“Time arced over us, all those years, and seemed to enfold us in its arms.� –Alicia Metcalf Miller.

The tee-shirt I bought at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame reads, “if it’s too loud, you’re too old.� Rock is, by definition, loud, even if it is a whisper. It is a shout of fire in a theater, the laugh in the back of the room, the voice inside us that does not shut up. It speaks in the language of the street, not that of the courtroom, classroom or home, in the only way it can.

When The News of the World was first shown in French movie theaters in 1940, it was placed between the first and second reels of the feature film. Audiences had not seen it before and assumed it was, merely, another reel of the feature. They would see Japanese soldiers in China, a drought in Africa, and German tanks and see them as part of Inspector Poirot’s investigation of a crime – Poirot must have gone to China following a clue.

“Every work of art is an uncommitted crime,� Theodore Adorno writes. Rather than murder people, Freud says of Dostoyevsky, he wrote novels of murders. “Any novel, poem, painting, or musical composition that does not destroy itself,� Jean Genet writes,� that is not constructed as a blood sport with its own head on the chopping block – is a fraud.�

Put a map of Lakewood on the wall. Throw a dart at it. Another. A third. Draw the lines between them to forma triangle. Walk from one point of the triangle to another and follow the hypotenuse home. Take a notebook,camera, recorder. Note what you see,hear, touch. Run-down buildings,new construction. Businesses, houses,people. Litter, garbage, graffiti. Advertisements, posters, signs. Coincidences,the accidental, the unusual. Signs. They’re all signs. “Walking makes for content,� Robert MacFarlane writes. “Footage for footage.�

“I thought [the Warren Report] far beyond anything I know in literature.� – George Oppen.

On January 8, 1815, Andrew Jackson defended New Orleans from British attack in the last battle of the War of 1812, a battle which took place 15 days after the peace treaty of Ghent had been signed. It took more than that time for news of the treaty to cross the ocean and travel south by stagecoach to New Orleans. Today, we know something almost as soon as it happens. Who can forget the images the day of September 11 transmitted cross country on computers? Or to see what Katrina did to New Orleans as soon as, if not before, the government?

“The local is not a place but a place in a given man.� – Robert Creeley

“A working class hero is something to be. They hate you if you’re clever. They despise you if you’re a fool.� -- John Lennon

Events in New Orleans after Katrina remind us of the truth of John Dos Passos’s assertion in his trilogy, U.S.A., that “we are two nations,� and have been, perhaps even from the beginning. Those in power do not care about those without power. Writers, musicians, and artists may serve power as much as anyone, but those who have not gone along may galvanize us in ways no one else can. “How much history can be communicated by pressure on a guitar string?� Robert Palmer asks. “More than we will ever know,� Greil Marcus answers. The storyteller, singer and artist may become the voice of the people and their response to events is always a needed counterhistory.

Leslie Kaplan, a French poet who at one time worked in a factory, wrote a book-length poem of her experience, L’exces-l’usine, which took her more than ten years to finish. In an interview, she comments that she did not want as much to write about the factory as to actually write the factory. It is not uncommon for writers to write about cities and the lives of people in them. Dickens comes to mind, Joyce, and, close by, Sherwood Anderson’s account of people in Clyde in Winesburg, Ohio. But how many writers write the city, as Kaplan does the factory, and not just write about it? How, we might ask, would one write Lakewood?

There were writers. There were readers. One was distinct from the other. Readers went to writers for an account of the far away and different (hunting whales, Gauguin in Tahiti); to read the news; to learn how to live (Emily Post was first a novelist); to escape. Although writers may have been readers first, for the most part readers did not become writers.

In David Brooks’ June 16th New York Times article, “Joe Strauss to Joe Six-Pack,� he laments the loss of middlebrow culture, arguing, “Time spent with consequential art uplifts character and time spent with dross debases it.... an educated person was expected to know something about opera.� We have been down this road before. The barbarians are always at the gates.