One long summer night, I was up late reading “Either/Or” by Elif Batuman, her second novel about the travails of naive, likeable, thinky Harvard undergrad Selin Karadag˘. On page 23, Selin stops outside a grocery store to buy a copy of the street paper Real Change.
“Wait. What?” I thought to myself. “The street paper in Boston is Spare Change.”
Selin opens the paper and scans the poetry section, stopping at “We Masses Don’t Want Tofu.”
“Wait, I KNOW that poem!” I said to myself. “That’s by Ruth A. Fox! We published that poem in Real Change in the ’90s!”
In the early days of Real Change, the paper operated with an empowered Editorial Committee of homeless and low-income people. We met every Wednesday afternoon at the Crocodile Café with huge photocopied packets of poetry to review and big story ideas to wrestle with. We debated, got angry, walked out, walked back in and voted on things.
Most of us also wrote for the paper. We did soup kitchen reviews, and the review mechanism — coined by Dr. Wes — was “How Many Dumpsters Would You Dive Through to Avoid Eating Here?” We wrote “Season’s Gratings,” a paean to the many idiotic and annoying ways volunteers and their phony cheer made the holidays even more intolerable than they already were for the homeless community. We put together long feature articles analyzing the portrayal of homeless people in mystery novels and crime shows on TV — the roles were victim or perp, almost never detective.
Lord, we had fun.
Back on page 23 of “Either/Or,” Selin leafs through the paper and thinks:
“The poems in Real Change were no worse, in any way that I could see, than the ones in the student literary magazine. Were the street people really good at poetry, or were we really bad?”
Ouch. Forgive Selin. She is young, too young to know homeless people can be any people, including brilliant poets and bad poets.
Later, in a financial aid waiting room, Selin is still reading Real Change:
“Something about the scene made me wonder whether that poem (‘Hate’), and all the other poems, and the rest of the newspaper, and maybe other newspapers, were an expression of suffering that it was obscene to print and publish and distribute and read.
Well, that’s just it, I thought: you didn’t just write down a raw cry of suffering. It would be boring and self-indulgent. You had to disguise it, turn it into art. That’s what literature was. That was what required talent, and made people want to read what you wrote, and then they would give you money.”
Nietzsche, of course. Selin is, after all, a thinker.
Our old Editorial Committee used satire and poetry to express suffering and poke at stereotypes. We attempted to educate (amusingly, we hoped). We tried hard to be truthful and funny enough for people to want to give us — or at least the vendors — money.
Boy, page 23 of “Either/Or” made me think and blasted me back to some glorious, earlier days.
Note: Full credit is given to Real Change and its early writers, including Ruth A. Fox, Anonymous, SGZ, Nancy, Frank and Sid, in the endnotes of “Either/Or,” which also include a link to the archives at https://www.realchangenews.org/archive. It’s interesting to think about why Batuman used Real Change’s archival material rather than that of her home paper, Spare Change.
Read more of the Aug. 31-Sept. 6, 2022 issue.