My, what a lot of posts to a guy who can't write, about a "conspiracy" which doesn't exist. It sure seems to me like an effort to derail what I'm doing. So be it. I've been fighting demi-puppets-- and "Harland"-- for seven years. There's no end to them. Invariably, they lack integrity and truthfulness-- no one more than Harland.
PEN
This organization is a house of cards. Points that can be brought up: how the bulk of money expended goes for salaries; the current Director making two-and-a-half times what the Director made ten years ago. (Did your wage or salary go up that much? Mine hasn't!) That their awards to writers consistently go to the affluent kind, famous or not-so-famous, who don't need the bucks. This from a "dissent" oriented organization. That there was dissent within PEN in the 90's over the organization's kowtowing to rich people. The dissenters lost the battle.
DIRTY TRICKS
These of course continue. (I'm still waiting for my blog to be freed up.) Latest are fake, badly written poems sent to some outfit called poetry.com under my name, with my real e-mail address but a fake Detroit snail address. The poems are a caricature of what I do. The question being, if there's no literary establishment, why some people are going to so much trouble to defend it.
MYSELF
Someone asked about my background. Yes, I focus on the class war in this country-- something I've been aware of since I was a kid. During high school my family lived on "the other side of the tracks"-- actually a newly built expressway. We'd moved into an area that had been vacant land until in the Fifties cheap 30 or 40-foot-lot houses were thrown up; where we lived had no school district so we had to attend a school miles away in a more affluent district. Myself and my siblings and our friends were the poorest kids in school. "There goes a Wenclas." We fought other students almost daily. The stories I could tell are endless. My factory worker father was sick most of the time-- I was working 38 hours a week in a restaurant, cooking beef rounds and washing pots, to pay my share in the house. In class the next morning I'd be sleeping in the back row, still emanating the beef smell which I could never seem to wash off, the other kids shaking their heads at me in disgust. Sometimes I never went home; both my parents had, er, drinking problems, which for many years, starting at sixteen, I inherited. The family battles in our tiny house were constant. Etc etc. Do you really want to hear this? I don't. It's something I'd rather forget-- but it did mold my attitudes; gave me a taste of the real world which further experiences reinforced.
THE HARLAND QUESTION
"Oh Goneril! You are not worth the dust which the rude wind blows in your face."
This is a talented person who has been holding a grudge against me for seven years. Justified? Probably in part. I wish the person would move on. The individual hasn't been answering my e-mails, so seems unwilling to address the real problems between us. I have no inclination to keep fighting this person.
p.s. Has it occurred to no one that Harland is a woman?
MY BLOGS
"Harland" in some sense is correct that the questions raised here, between the underground and the establishment, will ultimately be decided by THE WRITING. I'm willing to accept that challenge. I'll have a remark put up on my Happy Lit blog about this.
Given a choice, at this moment in time I'll take my Literary Mystery blog over this one. That's where my further opinions regarding Harland and the other detestable people of the literary world will be found. I have some very entertaining chapters to come-- including new characters like evil clown "Roody McDoody" and masked villain "The Assassin." I plan to have fun, and hope my remaining readers will also.
As for this blog, I've shut down comments-- I just don't have time for all the noise and attacks, sorry. Interpret it as you like. I have a backlog of half-a-dozen posts or so-- some fairly good-- which will go up when I get to it. The same for the Happy Lit blog. I have two or three reviews to post at my new review blog. Otherwise I'll be taking a well-deserved break from all except "Mystery" and "Detroit." (Oh yes, I am living here full-time, but will likely move on when I can, leaving no forwarding address. Detroit is a landscape of misery, a vortex of negativity which drains all who fall into its path.)
Later. . . .
Wednesday, June 25, 2008
Monday, June 23, 2008
Allied Media
I stopped by the Allied Media Conference on the Wayne campus in Detroit Saturday, where I sat for a bit with Mr. Potter and Yul Tolbert at the ULA table. The ULA books presented there looked great. (I like the blue cover of Steve Kostecke's Wasted Angels.) I formed several new observations about the alternative press and its possibilities from my visit; too many to write about now.
A shout-out to everyone I met there!
(For more about Detroit, see my new post at www.detroitliterary.blogspot.com)
(p.s. I should be able to stop by the Peter Markus reading at MOCAD this Thursday in Detroit, 7 p.m., if anyone wants to meet me in the flesh.)
A shout-out to everyone I met there!
(For more about Detroit, see my new post at www.detroitliterary.blogspot.com)
(p.s. I should be able to stop by the Peter Markus reading at MOCAD this Thursday in Detroit, 7 p.m., if anyone wants to meet me in the flesh.)
Saturday, June 21, 2008
About PEN
ASKING QUESTIONS
I'd say both PEN and Paris Review are protected assets, vulnerable spots on the literary Beast, based on the reaction generated when asking questions about them, which is all I've been doing. The barriers of disinformation and demi-puppets surrounding them may be too much for me to overcome.
In a related topic, it's amazing to me how individuals like "Roody McDoody" and "Harland" ("Guildenstern" and "The Assassin") can be turned into absolute tools of established literary power.
PEN
PEN in its various manifestations is hard to assail, because it does much good work. Since its founding its purpose has been to propagate liberal Anglo-American values (democracy; freedom) around the planet-- values I agree with. The questions are two. First, whether these values are being realized in our own society, or in PEN itself. I say no. The second question is about the world context within which PEN has operated: the spread of Anglo-American financial and military power which has always seemed to accompany Anglo-American values. In other words, the spread of Empire, which was NOT a value upon which the American republic was founded. We seem to have fully adopted the redcoat, "BBC liberal" ideology against which the American Revolution stood opposed.
IF the American ideal has been perverted, this is a question well worth investigating. Frenzied opposition to the question is mere blowing of smoke.
I'd say both PEN and Paris Review are protected assets, vulnerable spots on the literary Beast, based on the reaction generated when asking questions about them, which is all I've been doing. The barriers of disinformation and demi-puppets surrounding them may be too much for me to overcome.
In a related topic, it's amazing to me how individuals like "Roody McDoody" and "Harland" ("Guildenstern" and "The Assassin") can be turned into absolute tools of established literary power.
PEN
PEN in its various manifestations is hard to assail, because it does much good work. Since its founding its purpose has been to propagate liberal Anglo-American values (democracy; freedom) around the planet-- values I agree with. The questions are two. First, whether these values are being realized in our own society, or in PEN itself. I say no. The second question is about the world context within which PEN has operated: the spread of Anglo-American financial and military power which has always seemed to accompany Anglo-American values. In other words, the spread of Empire, which was NOT a value upon which the American republic was founded. We seem to have fully adopted the redcoat, "BBC liberal" ideology against which the American Revolution stood opposed.
IF the American ideal has been perverted, this is a question well worth investigating. Frenzied opposition to the question is mere blowing of smoke.
Irony
IT'S IRONIC that the self-proclaimed fans and defenders of the poster "Harland" are insistent the person be outed. To avoid this is why the individual vanished. Curious that I'm the one left protecting the person.
Take note, harland. Your anonymity was to protect against my presumed retribution against you. This assumption on your part was misguided. Attacking you isn't what I want, which to you should be obvious.
Take note, harland. Your anonymity was to protect against my presumed retribution against you. This assumption on your part was misguided. Attacking you isn't what I want, which to you should be obvious.
Friday, June 20, 2008
Resentments
ANOTHER of the criticisms sent my way for trying to change literature is that I'm simply resentful. But resentful of what? Foppish, marginally talented plutocrats? That's like saying the sans-culottes were resentful of Louis XVI. Well, hell yeah, I'm resentful of what some people are doing to the art.
The problem is a structural situation which denies some writers access, and gives others every privilege and backing based on their connections and background. The American way.
*************************************
THE IRONY is that I've faced tons of resentment among the underground. It's no secret that I'm the biggest name and most dynamic personality in the literary underground. Since the ULA began, this has bothered many petty little egos. Every time I've leveraged my rep to gain press, from 2001 through 2007, backbiting and backstabbing have followed. Some of the perplexing incidents have included a local zeenster boycott of a Benefit concert I staged and hosted in Chicago in 2003, to an insistence I not be invited to an underground poetry reading at Swarthmore College near Philly a few years ago. My biggest opponents have been welcome to read at any event I've promoted. The reverse has not been the case. The reaction to the Chicago Benefit was particularly small-minded. If my worst enemy on the planet was available, I'm sure that person would've shown up, because it was a worthy cause. But not the petty egoists.
And so I get it from both sides; from the blackballing and roadblocks of the literary establishment and their lit-blogger demi-puppets; and at the same time from the writers I've been trying to help.
What are all these knives in me, you ask, front and back? From writers! The all-holy defenders of free speech themselves.
The problem is a structural situation which denies some writers access, and gives others every privilege and backing based on their connections and background. The American way.
*************************************
THE IRONY is that I've faced tons of resentment among the underground. It's no secret that I'm the biggest name and most dynamic personality in the literary underground. Since the ULA began, this has bothered many petty little egos. Every time I've leveraged my rep to gain press, from 2001 through 2007, backbiting and backstabbing have followed. Some of the perplexing incidents have included a local zeenster boycott of a Benefit concert I staged and hosted in Chicago in 2003, to an insistence I not be invited to an underground poetry reading at Swarthmore College near Philly a few years ago. My biggest opponents have been welcome to read at any event I've promoted. The reverse has not been the case. The reaction to the Chicago Benefit was particularly small-minded. If my worst enemy on the planet was available, I'm sure that person would've shown up, because it was a worthy cause. But not the petty egoists.
And so I get it from both sides; from the blackballing and roadblocks of the literary establishment and their lit-blogger demi-puppets; and at the same time from the writers I've been trying to help.
What are all these knives in me, you ask, front and back? From writers! The all-holy defenders of free speech themselves.
Thursday, June 19, 2008
Pyramids
The Lefty mag The Nation devotes its June 30 issue to the topic of "Plutocracy Reborn." Much of the discussion is intent on proving points I've already made. On page 18, in fact, is a drawing of a pyramid which could also have illustrated my June 5 post, "Amazement." If the editors of this periodical have been reading this blog, that's a welcome sign.
What The Nation needs to do now is to put its professed ideals into practice inside their magazine. Instead of always recruiting millionaire boozhie authors like Barbara Ehrenreich to speak FOR working people, they should consider the possibility that there are many real-not-fake working people who are also writers and able to speak for themselves. (In contradiction to Keith Gessen's infamous remark in n+1 a while back that there were no writers working as waitresses.) That's the essence of democracy.
The Nation could also begin reviewing books by outsider writers-- such as titles from the ULA Press, or by Leopold McGinnis and others; writers with new viewpoints and with no connections whatsoever to the current plutocracy.
Katrina and Company: The ball's in your court. Let's do it!
What The Nation needs to do now is to put its professed ideals into practice inside their magazine. Instead of always recruiting millionaire boozhie authors like Barbara Ehrenreich to speak FOR working people, they should consider the possibility that there are many real-not-fake working people who are also writers and able to speak for themselves. (In contradiction to Keith Gessen's infamous remark in n+1 a while back that there were no writers working as waitresses.) That's the essence of democracy.
The Nation could also begin reviewing books by outsider writers-- such as titles from the ULA Press, or by Leopold McGinnis and others; writers with new viewpoints and with no connections whatsoever to the current plutocracy.
Katrina and Company: The ball's in your court. Let's do it!
Punchbowls
ANSWERING A CRITIC
1.) MONOMANIA
My blogs in their diversity are hardly those of a monomaniac. In my words and my actions I don't limit myself to being "just" a writer.
I'd say instead that the literary world suffers from monomania. Its focus is strictly on the work, and within the work, the sentence, and beyond this, on the self, while I examine literature within the broader context of the machine which produces it, and the civilization within which that machine is placed. This complex nation is a conjunction of systems, giant wheels of machinery which the writer must negotiate. To think that the production and presentation of the art happens by random accident is naive.
2.) WRITER
My fiercest critic has insisted I'm not a writer. I don't know then what all these words are on my blogs! Numerology? Needlepoint? Whittling?
Something I've written perhaps has strenuously exercised this person with dislike. Maybe that's the idea.
3.) PUNCHBOWLS
That I'm a person who puts his head into punchbowls at parties-- it's said-- must show I'm a mere exhibitionist. Is this so? Why then was I not such a performer through most of my life? In truth I'm a modest, fairly private person. I seldom if ever narcissistically obsess over my childhood, for instance, as seems required for writers of the workshop "literary" variety. No memoirs about driving out west (I've driven out west) as advertisement for the self have been forthcoming from me. What then is really happening?
Could the ULA's "crashes" have been a planned tactic? A way for shut out writers to address literature's caretakers directly, face-to-face, in order to recapture, in a monopolistic society, our democratic rights and freedoms? It's a possibility.
1.) MONOMANIA
My blogs in their diversity are hardly those of a monomaniac. In my words and my actions I don't limit myself to being "just" a writer.
I'd say instead that the literary world suffers from monomania. Its focus is strictly on the work, and within the work, the sentence, and beyond this, on the self, while I examine literature within the broader context of the machine which produces it, and the civilization within which that machine is placed. This complex nation is a conjunction of systems, giant wheels of machinery which the writer must negotiate. To think that the production and presentation of the art happens by random accident is naive.
2.) WRITER
My fiercest critic has insisted I'm not a writer. I don't know then what all these words are on my blogs! Numerology? Needlepoint? Whittling?
Something I've written perhaps has strenuously exercised this person with dislike. Maybe that's the idea.
3.) PUNCHBOWLS
That I'm a person who puts his head into punchbowls at parties-- it's said-- must show I'm a mere exhibitionist. Is this so? Why then was I not such a performer through most of my life? In truth I'm a modest, fairly private person. I seldom if ever narcissistically obsess over my childhood, for instance, as seems required for writers of the workshop "literary" variety. No memoirs about driving out west (I've driven out west) as advertisement for the self have been forthcoming from me. What then is really happening?
Could the ULA's "crashes" have been a planned tactic? A way for shut out writers to address literature's caretakers directly, face-to-face, in order to recapture, in a monopolistic society, our democratic rights and freedoms? It's a possibility.
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
Great New Chapter
A new chapter of the fictional "Plutocracy USA" is now up at
www.literarymystery.blogspot.com
I hope the delay was worth it!
www.literarymystery.blogspot.com
I hope the delay was worth it!
Monday, June 16, 2008
Import
The PEN American Center in New York appears to be a protected organization. I base this on how swiftly my blog about them was shut down.
Why is this? What's going on?
Looking at their stated causes, their targets like China and Iran, one can speculate that the organization is an extension of neo-con foreign policy. PEN has no hesitation in becoming an instrument of foreign policy. An example of this is the recent award to an Iranian-born author whose wealthy family fled the country during the Iranian revolution. Is a signal being sent with this award? Possibly. This at a time when certain ideologues have presented a case for bombing or invading Iran.
WE CAN HYPOTHESIZE that someone is using PEN in this way. I have no evidence to support this. None. I'm speculating.
But think of it. A literary organization with a spotlessly liberal veneer, supported by major literary names, whose stated purpose and indeed actions are right and just. There ARE writers abused in countries not under the American umbrella. What a tool such an organization could make. What an ideal "cutting edge"; cultural and ideological missionaries for the soldiers and conglomerate salesmen to follow.
I don't know if this is the case. Nobody does. With the literary world we seem to be forever in the dark.
We DO know that American literary journals and organizations were used this way in the past. The Paris Review/CIA revelation was one example. It's because of the PRESENT situation that we need the full truth from the Paris Review about CIA involvement in their founding; how far and long it extended. We've received to this question: silence.
We'll never comprehend the present if we're not allowed to understand the past.
Why is this? What's going on?
Looking at their stated causes, their targets like China and Iran, one can speculate that the organization is an extension of neo-con foreign policy. PEN has no hesitation in becoming an instrument of foreign policy. An example of this is the recent award to an Iranian-born author whose wealthy family fled the country during the Iranian revolution. Is a signal being sent with this award? Possibly. This at a time when certain ideologues have presented a case for bombing or invading Iran.
WE CAN HYPOTHESIZE that someone is using PEN in this way. I have no evidence to support this. None. I'm speculating.
But think of it. A literary organization with a spotlessly liberal veneer, supported by major literary names, whose stated purpose and indeed actions are right and just. There ARE writers abused in countries not under the American umbrella. What a tool such an organization could make. What an ideal "cutting edge"; cultural and ideological missionaries for the soldiers and conglomerate salesmen to follow.
I don't know if this is the case. Nobody does. With the literary world we seem to be forever in the dark.
We DO know that American literary journals and organizations were used this way in the past. The Paris Review/CIA revelation was one example. It's because of the PRESENT situation that we need the full truth from the Paris Review about CIA involvement in their founding; how far and long it extended. We've received to this question: silence.
We'll never comprehend the present if we're not allowed to understand the past.
Sunday, June 15, 2008
To the Monitors
As my "PEN" blog was so quickly cut down, before I had a chance even to announce it, I have to speculate that someone is monitoring my on-line actions-- for reasons I'll soon speculate about.
What do I do about this?
The only solution I see is to convert the monitors-- first by reminding them that the ideas the undergrounders represent are fully in keeping with the DIY attitude which founded this nation. Any objections I make to "Imperialism" are the kind that George Washington himself would make-- not to mention Tom Paine. I see the underground literary movement as a way to renew our culture, and thereby America itself. A most worthy project.
(Stay tuned also to my idea blog, http://www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com/ )
What do I do about this?
The only solution I see is to convert the monitors-- first by reminding them that the ideas the undergrounders represent are fully in keeping with the DIY attitude which founded this nation. Any objections I make to "Imperialism" are the kind that George Washington himself would make-- not to mention Tom Paine. I see the underground literary movement as a way to renew our culture, and thereby America itself. A most worthy project.
(Stay tuned also to my idea blog, http://www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com/ )
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Short-Term Objectives
IMAGINING THE IMPOSSIBLE
ONE reason my ambitious plans to transform literature haven't been realized, aside from a total lack of resources, is that I've been pushed to an isolated corner of the literary map through fear and blackballing. My expanding blog network will eventually break me out of this, but I hope to speed up things.
1.) The boycott of my blogs and their growing readership by the main establishment-oriented lit-blogs is senseless. Maud, for instance, links to every obscure lit-blog on the planet, including many defunct ones, but pretends this blog doesn't exist. Talk about a Cold War mentality! The result is to shut out the kind of radical new ideas which the stagnant lit-world badly needs. Readers should be urging them to reverse this.
2.) I seek adventurous allies willing to join a planned future new assault on the status quo lit-world. My move to Detroit has been a tactical retreat, that's all. After the tremendous noise made by the initial stage of the campaign, does anyone believe I'll not rework the strategy and put together another wave?
What's to be gained? Everything! For starters, the excitement of making literary history. With the right ideas and energy we can reinvent the art, in so doing multiplying its audience. Steps toward accomplishing this goal are being put into place. . . .
What I'd like to hear from readers isn't more of the "It can't be done" naysaying I've been bombarded with, but suggestions about what stories, poems, products, personalities will give lit a radically new look and attract a mass audience.
ONE reason my ambitious plans to transform literature haven't been realized, aside from a total lack of resources, is that I've been pushed to an isolated corner of the literary map through fear and blackballing. My expanding blog network will eventually break me out of this, but I hope to speed up things.
1.) The boycott of my blogs and their growing readership by the main establishment-oriented lit-blogs is senseless. Maud, for instance, links to every obscure lit-blog on the planet, including many defunct ones, but pretends this blog doesn't exist. Talk about a Cold War mentality! The result is to shut out the kind of radical new ideas which the stagnant lit-world badly needs. Readers should be urging them to reverse this.
2.) I seek adventurous allies willing to join a planned future new assault on the status quo lit-world. My move to Detroit has been a tactical retreat, that's all. After the tremendous noise made by the initial stage of the campaign, does anyone believe I'll not rework the strategy and put together another wave?
What's to be gained? Everything! For starters, the excitement of making literary history. With the right ideas and energy we can reinvent the art, in so doing multiplying its audience. Steps toward accomplishing this goal are being put into place. . . .
What I'd like to hear from readers isn't more of the "It can't be done" naysaying I've been bombarded with, but suggestions about what stories, poems, products, personalities will give lit a radically new look and attract a mass audience.
Wednesday, June 11, 2008
New Essay
I have a new essay going up shortly at
www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com
which attempts to further explain my ideas.
************************************************
FURTHER THOUGHTS
One subject I haven't examined in depth, is that of the Beats. To me they're not a model, only an influence. Or, if anything, a negative model, in that I'm trying to understand where they went off track.
To me, the Beats were typified not by co-opted Ginsberg in the academy, but Kerouac drinking himself to death in disgust in Florida. Or maybe, as M. Grover keeps pointing out, typified by poet Bob Kaufman.
Why did the movement fizzle out so quickly? I don't know. I know that mainstream lit then was more vibrant and vital than it is today. I know that Ginsberg was obviously the wrong figure to appeal to proletarians; to the mass public. Ginsberg, like an Eggers or Gessen, wanted to appeal to intellectuals; Kerouac to the people. I know that Kerouac was thoroughly disillusioned with the bourgeois "counter-culture" direction of the Sixties. Maybe because he wanted what he was doing to BE the culture; to be the mainstream; populist at its core, to appeal to everybody.
****************************************************************
There's also the factor of course that his quick fame took him far out of his comfort zone, and he couldn't handle it, so he retreated. A shame, because if he'd kept his head, he was the movement's proper leader.
The ULA faced a little of this when its three intended original "stars" all fled into hiding; in their own ways, as far as possible from any media attention. Unfortunately, however, the mass media exists, and has to be addressed or manipulated if new ideas are to surface in any way. How to do this and retain one's integrity remains the dilemma.
*****************************************************************
I want to reaffirm here that I've never claimed myself as nothing more than a precursor, at best, to literary change. That's the role characters like Frank Walsh, Tom Hendricks, and myself are playing-- voices in the wilderness trying to show the way, and open the door to literary revolution ever so slightly. The eventual success of the movement will depend on those who follow-- on new voices, with attitude, like Eric Broomfield's. They'll need the attitude we carry-- which we carry maybe because we came of age immediately post-Sixties, during a window of time when there seemed to exist all possibilities-- possibilities which for the younger generation today don't seem to remain, so that so many of them are entrenched in their own pessimism and timidity.
www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com
which attempts to further explain my ideas.
************************************************
FURTHER THOUGHTS
One subject I haven't examined in depth, is that of the Beats. To me they're not a model, only an influence. Or, if anything, a negative model, in that I'm trying to understand where they went off track.
To me, the Beats were typified not by co-opted Ginsberg in the academy, but Kerouac drinking himself to death in disgust in Florida. Or maybe, as M. Grover keeps pointing out, typified by poet Bob Kaufman.
Why did the movement fizzle out so quickly? I don't know. I know that mainstream lit then was more vibrant and vital than it is today. I know that Ginsberg was obviously the wrong figure to appeal to proletarians; to the mass public. Ginsberg, like an Eggers or Gessen, wanted to appeal to intellectuals; Kerouac to the people. I know that Kerouac was thoroughly disillusioned with the bourgeois "counter-culture" direction of the Sixties. Maybe because he wanted what he was doing to BE the culture; to be the mainstream; populist at its core, to appeal to everybody.
****************************************************************
There's also the factor of course that his quick fame took him far out of his comfort zone, and he couldn't handle it, so he retreated. A shame, because if he'd kept his head, he was the movement's proper leader.
The ULA faced a little of this when its three intended original "stars" all fled into hiding; in their own ways, as far as possible from any media attention. Unfortunately, however, the mass media exists, and has to be addressed or manipulated if new ideas are to surface in any way. How to do this and retain one's integrity remains the dilemma.
*****************************************************************
I want to reaffirm here that I've never claimed myself as nothing more than a precursor, at best, to literary change. That's the role characters like Frank Walsh, Tom Hendricks, and myself are playing-- voices in the wilderness trying to show the way, and open the door to literary revolution ever so slightly. The eventual success of the movement will depend on those who follow-- on new voices, with attitude, like Eric Broomfield's. They'll need the attitude we carry-- which we carry maybe because we came of age immediately post-Sixties, during a window of time when there seemed to exist all possibilities-- possibilities which for the younger generation today don't seem to remain, so that so many of them are entrenched in their own pessimism and timidity.
Tuesday, June 10, 2008
Misguided
MISGUIDED is someone who'd claim to have "shredded" my arguments; to think it a worthwhile goal to shred the arguments of one of the only persons thinking ahead of where American literature is now.
Misguided is to wring your hands over my contentious ballyhoo, for being "too mean," which shows a prim reluctance for lit to make the kind of cultural noise being made in other cultural activities on a daily basis from sports to movies to music in this country. If some individuals refuse to review underground books because one underground promoter is too loud or too mean, then they shouldn't be reviewing anything. Apply the same logic to a rock critic or movie reviewer and you'll see the absurdity of their misguided thinking-- absurdity times ten, because if any art form needs noise of every kind it's the sleepy world of literature.
I don't worry about upsetting a handful of tepid book reviewers because I know they're not reaching anybody anyhow. The potential and future audience for reading given the right promotion and the right products is ten times greater than literature's audience now. Given a choice, I'll take that future, ten out of ten times over the status quo.
Writers today are modeling themselves after the likes of Jonathan Lethem and Jeffrey Eugenides. I could give Lethem's last book full of nicely crafted prose that says nothing and goes nowhere to a non-lit person and the person would never connect with it. The novel is intended for the insular literary world itself. The status quo Volvo is stopped at an amber-light road barrier with emergency lights flashing. It's time to roar past it.
Lit needs a little less Mozart string quartet and a lot more MC5 "Kick Out the Jams." I've sought to provide that. You can have your fine musicianship. I'm looking for relentless thundering noise.
Misguided is to wring your hands over my contentious ballyhoo, for being "too mean," which shows a prim reluctance for lit to make the kind of cultural noise being made in other cultural activities on a daily basis from sports to movies to music in this country. If some individuals refuse to review underground books because one underground promoter is too loud or too mean, then they shouldn't be reviewing anything. Apply the same logic to a rock critic or movie reviewer and you'll see the absurdity of their misguided thinking-- absurdity times ten, because if any art form needs noise of every kind it's the sleepy world of literature.
I don't worry about upsetting a handful of tepid book reviewers because I know they're not reaching anybody anyhow. The potential and future audience for reading given the right promotion and the right products is ten times greater than literature's audience now. Given a choice, I'll take that future, ten out of ten times over the status quo.
Writers today are modeling themselves after the likes of Jonathan Lethem and Jeffrey Eugenides. I could give Lethem's last book full of nicely crafted prose that says nothing and goes nowhere to a non-lit person and the person would never connect with it. The novel is intended for the insular literary world itself. The status quo Volvo is stopped at an amber-light road barrier with emergency lights flashing. It's time to roar past it.
Lit needs a little less Mozart string quartet and a lot more MC5 "Kick Out the Jams." I've sought to provide that. You can have your fine musicianship. I'm looking for relentless thundering noise.
Monday, June 09, 2008
Imagining the Future
SOMEONE has said that I lack imagination. Nothing could be further from the truth. Who else but myself has imagined an entirely new and renewed literature?
What American literature lacks today in its totality is a sense of excitement. To create this excitement, we'll need exciting happenings, exciting works, and exciting stars. This is the path that was taken by the underground in the form of the ULA, and which needs to be taken again with increased vigor. Already, the various segments of the underground have produced novels with better writing (Larry Richette's), more entertainment (Wred Fright's) and more social relevance (James Nowlan's) than the tame offerings from the conglomerate mainstream. Our shows have been unspeakably wild.
On the other side of the room stand the cliquesters of the status quo "mainstream," tightly clutching their books, laptops, and Guggenheims lest anyone take them away. "We're entitled!" they claim. And, yes, they are very literary, these proper persons, no question about it. In their way, they love writing. In a quiet way they're even able to convey this. Francine Prose wrote an entire quiet book affirming how to quietly write and how to quietly read, without once raising her voice.
That's the problem! Literary writing and reading has regressed to a hard-core upper-middle class isolated in their plush condos or homes with Fluffy the cat sleeping on their laps and pristine books whose pages turn carefully to be placed in preserved condition back on the shelf or coffee table as if in a monastery. "Lions, Harts, Leaping Does." Well and fine, for them, but they've detached the art from human society.
Displace this crowd? Why not ? WHY NOT?!! Push them aside if they refuse to move. Shove them into the wings. They've had their turn, these proper beings. Allow please a more exciting variety of poet and writer to stand at the front of the stage.
What American literature lacks today in its totality is a sense of excitement. To create this excitement, we'll need exciting happenings, exciting works, and exciting stars. This is the path that was taken by the underground in the form of the ULA, and which needs to be taken again with increased vigor. Already, the various segments of the underground have produced novels with better writing (Larry Richette's), more entertainment (Wred Fright's) and more social relevance (James Nowlan's) than the tame offerings from the conglomerate mainstream. Our shows have been unspeakably wild.
On the other side of the room stand the cliquesters of the status quo "mainstream," tightly clutching their books, laptops, and Guggenheims lest anyone take them away. "We're entitled!" they claim. And, yes, they are very literary, these proper persons, no question about it. In their way, they love writing. In a quiet way they're even able to convey this. Francine Prose wrote an entire quiet book affirming how to quietly write and how to quietly read, without once raising her voice.
That's the problem! Literary writing and reading has regressed to a hard-core upper-middle class isolated in their plush condos or homes with Fluffy the cat sleeping on their laps and pristine books whose pages turn carefully to be placed in preserved condition back on the shelf or coffee table as if in a monastery. "Lions, Harts, Leaping Does." Well and fine, for them, but they've detached the art from human society.
Displace this crowd? Why not ? WHY NOT?!! Push them aside if they refuse to move. Shove them into the wings. They've had their turn, these proper beings. Allow please a more exciting variety of poet and writer to stand at the front of the stage.
Gaitskill Appearance
GOOD to see The New Yorker carry a story by Mary Gaitskill. Still, to me Gaitskill is a tale of unrealized potential; of the controlling influence of the corporation and the academy. Her stories, as excellent as they are, have always struck me as too controlled, like other literary stories, as if her art has been kept on a leash. Probably I was too influenced as a reader in the 90's by riot-grrrl zeens, which were full of literary "raw power" unlike any writing ever seen. They were crude affairs mostly, but captured the tough emotion of a Gaitskill and multiplied it by ten or twenty. Jen Gogglebox and Ammi Emergency are only two names I can recall from a score of great young women writers from that period; including the ULA's original "Zeen Elvis," who in pure explosive writing talent represented the fulfillment of what Mary Gaitskill hinted at. Talent that burned the page.
Gaitskill's story as a writer is a tragedy, in a way. Like a stray cat picked up from the streets; given shots, cleaned-up, and other things so to be properly domesticated. That's what I think of when I read her stories. "Look what we've done to her," the well-crafted writing says-- but I prefer the "before" kind of story; the fully uninhibited fully lusty and bloody voice of the streets.
Gaitskill's story as a writer is a tragedy, in a way. Like a stray cat picked up from the streets; given shots, cleaned-up, and other things so to be properly domesticated. That's what I think of when I read her stories. "Look what we've done to her," the well-crafted writing says-- but I prefer the "before" kind of story; the fully uninhibited fully lusty and bloody voice of the streets.
Thursday, June 05, 2008
Amazement
AMAZING to me is the societal blindness of those who've been posting on this blog-- society's approved writers. They're proving they don't understand their own country. They can't even see it! This alone disqualifies them from their self-designation as the nation's best writers.
Visualize a pyramid. Socially and economically, that's what America is. Its structure is not all that different from ancient Rome or ancient Egypt. In many ways it's becoming an artfully masked slave-ocracy.
From what part of the pyramid comes William Vollmann? I believe both his parents were university professors, in Cali, which means he comes socio-economically from the top 5% of the pyramid, albeit near the bottom of that 5%. (He's from the top 1% intellectual class. Maybe you think this makes no difference; or maybe you realize, as I do, that his outlook on the world, BBC-liberal though it may be, is vastly different from, say, a Noah Cicero's, native of collapsing Youngstown, Ohio.)
Also from near the bottom of the top 5% is Francine Prose, whose parents were physicians. Ms. Prose portrays herself as a college dropout. When did she drop out? In the middle of her Phd program!
Are we beginning to see the unreality of today's literary class?
We may as well detach that top 5% peak, and set it alongside the real pyramid, because for the cliquesters of literature like Eugenides, Beattie, Hempel, Jorie Graham, Miranda July and Company that smaller pyramid is all there is. The other is out of their viewpoint. In that other, even the ULA comes from nowhere the bottom. More like halfway to two-thirds down, because beneath are the millions and millions of underclass; most who are people of color; from the millions in our nation's jails and prisons to black inner city dwellers to the more recently arrived twenty million illegals, who are here to serve, in some way or other, the Overclass-- those in the much smaller pyramid we've placed alongside, on the ground.
When I use the word "Overdog," it's an accurate designation.
What made the ULA hyper-- at least me-- was the realization that we were falling within the main pyramid. Falling, falling. Falling! I've arrived back in Detroit to see that, yes, this city and other cities of the industrial heartland are still in freefall.
But let's go back to the mini-pyramid, of the top 5%. Do you hear the chattering? Enclosed in there is the nation's intellectual class, almost in its entirety. Their premises, their perspectives, seldom go beyond their own little world. When they do look at the larger pyramid, it's from a great height.
Within the mini-pyramid circulates virtually all of literature's largesse; from large advances to grant money. You know what? For them, this is okay! Never mind that this money comes in large part, or is sustained by, taxes or monies paid by those in the larger entity. No matter! To the top 5% there is aristocratic entitlement. On this they thrive.
Sure, there are writers who make it from the larger pyramid into the smaller, elite one. Those like Ray Carver. What price do they pay?
I've been saying on my blogs that we need to free literature from the dominance of the top 5%; to bring it out of the mini-pyramid. Maybe I'm also saying that we need to dismantle the pyramids.
Visualize a pyramid. Socially and economically, that's what America is. Its structure is not all that different from ancient Rome or ancient Egypt. In many ways it's becoming an artfully masked slave-ocracy.
From what part of the pyramid comes William Vollmann? I believe both his parents were university professors, in Cali, which means he comes socio-economically from the top 5% of the pyramid, albeit near the bottom of that 5%. (He's from the top 1% intellectual class. Maybe you think this makes no difference; or maybe you realize, as I do, that his outlook on the world, BBC-liberal though it may be, is vastly different from, say, a Noah Cicero's, native of collapsing Youngstown, Ohio.)
Also from near the bottom of the top 5% is Francine Prose, whose parents were physicians. Ms. Prose portrays herself as a college dropout. When did she drop out? In the middle of her Phd program!
Are we beginning to see the unreality of today's literary class?
We may as well detach that top 5% peak, and set it alongside the real pyramid, because for the cliquesters of literature like Eugenides, Beattie, Hempel, Jorie Graham, Miranda July and Company that smaller pyramid is all there is. The other is out of their viewpoint. In that other, even the ULA comes from nowhere the bottom. More like halfway to two-thirds down, because beneath are the millions and millions of underclass; most who are people of color; from the millions in our nation's jails and prisons to black inner city dwellers to the more recently arrived twenty million illegals, who are here to serve, in some way or other, the Overclass-- those in the much smaller pyramid we've placed alongside, on the ground.
When I use the word "Overdog," it's an accurate designation.
What made the ULA hyper-- at least me-- was the realization that we were falling within the main pyramid. Falling, falling. Falling! I've arrived back in Detroit to see that, yes, this city and other cities of the industrial heartland are still in freefall.
But let's go back to the mini-pyramid, of the top 5%. Do you hear the chattering? Enclosed in there is the nation's intellectual class, almost in its entirety. Their premises, their perspectives, seldom go beyond their own little world. When they do look at the larger pyramid, it's from a great height.
Within the mini-pyramid circulates virtually all of literature's largesse; from large advances to grant money. You know what? For them, this is okay! Never mind that this money comes in large part, or is sustained by, taxes or monies paid by those in the larger entity. No matter! To the top 5% there is aristocratic entitlement. On this they thrive.
Sure, there are writers who make it from the larger pyramid into the smaller, elite one. Those like Ray Carver. What price do they pay?
I've been saying on my blogs that we need to free literature from the dominance of the top 5%; to bring it out of the mini-pyramid. Maybe I'm also saying that we need to dismantle the pyramids.
Blogs Update
WHY IS THIS MAN PUBLISHING THROUGH X-LIBRIS?
I have my review of Lawrence Richette's latest novel now up at both
http://www.phillyliterary.blogspot.com/
and
http://www.blitzreview.blogspot.com/
The question is why the best American novelist isn't being published by the machine. He's tried to access it. Questions are raised about the System's aesthetics and tastes, and the role played by the "Buddy System" in American letters.
***********************************************
SHAKESPEAREAN MADNESS
I'm told that a lot is happening courtesy of ULA madman Frank Walsh over at
http://www.ulapoetryandfiction.blogspot.com/
possibly related to the discussion that's been happening at this place. I plan to take a look.
The literary rebellion lives!
I have my review of Lawrence Richette's latest novel now up at both
http://www.phillyliterary.blogspot.com/
and
http://www.blitzreview.blogspot.com/
The question is why the best American novelist isn't being published by the machine. He's tried to access it. Questions are raised about the System's aesthetics and tastes, and the role played by the "Buddy System" in American letters.
***********************************************
SHAKESPEAREAN MADNESS
I'm told that a lot is happening courtesy of ULA madman Frank Walsh over at
http://www.ulapoetryandfiction.blogspot.com/
possibly related to the discussion that's been happening at this place. I plan to take a look.
The literary rebellion lives!
Monday, June 02, 2008
My Response
Patricians vs. Plebians Cont.
BLOODBATHS
The Overdogs have called their posts here a "bloodbath." They've stormed onto this blog while simultaneously a Petition blog I attempted to set up has been frozen. The sound you hear in the background is the patricians high-fiving themselves at the mansion.
Their actions work on several levels. The millionaires need to justify themselves to themselves. They need to defuse my arguments. They hope to discourage me or shut me up. Part of their thinking is to use me as example; as warning to other underground writers who might be tempted to call them on their machinations. The dissenter strung up.
What they really show is the reactionary mindset behind this country's literary aristocracy centered in New York. They control enough key intellectual centers of the literary apparatus, like PEN, to keep their influence dominant. As PEN's President they have Francine Prose, who in terms of theory and aesthetics is one of the more reactionary literary critics in America.
More pernicious is the Overdog being heard from on this blog, to whom everything is fine because for HIS sterling person everything is fine. To him the Beat movement lives, though its current practicioners are nowhere published, because he's met a few aging Beat stars in their last years and feels qualified, from his high station, to speak on the movement. HE decides if status quo lit is okay, and has decreed it is. To him there is an alternative in literature because his kind helped create that alternative, and stocked it with fellow aristocrats like William Vollmann. How intolerable then to witness the arrival of a real, organic opposition. How necessary to stamp it out.
PROPAGANDA
The posts here from Overdogs and their demi-puppets are as much propaganda as the Susan Nagel book about the daughter of Marie Antoinette. The point of view is the same: the poor aristos in their Versailles palace being picked on. Woe is us! You resentful beggar. How dare you mention our eleven hundred horses!
Compare them. The similarity is obvious.
MY CRIMES
Conditions set for the aristocrats to be involved with their token tax-deductible programs to help people: that they be accepted as the great and generous liberal benefactors they imagine themselves to be. Watch them parade themselves at their black-tie "charitable" events while the bulk of money goes into their own pockets. If someone dares call these folks the a--holes they are in reality, the aristos are outraged.
What are my crimes?
1.) I've thrown a spotlight onto plutocrat writers robbing the grants process.
2.) I and my friends have enlivened a few staid establishment readings, waking up audiences at the kind of moribund lethargically dead presentations that have killed literature's audience.
3.) I've refused to kow-tow to rich Overdog societal parasites deluded into believing they're talented, so used to everything going their way they can't tolerate any criticism.
4.) I didn't get weepy (but hardly celebrated) when a much-awarded lit-Insider bureaucratic politician poet with absolutely NO talent-- none discernible whatsoever; example of everything wrong with System literature now-- kicked off.
Am I supposed to apologize? To who? The rich a--holes who've been coming onto my blog? I've worked enough shitty jobs in my life serving the plutocrats to know these are the most selfish most villainous most egregiously mendacious collection of mindlessly self-important jerks who've ever lived. Go choke on your hors d'ouevres and be happy there's not real revolution in this country, as will no doubt occur should current trends continue. I'm merely ahead of the curve.
RE CRIME #2
The Howl Protest was a good example. Those of us who stepped into the hall all agreed the atmosphere was that of a morgue. You had an audience of sleepy gentry and on stage were six or seven wax dummies in chairs. We woke one or two of them up. I guess at some point we offended blustery Lopate, outraged and outrageously lying about how tough it is to make ends meet on his six-figure tenured chair position. (Though compared to some other writers, maybe he could be considered "poor.")
Know what I thought sitting there? I thought, "Is this the best literature has to offer?" This tepid celebration of Ginsberg that had nothing celebratory about it? The celebrating and the real writers were outside! On the sidewalk.
The onstage folks write for museums. Their pretentiously wordy concoctions, despite a massive billion-dollar apparatus behind them, touch no one. Soulless artifacts. Lifeless furniture, indistinguishable from the chairs they sat on; Lopate a chair in more ways than one; his carefully-crafted Polonious essays as square and as wooden as a chair. Dead purveyors of a dead art. You should be glad we awoke you, you demi-puppets.
"TROUBLED"
The dissenter being called disturbed or troubled reeks of the Soviet Union, where anyone who opposed the monolith had to be insane, by definition. I love that word, "troubled." The fact is I'm enjoying myself with this campaign-- hearing the dragon's death throes. I suspect some people in high literary places are "troubled" I'm conducting it.
I've alienated a narrow claque of trust-funders and their flunkies who don't give a shit anyway about anyone outside their greedy circle. They've got theirs and to hell with anyone else. What's to lose? The good opinion of Hiram, Francine, and Phillip? I never had it!
CONTEXT
Meanwhile, the workforce in industries like automobiles and steel is a fraction of what it was thirty years ago; part of a huge nationwide shakeout in which wages have plummeted while cost of living goes up. Good-paying jobs for two-thirds of America have vanished. We've seen a massive wealth transfer from poor to rich. The great untold story of America is the economic destruction of an entire class of people. Who's writing about this? Instead, literary Overdogs erect thicker walls to keep the rest of America out.
UNFAIRNESS
Have I been unfair on occasion in my arguments and outrageous in my actions? Against a house deck of cards stacked against me and my kind 1,000 to one? Yes! I look for every opening and any advantage. But I also give opponents the opportunity to speak which they'd never grant me.
Funny how those who grab power in every form, so they control all the rules and every aspect of the game, and run up countless points on the scoreboard for themselves before the whistle's even blown, then ask us to "play fair." While on the football field they oppose out tiny clown car with a steamroller. "You're not playing by our rules!" they yell. No shit. I'm going to take your rules and your phony liberal poses of niceness and virtue; the smiling masks you wear hiding your Dorian Gray faces and decaying villainous hearts; and hit you over the head with them.
THE VILLAIN AS SYMBOL
Have I turned one of our rich foes, the ULA's first target, into a symbol; poster boy for our cause? I'd say he's turned himself into that symbol by remaining at the center of the apparatus which must be democratized before literature can move forward. He failed to take his own advice to "just write."
THE NADIR
The absolute nadir for contemporary American literature was the National Book Award a few years back handed to a ridiculously bad novel about letters to Peru or such by wealthy blueblood author Lily Tuck.
Bullshit scribblings from a dilettante's bullshit life. Diary entries from a debutante. The National Book Award-- representative of the best America has to offer-- given to a narrow sideshow of a glimpse of a narrow segment of society's narrow outlook. Who made this award-- to what purpose? Was the book the sound of America-- of its farms, factories, roads, docks, offices; throbbing hatreds and raging loves; of our massive, vast, mad and madly beautiful country? Uh, no.
ON BEING HECKLED
Someone said I've never been heckled. I have. At open mics and at the ULA's own events-- have asked for it and welcomed it; have loved the interchange, the opportunity to show, "This art form is not dead."
THE JOY OF REBELLION
When Allen Ginsberg spoke of throwing potato salad, he was speaking to future generations. First, to us. He was affirming the necessity of dissent in literature-- dissent not frozen at 1958 in the Beat heyday as the Villains and Overdogs of literature would have it. Dissent ongoing, perpetual, for all time; the kind of unyielding artistic dissent which is the only thing which keeps any art form alive. Print out this rant and tape it to your walls as reminder that it's the artist's JOB to dissent-- to dissent first against power, privilege, complacency, falsehood, and unearned arrogance, which is all I've been doing. "My family! the black-hearted villain cries when caught in the spotlight. He means, "My station. My inheritance. My caste. My legacy of leverage and largesse in this society which I've drawn on again and again." He means the plutocratic nature of America itself.
Who's the oppressor and who the oppressed? The Rebellion's targets have been the most connected writers around, privileged of the privileged, scions of affluence tied to literary power centers which control hype, money, and influence. Targeted have been the roadblocks to independent writers, and barriers to the writer's independence. Aristocrats from their palaces would have us believe opportunity is equal for all, and those not allowed into the show simply aren't good enough. "Jeeves, fill out that Guggenheim application, could you?"It's a sign of their refusal to change, to alter the ways and means of literature to the slightest extent.
If the System refuses to allow outside voices into literature's argument, then backwardness and evil will have won. As the bureaucracies and monied manipulators extend their control even over organizations dedicated to the small press (see CLMP) or to dissent (see PEN), this tightening of artistic control and lethargy must be balanced, if the art is to remain relevant, connected to the nation-at-large. Remember, I came to this subject as a reader, one unsatisfied with what the literary machine was handing us-- well-edited beaten-down "dirty realism" or the continuous posing of rich kids. I believed we as a civilization could do better. I don't care if I'm "published." What does that matter to me? That's never been my goal. If I can knock over roadblocks to other writers, I'll have done enough.
A harpoon has gone into the white whale of corruption. The screaming you hear is the result. For a static art, this is nothing but a positive.
The literary Rebellion which reached a peak through the actions of the ULA has been a joyful rebellion. Its actions have been among the most thrilling in literary history-- actions of boldness and exuberance against the decay of the art form. Actions which have woken the slumbering mummies. Amazing events. Read the history. It's there as a potato salad example for everyone.
BLOODBATHS
The Overdogs have called their posts here a "bloodbath." They've stormed onto this blog while simultaneously a Petition blog I attempted to set up has been frozen. The sound you hear in the background is the patricians high-fiving themselves at the mansion.
Their actions work on several levels. The millionaires need to justify themselves to themselves. They need to defuse my arguments. They hope to discourage me or shut me up. Part of their thinking is to use me as example; as warning to other underground writers who might be tempted to call them on their machinations. The dissenter strung up.
What they really show is the reactionary mindset behind this country's literary aristocracy centered in New York. They control enough key intellectual centers of the literary apparatus, like PEN, to keep their influence dominant. As PEN's President they have Francine Prose, who in terms of theory and aesthetics is one of the more reactionary literary critics in America.
More pernicious is the Overdog being heard from on this blog, to whom everything is fine because for HIS sterling person everything is fine. To him the Beat movement lives, though its current practicioners are nowhere published, because he's met a few aging Beat stars in their last years and feels qualified, from his high station, to speak on the movement. HE decides if status quo lit is okay, and has decreed it is. To him there is an alternative in literature because his kind helped create that alternative, and stocked it with fellow aristocrats like William Vollmann. How intolerable then to witness the arrival of a real, organic opposition. How necessary to stamp it out.
PROPAGANDA
The posts here from Overdogs and their demi-puppets are as much propaganda as the Susan Nagel book about the daughter of Marie Antoinette. The point of view is the same: the poor aristos in their Versailles palace being picked on. Woe is us! You resentful beggar. How dare you mention our eleven hundred horses!
Compare them. The similarity is obvious.
MY CRIMES
Conditions set for the aristocrats to be involved with their token tax-deductible programs to help people: that they be accepted as the great and generous liberal benefactors they imagine themselves to be. Watch them parade themselves at their black-tie "charitable" events while the bulk of money goes into their own pockets. If someone dares call these folks the a--holes they are in reality, the aristos are outraged.
What are my crimes?
1.) I've thrown a spotlight onto plutocrat writers robbing the grants process.
2.) I and my friends have enlivened a few staid establishment readings, waking up audiences at the kind of moribund lethargically dead presentations that have killed literature's audience.
3.) I've refused to kow-tow to rich Overdog societal parasites deluded into believing they're talented, so used to everything going their way they can't tolerate any criticism.
4.) I didn't get weepy (but hardly celebrated) when a much-awarded lit-Insider bureaucratic politician poet with absolutely NO talent-- none discernible whatsoever; example of everything wrong with System literature now-- kicked off.
Am I supposed to apologize? To who? The rich a--holes who've been coming onto my blog? I've worked enough shitty jobs in my life serving the plutocrats to know these are the most selfish most villainous most egregiously mendacious collection of mindlessly self-important jerks who've ever lived. Go choke on your hors d'ouevres and be happy there's not real revolution in this country, as will no doubt occur should current trends continue. I'm merely ahead of the curve.
RE CRIME #2
The Howl Protest was a good example. Those of us who stepped into the hall all agreed the atmosphere was that of a morgue. You had an audience of sleepy gentry and on stage were six or seven wax dummies in chairs. We woke one or two of them up. I guess at some point we offended blustery Lopate, outraged and outrageously lying about how tough it is to make ends meet on his six-figure tenured chair position. (Though compared to some other writers, maybe he could be considered "poor.")
Know what I thought sitting there? I thought, "Is this the best literature has to offer?" This tepid celebration of Ginsberg that had nothing celebratory about it? The celebrating and the real writers were outside! On the sidewalk.
The onstage folks write for museums. Their pretentiously wordy concoctions, despite a massive billion-dollar apparatus behind them, touch no one. Soulless artifacts. Lifeless furniture, indistinguishable from the chairs they sat on; Lopate a chair in more ways than one; his carefully-crafted Polonious essays as square and as wooden as a chair. Dead purveyors of a dead art. You should be glad we awoke you, you demi-puppets.
"TROUBLED"
The dissenter being called disturbed or troubled reeks of the Soviet Union, where anyone who opposed the monolith had to be insane, by definition. I love that word, "troubled." The fact is I'm enjoying myself with this campaign-- hearing the dragon's death throes. I suspect some people in high literary places are "troubled" I'm conducting it.
I've alienated a narrow claque of trust-funders and their flunkies who don't give a shit anyway about anyone outside their greedy circle. They've got theirs and to hell with anyone else. What's to lose? The good opinion of Hiram, Francine, and Phillip? I never had it!
CONTEXT
Meanwhile, the workforce in industries like automobiles and steel is a fraction of what it was thirty years ago; part of a huge nationwide shakeout in which wages have plummeted while cost of living goes up. Good-paying jobs for two-thirds of America have vanished. We've seen a massive wealth transfer from poor to rich. The great untold story of America is the economic destruction of an entire class of people. Who's writing about this? Instead, literary Overdogs erect thicker walls to keep the rest of America out.
UNFAIRNESS
Have I been unfair on occasion in my arguments and outrageous in my actions? Against a house deck of cards stacked against me and my kind 1,000 to one? Yes! I look for every opening and any advantage. But I also give opponents the opportunity to speak which they'd never grant me.
Funny how those who grab power in every form, so they control all the rules and every aspect of the game, and run up countless points on the scoreboard for themselves before the whistle's even blown, then ask us to "play fair." While on the football field they oppose out tiny clown car with a steamroller. "You're not playing by our rules!" they yell. No shit. I'm going to take your rules and your phony liberal poses of niceness and virtue; the smiling masks you wear hiding your Dorian Gray faces and decaying villainous hearts; and hit you over the head with them.
THE VILLAIN AS SYMBOL
Have I turned one of our rich foes, the ULA's first target, into a symbol; poster boy for our cause? I'd say he's turned himself into that symbol by remaining at the center of the apparatus which must be democratized before literature can move forward. He failed to take his own advice to "just write."
THE NADIR
The absolute nadir for contemporary American literature was the National Book Award a few years back handed to a ridiculously bad novel about letters to Peru or such by wealthy blueblood author Lily Tuck.
Bullshit scribblings from a dilettante's bullshit life. Diary entries from a debutante. The National Book Award-- representative of the best America has to offer-- given to a narrow sideshow of a glimpse of a narrow segment of society's narrow outlook. Who made this award-- to what purpose? Was the book the sound of America-- of its farms, factories, roads, docks, offices; throbbing hatreds and raging loves; of our massive, vast, mad and madly beautiful country? Uh, no.
ON BEING HECKLED
Someone said I've never been heckled. I have. At open mics and at the ULA's own events-- have asked for it and welcomed it; have loved the interchange, the opportunity to show, "This art form is not dead."
THE JOY OF REBELLION
When Allen Ginsberg spoke of throwing potato salad, he was speaking to future generations. First, to us. He was affirming the necessity of dissent in literature-- dissent not frozen at 1958 in the Beat heyday as the Villains and Overdogs of literature would have it. Dissent ongoing, perpetual, for all time; the kind of unyielding artistic dissent which is the only thing which keeps any art form alive. Print out this rant and tape it to your walls as reminder that it's the artist's JOB to dissent-- to dissent first against power, privilege, complacency, falsehood, and unearned arrogance, which is all I've been doing. "My family! the black-hearted villain cries when caught in the spotlight. He means, "My station. My inheritance. My caste. My legacy of leverage and largesse in this society which I've drawn on again and again." He means the plutocratic nature of America itself.
Who's the oppressor and who the oppressed? The Rebellion's targets have been the most connected writers around, privileged of the privileged, scions of affluence tied to literary power centers which control hype, money, and influence. Targeted have been the roadblocks to independent writers, and barriers to the writer's independence. Aristocrats from their palaces would have us believe opportunity is equal for all, and those not allowed into the show simply aren't good enough. "Jeeves, fill out that Guggenheim application, could you?"It's a sign of their refusal to change, to alter the ways and means of literature to the slightest extent.
If the System refuses to allow outside voices into literature's argument, then backwardness and evil will have won. As the bureaucracies and monied manipulators extend their control even over organizations dedicated to the small press (see CLMP) or to dissent (see PEN), this tightening of artistic control and lethargy must be balanced, if the art is to remain relevant, connected to the nation-at-large. Remember, I came to this subject as a reader, one unsatisfied with what the literary machine was handing us-- well-edited beaten-down "dirty realism" or the continuous posing of rich kids. I believed we as a civilization could do better. I don't care if I'm "published." What does that matter to me? That's never been my goal. If I can knock over roadblocks to other writers, I'll have done enough.
A harpoon has gone into the white whale of corruption. The screaming you hear is the result. For a static art, this is nothing but a positive.
The literary Rebellion which reached a peak through the actions of the ULA has been a joyful rebellion. Its actions have been among the most thrilling in literary history-- actions of boldness and exuberance against the decay of the art form. Actions which have woken the slumbering mummies. Amazing events. Read the history. It's there as a potato salad example for everyone.
Thursday, May 29, 2008
Censorship?
A PRE-EMPTIVE STRIKE?
I began to set up a blog, "Petition to PEN," at www.penpetition.blogspot.com
Apparently it's been frozen. Perhaps by the time you read this their review will be over and you'll be able to read what the Petition says.
It's curious-- blogger has thousands and thousands of blogs to manage. Why would they take action like this-- unless someone complained?
I began to set up a blog, "Petition to PEN," at www.penpetition.blogspot.com
Apparently it's been frozen. Perhaps by the time you read this their review will be over and you'll be able to read what the Petition says.
It's curious-- blogger has thousands and thousands of blogs to manage. Why would they take action like this-- unless someone complained?
A PEN Quote
From PEN's Larry Siems:
"Excluding those with challenging or critical viewpoints is just as wrong now. In the post-9/11 world, where the future depends more than ever on bridging intellectual chasms and cultural divides, we believe that exclusion is also self-defeating."
Does he and PEN apply this to America's literary scene?
PEN is doing many things right. I believe they can do better.
"Excluding those with challenging or critical viewpoints is just as wrong now. In the post-9/11 world, where the future depends more than ever on bridging intellectual chasms and cultural divides, we believe that exclusion is also self-defeating."
Does he and PEN apply this to America's literary scene?
PEN is doing many things right. I believe they can do better.
The Dishonesty Brigade
I've been getting hit of late with a variety of anonymous posters, from all directions, in various guises. They're what Shakespeare described inThe Tempest, "that by moonshine do the green sour ringlets make": demi-puppets. Shadows without substance.
The shadows have complained about my hostility, yet their dissembling is hostile. They won't give my readers and myself the respect of appearing under their own identities. Their actions are of duplicity. Let them come into the light if they have genuineness and meaning. I can hardly be blamed for calling them demi-puppets when they remain demi-puppets!
The shadows have complained about my hostility, yet their dissembling is hostile. They won't give my readers and myself the respect of appearing under their own identities. Their actions are of duplicity. Let them come into the light if they have genuineness and meaning. I can hardly be blamed for calling them demi-puppets when they remain demi-puppets!
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
New Links
In addition to my new review blog at
www.blitzreview.blogspot.com,
I've added two other contacts to my Links feature--
www.apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com (this link long overdue);
and
www.sundaysalon.com,
an interesting new lit site.
Check them out!
www.blitzreview.blogspot.com,
I've added two other contacts to my Links feature--
www.apragmaticpolicy.wordpress.com (this link long overdue);
and
www.sundaysalon.com,
an interesting new lit site.
Check them out!
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Peace Gesture
As a gesture of good will, I'm removing the reference to pods in this blog's Profile. I've also made another change for politically correct reasons, meeting critics halfway.
I'm also willing to overlook differences of opinion with Moody-spokesman "Harland," to pursue instead those points we can agree upon; chiefly the belief in democracy in literature. In coming days I'll propose an area in which we might be able to work together toward that goal.
I'm also willing to overlook differences of opinion with Moody-spokesman "Harland," to pursue instead those points we can agree upon; chiefly the belief in democracy in literature. In coming days I'll propose an area in which we might be able to work together toward that goal.
The PEN Board
I'M TOLD that one has to have a book published to be on PEN's board of trustees, or to become a member of PEN. This means that excluded writers can't belong to an organization meant to protect excluded writers! A neat trick.
Who are PEN board members?
They're the most privileged and connected writers in America, with the least interest in changing anything about the American writing scene. The very writers who least should be on the board of such an organization are running the thing.
The solution: There are underground writers who've been published who'd make excellent PEN trustees; Tim W. Brown, Carl Robinson, and Wred Fright among them.
Who are PEN board members?
They're the most privileged and connected writers in America, with the least interest in changing anything about the American writing scene. The very writers who least should be on the board of such an organization are running the thing.
The solution: There are underground writers who've been published who'd make excellent PEN trustees; Tim W. Brown, Carl Robinson, and Wred Fright among them.
Miscalculation
The biggest miscalculation I made when plotting the original ULA strategy was assuming that established literati, as writers, had consciences. I assumed the justness of our grievance would be universally recognized; that those who pay lip service to democracy and foul play would help us institute democracy in literature in reality. I assumed that our first target would return the ill-gotten grant we protested against, and apologize. Surely no one of his station could be that obstinate, that greedy, that selfish. We sought to remind him and his friends that they're part of a community of citizens, a community of writers which includes others beyond their own privileged clique-- that they had an obligation as members of that community to not always take all resources for themselves; they who least needed those resources.
He was that obstinate. His crowd was that selfish, and closed ranks in support of the wrongdoer. They dismissed the idea of community. They've been the alienators, not anyone on our side.
I've sought redress of grievances-- to force our literature, our America, to live up to its ideals. To open up the decision-making to all levels of society, and to ensure that resources set aside to remedy inequalities, not be stolen first by those who already receive more than equal treatment.
Literary rebels in this society have nothing to lose. Who cares who we alienate when they're alienated to us anyway!-- when in their circles of snobbery they've been alienated to our kind of writer from the very beginning?
Ever read Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Lodging for the Night''-- his take on medieval poet Francois Villon? The encounter at the end between the cold and hungry poet, and the old "noble," is the dynamic we face today.
The Rebellion has nothing; no status and no resources, existing penniless in the cold, yet at the same time it has everything on its side; the hunger and energy of the new-- while the other side, the old order of literature, exists in a holding pattern, marching nowhere, clinging to its exclusiveness inside boundaries of its own making.
He was that obstinate. His crowd was that selfish, and closed ranks in support of the wrongdoer. They dismissed the idea of community. They've been the alienators, not anyone on our side.
I've sought redress of grievances-- to force our literature, our America, to live up to its ideals. To open up the decision-making to all levels of society, and to ensure that resources set aside to remedy inequalities, not be stolen first by those who already receive more than equal treatment.
Literary rebels in this society have nothing to lose. Who cares who we alienate when they're alienated to us anyway!-- when in their circles of snobbery they've been alienated to our kind of writer from the very beginning?
Ever read Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Lodging for the Night''-- his take on medieval poet Francois Villon? The encounter at the end between the cold and hungry poet, and the old "noble," is the dynamic we face today.
The Rebellion has nothing; no status and no resources, existing penniless in the cold, yet at the same time it has everything on its side; the hunger and energy of the new-- while the other side, the old order of literature, exists in a holding pattern, marching nowhere, clinging to its exclusiveness inside boundaries of its own making.
Friday, May 23, 2008
Two Undergrounds
PICTURE the heyday of the Soviet Union, when kitchen-produced samizdat was the only outlet for independent literary activity disconnected from the state-approved literature of the bureaucracies. What if the state had countered samizdat with its own fake version of underground writing, controlled from on high?
This is the situation in America today, where two undergrounds exist side-by-side. One is the authentic version, grass roots "zine" publishing, a spontaneous activity sparked in reaction to the oppressive dominating noise of the media monopolies. Genuine roots art; an organic cultural happening.
The Fake Underground is a Frankenstein monster produced in university and government laboratories; part of a reactionary move begun in the 1950's to misdirect the American literary mainstream. Its funding has come from various sources; from NEA grants to big-money foundations to, yes, in some instances, the CIA. (See post below this one.) Study where the support comes from for what's handed us by anonymous posters on this blog as "avant-garde" and you'll see it comes from the highest levels of society.
Locating the financial sources isn't easy, as they often operate through many layers. One of the players today is the "progressive" Creative Capital Foundation. Further digging shows CCF is funded by giant tax shelters like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the J.P. Morgan Chase Foundation.
In the 1990's, for my zeen I looked into the takeover of the U.S. version of Critique by the Jeane Kirkpatrick-run Heldref Foundation. (Kirkpatrick was a notorious neo-con ideologue.) Connected with this, curiously enough-- perhaps innocently-- was noted "avante-garde" lit figure and FC2 editor Larry McCaffery.
I covered a more recent takeover, of a small press organization, for the ULA. Check the Monday Report archives at www.literaryrevolution.com
Throughout the Substitute Underground (straight out of Orwell's 1984, by the way) are the fingerprints of the wealthiest, most powerful individuals in this country.
I consider it a reactionary phenomenon. For a similar occurrence one can look at the art world of the 1950's when the Rockefeller family, stung by an encounter with populist Mexican artist Diego Rivera-- who created works of striking social relevance-- went in the opposite direction with their enormous financial backing and promotion of abstract art. American art connecting with the people was shoved aside for art representing a heavily Europeanized elite, art which by its very nature viscerally touched nobody.
What's called literary "avant-garde" today is merely window dressing. Despite the sums of money behind it, it's moved no place. It exists to displace the real thing. It's one more part of a stagnating literary present whose other manifestations-- Cecily von Ziegasar's "Gossip Girl" and its offshoots; literary flagship The New Yorker's still publishing John Updike and Updike wannabes, or John Ashbery and Ashbery wannabes-- show status quo literature to be reactionary, regressive, and dead.
This is the situation in America today, where two undergrounds exist side-by-side. One is the authentic version, grass roots "zine" publishing, a spontaneous activity sparked in reaction to the oppressive dominating noise of the media monopolies. Genuine roots art; an organic cultural happening.
The Fake Underground is a Frankenstein monster produced in university and government laboratories; part of a reactionary move begun in the 1950's to misdirect the American literary mainstream. Its funding has come from various sources; from NEA grants to big-money foundations to, yes, in some instances, the CIA. (See post below this one.) Study where the support comes from for what's handed us by anonymous posters on this blog as "avant-garde" and you'll see it comes from the highest levels of society.
Locating the financial sources isn't easy, as they often operate through many layers. One of the players today is the "progressive" Creative Capital Foundation. Further digging shows CCF is funded by giant tax shelters like the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and the J.P. Morgan Chase Foundation.
In the 1990's, for my zeen I looked into the takeover of the U.S. version of Critique by the Jeane Kirkpatrick-run Heldref Foundation. (Kirkpatrick was a notorious neo-con ideologue.) Connected with this, curiously enough-- perhaps innocently-- was noted "avante-garde" lit figure and FC2 editor Larry McCaffery.
I covered a more recent takeover, of a small press organization, for the ULA. Check the Monday Report archives at www.literaryrevolution.com
Throughout the Substitute Underground (straight out of Orwell's 1984, by the way) are the fingerprints of the wealthiest, most powerful individuals in this country.
I consider it a reactionary phenomenon. For a similar occurrence one can look at the art world of the 1950's when the Rockefeller family, stung by an encounter with populist Mexican artist Diego Rivera-- who created works of striking social relevance-- went in the opposite direction with their enormous financial backing and promotion of abstract art. American art connecting with the people was shoved aside for art representing a heavily Europeanized elite, art which by its very nature viscerally touched nobody.
What's called literary "avant-garde" today is merely window dressing. Despite the sums of money behind it, it's moved no place. It exists to displace the real thing. It's one more part of a stagnating literary present whose other manifestations-- Cecily von Ziegasar's "Gossip Girl" and its offshoots; literary flagship The New Yorker's still publishing John Updike and Updike wannabes, or John Ashbery and Ashbery wannabes-- show status quo literature to be reactionary, regressive, and dead.
A Crazy Tale
This is right out of my "Plutocracy USA" story at Literary Mystery.
Yale poet WWII vet Cord Meyer won an O. Henry Prize in 1946 for best first-published story. He became President of the United World Federalists, "which envisioned a globe under the calm and rational dominion of one government." In 1951 he joined the CIA. "He would rise to become the number two man in the agency's clandestine operations. . . ." "Along the way, he secretly financed labor unions, youth groups, writers' organizations, and literary journals."
This info is from a 2007 bio of the Kennedys, Brothers by David Talbot, former editor of Salon. Elsewhere in the book, Talbot mentions that by 1977 there were over 400 U.S. journalists considered "assets" by the CIA. Do any remain? (We know that CNN's Anderson Cooper worked for the CIA after Yale.)
Yale poet WWII vet Cord Meyer won an O. Henry Prize in 1946 for best first-published story. He became President of the United World Federalists, "which envisioned a globe under the calm and rational dominion of one government." In 1951 he joined the CIA. "He would rise to become the number two man in the agency's clandestine operations. . . ." "Along the way, he secretly financed labor unions, youth groups, writers' organizations, and literary journals."
This info is from a 2007 bio of the Kennedys, Brothers by David Talbot, former editor of Salon. Elsewhere in the book, Talbot mentions that by 1977 there were over 400 U.S. journalists considered "assets" by the CIA. Do any remain? (We know that CNN's Anderson Cooper worked for the CIA after Yale.)
"Burning Mansions"
SPARE ME your lectures,
your trivialized posing
snooty condescension
chi-chi descritpions
of the swanky parties
of bohemian millionaires
Sedaris clown entertainment
snot-filled pastry dishes
white powder trays of sandwiches
clinking wineglasses
at the Benefit for the African tourist
flash photo taken with the guests
to show they're generous progressives;
Saturday smiles of glowing teeth,
boob jobs and face lifts.
They return home
comforting digs--
million dollar--
take off their ties and party dresses
to hand to the maid
head-bowed and silent immigrant.
Then the Overdogs open
laid out on the mahogany end table
neatly-stacked envelopes
counting the profits
of their global investments,
perfume-tinged,
smelling of sanctity
of the convent of their untouched
conscience.
your trivialized posing
snooty condescension
chi-chi descritpions
of the swanky parties
of bohemian millionaires
Sedaris clown entertainment
snot-filled pastry dishes
white powder trays of sandwiches
clinking wineglasses
at the Benefit for the African tourist
flash photo taken with the guests
to show they're generous progressives;
Saturday smiles of glowing teeth,
boob jobs and face lifts.
They return home
comforting digs--
million dollar--
take off their ties and party dresses
to hand to the maid
head-bowed and silent immigrant.
Then the Overdogs open
laid out on the mahogany end table
neatly-stacked envelopes
counting the profits
of their global investments,
perfume-tinged,
smelling of sanctity
of the convent of their untouched
conscience.
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Letter to PEN
Text of an e-mail I sent to the PEN organization in New York two days ago:
To PEN staff, officers, and board members:
It's heartening to see your progressive stance in support of dissenting writers in distant countries.
What's your public stance regarding dissenting writers in the United States-- including those who criticize the cultural establishment?
Also, given that American literature is dominated by the upper classes; and that those scattered or token lower class writers who are allowed into the party have to aggressively conform to tightly regulated standards, with little to no control over their own work (see the career of Raymond Carver), what steps are being taken to democratize your organization; to bring in as officers or board members writers from outside the literary establishment-- including voices of American literary dissent?
I look forward to your reply.
Thank you.
-Karl "King" Wenclas
(I await a response.)
To PEN staff, officers, and board members:
It's heartening to see your progressive stance in support of dissenting writers in distant countries.
What's your public stance regarding dissenting writers in the United States-- including those who criticize the cultural establishment?
Also, given that American literature is dominated by the upper classes; and that those scattered or token lower class writers who are allowed into the party have to aggressively conform to tightly regulated standards, with little to no control over their own work (see the career of Raymond Carver), what steps are being taken to democratize your organization; to bring in as officers or board members writers from outside the literary establishment-- including voices of American literary dissent?
I look forward to your reply.
Thank you.
-Karl "King" Wenclas
(I await a response.)
The Island
The sad fact is that the literary establishment lives on an isolated island. Nowhere is this more striking than in the poetry realm, where the stripped-down Bennington-style of verse is completely disconnected with the Beat-or-hip hop-influenced stylings coming from the lower classes, heard in dive clubs or on streetcorners. (The best underground poets do a synthesis of types, mixing in the knowledge of an Eliot or a Pound.)
The remarks here of Moody-mouthpiece "Harland" shows how out-of-touch the status quo's prose masters are as well; desperately clinging to a stale "avant-garde" left over from the days of Robert Coover and others of his ilk, with Gordon Lish/Thomas Pynchon wordplay thrown in. All very tiring. Overintellectualized; meant only for the pseudo-intellectual crowd. The Conformity factories known as universities continue preaching old dogma, while hundreds of DIYers outside the Ivy-covered walls are breaking the rules and the boundaries.
No, Harland; zeensters aren't submitting to literary journals whose focus is on the well-polished sentence while ignoring the deeper impetus of a work. These journals, like you, are micro-focused. It's not working. The answer for the art is to take a larger view, in so doing deciding upon a work's-- and literature's-- real goals, then adjusting the style accordingly, creating new styles which live. The answer for literature is right in front of us, has always been right in front of us, but no one can see it. Peace. Out.
The remarks here of Moody-mouthpiece "Harland" shows how out-of-touch the status quo's prose masters are as well; desperately clinging to a stale "avant-garde" left over from the days of Robert Coover and others of his ilk, with Gordon Lish/Thomas Pynchon wordplay thrown in. All very tiring. Overintellectualized; meant only for the pseudo-intellectual crowd. The Conformity factories known as universities continue preaching old dogma, while hundreds of DIYers outside the Ivy-covered walls are breaking the rules and the boundaries.
No, Harland; zeensters aren't submitting to literary journals whose focus is on the well-polished sentence while ignoring the deeper impetus of a work. These journals, like you, are micro-focused. It's not working. The answer for the art is to take a larger view, in so doing deciding upon a work's-- and literature's-- real goals, then adjusting the style accordingly, creating new styles which live. The answer for literature is right in front of us, has always been right in front of us, but no one can see it. Peace. Out.
Poem
Those looking in on my "McCartney at Starbucks" poem at www.happyamericawriting.blogspot.com,
please be aware that I wrote it last year. I stepped into a Starbucks the other day and there was no McCartney, but instead a horrendous cd by Carly Simon was playing; a lethargic parody of her best work. I fled.
NEXT WEEK: I debut an all-new review blog with a movie review, "Iron Man and the Imperialist Mindset." Stay tuned here for more info.
please be aware that I wrote it last year. I stepped into a Starbucks the other day and there was no McCartney, but instead a horrendous cd by Carly Simon was playing; a lethargic parody of her best work. I fled.
NEXT WEEK: I debut an all-new review blog with a movie review, "Iron Man and the Imperialist Mindset." Stay tuned here for more info.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Points of Agreement?
Here are ten points that possibly we all can agree on.
1.) The position of literature in American society has declined.
2.) There are no larger-than-life personalities in the writing game.
3.) The U.S. literary world is centered in, and largely controlled from, New York City.
4.) The literary system is hierarchical.
5.) The system is dominated by those from the upper levels of American society.
6.) The trend in book publishing, distribution, and sales is in the direction of monopoly.
7.) Writers without connections are excluded, except for those who go to the great expense of obtaining MFA degrees, whose main purpose is to create connections for the writer.
8.) Conformity and manners, in the writing and the writer, are valued over excitement.
9.) The style and premises of writers and their writing have scarcely changed in fifty years.
10.) Dissent to things-as-they-are isn't tolerated.
1.) The position of literature in American society has declined.
2.) There are no larger-than-life personalities in the writing game.
3.) The U.S. literary world is centered in, and largely controlled from, New York City.
4.) The literary system is hierarchical.
5.) The system is dominated by those from the upper levels of American society.
6.) The trend in book publishing, distribution, and sales is in the direction of monopoly.
7.) Writers without connections are excluded, except for those who go to the great expense of obtaining MFA degrees, whose main purpose is to create connections for the writer.
8.) Conformity and manners, in the writing and the writer, are valued over excitement.
9.) The style and premises of writers and their writing have scarcely changed in fifty years.
10.) Dissent to things-as-they-are isn't tolerated.
Defenders of Corruption
Every established order will have its defenders, its reactionaries, those so heavily invested in the present they'll frantically fight to stave off the smallest moves toward future change. It's what we've been witnessing-- the favorite tactic being to focus on myself; to caricaturize the critic, so that at the end of the day I'm such a bad writer I can hardly string three words together; I'm merely "bitter" because I'm not one of the special elite, etc. etc., while my points, arguments, and evidence are avoided.
With Bennington, I located a sensitive spot on the Beast. If nothing else the place is a good example of the Buddy system.
Do you recall the questions of plagiarism raised about Harper's magazine? One of the writers involved was one of our Bennington friends. To defend the person, albeit indirectly, MacArthur grant "genius" winner Jonathan Lethem later wrote a long essay, full of sophistry, for Harper's, explaining how everything is plagiarism. After all, we all use words, and SOMEONE somewhere has used these same words before at some time. Had to have! (This is a variation of the chimps at typewriters writing "Hamlet" idea.) Lethem defined the word plagiarism out of existence, which for Harper's was quite convenient!
THIS is what qualifies as literary genius in this age-- demonstrations of originality in defense of the corruption of the mainstream. The game-show bell rings. "Come on down! Let's give this man some money!"
And now another of the Bennington Buds in the person of "Harland" is here defending the System's reputation. Examples of corruption? Can't be worried! Let's discredit the critic instead. Make sure to hide your identity, literary assassin. Oops! The mask is slipping out of place.
Know this, readers. These are extremely mendacious people with not a speck of character or integrity. It's how they achieve and maintain their station. Their facile, tactical brains are employed to defend the apparatus which sustains them. They have no vision of what literature can and should be. Their focus is at ground level, defending the perks, the sinecures, the positions; the incoming awards, advances, and grant money. The "art" itself-- skillfully empty posturing-- is merely an excuse for the process; a necessary inconvenience. Plagiarism, lies, financial venality-- all part and parcel of the established System of literature today.
Which is why that System must be unflinchingly attacked-- intellectually attacked-- and destroyed.
With Bennington, I located a sensitive spot on the Beast. If nothing else the place is a good example of the Buddy system.
Do you recall the questions of plagiarism raised about Harper's magazine? One of the writers involved was one of our Bennington friends. To defend the person, albeit indirectly, MacArthur grant "genius" winner Jonathan Lethem later wrote a long essay, full of sophistry, for Harper's, explaining how everything is plagiarism. After all, we all use words, and SOMEONE somewhere has used these same words before at some time. Had to have! (This is a variation of the chimps at typewriters writing "Hamlet" idea.) Lethem defined the word plagiarism out of existence, which for Harper's was quite convenient!
THIS is what qualifies as literary genius in this age-- demonstrations of originality in defense of the corruption of the mainstream. The game-show bell rings. "Come on down! Let's give this man some money!"
And now another of the Bennington Buds in the person of "Harland" is here defending the System's reputation. Examples of corruption? Can't be worried! Let's discredit the critic instead. Make sure to hide your identity, literary assassin. Oops! The mask is slipping out of place.
Know this, readers. These are extremely mendacious people with not a speck of character or integrity. It's how they achieve and maintain their station. Their facile, tactical brains are employed to defend the apparatus which sustains them. They have no vision of what literature can and should be. Their focus is at ground level, defending the perks, the sinecures, the positions; the incoming awards, advances, and grant money. The "art" itself-- skillfully empty posturing-- is merely an excuse for the process; a necessary inconvenience. Plagiarism, lies, financial venality-- all part and parcel of the established System of literature today.
Which is why that System must be unflinchingly attacked-- intellectually attacked-- and destroyed.
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
New York Oz: The Reality
THINK for a minute of the cities of this country as entirely different lands. As Gore Vidal has pointed out, in the global economy our cities are city-states competing as much with one another as against other countries-- competing for investment, jobs, tourists, government funds and political influence. Also culturally.
I live right now in an industrial city-state, surrounded by fresh water lakes, whose industries are near collapse.
Imagine, at the very eastern end of the continent, situated on and around a narrow island, a Babylon-like city of more wealth than any city on the planet. More wealth than any city ever seen on the planet. It's moreover a city of caste, a towering pyramid of hierarchy. At the bottom of the pyramid are the brown-and-black skinned illegals, working in sidestreet sweatshops or serving the rich in some capacity. Substantially up the pyramid are the white ethnic bulldogs who dominate the police and fire departments. Slightly higher, the multi-ethnic political machine bureaucrats. Above them, the much-whiter layer of corporate lawyers, then the rich and ultra-rich investment people.
At the top, culturally and socially, are the trust-fund aristocrats who dominate publishing and the arts. They maintain their own hierarchical pyramids within the pyramid, are sustained by the brightest eager-beaver ladder climbers from the upper levels of other city-states, many educated at nearby "Ivy League" universities, come to the pyramid city to rise higher.
Attend a book party in the pyramid and you'll brush against the elite of the elite, overwhelmingly white, with a surprising number of upper-class Europeans. One stands at such a party with the awareness of being at the uppermost floor of the skyscraper; the highest level of caste. You will witness in the conversation around you utter superficialty, an almost total ignorance of the stark realities of life not only in America, but even in their own city.
Yet, bizarrely enough, these insulated mandarins determine, to a large extent, the culture of the entire nation.
Think of this glittering city-state, with its enormous wealth. Realize that every day many truckloads of books, magazines, and newspapers leave this place to be delivered to other city-states across the continent. (Or, the information to publish an enormous mass of print-media leaves the island.) We who live in other cities are inundated-- inundated-- with the values of this unreal Oz land.
The values expressed in the books and publications, unsurprisingly, are those of privilege and hierarchy; celebrations of wealth; opinions of intellectual mandarin masters; all mirroring the make-up of the pyramid city-state island.
I live right now in an industrial city-state, surrounded by fresh water lakes, whose industries are near collapse.
Imagine, at the very eastern end of the continent, situated on and around a narrow island, a Babylon-like city of more wealth than any city on the planet. More wealth than any city ever seen on the planet. It's moreover a city of caste, a towering pyramid of hierarchy. At the bottom of the pyramid are the brown-and-black skinned illegals, working in sidestreet sweatshops or serving the rich in some capacity. Substantially up the pyramid are the white ethnic bulldogs who dominate the police and fire departments. Slightly higher, the multi-ethnic political machine bureaucrats. Above them, the much-whiter layer of corporate lawyers, then the rich and ultra-rich investment people.
At the top, culturally and socially, are the trust-fund aristocrats who dominate publishing and the arts. They maintain their own hierarchical pyramids within the pyramid, are sustained by the brightest eager-beaver ladder climbers from the upper levels of other city-states, many educated at nearby "Ivy League" universities, come to the pyramid city to rise higher.
Attend a book party in the pyramid and you'll brush against the elite of the elite, overwhelmingly white, with a surprising number of upper-class Europeans. One stands at such a party with the awareness of being at the uppermost floor of the skyscraper; the highest level of caste. You will witness in the conversation around you utter superficialty, an almost total ignorance of the stark realities of life not only in America, but even in their own city.
Yet, bizarrely enough, these insulated mandarins determine, to a large extent, the culture of the entire nation.
Think of this glittering city-state, with its enormous wealth. Realize that every day many truckloads of books, magazines, and newspapers leave this place to be delivered to other city-states across the continent. (Or, the information to publish an enormous mass of print-media leaves the island.) We who live in other cities are inundated-- inundated-- with the values of this unreal Oz land.
The values expressed in the books and publications, unsurprisingly, are those of privilege and hierarchy; celebrations of wealth; opinions of intellectual mandarin masters; all mirroring the make-up of the pyramid city-state island.
Backwards
The sure mark of a demi-puppet is to view all literary situations ass-backwards; so that, for instance, the most powerful and connected writers in America need their protection, and stray dissenters to the monolithic mindset of the status quo become a threat. An example of this is the self-described publishing person who has posted comments on this blog. The individual's words bolster my case: the disdain for writers, like myself, who are too outspoken, who aren't submissive. The kind of undomesticated writer they so badly need, who can attract attention to the art. "You've received enough attention already," this bureaucratic snob said in dismissal.
Oh, really? How did this happen? Was the attention granted me through the generosity of overdogs; the standard operating procedure? Or did I not earn the attention through my own p.r. efforts?
What the apparatchiks overlook, enclosed as they are in their insular world, is that I'm not JUST a writer of the kind they so easily and regularly control or dismiss. I'm first a unique noisemaker. With no funds, I've outdone entire conglomerate publicity departments.
Can it happen again? Don't bet against it.
The question isn't who I'm pissing off, but who's pissing off myself. I know my own value. I do the lit world a favor by posting my ideas. They can listen to them or ignore them as they like.
Oh, really? How did this happen? Was the attention granted me through the generosity of overdogs; the standard operating procedure? Or did I not earn the attention through my own p.r. efforts?
What the apparatchiks overlook, enclosed as they are in their insular world, is that I'm not JUST a writer of the kind they so easily and regularly control or dismiss. I'm first a unique noisemaker. With no funds, I've outdone entire conglomerate publicity departments.
Can it happen again? Don't bet against it.
The question isn't who I'm pissing off, but who's pissing off myself. I know my own value. I do the lit world a favor by posting my ideas. They can listen to them or ignore them as they like.
Monday, May 19, 2008
Who's Harland?
A VARIATION OF THE "WHERE'S WALDO?" GAME.
"Harland," to me, appears fairly transparent. He first appeared recently on an old post of this blog which people from Bennington were finding when googling for info about one of their dead colleagues. Several new comments were added to the thread-- all from Bennington folks. We can assume Harland is in some way a Bennington person as well, and since he hid his identity-- unlike the others-- likely of greater stature, or at least someone known to myself. He's not a poet, has not responded to poetic aspects of the discussion, confining his attention to novelists. This narrows the field somewhat.
Why would Bennington be hyper about what I say? It's the home of two main antagonists of my campaign, one of them being the overmuch mentioned Poster Boy of Literary Corruption, known to all.
Who's the other guy? Someone who has writing skill combined with personal ambition and an extremely narrow outlook on literature-- always concerned, like so many of his kind, that writers follow the arbitrary "rules" of the game. When he wrote an essay about the ULA several years ago, he excerpted a piece of mine written in a Kerouac/Hubert Selby style-- and made sure to point out all necessary commas and such which were supposed to be there. This was a sign of his well-trained obedience, his anality, which is one of the first things the Rebellion is designed to overthrow. We wish to change the literary mentality itself, of which he's an exemplar.
Beyond this is a refusal not only to look one step ahead-- to see what literature can and should be in this culture-- but even to see it as it is now; the tool of huge, enormously funded institutions, from conglomerates to universities to foundations, which working together have imposed upon the art and its practitioners an institutional mindset. And so, in the essay, he made absurd remarks, such as no writers in the past criticized the literary system because it's always been so fragile.
Well, if literature today is so fragile-- and I don't dispute this-- then WHY IS THIS? Given the enormous expenditure, the hundreds of writing programs, the billions of dollars being spent to, one would think, make it a vibrant, ongoing concern; as healthy in society as it once was, why hasn't this worked? Isn't this something which we should be looking at? The second point to be made is that the institutions which control literature aren't fragile at all. They include monstrous Time-Warner, Murdoch, etc.: media giants with enormous power. The literature of the past never faced this kind of control.
A gross ugly beast has its slimy, dragon-like paw around a delicate, ever-withering flower. I'm trying to slay the dragon to release the flower; to plant it back in the ground so it can reconnect with its organic roots and become healthy and beautiful once more.
(Please keep up with other aspects of this discussion at www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com, or really, all of my blogs.)
"Harland," to me, appears fairly transparent. He first appeared recently on an old post of this blog which people from Bennington were finding when googling for info about one of their dead colleagues. Several new comments were added to the thread-- all from Bennington folks. We can assume Harland is in some way a Bennington person as well, and since he hid his identity-- unlike the others-- likely of greater stature, or at least someone known to myself. He's not a poet, has not responded to poetic aspects of the discussion, confining his attention to novelists. This narrows the field somewhat.
Why would Bennington be hyper about what I say? It's the home of two main antagonists of my campaign, one of them being the overmuch mentioned Poster Boy of Literary Corruption, known to all.
Who's the other guy? Someone who has writing skill combined with personal ambition and an extremely narrow outlook on literature-- always concerned, like so many of his kind, that writers follow the arbitrary "rules" of the game. When he wrote an essay about the ULA several years ago, he excerpted a piece of mine written in a Kerouac/Hubert Selby style-- and made sure to point out all necessary commas and such which were supposed to be there. This was a sign of his well-trained obedience, his anality, which is one of the first things the Rebellion is designed to overthrow. We wish to change the literary mentality itself, of which he's an exemplar.
Beyond this is a refusal not only to look one step ahead-- to see what literature can and should be in this culture-- but even to see it as it is now; the tool of huge, enormously funded institutions, from conglomerates to universities to foundations, which working together have imposed upon the art and its practitioners an institutional mindset. And so, in the essay, he made absurd remarks, such as no writers in the past criticized the literary system because it's always been so fragile.
Well, if literature today is so fragile-- and I don't dispute this-- then WHY IS THIS? Given the enormous expenditure, the hundreds of writing programs, the billions of dollars being spent to, one would think, make it a vibrant, ongoing concern; as healthy in society as it once was, why hasn't this worked? Isn't this something which we should be looking at? The second point to be made is that the institutions which control literature aren't fragile at all. They include monstrous Time-Warner, Murdoch, etc.: media giants with enormous power. The literature of the past never faced this kind of control.
A gross ugly beast has its slimy, dragon-like paw around a delicate, ever-withering flower. I'm trying to slay the dragon to release the flower; to plant it back in the ground so it can reconnect with its organic roots and become healthy and beautiful once more.
(Please keep up with other aspects of this discussion at www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com, or really, all of my blogs.)
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Victory Denied?
I've had some time to think about ULA strategy, its successes and failures. I realize how close we came to collapsing the whole shitty mess of the literary elite on more than one occasion.
My question: Why did people on the other side exaggerate our threat, giving us power we didn't have-- the ability to shut out privileged writers? Because that's how they saw us, a sign of their own weakness.
ACTIVIST CAMPAIGN
Isolating just the activist campaign-- one of four legs of the original strategy-- one can see how in its early stages it worked beautifully. Targeted was not the entire literary establishment-- always unnecessary-- but a few isolated pressure points. We struck inside the very heart of the beast. The main part of our total campaign-- in-person protests and shows combined-- in 2001 lasted a grand total of six weeks before the ULA itself split in half, yet the momentum we generated carried through 2003.
Until 2004 a few core remaining members did enough to keep the momentum rolling, despite our limitations. Establishment response was inept, best exemplified by Dave Eggers caught posting anonymously against us on Amazon, as spotlighted in the New York Times. Still, we had a short window of opportunity before the establishment solidified its opposition and sealed its walls at all points against us. Speed versus time.
Later demonstrations of the campaign, notably the Howl Protest, were probings of status quo strength-- necessary reminders that the ULA campaign was ongoing. Through vehicles like this blog, ULA pressure never ceased.
One mistake we made was to underestimate status quo weakness. Panicked mad reaction, as we faced; hostility and blackballing; is no sign of strength.
The essence of a guerrilla insurgency campaign is to wait for openings, then exploit them. Opportunity was granted early in 2007 with the Paris Review/CIA revelations. Yes, it's a low circulation publication, but has always had tremendous influence within inner circles of New York decision making. (Look at the names on its masthead sometime.)
We didn't notice ENOUGH Paris Review's failure to address the CIA question. (We also didn't recall the quick failure of another lit journal, when it was caught printing a fake letter purporting to be from me.) We didn't recognize the huge ongoing embarrassment of the CIA matter being openly discussed, including on Paris Review's Wikipedia entry, or the panicked flurry of e-mails from ex-PR co-editor James Linville, and his panicked flight from London to New York to consult with the current Paris Review team.
We felt the pressure ourselves as we generated it. Within the circles of the Paris Review and their allies it had to be greater. As the ULA ship vibrated from its own assault, the ULA member with closest contacts to the New York scene bailed, taking four other ULAers out the door with him. Our direction was turned. Attack engines shut down.
If the Paris Review-- a key foundation stone of the literary elite-- had been forced to address the legitimate questions raised, this would've been a huge victory for the ULA.
The departure of five ULA members at once was damaging, no doubt about it. The timing was killing. I put on a brave front on this blog, and took full responsibility for the situation. This weakened me irrevocably within the ULA team.
We'd found a vulnerable spot on the establishment dragon-- but you need to push the sword home all the way in order to slay it. The vulnerabilities in the serpent remain.
My question: Why did people on the other side exaggerate our threat, giving us power we didn't have-- the ability to shut out privileged writers? Because that's how they saw us, a sign of their own weakness.
ACTIVIST CAMPAIGN
Isolating just the activist campaign-- one of four legs of the original strategy-- one can see how in its early stages it worked beautifully. Targeted was not the entire literary establishment-- always unnecessary-- but a few isolated pressure points. We struck inside the very heart of the beast. The main part of our total campaign-- in-person protests and shows combined-- in 2001 lasted a grand total of six weeks before the ULA itself split in half, yet the momentum we generated carried through 2003.
Until 2004 a few core remaining members did enough to keep the momentum rolling, despite our limitations. Establishment response was inept, best exemplified by Dave Eggers caught posting anonymously against us on Amazon, as spotlighted in the New York Times. Still, we had a short window of opportunity before the establishment solidified its opposition and sealed its walls at all points against us. Speed versus time.
Later demonstrations of the campaign, notably the Howl Protest, were probings of status quo strength-- necessary reminders that the ULA campaign was ongoing. Through vehicles like this blog, ULA pressure never ceased.
One mistake we made was to underestimate status quo weakness. Panicked mad reaction, as we faced; hostility and blackballing; is no sign of strength.
The essence of a guerrilla insurgency campaign is to wait for openings, then exploit them. Opportunity was granted early in 2007 with the Paris Review/CIA revelations. Yes, it's a low circulation publication, but has always had tremendous influence within inner circles of New York decision making. (Look at the names on its masthead sometime.)
We didn't notice ENOUGH Paris Review's failure to address the CIA question. (We also didn't recall the quick failure of another lit journal, when it was caught printing a fake letter purporting to be from me.) We didn't recognize the huge ongoing embarrassment of the CIA matter being openly discussed, including on Paris Review's Wikipedia entry, or the panicked flurry of e-mails from ex-PR co-editor James Linville, and his panicked flight from London to New York to consult with the current Paris Review team.
We felt the pressure ourselves as we generated it. Within the circles of the Paris Review and their allies it had to be greater. As the ULA ship vibrated from its own assault, the ULA member with closest contacts to the New York scene bailed, taking four other ULAers out the door with him. Our direction was turned. Attack engines shut down.
If the Paris Review-- a key foundation stone of the literary elite-- had been forced to address the legitimate questions raised, this would've been a huge victory for the ULA.
The departure of five ULA members at once was damaging, no doubt about it. The timing was killing. I put on a brave front on this blog, and took full responsibility for the situation. This weakened me irrevocably within the ULA team.
We'd found a vulnerable spot on the establishment dragon-- but you need to push the sword home all the way in order to slay it. The vulnerabilities in the serpent remain.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
More Writing!
For those who claim I'm not a writer, I have more samples up on my blogs to be praised, ripped-apart, or ignored, depending what mood takes you.
An All-New chapter of "Plutocracy USA" is just up at
www.literarymystery.blogspot.com
A poem/polemic is up at my new writing blog,
www.happyamericawriting.blogspot.com
And don't forget to read my "Zytron" excerpts about my experience in the teaching game at the August 2005 archive on this very blog.
All-in-all, great variety-- enough there to keep everyone busy.
An All-New chapter of "Plutocracy USA" is just up at
www.literarymystery.blogspot.com
A poem/polemic is up at my new writing blog,
www.happyamericawriting.blogspot.com
And don't forget to read my "Zytron" excerpts about my experience in the teaching game at the August 2005 archive on this very blog.
All-in-all, great variety-- enough there to keep everyone busy.
About Teaching
BECAUSE I've been critical of writing programs doesn't mean I'm against teachers, or don't understand the tremendously difficult job teaching is. As I mentioned in a response to a comment, I've done some teaching myself, as an uncertified substitute in Philadelphia. A slightly fictionalized version of one of my more positive experiences is on this blog, under August 2005, as part of my "Zytron" series. (Note: by the nature of blogs, the posts are in reverse order.)
Writing classes are not a bad thing, but there are sound reasons to question graduate writing programs and MFA writing degrees, which I'll list some time.
The zine (zeen) underground represents an alternate way of producing writers. Note my new post at www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com
Writing classes are not a bad thing, but there are sound reasons to question graduate writing programs and MFA writing degrees, which I'll list some time.
The zine (zeen) underground represents an alternate way of producing writers. Note my new post at www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
The Monolith
CONTRARY to what's been said by "Harland," it could easily be shown using statistics alone that the literary world is a monolith with the main power center in New York. It'd be a job for someone's doctoral dissertation, no doubt. One could calculate:
-percentage of magazine ad dollars spent, spent in New York;
-percentage of total books sold which were created in New York;
-percentage of total advance money paid, paid from New York;
-percentage of books reviewed, sent from New York;
and so on.
More important than quantity of influence on literature is quality of influence. America's intellectual class is large, but tiny compared to America as a whole. I'd guess that the main source of cultural information for that class, overwhelmingly, is the New York Times, including its Book Review. In second place would be The New Yorker.
If one did a survey of the very serious writing students at the University of Iowa, you'd find their most studied publication, for models, to be not at all the esteemed North American Review, based in the state, but The New Yorker. (I recall reading about this.)
This dominating influence is why work in the most obscure "literary" journal in the most ignored corner of America will sound like the lame poetry and fiction in The New Yorker.
-percentage of magazine ad dollars spent, spent in New York;
-percentage of total books sold which were created in New York;
-percentage of total advance money paid, paid from New York;
-percentage of books reviewed, sent from New York;
and so on.
More important than quantity of influence on literature is quality of influence. America's intellectual class is large, but tiny compared to America as a whole. I'd guess that the main source of cultural information for that class, overwhelmingly, is the New York Times, including its Book Review. In second place would be The New Yorker.
If one did a survey of the very serious writing students at the University of Iowa, you'd find their most studied publication, for models, to be not at all the esteemed North American Review, based in the state, but The New Yorker. (I recall reading about this.)
This dominating influence is why work in the most obscure "literary" journal in the most ignored corner of America will sound like the lame poetry and fiction in The New Yorker.
Tactic
ONE of the favorite tactics of the literary establishment and its advocates is to intentionally turn reality on its head. Or maybe they really believe I'm this powerful onrushing force liable to put all of them out of their jobs. And so the radio commentator last year assumes "eternal outsider" myself will somehow exclude literary darling Jeffrey Eugenides, who by the way continues scoring huge advances while I score sandwiches meant for the homeless. Or editor Aaron Hicklin takes an unnecessary shot at me in the Foreword to the Black Book anthology. I may be a lone nut on the sidewalk but they're eager to knock down my stand and throw me into the street! (Exactly what happened to me, incidentally, when I was with a few other writers outside the New York Times last year.)
The latest demi-puppet to wade into battle on this blog talks about tiny deviations from my 'program." Program? My program is more an anti-program. Even if I had a "program," I have no power to implement it. I have no power whatsoever. Remember, I'm the guy on the sidewalk who was futilely standing with my underground brothers outside huge entities like the Conde-Nast building.
The workers inside must get panicked by a mouse. "There they are! Look out the window. Those dots far below. It's them! Those grubby undergrounders. They don't tolerate the dissent that we in this billion-dollar skyscraper represent. They're trying to impose their Program, on us! Do something! Security! Police! Help us!"
(Would that the underground had a program.)
The latest demi-puppet to wade into battle on this blog talks about tiny deviations from my 'program." Program? My program is more an anti-program. Even if I had a "program," I have no power to implement it. I have no power whatsoever. Remember, I'm the guy on the sidewalk who was futilely standing with my underground brothers outside huge entities like the Conde-Nast building.
The workers inside must get panicked by a mouse. "There they are! Look out the window. Those dots far below. It's them! Those grubby undergrounders. They don't tolerate the dissent that we in this billion-dollar skyscraper represent. They're trying to impose their Program, on us! Do something! Security! Police! Help us!"
(Would that the underground had a program.)
Monday, May 12, 2008
Smugness
It's possible that my message will never connect with those in established literature. The residents of that land are insulated by their own smugness. There's no need for contrary opinions when they already know everything.
Are they a mono-class? For the most part, yes. The power in print-media and publishing is concentrated in New York. The decision-makers are predominately Ivy Leaguers, which means, from the upper echelons of this society.
America's social stratifications aren't something I've made up. They're clearly visible for those who care to see them-- the bottom level most strikingly obvious in a city like Detroit, where only 25% of students even finish high school. What percentage go on to college? Graduate school?
Our well-educated Overdogs on the other hand, several who post here, overwhelmingly from comfortable backgrounds, will have none of it. They dismiss notions about the "real world," because to them their catered life is just as real. Any criticism of themselves that seeps through to them is just so much carping from an "eternal outsider"; from a caricature. Smugly, they insist I don't know how the machine works. "You just don't know!" they say, from the safety of the latest cocktail party. "Those people in the photos, the socialites, have nothing in common with the publishing grunts, much less a creative writing instructor in Iowa"-- and this has a sliver of truth. The Machine encompasses many levels-- I've never said otherwise. It itself is very hierarchical. It's sustained because those toward the bottom (not at all at the bottom of America by the way; only of the Machine) never question it, and allow through their subservience the obvious power of the monied at the top.
Those who refuse to see caste in America and in the creation of its literature aren't fooling me, whatever happens to me. The realities I live among are all too true, incapable of being ignored. The smug literati in their castle of illusion are fooling themselves.
Are they a mono-class? For the most part, yes. The power in print-media and publishing is concentrated in New York. The decision-makers are predominately Ivy Leaguers, which means, from the upper echelons of this society.
America's social stratifications aren't something I've made up. They're clearly visible for those who care to see them-- the bottom level most strikingly obvious in a city like Detroit, where only 25% of students even finish high school. What percentage go on to college? Graduate school?
Our well-educated Overdogs on the other hand, several who post here, overwhelmingly from comfortable backgrounds, will have none of it. They dismiss notions about the "real world," because to them their catered life is just as real. Any criticism of themselves that seeps through to them is just so much carping from an "eternal outsider"; from a caricature. Smugly, they insist I don't know how the machine works. "You just don't know!" they say, from the safety of the latest cocktail party. "Those people in the photos, the socialites, have nothing in common with the publishing grunts, much less a creative writing instructor in Iowa"-- and this has a sliver of truth. The Machine encompasses many levels-- I've never said otherwise. It itself is very hierarchical. It's sustained because those toward the bottom (not at all at the bottom of America by the way; only of the Machine) never question it, and allow through their subservience the obvious power of the monied at the top.
Those who refuse to see caste in America and in the creation of its literature aren't fooling me, whatever happens to me. The realities I live among are all too true, incapable of being ignored. The smug literati in their castle of illusion are fooling themselves.
Is It True?
Is it true that there are vast differences throughout the literary establishment; that some who inhabit it are more in touch with what's happening in this country that others? That a writing instructor in Virginia will have little in common with a Vanity Fair editor in New York?
Well, yes and no. This weekend I sent off some e-mail spam to creative writing instructors in Virginia, to the renowned writing program at the university there. Many of the e-mails were returned instantly with polite messages saying the person was on vacation for the summer, and would check messages "infrequently," or when he or she got back in the fall. One, from an Elizabeth Denton, spoke humorously of a "Semester at Sea," "sailing around the world."
Can we surmise that these folks are not part of this nation's bottom half, those now under economic siege? Is that an unfair leap? Might they have much in common with their literary brethren in New York after all?
Well, yes and no. This weekend I sent off some e-mail spam to creative writing instructors in Virginia, to the renowned writing program at the university there. Many of the e-mails were returned instantly with polite messages saying the person was on vacation for the summer, and would check messages "infrequently," or when he or she got back in the fall. One, from an Elizabeth Denton, spoke humorously of a "Semester at Sea," "sailing around the world."
Can we surmise that these folks are not part of this nation's bottom half, those now under economic siege? Is that an unfair leap? Might they have much in common with their literary brethren in New York after all?
Montezuma
OCCASIONALLY an establishment mouthpiece will show up on this blog with superficially plausible arguments and for a time score a few points. My wonder is why they still insist on remaining anonymous. Wouldn't a "Harland" want the credit due him for putting me in my place?
Yet he hesitates. He thinks he can destroy my arguments, but he's not sure. There remains a level of doubt-- and that doubt, that hesitation, reveals his own weakness and the weakness of the status quo behind him.
Yet he hesitates. He thinks he can destroy my arguments, but he's not sure. There remains a level of doubt-- and that doubt, that hesitation, reveals his own weakness and the weakness of the status quo behind him.
Saturday, May 10, 2008
The Pod Way
The biggest crime a writer can commit today is to criticize contemporary literature. Its defenders all sound the same. (In a monotone): "Our literature is wonderful William Vollmann Philip Roth Nicholson Baker John Ashbery there is nothing wrong everything is fine people love what we make the conglomerates are hip everything is okay. Go home and don't make waves."
A person murmurs in your ear: "Shhh! Don't make waves," while your file is being stamped, "BLACKBALLED."
Not just criticism of the status quo is banned, but if you're too provocative, too loud, too exciting, too different. When mediocrity is the standard, anyone who stands out is suspect.
The small press and the lower-level writing programs follow the pattern, the unspoken goal of "Same as the big guys." It's the same compliant complicit boozhie people. They truly believe for instance that Alice Munro's coagulated New Yorker writing has "reinvigorated the story." Why do they believe this? Because everyone says it. It's an affirmation of blandess. (Anyone who believes that Alice Munro has reinvigorated anything lives in a world of delirium.)
The General Motors Syndrome:
"These are our best cars yet!"
"Are as they as good as Japanese cars?"
"Well, no. But we're trying!"
Complacency leads to mediocrity, which the literary world is drowning in.
A person murmurs in your ear: "Shhh! Don't make waves," while your file is being stamped, "BLACKBALLED."
Not just criticism of the status quo is banned, but if you're too provocative, too loud, too exciting, too different. When mediocrity is the standard, anyone who stands out is suspect.
The small press and the lower-level writing programs follow the pattern, the unspoken goal of "Same as the big guys." It's the same compliant complicit boozhie people. They truly believe for instance that Alice Munro's coagulated New Yorker writing has "reinvigorated the story." Why do they believe this? Because everyone says it. It's an affirmation of blandess. (Anyone who believes that Alice Munro has reinvigorated anything lives in a world of delirium.)
The General Motors Syndrome:
"These are our best cars yet!"
"Are as they as good as Japanese cars?"
"Well, no. But we're trying!"
Complacency leads to mediocrity, which the literary world is drowning in.
The Obligation of Students
The obligation of university students is to know when they're being force-fed garbage. The purpose of the new generation is to overthrow those who are in charge, not to meekly obediently accept what they're presented, the art of a static present which in a swiftly moving universe is already outdated. Failure to embrace change, to destroy, to burn down and rebuild an art is to fail the reason for which you're born, the reason you've become an artist.
Can one become an artist of any kind without pushing boundaries; without criticizing what is, NOW? You're too complacent. You're too programmed. You're too subservient to the erected temple gods-- Roth, Beattie, Ashbery, Gluck, name as many as you like. If you don't believe you can do way better you have no business calling yourselves writers.
Which is not blindly to accept my ideas either or the ideas and writers of the underground, but to seek and create a synthesis of the new and the past and the now.
You're not amoebas at desks. Challenge your professors.
Can one become an artist of any kind without pushing boundaries; without criticizing what is, NOW? You're too complacent. You're too programmed. You're too subservient to the erected temple gods-- Roth, Beattie, Ashbery, Gluck, name as many as you like. If you don't believe you can do way better you have no business calling yourselves writers.
Which is not blindly to accept my ideas either or the ideas and writers of the underground, but to seek and create a synthesis of the new and the past and the now.
You're not amoebas at desks. Challenge your professors.
Friday, May 09, 2008
Pathetically Bad
REVEALED
I've found out, anyway, why critics of this blog who post here generally don't give their real names. When they do, it exposes their own work to scrutiny, which destroys anything they have to say.
THE FRAGILITY DEFENSE
When I present my case, the attitude which infects even myself, not to mention the other side, is that opponents are so feeble and defenseless that if I argue against their ideas and their art I'm picking on them.
Case in point: poet Christopher Salerno, Bennington MFA grad.
By naming him I'm singling him out, so I'll add that I use him only as a typical case. Others of his kind are worse. I hope I don't bruise him. He has a cozy teaching position, and is young enough anyway to find another career. I urge him to do so. Removing himself from the bubble of academe could only improve his work.
Much of his poetry is on-line. While examining it I thought, "He received an expensive MFA degree, studying for many years with the supposed best, to create this?"
He's learned little of the various forms and tricks of harmonious sound which bring joy to the art. Unlearned and unexpressed is the idea of poetry as language; musical magical language that when recited takes the poet and the audience to another plane.
With today's poets-- I use Christopher Salerno only as example-- after fifteen minutes of reading their work one is able to match it, if anyone'd want to. One could sit down and in an hour create ten times the amount, as pretentious and meaningless. The years of study at Bennington; the teaching of renowned instructors-- WHERE IS IT? What's being taught?
*************************************************************
Democracy XX
One part and the farthest
I awake next to the
refrigerator
On one hand and the other
hand
you prefer that I not sit
grappling with muddy boots.
Democracy XXVI
When you wake, when you
sit, when you cry,
Not sleeping,
crying
The painting is in the attic.
Democracy XXXII
Here, here is the
mud that you came for,
the tracks across
the kitchen floor
Here are the
tracks of your conscience
given form
weighed against the
scales of my labor
Your dark-eyed hangover
the literal interior mess
coming home from the bar.
Democracy XXXXVVIII
Here is the poetry
bad
poetry
worse than worst,
execrable poetry
I call it bad,
a nightmare of evasion
the twisted experience of too many
writing programs
dollars paid, receipt stamped
detestable fraud
the dead garbage can remains
with the unplucked festering
egg
coffee grounds mixed with decaying fish
foul smell, putrid mess
back alley behind the barn
fills with it
the smell of broken
lavoratories human stench classrooms
vomitories repositories of pretention
at Bennington
barge heaps towed down the Hudson
unwanted refuse
from all the bad poets
from all the preppy New England
green campus students
I call it charade, circus, scam,
You call it poetry.
(Disclaimer: these poems are inspired by, but are not actually written by, Mr. Salerno.)
I've found out, anyway, why critics of this blog who post here generally don't give their real names. When they do, it exposes their own work to scrutiny, which destroys anything they have to say.
THE FRAGILITY DEFENSE
When I present my case, the attitude which infects even myself, not to mention the other side, is that opponents are so feeble and defenseless that if I argue against their ideas and their art I'm picking on them.
Case in point: poet Christopher Salerno, Bennington MFA grad.
By naming him I'm singling him out, so I'll add that I use him only as a typical case. Others of his kind are worse. I hope I don't bruise him. He has a cozy teaching position, and is young enough anyway to find another career. I urge him to do so. Removing himself from the bubble of academe could only improve his work.
Much of his poetry is on-line. While examining it I thought, "He received an expensive MFA degree, studying for many years with the supposed best, to create this?"
He's learned little of the various forms and tricks of harmonious sound which bring joy to the art. Unlearned and unexpressed is the idea of poetry as language; musical magical language that when recited takes the poet and the audience to another plane.
With today's poets-- I use Christopher Salerno only as example-- after fifteen minutes of reading their work one is able to match it, if anyone'd want to. One could sit down and in an hour create ten times the amount, as pretentious and meaningless. The years of study at Bennington; the teaching of renowned instructors-- WHERE IS IT? What's being taught?
*************************************************************
Democracy XX
One part and the farthest
I awake next to the
refrigerator
On one hand and the other
hand
you prefer that I not sit
grappling with muddy boots.
Democracy XXVI
When you wake, when you
sit, when you cry,
Not sleeping,
crying
The painting is in the attic.
Democracy XXXII
Here, here is the
mud that you came for,
the tracks across
the kitchen floor
Here are the
tracks of your conscience
given form
weighed against the
scales of my labor
Your dark-eyed hangover
the literal interior mess
coming home from the bar.
Democracy XXXXVVIII
Here is the poetry
bad
poetry
worse than worst,
execrable poetry
I call it bad,
a nightmare of evasion
the twisted experience of too many
writing programs
dollars paid, receipt stamped
detestable fraud
the dead garbage can remains
with the unplucked festering
egg
coffee grounds mixed with decaying fish
foul smell, putrid mess
back alley behind the barn
fills with it
the smell of broken
lavoratories human stench classrooms
vomitories repositories of pretention
at Bennington
barge heaps towed down the Hudson
unwanted refuse
from all the bad poets
from all the preppy New England
green campus students
I call it charade, circus, scam,
You call it poetry.
(Disclaimer: these poems are inspired by, but are not actually written by, Mr. Salerno.)
"Star Spangled Poet II"
(For Bennington)
I wanna
wanna wanna
wanna wanna wanna
wanna wanna
wannabe
wanna wanna be
a poet.
I wanna
wanna wanna
wanna wanna wanna
wanna wanna
wannabe
wanna wanna be
a poet.
Thursday, May 08, 2008
To the Demi-Puppets
My problem with demi-puppets isn't that they work low-level jobs in the lit-biz. Not at all. It's instead that they relentlessly support the status quo-- things as they are-- cannot see that our literature A.) is on the wrong course; B.) can be much better. It may have something to do with their being INSIDE the system; that they've been trained to conform.
To say, for instance, that academic poetry was good sixty years ago is hardly an argument for the stale and lethargic academy poetry of now.
It's like "The School of Rock"-- new generations taught to do it the way it's been done; the same postures, the same sound, with a few differences in notes. Worship the dead. You're perpetuating a dead art form.
To say, for instance, that academic poetry was good sixty years ago is hardly an argument for the stale and lethargic academy poetry of now.
It's like "The School of Rock"-- new generations taught to do it the way it's been done; the same postures, the same sound, with a few differences in notes. Worship the dead. You're perpetuating a dead art form.
Monday, May 05, 2008
This Blog
IT'S UNFORTUNATE that writers who heard about Jason Shinder's death last Friday, and googled his name for information, came up first with a 2006 post from this blog. Hardly what they wanted. (See www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2006/03/establishment-pet-poet-of-year-jason.html) Unfortunate for Mr. Shinder: the cost of being on the wrong side of literary history.
**********************************************
With the passing of both Liam Rector and Jason Shinder in recent months-- members of the most infamous Insider writers nest, at Bennington-- I'd guess the literary gods are temporarily appeased. It'd make a good time for the literary establishment to make peace. Their position won't improve. I'm in "exile" in Detroit. The literary Resistance is momentarily disunified, but this will change. Movements, like the patterns of life, proceed in up and down waves. Blackballing me hasn't worked. My message is getting out there, as the google searches done by folks this weekend indicate.
I should add that I have a line-up of strong posts ready to go up on this blog, as well as my other blogs, and a couple new blogs yet to follow. The literary establishment hasn't seen anything. Peace or war?-- it's your choice.
(More on Jason Shinder at www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com)
**********************************************
With the passing of both Liam Rector and Jason Shinder in recent months-- members of the most infamous Insider writers nest, at Bennington-- I'd guess the literary gods are temporarily appeased. It'd make a good time for the literary establishment to make peace. Their position won't improve. I'm in "exile" in Detroit. The literary Resistance is momentarily disunified, but this will change. Movements, like the patterns of life, proceed in up and down waves. Blackballing me hasn't worked. My message is getting out there, as the google searches done by folks this weekend indicate.
I should add that I have a line-up of strong posts ready to go up on this blog, as well as my other blogs, and a couple new blogs yet to follow. The literary establishment hasn't seen anything. Peace or war?-- it's your choice.
(More on Jason Shinder at www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com)
Saturday, May 03, 2008
The Gessen Problem
AT A BOOKSTORE I glanced at Keith Gessen's novel, All the Sad Young Literary Men, which seems to be based on the ideas of himself and his n+1 colleagues. In the novel they allude to themselves as Marxists, identify with Menshevists, posture as political radicals-- most notably at the end-- but present is the sense that they're playing; that Gessen himself knows they're playing and can't be taken seriously in any way as revolutionaries.
And how could they be? They're the established system's captive pets, existing at the center of New York hierarchy and privilege.
Noteworthy is the group's real-world treatment of the literary underground-- an underground that was spawned from authentic grass roots samizdat. Embarrassed by the genuine article, they've done their best to ignore us. They refused at first even to print a letter from me a couple issues ago-- though they readily print all nonsense from the boozhies-- then relented and printed half of it only after intensive lobbying. In their latest issue they celebrate a Russian underground poet who's not half as lively as the literary activists of the ULA. Any mention of the American literary underground? No place! Amazing.
We don't exist to them. I've yet to find an explanation for this other than pure phoniness. I believe Gessen is smart enough to realize he's a phony-- that in the face of the uncompromising buzzsaw voices across the spectrum of our side of things (I think of George, Frank W., MDG, Nowlan, and other attack dogs) Gessen and his friends would wilt away.
At least, that's the impression I received browsing for several minutes through his book.
(For a fictional look at the n+1 gang, see www.literarymystery.blogspot.com)
And how could they be? They're the established system's captive pets, existing at the center of New York hierarchy and privilege.
Noteworthy is the group's real-world treatment of the literary underground-- an underground that was spawned from authentic grass roots samizdat. Embarrassed by the genuine article, they've done their best to ignore us. They refused at first even to print a letter from me a couple issues ago-- though they readily print all nonsense from the boozhies-- then relented and printed half of it only after intensive lobbying. In their latest issue they celebrate a Russian underground poet who's not half as lively as the literary activists of the ULA. Any mention of the American literary underground? No place! Amazing.
We don't exist to them. I've yet to find an explanation for this other than pure phoniness. I believe Gessen is smart enough to realize he's a phony-- that in the face of the uncompromising buzzsaw voices across the spectrum of our side of things (I think of George, Frank W., MDG, Nowlan, and other attack dogs) Gessen and his friends would wilt away.
At least, that's the impression I received browsing for several minutes through his book.
(For a fictional look at the n+1 gang, see www.literarymystery.blogspot.com)
Breaking the Stranglehold
I'm convinced that American literature can be saved only by breaking the New York City monopoly on publishing, print media, and our intellectual life.
Thursday, May 01, 2008
New York Media S.O.S.
MAY DAY! MAY DAY! MAY DAY!
American culture is in distress.
It's been captured by the aristocrats, the Spirit of 1776 reversed.
S.O.S.! S.O.S.!
The latest manifestation of this is the cover story by privileged brat ex-Philadelphian Jessica Pressler about the hyper-privileged brats of the TV show, "Gossip Girl" (based on the book series) in the April 28 issue of the magazine which celebrates New York hyper-wealth, New York. (Note all the plastic surgery ads throughout the mag-- a good clue to its audience.)
The loathsome article itself is at
www.nymag.com/arts/tv/features/46225/
What does it mean?
It means the overpriced island of exclusivity has further disconnected itself from the nation. They chatter through their bistros, their million-dollar lofts, their chi-chi parties, as their island slips farther into the Atlantic. They're in love with all things European anyway. We best see them off at the dock.
A horn sounds. Streamers and confetti everyplace. The gangplank rises, the rich and the insulated all aboard. The snobby island of fools and fops begins sailing into the deep blue.
"Yummy hors d'ouevres!" is the last distant sound heard from them.
(See more May Day posts at www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com)
American culture is in distress.
It's been captured by the aristocrats, the Spirit of 1776 reversed.
S.O.S.! S.O.S.!
The latest manifestation of this is the cover story by privileged brat ex-Philadelphian Jessica Pressler about the hyper-privileged brats of the TV show, "Gossip Girl" (based on the book series) in the April 28 issue of the magazine which celebrates New York hyper-wealth, New York. (Note all the plastic surgery ads throughout the mag-- a good clue to its audience.)
The loathsome article itself is at
www.nymag.com/arts/tv/features/46225/
What does it mean?
It means the overpriced island of exclusivity has further disconnected itself from the nation. They chatter through their bistros, their million-dollar lofts, their chi-chi parties, as their island slips farther into the Atlantic. They're in love with all things European anyway. We best see them off at the dock.
A horn sounds. Streamers and confetti everyplace. The gangplank rises, the rich and the insulated all aboard. The snobby island of fools and fops begins sailing into the deep blue.
"Yummy hors d'ouevres!" is the last distant sound heard from them.
(See more May Day posts at www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com)
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
"Star Spangled Poet"
I Wanna Be a Poet
A Rebel
Icon spouting fiery language
the veneer of revolution
without the substance
yelling words mouthing
Che t-shirt wearing
shit
man, I'm bad.
I wanna be a star
in whiskey-sour saloons
wanna-be language-wearing
conscience-breaking all-American
streetcorner rabble-rousing
curiosity
wave my arms around
look sincere
that's right
beatified halo effect
in the spotlight
drum the rhythmn
impress the women
in the smoky
red-lit barroom
jazz the room
syncopated. . . .
Che was cool, man
dig that cat
don't know why he was in the jungles
when he coulda been a poet
coulda been a contender in a slamfest poetry match
havin' swingin' fun with words
role-playing vibe language sounds,
brother,
with no meaning or action behind them.
A Rebel
Icon spouting fiery language
the veneer of revolution
without the substance
yelling words mouthing
Che t-shirt wearing
shit
man, I'm bad.
I wanna be a star
in whiskey-sour saloons
wanna-be language-wearing
conscience-breaking all-American
streetcorner rabble-rousing
curiosity
wave my arms around
look sincere
that's right
beatified halo effect
in the spotlight
drum the rhythmn
impress the women
in the smoky
red-lit barroom
jazz the room
syncopated. . . .
Che was cool, man
dig that cat
don't know why he was in the jungles
when he coulda been a poet
coulda been a contender in a slamfest poetry match
havin' swingin' fun with words
role-playing vibe language sounds,
brother,
with no meaning or action behind them.
Finally!
I've finally more-or-less completed my review of Susan Nagel's Marie Therese, Child of Terror, now up at
www.happyamericawriting.blogspot.com
That's the last long review, with quotes, etc., I plan to do. With it I still followed too closely to the accepted "rules." From hereon with all my reviews I'm throwing out the rules. (As I did in the 1990's with my review zeen, New Philistine.) Book reviews have to be revamped. They have to be punchy and provocative. They must be quickly exciting. There's no place for outdated rules in a new literary environment.
(I'll be using this new blog for longer pieces of mine; prose and poetry both.)
www.happyamericawriting.blogspot.com
That's the last long review, with quotes, etc., I plan to do. With it I still followed too closely to the accepted "rules." From hereon with all my reviews I'm throwing out the rules. (As I did in the 1990's with my review zeen, New Philistine.) Book reviews have to be revamped. They have to be punchy and provocative. They must be quickly exciting. There's no place for outdated rules in a new literary environment.
(I'll be using this new blog for longer pieces of mine; prose and poetry both.)
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
The Brady Thread
Brady Russell's post, on his personal site (This Too Will Pass), calling for a new underground leader, was entirely his own idea. It began highly critical of no one so much as MYSELF. Despite this, I supported the idea. Through my experiences with the ULA, and my readings of history, I've come to believe that for a rebellion to succeed, strong leadership is necessary.
I entered into the discussion without knowing what the outcome would be. The discussion, for the most part, turned out to be a good thing. Diverse members of the underground were able to exchange views honestly, in a neutral setting. Such a discussion depends on the honesty and good will of those who participate. For me it was a way to see which of the younger writers in the movement would display leadership qualities. The movement can progress from here only with new faces.
Some, like both Pats, acquited themselves well. (Both are consensus-builders for their respective teams.) Brady has to be commended for convening the "conclave" in the first place.
STRATEGY
Most important was that Brady began the thread. That rare thing: an undergrounder stepping back from the endless petty feuds and micro-level obsessions to examine the larger picture. The underground is a small part of the literary scene as a whole and has to be viewed within that context, for us to understand what steps need to be taken on a strategic (broad) level for our cause to expand its base and raise its profile.
A major part of this for all of us has to be abandoning personality conflicts in the interest of following that larger strategy.
But what is that strategy? Who will implement it? How do we harmonize the various elements of the literary Resistance to follow it, even once it's articulated and agreed to?
There are many steps yet which have to be taken; that can't be done in an atmosphere of chaos (underground chaos-- I'll accept societal upheaval, am well adapted to crisis and conflict). We can't proceed without direction or directors, or directions, amid inertia, ostriches, lone wolves and loose cannons.
AMBITION
Above all we need ambition-- artistic ambition and ambition which dares to want to change this society. I could lock myself in a garret to "just write"-- but shit-disturbing is far more exciting. I spent many years of my life as the happy guy at the end of the bar-- at some point saw that as not enough. For a few years, for someone like me-- an ordinary working guy-- I helped accomplish some amazing things. We shook the lit establishment to its foundations. This was merely a taste of what we can potentially achieve-- if we have the desire to achieve.
I entered into the discussion without knowing what the outcome would be. The discussion, for the most part, turned out to be a good thing. Diverse members of the underground were able to exchange views honestly, in a neutral setting. Such a discussion depends on the honesty and good will of those who participate. For me it was a way to see which of the younger writers in the movement would display leadership qualities. The movement can progress from here only with new faces.
Some, like both Pats, acquited themselves well. (Both are consensus-builders for their respective teams.) Brady has to be commended for convening the "conclave" in the first place.
STRATEGY
Most important was that Brady began the thread. That rare thing: an undergrounder stepping back from the endless petty feuds and micro-level obsessions to examine the larger picture. The underground is a small part of the literary scene as a whole and has to be viewed within that context, for us to understand what steps need to be taken on a strategic (broad) level for our cause to expand its base and raise its profile.
A major part of this for all of us has to be abandoning personality conflicts in the interest of following that larger strategy.
But what is that strategy? Who will implement it? How do we harmonize the various elements of the literary Resistance to follow it, even once it's articulated and agreed to?
There are many steps yet which have to be taken; that can't be done in an atmosphere of chaos (underground chaos-- I'll accept societal upheaval, am well adapted to crisis and conflict). We can't proceed without direction or directors, or directions, amid inertia, ostriches, lone wolves and loose cannons.
AMBITION
Above all we need ambition-- artistic ambition and ambition which dares to want to change this society. I could lock myself in a garret to "just write"-- but shit-disturbing is far more exciting. I spent many years of my life as the happy guy at the end of the bar-- at some point saw that as not enough. For a few years, for someone like me-- an ordinary working guy-- I helped accomplish some amazing things. We shook the lit establishment to its foundations. This was merely a taste of what we can potentially achieve-- if we have the desire to achieve.
Monday, April 28, 2008
Media Aristocrats
BEFORE THE DELUGE
Here's a story about New York media's current favorite hangout:
www.nysocialdiary.com/node/2976
"Cinderella," were you there?
Here's a story about New York media's current favorite hangout:
www.nysocialdiary.com/node/2976
"Cinderella," were you there?
Saturday, April 26, 2008
Establishment Weakness
UNDERGROUND STRENGTH
Once again it's been demonstrated that establishment literature is a house of cards awaiting collapse.
What happened: a preview of my review of Susan Nagel's Marie Therese was posted on this blog more than two weeks ago, followed by the review three days later which demolished the book's credibility as history. (A tepid, half-hearted "pan" followed in the New York Times many days later.) The review here was a direct hit on the protege of one of established print media's most powerful figures, Tina Brown, who even hosted a release party to celebrate Nagel's book, with premature smiles in place before the splatter of embarrassment disturbed the cozy plastic-surgery faces. To this date, Ms. Brown and friends have been unable to put the pieces of the book back together again. The only attempt to counteract my argument, in a discussion on the World of Royalty blog, ended in quick failure; their defense of the book so swiftly blown apart by myself that the blog's managers hurriedly deleted the entire thread. (Traces remain on Google.)
Don't think there's not a battle going on. The establishment has lost every encounter. They're able to respond only in underhand fashion, through hackers, moles, and anonymous posters-- signs of weakness and panic.
If the underground took its view of things higher than one inch above the sidewalk, if it united and organized, it'd put the bankrupt philosophy of the print media monopolists into flight. The insular Overdog mindset should be grabbed by the collar and tossed out. (Tina Brown first of all. She should better exult over privilege from London.)
As I've said many times about New York, nothing is there. Money and superficial smiles, maybe, but no ideas, originality, character, honesty, integrity, belief in what they do or ability to generate lasting literary excitement.
Once again it's been demonstrated that establishment literature is a house of cards awaiting collapse.
What happened: a preview of my review of Susan Nagel's Marie Therese was posted on this blog more than two weeks ago, followed by the review three days later which demolished the book's credibility as history. (A tepid, half-hearted "pan" followed in the New York Times many days later.) The review here was a direct hit on the protege of one of established print media's most powerful figures, Tina Brown, who even hosted a release party to celebrate Nagel's book, with premature smiles in place before the splatter of embarrassment disturbed the cozy plastic-surgery faces. To this date, Ms. Brown and friends have been unable to put the pieces of the book back together again. The only attempt to counteract my argument, in a discussion on the World of Royalty blog, ended in quick failure; their defense of the book so swiftly blown apart by myself that the blog's managers hurriedly deleted the entire thread. (Traces remain on Google.)
Don't think there's not a battle going on. The establishment has lost every encounter. They're able to respond only in underhand fashion, through hackers, moles, and anonymous posters-- signs of weakness and panic.
If the underground took its view of things higher than one inch above the sidewalk, if it united and organized, it'd put the bankrupt philosophy of the print media monopolists into flight. The insular Overdog mindset should be grabbed by the collar and tossed out. (Tina Brown first of all. She should better exult over privilege from London.)
As I've said many times about New York, nothing is there. Money and superficial smiles, maybe, but no ideas, originality, character, honesty, integrity, belief in what they do or ability to generate lasting literary excitement.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Context #2
I'VE RECEIVED word that the Zinewiki project, intended to preserve and celebrate the history of underground lit on-line, has been destroyed by hackers. "Hackers." Who are these people? What's the motivation?
This is a reminder that the struggle of underground literature, of our art, is still merely to survive, in a tops-down overregulated society hostile to what we're doing.
This is a reminder that the struggle of underground literature, of our art, is still merely to survive, in a tops-down overregulated society hostile to what we're doing.
Context #1
AN INTERESTING article was in the Detroit News yesterday, by Charlie LeDuff:
www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080422/METRO/804220377&imw=Y
Powerful stuff.
This city, where I've lived some years of my life, is part of my background, the context within which I write.
www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080422/METRO/804220377&imw=Y
Powerful stuff.
This city, where I've lived some years of my life, is part of my background, the context within which I write.
About George
Regarding George Balgobin, who like so many of us has a habit of upsetting people. Through the years of the ULA I disagreed with George on many things, but always respected his honesty. I wanted him in the ULA, when I was active in it, because I knew he would never try to bullshit me, and on any topic or person he was guaranteed to give me a bullshit-free take. His entire career as a writer has been committed to truth-telling as he sees it, wrong on occasion though he may be. He's fearlessly expressed his ideas, willing to coherently support and defend his statements. No pandering, no expediency, letting the chips fall where they may has been his history. This is not a bad thing! It's consistent with the ideals of the ULA.
George is also an excellent essayist, as good, when he wants to be, as anyone in the country.
A movement-- any movement-- has to want the best, most talented people in its ranks, on its side, and has to make an effort to obtain and keep those people, whoever they may be. It's true that we never adequately figured out how to use him. The effort was worthwhile. If the Rebellion can't learn how to appeal to disaffected members of the intellectual class it won't succeed.
*****************************************************
There's consolidation and then there's withdrawing. I fear the underground is too content to put its head back into the hole in the ground from where it came; to abandon the boldness of new tactics; to embrace tried-and-failed ways of doing things; the incremental, the inch-by-inch day-by-day creep of illusory progress while the rest of this monopolistic society races by. To embrace as well while high-fiving over petty gains the comfort of petty feuds and grievances. To splinter and fragment into ever smaller pieces. The province: the parish: the street. The garrett, finally; back to the starting point, where there's no failure because no risks are taken. You can't be upset by how that article portrays you when there are no articles. Right back at the beginning.
When I was active in the ULA it was my task to think bigger than this. To envision a greater movement which could truly compete. To recruit on the edges of the established machine those with skills and talents who were attracted to our ideals and our noise.
George is also an excellent essayist, as good, when he wants to be, as anyone in the country.
A movement-- any movement-- has to want the best, most talented people in its ranks, on its side, and has to make an effort to obtain and keep those people, whoever they may be. It's true that we never adequately figured out how to use him. The effort was worthwhile. If the Rebellion can't learn how to appeal to disaffected members of the intellectual class it won't succeed.
*****************************************************
There's consolidation and then there's withdrawing. I fear the underground is too content to put its head back into the hole in the ground from where it came; to abandon the boldness of new tactics; to embrace tried-and-failed ways of doing things; the incremental, the inch-by-inch day-by-day creep of illusory progress while the rest of this monopolistic society races by. To embrace as well while high-fiving over petty gains the comfort of petty feuds and grievances. To splinter and fragment into ever smaller pieces. The province: the parish: the street. The garrett, finally; back to the starting point, where there's no failure because no risks are taken. You can't be upset by how that article portrays you when there are no articles. Right back at the beginning.
When I was active in the ULA it was my task to think bigger than this. To envision a greater movement which could truly compete. To recruit on the edges of the established machine those with skills and talents who were attracted to our ideals and our noise.
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
Happy Earth Day!
To celebrate Earth Day I have a special Earth Day chapter up at the "Plutocracy USA" series at
www.literarymystery.blogspot.com
The chapter is entitled, "A Gang Self-Destructs."
www.literarymystery.blogspot.com
The chapter is entitled, "A Gang Self-Destructs."
A Dead Review?
A RELIC OF LITERATURE PAST
The New York Times came out Sunday, April 20, with their own review of the Susan Nagel Marie Therese, Child of Terror book:
www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/books/review/Steiker-t.html?ref=todayspaper
The review, by Valerie Steiker, is critical of the book in a lukewarm way, like so much of the NYTBR's writing. It mentions the subject's restricted point-of-view, but fails to put the work within context of our society today-- and scarcely mentions its historical inaccuracy.
This may have something to do with the fact that Valerie Steiker is Culture editor at Vogue, a fashion magazine-- with that circumstance, the perusal was guaranteed to be superfical, as if the book were reviewed by a well-trained intelligent Persian cat.
Actually it's a miracle that Valerie Steiker wasn't glowing with praise, given that her magazine is at the heart of the Conde Nast magazine empire-- our own little aristocracy-- stomping grounds for many years of Tina Brown, Nagel's mentor. Can we guess that there will be polite tsks and frowns at a future Manhattan cocktail party? This is a narrow world, folks; a tiny little closed-mided insular and intellectually incestuous little world of superficial people living a "rarefied, peripatetic extistence," who happen to have billions of dollars of media clout behind them.
The New York Times came out Sunday, April 20, with their own review of the Susan Nagel Marie Therese, Child of Terror book:
www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/books/review/Steiker-t.html?ref=todayspaper
The review, by Valerie Steiker, is critical of the book in a lukewarm way, like so much of the NYTBR's writing. It mentions the subject's restricted point-of-view, but fails to put the work within context of our society today-- and scarcely mentions its historical inaccuracy.
This may have something to do with the fact that Valerie Steiker is Culture editor at Vogue, a fashion magazine-- with that circumstance, the perusal was guaranteed to be superfical, as if the book were reviewed by a well-trained intelligent Persian cat.
Actually it's a miracle that Valerie Steiker wasn't glowing with praise, given that her magazine is at the heart of the Conde Nast magazine empire-- our own little aristocracy-- stomping grounds for many years of Tina Brown, Nagel's mentor. Can we guess that there will be polite tsks and frowns at a future Manhattan cocktail party? This is a narrow world, folks; a tiny little closed-mided insular and intellectually incestuous little world of superficial people living a "rarefied, peripatetic extistence," who happen to have billions of dollars of media clout behind them.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Danica's Triumph
Danica Patrick's IRL open-wheel racing win over the weekend is a victory for Danica, but moreso a victory for Indy racing in competing against the overwhelming lead NASCAR has built in the sport of auto racing.
I was raised in a region and a time when the Indy 500 was THE biggest sporting event. (Surely the greatest sporting event I've attended.) The two events Indy car has needed in recent years: A.) to unite its two leagues; B.) to create an Elvis-like face; have now taken place.
It's a victory for the underdog and a positive note for all underdogs competing against larger rivals.
I was raised in a region and a time when the Indy 500 was THE biggest sporting event. (Surely the greatest sporting event I've attended.) The two events Indy car has needed in recent years: A.) to unite its two leagues; B.) to create an Elvis-like face; have now taken place.
It's a victory for the underdog and a positive note for all underdogs competing against larger rivals.
Friday, April 18, 2008
Revolutionary Writing
READERS of this blog keep asking where's the new underground writing. It's under their noses. They're reading it. From the start I've offered literary criticism unlike any seen anywhere, in that I place literature within context of A.) current historical trends; B.) the Machine which produces it.
I've also worked to build alternatives, and have presented in-person criticism through various live crashes and confrontations, with the ULA and without them: criticism taken OFF the page and put directly in front of the lit crowd.
Most recently I've been working to create a new-style of book review which can rescue the genre. In coming months on my various blogs I'll be presenting varied examples.
Standard lit people have been trained to think in terms of what's available now-- the safe and known. Which means, stories and novels.
When being questioned about the underground last July by a staffer before going on a Philly radio show, I was asked if we write short stories. (Creative Writing class thinking.) "Short stories?" I said. "We're not from a writing class. We're undergrounders. We produce ZEENS. We're not the same-old same-old."
I've also worked to build alternatives, and have presented in-person criticism through various live crashes and confrontations, with the ULA and without them: criticism taken OFF the page and put directly in front of the lit crowd.
Most recently I've been working to create a new-style of book review which can rescue the genre. In coming months on my various blogs I'll be presenting varied examples.
Standard lit people have been trained to think in terms of what's available now-- the safe and known. Which means, stories and novels.
When being questioned about the underground last July by a staffer before going on a Philly radio show, I was asked if we write short stories. (Creative Writing class thinking.) "Short stories?" I said. "We're not from a writing class. We're undergrounders. We produce ZEENS. We're not the same-old same-old."
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