Author: ellen

He might have been a different writer if he lived, say, in Indianapolis or Atlanta, But Jack Canavan, who is working on a book about the 1972 Hotel Vendome fire, is a Bostonian writing Boston stories about Boston people.

“I write because I have to,” he says. “There’s a story to be told and I have to tell that story. Every day I think about it. It’s with me every day. The book I’m working on is all about here, all the resources are here, the characters, the dialogue are all from Boston.”

But more than that, Canavan, born and bred and still living in South Boston, is also a South Boston writer.

“I suppose I could write anywhere, but because I haven’t lived anywhere else but South Boston, I’m a Southie writer. I’m just a Southie person.”

Boston’s neighborhood ties are legend. When I was new to the city I didn’t realize their strength until my first election season here, when one candidate’s victory was explained in part by the fact that he grew up in a neighborhood with a traditionally high voter turnout. Wait a minute–he won an election because of the neighborhood he grew up in? I picture fifth-grade heads down on the desks, hands raised to vote for class treasurer, fast-forwarded to adults pulling the levers at polling stations where their parents once voted. Yes, this is a city of neighborhoods, probably none with a more legendary identity than Southie. And Canavan knows those surroundings well enough to make them real and distinct.

“The characters in my book are from Boston and South Boston, and the behavior of the characters is different. I have to get that down right, that South Boston presence, the language, the dialogue.”

The fact-based novel, which has the working title Without Cause, has been in progress for four years. Much of his writing has been done at the Writers’ Room, where he received two fellowships, including one endowed by Stephen and Tabitha King. He also teaches creative writing at the Boston Center for Adult Education and the Laboure Center and is an editor of the South Boston Literary Gazette. When we meet at the South Boston branch of the Boston Public Library, Canavan knows where we can find an easy place to sit and talk, just as he knows the rest of the neighborhood he translates onto the page.

“There’s a male and female code of dress. You don’t see too many suits. It’s mostly blue collar,” he tells me, noting that my (trust me, pretty generic) outfit marks me as being “not from around here.”

“People here can be tightlipped to outsiders,” he continues. “They keep things to themselves. You know everyone and everyone knows you.”

Sure, we’re talking Southie here, but, except for the names and faces, this could probably apply to a lot of other Boston neighborhoods. This is a city that seems to thrive on believing in distinctions, even when those distinctions define slices of the same pie. The turf is clearly marked, but it’s marked by the same things—the local shops, landmarks, places to congregate; nuances of dress and manner; and most of all, familiar faces–and for the same reasons–the comfort of the known; the urge to create “home.” Isn’t this, after all, where even if it’s fiction, people flock to the place “where everybody knows your name”?

On April 8 and 9 when the sixth annual Boston Poetry Festival is held at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square, it will reflect the vision of one poet, Harris Gardner. And, each week when Somerville Community Access Television airs the program Poet to Poet/Writer to Writer, another poet, Doug Holder, brings the written word to a television audience.

I think of Gardner and Holder as the Johnny Appleseeds of Boston-area poetry, planting a reading series here, a publishing venture there, sprinkling poetry from Amesbury to Warwick, Rhode Island. Most of their efforts are concentrated close to home. Holder co-founded the Somerville News Writers Festival and started the monthly poetry series at Somerville’s Toast Lounge. With his wife, Dianne, he founded Ibbetson Street Press, which publishes books, a magazine, and an online newsletter. He presided for a time over the legendary Stone Soup Poets and is the current host of the Newton Free Library poetry reading series. Gardner originated poetry readings at Border’s at Downtown Crossing and at Forest Hills Cemetery. He has organized benefit readings after 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. His biggest project has been the Poetry Festival which, each year, organizes more than 50 poets into a free weekend marathon reading.

Although they are publishers and venue hosts, they consider themselves poets first. Each has amassed a solid list of publishing credits. Gardner is author of the collection “Lest They Become “ and co-author, with Lainie Senechal , of “Chalice of Eros.” Holder’s most recent collection is “Wrestling with my Father.”

I catch up with them at yet another event they started. It is 9 o’clock on Saturday morning and I am in Harvard Square with other early-to-rise poets at what Holder and Gardner call “Bagels and Bards.” Open to all poets, it’s a place to bring new work, share experiences, and schmooze, which, in the basement of Finagle a Bagel , seems about right.

It’s hard for any poet, especially a beginning one, to find an audience, and the city is filled with poets grateful for the audiences these two have helped them find, including at the open mikes their venues often feature.

“I feel I’m in this world to be a catalytic agent,” says Gardner, “ to provide space and opportunity for other poets. I’m a bridge builder–sort of a civil engineer of poetry.”

He’s enjoyed bringing together poets from both the city’s academic and performance communities and is known for venues that combine poets with major reputations and those he calls “emerging.”

“I like the mix of new and established voices,” he says. “I think it encourages beginning poets to push themselves more and bring themselves to the next level.”

Holder agrees.“I like showcasing other poets. I like to bring out a new exciting voice. And I like to make a venue lively, not too formal. The poetry should be solid, but I want to have fun. I want it to be eclectic. I like to encourage people who are engaging to put on a show. Poetry should be a joyous thing.”

They are clearly having fun. I picture puppies or maybe lion cubs as they talk, tumbling over each other’s words, interrupting, finishing each other’s sentences, trading verbal jabs over who’s younger (Holder), who has more hair (Gardner).

Holder says, “If we lost everything else tomorrow we’d still be writing poetry.”

And maybe organizing a reading series.

In the last election did you just for a minute wish you could vote for Jed Bartlet, the fictional president on The West Wing? And if I say “woman president,”what’s your first thought–quick–Liberia, Chile, or Geena Davis? With the intersection between politics and culture looking increasingly like an overachieving interstate cloverleaf, it seems fitting that some of the most thoughtful political commentary comes from a former drama critic.

“I think the cultural story and the political news story are inseparable,” says Frank Rich. Rich is op-ed columnist and former chief drama critic for The New York Times; the author of Ghost Light, a memoir; and Hot Seat, a collection of theater reviews; and co-author, with Lisa Aronson, of The Theatre Art of Boris Aronson. His visit to Boston on February 12 for a Celebrity Series “Conversation” gave me the opportunity to consider this writer I have long admired a “City Type” for a day.

For Rich, who grew up in Washington, D. C., politics and theater have always been interwoven. As a student at Harvard he was both a drama critic and editorial chairman for the Harvard Crimson, foreshadowing his career path from theater to politics.

“Maybe the move was fated to happen, but it wasn’t planned,” Rich says, noting that, in the 1980s, the AIDS epidemic was decimating Broadway. Suddenly theater was a story as much about politics as about stagecraft. “People were literally dying in the wings. I became interested in bursting beyond the bounds of normal reviewing.”

The landscape of news changed, as well.

“The explosion of 24/7 news on television and the Internet,” says Rich, “combined with the swallowing up of network news operations by giant media companies. The changes in media culture and an administration that is probably the most savvy in manipulating that culture have combined to create an almost fictional story line.” He cites as “a classic example” last month’s White House gathering of 13 former secretaries of state and defense which the President, according to news reports, attended for between five and 10 minutes of conversation before everyone arranged themselves for the photo that appeared next morning on front pages across the country.

Surely among the political theater’s greatest hits is the 1992 campaign, where the political-cultural divide blurred as candidate Clinton played sax on late-night television and the nation’s vice president debated a sitcom character, Murphy Brown. By now we’re used to it. We barely blink when scripted illusion trumps reality. When we watched footage of President Bush serving Thanksgiving dinner to the troops in Iraq in 2004, did we even realize that those applauding soldiers and marines were having their cranberry sauce and stuffing at around 6 AM? Looked like Thanksgiving dinner to us. And of course we’ll always have the “Mission Accomplished” backdrop, the summer stock brush clearing.

Thinking back to his reviewing days, Rich says, “I think the least important role of the critic is to come to a judgment about a show.” He tells of another former Times drama critic, the legendary Walter Kerr, who “made you feel what it was like to be in that theater on that night.” Reviewers like Kerr, he says, felt their job was to generate an excitement about the art form, and perhaps to champion something new and exciting, even if it might be unpopular.

Actually, that sounds like political writing, too: trying to offer the reader a front-row seat to what unfolds each day. Since we can’t always attend the performance, we need to rely on someone to tell us about it. We’re hoping for a reality show.

“War on terror!”
“Moral values!”

I am in Cambridge, in Anne Bernays’s and Justin Kaplan’s cozy sitting room and we are throwing down catchwords like trump cards. We are talking–well, ok, we’re ranting–about how civil discourse is increasingly dumbed down into shoot-from-the-hip slogans with superimposed political meanings. As a result, when we talk about public issues, we’re often speaking in code, consciously or not.

“Defense of Marriage!”

One resolution the three of us would like to see in the new year is for people to say what they mean and mean what they say. Bernays and Kaplan have spent their careers doing just that. Bernays, a novelist perhaps best known for her book Professor Romeo, teaches at Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism. Her newest book, Trophy House, will be published next fall. Kaplan is aPulitzer Prize-winning biographer who was the editor of the last two editions of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. He is also, Bernays adds, “good at household repairs and a very good cook.”

The objects of our afternoon rant are those insidiously familiar terms so loaded with agenda that, when we say or hear them, actually frame our point of view. Terms like “support our troops,” which Bernays drily notes, “is code for ‘I’m a Republican’.” A visitor from some other world, hearing the phrase, might assume it had a relatively apolitical meaning, appreciation for the men and women who put their lives in danger on behalf of us all. Most Americans, though, would understand it as not only support for the individuals serving in the military, but also support for the war they have been sent to fight.

“It’s the difference between “liberating” Iraq and “occupying” it,” says Kaplan.

“It would be funny if it weren’t so tragic,” says Bernays. “I worry that people grow up accepting these things like candy, not questionning the meaningless phrases they use.”

“No Child Left Behind.”
“Patriot Act.”

The power that comes with naming has been understood since the Garden of Eden. But the power to name has morphed into the power to frame as politicians use their naming rights opportunities to put their objectives on our lips. Remember Alice in Wonderland: When the March Hare insisted Alice say what she mean, she protested, “At least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.”“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “Why you might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”

“I teach writing,” says Bernays, “and I’m exquisitely aware of how people use words. I get terribly heated when I feel someone is deliberately manipulating words to pull the wool over people’s eyes. People haven’t been taught to question.”

“Tax relief.”

Even examples that seem innocuous leave us speaking in built-in conclusions. Unless we keep our skeptical, critical, analytic abilities sharp, we’re left mouthing cliches that, as Kaplan points out, provide people with a substitute for thinking.

“Ethnic cleansing.”

Words are conscripted for political purposes so routinely that, when we hear them benignly uttered on the evening news, we can lose sense of how truly horrific they are.

“In an odd way it’s almost criminal. It’s manipulation of your brain. Words are used as weapons,” Kaplan says, adding that, there are parts of the world where that might be an improvement.

Now, what was that you said?

What we’re reading now: Justin Kaplan is reading The Peabody Sisters, by Megan Marshall, which will be published in April. As soon as Anne Bernays finishes her reading tasks as a judge of fiction for the Massachusetts Book Awards, she’s looking forward to reading Volume One of Norman Sherry’s The Life of Graham Greene. I am reading The Fading Smile, the late Peter Davison’s charming dish about the Boston poetry scene between 1955 and 1960, with its intimate glimpses of the astounding group that included Lowell, Sexton, Plath, Kunitz, and Frost.

From Anne Bernays’s forthcoming book, Trophy House, to be published in September by Simon and Schuster: The sky was as blue as a Delft plate and cloudless except for a few wisps near the horizon. More and more people. I realized, were staying on past Labor Day, enough to make me uneasy. Figures, rendered tiny by distance, walked near the edge of the bay, a couple were sitting on the sand, wearing fleece of many colors. A man with bushy eyebrows appeared from over a dune. At his heels was a black standard poodle, clipped to look like a turn of the century chorus girl. The dog calmly pooped onto the sand and failed to kick back over what he’d left there.

From Justin Kaplan’s forthcoming non-fiction book, Innkeepers, scheduled to be published by Viking/Penguin: When John Jacob Astor died in 1848, at the age of 84, he was the richest man in America. His fortune, an estimated twenty to thirty million dollars, mainly founded on his holdings in Manhattan real estate, was ten to twenty times greater than that of the nearest contenders in that line, the inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper and shipping magnate Cornelius Vanderbilt. William Backhouse Astor, the old man’s son and heir, had the body put on display in the parlor of his house in Lafayette Place. The undertaker installed a glass window in the black silk velvet pall so that citizens who pushed their way through the crowd of gawkers could look upon the face of wealth incarnate.

Some people have it all planned out. They have their maps and they’re sure of where they’re going. Others, and I am one of them, make plans but then tend to drift a little with the prevailing winds, sometimes arriving in an unexpected place.

Afaa Michael Weaver is one of those, too. He is a poet, playwright and professor who holds an endowed chair in English at Simmons College, where he is director of the Zora Neale Hurston Literary Center. When we meet, he is preparing to leave for China, where has spent much of his time in recent years. The life he is living probably was not what he envisioned when he was a child named Michael S. Weaver growing up in an African-American family in 1950s Baltimore, or during the 15 years he spent as a factory worker. And I can’t help thinking that the story of his journey lies in his name.

Michael Weaver became Afaa M. Weaver when the Nigerian playwright Tess Onwueme gave him a name from the Ibo language.

“Afaa means oracle,” Weaver says. “It is a good name for a poet because an oracle is a person who can clarify things in the present time.”

Weaver also has a Chinese name, Wei Yafeng. “Wei” means flourishing or blossoming. “Yafeng” is the title of a section from the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry and carries implications of middle age. Weaver says he asked his Chinese godfather, who gave him the name, to add a “radical,” or character, that indicates grass growing.

Weaver describes the chain of events so logically you think it could have happened to anyone: At first, while working in a factory, he began studying tai chi.

“It helped with my balance,” he explains, meaning physical balance, but noting that, as he began struggling with depression, it seemed to help him maintain emotional balance as well. Weaver continued practicing tai chi casually as he began writing poetry, saw his work published, founded a literary journal, and began freelancing for newspapers like the Baltimore Sun, Philadelphia Inquirer, and Chicago Tribune. He was still dabbling in tai chi when he published his first poetry collection, Water Song; when he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship; and when he completed his B.A. and M.F.A.

And when, teaching at Rutgers University, he experienced congestive heart failure, he added more intensive practice of tai chi to his medical regimen.

“It restored my health,” he says, “ and I thought maybe Chinese culture was something important in my life.” So when he was awarded a Fulbright scholarship, he chose to study in Taiwan.

Since then he has written poems in Chinese, including some he considers among his best. And even symbolism from the Kabbalah has found its way into his poetry as this weaver has brought together disparate strands of far-flung cultures.

“There have been different manifestations,” he explains. “At first I was writing about the United States, north and south. My Father’s Geography is part of that. Timber and Prayer I saw as my last ‘migration’ book. Then there is the inner movement of Talisman and Multitudes. At this point I can look back and see more clearly what I was doing.

“It’s a blessing for a poet to know you don’t always have to figure it out. It’s kind of a gift that requires a self-knowledge and self-awareness that are not always available to you, especially when you’re younger. One should always hope for surprises.”

Among the Hurricane Katrina photos that continue to haunt me were those two–you remember the ones–of people slogging through chest-deep water, carrying food. You remember the captions, too: the white people, “finding (food),” the black man “looting.” Just for a minute forget the ethics of ownership versus need or what someone might have to do to stay alive in such an extreme situation. Forget the societal divisions festering just below the surface. Simply think about this: words aren’t neutral; they take sides.

“Change a word and you change the atmosphere,” says Askold Melnyczuk, reminding me of William Blake’s words, “Damn braces: Bless relaxes.” Melnyczuk is the founding editor of the literary magazine Agni, director of the UMass Boston Creative Writing Program, and a recipient of a Lila Wallace-Readers’ Digest Award in Fiction. His first novel, What Is Told, was listed as a New York Times Notable Book and his second, Ambassador of the Dead was named a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year in 2002. When we meet, we talk about how often words are used to narrow, rather than broaden, our understanding.

“There seems to be no weight to words anymore,” Melnyczuk says. “There has been a reinvention of language. Deeds used to precede words.”

Now he and I talk about how words have taken the lead, springing ahead of deeds to become slogans that hurry us to pre-ordained conclusions or frame what is in front of our eyes. Think of how our news, for example, is filled with talk of “insurgents” and “terrorists.” If CNN had been around in 18th century England, the insurgents and terrorists surely would have been Samuel Adams, Thomas Paine, and all those others better known to us as patriots. And have you noticed when we read now of military casualties, it isn’t “soldiers” or “Marines,” or any other individual person, but rather the vague, sanitized “troops” who are killed or injured? I’ll admit it took me a while to catch on that “a troop” was actually one human being, not some military unit like a battalion or division. Just one human being.

Of course we see mundane examples every day of how words are played with fast and loose, their meanings casually suborned. An inconvenience or service cutback becomes a way “to serve you better (Have a wonderful day).” And “new and improved” is not likely to mean something good.

And, as, Melnyczuk and I note, when words are devalued, writers are left with less to say that means anything; our first line of defense against doublespeak is gone.

“In totalitarian countries.” he says, “the joke used to be that the evidence that poetry was important was that poets would get locked up. Poets in the West regularly envied Neruda that he could get exiled for what he wrote.”

No one gets locked up or exiled for poetry here, and that’s good news. But it also shows how our words have been defanged, housebroken for the benefit of anyone with a product or point of view to sell. Of course words aren’t only for use in public . They keep us close to one another privately, too, as Melnyczuk shows us in this poem:

And So

amid the loved lost causes,
the revival of the classics,
the classless society,

you work on a dirge
for the language your
grandmother loved you in:

snih, trava, lyubov . . .

We can only start with our own words and use them carefully to say what is real. If we don’t protect them, how will we talk to each other.?

Among the many routes to becoming a poet, two basic themes emerge. There is the solitary scribbler, the Emily Dickinson model. And then there are the poets like those fortunates who gathered in Robert Lowell’s office or blossomed in Stanley Kunitz’s garden, who
flourish best in a community. They find a workshop, a place to listen, a place to read, people whose work they respect, and they begin to find their own voices. That’s how Prabakar T. Rajan did it.

I heard Rajan read at the Cantab in Central Square, Cambridge. It is a poetry community I also found when I arrived in Boston from New York. His route, though, was longer and more circuitous, beginning in his native India, winding through England, through his years of training as a psychiatrist. It was in England that he began writing poetry more seriously. He says it was because of the light.

“In England there is a tenderness of light. In India there is a very brief twilight and dawn at either end of a long day of bright sunlight. When the light is more muted that does things to your mood. It becomes an impetus for reflection, and I started writing about fall and twilight in England.”

When he arrived in the Boston area, he began spending time in front of the poetry shelves at the Brookline Booksmith, devouring the work of Adrienne Rich, Mark Doty, Philip Levine, and others.

“I was beyond rescue after that,” he says. He was smitten with poetry, but he also felt paralyzed. “What I read on the shelves overwhelmed me.”

Then he found his poetry home at the Cantab, a venue I’m glad he lucked into. If they are to be nurturing, poetry communities of all types–workshops, open mic venues, graduate programs–need to be respectful, to offer an example of people working hard at their craft, to listen and respond thoughtfully to the work that’s offered. It’s easy to find bad ones, where the prevailing atmosphere is self-indulgent and disrespectful. At the Cantab, by contrast, the hosts tend to know what they’re doing and audiences are famously welcoming, especially to the newbies who haltingly confess it’s their “first time.” Rajan felt so at home there, in fact, that he joined a workshop run by Ron Goba, the venue’s doorman and resident father figure.

“Honestly I feel privileged to have the Cantab,” Rajan says. “Unlike with the poet you meet on the shelf, here you can hear the poet’s work and then you can shake her hand and talk with her. What could be more magical than that? Just imagine getting to do that with Hart Crane.”

Rajan now has a chapbook out, Leaving Ripples. It, too, in a way is a product of the communal experience he has found in poetry. He explains that when he first began writing, he started with fiction and actually wrote part of a novel. But he found himself constantly distracted by thoughts of who the readers would be and how his work could find its way to them.

“I was disillusioned with prose because I was always thinking that I had to take it somewhere. With poetry, you can have an audience of one or two and it’s wonderful.

“Writing is too serious to be left to publishers. The venues where poets perform is in the verbal, narrative poetry tradition. It’s how poetry was originally transmitted. I feel I’ve rediscovered an ancient tradition and a place of true brotherhood, well, siblinghood, where you are linked with other people through a line or a phrase that you or they have spoken.

My home state, Delaware, has a post-election tradition called Return Day, when winners and losers parade together in a show of good will. Sure, some smiles look a little tight and the parade, admittedly, is even smaller than the state, but the ritual is a reminder that administrations come and go, while much of the country’s truest work continues in places far removed from the great halls of power. Places like the MCI Framingham women’s prison, where Elizabeth Lund teaches poetry.

“I was attracted to the idea of writing as a transformative experience,” says Lund, who covers and reviews poetry for the Christian Science Monitor. She has been a finalist for the Brittingham Prize, the BOA First Book Award, and has read at the Dodge Poetry Festival. “Poetry has a profound effect on a person’s life and on the people around them. I think there’s something in people that responds to poetry. Poetry teaches you something about yourself that you didn’t know before. It gives you back parts of yourself that you didn’t know were there.”

For the women Lund teaches, many with only a junior high school education, studying poetry is indeed transformative. Reading the work of poets like Rita Dove and Gwendolyn Brooks helps them articulate what they know. Learning to write their own poetry gives them a way to find their voices as they work toward claiming a better place in the world. Lund, who has been teaching at MCI Framingham for 10 years, prefers to talk more about her own satisfaction in the work than the gift she is offering. But in a time when personal beliefs are tossed down like gauntlets, the simple act of one person helping another realize her potential seems not only generous but also like the most American of values. That the transformation comes through art makes it even more powerful.

“Poetry has a different meaning to these women. Lund says. “It’s not just an intellectual exercise. It makes them think about what kind of weight their words are carrying.”

Lund describes one woman who wrote about how she used to walk around the prison courtyard with her head down and how she poetry has changed her. Now she walks with her head up.

“Now she’s articulate. She speaks up for herself. She’s learning how to have a voice, on paper and then in her life.”

In describing another woman, who is mentally ill and takes strong psychotropic medications, Lund says, “Poetry is one of the only things that keeps her balanced. I can literally see her stepping back from the edge when she starts talking about something she’s writing.

“They’re not the same people after they’ve been writing for a while. They’re more grateful, more aware. They have more hope, more compassion. It’s an honor to be part of that process.”

In one workshop Lund has taught, “Read to Me, Mommy,” women can make tapes of themselves reading a book for their children. For women who may have had limited parenting choices, it is empowering to select their books, practice reading them effectively before a camera, and send the tapes along with the books to their children.

Lund, too, has been changed by her experiences. In choosing poems and reviewing books of poetry for the Monitor, her criterion is now more clearly whether or not the writer has something genuine to say. And she feels her own poetry is “a bit grittier.”

“It may have made me more clear-eyed, and that’s a good thing. It’s made me aware of what’s really going on.”

Lund’s work clearly does not grow out of the cynical “thousand points of light” idea that assumes volunteers will fill the chasm left after slashing human services funding. No, what I picture here is a single pebble dropped into a pool, the ripples spreading out.

Not us, of course, but some people in this election season aren’t paying much attention to the issues. There’s that cloud of orange alerts circling overhead, grim war news pouring in relentlessly, and no flu vaccine, but we are busy obsessing about the curse that Ruth built or, at our most engaged, which candidate we’d rather kick back and relax with.

“I can think about Bush’s tax policy, about which I can do nothing, or I can think about his cocaine use,” says Jay Cantor, author of Great Neck, Krazy Kat, and The Death of Che Guevara, novels whose characters are passionately involved in their times. He and I are hunched over our coffee in the People’s Republic, talking about why, in this time when so much is critically important, we are eager, instead, to be entertained. It’s the Scott Peterson trial, the Dan Rather apology that draw our attention away from questions about social security privatization, adequate military funding, alternative fuel development. What reaches out and grabs us is the constant parade of advertising and entertainment images and gossip passing for news, what Cantor refers to as “the spectacle.” His argument is that it happens precisely because things are so important, and so seemingly out of our hands.

“If I can have no substantive effect on what is happening,” he says, “what’s more entertaining is what I’ll turn to. The spectacle is overwhelming and interesting, and it is so omnipresent and the techniques are so good.”

The election spectacle, on the other hand, now lasts as long as the term of office and has been known to cause serious campaign fatigue, especially here in a state that already has its assigned color. Some citizens of the Athens of America continue to follow every detail, to be sure. But it gets harder to concentrate all the time, especially since the television networks declared themselves officially irrelevant last summer with their truncated convention coverage. And when some of the most cogent commentary is on the Comedy Channel. But even if we remain engaged as war deaths mount and America edges farther from the international community, we seem to doubt that we can have any influence.

“We feel helpless,” says Cantor. “And when I feel helpless, I watch soap operas. During a divorce, what are most of us doing? We’re home under a blanket watching soap operas. Now politics becomes the soap opera. I may feel I have a rooting interest, but it doesn’t affect the outcome. And if I don’t think I’m going to have any effect, soap opera is more interesting.”

Politically, Cantor and I both carry a ‘60s sensibility. I find it impossible to understand disengagement, indecisiveness. Cantor, who is a MacArthur Prize Fellow and a professor at Tufts, points out that, in the ‘60s people knew political involvement was important and felt they could make a difference. And they felt the difference was literally one of life or death.

“During the Vietnam War if you were worried that you might die or you felt guilty about those who had died, it focused your attention. The sheer violence, the possibility of mass atomic death–people felt not only could the world change, it had better change. The successes of the civil rights movement gave people the sense that the world could be entirely different. Drugs played a role, too. It made people feel that their community, their work could be erotic, pleasurable, that nothing was fixed about the world.”

In the 2000 election, by contrast, Cantor says, the feeling was that history was, in some real way, over, that whatever the outcome, the difference would be imperceptible. Although one sunny September morning and two subsequent wars ended that illusion, it somehow did not dislodge our sense of being powerless in the process. This election is poised to teach us either that we can have an impact or that we’d better.

When Jane Holtz Kay was growing up in Brookline, the Back Bay was where you went to the dentist. It was the ‘50s and the Back Bay’s veneer of elegance had peeled a bit.“It was filled with rooming houses and dentists’ offices,” recalls Kay, the architecture critic for The Nation and the author of Lost Boston and Asphalt Nation: How the Automobile Took Over America and How We Can Take It Back.

By the time I moved here, in 1990, the Back Bay was back again, beautiful and polished. Now, though, it seems not quite itself. Over the past decade I’ve seen it morph from a vibrant neighborhood into “Back Bay-land,” a theme-park version of a quaint urban area, with a salon for every finger- and toenail on Marlborough Street. I remember when the Pops played classical music on the Esplanade, when three bookstores thrived within a two-block stretch, when trash bins outnumbered newspaper boxes. Now, with notable exceptions, the unique, quirky shops are in other places–Charles Street, Roslindale, Porter Square–while Newbury Street grows fat on stores owned from afar and staffed by people who don’t know your name and don’t particularly care to. Well, to be honest, neither do my neighbors. People, what’s with the no eye contact, no acknowledgment, no smiling on the street?

In the book Toward the Livable City, Kay contributed a chapter about what makes cities, as she puts it, “lived-in.” The lived-in city, she says, is a place of “impersonal connections….City life is the sharing of space with absent-minded courtesy.”

Still, in Back Bay “absent-minded” often trumps “courtesy.” Unless you’re walking a dog, the neighborhood culture calls for no fraternization.

“The Back Bay lacks neighborhood connection,”Kay agrees, “whether nodding or chatting acquaintances. Perhaps everyone is in their cars in the back alley, versus, say, the South End, where they meet around their street by street park-lets to prune and plant.”

Well, we do have the Mall, the best front yard in the city. But maybe the things that are imposed on our neighborhood make us feel less connected to each other and to the place itself: the groundwater to keep our buildings upright blithely pumped away in construction projects, the (no-longer-local) corporations flexing their entitlement in road races that immobilize the neighborhood, Christmas lights (excuse me, “holiday lights”) on the Mall humiliating the stately trees from Halloween until St. Patrick’s Day, the shops that, as Kay says, all seem “tentative.” Kay notes the French Library is an example of a local institution that once contributed to a feeling of community, “but now is less intellectual in its offerings and less open to the neighborhood.”

Kay continues, “I miss delivery, takeout, and other ancillary services for the carfree…perhaps driven out by the realtors’ overpricing policies. Overall I always say that the Back Bay (and maybe Boston as a whole) is like a baby: if it weren’t so beautiful you’d want to strangle it.”

It’s in there somewhere. Little things pull us together, like the homeless man who used to hand out dog biscuits, and the Mall bench locals donated in his memory. For all its maddening shortcomings, Kay still clearly loves living in the Back Bay. So do I. Sometimes, walking home at sunset in the glow of those brick buildings, I can’t believe how lucky I am to be one of its temporary custodians. So, okay, I’m going to smile at the next person I pass on the street and see if I get at least a nod in return. It would be a beginning.