Carol Bergman

    

There's no money in poetry but there's no poetry in money either.

                 

 - Robert Graves      

           

 

It was my birthday and I wanted to treat myself to a hard-back book, preferably American history as it is my intention to read as much American history as possible until July 4, 2026 to catch up on the scholarly tomes that have been published since I minored in American History in college. It was an unseasonably warm day so I had a plan to sit outside  at a local café and read assuming, of course, that I would find a book I wanted to read. I didn't have a list, I had an intention, a desire. I headed for Barner Books on Church St. in New Paltz, NY where I am never disappointed. New Paltz, a college town, is blessed with an outstanding library and three bookstores: Inquiring Minds, Literally Books  and Barner Books. Sales are brisk during the warmer months at all stores, but Katherine Spelling, the relatively new proprietor of Barner Books, has noticed that when gas prices go up, fewer customers visit, no matter the season these days. "People are struggling and there is less discretionary money," she hypothesizes. Yet I have visited this bookstore in all seasons—personal, political, and financial—to  browse, to handle books and flip their enticing pages, to remind myself that once I had my cataracts removed I could abandon a Kindle reader some of the time, and hold books with paper pages and print in my newly clarified sights. And so the time had come, cataract surgery complete, I was prepared to purchase a book as a birthday present to myself.

 

"I took over the store before Covid hit," Katherine told me. "Even though we also have an online business, it became a challenge to make the rent. I accept that this is prime real estate, but it was hard." I've heard that lament from other business owners in town, especially young ones. I don't have a solution, but I'll just note here my dismay. Is an exorbitant rent necessary? Or exploitative?

 

Barner Books has been in New Paltz for more than 30 years; it was originally owned by James Barner who sold it to David Friedman. Katherine is continuing their legacy; the museum-like aesthetic of the store has not changed. The artifacts—much loved books—are accessible and touchable. There are about 12,000 volumes; 1,000 are vintage collectibles. More are listed in Barner's online catalog. I was in luck the day I went in and found two Stacy Schiff hardback biographies: The Great Improvisation; Franklin, France, and the Birth of America and The Revolutionary Samuel Adams, both used but in pristine condition, at $12 each, a bargain. I will probably donate them to the library for the annual book fair when I am done for someone else's edification and pleasure. Thus do we pass on knowledge.

 

Originally from the UK, Spelling, 54, went to grad school in San Francisco to study linguistics and poetry, where she worked in bookstores for the last 29 years. She has had one book of poetry published but has no time to write these days. "And I always knew that it was not possible for me to be a professional poet," she says. Still, her literary sensibility is evident. A person who can translate Homer, however slowly, is a lifelong student, as are most of her customers. Though they may not be able to afford a new hardback, the books at Barner, even the collectible books, are affordable. 

 

Katherine's well-read manager, Abby Shor, majored in Women's Studies at SUNY New Paltz, left the area, and came back.  She's at the front desk 5 days a week 10-6. "Katherine inherited me with the store," Abby says. "Because  I worked for the previous owner I feel like I'm part of the fixtures and fittings by now." The two collaborated on improving the structure of the collection to improve its "flow," as Abby describes it, one subject area leading to another in a store that is much bigger than it seems at first. As soon as someone enters, Abby, or John on the weekends, ask if they can answer any questions, or if someone is looking for a particular book, they'll know where to find it. "Sometimes people are so happy to find a book they read and loved when they were younger and there it is on our shelf," Abby says.

 

It is no surprise that both Katherine and Abby are voracious readers who nurture the curiosity and interests of everyone who enters the store. "This is not a transactional environment," Katherine says thoughtfully, using a charged word that is in the news too often these days.  "People linger here. They browse. This is a safe and cozy space."

 

 

 

 

Some women get erased a little at a time, some all at once. Some reappear. Every woman who appears wrestles with the forces that would have her disappear. She struggles with the forces that would tell her story for her, or write her out of the story… The ability to tell your own story, in words or images, is already a victory, already a revolt.

        

― Rebecca Solnit, Men Explain Things to Me

 

 

My husband was working on a screenplay as I watched Melania on Netflix. He had already told me he was too busy to watch it, much less parse each frame, as was my intention, from a journalist and media critic's POV. I knew the semiotics—the propaganda tools—would  be fascinating, and disheartening. I had studied films frame by frame, as well as posters from 1930s Germany in grad school, and recently compared Project 2025 to Mein Kampf; there are many resonances.

 

So I watched the movie, and later that night, I downloaded the book, which reads as though it was ghostwritten by a campaign speechwriter. But the documentary is something else. It's the saga of a nearly middle-aged woman and mother from a working class family, her youth spent under communism, struggling to find her purpose and her voice. The problem is that she is being used by a propaganda machine and a husband who admits towards the end of the film that she is "difficult."  It's 2 a.m. when the newly inaugurated president utters this word, he and Melania are exhausted, and the beautiful gown she's been wearing all day is slipping under her breast- line even though she asked her designer Hervé, to make it really "straight."  She hikes it up. Trump softens the "difficult," with, "She's a wonderful first lady," and peels away to his solitary quarters. Did they kiss goodnight? I can't remember. "Goodnight Mr. President," the cameraman says.

 

I didn't time the segments but I'd say that more than half the footage is Melania modelling her spiky shoes and beautiful clothes as she looks in a mirror, surrounded by glitter, gold, light, and fawning employees. She is an object, a objet d'art, objectified for the pleasure of men when she was still a young woman, and now for American acolytes.

 

I kept thinking about Versailles, and all its glitter and gold, and of Le Petit Trianon, the château and its surrounding park that the 20-year-old Louis XVI  gave to his 19-year-old wife, Marie Antoinette, for her exclusive use. Melania has found her privacy, also, in the projects she has initiated, always with children in mind, and the efforts she has made to connect with other "first ladies." There's a zoom call  between Melania and Mme. Macron. It seems they know each other well and are both concerned about the impact of social media on children as well as cyberbullying. When I mentioned this seemingly friendly connection to a French/German friend who—serendipitously—lives near Versailles, she said with wry understatement, "It must have been AI generated." But I do not think so, which gives me pause. Is Melania's effort to work, find purpose and a voice genuine? I believe it is despite the obvious obstacles. Here is a woman struggling to break the glass prison in which she lives, however difficult the effort.

 

Before long the propaganda kicks in again, or it goes in and out like a pendulum. When Melania watches television, it is always tuned to FOX News, and when she meets a released Israeli hostage, there is no mention of the devastation in Gaza, or its people, the Palestinian people. Nonetheless, the encounter is warm, and Melania is kind. So how would someone who does not know about the ethnic cleansing of Gaza respond to this? Positively, of course, which was the intention. 

 

Melania is a princess, married to a prince, the fantasy does not abate. Protected by the Secret Service, her honor guard, she is fearful nonetheless. The filming started after the assassination attempt and she is not feeling safe. She wonders if her family will be protected when they get out of the limo on inauguration day. She knows her son Barron will not want to be exposed and greet anyone, "and I respect that," she says, a mother's recompense for his disrupted, cloistered childhood.

 

In conclusion, let us imagine, by comparison, July, 1789 in Paris, France, which we can view as either a lesson, or a warning. For two years before the Estates General assembled at Versailles in May of that year, families were suffering. The economy had shrunk. The spectacle of nobility at Versailles with all its glitter and gold, the decadence, the debauchery, no longer entertained or assuaged the ordinary people. They became a mob. More than liberty, equality and fraternity, they were rioting for bread and relief from taxes. 

 

 

  A poem cannot stop a bullet. A novel cannot defuse a bomb. But we are not helpless. We can sing the truth and name the liars.

      

      - Salman  Rushdie , PEN World Voices Festival, May 2022         

 

          

I decided to take a four-session acting workshop for amateurs at a local library. This was not an ambition, it was a necessity. It was a way of straining towards life after a hard winter, bitter cold, and a war perpetrated by American fascist war mongers.

  

I was eager to have some fun, but felt uneasy as I was driving. I thought that if I left my reporter's notebook at home it would force me to participate rather than observe from the sidelines. I knew that there is probably no safe space in an acting workshop, yet I decided to risk exposing my worst fears. My writing students are trepidatious on the first day of my workshops, but they do not have to get up in front of strangers and perform. I quickly put them at ease, or hope I do.

 

When I arrived at the library, the room was already abuzz with conversation. I introduced myself to the instructor who checked off my name in a small notebook. The chairs were arranged in a circle. I chose a chair and took off my coat, but I could not settle. Bombs had destroyed oil depots in the Middle East, black rain was falling on innocent civilians, and an Iranian-American friend had texted early that morning to say she could not stop crying. She was  worried that her American citizenship would be revoked, and was planning to leave the country for good. Her husband has EU citizenship, and they have a house in Spain. I felt saddened by this decision. I could understand the desperation, the fear, but I still felt saddened. If too many good people with means jump ship, those of us who remain will be weakened in our efforts to recover American democracy. I had felt annoyed with former Yale professor Timothy Snyder ("On Tyranny," "On Freedom")  when he moved to the University of Toronto until I understood his plan. He returns to the U.S. often, and also is involved in projects in Ukraine. He continues important work without the harassment many professors must endure on beleaguered American campuses, as I had endured at NYU in 2020. In Canada he is safe, his family is safe, and he is free from harassment. Oddly—and I am extrapolating from his Substack posts and videos—he may feel freer traveling to Ukraine—an active war zone—than he does in America. Is that possible?

 

Like my Iranian-American friend, the images and sounds  of war are embedded in my psyche, an intergenerational cicatrix, a scar on a wound that never fully heals. Photographs of bombed out buildings, black rain falling on children from destroyed oil depots, and crazed soldiers raping and kidnapping women, never segue into memory. War is war, massacres are massacres, if they happen in Nigeria, Israel, Gaza, Sudan, Minneapolis, Tehran, or anywhere else.

 

So, I decided to take an acting workshop. The instructor talked for a very long time. She mumbled her name and said one or two things about her background, her credentials, her experience. She could not compile a succinct answer in seconds, she explained. This was only the first of several hurdles for me that afternoon. We worked in pairs at times and I felt self-conscious, annoyed by the banality of the prompts. I wanted to leave, but forced myself to stay to absorb the cheerful positivity and laughter all around me. Life is mysterious and unpredictable for everyone, I reminded myself.  There is no retreat from suffering, or challenges, or loss. La Condition Humaine. By the end of the workshop I will once again be at peace in a world at peace, I told myself. But I dropped out after the first session and wrote to the teacher to apologize. I decided to become a reporter again and offered to interview her. But she wasn't interested. 

 

Note: In 1939, Picasso gave the painting on extended loan to New York's Museum of Modern Art, where I first saw it. Picasso stipulated that it could not be returned to Spain until it became a democracy. It was returned in 1981. The image is in the public domain, given freely to the world in remembrance of wartime atrocities.

 

…The joy of writing

The power of preserving

Revenge of a mortal hand.

 

-Wislawa Szymborska, The Joy of Writing

 

 

There's a guy at the gym, 50 maybe, who has tattooed feet crawling up his right shin. It looks as though a child clambered all over him when he was lying down and left his or her footprints. Maybe that child is all grown up now, or maybe he's dead, and the tattoo is what's left of him, or her, or them, or they. It's just feet without pronouns, so I'm guessing. I could ask the man, a stranger, to tell me the story that inspired the image. And the recitation would be oral history, not visual storytelling, powerful nonetheless.

 

I hardly meet a person these days who doesn't have tattoos. I gaze on many of them at the pool where I swim, or in the locker room. The hot tub wasn't working the other day, so I went into the sauna where I was surrounded by tattoos, a panoply of inscribed flesh exposed for everyone to "read," so to speak. Not that anyone was asking questions about them, nor would I in that situation. Queries about tattoos require a safe space; tattoos are personal, even confessional at times. Ask anyone with tattoos what they signify and, in my experience, stories pour out. It's a visual storytelling genre that is significant to a person, but meaningless to a voyeur unless an interpretation is requested. Sometimes the tattoos are so dense they read as a blotch of ink and I disregard them. But mostly I'm fascinated by the stories that inspire tattoos, mostly on people much younger than I am, to be sure. And I also wonder if tattoos are replacing literature by shortcutting storytelling, or are an ancient form of storytelling revived and reinvented in our often cold-hearted digital age because they are more visceral and tactile.

 

Personally, I don't have a tattoo. I associate inscription onto human flesh with the Holocaust. I know it's been 80 years, but there it is, I am possessed of intergenerational loathing of ink embedded in skin. That said, a young friend of mine, descended from Holocaust survivors, said the other day when I asked if he had a tattoo—he doesn't—that if his grandparents had been in camps, he might consider tattooing their numbers onto his arm, as a remembrance of murdered relatives. Remembrance and warning, I might add, given the current administration in DC.

 

I do not  judge or begrudge anyone who sports one tattoo, or a plethora of tattoos, or an entire sleeve of tattoos, so long as the images are not incendiary. After many conversations in recent years with people who enjoy tattoos, I know that most hold deep emotion, connection, and memories, and that is all to be applauded. But if they are not transcribed in some way, they will disappear when the person disappears unless they are preserved in photography, or illustration, or handed down through tradition as in tribal cultures. Otherwise they are ephemeral, and disposable, as writing is not, as this blog post is not, though I am aware it could easily disappear into cyberspace in an instant.

 

Dedicated to all the visual artists and writers making art in challenging times.