Viewpoints

Like a chess player viewing his position from his opponent's chair, I've been looking at the ULA the way demi-puppets see us. Their stance has a rough logic-- from the pristine isolation of their perspective.

The ULA and its opponents look at writing from two very different directions. The question isn't so much which side is "right" (as demi-puppets believe), but which viewpoint is healthier for lit and the survival of lit in this ultra-mad culture.

The demi-puppets honor "fine" writing. Perfectly understandable. It's how they've been trained. Their training is the justification for their careers as writers. THE PROBLEM is that the public doesn't view literature through their trained (brainwashed) eyes. The demi-puppets don't want to accept the truth that the ULA has arisen organically from that public-- we see writing through the public's eyes, because those eyes and ours are one and the same.

The demi-puppets can see the ULA's writing, then, only in terms of the rules and limitations that were programmed into them as students and editors. They've lost the ability to respond spontaneously. Like the opera record producer put into the studio with Big Brother and the Holding Company in 1967 to produce the Janis Joplin band's first album, they can only shriek that we're off-key and not hitting the proper notes! They miss the whole point.

We look back at the 20's Paris collection of underground writers-- Joyce, Stein, Pound, McAlmon-- as having great significance. Their works and lives are discussed and taught. Yet this is not how they were viewed in their own time! For a long while they were unpublished or self-published; were scorned and mocked. How could that day's mandarins have been so stupid?

History tells us that status quo critics and the writers they favor are usually wrong-- because their viewpoint is too of the moment (which means, in a swiftly moving world, of the past); within a box narrow and closed.