Interview About the Underground

 RECENTLY I did an interview with Wred Fright for Patrick King and the Mugwump Corporation. Much scattered thoughts about some crazy times, a slice of literary history.

With gigantic monopolistic corporations more powerful than ever-- dominating the culture-- alternative voices and ideas are more important than they've ever been. Needed: credible indie scenes, of the kind the Underground Literary Alliance once so capably represented. Culture belongs to everybody!

The Interview

The Truth About the Literary System

 NO ONE really wants to know how the literary system in the U.S. operates.

That thought went through my head last week when I tweeted, from my personal Twitter account, links to a few essays I wrote some time back about Tao Lin and other writers and how the literary game is actually played. Clues to how a writer-- such as this one-- can receive a $2 million advance from a Big Four Manhattan publisher for an unreadable 900-page novel which bombs. 

The truth is that no writer wants to know "how the sausage is made," to use an old analogy. The reality is too upsetting, too dislocating, so we dismiss it, block it out. There will be exceptions, we believe. There have to be exceptions.

Or really, most writers aren't ambitious, aren't hungry enough to want to change things, are content to find a place in the literary world, any place. A niche.

While abject mediocrities receive $2 million advances and the condition of literature continues to decline. 

MY THINKING when I began looking into how the literary machine worked-- chiefly during my days with the Underground Literary Alliance-- was that hearing the reality would so outrage the great mass of writers they'd tear down the Potemkin Village of the established literary scene. But it didn't happen.

Can change, real change, in the literary world, or with society itself, ever happen?

Maybe not. There will always be a significant percentage of people who'll take the easy-and-cheap payoff. This happened even with the sleep-on-floors radicals of the ULA, so it can happen to any movement, anyplace.

Who Was Against the Afghanistan War?

 THE PROBLEM with Afghanistan from a United States perspective was getting heavily involved there to start with. War apologists claim that 90% of the American public in 2001 supported the action and no voices spoke out in protest.

This isn't true. One segment-- maybe the only segment-- of the intellectual community opposed the action: the DIY print underground, which at that moment in time centered around a review publication, Zine World: A Reader's Guide to the Underground Press, and through multiple activist groups, one of them being the Underground Literary Alliance.

My contribution to the noise we tried to make was a zine novella I put out within a few weeks of 9-11 called War Hysteria!.

Few copies of the zine remain anywhere-- but the text can be accessed in a terrific anthology via the Wred Fright blog, here. (Wred a long-time zine publisher and activist.) In the zine I tried to capture the headlong rush to war, no one in the government or mainstream media keeping their heads. All was panic. 

The repercussions of such panic are with us now.

Staggering Hypocrisy

AN ARISTOCRAT SPEAKS!

I happened to stumble upon a twitter exchange between establishment novelist Ayelet Waldman and Salon writer Dahlia Lithwick. Waldman was congratulating Lithwick on an article in The New Republic which criticizes the narrowmindedness of the U.S. Supreme Court—as all have Ivy League educations.

http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120173/2014-supreme-court-ivy-league-clan-disconnected-reality

Disconnected reality indeed! I made the mistake of pointing out that the east coast literary media is predominately Ivy League. I asked Ayelet Waldman where she was last decade when the Underground Literary Alliance tried to democratize the U.S. literary scene, and for its efforts was blackballed and destroyed. Ms. Waldman responded quickly:

Ayelet Waldman ‏@ayeletw 

@LiteraryCircus Seriously? You're questioning my advocacy? Because I'm not working on your issue in exactly they way you are? Fuck off.

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Yes, I was questioning her selective advocacy—which clearly steers away from her own field. Dare not one criticize one of the elite! These are questions, of course, which members of the literary establishment can’t debate. They know they can’t debate them. During the entirety of the ULA’s history, the response was the same: invective and blackballing.

Do I need to mention that Ayelet Waldman is a Harvard graduate, while Dahlia Lithwick is a graduate of Yale?

Incidentally, or not, here’s a NEW POP LIT blog post which looks at the mindset of New York-based publishing.

http://newpoplitinteractive.wordpress.com/2014/11/10/inside-out-or-outside-in/

Also be sure to read NPL’s latest Opinion piece, wrapping things up about the Tao Lin story, “Self-Marketing 101: Tao Lin”

http://newpoplit.com/opinion/self-marketing-101-tao-lin/

My co-editor refers to the piece as “Art of the Con.” One thing to be said about Tao Lin is that he isn’t Ivy League—not part of the power elite—and so may have decided that extraordinary measures were needed.

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.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Next Book

New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell is working on a new book that will supposedly examine the fight of “David and Goliath,” according to articles like this one:

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2012/07/malcolm-gladwell-to-study-underdogoverlord-dynamics-in-%E2%80%9Cdavid-and-goliath%E2%80%9D

Will Malcolm Gladwell examine the quixotic attempt of the Underground Literary Alliance to upend the established literary world? Or does that cut too close to home? After all, he writes for an establishment mouthpiece, The New Yorker, and is published by Little, Brown and Company, owned by one of the big book conglomerates. We’ll find out how independent Mr. Gladwell truly is.

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!

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.

**************************

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.

*****************************

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.

*************************

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.

********************************

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.

What's Wrong with This?

DIRTY TRICKS OF THE LIT-ESTABLISHMENT DEPT.

Here's a part of the wikipedia entry for the Underground Literary Alliance, pertaining to one event:

"Firecracker Awards
Late 2001, the ULA protested against McSweeney's Quarterly Concern being awarded Best Zine of the Year by the Firecracker Alternative Books Award because McSweeney’s does not fit their definition of zine. The jury of the Firecracker Alternative Books Award remarked that they didn't ask the ULA what was their definition of a zine, because the ULA wasn't the organization presenting the award."

Snarky?

Here are a few definitions of the word "zine" found at various places:

thefreedictionary.com:
"An inexpensively produced, self-published, underground publication."

Urban Dictionary:
"a cheaply-made, cheaply-priced publication."

ZineWiki:
"an independently or self published booklet often created by a single person."

yourdictionary.com:
"a cheaply printed magazine published irregularly by amateurs."

You get the idea. McSweeney's of course was a professionally-produced publication, with a paid office staff, the thick issues printed in Iceland at considerable expense and shipped to America by cargo container. Copies of each issue sold in the neighborhood of $25. The project may have been started with seed money from Simon & Schuster, a large book company owned by a gigantic conglomerate. Yes, the ULA protested this award, absolutely-- and was right to do so.

FYI: Much of the ULA's original wiki entry was written by Steve Kostecke, now deceased. What he put there, the basic facts, has been greatly distorted by a series of anonymous persons over the past few years. The result is a distorted view of the organization, its motives and history. I'd suggest that anyone considering restarting the outfit, in whatever way, begin by correcting the malicious damage done to this record. (If I get the opportunity, between my blogs and writing, I'll make a partial attempt myself.)

The truth is important-- to some of us.

The Meaning of Steve Kostecke

The writers group that wanted to replace the Underground Literary Alliance, that was founded in early 2007 by five former ULAers, asked for no commitment and received no commitment. When it finally asked for something from its 900(!) signed-up clicked-on members, the entire thing, the would-be organization, simply melted away, like the witch at the end of "Wizard of Oz."

By contrast, the ULA finally split because its two core guys believed too strongly in the ULA idea. Steve Kostecke and I agreed on the overall strategy but argued over tactics. Both of us, it turned out, were too wedded too intensely to the project to compromise.

Most writers like to consider themselves "outsiders," but few are in reality. Steve Kostecke was alienated from the madness of his home country, the good old USA, so he spent most of his adult life overseas. Did he have a commitment to his writing? Yes! All the way. At some stage he made literature that crazy quest of words the #1 priority in his life. He was no hobbyist.

When you ask for commitment to literary change, those are the kind of writers you need.

On Other Blogs of Mine

At my newest blog, I make a few further remarks about Joe Paterno, and again relate him and his situation to the literary world. See
http://www.crimecityusa.blogspot.com/

At my restricted access blog, I've been discussing the ULA. Recent posts include "Why Do It?"; "Targets"; "Outlaws"; with other posts to come like "Going Radical?" and "Going Moderate?" See
http://www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com/ or email me to gain access.

I've also reopened the Petition to PEN blog at
http://www.penpetition.blogspot.com/
to show that outreach to the literary establishment has been attempted. The Petition was one small tentative step toward democratizing the art.

Has the environment changed in two years? Is democracy in literature suddenly now possible?

Literary Rebellion, Near and Far

From the New York Times, November 7, 2011, on the front page: "A Literary Rebel Finds Success."

Really? Where?

Not here, it turns out. In China. Novelist Murong Xuecun, "a laureate of corruption" and "word criminal," is approvingly profiled.

The New York Times is the place, incidentally, that had their security thugs throw members of the Underground Literary Alliance and a zine table off the sidewalk in front of their then-headquarters in January of 2007.

For The New York Times, literary rebels are fine as long as they're not American. As long as they don't expose corruption in the very corrupt U.S. literary regime.

The Literary Group as Non-Person

MUCH has been made of corporations being granted personhood status. With the now-defunct Underground Literary Alliance we have an instance of a writers group being made a NONperson, Soviet-style, by the powers-that-be of literature and monopoly media. The ULA's history is Forbidden History. No one is allowed to publicly talk about it. We've been airbrushed out of the narrative.

The Squirrels at Rittenhouse

Rittenhouse Square is a pleasant little park of grass, trees, sidewalks and park benches set in Center City Philadelphia. The square is surrounded on all sides by towers of condos inhabited by the wealthy. Yet all kinds of people hang out at the square.

You used to see a lot of squirrels in the park. Bold squirrels. Assertive squirrels. They'd jump right onto your park bench to beg for one of those peanuts you hand in your hand! Heavens.

The squirrels weren't asking for a whole lot. Squirrels have to live also. Besides, I'd bet that squirrels inhabited that landscape before refined mankind came around.

Lately, I've seen no squirrels in Rittenhouse Square. Not a one of them.

Can we surmise that squirrels became irritating to the rich gentry who live around the square, and that the exterminators were called?

The irony is that you can bet that these very same gentry are animal lovers. No doubt they donate tax-deductible money to a variety of animal causes, from wolves in Colorado to elephants in Africa. They love animals, these good liberal people. As long as those animals aren't in their own backyard.

You can choose the analogy you want. A hundred are out there. Prosperous liberal people move in somewhere and take ownership, bringing with them their rules of cleanliness and order.

I prefer to use the analogy of what's happened to American literature. We see not populists, but pseudo-populists. Elitists with a populist pose. The authentic voice has been displaced. After a time, the very existence of the authentic voice becomes intolerable.

The Underground Literary Alliance was treated like bothersome squirrels by the literary establishment. Yes, the fine Members of the Club are all "progressives," "social democrats," and the like-- they'll tell you so themselves-- but our grubby hungry presence just became, well, intolerable! Call the exterminators.

Literary Police State II

THE TRUTH ABOUT THE NEW YORK TIMES

This was in January 2007, in front of the Times's previous headquarters. I'm told they've since moved into more exclusive digs.

The fortress-like structure rose before us like a heartless monolith of power. We were there to make those who dominate news in this country aware of the plight of underground writers. That had been ever the purpose and cause of our now-destroyed organization, the Underground Literary Alliance. We set up a zeen table on the public sidewalk and began handing out flyers to Times editors and writers entering and exiting the fortress.

Soon enough, someone dimed us out. Security thugs ran out and began pushing us around. The zeen table was tossed into the street, zeens flying. I wrestled the zeen box away from the head thug. I don't know if the New York Times' precious liberal journalists looked on, from inside the doors or from above.

THE TRUTH about the New York Times is that it's the center of system power. It dominates intellectual debate, and the dissemination of ideas. It's the representative and embodiment of hierarchy. Its members, despite the pristine gloss they place over themselves, are among this society's most privileged. Many, if not most, of them are Ivy Leaguers. They're from a very UNrepresentative sliver of America. They feign to speak about America, yet know little about much of it. As the January 2007 incident in front of their building illustrates, they don't want to know.

(For authentic all-American DIY writing, purchase the new e-zeen Ten Pop Stories, now available for a ridiculously low price at Amazon's Kindle Store as well as at http://www.bn.com/.)