Author: hankkalet

Hank Kalet is a poet and freelance journalist. He is the economic needs reporter for NJ Spotlight, teaches journalism at Rutgers University and writing at Middlesex County College and Brookdale Community College. He writes a semi-monthly column for the Progressive Populist. He is a lifelong fan of the New York Mets and New York Knicks, drinks too much coffee and attends as many Bruce Springsteen concerts as his meager finances will allow. He lives in South Brunswick with his wife Annie.

Eclectic pair featured at SB poetry reading

For poets Mark Hillringhouse and Richard O’Brien, poetry is just one of many ways they express themselves.
Hillringhouse, author of Between Frames, is also an accomplished photographer, while O’Brien is a published novelist — author or Little Flower of Luzon — who has taken up painting.
And both will bring their eclectic mix of talents to the South Brunswick Library on Sunday, where they are the feature readers at the monthly reading series sponsored by the South Brunswick Arts Commission.
Mark Hillringhouse
Hillringhouse, 59, lives in Englewood and has been writing since he was 14. He was influenced by a pastor at his church and started writing spiritual meditations that were published in the church magazine.
“I was a strange, quiet kid who liked to read,” he says in a publicity questionnaire. “I hung out in the public library after school.  I discovered section 8.11 in the Dewey Decimal system, that’s the American poetry section and I discovered poets like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams and Robert Frost and Ezra Pound, all the big names.
“I was into some philosophy then, too, and I would always argue religion or theories about the godhead with the minister of my church,” he adds. “I was about 14 and I wrote this spiritual poem that the minister liked and he published it in the church magazine.  I thought I was a poet!”
He counts as his influences those American giants, but the shared New Jersey roots gives Williams a special place.
“Frost was the first major American poet I remember as a kid since I watched him read at Kennedy’s inauguration,” he says. “I fell in love with Wallace Stevens in college and William Carlos Williams. I later got to know both of Williams’s sons, Eric and Paul, when I ran the Williams Center for the Performing Arts in Rutherford.  I interviewed them.  I am still writing about Williams.”
And taking pictures inspired by his work.
“I did a year-long project writing and photographing the Lower Passaic River that was commissioned by the American Poetry Review,” he says. “The editor, David Bonnano, asked me to write him something about the Passaic.  I thought a good thing would be to trace the locations mentioned in Williams’s 1938 collection of short stories titled ‘Life along The Passaic River,’ which was published by New Directions.  I have a first edition of the text and I read and reread the stories looking for clues and finding that Williams being a doctor was very specific in mentioning places and street names. 
“So I tried to follow the old roads that Williams took as he went on his house calls in cities and towns along the Passaic such as Wallington and Passaic and Garfield and Rutherford and Lyndhurst. I paddled canoes and kayaks up and down and took photographs of the river at different spots in different seasons and in different weather and I interviewed dozens of people close to the river.  I got some poems out of it, too, like the poem titled ‘At The Arlington Diner,’ which is in my new book.  The poem grew from doing the photo-essay.”
Williams, he says, “proved that you could take a place like Paterson and make it into a book-length poem and that an artist can turn his attention to what is here locally and create something that is as powerful and as important as anything exotic and remote. He wrote about where he lived and about the people he encountered.”
O’Brien, 46, says he began writing in high school, inspired by Percy Bysshe
Shelley.
“The line from ‘Ode to a Skylark’ haunted me for years: ‘We look before and after, and pine for what is not,'” he says. “Then, Bukowski when I was in my 20s, and Robert Creeley.”
O’Brien, who like Hillringhouse recently finished his Master of Fine Arts degree at Fairleigh Dickinson University, cites the MFA faculty there — H.L. Hix, Renee Ashley and David Daniel — as big influences and he is looking forward to Sunday’s reading.
“I don’t do readings as often as I like, but I value them,” he says. “The benefit is hearing your work aloud, and the work of others, of course.”
Mark Hillringhouse and Richard O’Brien will read at the South Brunswick Library, 110 Kingston Lane, Monmouth Junction, on Sunday, March 17, at 2 p.m. An open reading will follow the featured poets. Admission is free, but a donation of a non-perishable food item to the township Food Pantry is appreciated. The reading is sponsored by the South Brunswick Arts Commission. Arts Commission website: www.sbarts.org; South Brunswick Library website: www.sbpl.info.

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10 years between records, but 30 years between gems: Bowie strikes gold with <i>The New Day</i>

It’s been 10 years since we’ve heard from David Bowie, though it has been more than 20 — probably close to 30 — since we’ve heard the kind of genre-bending, mind-expanding music that made him famous. So why the hype surrounding the Grand White Duke’s latest, due to be released Tuesday?

One listen to the free stream provided by iTunes and it is clear that The New Day is a return to form for Bowie, but not only that. The record, which is awash in discordant guitars , organs and saxophones, connects with the better parts of Bowie’s past catalogue while still feeling fresh and forward-thinking.

The music moves between aggressive proto-art-punk in which the guitar feels like a weapon, to dance tracks and shockingly sensitive ballads (“Where are We Now?” is spare and absolutely beautiful).

Ten years is a long time to wait, but 30 years is even longer. The New Day is the album we’ve been waiting for since Let’s Dance. Believe the hype.

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Scarborough and Sachs knock down a strawman and name it Paul Krugman

One of the things that drives me crazy about public argument is the willingness of those doing the arguing to ignore the basics of logic.

Regularly, we are forced to listen to politicians and talking heads violating the most basic of principles — making ad hominem (or personal) attacks or engaging in a straw-man argument or equivocation.

Consider this piece in The Washington Post from Joe Scarborough and Jeffrey Sachs, which using the straw man to take down an argument that has been made repeatedly not only by the man under attack, but by a large contingent of economists.

Dick Cheney and Paul Krugman have declared from opposite sides of the ideological divide that deficits don’t matter, but they simply have it wrong. Reasonable liberals and conservatives can disagree on what role the federal government should play yet still believe that government should resume paying its way.

It has become part of Keynesian lore in recent years that public debt is essentially free, that we needn’t worry about its buildup and that we should devote all of our attention to short-term concerns since, as John Maynard Keynes wrote, “in the long run, we are all dead.” But that crude interpretation of Keynesian economics is deeply misguided; Keynes himself disagreed with it.

And so does Krugman. Economists like Krugman, Dean Baker and others are not arguing that deficits do not matter, and they certainly are not saying that debt is free. What they are saying is that we have short-term issues that need to be addressed that will go a long way toward plugging the deficit and that once the economy is on sounder footing the federal government should turn its attention to deficits.

This Post piece is the class use of the straw man, defined by Logicalfallacies.info as

one that misrepresents a position in order to make it appear weaker than it actually is, refutes this misrepresentation of the position, and then concludes that the real position has been refuted.

Krugman’s actual position on deficits, however, is far more subtle than Scarborough and Sachs portray it to be. Krugman wrote a piece the Times’ headlined “Nobody Understands Debt” that eventually made its way around the internet as “Why Deficits Don’t Matter,” which argued that our approach to government debt and deficits is based on erroneous assumptions. “Deficit-worriers,” he said, “portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing.” The analogy is to family or household debt, which Krugman says is faulty because governments are not households. They do not have to pay the money back in the same way. All governments need to do, he said,

is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.

Just as importantly, “an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.”

This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.

But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.

It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.

The key point, however, especially when it comes to the disingenuous Scarborough/Sachs argument is that Krugman does view debt as potentially dangerous to the economy:

Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.

The issue, he says, is not the debt but the debt as it relates to the tax base — and the current political mania for tax cuts and austerity. Nations with what he calls “stable, responsible governments” or governments “willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it”

have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.

Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.

So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way.

Krugman, as you can see, has not declared deficits irrelevant. On the contrary, his argument has more to do with politics than economics. But that doesn’t matter to Scarborough and Sachs, who never address Krugman’s actual argument (aside from pointing out something he wrote in 2001). That makes the Scarborough/Sachs pieces a perfect example of the strawman, because “the position that has been claimed to be refuted is different to that which has actually been refuted; the real target of the argument is untouched by it.”

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