My take on Norman Mailer is still up at the Literary Mystery blog, in Chapter Four. (He appears near the end of the chapter.)
It can be found at www.literarymystery.blogspot.com/2007/07/chapter-four.html
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3 comments:
Hey Karl, I stacked up all the blog entries for your Eggers story, and inserted them into Word to make it easier to read. I must say it was a really good read, and I hope you continue it. I think it can make a great novel, actually. The terse and tight style keeps the story moving along briskly. Combined with the broad characters, it makes for an interesting technique.
Eggers is also in the current Rolling Stone, featured as one of the people whose opinions about the future of America we should care about. If nothing else, the guy has done a great job of promoting himself as some sort of literary icon.
Thanks for the words, Frank. The tale is my attempt to make literary criticism come to life.
But really, what does it matter? Like other underground writers I sometimes think, what does it matter?
That story especially, which I guess I'll finish-- some good chapters to come-- would never be published, and if it were would be completely blackballed; because the reality is that there is no free speech in this country. There's no free speech if you piss off people. There's free speech if you're well-connected, subservient, or wealthy.
If there were integrity in the literary world, several ULAers, among others, would be read and lauded, instead of hovering one step above oblivion. Oblivion waiting shortly. I like Jack Saunders's work, the documentation of his oblivion, because he's the voice of the rest of us. The voice of the underground writer. What it means to be securely shut out your entire life.
Cullen Carter captured things well in an essay he wrote before his accident; the image of a box of manuscripts at a garage sale waiting to be tossed away. How many masterpieces have we lost that way? From how many amazing poets or novelists?
If American literature weren't a farce, The Whirligig when you were doing it would've been hailed as the best lit-mag in the country. (Ever notice by contrast how bad are the approved story award collections?) You published some amazing talents. Where are they compared with the elevated status of a Jonathan Lethem, well-funded "genius" whose work lacks the spark of life one would expect from one so designated-- the kind of spark which appeared in TW's pages? The lit-world is topsy-turvy. The ULA sought to turn it on its head so it would be right side up.
Every night I walk back from my job, to where I'm staying, through a very bleak area, the remains of Detroit's Cass Corridor, a couple miles of abandoned buildings, of rats and homeless people. As I walk I think, "This is what it means to be an underground writer." When your writing means everything because it's all you have. The ULA project is and has been a fight against oblivion. Thrown rocks at windows of palaces. An honest shot to get recognition for the lot of us authentic writers before we're dumpstered into permanent oblivion. I was blackballed before the ULA, by circumstances and life, as the Villons of this society are from the beginning. The "Movie Serial" is written for my amusement, that's all, as the stunts I've engaged in with the ULA in part on my part were done for entertainment. I'm not sure I fully believed they would change anything. The forces of willfull stupidity and exclusion are very great. BUT-- if I can get a few good shots in against the bad guys, the literary fakes, before I vanish permanently into the rat-shadows from where I came, I'll be satisfied.
Yeah, it's a shame I could never figure out how to market TW better, but that time is gone. Can't do anything to change it.
I still think that if the story does go the distance as a novel, it'd make a good addition to the ULA Press line-up.
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