News?

It's funny that NEWspapers and NEWsmagazines will deliberately not cover that which is truly new in the lit-world, instead set on reporting forever on the same-old same-old of literature's status quo.

The power of the conglomerates?

To all the anonymous fakes who lurk on this blog: Know this, that we put on in Philly as exciting a reading as ever's been seen. (Ask objective observers like Jackie Corley who were there about it.) Know also that you yourself show us nothing, have nothing-- why you're anonymous, of course. I get tired of your nonsense, if you want to know the truth, because I know you're all bluff. There isn't a writer among your entire privileged world who can stand against good undergrounders. Doubt it? Again, pick up the thrown gauntlet. Answer our challenge to debate us and read against us in any kind of venue. Drag out your fossilized icons-- Joyce Carol Oates and Charles Baxter, or Rick Moody, all covered in the Atlantic's big special Fiction issue (they give their own poets like Billy Collins little notice)-- and put those icons against us as a start. Back up your words. Or are you afraid the dust-covered icons represent a failed and tired past? (I've seen Oates, Baxter, and Moody of course all read, at different times, before, and they're all purely awful. They give literature NOTHING, present to the public not one iota of energy and excitement, only complacent smugness, and in Moody's case, the worst kind of self-deluded smarminess. We're talking about REAL self-delusion, backed by huge sums of unearned money and tons of ill-deserved promotion. The underground's performers, like those who appeared at the Medusa, aren't at all deluded-- they know how good they truly are; Walsh, Brady Russell, Mike Grover, Natalie Felix, and company, because they've proved it time and again, as they proved for us when they rocked the house.)

We ask only for the fakes to step out of the way and let the representatives of our nation's true literature take the stage. That's all.