Thursday, July 30, 2020

What can a writing workshop do for you?

Because I was dazzled by Rachel Cusk's trilogy, Outline, Transit, Kudos, I bought her collection of essays Coventry. Although I wrote about the novels in this blog, Katy Waldman did a much better job in The New Yorker. She wrote they "represent an attempt to remake the novel, to establish a blueprint for a form of negative literature. Cusk believes that traditional fiction is broken; she seems to long for an alternative that is wholly unauthored, without artifice. In the service of that vision, she dispenses with every convention she can think of: plot, dialogue, interiority. Her recent books have a searching quality; they chase after radical realism, the authenticity of the ascetic who forswears all but the bones of life." Because these novels resemble nonfiction (no inciting incident, no plot, no interiority, no denouement), what are her essays like?

I'm not going to generalize. Each essay offers its own pleasures although one commonality is the terrific writing. "Driving as Metaphor" takes the reader on a ride through rural England. In "Coventry" Cusk's parents send her to Coventry which means that "Every so often, for offenses actual or hypothetical, my mother and father stop speaking to me." "Rudeness" talks about the implications of rude behavior with case histories. 

Cusk writes about other books and authors: Francois Sagan, Olivia Manning, Natalia Ginzberg, The Age of Innocence, The Rainbow, Never Let Me Go, and Eat, Pray, Love, which she eviscerates. Elizabeth Gilbert's voice is that of "twenty-first-century self-identity: subjective, autocratic, superstitious, knowing what it wants before it gets it, specifying even the unknown to which it purports to be abandoning itself. It is the voice moreover of the consumer, turning other realities into static and purchasable concepts ('tradition', 'the art of pleasure') that can be incorporated into the sense of self." Fun stuff.

For writers, however, her essay "How to Get There" is worth the price of the book. In the second paragraph Cusk asks, "What other grown-up gets told how to do their job so often as a writer? Or rather, what is it about writing that makes other people think they know how to do it?" Composers don't have people say to them, "I heard a great tune the other day. Why don't you use it in a symphony?" Few people say upon retirement from the business world, "I've listened to a lot of music. I think I'll write an opera." Many people say, "I've got a book in me." (I know this because I'm one of them.)

The subject Cusk discusses in "How to Get There" is creative writing classes and the writers who teach them. She has taught creative writing and so brings an insider's perspective to the issue. "The ascent of creative writing courses has given writers a different kind of work to do," she writes, "and is transforming every established role—writer, reader, editor, critic—in the literary drama."

Because a creative writing workshop will contain students wildly diverse in ambition and ability and because they are led by writers of wildly diverse character ("contradictory advice can be given in two different classes about the same piece of work"), how to evaluate a workshop? How are standards defined? The answer she says is by agreement. "There is no autocratic way of assessing literature: the shared basis of language forbids it. Agreement is the flawed, frightening, but ultimately trustworthy process by which writing is and always has been judged."

She notes that some students may already be writers, "but often they are people whose immersion [in the social contract], conversely, has been complete; they are writers who have never actually written anything." But what is actually "taught" in a creative writing class? Point of view? Narrative arc? Theme? You can get all those in a good English class.

She quotes Karl Ove Knausgaard: "Writing is drawing the essence of what we know out of the shadows. That is what writing is about. Not what happens there, not what actions are played out there, but the there itself. There, that is writing's location and aim. But how to get there?" Ideally, what the student gets out of a writing workshop Cusk says, "is a feeling of being 'there' for a couple hours, the beginning of a process by which 'there'—writing—can become a more concrete aspect of identity." 

In other words, we attend a creative writing workshop and write, as I understand her essay, to become our authentic selves. This is not easy and the temptation "is to elude this labour by 'making things up', by escaping into faux realities or unrealities that are the unmediated projections of the subject self." Cusk says that this labor is what is—or, I would amend, should be—taught in creative writing classes. "How to Get There" is an essay for both writing students and their teachers. Cusk's collection of essays is for everyone interested in terrific writing.

Saturday, July 25, 2020

Why are federal trials becoming an endangered species?

The Vanishing Trial: The Era of Courtroom Performer and the Perils of Its Passing is interesting if only because the author Robert Katzberg is able to make his memoir more than a collection of war stories. He argues that jury trials are slowly but surely disappearing in the federal criminal justice system as more and more defendants decide to take a plea rather than risk a longer sentence with a trial. 

In 1990 there were 5,210 federal jury trials; in 2018 there were 1,879. In percentages, the share of defendants demanding a trial dropped from a little over 9 percent to slightly more than 2 percent. This, says Katzberg, has consequences for defendants, trial lawyers, and American society. (There has not been comparable drop in state criminal trials.)

Katzberg, a graduate of George Washington University Law School and a member of its Law Review, began his career as a law clerk in 1971 to the Honorable Oliver Gasch on the United States District Court for the District of Columbia. He served four years as an Assistant United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York (i.e., a prosecutor with the U.S. government as his client). He and a friend formed Kaplan & Katzberg, a white collar criminal law boutique in New York where he was a defense attorney. He's is now consulting counsel to Holland & Knight, an international law firm, so he is writing with considerable experience.

The vanishing trial is an issue because U.S. justice is built on an adversarial system in which you are innocent until proven guilty and the state must prove guilt. "For the adversarial system to work as required," Katzberg writes, "due process is an absolute necessity, and the power of the sovereign must be challenged whenever necessary. It is only when the defense lawyer can effectively mount a strong defense in the courtroom that the adversarial system is truly tested and can function as required. Simply put, without capable defense attorneys, innocent people will be convicted of crimes they did not commit." With fewer and fewer federal trials, young defense attorneys have fewer and fewer opportunities to hone their courtroom skills, further tilting the scales toward government prosecutors.

Why so few trials? What changed? The main culprit is the Federal Sentencing Guidelines adopted in 1987. The goal was "to achieve greater nationwide uniformity in sentencing persons convicted of federal crimes by creating a mandatory sentencing regime . . .  which ascribes numerical equivalents to all federal offenses." They sound scientific and reasonable until you look at actual cases, actual trials, and actual judges who are "required to sentence the defendant within the prison range corresponding to the total level of [points] calculated." Forget mitigating factors. 

Mandatory minimum sentences tend to be much higher than those imposed before the Guidelines. Moreover, the Guidelines require a convict serve 85 percent of the sentence. Facing a choice—a sentence negotiated with the prosecution or a much longer sentence if found guilty by a jury—defendants who don't trust the system are choosing the plea. It tends, I suspect, to subtly distort the system. It certainly has filled federal prisons.

Katzberg has interesting thoughts about judges and the idea of "textualism" or "originalism," the idea that the meaning of a constitutional provision or statute is based on "how a reasonable reader of that text would have understood it at the time it was written." This discussion is worth a book of its own, but Katzberg is skeptical of the theory. "Are we to believe that the individual 'textualist/originalist' judge's personal views and life experiences will nonetheless not play a role in the decision-making process, consciously or otherwise?" A case can be made that an "originalist" is using the idea as a cover to impose conservative value judgments. 

As I've indicated, The Vanishing Trial is an accessible insight into one aspect of the criminal justice system. Katzberg is an entertaining writer who made me laugh more than once. For example, talking about the power and respect federal district court judges command, he once asked a former colleague what had been the biggest change since he became such a judge. He said, "My jokes have gotten a lot funnier."

The book is a worthy effort to introduce lay people to the realities of federal trials. It's worth reading even if you never expect to need a defense attorney who can represent you in a federal courtroom. If, by then, you can even find one with the experience to do so.

Tuesday, July 21, 2020

What did you do in the Civil Rights movement, daddy?

I picked up Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle Over Civil Rights by Steven Levingston because I'm revising my novel which is set in the period right after the time this history covers. My book begins with JFK's assassination; Levingston's book ends just before it with the August 1963 March on Washington and King's: "I have a dream that little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the color of their character."

Levingston spends the first chapters covering Kennedy's and King's biographies to put the rest of the book into a context. The bulk of the text, however, is a history of their activities and their evolving relationship between the 1960 presidential campaign and the March. This is history, but at times it reads like a novel as, just one example, a white crowd follows a Greyhound Bus with Freedom Riders out of Anniston, Alabama. The Freedom Riders planned to eat at interstate terminals that were, in theory, protected by Federal law under the Interstate Commerce Commission Act. The bus is forced off the road, windows are smashed, a Molotov cocktail is thrown inside, and the mob blocks the exit. Fortunately, the bus passengers included two armed undercover Alabama state police who, however they felt about outside agitators, were not willing to die and helped the riders leave the bus where the Freedom Riders were beaten by the mob.

In 1961, I was the editor of the Columbia OWL, a college newspaper and we organized a fund-raiser for Dr. King.
In 1961 I was the editor of The Columbia OWL, and the school newspaper
organized a fund-raiser for Dr. King where I met him. 

Because so much time has passed but not so much time that everyone involved is beyond being interviewed (pace John Lewis), Levingston is able to read the slanders about King that Herbert Hoover was able to put in front of Kennedy. As Senator and later as President, John F. Kennedy did not regard the Civil Rights as a major interest. He cared, but he also cared about Southern votes in congress and did not want to offend them. He seems to have felt that while Jim Crow was a bad thing, it would eventually go away and that sit-ins, Freedom Rides, marches and demonstrations were just making a bad situation worse. 

JFK was more interested in international affairs, was scalded by the Bay of Pigs debacle, and during this period had to confront Russian missiles in Cuba. He did want Black votes and he courted King before the 1960 presidential election. King did not endorse Kennedy or Nixon, however, feeling that the Southern Christian Leadership Conference should keep out of presidential politics. JFK's brother Robert, the Attorney General, was delegated to deal with the situation in the South. Robert seems to have become more sympathetic over time to black aspirations and impatient with implacable southern official like Sheriff "Bull" Connor and Governor George Wallace.

The book covers—sometimes almost hour-by-hour—the Montgomery bus boycott, the Albany Movement, the "Letter from Birmingham jail," the police dogs' attack on peaceful protestors about which Robert Kennedy said, "The dogs and the [fire] hoses and the pictures with the Negroes [being attacked in Birmingham, AL] is what created a feeling in the United States that more needed to be done." 

We read about the involvement of Harry Belafonte, Jackie Robinson, James Baldwin, Wyatt Walker, Nicholas Katzenbach, Harris Wofford, and more, and more. Fortunately the book comes with an index, notes, and an extensive bibliography.

It's an interesting history to read at this moment. The country continues to struggle with its racial history. On the one hand, Kennedy and King indicates how far we've come: no more segregated lunch counters, white-only drinking fountains, poll taxes and preposterous literary tests to register to vote. On the other hand, how far we have yet to go when we can watch a white police officer murder a black man on the street. We're not where King (or Kennedy for that matter) would want us to be, but Levingston's history can help us see where we've come from.