phil's blog

I haven’t done much living from the perspective of the tourist, but when I do find myself in that role, I can get quite uncomfortable. I like to know where I’m going, whether I’m driving through an unfamiliar area, on foot in an unrecognizable neighborhood, or relaxing on vacation in a new city. I can imagine this being quite tedious for anyone I’m ever with, but it makes perfect sense to me to have a map of the place you’re going to be exploring on vacation. I’ll only examine the map before leaving, though, and I’m loath to consult it while out and about. This, I admit, makes less sense, but it’s all part of my effort to never look uncool – it’s hard to show people how cool you are when you’re thoroughly confused about your surroundings. But in a way, this is where the “exploration” aspect of “tourism” kicks in. In this way, one sees an area a little more naturally, with a greater sense of spontaneity that might result in a more personal and enriching experience. At the same time, you run the risk of seeming like a total goof when you realize you have no idea where you are. No matter how one does his or her tourism-ing nowadays, though, it’s hardly like it was in Agee’s piece, “The American Roadside.” It’s not too difficult to imagine seedy motels planted not far from any Interstate exits in place of more communal and unique cabin camps. Though the hold the same basic purpose – a stop along the way to a more final destination, where you might stay at a hotel or in a house – the motel seems to be a generally franchised business with little to offer in the way of a distinctive experience. Honestly, most of the hotels I’ve stayed in have all looked exactly the same, too. My best experiences in traveling have involved staying with friends and fighting for the most comfortable couch to sleep on at night and spending all day roaming around and finding good food to eat; or paying attention to all the rest of the areas in the beach town where my family used to vacation summer after summer when my brother and I were younger; or just driving through an area near my hometown that I never bothered to investigate because there was no “reason” to be there. Tourism may be, in its bare essentials, the same as it was in the 30s, but the business of it certainly isn’t undertaken in the same ways anymore – it’s been perfected, and boiled down to statistics. I think the best way to experience a place, however, is to eschew the statistics and make your own vacation.

Philadelphia City Hall: City Hall is about the same; Broad St is a little busier, though.The WPA-guided cities that I’m most familiar are Philadelphia, which apparently was deserving of its very own massive book (really WPA? 700 pages?), and New Brunswick, NJ, tucked into the equally massive guide to beautiful New Jersey. Philadelphia feels like the kind of city that is prone to identity change, and the guide suggests that this is indeed the case. Regarding South Philadelphia, the WPA says: “More evident than their color and quaintness is the paralyzing poverty of South Philadelphia’s Negro and foreign sections. The cobbled streets and uneven brick sidewalks, many reminiscent of Revolutionary days, are usually littered with dirt, rubbish and torn newspapers.… Neglected children swarm about dingy alleyways…. Through broken window panes, sometimes patched with paper…and society pays the usual price of its apathy with high mortality, disease and crime rate.” The situation is quite the opposite now. South Philly is now much nicer and is the “cooler” part of town. The aspects described, from the higher (and so very quaint) Black and Hispanic population, to the dirty streets, to a raised crime rate in a somewhat neglected area are rather characteristic of the large area north of city hall. There’s even an area north of Temple’s campus nicknamed “the badlands.” The Temple campus is generally regarded as the nicest part of North Philly, and it is, because Temple has sunk so much money into it. It’s surrounded by popular franchises and generally nicer establishments, and then as you move further away, the areas get a little seedier. That gives it character, though; what’s a major city if not for its parts of town that may be dangerous? An interesting note: The National Headquarters of the American Federation of Hosiery Workers was formerly housed in a “building of modern design” on Berks Street. Good for them.

New Brunswick’s description is just as specific, and includes just as much editorializing on the part of the writers! The second paragraph: “A visitor in 1778 described New Brunswick as a ‘dismal town, but pleasantly situated.’ The riverside site is almost as pleasant as ever, but industrial development has converted the green shore into an area of brick-walled factories and old frame tenements.” This isn’t so far off, right down to the vaguely dismal vibe. It’s hard to imagine the riverside being too pleasant, however, as the rivers often look pretty filthy, especially after a heavy rain. The guide describes George Street, one of the town’s main roads, as lined with generally short buildings, two- and three-story structures. There’s a bit more going on now, including a large hotel and some clusters of apartment buildings packed into the area that isn’t owned by Rutgers (which seems like it was quite nice back then, too). The WPA also describes the intersection of George and Albany Streets as a spot of “automotive confusion” because of commuters entering the city from towns north, east and west. That’s still somewhat true, but one block away, on Albany and Easton, is a genuine traffic clusterfuck, as Easton is directly connected to an interstate highway that lets off just a few miles down the road. A few other facts nestled in here that stand out: “In 1875 a group of Rutgers sophomores raided the Princeton campus and returned with a cannon, but not the one that Princeton men had boasted of stealing from Rutgers years earlier. After a reprisal by Princeton students, both sides returned stolen goods and Rutgers got a new cannon [from the Federal Government].” When students graduate from Rutgers, they smash clay pipes on that cannon, which for some reason symbolizes the smashing of their youthful dreams. Finally, you used to be able to catch a train from New Brunswick that went to the Lehigh Valley, PA, where I’m from. The Lehigh Valley now has no train line. Much of these guide books may be completely irrelevant now – it would be ridiculous to expect them to still be useful, I suppose – but they certainly are entertaining to skim through.

The American Dream: This is what it's all about.I wonder, now, what I would have thought of A Cool Million had I not known ahead of time that it’s a satirical novel. Since I was laughing pretty steadily just after the first few chapters, I’m sure I would have picked up on it. If I lived back when this was released, however, and began reading the book completely unaware that it was meant to poke fun at those types of popular rags-to-riches tales might have left me with a pretty sour feeling. In fact, even knowing that it’s an amusing book, Lemuel’s undertakings follow such a drastic up-and-down rollercoaster motion that it’s hard to ever find a real satisfaction even in the humor of it. Its darkness and matter-of-fact tone are what made it so funny to me, but the crushing sadness in the reality of his brutal injuries are quick to bring the reader back down. Lemuel, forever holding on to a sense of optimism – generally emboldened by that stroke of luck that seemed to come along every few minutes – keeps on going, marching in search of a unique kind of success that he believes is out there, if only because he is constantly pushed to hold that belief. Lemuel is simultaneously searching for and representative of the American Dream, and West is explaining to us that it’s not out there, at least in the sense that people were raised to think about it. In hard times, holding on to a sense of entitlement can’t work for anybody, and in the extreme case of Pitkin, goaded by former President Whipple, it works against him. Hunter Thompson wrote extensively on the concept of the American Dream about thirty years later. In his quests to “find” it, he often noted that people needed to expand the definition of the phrase to even come close to achieving it anymore. In Hell’s Angels, in which Thompson documents his experiences riding with the infamous motorcycle gang, he makes the implication that they have found their own version of it; they live content lives, riding their bikes and working simple jobs, leading simple existences. If we don’t modify what we want the American Dream to be – if we seek some mystical ideal that is, and maybe always was, almost impossible to realize– then it’s absurd to think that it could ever be found. The absurdity of life was another common theme of Thompson’s, and it comes up often in A Cool Million. West does not hesitate take the surreal qualities of American life during the Depression to a wild and symbolic conclusion.

(Google image search: nuclear hobo)I’m currently taking another class that’s been focusing on this time period, called Origins of the Atomic Age. So far, discussion has been centered around the lead-up, through the 1930s, to the first nuclear weapon test in the New Mexican desert in 1945 and the subsequent usage of two nuclear bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. I only recently realized that the first half of that story lines up, chronologically, with all of ours. I suppose since we’re focusing on such different, more complex aspects of the decade – the effort needed to live out on the road and off the land in this class; the race to uncover the mysteries behind a new and immensely powerful source of energy in that one – that I didn’t quite notice the very simple coincidence of temporal setting. Of course, there aren’t too many other coincidences. It would be downright incorrect to imply that the physicists charged with contemplating and constructing a nuclear weapon were concerned with homelessness or hitchhikers in the 30s; and on the flip side, hobos and Okies surely didn’t give a shit about the work of Niels Bohr, Leo Szilard, or Enrico Fermi. Travelers of the day were thinking small and personal, seeing the country and staying alive from day-to-day, while the scientists were out to save the world, always considering the big picture. Interestingly, though, the actions of both groups produced some major accomplishments still observed to this day. A handful of the artistic works that surfaced during the 30s – including photographs, novels, paintings, and early music recordings – are still highly-regarded as prime examples of the documentation of hardship in America. They are often stories of great physical and mental exertion and persistence. The work that went into and preceded the Manhattan Project, though controversial, was undoubtedly a great step forward for human creativity and innovation, and signaled a new age of American life. Like I said, there aren’t too many other links between the subjects; the Depression was winding down just as race to develop nuclear weapons kicked into high gear. But I find it to be rather noteworthy that these two completely dissimilar events were occurring at about the same time. I suppose it could be seen as a compelling indicator of how disparate living situations were at that time based on one’s occupation and class status. After all, there weren’t too many poor, struggling scientists out there, bumming around with unpublished scholarly articles in their back pockets.

Just one reason why I dislike Al Jolson.While reading Waiting for Nothing, I was made certain of something that I was already pretty sure of: Al Jolson was an asshole. (Owl Jolson, however….) His part in the depiction of an entertainingly jaunty and singsongy existence as a member of New York’s growing fleet of Depression-stricken homeless in the 1933 film “Hallelujah, I’m A Bum!” presents a very stark and bizarre contrast to the dark, impoverished City-life that Kromer shows us. There is no romance in Waiting for Nothing, but that doesn’t stop it from becoming something special and unique. Unlike Jolson as Bumper in “Hallelujah,” Kromer sees no particular upside to his dismal circumstances, his life as an American citizen left behind because of his inability to find and keep a paying job. He gets arrested for trying to keep out of the rain. He contemplates suicide. (“Why not? It doesn’t hurt.”) There is no glory here. There is no ridiculous Black servant sitting at his side awaiting his next instruction and making eyes at him. Rather, the homosexual tension in Kromer’s book is outright, and is as uncomfortable to read as it may have been for Kromer to write, or witness, or experience – whichever is most applicable. Kromer’s narrative is pained and honest. Other writers we’ve read that documented this period were able to effectively describe the harsh landscape of this time period, but often infused it with some underlying and unwarranted sense of optimism, or included some sort of vague political slant. Kromer’s style, however, is far more direct and brutal, leaving no room for misinterpretation or extrapolation.

This reminded me of another author of the period, John Fante. Like Kromer, his method and tone exist opposite the wordy, epic approach taken by Steinbeck, or the folksy one that Guthrie pursued. Despite being more character-centric than issue-oriented, Fante’s early novels depict many concerns that arose as effects of the Depression with a similar bluntness. His best-known protagonist, the autobiographical Arturo Bandini, is constantly struggling: to become a highly-regarded writer, to find work in a bleak Los Angeles that hasn’t delivered on its shiny promises, to deal with his Italian-American heritage and intensely religious immigrant family, to pay the rent, to find a woman. While decidedly “lighter” than Kromer’s book, Fante attacks these somewhat romantic issues in a sincere and believable manner, rarely letting reality slip from his grasp. In spite of that tonal difference, each author holds true to a more basic tenet: you do what you must in order to survive.

Fante abandoned novel writing for several decades in favor of becoming a successful Hollywood screenwriter, but his Depression-era trilogy about Bandini and his family became hugely influential, particularly on Charles Bukowski, who would refer to Fante as “my God” in the forward to a later printing of 1939’s Ask the Dust (which was recently adapted into an AWFUL film starring Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek).

The only things I knew about Woody Guthrie before reading that excerpt from his book was that his music was hugely influential on Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan, he wrote “This Land is Your Land,” and that he had THIS MACHINE KILLS FASCISTS written on his guitar, which is pretty damn cool. Those facts on their own was enough for me to think Guthrie was a pretty good dude. That he wrote a book about traveling and living the hard-working life in the 1940s that was turned into a movie thirty years later starring David Carradine – a fun little Grapes of Wrath connection there – came as quite a surprise to me. A pleasant surprise, though. Guthrie has an honest and folksy style to his writing that made the chapter really easy and exciting to read. His words also give insight into his mindset as an artist, as a folk singer and a man of the people. This chapter sees Guthrie making his way west to California, after spending about 200 pages knocking around and living the honest life in his native Midwest. The hardships faced by Guthrie on his trip seem to be characteristic of that iconic pilgrimage, at least compared to the other texts we’ve read. Many questions quickly arose: Where can I find food to eat? Where can I find a place to sleep? How can I make sure I make it out there safely? And where can I go when I get there? Imagining these words coming from the mouth of the folk legend gives them a clear romantic quality, and had me thinking about which passages or lines of dialogue might best be boiled down to a simple tune, a song that might rally the struggling masses of the Depression. I searched out a few Guthrie recordings (besides “This Land is Your Land”) and found one, “Jesus Christ,” to be particularly representative of that romanticism. The song depicts Jesus as a wise and hard-working man, whose followers worked for their keep and were brave to be following him, who was sentenced to death by bankers, preachers and soldiers for eschewing wealth and advocating that the rich give to the poor. It’s not hard to see that concept, Christ as an everyman, just another member of the proletariat, getting some people excited at a time when being a poor member of the working class might have left many with no hope.

photo by Walker EvansCritical essays about photography, such as James Goodwin’s “The Depression Era in Black and White,” tend to irritate me, and generally come off as pretentious, because I feel that really great photographs can almost always speak for themselves. The stark and striking pictures presented along with his article do just that. While his inclusion of history between assessments is compelling, his critiques are pretty stale and didn’t do much to help me understand the photographs. I was thankful, though, to get a look at some of the books he was discussing, including Dorthea Lange and Paul Taylor’s American Exodus and James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Walker and Lange’s photos are intriguing and beautiful, in a kind of bleak, and sometimes even ugly, way. Evans’ work, especially, has both sobering and brutal qualities to it that really draw me in. His photos have a very subtle, yet still very apparent, power to them that allows them to exist as something much greater than simple, run-of-the-mill portraits-of-poor-folk-making-it-on-their-own-during-the-Depression. The simplicity of the style helps the complexity of the subject matter really shine through, and also speaks to the power of the standard, clean black-and-white photography.

Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov’s American Road Trip, a portrayal of the same time period, but from the foreigner’s perspective, was more entertaining than the aforementioned books, but still offered up crisp and interesting pictures. They depict an alternative aspect of the era, however, one in which life is still going on, and people are traveling in their cars and gas station attendants seem to be thrilled to provide aid when they need directions to the next town, the next gas station. Ilf and Petrov’s photos have a curious and excited tone to them, opposed to the markedly serious and journalistic photographs taken by Lange and Evans for their books. Because of that, though, a heavier weight is placed on the accompanying text. Fortunately, the writing is amusing and complements the lighter attitude of the photos well. In presenting more everyday aspects of the Depression-era story, some of the anecdotes tend to resonate a little more clearly today. One was about a jobless and homeless man who co-writes a book documenting the stories of those “who’d fallen through the cracks in society, the ones who’d been forgotten” (33) only to have the manuscript taken away after a beating by the cops. He recognizes the need for a full-scale societal change, but he proposes bringing it about by taking all but five million dollars of every rich person’s wealth.

This reminded me of the present American society’s debate over health care reform, in which many are defending a system that is generally broken, simply because changing it could become complicated. For some reason, people are worried about those huge, wealthy companies, just as that jobless man, who had seen no help while seeking work across the country for five years, was concerned that less than five million dollars just “won’t do.”

photo by david geetingOnce again, Asch’s piece, another section from his travelogue, The Road, most intrigued me. Right from the start of the chapter, it surges with a blunt and simple honesty that some of the others seem to lack. He reports his experiences as a novelist, not a journalist – he’s still telling his story but he’s not afraid to embellish, or to admit that it’s hopelessly subjective and not fully fleshed out. As he says in Detroit, he’s not out looking to shed light on some big story, he’s just trying to see his country. Sherwood Anderson and Louis Adamic explore similar approaches in their works, Puzzled America and My America, respectively. Anderson knows there are too many different perspectives out there to really compose a complete and true picture. He differs from Asch, though, in that he seems to travel with a bit of purpose, even if it’s simply to “loaf, smell, taste, see, feel” (25) an area, like when he heads out to Mobile, Alabama, whereas Asch seems to make his way around by gut feeling alone. There is a semblance of form in the depiction of his time in Detroit and Hamtramck, an industrial city within greater Detroit, when he tries to obtain permission to stay in an automobile factory but is he denied and just ends up going on a visitor tour, getting involved in others’ conversations. Adamic presents an individual’s portrait in the essay “Girl on the Road” – and I assume in the rest of the book’s chapters – that presents a brief slice-of-life tale. Adamic and Anderson’s ambition allows for a slightly more consistent and informative read, but Asch’s strong and disjointed poetic style rings truer to me, or at least seems like the way I would attack the challenge of travelling across and writing about America. Additionally, Asch’s method sees him come to a conclusion that I think much of The Grapes of Wrath was working towards: “I had wanted to reach inside the miners and field workers and unskilled laborers and the poor farmers… and with a million hands grasp their death and rip it out and show it was not death, it was not defeat; it was want that was fought and struggled against daily; and since it was not some exceptional, unique, exotic want, but usual and everyday and common in its suffering, it united them all and some day by all of them it would fought together, vanquished” (269). We all suffer together and life goes on in spite of it, or maybe because of it. As is the benefit of a non-fiction, he goes on to express, immediately after that statement, a slight sense of futility and a feeling of powerlessness as he re-enters New York, perhaps even some guilt about his inability to change anything that in some ways may equate to the guilt that Steinbeck felt about becoming so rich off the hardships of the Oakies in his novel.

On an only somewhat unrelated note, Hamtramck, MI, is, apparently, a cultural hotspot in the Midwest nowadays, and a much different place than the one described by Asch. The Polish population has declined severely, to about 23%, according to the 2000 census, compared to 90% in 1970; the population of families of Middle Eastern ancestry has risen sharply. In fact, Hamtramck Michigan’s most diverse city, with 41% of its residents being foreign-born. This late 2007 article details some of the shops and local flavors that led to it being named one of the top 15 “hippest neighborhoods” in North America by the Utne Reader in 1997 and, in 2003, the second “most rock’n’roll town” in the country by Blender. Number one on that list? Williamsburg, of course. On getting around: “The L train is a quick ride into Manhattan, while the G is less reliable. For a trip to the grocery, take your low-rider BMX bike.” What? That article reminds of two things that sucked: Blender and 2003. Anyway, there you have it: Hamtramck is fucking awesome.

In this final section of the book, the Joads briefly find themselves in a comfortable situation in a government-sponsored camp, only to be moved along once more after an incident leads Tom to commit murder again. The heavy-handed lesson that follows about human kindness and the importance of giving aid to all that need it and Biblical allusions and so on ties a peculiar bow, but a bow nonetheless, on Steinbeck’s epic. The Joads may be fucked, but humanity will go on. It usually does. A section that strongly stood out to me was Chapter 25, one of the interlude chapters, wherein Steinbeck describes the destruction of food surpluses and arable land left unfarmed in accordance with the Agricultural Adjustment Act, an important piece of New Deal legislation enacted in 1933, found unconstitutional in 1936, and then reworked and replaced by something only slightly different in 1938. Because of this act, and President Franklin Roosevelt’s insistence that keeping the agricultural industry stable would help the rest of the country, an incredible amount of land was not put to use. Food was left to waste, for farmers could make more money from the government than they could from the consumer who needed it. In the world of the book, Steinbeck imagines the frustration that these practices caused to be the precursor to a significant upheaval; this chapter even includes the titular line, “In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.” I don’t get the sense that a revolution was in order, as so much of the American population was still rather comfortable, but rather some sort of organized action that could turn heads and make people see that fellow citizens were starving, jobless and homeless, that they already had nothing and the government was preventing the food from even being taken from their mouths. Unfortunately, this is a situation that we are still dealing with, although obviously it’s not as dire (yet). Farmers today are still paid not to farm, or to save up their crops in order to keep prices high. This is becoming more and more unreasonable as unemployment and poverty rise once again. Corn is one crop that is heavily subsidized while still being overutilized, a fact first brought to my attention by Michael Pollan in his book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma. It is used in feed for animals that do not regularly consume corn, in sodas and fruit drinks as the artificial sweetener high fructose corn syrup, in many processed foods like chicken nuggets and twinkies, and in ethanol fuel. Yet with that much corn being used for so many different purposes, corn farmers are still paid to keep a huge amount of their crop out of the hands of the public. Of course corn is not the only culprit here, but it is one of the most extreme examples. While some full-scale revolt may be a bit overkill right now, I think if economic conditions were to worsen to a Depression-era level, many would begin to take a more serious look at the way the government deals with the agricultural industry.

On a sillier note, here are a few ads released by the Corn Refiners Association about a year ago that claim that high fructose corn syrup isn't so bad, after all!

A New York HoovervilleBy the time the Joads reach the promised land of California, very little has turned out as intended. Granma and Grampa are dead. Noah Joad has run off to live in a river for some reason. There’s no work to be found. The preacher was arrested. The cops are pricks. (Nothing too unusual about that, actually.) The promise has been broken. As Floyd Knowles explains to Tom in Chapter 20, the work needed in the area had been over-advertised, often bringing twice as many people in than were needed, allowing the owners to pay far less per hour than what a family might need to stave off starvation and find a home. How true any of that is is questionable, as Keith Windschuttle points out in the essay, “Steinbeck’s Myth of the Okies,” wherein he states that many migrants made their way west already knowing what was in store for them, as they were in contact with friends or relatives in many areas that informed them of the conditions. It certainly makes for an engaging read, though. Windschuttle also makes note of something else that caught my attention in Steinbeck’s narrative. As the family rolls through the Southwest and into California, they encounter numerous temporary communities, an aspect of the migration to which Steinbeck dedicates multiple chapters. Every night, groups were setting up camp, all with the intention of breaking it back down in the morning to get back on the road, to find work in the promised land of California. I couldn’t help but wonder, however, why these families didn’t band together at any point to search out work along the way. Every family seemed to form such a strong bond over their shared dream of prospering out west, why was it so easy for them to just disperse and keep on? Surely, a farm somewhere between Sallisaw, near Oklahoma’s eastern border, and Bakersfield, CA, needed men for at least a short-term job. After all of the “it’s not so great but go on and see for yourselves” horror stories, why not try to find some extra cash along the way – or maybe even something permanent? As Windschuttle points out, that’s exactly what some travelers did. “[Migrants] planned their journey to coincide with the Arizona cotton-picking season. Others who were less well organized nonetheless found plenty of agricultural employment along the way in the newly developed irrigation fields of the desert state. In the 1930s, Arizona acquired thousands of new citizens in this way.” This makes far more sense to me than Steinbeck’s romantic portrayal of the listless wandering clan making their way out west with more hope in their hearts than money in their pockets. Again, though, as a dramatic interpretation of the events, it’s all very exciting.