forgotten how vast the spaces are in northern Montana. At first the rolling land seems empty and minimal, but then I began to notice the subtleties and specific colors of the prairie. There are shades of green and yellow, brown and black dirt, red earth, and sage, which is silver.

As we drove in we saw antelope, horses and cattle in the fields, and we passed a few pickup trucks on the road. To our right the Bear’s Paw Mountains float above the horizon.

Around 8 Thursday evening we parked near the Mission Community Hall next to the Catholic Church in Hays. A crowd of people stood near the entrance to the auditorium. George Chandler’s son Raymond was there talking to George Horse Capture, Jr. I hadn’t seen them in four years.

Inside, the big room was filled with people sitting in folding chairs and talking quietly. There were star quilt blankets on the wall behind George Chandler’s coffin. A woman with a guitar was singing Amazing Grace. There were two tables with framed family photographs. One of the photographs was a picture of my father and Uncle George sitting together in the shade of a camper trailer. Carol Kindness told me she thought the photo was taken at a Hays Pow Wow in the early 1990s.

In 1933, my dad drove from Michigan to Montana and worked for the Emergency Conservation Work Organization, repairing roads through Mission Canyon near Hays. He returned to Fort Belknap in 1935 and was invited by Al and Cora Chandler, George’s parents, to live in their home. He went back again in 1937.

My childhood was saturated with stories dad told us about Fort Belknap. We visited the Chandlers in Hays and camped with them at Crow Fair.

In George Chandler’s obituary my father was listed as his traditional adopted brother. My mother, my brothers and I were named as extended family. We felt very honored.

When I think about my father’s relationships to the Chandler family and the Gros Ventre people, the way they connected despite the awful history of white racism and the marginalization of Native People, I think it is miraculous. My dad tried to live outside the box of racism and the Chandlers, the Horse Captures and his other Gros Ventre friends are by custom and their nature generous people.

In January 2005 my father died. Raymond Chandler, George Horse Capture and his two sons came to the funeral in Michigan. George Horse Capture brought along a sweet grass braid and he asked me to put it in my father’s coffin. According to Gros Ventre tradition, when a person dies their spirit travels to a place called the Sand Hills. They should arrive with a gift of sweet grass for their relatives and friends.

George Horse Capture also asked our permission to place a box of biscuits in the coffin. He was worried my dad might get hungry during the long journey to the Sand Hills. We trusted George’s sense that this was appropriate, even if we weren’t steeped in the Gros Ventre understanding of the life cycle.

I saw Margie Chandler, George’s widow, moving slowly through the Community Hall, visiting with people. Raymond walked across the room with us and we greeted her. A young woman approached me as we spoke and offered a paper plate filled with food, which I politely refused.

“Oh, Karl, that’s bad!” Margie said. “It’s not the Indian way to refuse food.”

I was tired and it took me just a moment to realize she was teasing me gently. I begged to be given another opportunity to get it right. Everyone laughed. I was given another plate. When we sat down I ate all the food.

My dad told me that when he was here back in the 30s, some old-time people offered him a bowl of what they said was blood soup. When he declined it, they asked him why.

“I knew it was a kind of test, and I had to think fast,” he said. “I told them I had a taboo against eating in the presence of women and children. They all knew I just made this up, but they thought it was a good answer and they all laughed.”

Ray told us they were going to organize a sing in the Community Hall but we decided not to stay. It was a long drive back to the Super8 in Havre.

On Friday it was cooler and the colors of the land and sky were softer in the morning.

The funeral was held at 11 a.m. in the St. Paul’s Mission Chapel. The place was packed. Father Joseph Retzel, S.J., said Mass and George Horse Capture, Jr., who is a Gros Ventre Medicine Man, gave a fine eulogy. He spoke about Uncle George’s sense of humor. Junior said he couldn’t tell when George was kidding him. Ray Gone reminded people that George was one of the original Fort Belknap singers, and he read out the long list of family members.

Then one of George’s teenage granddaughters came to the front of the church. She spoke at length, witnessing to the ways her grandfather cared for his family and his community. She was amazing. George and Margie raised their own six children and many of their grandchildren. She said her grandfather woke all the children in the house in the morning and got them ready for school. She told us he and Margie never missed a Hays High School basketball game. And she described her grandfather sitting in his parked car in the driveway, beating the door like it was a drum and singing the old time Owl Dance songs he loved. Near the end her voice broke and most of the taciturn, reserved people in the Chapel wept.

George Chandler was buried in the Mission cemetery south of the church. A group of Gros Ventre veterans fired their rifles in a military salute. Then a group of singers from Hays sang two traditional songs. The lead singer had a hand drum. He sang a phrase and the men repeated it and then the women standing behind them joined in. The songs sounded to me like hymns that came straight off the wind and the earth here.

Afterwards people dropped handfuls of dirt into the grave. Then it was over.

We all walked back to the Mission Community Hall for a potluck dinner. We ate boiled meat, tripe, fry bread, salads, cakes and pies. When we said goodbye, the Chandlers gave us sweet grass braids, a camp blanket and the transcript of an oral narrative George recorded in 1981.

On the way back we drove into Mission Canyon, where my father had repaired roads 74 years earlier. There were many markers honoring various Gros Ventre people. We turned around up in the canyon near the marker for Old Lady Warrior (E-Yah-Yea), a member of the Gros Ventre Frozen Clan. Her Gros Ventre name translates as Takes-A-Prisoner. My dad knew Mrs. Warrior back in the late 1930s.

As we drove out I looked at the fine little creek that runs through the canyon. We had been warned the creek was poisoned with cyanide as a result of mining upstream. In his oral narrative, Uncle George said:

The mines are probably the main reason why we don’t have any fish in the mountains today. The biggest source of destruction was the mines up here and that cyanide. Then the greed too. Boy, I just can’t see that greed.

It is obvious to me that Uncle George tried to turn it around, to make the world right again. I believe he did quite well.

Friday evening the wind came up and the temperature dropped. It was raining when we left Havre the next morning and then it snowed hard.


Craig Chandler, Margie Chandler, George Chandler, Raymond Chandler

Shaman Drum Bookshop

On the advice of my accountant and my business manager, I am closing Shaman Drum Bookshop June 30. Despite a first rate staff, a fiercely loyal core of customers, a very decent landlord and my own commitment to the community of arts and letters in Ann Arbor, it is clear to me that the bookshop is not a sustainable business.

In spite of the downturn in the economy, Ann Arbor continues to be an excellent book town. There are wonderful independent stores here (Crazy Wisdom, Nicolas’s Books), fine specialty book stores (Vault of Midnight, Aunt Agatha’s) and great used bookshops (Dawn Treader, West Side Books, Motte & Bailey). They need your support.

Over a year ago we began a process to become a non-profit center for the literary arts. I am decoupling Shaman Drum Bookshop from the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center, which should simplify and streamline our IRS application. I will pursue this new venture after we close the store.

Shaman Drum Bookshop has been here for 29 years. We had 28 good years. Thank you for your support. I’m very grateful for the opportunity to be a bookseller in Ann Arbor.

'BOOKISHNESS GOES MARGINAL': a report from the Bookishness Symposium

Bookishness: The New Fate of Reading in the Digital Age is the title of a symposium held today at the University of Michigan.

New Fate of Reading? Uh-oh….

The event announcement features an illustration of books rendered as if they are a flock of birds flying above the reach of a group of young people standing in an open field. The image is ambiguous. Are the books flying toward the people or away from them? Are people greeting the arrival of the books or are they ecstatically waving goodbye? In both instances I fear it’s the later. This might be due to my anxiety about the precarious economics of the culture of books these days. Or perhaps it’s just my bad attitude, something that surfaces now and then despite years spent practicing hardcore zazen.

The text accompanying the picture poses some key questions: What new literacies are generated in the digital era? What happens to the cultural practices associated with the traditional book? How are institutions responding to this new situation? Bookstores are specifically mentioned, along with libraries, publishers, and newspapers. And finally, moving from the descriptive to the prescriptive: How ought they (to) respond? This is what I’m really interested in. What is to be done?

The symposium, sponsored by the Michigan Quarterly Review and the Rackham Graduate School, is held in Angell Hall on the U of M’s central campus, and is divided into two sessions. MQR editor Jonathan Freedman tells us the morning panel, New Reading Practices and Literacies in a Digital Age, is devoted to questions of theory and history. The afternoon sessions will examine new institutions.

The program kicks off with a talk entitled “The Aesthetic of Bookishness in 21st Century Literature.” Jessica Pressman, who teaches at Yale, informs us that the role of the book will change—has changed—from an essential format to one medium among many. She says the recent talk about the death of the book is a literary response to the perceived threats of the digital age. The theme of the death of the book has become a source of inspiration for writers, despite the fact that literature was never about information delivery. Book bound content is now associated with the literary.

She cites The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall, as an example of a new literary form in which the novel itself exists as a character.

“Shark Texts begins with the main character reading himself back to life from near death,” she says.

Pressman describes an aesthetic of bookishness in which books are viewed as a haven from the increasingly threatening digital age. This position is most certainly retro because “we now live in a world in which the text no longer exists just on the page.”

Within the bookish aesthetic, bookstores (“spaces for bound books”) are like sanctuaries or churches. They provide a safe location from which readers can network with each other and critique the digital culture. For bookish folk, bookstores are “shields against the shark.”

Frankly, I never thought of bookshops as lairs of a bound-book Ancien Regime, but I take her point.

“The book is a reading machine and data mutates across discourse networks,” she tells us, channeling William Gibson or William S. Burroughs.

Obviously the practice of reading and the bookish experience have changed in the digital age. Nostalgia for the world of print doesn’t cut it anymore in our multi-modal world.

* * *

Our second speaker’s subject is book fetishism. Harvard English Professor Leah Price informs us that the “hand-wringing age-based subgroups” fretting over the two National Endowment for the Arts reports on the decline of reading in America are contributing to “a nostalgic narrative of loss.” Price says that books make up only around 14% of printed media, so we’re not factoring in newspapers, magazines, advertising circulars, legal document or screens. She refers to computer screens as “the ‘uncanny double’ of the book.”

“We feel like a beleaguered minority. There is a self-congratulatory aspect to this.”

She does concede that “books are precariously perched in the larger media cultural context.”

Price gives us examples of book fetishism (books as objects regarded with respect, devotion or awe), beginning with Bibles that were never read but functioned as decorative objects in religious households from the 18th century on.

She mentions alternative sentencing programs in which offenders are required to attend book discussion groups because it is assumed that reading creates empathy. And she tells us about Bibliotherapy, created by psychologists who believe fiction has a therapeutic value, a moral logic.

The latter two examples sound reasonable to me. Granted, these programs and therapies presume a more optimistic view of the human condition and the transformative power of fiction than may be warranted, but neuroscientists do talk seriously about the plasticity of the brain and speculate about the connection of mirror neurons to empathy. And regarding moral logic, I read an essay by the Israeli writer Amos Oz in which he argues that “imagining the other is a powerful antidote to fanaticism and hatred.” Aren’t novels powerful tools in assisting us to imagine others?

Price talks about reading as a substitutive behavior for different compulsions, mentioning various addiction metaphors we use to describe our reading experiences: “I couldn’t put the book down….I was swept away….I’m hooked on books.”

She goes on to describe programs in which children are encouraged to read aloud to dogs. This keeps the animals relaxed and calm and the kids get to practice their literacy skills.

She mentions children who read aloud to horses, and says “a kind of species politics is emerging these days.” This gets a good laugh.

I briefly consider what I might read to my cat, who has a short attention span and is easily irritated. Maybe a book of snappy jokes about birds and squirrels?

Price informs us she doesn’t mean to trivialize the project of literacy. I’m grateful that she is clear about this.

Then she zeroes in for the kill:

“Literacy had been feminized by the time Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary. Since then, men have been distanced from reading.”

“Reading used to be associated with mobility, but now reading—along with the rise of other sedentary enjoyments—has become a refuge for those trapped in enclosed spaces.”

“Reading for pleasure is done most often by women, children and the old—three segments of the population associated with the social loss of power. What does it mean that reading is associated with socially disempowered groups?”

“Books change lives for the young,” she says. “Books fill time for old people. Americans read when they are about to die.”

Smackdown!

Recently retired psychotherapist Jim Kern, who is sitting next to me, whispers, “Well said...for a young person.”

* * *

Our final speaker this morning is Alan Liu, chair of the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

He tells us he has changed the title of his talk from "Marginalizing the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins, and Social Computing" to "The End of the End of the Book: Dead Books, Lively Margins and Social Computing." Is this good news? Has the paradigm shifted back again? Will the book business as we know it rebound? Will I live to see a return to the good old days?

I don’t think so, especially after Professor Liu tells us” it doesn’t make much sense to focus on bookishness in an age when books have already gone away.” I get the drift.

That said, the talk is a fine introduction to cutting edge electronic research environments, what he calls Knowledge Ecology Studies, the culture of information. A number of Powerpoint images of interesting websites, graphs, and various formula (Accessibility + Tractability=Operability, On-line use=operability specific to the level of data structure) flash across the screen next to him. I’m able to follow most of this until he starts talking about String Theory and the “Hermeneutics of Reduced Dimensions.” I don’t understand the twelve dimensions slide, but the visual pattern is beautiful and the colors are restful tones of blue. It’s kind of a 60’s psychedelic thing.

He speaks of data structure hierarchy and post industrial flexibility, and tells us that “the digital subordinates big forms (like books, music, and films) into documents. Documents signify the de-formation of forms.”

I wonder if this is a step forward. Sounds somewhat reductive, but he reminds us that breaking up big forms into small pieces is not new. He cites the way monks read the Bible in the Medieval West. In monastic liturgical traditions the Bible was read “discontinuously in daily modules.”

“The Bible is a very flexible & plastical codex,” Liu says, citing the Book of Revelation as the proto hypertext.

One of the potential consequences of what he calls “the de-formation of forms” is the end of narrative. This could be a problem.

Anyway, Bookishness has gone marginal; and there is an analogous move to the marginal in academia. Liu lays out the sequential movement in contemporary scholarship: From Deconstruction to Cultural Theory to Media Theory and finally to the History of the Book, the materiality of the book.

He tells us scholars are concentrating on book euphemera these days. Current cutting edge research involves looking at website sidebars, which he thinks are “bookish metaphors.”

“This is where the Shark lives,” he tells us. We must “boldly go where no bookshelf has gone before.” The Star Trek reference is a crowd pleaser.

Professor Liu concludes his talk on an up note. “Books can be a new media,” he says.

I raise my hand in a Vulcan salute. “Live long and prosper!”

During the Q & A, a librarian who obviously still embraces ‘old school’ values says he doesn’t believe people will cozy up with electronic readers.

Prof Liu says he owns a Kindle and suggests the librarian read an essay by Jeffrey Nunberg about reading as a private activity, which traces the history of the image of curling up with a book.

Tom Fitzgerald, who writes on social policy, talks about the closing of our local newspaper and asks Liu if he thinks the loss of newspapers is a problem in a democratic society that depends on an informed electorate.

Liu says he’s heard that argument before and doesn’t think it’s true.

“When I go into Starbucks I see people all around me reading the news on their laptops,” he says.

I ask him about people who don’t have laptops or access to Starbucks

He tells me he doesn’t think this is a problem because computers have come down in price to around $400.

I think about inviting him to visit Flint, my hometown, where about a third of the population now lives in poverty. We could take a poll or do a visual census of computer use among folks in downtown Flint coffee shops. But I hold my tongue.

* * *

At noon I leave the building for lunch. I thought the talks by the panelists were interesting and provocative, but disconnected from my reality—which at the present moment is filled with anxiety.

This morning Pressman and Price, like a pair of professional tag team wrestlers, skillfully tossed the bookishness aesthetic to the mat. They were followed by Alan Liu, who stepped over the body and escorted us into the world of…book ephemera?

I’m being unfair. I’m taking this way too personally. Maybe that’s because I suffer from book fetishism, a pathological condition I used to think was relatively harmless.

Various authority figures in my past told me that books were a kind of charm or talisman against the chaos of the world. Was this true? My elementary school librarian said it was while she taught us to fold bright yellow oil cloth jackets around our books to protect them from damage. She told us we were making book rain coats.

And this doesn’t even begin to get at the radioactive half-life of messages still in my head from my Presbyterian Sunday School teachers, who told me that the Bible was the ultimate powerful mojo.

My teachers were speaking metaphorically, but children live in a literal universe. So maybe I was set up for this fall by well-meaning youth literacy advocates. And I never got over it. I kept the faith.

What a chump.

* * *

At 2 pm we reconvene for the afternoon forum. I find the topic—New Institutions for the Digital Age—vaguely depressing, but after this morning’s sessions it’s difficult to feel upbeat and peppy. I’m afraid I’m still mourning the decline of the Old Institutions. And it’s 2:00 on a Friday afternoon. Maybe my sugar is a bit low.

Our first panelist, Paul Courant, Dean of Libraries at the University of Michigan, is a public economist. He tells us he approaches information technology as a person concerned principally with public institutions and public policy. Profit is not the bottom line.

“There are a number of flavors of value and not many of them are monetized,” he says.

Paul Courant is optimistic about the future and he doesn’t think it helps to be wistful and Luddite, to turn the clock back.

I understand, and I try to buck up, but some days this is easier said than done.

Paul asks about the consequences of the revolution in information technology. Are there things we have lost?

He says the number of households that can produce their own music in America has declined over the years. The production of music is lost to an increasingly large sector of the population. However, people now have available a vast catalog of music that they can listen to on their ipods or MP3 players. The point is there are gains as well as losses.

How do we minimize those losses?

What has changed?

Competition is less important these days, he says. Inexpensive searching and indexing changes everything. We are moving from libraries filled with books to libraries of electronic records. A library will cease to have a competitive advantage over another one because electronic records will be so cheap.

“Now we can share and we should share,” he says.

He returns to the subject of the new technologies.

“I own a Kindle,” he tells us. “Not only can I read in bed at 2:30 in the morning without waking my wife, but I can also buy a book on my Kindle at the same time.”

This is bad news for booksellers in bricks and mortar stores. I’ve just been disintermediated.

“The world of search and the world of browse are finally merging,” Paul concludes. “Software designers are creating an analog to browsing. Soon we’ll be able to see a computer image of titles on either side of the book we’re reading. Of course, we’ll still need librarians to help people search the database.”

“What we need are charismatic human kiosks in the library,” he says.

This is an interesting idea, although I’m not sure I’d like the outfits. I imagine a version of the Gumby costume Eddie Murphy wore on SNL, except that it would be more conical & cement gray—not green.

I sneak a quick look around the room to see if the librarians in the audience are flinching, but it’s a joke.

I need to get a grip.

* * *

Phil Pochoda, Director of the University of Michigan Press, is up next. He describes the difficulties of serving authors and readers who are from the relatively small community of scholars, and he tells us university presses are extremely fragile right now because of the uncertain business model for electronic media and the economic collapse. They could fail.

Phil’s talk is grounded in a reality I understand. This is a perspective that was missing from the theoretical papers this morning

After describing the professional tensions and economic risks facing university presses, he asks what university presses in the future might look like. If they survive, will they be the digital analog to what university presses are today? Authors and readers will be able to interact with each other much more quickly and easily when all the texts are digital.

During the Q & A session, Alan Liu wonders who in the future is going to fund scholarly books and journals if university presses collapse.

Good question.

* * *

Sam Tanenhaus, editor of the New York Times Book Review, is our last speaker. He begins by talking about the paradox of transformation. As information becomes more universally accessible, a single identity evaporates. He worries that the social conditions are no longer there to nurture the next Whitman, Melville, Bellow or Updike.

He feels that the romance of technology overwhelms content right now, and he asks writers in the audience if what they do feels different as a result of the new technologies.

Then he turns to the crisis in the newspaper business. Economic market forces have always existed in a jumbled up relationship with the creative, but conditions are now dire. All newspaper profit comes from advertising, and on-line ads cost one tenth of what print advertisers pay.

How do you solve this? Do you make up for the loss in advertising revenues by charging readers for access?

“We have lots of solutions,” Tanenhaus says, “but that means there isn’t one good one.”

At its peak the NYTimes Book Review published over 50 book reviews in every issue. Now they average around 14 reviews per issue.

This decline in review space is a terrible problem for the book industry. How will we inform a broad sector of the public about books? Will publishers be able to effectively advertise new books on social networking sites, blogs and cellphones? How will people discover important new writers? Will publishers be profitable enough to risk investing in new writers who haven’t yet been tested in the marketplace?

During the Q & A, Eileen Pollack, Director of the UM MFA Program in Creative Writers, speaks about mid-career writers she knows who can’t get agents or publishers to look at their work. She worries they will just stop writing.

And then there is the attention span problem. Tanenhaus mentions being on a TV talk show with columnist Ariana Huffington, who was critical of a recent article in the Times on the stress tests for banks. She complained that she had to read down eleven paragraphs before the article got to the point.

Sam asks, “Since when has reading eleven paragraphs become outrageous?”

The symposium wraps up a few minutes past four, and I leave quickly. Hopefully these problems will all work themselves out, but then again maybe they won’t. Given what I’ve heard today, I think there will be a great deal of collateral damage. I don’t know how to fix this.

I’ve got to get home to help my wife Dianne prepare for a small dinner tonight. Rev. Bayardo Lopez, who we met in Nicaragua this January, is in town. Bayardo, a veteran of the Sandinista literacy campaign during the Contra War, used to travel by horseback across rural areas occupied by Contra paramilitary soldiers in the early 1980s, risking his life to teach peasants to read.

But that’s another story, about a different world, another life.

'Saving Shaman Drum'

I'm deeply grateful to the community of friends who wrote and signed on to 'Saving Shaman Drum': http://www.shamandrum.blogspot.com/.

OPEN LETTER 2: A Nicaraguan Interlude

In the midst of all the sturm und drang surrounding the future of Shaman Drum Bookshop, I went to Nicaragua.

Dianne, my wife, had been teaching for the last month in Catarina, a town in the mountains south of Managua. She volunteered under the auspices of the Episcopal Church of the Incarnation, a small congregation in Ann Arbor of which we are both members. ECI is collaborating with the Iglesia Bautista Remanente, a Baptist church in Catarina, on projects that “will bridge the divide between wealth and impoverished countries by providing capital, employment and opportunities for cultural exchange.”

Joe Summers, our minister, is an old friend of mine—we worked together in the bookshop years ago—and ECI is an openhearted, diverse community that is serious about creating a better world. Although I’ve been mostly engaged with Buddhism in my adult life, I was attracted to this church because of the willingness of Joe and the congregation to struggle together around difficult issues. And I still enjoy a good sermon.


I hadn’t had much of a chance to talk with Dianne about the state of the bookshop given that our telephone and internet connections were short and infrequent. The experience teaching in Catarina was transformative and very positive for her, but living conditions were difficult. She asked me to come. I traded my frequent flyer miles for a ticket to Nicaragua.

I traveled to Nicaragua with a delegation of eight members from the church. There were many moments during the trip when these good people made me feel that it might still be possible to fix (or at least patch up) this broken world. The delegation came to Catarina to celebrate the wedding anniversary and the ministry of Bayardo Lopez Garcia, Padre of the Church of the Remnant.

After Haiti, Nicaragua is the second poorest country in the western hemisphere according to Joe. The U.S. State Department says it is “prone to a wide variety of natural disasters, including earthquakes, hurricanes, and volcanic eruptions.” The country, situated on two converging tectonic plates, is a “Belt of Fire.”

Nicaraguan history has been every bit as volatile as its geography. From 1853 until the Great Depression, the U.S. Marines landed there seven times and occupied the country for twenty one years. In 1937, General Anastasio Somoza seized control of Nicaragua. He and two subsequent Somozas robbed and thugged the country blind until 1979, when Tachito Somoza was overthrown by the FSLN (Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional), named after Augusto Sandino who led an armed insurrection against U.S. interests in 1937.

From 1981 to 1990, the C.I.A. ran a secret operation to topple the government, mining harbors and financing the Contras, who fought a vicious civil war against the Sandinistas.

The current government is led by Daniel Ortega and is a coalition of the Sandinistas and the Liberal Party. Ortega is widely believed to have stolen the last election, and his leftist posture is seen as a rhetorical cover to rob the country. I’m told he requires his staff to address him as El Commandante.

Catarina is a windy town of eight thousand souls perched on the lip of an extinct volcano, which is now a lake. During a recent earthquake, people reported that the water in the lake sloshed around like it was boiling. The town is paved with flagstones and you can still see men on small, fast horses galloping up the steep streets.

Just inside the cemetery at the edge of Catarina is the grave of Benjamin Zeledon, leader of a 1912 uprising against a puppet government installed by the United States. He was killed by government troops, who then dragged his body through town. Augusto Sandino, a teenager at the time, witnessed the desecration of Zeledon’s body, which led to his radicalization.

I stayed at the Hotel Jaaris. Rooms there rent for ten dollars a night. Water was only sporadically available, and there has been a serious shortage in the area, which set off a noisy protest demonstration in Catarina a week before I arrived. The hotel did not have hot water.

The walls in our room didn’t meet the corrugated metal ceiling, so you could hear what was going on in the other rooms. The metal roof created an almost perfect interior acoustic bounce. Some nights it was difficult to sleep.

No matter. The vibe was positive. The hotel had a pet bird and a barking dog. There were lots of clucking chickens and crowing roosters in the next building. And the people of Catarina were extraordinary. Near the end of our stay a number of them said they would pray for us. I’m not used to having people speak to me this way. I always felt it was my responsibility to cultivate Great Doubt—as the Buddhists say—around religious claims, but it became increasingly obvious to me during this trip that people living in such impermanent economic, political and geographical circumstances just might know some things I didn’t.

I replied gracias when people said they would keep me in their prayers.

I had the good luck during the trip to meet the poet-activist Ernesto Cardenal. One morning we drove to the Galeria casa de los Mundos in Managua to look at Nicaraguan folk paintings from the Primitive Painting School. The building is also Cardenal’s residence, and he was in his office. At eighty four he is still very active and spry. He greeted us warmly, signed autographs and posed for pictures.

Cardenal was Minister of Culture in the Sandinista government following the revolution, but he has dissociated himself from Daniel Ortega. Ortega has countered by freezing all of Cardenal’s assets. Although he is obviously beleaguered, he seems at peace with his situation.

Cardenal’s poetry is direct and accessible, and it is clear that North American Beat poets influenced him stylistically. His books have been widely translated and are available in the U.S. from City Lights Publishers, New Directions and Curbstone Press. He is the most important living poet in Nicaragua, which is a country that values its poets. The great Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario’s picture graces the Nicaraguan currency.

Cardenal is also a Catholic priest and was a friend of the Trappist monk Thomas Merton. In the early 1970s he founded a lay religious community on one of the islands in the Solentiname archipelago in Lake Nicaragua. Among various other community projects, he read the Bible with a small group of campesinos. Cardenal asked them to respond from their own lived experience. He recorded the conversations and eventually published them as The Gospel in Solentiname in four volumes. They are among my favorite books. They were published in the U.S. by Orbis Books, and I’m afraid are now out of print.

At the Church of the Incarnation in Ann Arbor the congregation is invited to reflect on the sermon immediately after it is given. This is modeled on base communities like Cardenal’s that were developed by Latin American Liberation Theologians in the 1970s. They exemplify a radically democratic hermeneutic.

Joe told me, paraphrasing Martin Luther, that “the scriptures become the Word of God in the hearing of the believer. This is a wonderfully nuanced view; very different from saying the scriptures are the Word of God. It becomes an active, dynamic process—it’s what is meant when we say this is the living Word of God.”

Christianity offers its adherents a rich and vibrant set of symbols and stories—as do all the major religions—and it provides a context in which people can structure their experience and give meaning to their lives. At its best, it is a powerful force for social change, a counter-cultural critique of the dominant society. Cardenal represents this form of religious culture.

And politics are another context. We spent a remarkable evening talking with five Catarinians about local and national politics in Nicaragua. Four of them were former Sandinista companeros. (Joe told me he preferred companeros to comrades because its etymology implies “to break bread with.”) These men, now middle aged, had all been active in the 1979 revolution.

Near the end of the night I asked what it was like to participate in a revolution and then see its ideals eroded, compromised and betrayed. Perhaps it was impertinent of me to ask this question because it implied assumptions I had no right to make, but they welcomed the opportunity to reflect on their experience.

Ariel Perez Olivas, a former Sandinista political analyst, said, “It makes me homesick when I think of the ideals and goals of the revolution in the early days. All our resources were used up in the war with the Contras. Now we have to deal with the problem of an entrenched political class that is focused on its own interests.”

Sandy Iran Canales, who still carries fragments of a bullet in his chest from a wound he received in 1979, told us, “When I was young I was moved to fight against the National Guards. All the people were so excited by the revolution, but then lands were stolen and money was misused.”

One of the men said, “Our revolution has become a rob-olution.”

Erving Sanchez, the former mayor of Catarina, said, “The government wants to politicize everything. They show favoritism. When I was mayor, we sat down together to support the people who really needed it. We need to form a culture of resistance against the national leadership. To me, Sandinista means simply to find a way to help the poor.”

Joe ended the evening with a riff on Kierkegaard. “We begin in the land of the aesthetic, which is a place of endless choices. Then we grow into the ethical life. We make commitments. At a certain point we fail at them. This will lead you to the life of faith or you can chose to return to the aesthetic life. Faith begins when what you’ve given your life to betrays you.”

* * *

On the drive back to Catarina following a visit to a Spanish School I start to nod off, but it is difficult because I’m sitting between Joe and Bayardo, who are having a spirited discussion in Spanish with Sandy, our driver. After a few minutes Joe translates. He says
Bayardo and Sandy are talking about the Sandinista Literacy Campaign in 1981 when High School seniors went into the countryside to teach the campesinos to read.

In two years illiteracy was cut in half in Nicaragua, despite the murder and rape of many students by the Contras.

Bayardo tells us he hid books underneath his poncho as he moved on horseback around the countryside.

“We carried lanterns with us so we could teach people at night. I was teaching in a relatively sparsely populated area filled with Contra soldiers. There were spies all around and I had to move from house to house fairly quickly or I would be betrayed.”

“I was very frightened,” he says and then laughs.

Then he and Sandy break into song. They sing the anthem of the Sandinista Literacy Campaign:

Avancemos brigadistas
Muchos siglos de incultura caerán
Levantemos barricadas
De cuadernos y pizarras
Vamos a la insurrección cultural.

Jennifer Reyes Rosales translated the lyrics:

Let’s advance brigadistas
Many centuries of illiteracy will fall
Let’s build up barricades
Of notebooks and blackboards
All the people to the Cultural Revolution.



So there you have it. I’m riding down the road with two men who are laughing and singing together after they recall risking their lives thirty years ago to teach people to read. These men speak about what happened with…a great lightness. To speak any other way about these things would not be appropriate, but what they are saying is simply so far outside of my own experience that it is unimaginable to me.

It strikes me that this is why I came to Nicaragua. I was meant to hear this shocking and moving testimony.

If these men were willing to risk their lives to teach people to read, the least I can do is to try to keep the bookshop going. Despite the down turn in the economy and all the trash talk about the ‘death of the book,’ I intend to do just that.

Life is very strange. When I left Ann Arbor I felt it was the most inappropriate time in my life to leave town. By the end of the trip my opinion had changed. It was the perfect moment.

______________
This was first published in the Ann Arbor Chronicle on Friday, March 6, 2009:
http://annarborchronicle.com/2009/03/05/open-letter-2-a-nicaraguan-interlude/

An Open Letter from a Distressed Bookseller

What Happened?

This fall and winter Shaman Drum Bookshop went into a steep financial decline. Text book sales declined 510K from last year. We managed to cut our payroll and other operating expenses by 80K, but that didn’t begin to cover our losses.

There was some good news. Our trade (general interest) book sales on the first floor were actually up in December from last year by 10%, which is extraordinary given what many other retailers were reporting. And trades sales in January were up 15%. Still, this hardly compensates for our losses in textbook sales.

The evaporation of our position has been astonishingly swift. We had been holding relatively even financially until September. Suddenly we’ve moved into the red.

I sort of saw this coming.

In July, 2004, the National Endowment for the Arts published Reading At Risk, a report detailing the decline of literary reading in America. This was followed by a second report in November, 2007, To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence, chronicling “recent declines in voluntary reading and test scores alike, exposing trends that have severe consequences for American society.”

Around the same time the NEA reports came out, I audited a UM course on the History of the Book in which I learned that every 500 years a major technological shift occurs. Five centuries ago Gutenberg invented (or perfected) moveable type. Now, with the digitization of print, we find ourselves in the middle of another sea change. I recall wondering what the new business model for bookstores would look like, and I worried that our industry would suffer from the same chaos roiling the music world.

And a few years ago the University Library held a conference on Digitization. I was invited to be a panelist and I defended the traditional book as still the most efficient technology for delivering information. I also said I was worried about collateral damage during our forward march into the joyous digitized future. I’m no Luddite, but everyone there seemed to me to be hypnotized by the new technology. Of course, it is dazzling.

In my own retail neighborhood I’ve watched the collapse of Schoolkids Records, an awesome independent record store, due largely to the impact of digitization, and it looks like I’ve got a front row seat on another sad decline. Borders Bookshop, which I think at one time was the best general interest book chain in the English speaking world, is a shadow of its former self and seems headed for oblivion.

Early this fall I told a group of booksellers that our industry (including the publishing sector) had a business model that didn’t work very well for any of us. A few of the booksellers said they didn’t think this was true, the others were silent.

Two weeks ago I met again with booksellers and publishers from around the country at the American Bookseller Association’s Winter Institute. Now everyone seems to agree that the book business is in trouble. The disintermediation resulting from customers migrating to the internet coupled with the frightening economic crisis makes it terribly difficult for us to see a way forward.

The crisis at Shaman Drum Bookshop is due to our loss of textbook sales. This fall the university introduced a program which allows professors to list their textbooks online, which effectively drives a significant number of students to the internet. It is impossible for local textbook stores to compete under these circumstances. I don’t think there are any villains here (well, maybe some greedy textbook publishers), but this is one of the consequences of the university’s policy.

The efficiencies of Amazon—even given the clever algorithms that bring us if you like this, you’ll like that—are no substitute for browsing in a bookshop.

In 1942 the economist Joseph A. Schumpeter said, “Creative Destruction is the essential fact about capitalism. It is what capitalism consists in and what every capitalist concern has got to live in….” This is our system and Schumpeter is undoubtedly correct, but there is a countervailing fact that is equally true: Stability is essential for a civilized society. The second truth is what I’ve learned selling books in this community for forty years, being married for thirty-seven years and raising two children.

It also seems to me that if we are witnessing the collapse of Big Capitalism, the way to revitalize the economy is through supporting locally owned businesses. If you agree, please lend your good energy to Think Local First, the movement supporting locally-owned independent businesses in Ann Arbor and Washtenaw County (www.ThinkLocalFirst.net).

What Is To Be Done?

Shaman Drum Bookshop is around one hundred steps from the central campus of the University of Michigan, one of the top ten public universities in the world. I believe the university community and Ann Arbor citizens who love literature need a first rate browsing store for books in the humanities in the university neighborhood. This is what we aspire to be.

However, as I mentioned earlier, it has been clear to me for a while now that the current model doesn’t work. In March 2008 I announced my wish to give the bookshop to the community. I hired Bob Hart, a recently retired Episcopal priest, to research the feasibility of forming a nonprofit bookshop. We wrote up a careful business plan, met with a good lawyer, filled out the IRS forms and submitted our papers in July. In November the IRS notified us that our application was still under consideration. The review is taking longer because a for-profit business is a component of the project.

The new entity is called the Great Lakes Literary Arts Center, whose mission is “to develop excellence in the literary arts by nurturing creative writing, providing quality literature and fostering a literate public.” We’re already hosting two classes in the store. If we do not survive this downturn, I hope the Great Lakes Literary Art Center will continue under other auspices. It is a good idea.

Last week I consulted a lawyer and a financial advisor. They both felt the store could manage the debt load with some temporary help from our friends and a bit of luck. My landlord, who is a decent man, will allow us to keep our first floor space, vacating only the second floor of the building.

The issue now is this: After we scale back the store, do we still have a viable business? I asked my business manager to crunch the numbers based on our projected sales for the next two years. He reported back that we do not have a sustainable business model. Given our current sales projections, we will continue to lose money.

This means very simply that we would need additional revenue sources/streams to make the store viable.

For many booksellers—certainly including me—this is our darkest hour. I know this sounds melodramatic, but that’s the way it feels to me in the middle of the night when I’m trying to figure out how I can possibly make this work.

If I can’t figure this out, the most realistic and responsible thing I can do is shut the store down and move on.

The question then becomes: What is the next version of a bookstore? This is something worth thinking about carefully. Like you, I want to live in a community that has many good bookshops. But then I’ve been spoiled living in Ann Arbor.

Whatever happens, I am filled with a sense of gratitude for having been able to sell books in this town for the past 29 years. It’s been absolutely wonderful.

____________________________________________________
This letter first appeared in the Ann Arbor Chronicle (www.annarborchronicle.com) on February 17, 2009.

A Celebrity Author Sighting

In January 2006 I was in Mumbai with my wife. I was quite ill, having eaten a chicken salad sandwich that hadn’t been properly refrigerated in a little restaurant near the Ajanta Caves two days earlier. Dianne somehow knew the food was bad and warned me, but I didn’t listen to her and was sorry later.

We were staying at the YWCA, which was clean, quiet, a bit Spartan, and relatively inexpensive given the rates in cosmopolitan Mumbai. There was a small air conditioning unit in our room, but it didn’t work very well.

The Y is located a few blocks from the Taj Mahal Hotel. This is the place that came under attack by terrorists in December. It is huge and gorgeous; a throwback to the colonial era, but the hotel’s powerful central air conditioning system was all that mattered to me. I knew I would feel much better if I could just sit in the lobby for a while. Late in the afternoon I shuffled over there with Dianne’s assistance.

When I walked into the hotel lobby the first person I saw was John Updike. He was dressed in green slacks and he looked sharp and relaxed. He was smiling.

I didn’t greet him or attempt to start a conversation. I respected his privacy and I was in awe of him. I was also afraid I might vomit again.

I was deeply surprised to see this iconic writer in the Taj lobby, a man who chronicled life in the American suburbs with such acuity. John Updike was the last person I ever expected to see in Mumbai.

But why shouldn’t he be there? This story is really just another example of my midwestern parochial tendency to stereotype people.

I had seen him a year earlier standing behind me in line at the Metropolitan Museum of Art bookstore holding a stack of books to purchase, but no one would be surprised to see John Updike in the Met.

* * *

I attended a dinner with a group of booksellers, writers and publishers last weekend in Salt Lake City.

“We lost a great man in American letters this past week,” Eric Price, Executive Vice President at Grove Atlantic, said. He invited us to raise our glasses in a toast to Mr. Updike.

A few of us shared Updike stories. I described my sighting in Mumbai.

What really matters, of course, are his remarkable novels, stories and criticism. Updike could write sentences so emotionally precise and incisive that they are shocking.

There is a moment early on in Couples. Piet Hanemas is in church, half listening to a bad sermon, imagining his mistress naked, deeply aware of his own mortality, and watching his daughter in the choir. The paragraph ends with this image: “his death leaned above him like a perfectly clear plate of glass.”

Astonishing.