Bad Propaganda

MARIA BUSTILLOS VS AYN RAND

DURING THE HOLIDAYS the online literary journal The Awl tweeted out the link to an essay they’d republished on 12/23/2013, “When Alan Met Ayn,” by Maria Bustillos. It was originally published 4/12/2011. The Awl’s editors apparently believe the essay is one of the best things they’ve published, or they wouldn’t still be hyping it.

See http://www.theawl.com/2011/04/when-alan-met-ayn-atlas-shrugged-and-our-tanked-economy

The essay caught my interest for a couple of reasons.

First, because it’s by Ms. Bustillos. Maria Bustillos is a fan of Tom Bissell’s book of essays, Magic Hours. When the book came out she gave it a glowing review, and applauded in particular his hatchet man essay on the Underground Literary Alliance. She appreciated a cheap shot Bissell took in the essay at me and an underground writer. (More about that in another post.)

Second, I noted obvious intellectual dishonesty in the Bustillos essay. I’m not an Objectivist—then again, one never knows—and I disagree with the Ayn Rand philosophy on several points. At the same time it’s obvious to me that the established literary community has long tried to marginalize Rand and her writings—her achievements—as if they weren’t after all part of American literary history. As if they should preferably be banned from it; in the same way that same establishment has banned mention of the ULA. (In Rand’s case, it’s tough to ignore massive sales figures.) The Bustillos rant against Rand strikes me as yet another attempt to conform and homogenize American literature, to pare from it unacceptable styles and ideas.

What struck me in the essay as most misleading:

Where do I begin? Probably with Bustillos’ most fraudulent claim, that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was an Objectivist. You’ll have to read the passages in her essay yourself to see if Bustillos means this tongue-in-cheek. Her reasoning seems to be that Stalin was an egotist; Ayn Rand lauded egotists; therefore Stalin subscribed to Rand’s philosophy. This is twisted logic, but I find it used often in mainstream essays. It’s like saying that because all Spartans are soldiers, all soldiers are Spartans. Such backward logic throws over the bounds of sense. It allows the commentator to say just about anything.

Her bringing Stalin into the conversation struck me, because it’s the same game that was played by Tom Bissell in his essay on the ULA. Characterize your opponent as the worst kind of historical person imaginable, using the flimsiest thread of sense to do so.

In Bissell’s case, he characterized the Do-It-Yourself working class writers of the ULA as Bolsheviks, though our philosophy was the polar opposite of what the Bolsheviks advocated and practiced. The comparison was made and gotten away with likely only because we were, in the main, working class.

The Rand/Stalin comparison Bustillos makes is more ludicrous. What Stalin was, indisputably, was a Marxist-Leninist. His commitment to the ideology was lifelong. His actions were justified by the ideology. As Bustillos indicates, Ayn Rand’s family was dispossessed by the Bolshevik revolutionaries. Bustillos passes over this lightly—yet it’s the best explanation available for the extremism of Rand’s own ideas. Her philosophy, in its every tenet or novelistic character, was a reaction to what she’d experienced.

Stalin and his buds eliminated not just the wealthy. Anarchists were among the first to be silenced. With studied Marxist-Leninist rigor, millions of Ukrainian Kulaks—modestly wealthy peasants—were wiped out. Through his entire life, following the proper ideological maxims, Stalin sacrificed his people again and again to the interest of the all-powerful state.

Stalin was no Ayn Rand-style individualist. He rose to power as a member of a collective. He operated through his career as member of a collective. Stalin did what he did, in his mind, for the good of the collective.

A case can be made that Stalin wasn’t even much of an egotist. Churchill’s memoirs and those of others; descriptions of Stalin at conferences like Teheran, Yalta, and Potsdam; show him to be in personality modest and self-effacing. Rather quiet. A good observer and listener.

We know he lived a modest, even Spartan lifestyle; usually in a small apartment or office in the Kremlin. His technique was that of power behind the scenes. A puppetmaster pulling strings. (As he did during the show trials; unobserved except as the red tip of a cigar behind an enormous screen.) For a long part of his tenure he allowed others to be front man head of state. Sure, he created a cult of personality about himself. He did this first with his mentor Lenin. In his shrewdness Stalin saw that the Russian people needed a god. Unlike Hitler, Stalin was not the kind of megalomaniacal dictator who required the adulation of his people. Famously, Stalin hid from the Russian people.

Stalin’s career stands almost as the triumph of a non-egotist. In person he was the most quiet and humble of the early Bolsheviks—which is why they trusted him and gave him power. His ascension over the vastly more dynamic, charismatic, and egotistical Trotsky was a victory of the quintessential bureaucrat. Of the Machine.

The man known as Joseph Stalin was skilled at handling individualistic egotists, as he showed at Yalta with his skillful negotiations with two men who had two of the largest egos in history, Winston Churchill and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Was FDR an Objectivist?

By Bustillos’ definition, everyone short of Gandhi and Mother Theresa can be classified as an Objectivist. Given their fame, we may as well lump those two into the category as well.

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What of the rest of the Maria Bustillos essay?

Look at it closely and you’ll see it’s filled with distortions. The argument against Alan Greenspan, and the connection between Greenspan and Ayn Rand, is jerry-rigged.

Yes, Greenspan was a core follower of Rand’s. But when he took the Fed job, after Ayn Rand’s death, Alan Greenspan, in Objectivist eyes, joined the camp of the enemy. Objectivists are a species of libertarian. Like all libertarians, they seek the elimination of the Federal Reserve System. A tops-down all-controlling central bank is anathema to them. They see it as a Communistic triumph—not least because the establishment of a central bank is plank#5 of Marx and Engels’ Communist Manifesto. Are not Maria Bustillos and the Awl editors aware of this? This alone discredits the essay’s argument.

One can see why Greenspan took the job—aside from abandoning, as others have done (see George Saunders) many of his youthful beliefs. He might’ve thought that by being inside the Beast, he could moderate its effects. There’s no doubt that if Ayn Rand were alive she would’ve banished him from the Objectivist community—and done it with style. Any economic collapse taking place during his watch would’ve been Greenspan’s just desserts, in her eyes.

But the collapse didn’t take place during his tenure. A financial panic did occur, but not the one in 2008. The stock market collapsed in 1987. Greenspan—and the Reagan administration—quickly limited the damage, and in short time put the Machine back on its feet; operating smoothly. It’s kind of unfair, don’t you think?, for Greenspan, having successfully battled the contradictions and inefficiencies of his own time, to be blamed for the failures of a later date.

Another problem with Bustillos’ argument is that she confuses monetary and fiscal policy. They are two different things. Greenspan may have wanted more deregulation—but he was in charge solely of monetary policy. He was answerable to Congress, and the President, for that. They weren’t answerable to him. Regulation is the domain of law and the enforcement of law. This is handled by Congress and the President. Not by the Fed chairman.

Bustillos uses several out-of-context quotes from Greenspan’s testimony before Congress, when he, like a lot of players, was called to answer for the 2008 fiasco. The fact remains that his only influence on the financial markets was as advisor and cheerleader. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is responsible for regulating the markets. The SEC is a creation of Congress and is answerable to Congress—not to the Fed chairman. Much of what the Congress did with their hearings (as with most congressional hearings) was for show. To evade their own responsibility in the matter. Or: politics, providing fodder for advocate commentators like Maria Bustillos.

As for what caused the 2008 collapse, there’s likely enough blame to go around on all sides, in both parties. An, er, “objective” journalist would see this. The creation of financial and economic bubbles might be instrinsic to the mega-Capitalist system we live in. How you handle them is as important as avoiding them. In both respects, the guy you’d want involved, in at least part of it, would be someone as famously tight as Mr. Greenspan. He did keep the massive bloated machine operating for twenty years, with all its dysfunctions, contradictions, and inefficiencies. No mean feat.

I wonder if Maria Bustillos and The Awl editors are as concerned about new financial bubbles being created, through the massive amounts of  money—created out of thin air—currently being pumped into the Fed system. Do they care? Are they aware it’s happening?

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Another point of Maria Bustillos’ attack is her condemnation of Wall Street. Of so much wealth being funnelled to so few, and at that, those who create nothing themselves, but merely manipulate paper—or numbers on computer screens.

Here again, Maria Bustillos is being unfair, this time to Ayn Rand, who would condemn the crony capitalist manipulators of financial instruments on Wall Street. In both of her big novels, Ayn Rand’s strongest scorn is for that affluent and well-connected layer of “parasites” who suck wealth from the system. Rand lauds instead the producers, the manufacturers, the designers—the actual creators of marketable products. Don’t take my word for it. Read the novels. See for yourself.

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No, Maria Bustillos, like her friend Tom Bissell, isn’t a fair-minded journalist. Like so many other of her peers, she’s a propagandist. The objective is to construct a distorted straw man of your opponent so you can knock it down. The troubling aspect is that her mishmash of inept thought and misrepresentation is taken for legitimate journalism. At least when Ayn Rand put her propaganda onto the pages of novels, she made it coherent and compelling.

Is Maria Bustillos an Objectivist, or a Marxist?

Likely she’s a little of both. But chiefly, Bissell and Bustillos are fashionable liberals who believe in little of nothing. They like the idea of changing this nation’s hierarchies—or of being perceived as liking the idea. They just don’t want to change the hierarchy they work in.

We live in an Age of Propaganda. A time when slanted opinions come at the reader or viewer from every direction. A time when being “well-educated” means having a superficial knowledge of subjects—as Bustillos has—having done some reading or research in the areas one proposes to write about, but (like Tom Bissell with the ULA) having no knowledge in depth. The glibness and facile ethics of the propagandists, and the ignorance of their audience, allows them to get away with it.

And so the essayist can belch up, from his-or-her depths, like a stage medium in performance, a long rant which connects with the prejudices of their readership, and at the same time is plausible enough to be believed by that scantly educated “educated” readership.

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There are reasons, beyond those of ideology and politics, why Ayn Rand has been universally hated (hated not too strong a word) by the established literary community. This, despite her feminism. Despite the reality that most who inhabit the literary scene are not models of altruism, but are instead hugely ambitious, egoistic, often supremely selfish individuals.

That’s one of the reasons right there. Rand’s naked celebration of the artistic ego is too blatant. It conflicts not with the reality of these people, but their adopted face.

The other reason may lie in Ayn Rand’s attacks on artistic cronyism in The Fountainhead. Her depiction of literary dilettantes and fakes. Her satirical scenes are perhaps too close to the way the literary scene operates.

In her essay, Maria Bustillos refers to the gap in the Soviet Union between nomenklatura and the population as if it were Stalin’s doing, and not a natural process inevitable to Marxism; to any attempt to impose upon a people a tops-down controlling state. The inevitable rise of bureaucracy. The unavoidable proliferation of bureaucrats wielding maximum authority.

Isn’t a nomenklatura the affliction of American literature today? To have standing to speak on literary subjects one should be certified; legitimized by academies, or by gates and gatekeepers. The literary herd operates as a unit, intolerant of unfamiliar ideas. It’s a mindset the Underground Literary Alliance fought against. A mindset embodied in Tom Bissell and Maria Bustillos.

Bissell made his career by accommodating powerful literary individuals such as Jonathan Franzen and Dave Eggers. From his days as an intern at Harpers he played the cronyistic game, and has never stopped playing it.

Maria Bustillos, advocate of the downtrodden, was fine with Bissell taking cheap shots at the renegade writers of the ULA. Her own contradictions and the contradictions in today’s literary scene don’t matter to her. Power matters. The Believer/McSweeney’s empire, narcissistic and individualistic to the max, with its own cult leader, is a center of literary power. Would Maria Bustillos mess with these people? I think not. You’ll see no critical essays from her or from anyone about them. So much safer to beat up on outcast American rebels—or on a long-dead American novelist—instead.

Master of Distortion

THE SELLING OF LIES

WHEN HIRED to do a hit job on someone, propagandist Tom Bissell uses many of the same techniques used in his hit piece on the Underground Literary Alliance.

One of the tricks is to get his blatant putdowns out front. He asserts them as fact, planting them in the reader’s head as if they were facts.

For instance, note this sentence from “Euphorias of Perrier,” an essay about Robert D. Kaplan which is also included in the Tom Bissell collection Magic Hours:

“Kaplan's real problem, which has becoming growingly evident is not his Parkinson's grip on history or that he is a bonehead or a warmonger but rather that he is an incompetent thinker and miserable writer.”

The designations given to Robert Kaplan set the tone for the entire essay, predisposing the reader to thinking about the target in Tom Bissell’s terms. It enables Bissell to get away with further distortions that fit the theme he’s laid down.

One could examine the essay, sentence by sentence, pointing out distortions, and spend an entire book doing so, because nearly every sentence is a distortion. The bombardment of misrepresentation is so full it becomes overwhelming. The density of it is too much for the brain to handle at once. The brain is forced to accept the essay in its entirety. Or, we accept the objectivity and good faith of the essayist as a given. We’re not trained to believe it could be a nonstop subtle assault on the truth.

I’ll give one example to show what I’m talking about. Here’s a sentence about the second President Bush, talking about how he changed after 9/11:

“Bush has gone from an isolationist to an interventionist minus the crucial intermediary stage wherein he actually became interested in other places.”

This sounds plausible, doesn’t it? I bought this presentation myself on first examination. It’s a trademark Tom Bissell phrase which comes off as effective and insightful. Surely as solid as any sentence in the book. It’s obviously true.

But is it?

Look at the first part of the sentence, which has George W. Bush entering the Presidency as an isolationist. By “Bush,” we also mean his entire team, which happened to be in this case a very strong team. Two of them, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, ran the first Iraq war for Bush’s father! Added to the team were aggressive individuals like Don “Rummy” Rumsfeld.

Isolationist?

Were any of these people ever going to disengage, Ron Paul-style, from American Empire? Was George W. Bush truly not interested in “other places”? Of course not!

All of them—W included; W being a Bush maybe most of all—had significant investments in that world; in those “other places”; particularly the Mideast, which in Bissell’s narrative they were suddenly expected to disengage from! To call them “isolationist” at any time is an absurdity. They’d be expected, on the contrary, to maintain a strong interest in the world, and to look for opportunities to strengthen their standing, settle scores, and so on. Which is what happened. Why else were they there, in positions of power? Why did they go after those positions? To disengage? To be isolationist?!

How does Tom Bissell get away with calling them isolationist?

He gets away with it because the mass media was selling two narratives about George W. Bush at the beginning of his administration. A minor narrative and a major narrative.

The minor narrative was that George W. Bush was not his father’s son; i.e., the media exaggerated minor personality differences between the two men; even though the fact that W brought in much of his father’s team showed the actual differences between the two men were slight.

The major narrative depicted George W. Bush as an isolationist uninterested in foreign policy—a narrative which was always a lie.

We buy it when Tom Bissell repeats the lie in his Robert D. Kaplan essay because we remember, vaguely, the storyline of George W. Bush as isolationist. The sheer memory of a media talking point has become a fact in our brains.

When you have a media without scruples, containing an essayist without scruples, willing to pile on distortion after distortion, lie after lie, to create an intended effect, you’re dealing with propaganda at its most masterful and devious.

How Corrupt Is Corrupt?

THE INTENT TO SMEAR

If the 2012 republication by McSweeney’s of Tom Bissell’s attack essay against the Underground Literary Alliance was the continuation of a vendetta by McSweeney’s against the Underground Literary Alliance, the Oxford American review of Bissell’s book by Johannes Lichtman takes the feud one step farther. The review condenses several of Tom Bissell’s misrepresentations and falsehoods into one paragraph at the top of the review for stronger effect.

The intent behind the smear has to be questioned, in that Oxford American editor Roger D. Hodge is Tom Bissell’s long-time friend and patron. They worked together at Harper’s magazine in 1996-97. Bissell has singled out Hodge for thanks in book acknowledgments. Hodge, while a Harper’s editor in the 2000’s, was apparently key in establishing Bissell’s career as an essayist.

Roger Hodge was at the center of questionable behavior while a Harper’s editor—behavior which the ULA covered.

(For an objective look at one of the issues, see this article by Tom Scocca-- http://observer.com/2004/05/off-the-record-54/ Scroll down the page to get to the Centralia fire matter. I covered this story as a follow-up to another possible Harper’s plagiarism issue early in 2005.)

Can we believe that Bissell and Hodge had no role whatsoever in Lichtman’s hatchet job review? Consider the history, then reread Lichtman’s review, which viciously goes after the ULA from the outset: http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2012/nov/27/indiecent-exposure-tom-bissell/

Tom Bissell won’t answer questions here about his ULA essay—he’s been caught laughing at these posts on Facebook—but he’s apparently not above encouraging more smears, coming from once-reputable sources.

It’s an example of how corrupt the established literary world is now. Once-prestigious literary journals like Oxford American are mere tools to use for the personal settling of scores. To use the Oxford American in this way smears the journal itself as much as it smears the Underground Literary Alliance. Truth, objectivity, and integrity have been trampled.

Is the established literary scene in such shaky shape that it needs to spend a year smearing a writers advocacy group which is no longer active? Esteemed outlets like New York Times, L.A. Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, and many others have joined in kicking around a whistle-blowing outfit whose crime was exposing cronyism and corruption at the highest levels of the literary scene, involving some of the lit world’s most powerful figures. You don’t do that and easily get away with it—and so the vendetta by the literary establishment against the ULA continues.

The Power of McSweeney’s

THE FIRST INACCURACY

WHEN I discovered the Johannes Lichtman review of Magic Hours in the Oxford American, a review which smears the Underground Literary Alliance in its first paragraph, I sent Lichtman a brief email asserting that Tom Bissell’s essay was dishonest and filled with distortions. Lichtman’s response was, predictably, filled with condescension, defensiveness, and hostility. He said, “—show me the specific sentence where I (not Bissell) wrote something inaccurate—“

I found the sentence he’s looking for at the very outset, before Lichtman’s review itself, before any Tom Bissell quotes, when Lichtman describes Magic Hours as “—a book from a small, independent publisher.”

How small and independent—how “indie”—is the McSweeney’s outfit?

I could write a book on the matter, but I don’t have the space here for a book. I made a brief examination of the McSweeney’s organization. I found:

-McSweeney’s chief Dave Eggers is published by one of the biggest book companies in the business, Random House, which in turn is owned by the gigantic media conglomerate Bertelsmann. All paperback versions of Dave’s novels are published by Random House.

-Dave Eggers is celebrated by the literary establishment, as evidenced by his having won a Literarian Award from the National Book Foundation, and been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

-McSweeney’s is regularly involved in joint publishing ventures with these huge outfits. For instance, the yearly Best American Non-Required Reading series is a joint project with Houghton-Mifflin. The relationship has been ongoing for ten years.

-Eggers wife Vendela Vida, co-editor of McSweeney’s flagship The Believer, is published by HarperCollins, owned by the Rupert Murdoch media empire.

-Believer co-editor Heidi Julavits is published by Doubleday, part of Random House, which is part of Bertelsmann.

-Regular Believer contributor and long-time ULA antagonist Daniel Handler is a hugely successful author estimated to be worth a few hundred million dollars. His books are cranked out by two corporate publishers, HarperCollins and Little, Brown. Here’s an article about the author, from the New York Times, which discusses Handler’s immense wealth:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/magazine/10lives-t.html

-National TV celebrity Amy Sedaris is regular contributor to The Believer. She does a monthly column for the journal entitled “Sedaritives.”

-Other regular contributors to The Believer are successful, award-winning authors published by the “Big Six,” who also carry clout within the halls of literature. Rick Moody and Jonathan Lethem are two of them.

-McSweeney’s cultivates relationships with international celebrities who are themselves controlled by conglomerates. In 2010, McSweeney’s published a collection of writing edited by famed movie director Judd Apatow. Contributors included Jon Stewart, David Sedaris, Adam Sandler, and Steve Martin, as well as big-name dead writers like F. Scott Fitzgerald. Most recently, McSweeney’s published a book by internationally known rock musician David Byrne.

-Big name authors published by flagship boutique journal McSweeney’s include Jonathan Franzen and Joyce Carol Oates.

-The McSweeney’s gang has a business relationship with at least one of the influential media outlets which review their books. Note this announcement at Salon.com from 4/15/10 in which Salon editor Kerry Lauerman announced “Our new partnership with McSweeney’s.”

http://www.salon.com/2010/04/15/mcsweeneys_2/

Incidentally, in 2012 Tom Bissell, himself a former Salon writer, was the subject of a gushy profile by Salon writer Katie Ryder titled “Secrets of Creation,” about Bissell’s McSweeney’s-published book.

-Dave Eggers and McSweeney’s books are regularly reviewed and lauded in America’s three main establishment book review outlets, New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and The New Yorker. This is evidence of a large profile and major media approval. Eggers is regularly profiled in large circulation glossies like Vanity Fair.

-McSweeney’s has established relationships with city bureaucracies not just in San Francisco, their home base, and Brooklyn, but across the country. For example, the City of Philadelphia named Dave Eggers’ What Is the What the selection for its “One Book, One Philadelphia” celebration for 2008, the novel the centerpiece of lectures, panel discussions, exhibits, and other activities throughout the city.

-One of the fundraising arms of the McSweeney’s empire is 826 National, founded by Dave and Vendela, an educational service with chapters in Los Angeles, Ann Arbor, San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, Brooklyn, and Washington D.C. These outlets include boutique retail stores.

Supporters of 826 National include notable public figures James Franco, Robin Williams, Zadie Smith, Phil Jackson, Ira Glass, Jon Stewart, Spike Jonze—who co-authored a movie screenplay with Dave Eggers—and many others.

Board members of 826 National, in addition to Dave Eggers, include a Director of Corporate Communications at J.P. Morgan; an “Investor” at Comatus Capital; a California Deputy Attorney General, the Deputy Counsel to the Mayor of New York City; a Vice President at Time Warner Cable; a Senior Vice President and Senior Portfolio Manager at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney; and others.

Major donors to 826 National include Google and Microsoft.

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These aren’t slurs, Mr. Lichtman, though Dave Eggers and his gang may take them as such. They’re documented fact.

“Dave Eggers is the most powerful individual in today’s U.S. literary world,” is an opinion.

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Here’s another take on the McSweeney’s organization:

http://www.mobylives.com/Backlash.html

Note that this piece is from 2002, when journalists and writers were still free to express truths about the literary world. Yet hints about “backlash” from the literary establishment’s media lapdogs are present in the article.

Since 2002, McSweeney’s has grown only more influential and powerful.

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When Johannes Lichtman, at an Oxford American blog devoted to indie literature, designates the McSweeney’s organization as “a small, independent publisher,” is this accurate?

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(Buy the satirical novel The McSweeney’s Gang at Nook or Kindle.)

Reasons to Defend the ULA

Why do I continue to defend the Underground Literary Alliance against overwhelming odds?

Maybe only in memory of key co-founder of the ULA, Steve Kostecke, who died last year. I’ve heard he’d been looking forward to the group’s revival. He always strongly believed in the ULA’s ideals.

Can I allow those ideals to be ruthlessly crushed into the ground?

Those who continue to attack the ULA are attacking a defunct organization. Over a year ago, the citizen journalist site iNewp published a report from me titled “A Tale of Two Literary Worlds.” The brief essay outlined the ULA’s fate. No date is given at the post. It went up some time in the fall of 2011. Note that I pointedly used as reference point not the McSweeney’s crowd, but another group of writers.

http://inewp.com/?p=8888

2011 was a bad year for the remnants of the ULA organization.

Was 2012 much better? It witnessed the republication of Tom Bissell’s essay on us, an essay filled with untruths and misrepresentations. This reappearance was an excuse for segments of the established literary world to engage in their own slurs against the ULA, beginning with a Kirkus Reviews piece in February which applauded Bissell’s “ferocity and brutal wit” against us. Many shots from other reviewers followed. Even in the New York Times.

Possibly the worst of them is a recent (11/27/12) hit piece by Johannes Lichtman at the esteemed Oxford American. Lichtman’s short review is loaded with smears and inaccuracies, including at least one outright lie.

http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2012/nov/27/indiecent-exposure-tom-bissell/

Without realizing it, Johannes Lichtman has done us a favor. In condensing many (by no means all) of Tom Bissell’s slurs against the ULA into a short piece, Lichtman emphasizes the mendacity of Bissell’s essay, revealing it as the hit piece it was intended to be. I’ll have more to say about this review and the motives behind it.

A year-long assault against a defunct organization for downtrodden writers—the detractors backed by great power and money. What was the ULA’s great crime? Exposing corruption in the literary grants scene, involving those at the highest levels of establishment literature. You don’t disturb those kind of players and easily get away with it. We find the tools of such players acting with malice again and again against the slightest evidence of the memory of literary dissent, using the lit world’s most prestigious mouthpieces.

The McSweeneys Gang is mild satire indeed when confronting this crew.

I have no choice but to fight for dissent’s memory.

The Art of Propaganda

Is it madness to obsess over the Tom Bissell essay on the ULA?

Yes and no. Yes, in that the ULA campaign was pure madness from its very beginning. If you want to change anything in this world, it involves a level of madness.

No, in that when you examine an object from all sides, break it down like a watch into its parts and put it together again, you begin to understand how the thing operates—which also gains you understanding of the mind of the object’s creator.

Bissell’s essay, for instance, is a collection of dishonest statements and presentations surrounded by empty assertions. Yet journalists bought this presentation.

I have a fictional character in my new satirical ebook named Mr. Empathy. He’s based loosely on Bissell. In the sole chapter he’s in, Mr. Empathy describes his propaganda techniques to “Boss Eggers,” a fictional character based loosely on Dave Eggers.

How did I learn Bissell’s techniques? When I reread the essay, I was struck by the disconnect between Tom Bissell’s presentation of the ULA, and the reality. I was well placed to know the reality, having founded, with a few others, the organization, and been with it throughout its history. I know the entity “ULA” as no one like Tom Bissell could possibly know it. In the essay Bissell presents distortion after distortion AS IF these distortions are reality.

The distortions then become exaggerated by others. For instance, in the ULA essay Bissell says that George Plimpton had gone into his debate with the ULA “with high hopes and fellow feeling but grew swiftly disgusted” by what the ULA was about. First, Plimpton had corresponded with me for several years, had been a reader of my 90’s zeen, and well knew what I and the ULA were about. Second, at the debate everyone had a great time. We left on good terms. Ask anyone who was there—including the CBGB’s bartenders. Plimpton’s purported disgust had to have come later.

Bissell’s distorted, ill-informed remark is then distorted further by others, such as Ed Champion-- “Bat Segundo”—who in his interview with Tom Bissell this year presents Plimpton as having invited us to an event (we invited him to ours) and then been treated rudely—when in reality we treated the old dog with utmost respect. Those who heard the Segundo interview will likely distort events further.

Slippage between truth and presentation.

Bissell’s distortions have been accepted by the literary world as a true narrative, AS the reality. Again, the same question: Why have intelligent journalists and writers bought the false presentation?

The essay becomes a Rosetta Stone for understanding the entire mainstream media. Bissell is an integral part of that media. In no way does he stand outside it. He’s embedded himself within it. His distortions then aren’t simply a conscious attempt to smear the ULA—though that’s part of it. He’s channeling the literary world’s herd mind; expressing that mind; to do this, acting not like objective commentator, so much as a ventriloquist’s dummy. This is why the essay receives unquestioning acceptance by its Insider audience. That audience, through its unconscious wishes, wrote that essay. Bissell is giving the audience exactly what they already believe about the ULA—or about writers like those in the ULA. He’s expressing what they want to read.

Case in point is the unfair slam against underground writer Urban Hermitt. Bissell takes an excerpt of Hermitt’s writing out of context, then bolsters his presentation with an excerpted comment by myself, adds a few snarky words—and his audience applauds because he’s cutting down a writer who ostensibly doesn’t belong; who presumptively doesn’t belong; who couldn’t possibly be a good writer. (Urban Hermitt in fact is a terrific writer, though one who, yes, colors outside the acceptable lines.) One of the reviewers, Maria Bustillos, literally applauded in her review of the Bissell book at this point. The everpresent question: Why?

Bissell wasn’t giving her the watch—the object being examined—with his essay on the ULA. He wasn’t giving Maria Bustillos a bad two-dimensional photograph of the watch. He gave her a scribbled sketch of a distant glance of the watch. For Bustillos and others, this faked glimpse was all that was required for her approval, and more than approval, enthusiastic commendation. A mere fragment of reality thrown into a mix of dishonesty and fakery. It’s the essence of propaganda to connect with the herd mind, with the presumptions, premises, and prejudices of that mind, to stimulate the preconceptions in a happy way so that they know that their mind, their beliefs, their herd, all the totality of their world is well and fine, so the herd continues along untroubled not thinking about anything.

(Upcoming: a note about the physics of propaganda.)

Silent Tom

Tom Bissell and Dave Eggers initiated a fight with the remnants of the Underground Literary Alliance, and now are nowhere in sight. Where are they? They're good at beating up a straw man they think won't fight back-- but now the straw man is fighting back. Bissell and Eggers are fleeing.

What kind of "great" writer (per Hillary Frey's designation) perpetuates distortions and malicious slurs against a defunct writers group, then when someone calls him on it is unwilling to enter the arena of debate?

It's a sign of the corrupt and phony condition of today's literary scene.

Can They Defend the Essay?

THE FLAWED PRODUCT

Essayist Tom Bissell and the folks at The Believer are like manufacturers who put out a product, and after the product is discovered to be defective they’re nowhere to be found. No response to criticism. Survey Believer headquarters—lights off, nobody home.

If they have knowledge of the Tylenol strategy they don’t show it. No readiness to withdraw the product from shelves or make amends to the consumer. (In this case, though, the consumers are elitist literary people who may enjoy seeing underground writers unfairly kicked around. See Maria Bustillos and others.)

The questions are: The integrity of Tom Bissell as a writer, and the credibility of McSweeney’s as an organization. McSweeney’s and Dave Eggers have invested a great deal of energy in establishing themselves as advocates for the downtrodden. Everything in Tom Bissell’s Believer essay runs counter to this carefully manufactured image. One would think they’d be eager to resolve the dispute.

Deconstructing Falsehood

THE BAT SEGUNDO TOM BISSELL INTERVIEW

Does the truth matter?

What can you do with a journalist, as in my recent exchange, who's helped smear a populist writers group, who refuses to examine the truth of the matter, and instead blindly clings to a distorted version?

"Don't bother me with the truth" is the attitude.

There's a point at which a false narrative becomes truth, simply due to the narrative's widespread acceptance.

It may be that Tom Bissell himself has accepted his own distortions, and the rationalizations for the distortions.

Listen to this interview, to the section referring to the Underground Literary Alliance (begins minute 26 or so). The discussion between Tom Bissell and Ed Champion, on Champions "Bat Segundo" show, is a contest to see how many lies can be crammed into a five minute time period.

http://www.edrants.com/the-bat-segundo-show-tom-bissell-part-two/

Tom Bissell speaks of his "attempt to take them seriously"; "to extend them some empathy when no one would."

These statements are untrue on a number of fronts.

First, Tom Bissell wrote his essay when the ULA was being covered by media across the nation and in other parts of the world. There'd been the numerous write-ups in "Page Six"; countless on-line stories in places like MobyLives and the Alternet; feature articles in alternative papers like the Boston Phoenix and Philadelphia Weekly, including a big article in Village Voice written by Bissell's current boss, Hillary Frey. (Mainstream media is a small world.) Also major write-ups in Soma and the Brown Daily Herald. At the same time The Believer essay came out, the ULA was the subject of feature articles in Black Book magazine (by Bruno Maddox) and the Glasgow Herald (by Aaron Hicklin).

But today, Tom says only he dared cover us! Only he cared, I guess.

Tom Bissell, then, is lying, not just to Ed Champion and the Bat Segundo audience. He's also lying to himself.

Second, Bissell's statements in the interview about his "empathy" ignore the context within which his essay was written. It was commisioned by The Believer, a Dave Eggers flagship, at a time Eggers was engulfed in an intense feud with the Underground Literary Alliance. How can this context be ignored? Bissell acts like he brought forth his essay out of the blue, purely from good intentions, and presented it, all by himself, to the world.

In the Bat Segundo interview, Bissell claims that he wanted to "entertain the possibility that some of the complaints were true." Yet he never looked into our major complaints, in which we documented instances of corruption in the literary world. In the Believer essay, Bissell finessed these matters. He surely didn't address them head-on or take them seriously.

On his part, Ed Champion's questions to Bissell border on the slanderous. I see what he's doing-- trying to be agreeable to his subject to get him to talk-- but in so doing, Ed throws the ULA completely under the bus, while also showing he doesn't know what he's talking about. (Or, his source is the widespread false narrative about us.)

For instance, Ed says, "George Plimpton of course makes this effort to invite them in, and of course they behave boorishly. . . ."

"Of course." Really, Ed? What's your source? You weren't there, unless you were hiding under a table.

The truth is that we invited George Plimpton to debate us. It was our event, not his. We had a contentiously exciting debate, then both teams sat down and had beers together. We parted amicably.

This is the TRUTH of what happened, not any after-the-fact distorted false narrative.

Ed Champion talks of "a duty to invite them in," "to go through the pain of an insulting boor," "even if they shit in our face." He says "go ahead and spit in our face," as if we ever did this. Many of his listeners will believe we did this. This is how false narratives are created. (The added irony is that Ed has often attacked me publicly on-line, while I've attempted to be civil in my dealings with him.)

No one, incidentally, ever invited us in! What a falsehood. All attention we received, from a closed and cronyistic literary world, we worked for. We did, yes, crash a few events on our own, with bought tickets some times but no gilt-edged invites. We asked embarrassing questions-- all that was ever required to get us thrown out.

Bissell, for his part, plays the injured party, and tells Ed Champion in aggrieved fashion, "you can't negotiate with someone who's going to crap in the room."

What does he mean by this? That I've stood up for myself when no one would? That the ULA's writers asked to be treated as equals?

Since what angered the literary establishment, including Dave Eggers, most of all were our exposes of corruption involving some of the biggest names in the lit-biz-- why doesn't Bissell say this? It's highly misleading to attribute the hostility we generated simply to "boorishness" or "bad behavior." Though I guess speaking about things one ought not to speak about is considered bad behavior by the In crowd.

In the Bat Segundo interview, as in his reprinted Believer essay, we still see Tom Bissell pitching his false narrative about the Underground Literary Alliance.

(Feedback from the parties involved is welcomed.)

Was Tom Bissell’s Essay Malicious?

Was Tom Bissell’s Believer essay about the Underground Literary Alliance, reprinted this year in Magic Hours by McSweeney’s Books, of malicious intent?

One way to judge is to look at reactions to the essay from recent reviewers.

The very influential Kirkus Reviews said this:

“Bissell can tear into his subjects with a ferocity and brutal wit that recalls Dwight MacDonald, as when he writes about the would-be literary provocateurs of the Underground Literary Alliance.”

In her review of Bissell’s Magic Hours in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Maria Bustillos calls the ULA “a bunch of noisy, not-too-talented zinesters who tried to form a literary movement.” Maria Bustillos goes on to applaud a Tom Bissell cheap shot against one of the best zine writers around, Urban Hermitt. I’m sure Bustillos has never read Hermitt’s work. Tom Bissell read only an excerpt.

By the way, Tom Bissell is listed on the L.A. Review of Books masthead as a Contributing Editor.

Lesser lights, taking their cues from the Bissell essay, also took their shots. For instance, video gamer Matthew Rickart, while applauding Bissell’s book, called ULAers “bitter children” and “hackneyed.”

Brian Wolowitz, at the site Spectrum Culture, first notes Bissell’s “ambivalent” attitude toward the ULA, then claims “he often attempts to understand or defend easily dismissible figures like the clownishly clueless ULA members. . . .”

If Brian concludes we’re merely clownish, then what kind of defense of us has Bissell made?

The answer is given in a Tom Scocca Bookforum piece on Tom Bissell, in which Scocca calls Bissell’s ULA essay “a masterpiece of tactics.” It’s exactly that, if the essay was able to convince some writers that Bissell was being even-handed at the same time he eviscerated us.

Part of the problem is that the natural sympathies of most of these reviewers is with Bissell, in that he’s placed himself where they seek to place themselves, within the approved literary hierarchy, accepting and defending the status quo. The other part of the problem is that their view of the Underground Literary Alliance is filtered through the prism of Tom Bissell’s biased and distorted essay. They accept his premises as a given.

Any Word from Garth Hallberg?

Has Garth Hallberg said anything about his misguided statement dissing the ULA? Will he defend the statement, or, apologize?

Attempting to ignore legitimate criticism seems cowardly. If you can't defend your statements, why make them?

Hallberg's mistake was to take Tom Bissell's essay on the ULA at face value.

Intent

What was the intent behind resuming the attack on underground writers?

We face the idea that Dave Eggers wishes to culturally assassinate the genuine article-- why he's sought to wipe out all memory of the DIY populist writers of the Underground Literary Alliance. (DIY not just in stance, but reality.) Attain this end, and he can present himself in our stead. Wasn't this the intent behind the curious additions to the Tom Bissell essay? As Bissell has been reading these blog posts-- and remarking on them in safety-- perhaps he can answer this question for us.

Who was behind the changes to the essay? What was the motivation?

(It's the kind of question the questionable "journalists" who did puff pieces on Bissell should have asked him.)

Tom Bissell, and by extension Dave Eggers, look great and intelligent because they're never challenged, and  never allowed to be challenged. Competition to them strictly restricted for their safety.

Meanwhile, former ULAers from Frank Walsh to Jack Saunders to Eric Broomfield among others, like myself, don't need to find Third World stand-ins to exploit. We don't have to buy our credibility. I've lived out of a duffel bag for years, bouncing along the underside of America. (Which I'll be portraying in my next e-book. Or see my Mood Detroit. Priced for the 99%.) I live my stance and my words. I'm not wearing a borrowed cloak, nor striking a phony pose.

An Open Note to Dave Eggers

A PEACE GESTURE

I previously mentioned Dave Eggers’ 6/20/05 public rebuke of his former puppet Neal Pollack. More interesting than the takedown itself are some of the things Eggers said to defend and explain himself. I quote:

“—my hope that whatever came next in the literary world would be different, mellower, less tense, less rivalrous”

“it . . . continues to be our goal at The Believer, that the literary world could be one of community, of mutual support . . . and that anyone pissing in the very small and fragile ecosystem that is the literary world is mucking it up for everyone. . . .”

One can disagree with Eggers’ sentiments on several points.

1.) His is a plea to leave things as they are. The status quo. Which is fine from his perspective, because it leaves Dave Eggers at the center of literary power.

2.) What exactly does Dave Eggers mean by “community”? Who’s included? I’m reminded of the Orwell quote, “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.”

3.) The mindset Eggers advocates could be likened to the stale peace of a totalitarian world. It’s like the word Islam, which means, “obedience,” and which some feckless souls take to mean “peace.” Peace equals obedience.

4.) I’ve always contended that the “very small” literary ecosystem Eggers talks about would grow in multiples A.) if it allowed alternative voices from different backgrounds and new, more populist styles of writing through its doors; B.) if it were more contentious and rivalrous; to make noise so that society knows it exists. For this you’d need to throw open the thick doors to the stuffy private club.

BUT, let’s take Dave Eggers’ statements at face value. If he was sincere in what he said—then why republish the Tom Bissell attack essay against the Underground Literary Alliance? The ULA had fragmented, in part because of the endless recession this country is in, which hurts those writers at the bottom most. Why kick us when we were down, and not a threat to anyone? The ULA campaign was in the past. Last decade’s story. We were now, all of us, struggling to sell our individual writings, and scarcely needed scornful attacks appearing across the literary landscape as a result of the reappearance of the Bissell tome. Attacks in the New York Times, L.A. Times, Guernica, Kirkus Reviews, and other places. What was Dave’s purpose, other than being “rivalrous” and “pissing in the very small and fragile ecosystem that is the literary world”? Surely, no writers group was in a more fragile condition than we were. We have no trust funds, inheritances, elite connections, tax shelter foundations or banker daddys to fall back on.

I then ask Dave Eggers to prove he’s for real by repudiating the Tom Bissell essay. Reprinting that at this time was a slap in the face on a section of American writers. An assault on true representatives of the 99%. It says there will be no end of rivalries—that it’s Dave Eggers, no one else, carrying on feuds. For him to publicly disavow that essay is the minimum that can be asked. It was a mistake to reprint the biased essay and it will be a bigger mistake for him to stand behind that severely flawed document.

Power Used Against the Powerless

THE ARROGANCE OF LITERARY POWER

McSweeneys Books shouldn’t have included the smear essay against the Underground Literary Alliance in Tom Bissell’s Magic Hours. What was the point? Bissell wasn’t attacking and slurring the powerful, but the powerless—an organization which was already broken; many of whose writers are broken. This enabled various literary people in outlets as diverse as the New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, Los Angeles Times, and Guernica magazine to take ill-informed shots at the ULA and its writers. That they did so was revealing—showing that the liberal pose of these people is just that: a pose. McSweeneys included.

The truth of the matter is that McSweeneys IS the One Percent. Dave Eggers IS the One Percent. Vendela Vida IS the One Percent. Many of their good friends, Rick Moody, Daniel Handler, and many others, ARE the One Percent. These are writers of privilege—in some cases, extreme privilege—who are out of touch with the struggles of the bulk of the American populace. No doubt many of them this moment are vacationing at their summer resorts.

What did they attack in the Underground Literary Alliance—in 2003 and again in 2012? They attacked the ONLY American writers group which has never kowtowed to the One Percent, is not dominated or owned or paid by the One Percent, has no connections whatsoever to the One Percent. An organization which was founded to stand up for the underdog, against power. You’d have a hard time saying these things about any other writers group—including the most “liberal” of them, PEN among them, which in reality are little more than playthings for the very One Percent they pretend to stand against. The hypocrisy is mind-boggling.

History will judge the truth of the matter.

Inside or Outside?

Here's another example of puff piece journalism, by Garth Risk Hallberg, in this instance at the most powerful flagship of them all:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/magic-hours-essays-by-tom-bissell.html?pagewanted=all

What can we say about the review, and where it appears, and so about Bissell and Hallberg themselves? (Or how the review is written?) Are these two writers Insiders or Outsiders? What do you think?

Are they not fully Insiders-- as Inside the literary power system as one can possibly get? Can we speculate that said book wouldn't have been reviewed-- and the review wouldn't have been so positive-- if the book weren't published by McSweeney's? When's the last time a writer or journalist took on the McSweeney's empire? What was the result?

Garth Hallberg of course is sympathetic to Bissell's book out of natural inclination. They're both members of America's intellectual "New Class." Their attitudes are similar, or they wouldn't be where they are. Their viewpoints are acceptable to the literary and media status quo. Hallberg is also at least subliminally aware of how power works in the literary world. He's making his way inside the system. One doesn't rise within the apparatus by questioning it.

We have in literature today not intellectuals, but bureaucrats.

(I invite either Garth Hallberg or Tom Bissell to comment. But you see, they can't. That's not allowed.)

Other Thoughts

YET ANOTHER ASIDE

I finally listened to the Bat Segundo interview with Tom Bissell. I have to give Ed Champion a grudging nod for pressing that cut-rate Eggers wannabe on the ULA and the current stagnant literary scene, which the Underground Literary Alliance unsuccessfully sought to change. The interview was interesting to me for a couple of reasons.

I noted Bissell’s innate superiority complex. He actually believes he was doing us a favor by trashing us in the essay—and maybe he was, because the prevalent view was to give us no notice whatsoever. Most of that crowd would rather have kicked us into the gutter. Tom Bissell by contrast threw us a few pennies-- “here, you peasants”—and thought he was being generous. Forget all the distortions in the essay, Tom. “Classocide.” We should be thanking you. Do I exaggerate? Slightly—but notice that the tone is to treat us as the Other-- “from that social milieu”—and not in any way approaching equals. His phrasing accepts, contrary to his misleading essay, the hierarchical power relationships that do exist in the literary world, of which Ed seeks to give his audience a glimpse. Tom Bissell states that I’d be impossible “to negotiate with,” because I’d “never be satisfied,” whatever that means. That I’d expect to be treated not as a hat-in-hand beggar, but an equal? That’s not how that world operates. “Negotiate.”

Bissell goes on to claim that one could “negotiate” with others of “that” milieu. Yet no one negotiated with the ULA after I broke with the team. An alternative outsiders group was created by former ULAers expecting to be accepted by the lit scene with open arms, once they were free of evil me. Boy, were they disappointed. They’re still waiting for their negotiation, I think. At least four individual ULA writers left the ULA in hopes of cutting a deal. There’s no point in naming them. They’re quite sad stories. Their rewards/payoffs were ridiculously minor. One of them was allowed to place a fawning essay on an insider website. Another is the token poor guy someplace. That kind of thing.

Tom Bissell and Ed Champion at least implicitly recognize that the world consists of leverage and power, where terms do need to be negotiated. The premise of the ULA recognized this—that only by creating leverage, by applying pressure, would we be allowed any kind of a voice. It’s the way of the world. The altruistic empathy of characters like the Dave and his various low-priced Bissell knockoffs is a pose for the gullible, nothing else.

p.s. A small correction to the interview. George Plimpton didn’t invite the ULA to an event. We invited him—to debate us at CBGB’s in New York City. To his credit, the establishment literary warrior showed up. Unlike all others of his breed, George Plimpton was fearless. He and his preppy staff were badly out of their depth, of course. Like throwing well-groomed poodles in with pit bulls. The Underground Literary Alliance then was the most exciting lit group on the planet. After the debate George and I, as respective leaders of our teams, had a polite chat over beers, while the old dog’s eyes popped-out at the see-through dress of our at-the-time zeen babe. George and I had an interesting talk, in which he probed my commitment to the ULA’s ideas. Not quite the way it’s portrayed. There were other dynamics going on. The real story is more interesting than a third-hand hearsay version. 

Have a good day!

Literary Citizens United

TOM BISSELL’S FAULTY ESSAY PART IV

That Tom Bissell’s biased and inaccurate essay is allowed to define the legacy of the Underground Literary Alliance, while reviewers applaud or look the other way, shows the importance of connections and standing in this society. A democracy? Not hardly. Bissell is backed by power and money, so his becomes the accepted version of the story. I could correct his distortions here for a year, and it wouldn’t change a thing. My response will be hardly read, and will be steadfastly ignored by those with literary influence who do read it. Falsehood wins the day. My Crime City USA ebook isn’t just a fictional story.

REAL LITERARY CLASSOCIDE

The irony about Tom Bissell’s false accusations against the ULA is that literary classocide has taken place in America. Populist styles of writing have been delegitimized and marginalized by the so-called literary mainstream. As I’ve already pointed out, naturalism, once the major stream of American letters, is one of those styles. The Underground Literary Alliance, which advocated a wide variety of literary populism, from the humor-pop of Wred Fright to the east Texas dialect outlaw tales of Wild Bill Blackolive to Michael Jackman’s pure naturalism to many other kinds. Tom Bissell’s distorted essay was one of the tools used to derail our movement.

Former ULA writers are around. They could be spotlighted now. Where are the many “liberal” lit outfits who constantly beat their chests about the 99%? Tom Bissell’s refined style of lit—so, so obsolete in the marketplace and among Americans generally—receives reviews and write-ups. Where are the authentic populist writers? Where are their profiles and write-ups? Why are not Salon, Slate, n+1, Guernica Mag, and all the others, in this day of Occupy, covering populists? Banker’s sons only need apply. The only style these sites and magazines seem to like is the style of urban haute literary bourgeoisie. Brooklyn hipster lit, if you will—refined and irrelevant. The same-old same-old. True mediocrity, because for all its refinement it has little to say, has few ideas, is largely pose.

THE UNEVEN PLAYING FIELD

All the Underground Literary Alliance asked for was a level playing field. Because we won the arguments we engaged in with the refined crowd, they panicked. All coverage, all debate, all discussion by us or about us was shut down. The false narrative about the ULA became the dominant narrative.

The result? Writers from the bottom levels of American society, without certifications, connections, or funds, who write in unfamiliar ways about little glimpsed realities, who present ideas which are contrary to those of the literary establishment and sometimes offensive to them, and who’ve documented financial corruption and cronyism within the literary system, are never heard. Bissell has ultimate gall calling the ULA “authoritarian,” when the system he defends—with the way it deals with alternate ideas and alternative writers—defines the term.

THE MONOLITH

Tom Bissell has scorned the idea of an organized literary system. Yet to me the system moves in lockstep, as unconsciously organized and compliant as a beehive. Look at the example of the Underground Literary Alliance and our brief but contentious rebellion. What was the result? The Machine that Bissell insists doesn’t exist embraced in totality the corruption of our targets.

Was there, say, 20% of the literary scene that took our side of the story, and 80% the side of the McSweeney’s Gang? 5% our side? 1%? No. The established lit scene became 100% opposed to us, though the facts and the truth of the matter were on our side. The members of the literary beehive knew that to do otherwise was suicide. I call that a monolith. The reason for it is that in literature today, money and power, which Bissell’s backers have in abundance, wield enormous clout. Established literary folk can sign all the Occupy Writers petitions they want. It means nothing. I know and they know it’s bullshit. In their clubby little world, such gestures will change nothing.

APPROPRIATION

The journalists who’ve interviewed Tom Bissell or reviewed his book have failed to ask the obvious questions. For one, questions about additions to the essay’s original version. Who wanted those changes? For what reason?

The changes consist of phrases or arguments portraying Dave Eggers as, of all things, a zinester. We’re brought back to the ULA’s original conflict with him. With the ULA a virtual corpse, Eggers can do now what he wanted to do then—namely, appropriate the authenticity and credibility of the independent zine scene for himself. Isn’t this how it’s usually done in American culture? The genuine article is wiped out, while the big money boys move in to play the role.

WHO CONTROLS LITERATURE?

This is the ultimate question that preening literary folk, in Brooklyn, San Francisco, or elsewhere, need to answer. The motto of the zine scene, as expressed in the pages of Zine World (aka A Reader’s Guide to the Underground Press) has long been, “Free Speech Belongs to Everyone.” Does it? Or does it belong only to those with the biggest megaphone? To whom does American literature belong? To self-appointed mandarins in ivory towers cut off from the living currents of American culture? To Big Money power boys sustained by relationships to the Big Six? Or does not literature belong to all of us?

Bissell’s Distortions

ASSESSING TOM BISSELL PART II

What of Tom Bissell’s essay itself? Retitled for Magic Hours as “Grief and the Outsider,” it appears to the eye roughly similar to the original version, though an additional “grief” or two may have been added to the narrative, for effect.

“Literature is always written by outsiders,” the essay begins. This is ridiculous on its face. Bissell’s statement is a refusal to make distinctions. It’s an attempt to strip the words “outsider” and “insider” of meaning—but it appeals to the self-image of Bissell’s audience: The Believer’s upscale staff and its hipster readership, who truly want to believe in what Bissell is selling them. Tom must believe he’s dealing with quite the gullible audience, because he goes on to say that John Updike, who virtually lived at The New Yorker, was an outsider. Bissell likely threw this in as a test of how much he could get away with.

In the essay, Tom Bissell presents a bizarro universe where down is up, up is down, victims turn into victimizers and victimizers into victims. We see in the real world Bissell and his mentors circulating their words everywhere, including in mass circulation flagship publications. ULAers, meanwhile, aren’t to be seen anyplace. From 2003 Tom Bissell has received the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Not quite an outsider himself.

Quickly enough in the essay, the members  of the Underground Literary Alliance are called “no-talent whiners” (from a New York editor) as well as “thuggish, cruel, and petty.” They, ULAers, “cause distress to fellow writers” Bissell assures us-- I guess by the ULA’s very existence-- and “they manage to achieve true menace.”

Tom Bissell does concede a few innocuous points. With the “fair” part of his presentation over with, he descends to the heart of his attack. Bissell paints the ULA as having “a stolid refusal to accept anyone who goes about his or her artistic life differently than the ULA.”

All evidence demonstrates, then and now, the opposite: the refusal of those who wield real literary power to accept writers who don’t play by the accepted rules or who don’t take the acceptable path. Chad Harbach: “We’re all MFA’s now.”

Tom Bissell then begins a long analogy between the Underground Literary Alliance and the censorship of the Bolsheviks. The ULA, mind you, was protesting the stagnation of literary bureaucracy, but dare not let truth intrude into the conversation. Bissell tells us that in Russia, “hundreds of independent newspapers . . . were crushed.”

Never mind that the ULA sprung from a diverse scene of hundreds of independent publications, with no ties whatsoever to any monolith. What side does Bissell think we’re on? He compares us with Soviet Glavlit, of all things, when a tops-down Glavlit mentality was the very thing we were fighting. Bissell talks of writers being “tarred,” of being forced to clean floors for a living. He discusses banned writers, banned because “—they did not write about the correct subject matter. . . . They were not real writers.”

Isn’t it funny that the ULA’s members weren’t considered “real writers”; that Bissell’s statements applied to no writers so much as those of the Underground Literary Alliance? To make his points, Bissell turns truth on its head.

“I am not suggesting that the ULA wants to exterminate writers in a Stalinist burst of classocide.” !!! This sentence disingenuously suggests exactly that.

Bissell targets our goofy nicknames; “King”; “Wild Bill”; “Urban Hermitt”; and the like. “To rename oneself in such a way is a gesture of both concealment and aggression.”

No it’s not. It’s ballyhoo. We were using those names before the ULA was ever thought of and formed. But Tom Bissell is caught up in the malevolent creation of his imagination, and takes it beyond all bounds.

“—I suspect, too, that very few writers would want to live in a world in which the Underground Literary Alliance could determine who could and could not write.”

Well, maybe, if such a thing were conceivable. When did that question arise? At no point in our history were we not the lowliest, brokest, most powerless of writers. There are hundreds of well-funded institutions involved with the creation of literature, operating out of large and impressive edifices wielding great power, from prestigious university writing programs to the Big Six book giants dwelling in gigantic skyscrapers. A great deal of determinations are made in these thick-walled, castle-like structures. The Underground Literary Alliance, a collection of street writers, has never inhabited a one of them.

The ULA’s attacks were against a closed system, an insular mentality that does, in fact, in the real world, determine who can or cannot write. Our goal throughout was to break OPEN that system, to allow different writers, with different ways of writing, a voice in the culture; a seat at the literary table. One can disagree with our premise, but to impute to the ULA the very things that were being done to us, as Bissell did in this essay, was either malicious or goofy. What it was, was branding—tarring us with a series of labels that were in effect smears. Bolsheviks, Stalinists, terrorists, thugs—he had no trouble slinging words around, knowing that in the memory of everyone who read his essay—which meant a great many literary people—the words were going to stick. I truly believe Tom Bissell is in the wrong business. He’d make a great political campaign strategist.

Tom Bissell then corrects me for using the term “the real America” to describe collapsing industrial cities like Detroit.

“The ‘real’ America,” Bissell states, “is not poor and desperate, just as the real America is not young and wealthy and hip. They are both America, and both can be written about in revelatory ways.” So it is determined by the authority himself.

This is true, as far as it goes, but Bissell misses his own point. One America was being written about, in novel after novel, book after book. The other America, seldom. Or at least not written about often enough, or in a passionate enough way—as the likes of a Frank Norris or Jack London or Theodore Dreiser or John Steinbeck would once do—to outrage a sleepy American populace. The ULA was a naive endeavor in many ways. We were naive or idealistic enough to believe that literature could be relevant. That words alone could change America.

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Tom Bissell’s entire essay on the Underground Literary Alliance is a mass of misinformation, distortions, and half-truths. Most of them are minor. Taken together, they add to the essay’s severely slanted effect. I’ll give three examples, one resulting from Bissell’s laziness, the other two from his dishonesty.

1.) Bissell mentions a short piece of mine from 1997 that was posted on the ULA site. He sees it as an “early” work of mine, and states that its “less hysterical tone suggests a writer whose voice has not yet been calcified by rejection—“

Though this sounds credible to the reader, it isn’t true. I’d published my zine, New Philistine, beginning in 1992. My first serious writing. Its tone was nothing if not “hysterical,” as those who’ve read it know. Before 1997 I’d also published a few essays in lit journals. At least one of the essays, also about Detroit, was far stronger than the short, later piece that Bissell cites. Though it’s most polemical parts were cut out, no doubt wisely, by the journal’s editor, the printed work was still more un-p.c. and in-your-face than the kind of writing usually found in such places. To the extent that this essay is still unavailable online, though a brother essay, about baseball!, is up. Tom Bissell could have easily found out about my other writings. But he didn’t. He was already viewing ULAers through the prism of his own literary experience. To this day he hasn’t altered that viewpoint.

My voice, incidentally, had been “calcified” before I ever started writing. It was why I began writing. As with Michael Jackman, to express my outrage and sense of injustice at the crumbling world around me.

2.) In the reprinted version of the essay in Magic Hours (I can’t seem to find it in the original), Tom Bissell says that McSweeney’s was “fronted with its own money and printed independently, which, as I understand it, pretty much defines a zine, but what do I know?”

Note the disclaimer at the end of the sentence, and the “pretty much.” Bissell has fudged the truth, and he knows it. He could’ve checked the definition for “zine” in any number of online dictionaries. Here’s what I found:

“an inexpensively produced, self-published underground publication”  --The Free Dictionary

“a noncommercial often homemade or online publication”  --Merriam-Webster

“a cheaply-made, cheaply-priced publication, often in black and white, which is mass-produced via photocopier and bound with staples.”  --Urban Dictionary

“a small circulation publication . . . self-published work of minority interest usually reproduced via photocopier.”

What zine does not mean is a slick, professionally-produced journal created by a paid professional staff working at a leased office, printed in Iceland and shipped back to the United States via cargo container, and selling in the neighborhood of twenty-five bucks.

The Tom Bissell disclaimer: “Who? Me?”

3.) Tom Bissell cites a challenge to the ULA from poet David Berman requesting a debate with us. When I responded in semi-polite fashion, Berman gave me a snarky response and ran off. He wasn’t serious in the challenge, of course, but merely looking to make a smirky rejoinder, which Bissell quoted in his essay, I suppose because he saw it as an available dig. When we kept after David Berman about the challenge, he begged off. Bissell’s presentation of the trivial incident is untruthful. As is so much else in the essay.

What’s curious about this particular incident is that Tom Bissell seems surprised that I wasn’t a thug or a terrorist in my response to David Berman. Bissell is puzzled. “Several people told me,” he writes, that ULAers are “basically polite.” Tom Bissell created in his head and in his essay a stereotype of the ULA as a collection of thugs and terrorists, then wondered why we didn’t fit the stereotype. Never, of course, did he meet us and find out for himself. That we were writers, pure and simple, engaging in occasional theater and a lot of ballyhoo in order to draw attention to ourselves—old-fashioned promotion—was something Bissell didn’t consider.

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What of our whistle blowing?

Tom Bissell selected a couple points out of scores of points, then again turned reality on its head, transforming arts grant victimizers into victims. Our chief target, one of the most connected writers in America—who Bissell portrayed in his essay as Jean Valjean!—was especially adept at gaming the system for his own benefit and that of his cronies. The scion of two hyper-wealthy families, this person sat on numerous grants panels, influenced the selection of heads of organizations like PEN America, awarded taxpayer money to his friends, and himself applied for and received a Guggenheim grant while residing inside America’s most exclusive private enclave, an island reserved for names like the Duponts and Firestones. Want to discuss the 1%? This individual was and is the cream of that 1%. Jean Valjean indeed.

The same person is also good friends with some of the wealthiest and most powerful figures on the literary scene, names like Daniel Handler and Dave Eggers, those able to decide in reality who’s blackballed from literature or not. To decide who is turned into a real-life Valjean, “branded as an outcast,” as Victor Huge portrays the character in his novel.

I could go into the literary corruption matter much further, and may say more in a few days in a comment to this blog post. Tom Bissell’s treatment of the NEA award to Jonathan Franzen—which Bissell both sidesteps and misdirects the reader about—is thoroughly dishonest. What’s interesting to me is that, though Bissell addressed some complex and controversial issues, he included no sources to his essay. No links to the ULA’s reports or to articles about the issues, in Page Six and elsewhere, where readers could find out about the controversies themselves. If I’m able to dig some of them up, I may include such sources in my comment about the whistle blowing subject.

Know that our whistle blowing presentations were thoroughly documented, unassailable, unless attacked in a quick, pithy and distorted way, as in Tom Bissell’s essay.

In retrospect, for the ULA band of nobodies to take on the powerful literary figures mentioned here, or not mentioned, was insanity. The ULA’s crime was stating the case for the 99% ten years before Occupy.

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To summarize Part II of this impromptu series:

--To deny our legitimate outsider status, Tom Bissell claimed that all writers are outsiders.

--He accused the ULA of the very sins and crimes engaged in by the established literary and publishing mainstream.

--He tarred us, without a shred of evidence or speck of connection to reality, as akin to Leninists, Bolsheviks, and totalitarians.

--He defended the “young and wealthy and hip,” and by extension defended the extreme inequities of American society, which many ULAers were and are in a unique position to appreciate. Writers cleaning floors indeed! Not in Tom Bissell’s fervid imagination, but in American reality.

(NEXT UP: I’ll address the case made against underground writing. Watch for the next post about this, possibly up by this weekend. Responses and counterarguments to what I’ve said here are welcome. Will we see any? I doubt it.)

The Bissell/Believer Back Story

TOM BISSELL’S DISTORTED ESSAY PART I

Reviewers and readers who take Tom Bissell’s 2003 Believer essay on the defunct Underground Literary Alliance, “Protesting All Fiction Writers!”—now reprinted with a different title in Bissell’s Magic Hours book of essays—at face value make a huge mistake. They should be aware of the essay’s context—the reason it was written and published. For the previous two years the ULA had been engaged in an intensely bitter feud with Dave Eggers and McSweeney’s, which kicked off when we protested an award to the publication for “Best Zine.” Things from there escalated. This was the backdrop to Bissell’s essay.

Bissell admits that Dave Eggers was initially opposed to the essay’s publication. A scant few months after its appearance, Eggers himself was caught posting anonymous attacks against the ULA on Amazon. Eggers carried extreme animus toward the ULA—from his perspective, with good reason. Could the essay have been approved if Bissell hadn’t assured the editors that it would be a proper takedown of the Underground Literary Alliance? A takedown, moreover, which fit the happy-face McSweeney’s/Believer image of pristine innocence. No easy feat.

In the essay, Tom Bissell presents himself as an innocent bystander; a disinterested observer objectively weighing facts. Gullible journalists today like Katie Ryder accept the presentation at face value. They swallow it whole, to the extent that Ryder, in an interview with Bissell, speaks of his tolerance, and absurdly applauds him for giving his subjects a “fair shot.” Yet in 2003 the essay was a partisan attack, and in it Bissell behaved like a partisan. He would not have been allowed the assignment otherwise.

The effectiveness of Bissell’s takedown can be judged by the result. The ULA was branded as a collection of no-talent whiners and thuggish authoritarians. His essay became the accepted source on us; the standard text. When I made a 2007 appearance on a PBS radio station, the host was still influenced by Bissell’s text, asking me wide-eyed and believing why the ULA wanted to ban Jeffrey Eugenides from publishing. A truly ill-informed statement. As evidenced by snarky or hateful statements still made about me online, the branding remains to this day.

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Journalists and reviewers wishing to understand Tom Bissell’s essay on the Underground Literary Alliance should realize that he did very little research on us. He exchanged several emails with one member out of forty. He made no effort to meet any of us, though many of us were a short bus ride away. He asked for none of our zines, though we were a writers group that sprung from the print zine scene and defined by it. He did read our web site, which contained a smattering of our writing.

To understand the ULA you’d have to understand the background we came from. The three initiators of the project, Steve Kostecke, Michael Jackman, and myself, were from Detroit. We’d witnessed wrenching social change and economic devastation, up close. First hand.

David M. Sheridan’s 1999 Michigan Quarterly Review essay about Detroit, “Making Sense of Detroit”-- http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0038.301;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg -- is a great source, because it was written at the very time that plans for an underground writers group were being discussed and formed. It gives a compelling picture of what was happening to the city. Sheridan’s essay also quotes from an essay of my own about Detroit, an essay which alone would be a good source for my mindset at that moment of time. Without understanding Detroit it’s impossible to understand the Underground Literary Alliance.

Tom Bissell, in his Believer piece, dismisses Jackman’s talk of “injustice”—yet thoughts of injustice were inescapable from our brains. Sheridan states that I wrote about “violence and racism and poverty.” With trademark snarkiness, The Believer, in one of its tags to Bissell’s essay, mocked the ULA’s concerns as “alienated socioeconomic posturing.” I urge people to read Sheridan’s essay and then decide if our concerns were posturing.

Tom Bissell never did the hard research to find out where the ULA was from and what we were about, because he didn’t care what we were about. That wasn’t the point of his essay.

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Tom Bissell’s own striving-writer background included an editorial position at W.W. Norton in Manhattan, at the very heart of the tops-down Big Six publishing system. By accommodating himself to powerful individuals he made his way through the heart of the machine. This was the perspective he brought to his essay, to his look at ULAers and our writings.

Bissell made no  attempt to understand our alien style of literature, our psychology, or the DIY/ print zine ethos of the 1990’s. That ethos determined how the ULA operated—by consensus, with no hierarchies and no real leaders. Our titles were a game. The “Director”—Michael Jackman—in personality was the most detached and laidback of the ULA’s major players.

The DIY/punk aesthetic determined our occasionally provocative, in-your-face behavior, which we saw as theater. We were sending up, in our way, the sober self-seriousness of the literary elite, and the pronounced pin-drop solemnity of the standard literary reading. The punk aesthetic determined many of our various styles of zine writing—expressions of the sound of American reality, of a Greyhound bus or a punk show or the street, in all its crudeness, emotion, immediacy and spontaneity. It’s why in 2006 we protested a tepid establishment “Howl” celebration at Columbia University. ULAers saw ourselves as the legitimate heirs of the Beats, and heirs of Dada and other arts movements outside the walls of the canon and the publishing machine. Our stylized and impudent zines were our proofs of our authenticity and credibility. In his Believer essay Tom Bissell scorned the very idea of this kind of alternative writing. Yet it was the kind of writing we’d been selling, mostly to alienated young readers who otherwise wouldn’t have been reading anything.

Authoritarian? That was the opposite of what we were about. We were a rebellion against rules, regulation, constipation, and authority. We were a disorganized blast of noise. We did have strong voices. In one of his recent interviews with Katie Ryder, Tom Bissell still refers to our no-hierarchy group as “authoritarian.” This is an ignorant, know-nothing statement. Also an ironic one, seeing that Bissell works and writes in a world of hierarchy and authority.

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Bissell admits that his essay on Robert Kaplan was a “literary assassination.” His essay on the ULA was no less an attempted assassination. Unlike Kaplan, we had no standing, no resources, no body of powerful and connected friends with which to withstand such attacks.

(Much more to come on this blog.)

(Also see @KingWenclas for other remarks.)

Rome versus Carthage

I admit I’m taken aback by the reappearance of Tom Bissell’s hatchet job essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, “Protesting All Fiction Writers!” The essay, whose very title is a distortion, originally appeared in The Believer literary journal and has been included in Bissell’s new collection of essays, Magic Hours. The flawed essay is bad enough. Worse are the reviews of it, many of which mention the ULA with gleeful hostility. What’s the point? It’s a sudden rush of extreme animus toward a defunct organization whose writers were knocked out by the recession, their movement broken. It’s as if McSweeney’s (which published Bissell’s new book) and their many acolytes are ancient Rome, wishing to see every Carthaginian shred of our past literary threat knocked down and buried into the ground.