Digging into the Narrative

RELATIONSHIPS TO POWER

While I’ve fairly well eviscerated Tom Bissell’s Believer Books essay about the Underground Literary Alliance, at the same time I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. I’ve yet to dig into what’s actually taking place. For instance, I haven’t looked into the essay’s relationship to power.

The entire literary establishment, which writers are approved or not approved, is determined by relationships to power. Nonsense, you say! Yet the point is easily demonstrated, as I may show in an upcoming post or two. I’ve yet to become bored by the topic. Understanding propaganda, and a propagandist like Bissell, can become fascinating and enlightening.

Know this: The purpose of Bissell’s essay was to defend certain powerful literary figures like Rick Moody and Jonathan Franzen, at the behest of another powerful literary figure, Dave Eggers. This is why the essay was written—stated or unstated; consciously or unconsciously. It’s not an accident that those Bissell was defending were known collectively at the time as “The New White Guys,” or that Bissell threw a defense of another of that group, Jeffrey Eugenides, into his essay. On Tom Bissell’s side he was making a clear statement—to them—showing his support of them and of the system he’d worked for and had wanted to be part of his entire life. The sell-out point.

Ask yourself: Is Tom Bissell an objective journalist, or a propagandist? What do we make of the Robert Kaplan essay? Is this not an intentional hit piece? In it, is Tom Bissell showing his support for a larger cultural area than literature, by going after a neo-con? In this instance, as in the ULA instance, it’s acceptable for Bissell to write a hit piece, a piece no doubt (in my mind) filled with slants and distortions. This is acceptable because Kaplan has been designated, like the ULA, as an enemy of the proper people. Of the politically correct herd.

Tom Bissell isn’t fair and objective, and Johannes Lichtman, in writing about Bissell’s book, doesn’t have to be fair and objective, because that’s not what the game is about. What game, you ask? You should know the game. Many of you reading this blog are playing it. Or have played it.

Here are two contradictory statements to think about. Understand them and you understand what’s really happening with Bissell’s essay. You’ll understand the “game,” and something of the nature of sophisticated propaganda as practiced by contemporary media. It takes examining different levels of intention and meaning in the same essay.

The two statements are this: The theme of Tom Bissell’s essay on the Underground Literary Alliance is that there is no literary establishment. At the same time, the theme of this same essay is that there very much is a literary establishment.

The Writer's Job

The writer's job is to see through the lies and layers of falsehood around him. To cut through the noise and cries to get to the heart of the matter. To the key to the situation; the truth of the world. From Brothers Karamazov to Heart of Darkness to Rebecca this has been the novelist's goal.

A writer, especially a novelist, should have one overriding concern: getting to the truth. It's what fiction at its best is about. What really happened? This is the task of the true writer-- maybe his only true task. All else is posing.

Why This Blog Is Necessary

This blog is the only spot in the entire vast Internet and analog realm of literature presenting a counter-story to literature’s Dominant Narrative. The only independent voice. Members of the totalitarian intelligentsia read it, because, instinctively, they know their world is totalitarian. McSweeney’s, fully part of the Dominant Narrative, is totalitarian. Close me off, shut me down, and they then fully close off their minds. There will not remain one spark, not one sentence, not one word of dissent and anti-conformity and Truth about their world entering their brains. Their smugness and complacency will further harden. Their minds will lose all flexibility—will turn, even more, if that’s possible!, into concrete.

They know that those who pass and pose as “critics” and commentators in the establishment literary-media world are glorified prostitutes. System hacks, domesticated pets, bought, paid, and trained.

I give here a different narrative. The truth as I see it, undiluted by bureaucratic career expediency. I’ve never compromised. Nor will I.

The Structure

THE MCSWEENEYS GANG EXAMINED

It’s obvious from the first couple chapters of the narrative that at the beginning I had no idea where I was going with the story. I started the serialized satirical novel as a gag. Then, before I knew it, the story got away from me.

In the middle third of the book images from my subconscious intruded against my will into the narrative. The tale got off track. Writing a novel is a battle between the reasoning part of the mind and the shadows beneath. The last several chapters, however, show me fully back in control of the thing.

How exaggerated is the story? Not at all. The literary establishment was fearfully obsessed with the rise of the ULA, and remains so to this day.

The Payroll

THE MISSING POST

Should I show the missing post? I suppose so. Then again, why should I? I guess I'm worried that if I start outing the spies et.al. who follow this blog, I'll lose the most loyal part of my audience. It's like the apocryphal story of the last meeting of the Utah (or Idaho) Communist Party, disbanded when it was realized that everyone there was working for the FBI!

At some point, the war of McSweeneyites vs ULA (or me) becomes a waste of time. It's a battle I can't possibly win. But it is aggravating to see what was an honorable and necessary project, the ULA, libeled across the literary realm. Whatever missteps we made, they were nothing compared to the scoundrels we were up against. Scoundrels those people remain.

But, the post. One of the more bizarre I've put up. 1.) There might be more to its premise than I thought. Otherwise, why would someone be so interested in reading it? (Or even know about it.) 2.) At the end of it-- or rather, end of the three comments attached-- an actual bitter enemy of myself, with no credible reason for his animus, possible member of the McS's payroll, makes a strange appearance.

I don't want anyone to think the post ranks with "The Day the Clown Cried" for absent strangeness. What it does, is point to the strangeness of those thrown out of joint by a low-rent noisemaking campaign from a tiny band of broke zinesters, to the extent that some of the most powerful figures in literature pulled out all stops in their eagerness to run us permanently out of town. At that, they've been quite successful.

(I hope the moles and spies involved have bilked the insecure mandarins-- Eggers, Handler, & Company-- for a substantial amount. Somehow, I think not.)

(The McSweeneys Gang may be a trifle bizarre, but not as bizarre as real life.)

The Latest

I removed this blog from view for a day because someone was getting into the html code of it. They were trying to get into one particular blog post from a couple years ago-- a post, moreover, which I had taken down a while back. Why that particular blog post? That's an interesting question.

ON THE PAYROLL

The premise of my satirical ebook novel, The McSweeneys Gang, is that the ULA was afflicted with a host of moles and spies tracking the ULA's every happening. How true could that possibly be?

The real story would be fascinating.

Notice!

I notice that someone who lives in Sunnyvale, California, IP# 98.137.207.224, is trying to get into the html code of this blog, either to mess things up or shut this blog down. Please stop it.

The Representative of Power

Tom Bissell doesn’t see himself as powerful. In himself, he’s not.

But he’s employed by some of the most powerful entities in literature. It’s not just Tom Bissell smearing the Underground Literary Alliance. It’s the highly influential and connected McSweeney’s organization. It’s ICM, one of the most powerful talent agencies in the business. Who’ll dare go up against them?

Someone at McSweeney’s had to have read and screened and approved Tom Bissell’s dishonest essay before it was included in the Believer Books collection Magic Hours. Presumably Heather Schroder, Bissell’s agent, an ICM partner, read that essay as well. They were perfectly fine with depicting a tiny band of DIY zinesters, currently inactive as a group, backed by no funds or connections whatsoever, as genocidal authoritarian Bolsheviks(!) whose quixotic campaign for a sliver of attention was liable to lead, in Bissell’s hysterically absurd words, to “lots and lots of tombstones.”(!!!)

The publication of this dishonest smear essay, backed by power, money, and influence, then allows other powerful entities, such as, oh, the New York Times(!) in reviews to pile on against that inactive band of nobodies.

An elephant panicked at the sight of a mouse.

Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor?

One doesn’t exclude the other.

Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor were the two legendary screen actresses/sex goddesses of the 1950’s. Which was the better actress?

Technically, Elizabeth Taylor was the more accomplished, more disciplined actress. She could play Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee without a hitch. Everything Marilyn Monroe played was with extreme difficulty. Yet Monroe could go places emotionally, subliminally, that Elizabeth Taylor couldn’t. Contrary to what some may suggest, art doesn’t exclude emotion. Art IS emotion.

The same principle holds true for literature and writing. System writers have this idea that because they’ve learned, technically, the current model, their style of creative writing is the only style there is. They’re eager to exclude all others. Which is what the war against the Underground Literary Alliance was about.

No art can advance if it allows nobody to take a different path to that art. No art can live if it permits no one to be different.

What Are the Facts?

THE ULA VERSUS THE LITERARY ESTABLISHMENT

As I'll further show, in his Believer essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, reprinted in Magic Hours, Tom Bissell ignored every point about the grants controversies embarrassing to Jonathan Franzen, and everything that would throw the ULA's protests in a positive light. Some of those points can be found in an objective article written at the time of our protests:

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

Instead, Tom Bissell turned one small mention of Josip Novakovich by the ULA into the centerpiece of his discussion on the grants matter. Bissell expressed mock outrage at our "treatment" of the man, while ignoring the main story.

Was Tom Bissell's Believer essay part of a vendetta by Dave Eggers against the Underground Literary Alliance?

A few months after the appearance of Bissell's essay, we have this story by Amy Harmon of the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/us/amazon-glitch-unmasks-war-of-reviewers.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Note that Amy Harmon treads carefully. Notice also the hysteria back then from Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen regarding the ULA, seeing us under every bush and around every street corner. Fact is, though, that the ULA had a strict policy of never posting anonymously, or under false identities.

This policy had two motives. One was to show our honesty and transparency. To demonstrate our difference from the corruption of the mainstream literary scene. Second, and at least as important, the ULA was intended as a promotional campaign for good underground writers. Shut out by organs of publicity, we needed to utilize every opportunity to use our real names. At Amazon or elsewhere. That was the whole point! It would've been senseless to waste time posting anywhere anonymously. We'd already been exposing corruption under our real names. We had nothing to lose and nothing to hide. (I've never altered that philosophy, as anyone who reads this blog can testify.)

"--what kind of person has time to write them?" Jonathan Franzen asks rhetorically in the article about anonymous negative Amazon reviews. As ULAers were working regular jobs, it wasn't us. Fact is, no one was able to expose the ULA as author of such reviews. They couldn't now. Franzen, Eggers, Handler, Moody, and the rest of the Big Money lit boys have ample funds to investigate the question. What they haven't realized themselves (Daniel Handler caught posting scores of anonymous comments on this blog) is that there are no secrets on the Internet. All postings are a permanent record.

Note in the Amy Harmon article how Jonathan Franzen defends his new-found friend Tom Bissell against those dastardly ULA whistleblowers. Narcissist that he is, Franzen never thought that in accepting the taxpayer NEA funds he did anything wrong. He doesn't hesitate to falsely smear, in a national publication, the whistleblowers. For Tom Bissell, his defense of the Big Boys in his essay ensured their approval. Entrance into the Club.

Jonathan Franzen and Tom Bissell remain buds to this day. Witness this 2011 Willamette Week article in which Franzen compares Bissell to David Foster Wallace-- a dubious honor-- and calls Bissell "a true talent."

http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-17989-professor_xbox.html

Do the proper thing by the Powers of the Literary World and all is good.

Corruption Buddies

IT’S NOT A SURPRISE that essayist Tom Bissell is a friend of author Jonathan Franzen. The Underground Literary Alliance exposed abuse of the grants system by Franzen back in 2002. The question is whether Tom Bissell became friends with Jonathan Franzen before or after Bissell misportrayed the Franzen grants controversy in his Believer essay on the ULA, since reprinted in Magic Hours.

Tom Bissell could’ve changed that misportrayal before Magic Hours came out. We’re left with lit-world cronyism at its worst.

Today's Contest

****TODAY'S CONTEST TESTING YOUR LITERARY KNOWLEDGE****

(A test to see if you're qualified to be a contemporary writer.)

CORRECTLY NAME THE PHOTO OF JONATHAN FRANZEN:

A.)

B.)

C.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Literary Cover Ups

SPORTS JOURNALISM VS LITERARY JOURNALISM

Sports journalists have finally gotten around to investigating a couple sports stories, in the case of Lance Armstrong and Manti Te’o. Reporters had to be dragged to the truth kicking and screaming. But they got there.

What about literary journalists? When it comes to literary cover ups, haven’t lit reporters been MIA?

In the short time the Underground Literary Alliance was most active, from 2001 to 2007, we covered a number of scandalous happenings in the literary scene. The reaction? Cover ups and enmity.

Today, writers acting in the role or position of journalists are more interested in crafting gushy puff pieces than breaking or covering an actual story. Document the truth for the likes of Garth Hallberg, Maria Bustillos, Johannes Lichtman, Katie Ryder, et.al., and they refuse to look at it. “We don’t want to know!” they scream.

And so they’re able to applaud a dishonest essay by a dishonest writer. Despite available evidence.

These “journalists” apparently also believe in the Easter Bunny.

Bookforum Mention

GIVEN my many literary opponents eager to shut me down, I don't get a fraction of the attention I once did, ten years ago when the ULA was kicking literary butt. However, I notice that the review journal Bookforum was generous enough to give my new ebook a mention last month:

http://www.bookforum.com/paper/archive/20121210

I do get mentioned ahead of luminaries Salman Rushdie and Vladimir Nabakov. Quite the honor for a lowly rebel undergrounder.

I appreciate the open mindedness of the BF editors.

(The McSweeneys Gang is now out and available at Nook or Kindle.)

The Josip Novakovich Matter

THE GRANTS CONTROVERSY PART I

The portion of the ULA’s activities which created for us the most animosity among the mandarins of American letters was our uncovering of apparent corruption in the awarding of grants monies to writers. It should be, and should’ve been, a major part of any in-depth examination of the Underground Literary Alliance.

The focus of the many articles done on the topic of grants corruption, and the ULA’s exposure of same, whether in Page Six, Moby Lives, Alternet.org, Soma, Boston Phoenix, or many other places, was on two successful and powerful writers: Rick Moody and Jonathan Franzen. With a dash of Dave Eggers thrown in. One writer not mentioned in any of the coverage was a writer named Josip Novakovich. Yet Tom Bissell made Josip Novakovich the centerpiece of his discussion, in his Believer essay, on the grants controversies.

Here’s a portion of what Tom Bissell said about the man:

“Novakovich (I do not think he would mind me saying this) also has a family; ‘university professors’ do not, by and large, roll around in piles of money, and they typically see their writing time vacuumed up by teaching. The money was probably crucial manna for him and his writing life. That the ULA can take a fine, unsung writer such as Novakovich—a writer, moreover, hitherto neglected by the larger publishing world—and single him out for opprobrium is nauseating. He is exactly the type of writer whom the ULA should be championing,—“

Was Josip Novakovich at the center of the ULA’s attacks on the literary grants system? Were we somehow unfair to the man?

With the ULA web site finally resurrected late in 2012 after a long period of being unavailable, I was able to track down the reference to Josip Novakovich. I found him discussed in ONE report out of many ULA reports during the years of our active existence. You can read that report here:

http://ulaliterary.com/jfranzgrant02.html

Note that we used Josip Novakovich as a representative example of the grants business, with our emphasis on the fact that Novakovich had both sat on a panel for, and been a recipient of, grants awards. The idea being that if you have the same small circle of individuals both giving out and receiving grants money, you have a flawed system.

Tom Bissell painted Novakovich as something of a hardship case. What’s the truth? What’s the real Josip Novakovich situation?

Josip Novakovich is listed at wikipedia and other places as a Canadian writer. He currently is a professor at Concordia University in Canada.

Quick investigation shows that the average professor salary at Penn State University, where Novakovich was employed at the time of our report, is $132,000. Given ten years of inflation, we can still give him $100,000 at the time. He likely makes at least that now, or he wouldn’t have moved.

Josip Novakovich has published ten books as well as hundreds of short stories. His book publishers include Graywolf Press, HarperPerennial, and HarperCollins. Presumably much of this came the past ten years.

Here’s a partial list of the awards and grants Josip Novakovich has received over the years, in addition to the two NEA grants and the Guggenheim Fellowship mentioned in our report:

-Whiting Writers Award

-Ingram Merrill Foundation award

-American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation

-Black Mountain Fellowship

-Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship

-New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship

-Tennessee Williams Fellowship

-Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant

-Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship

-W.K. Rose Fellowship

There may be a few in the pipeline.

I suspect that Novakovich’s valuable writing time is “vacuumed up” not by teaching so much as filling out grants applications, at which Josip Novakovich is assuredly a master. Is he a great writer? It’s a matter of opinion and viewpoint. I’ve read a couple of his short stories, and found him to be a typical literary writer. Indeed, he’d have to be, to encounter such widespread approval. His work couldn’t upset anybody—or at least, not refined society. Literary writers are not a rare commodity in this society. Throw a rock on any university campus and you’ll hit a dozen of them.

The point is that Josip Novakovich is mentioned in this sole ULA report as one of a number of “awards professionals.” Can anyone deny that an awards professional is exactly what he is?

Note how Tom Bissell, in his essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, takes out of context and distorts our treatment of Mr. Novakovich. At the same time, Bissell finessed his coverage of our actual targets, Moody and Franzen, as I’ll show.

(To be continued.)

Victims of Dishonesty

If I had to name the single greatest failing of today’s status quo literary scene, I’d name its intrinsic, thoroughgoing dishonesty.

The first victims of this dishonesty are the purveyors of dishonesty. The first victim of a false presentation is the person who created it.

For example, Johannes Lichtman created a false presentation with his 11/27/12 review of Tom Bissell’s Magic Hours, in the way he presented the Underground Literary Alliance. Virtually every sentence or phrase pertaining to the ULA is false. I’ve shown them, at this blog, to be false. Does Lichtman admit this? No. He doubles down. He ignores all evidence countering his false narrative, willfully refusing to look at any evidence, while continuing to insist on the lies he’s presented. (The ULA is “generally untalented . . . conspiracy theorists” etc.) His mind is made up. Closed. From the start—and never can he be prodded to open it. Two plus two equals five, in his mind, simply because it does. It’s what he’s been told.

Who is he hurting by his false presentation? Mainly himself. He’s taking his intellectual integrity and blowing it up.

For what price? What reason? Lichtman admits the Oxford American web site (despite large sums of money pumped into it), has few readers. His payment for the piece, he’s said again and again, is $25. What’s the payoff? As far as I can see, merely in being allowed to be part of that creature known as “mainstream publishing,” a dying animal.

OTHER VICTIMS

Johannes Lichtman is a victim of false presentations in the micro. His mistake is believing wholeheartedly in Tom Bissell’s false essay. That essay has been shown to be false. Does it matter? Bissell’s fans cling to the essay—but so, apparently, does Tom Bissell himself. Which makes him his own victim. He, like Johannes Lichtman, is content to take his intellectual integrity and dynamite it. The payoff: Being part of “mainstream publishing,” but on a somewhat higher level.

Above Tom Bissell is Dave Eggers, who has his own false presentations to perpetuate. In his case, a great many of them.

The ultimate victim of all the falseness is literature itself. Failure in the macro. Can a status quo literary scene maintain itself as a construction of lies? When you build your reputation on lies, you’re unable to defend yourself. You can blackball, censor, lie more, but the one thing you can’t do is engage in honest and open debate. You’ve created a legacy of dishonesty. A record of untruthfulness.

Some day someone will come along—whether a renewed ULA, or others—and knock down the tottering house of cards.

Jonathan Franzen Isn't in The McSweeneys Gang

THE MCSWEENEYS GANG IS ON SALE

There's a character in The McSweeneys Gang, a new American Pop Lit e-novel by King Wenclas, who resembles acclaimed author Jonathan Franzen. But it's not Jonathan Franzen.

Not the Real Dave Eggers

THE MCSWEENEYS GANG EBOOK NOVEL IS ON SALE

The Dave Eggers character in The McSweeneys Gang, a new ebook novel by King Wenclas, is not the real Dave Eggers, and has no resemblance to the wonderful real person.

The Elite and Effete

HIPSTER ALERT

Here’s a couple of writers found in the New York Times Style Magazine, courtesy of a piece by Stephen Heyman:

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/book-forum/

Don’t they look just unpacked from a box? (The people as well as the clothes.) Pricey duds for a mock-bohemian look. I bet these two know a great deal about the hardships, tensions, and divisions wrenching this country right now. Writers!

Literary World Wrestling

Literary World Wrestling is an apt way to describe Tom Bissell’s ULA essay. The essay’s narrative was created in advance. The outcome was assured. Rehearsed and ready. Bissell then jumped into the ring to toss around a stuffed dummy named Ranger Rick, while the herd audience cheered loudly. “Yaaaay!!” Gullible reviewers in the audience like Maria Bustillos, Garth Hallberg, and Johannes Lichtman were too brainwashed to see the presentation as staged hoax. They believe Literary World Wrestling is real.

At the end of the fake match, smirking Bissell raised his arms in the air, while Literary World Wrestling chief Dave Eggers, dressed in a referee’s costume, declared him the victor. The verdict, of course, though it was fake, can never be appealed.

Tom Bissell took the L.W.W. trophy home with him. There it sits on his mantle, glittering and fake. I’m sure he believes in its reality. Let’s hope he never has to meet a live opponent.

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

Support dynamic new literature. Buy The McSweeneys Gang by King Wenclas. Affordably available via Nook or Kindle.

A Different Take on Warwick Sabin

Here's an interesting online piece by Marc Smirnoff, founder and former editor of the Oxford American. It's curious what you find when you do some superficial digging in the realm of the literary world:

http://www.editorsinlove.com/editor-smirnoff-on-editor-hodge

Things get curiouser and curiouser. The piece does provide us with a glimpse of the Big Money boys who stand behind so much of the establishment literary world. It's a part of lit that Tom Bissell will never cover, and which writers like Maria Bustillos and Johannes Lichtman refuse to know about.

I like Smirnoff's point that journalists are supposed to get both sides of a story. This is what those who've applauded Bissell's faulty ULA essay have determinedly refused to do.

Response from Warwick Sabin

RESPONSE FROM WARWICK BARON REID SABIN, PUBLISHER OF OXFORD AMERICAN, TO TWO EMAILS SENT HIM ABOUT THE BOOK REVIEW WHICH SMEARS THE UNDERGROUND LITERARY ALLIANCE:

What's to Be Done?

THE LOBOTOMIZED WRITER








THE MCSWEENEYS HAPPY FACE

I know I’m wasting my time with these posts—though venting keeps me from, say, punching somebody out. I’ll move on to other topics soon enough. I know the literary world is immovable. All my research and experience shows that it’s thoroughly corrupt. Upside down and sideways. Through and through.

One thing for sure. Every criticism the ULA made of today’s established literary world has been shown to be true, many times over.

Does anyone care if Eggers, Bissell and Company sell “The Big Lie” over and over? Of course not! It’s not their place to care. Not Hallberg-Bustillos-Lichtman’s place to care. Less to think about the way things are done. They’re merely “writers.” Which means, not the stand-up fearless figures of the past like Zola or Solzhenitsyn. Today, “writer” is a euphemism for “bureaucrat,” “apparatchik,” or “tool.” Truth? What’s that? If there were such thing as truth (they don’t believe there is), they wouldn’t want to know.

Character? Integrity? Backbone? Unknown concepts.

Literature—real literature—in the final analysis isn’t a product of smoothly crafted sentences or certificates from everyone-think-alike workshops. It is, instead, a function of heart, conscience, and soul. Of seeing the world as it is, and with unflinching honesty, speaking about it. “Get along to go along”? There’s no place for that for the real writer—but the real writer today is a rare creature, hard to find among the hordes of see-no-evil go with the flow conscienceless sociopaths who populate the established literary world.

Fortunately the world of publishing is changing. The insular corrupt tower of arrogant mandarins is crumbling. Their day will soon enough be over.

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

(Be sure to buy the new ebook, "The McSweeneys Gang," by King Wenclas. Available at Nook or Kindle. Fictional satire-- but maybe not so fictional after all.)

How Corrupt Is Corrupt?

THE INTENT TO SMEAR

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Writers of Conscience?

Intellectually, Tom Bissell knows that his essay about the Underground Literary Alliance is filled with distortions and slurs (“lots and lots of tombstones”), and that it has spread malice against the ULA across the literary world. Yet he’s willing to have that Frankenstein’s monster of an essay represent him and his career. He’s willing to live with the fraud.

Tom Bissell’s friends and supporters should also know by now that the essay is false. Willfully, like stubborn children, they continue to support it.

The journalists and writers who applauded the essay, Garth Risk Hallberg, Maria Bustillos, and Johannes Lichtman among them, have been sent evidence that the essay’s narrative is false. Will they confront the slurs and misrepresentations, the distortion of truth? Or do they choose convenience over conscience?

If the writer has no conscience, who in society will?

The literary establishment has the power to close me off and shut me down. They’ve been doing it. It’s a victory for a clique but a crime against conscience. If not one writer has integrity or conscience, then the false narrative becomes accepted truth.

If it can happen in literature, it can happen anywhere.

The Fall Guy

Johannes Lichtman seems willing to take sole responsibility for the Oxford American smear of the Underground Literary Alliance, as if the review, and the malicious way it was written, was entirely his idea.

It’s possible Lichtman bought the Bissell/Believer false narrative wholly. There’s no accounting for gullibility. Lichtman may have thought ULAers were indeed semi-sentient backwoods “Ranger Rick” Neanderthals scarcely capable of writing their own names. Like the sneering villain in a bad World War II movie, jackbooted and monocled, Lichtman assumed he could casually stomp us without blowback or complaint.

It didn’t occur to Johannes Lichtman that Tom Bissell’s essay on the ULA is essentially one giant lie from start to finish—from the opening premise that all writers are outsiders inhabiting no literary world to speak of.

Such ideas are propaganda for suckers. Have Dave Eggers and the McSweeney’s Gang behaved as if there were no literary world and no Insiders? Not for one minute. Dave Eggers was assiduously networking with every well-connected literary Insider and big publishing conglomerate he could find from Day One of his operations. Any unknown writers thrown into the mix were window dressing. Eggers went after the Moody-Minot blueblood New Yorker crowd. Those were the kind of writers he most wanted to buddy-up with and highlight.

Any quick investigation shows that the networking, the accommodating to Money and Power, has never ceased. Outsiders indeed!

Yet, as part of the game, Eggers continues to pretend that aside from the connections to Google Microsoft Amazon, to assorted and various big investment types, he’s actually an “indie” kind of guy. With the clueless, including Johannes Lichtman apparently, Eggers gets away with it. A variation of the Big Lie. Nobody questions the scamming, nor desires to question it. Take your meds. Don’t worry. Be happy. The state of the American literary world today.

(Be sure to buy the fearless satirical novel, The McSweeneys Gang, available via Nook or Kindle.)

One More Inaccuracy

FOURTH IN A SERIES

Re the Johannes Lichtman review of Magic Hours.

Leaving out crucial information isn’t being accurate.

In his remarks about the Underground Literary Alliance, Lichtman says, “—they group Rick Moody together with Jonathan Franzen because both are members of the ‘elite.’”

This isn’t true. One has to distort language and meaning to make it true. The statement, as it’s presented, is a falsehood.

I’ll give the link again to the backstory of the ULA’s encounters with Moody and Franzen:

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

Much more, incidentally, remains to be said about the dishonesty of the pertinent section of Tom Bissell’s ULA essay.

Abuse of the grants system is why we wrote about Rick Moody and Jonathan Franzen. We didn’t cover their writing in our pieces on them, because that wasn’t the topic in question. Neither did we “hate” them. That’s projecting emotion where it doesn’t belong.

We—or at least most of us—criticized the grants system not because we wanted grants ourselves, but to point to the corruption of establishment literature in contrast to the zine world. We were also acting as advocates for writers of every stripe.

The word “elite” is not a synonym for “corrupt.” It’s not a synonym for “cronyism.” With even his choice of words, Professor Lichtman isn’t accurate.

I always thought “elite” meant the best individuals—not the worst.

Accuracy means hitting the bulls eye. In the portion of his review about the Underground Literary Alliance, Johannes Lichtman missed with every shot.

Another Inaccuracy

THIRD IN A SERIES

Here’s another inaccuracy in Johannes Lichtman’s review of Tom Bissell’s Magic Hours.

Lichtman writes, about Bissell, “—he probes the deeper motivations behind their inchoate anger.”

This isn’t simply an inaccuracy. It’s an outright falsehood. As I explain in my “Believer Essay” parts I and III, linked at the left of this page, Tom Bissell did shallow research on the Underground Literary Alliance. He never met a one of us. This might’ve been okay if we were just like all other writers. But we weren’t.

What Bissell gives us in his ULA essay are the motivations of system writers like himself. It’s an example of his narrow-mindedness that it never occurred to him there was a difference. Yet the ULA’s founders and most of its members came to literature on a different path from those who are “taught” how to write in university programs.

Tom Bissell’s misinterpretation of the meaning of zine nicknames, or his failure to comprehend (or even try to comprehend) the idea behind Urban Hermitt’s writing, strongly show that zine literature was an alien creature to him.

Zinesters were and are Do-It-Yourselfers. Most zinesters simply begin writing and publishing. They take literature entirely into their own hands. Most have their own angle to pursue. Their task is to sell the zine by connecting immediately to an audience, no matter how they must do it. The rule book is thrown into a dumpster.

There are no thick layers of bureaucracies like those which confront the system writer. No expensive writing programs at impressive campuses of imposing stone buildings. No banks of agents and editors in plush offices in New York skyscrapers; no phalanxes of mandarins in metaphorical robes granting or disallowing approval. Yet, through the system is the way Tom Bissell views literature. It’s how he chose to view us. He imagined us struggling to attain certificates of approval. That we didn’t have any could only mean we weren’t very smart, and not very good. He saw us like other writers attending high-priced bourgie seminars (we’d attend a seminar only to “crash” it), and circulating and recirculating manuscripts through the mailrooms of status quo journals and publishers. No doubt some of us had done so, briefly, at some point. But to become a serious zinester is to throw that over, because you’re going into alternate territory, where the means of survival are something other. Which is why the style of zine writing isn’t literary. The connection with readers has to be as fast as a punk rock song. You’re not out to impress with “craft,” but to shake the reader in the quickest or harshest or most fun way possible.

Tom Bissell didn’t know this. Manufactured creature that he is, I’m sure he still doesn’t know it. But it didn’t have to be that way. Not long before Bissell did his essay on us, I met a local Philly journalist at a famous local saloon named McGlinchey’s. I brought with me several of the most amazing specimens of zines I’d collected over the previous ten years, so she could see the extreme variety of design, styles, writing, graphics, ideas, and viewpoints there embodied. She took those priceless DIY objects away with her. I never saw them again, and her article was killed by her editor, but she became a zinester herself, and today is one of the leading figures in what remains of the scene.

The ULA was an extension of zinedom, a more ambitious project. Naive fools that we were, we sought to bring our discoveries about writing and about readers into the literary mainstream. We brought with us a different viewpoint toward literature. A different mindset. Differently wired eyes and brains, from a different, newer literary planet. Tom Bissell didn’t want to know. “Probes.” “Deeper.” The words are absurd. They’re laughable. Throughout his essay on the ULA Bissell shows a complete misunderstanding of, and unconcern with, zine literature and the zine scene.

Johannes Lichtman behaves the same way, of course. In his email to me, Lichtman pleads deliberate ignorance of the subject. “What your organization is about is not of great concern to me.” He doesn’t want to know! It’s not his place to judge the truth of Bissell’s essays. If Bissell says it, it must be so. Like an unintelligent housecat listening to its master, Johannes Lichtman enjoys the style of writing, the patter of words. For him, the typical trained literary person, that’s good enough. That’s all.

“—he probes the deeper motivations behind their inchoate anger—“ 

This single remark marks Bissell’s failure as an essayist, and Lichtman’s as a reviewer.

More Inaccuracies

SECOND IN A SERIES

Johannes Lichtman has requested that I point out any inaccuracies about the ULA in his Oxford American review of Tom Bissell’s book Magic Hours, published by Believer Books in 2012. “—your issues are matters of opinion rather than matters of fact—“ Lichtman says. He asks “—if you can point to a specific sentence I wrote that’s inaccurate—,” and says to make it “a provable matter.” “—show me the specific sentence where I (not Bissell) wrote something inaccurate—“

Johannes Lichtman sounds more like an attorney than a writer. He sets the bar high. But as Lichtman crams more slurs into a single paragraph at the top of his review than I’ve seen, perhaps I can come up with something.

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

Here’s a possibility. Lichtman says about Bissell: “—instead of simply eviscerating the ULA—which would be the simplest thing to do, given how obnoxious they are—“

Obnoxious? Anyone who seeks to make change is perceived as obnoxious by the defenders of a status quo. Was Occupy Wall Street obnoxious? The literary world embraces change, as long as it’s nowhere near their own cozy realm.

I’m more interested in the eviscerating part of the phrase. For months I’ve been inviting Tom Bissell to come onto this blog to defend his essay. This great essayist of “brutal wit” has had plenty of opportunities to eviscerate me. “—the simplest thing—“ Not so simple.

We’re talking about Bissell’s essay. Not mine. I didn’t write the article. He did. Tom Bissell thought highly enough of it to republish it in his book of essays.

That very same essay about the ULA, moreover, has been praised in the literary establishment’s most prestigious outlets. In places like the New York Times, Kirkus Reviews, L.A. Review of Books, and now the Oxford American. The entire great McSweeney’s organization continues to stand behind the essay, which must mean it’s a wonderful thing. So why won’t anyone defend it? “The simplest thing.”

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

Which brings us to another inaccuracy from Mr. Lichtman. He says about the ULA, quoting Bissell in part, “Most of them ‘could not write (his/her) way out of an issue of Ranger Rick.’”

Here Johannes Lichtman has amplified the original Tom Bissell slur, by adding “Most of them”—when Bissell was referring to a single ULA writer. Very sloppy for such an advocate of accuracy.

But the statement is false even when applied to Bissell’s original target. “Ranger Rick” appeared in the pages of The Believer with a letter responding to Bissell’s smear essay, and did so quite adequately. “Ranger Rick” held his own well against award-winning essayist Tom Bissell. It’s unfortunate the exchange is no longer available on the Believer web site. 

What of Lichtman’s “Most of” statement?

Johannes Lichtman’s statement is a lie when applied to the ULA’s six founders: the original team. “Ranger Rick” currently works as a professional journalist, as does another founder, who has worked as a staff writer for the Washington Times. Another founder worked as a staff writer for several years at the Chicago Reader, has taught English Composition or such at an Illinois college, and has a couple small press books in print.

That’s three. Half. We need only me to make a “Most”: four of six.

Before I became radioactive, I wrote several pieces for reputable literary publications, including two solicited 8,000-word essays in 1994 for an award-winning literary journal based in Iowa (America’s oldest literary publication), and in 2000, a solicited book review for Bookforum.

(Strangely enough, after the Underground Literary Alliance made waves, no one’s asked me to write a thing.)

Four of six. “Most” of our main people can be proven to write better than Ranger Rick.

Note: I’ve lost track of one of the six, writing wise, though I bumped into him in Philly awhile back, before I left to visit Detroit. This person was our token Ivy Leaguer, a Williams grad. He’s an intelligent, sober, competent writer.

The sixth? That would be swaggering Steve Kostecke, whose health problems, wild lifestyle, and unwillingness to compromise compromised his potential as a writer. Founding the ULA, and achieving as a result a host of mendacious and cowardly demi-puppet enemies, may have been a mistake. Steve died in 2011, in the spring.

The Power of McSweeney’s

THE FIRST INACCURACY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Major donors to 826 National include Google and Microsoft.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reasons to Defend the ULA

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hemingway Would Love this Book!

After all, Hemingway wrote a fairly good literary satire himself, The Torrents of Spring.

The McSweeneys Gang follows in this tradition. But which satire is better?

Read The McSweeneys Gang by King Wenclas, affordably available at Nook or Kindle, and see for yourself.

Buy The McSweeneys Gang!

If the Phillie Phanatic creature could read, I’m sure he’d tell all phans of phun reading to buy the new ebook, The McSweeneys Gang. Literary satire at its wildest.

(DISCLAIMER: Use of Phanatic image is unauthorized. This animal doesn’t endorse The McSweeneys Gang in reality, nor any writing. After all, Phanatic creatures can’t read!)

Novels of Ideas

There are more ideas per page in The McSweeneys Gang than in any other contemporary novel you're likely to read. Ideas about literature and today's literary scene.

When I was writing my famed newsletter of the 1990's, New Philistine, two name literary personalities attempted to enlighten me on the "rules" of contemporary writing. I was told that -one shouldn't impose ideas on the narrative; -one shouldn't use characters as mouthpieces for ideas.

The only problem with these rules is that they exclude the greatest novelists of all time, giants like Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, whose works overflow with ideas, many of them expressed by the characters themselves.

What literati want in reality is a lobotomized literary scene in which no one makes any waves. Where the literary neighborhood is forever undisturbed because nothing is happening.

Read The McSweeneys Gang, a novel in which free thought and literary dissent remain alive.

McSweeneys Gang Now on Sale!

State of the art literary satire hits right now. The action-packed dramatic novel The McSweeneys Gang is on sale—just in time for last-minute Christmas shoppers. Gift your friends. This is balls-to-the-wall literary criticism in the guise of a pop novel, like nothing you’ve read. See the links to the side for Amazon and B&N to purchase your copy. Read it ahead of the crowd.

Literary gang wars. Bold satire.

Remember This?

Have you read this story before, from ten years ago?

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

The author, Dennis Loy Johnson, is a supporter of traditional literary writing and the current literary establishment. He’s no fan of the ULA. But he’s also an honest person.

His is quite a different take on ULA actions against corruption than Bissell’s. Nowhere in Tom Bissell’s essay, first published in 2003, then again earlier this year, is there used or implied the word whistleblower. Yet whistleblowers is exactly what ULAers were.

Did Maria Bustillos read the “J-Franz” story? Did Garth Risk Hallberg, David Ulin, Brian Wolowitz, Katie Ryder, Maria Popova, or the many others who praised Bissell’s ULA essay when they reviewed Bissell’s book?

What about the great advocate of social justice, Dave Eggers. What did he think? Did he applaud Johnson’s story, or others like it back then, as he should have? Or did he instead think, “Destroy the ULA”?

Literary history has been twisted, dissent has been squelched, voices against corruption in the literary scene have been silenced.

Where’s Bissell?

Why doesn’t Dave Eggers prod brilliant essayist Tom Bissell to come on this blog to defend the accuracy of his Believer Books essay on the Underground Literary Alliance? For Eggers and his cult, er, crew, that would solve a lot of problems.

That is, unless there’s no accuracy to defend. I’ve yet to discuss the most vulnerable part of that essay—Bissell’s dishonest handling of the ULA’s exposure of grants controversies.

A REACTIONARY ESSAY

I intend to show that the essay’s original purpose was to defend a handful of well-connected writers known ten years ago as “The New White Guys” who, in the ULA’s eyes, were abusing the arts grants process. I intend to stick that essay to its promoters and defenders like a tar baby.

How will Eggers, and reviewers like Maria Bustillos, feel knowing they’ve backed a reactionary essay? An essay which took the side of powerful writers against a writers group that was always completely powerless; against a writers group which represented the underdog because it consisted of literary underdogs? What will Eggers and company think knowing they supported and approved an essay which targeted for abuse indie writers, the most indie writers around, writers divorced from the conglomerate monopolized machine, including trannie zinester Urban Hermitt and other harmless free spirits? How will advocates of social justice like Eggers look backing an essay that trashed an outfit whose purpose was to advocate for social justice in the literary realm?

DEFEND THE ESSAY OR DISAVOW IT

Very bold, Mr. Bissell. Very brave. A look at your book of essays shows you prefer easy or acceptable targets, whether a low rent writers group, or a low rent filmmaker, or an easily smeared neo-con villainous (“Boo! Hiss!”) travel writer. Would you ever choose for examination a literary group with actual sources of funding and a high profile—a group you actually know something about—such as the McSweeney’s organization? A target with which you’d have to buck the approval of the literary crowd?

But that’s not how you play the game, is it?

The Art of Propaganda

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Slippage between truth and presentation.

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

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

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

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

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

Failure of the Workshop Model

A bureaucratic system is incapable of critiquing itself. Like a living organism, its main purpose is to survive and grow. This holds true for the current system in the U.S. for producing official literature.

The failure of the system, and the current workshop model, can be seen in the American short story. One hundred years ago it was America’s most popular art form. Fifty-plus years of the workshop model have killed the art.

Why has readership of the short story dwindled? Look up past volumes of “Best” American stories collections and you’ll discover your answer. You could check the last four decades of such collections and be lucky to find a handful of stories that are fun to read—or memorable, as short stories once were memorable.

The opening of the standard literary story is designed to impress the reader with how well the writer can write. The stories are well written but they’re not entertaining. They’re certainly not fun. Is this a missed opportunity? Yes!—because the short story should be an entry into literature, toward longer, greater works—not a turnoff.

I’m approaching things differently. The first chapter of my new e-novel, due out in about a week, is written to be simple and accessible, thoroughly “pop,” so I can get the reader directly into the narrative. I save my better writing for later.  The traditional novel opening, such as the beautiful beginning to “Gatsby,” or the famous opening to “Tale of Two Cities,” is fine and good. Except today there’s little time for dawdling, and very few writers are Dickens or Fitzgerald. None that I can spot.

Classic arts which survive as relevant parts of the culture do so through pop incarnations of their form. For instance, no one today walks around reciting the poetry of today’s academic crop of poets—whether John Ashbery or Jorie Graham—in the way the words of a Shakespeare or Kipling or Tennyson were once recited by ordinary members of the public. The public does know, though, the words to songs by pop artists, Bob Dylan being a notable example. Classical music composers have interested the general public over the past fifty years almost solely for their movie music—the music is forced to connect with the listener, instead of being monotonous atonal intellectualized university-spawned junk.

Novels are surviving today among the public because of popular versions containing vampires and wizards and such. My premise is that we can do better than that. We can produce novels which are readable and entertaining but also intelligent, relevant, and good.

ULA Versus the Machine

The Underground Literary Alliance versus McSweeney’s was a battle of hippies, punks, dropouts and lowlifes versus the most prestigious conformists of the Machine.

This was evident in Tom Bissell’s trashing of underground writers like Urban Hermitt in his Believer essay. The Believer was founded by individuals who played by the rules every step of the way, certified by the highest Ivy League centers of education. Their becoming writers was the end point of a hugely expensive, institutionalized process.

DIY writers rejected institutions and rejected the process. We said that literature belongs to everybody. Our motto was, Live Simply, Write Simply. Did some take DIY philosophy too far? Maybe. We were a reaction against an overregulated extreme. Against the metronome march of literature’s pod people.

When Tom Bissell says, “You have to write well,” he really means, “You have to write processed.”

The ultimate Machine writer was David Foster Wallace. Wallace presented footnotes, spreadsheets, calculations, trajectories. If a mainframe IBM computer could speak, it’d sound like him. His fiction is hyperalert, overintellectualized, overstimulated,; his mind embedded into technology and into the rat race. Our mad hypertechnological hypermediated electronic civilization drove him crazy. Nothing less.

Antithesis of a Pop Writer

I’VE WRITTEN a post about DIY writing but I’m reluctant to put it up, because in it I trash a bit the epitome of contemporary postmodern literature, David Foster Wallace. I’ve discovered that to criticize DFW in any way hurts feelings. DFW is treated by well-schooled writers as akin to a god. (See the HTML Giant crowd, for instance.) He’s worshipped.

Before I criticize DFW, then—the way he wrote and what our crazed society did to him—I’ll first make two points which all writers should know. The premise for the two points is that literature is in competition with all the many other aspects of American culture which blare loudly at us from all corners of the world at every moment. You have to literally retreat to a cave to get away from this bombardment of images and noise. The first task of a story, poem, or novel is to be read. This is more difficult than ever.

The two points are taken from sales. They’re maxims. They’re musts. They’re two sides of the same coin.

1.) Keep It Simple, Stupid.

2.) Avoid T.M.I.—Too Much Information.

If the writer doesn’t follow these two points he’ll not hook the reader. (Brainwashed HTML Giant readers excepted.) One can debate whether or not I’m a writer, but I’ve been a reader for many years; was a reader before I imagined writing. I started writing out of frustration as a reader at what I was expected to accept as literature. As a reader, I have a good sense of what fiction needs to do to stay competitive and relevant. The success of pop writers like J.A. Konrath bolsters this sense.

David Foster Wallace didn’t just break the two rules of reaching the public. He obliterated them. If literary writers use him as a model, they’re crafting their own failure, their own demise as a genre, as an art, as writers.

Where Are Literary Journalists?

WHILE all Americans await the standard thorough Lawrence Wright-style New Yorker think piece detailing what happened in Benghazi on 9/11, I'm caused to note the absence of mainstream journalism in other areas of American life. Such as in today's literary scene.

JOURNALISTS OR CHEERLEADERS?

Take someone like Lucas Wittmann at Daily Beast/Newsweek. Journalist or cheerleader?

I'm told there is no literary establishment. Yet a Lucas Wittmann gives voice to the main ideas and major players of one literary viewpoint-- the "literary"-- such as that of Dave Eggers and the McSweeney's organization. Any such article by Eggers, depicting how wonderful he and his friends are, is followed by tweets from Wittmann himself pointing people to the article, as if he were a McSweeney's p.r. person. And who knows-- maybe he is.

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED

What really happened in 2003 with Tom Bissell's Believer magazine essay is that the Underground Literary Alliance was engaging in actual literary journalism, covering a host of stories uncomfortable to mainstream literati. Some of those stories, yes, involved Dave Eggers and McSweeney's, or so-called Friends of Eggers.

The Believer, on the other hand, was instituted to shut down real literary journalism and literary debate, to create instead the Dave Eggers personal vision of an uncritical happy face literary scene. Which is what we have today.

Bissell's Believer essay was a flat-out propaganda piece designed to discredit the literary group looking hardest into the operations of the literary machine. The essay represented a clash of views and visions. For Eggers to have his peacefully lobotomized literary world, the ULA had to be destroyed.

Anyone care to deny this?

The McSweeney's Campaign for Niceness

ONCE he became successful in 2000, Dave Eggers launched a preemptive strike against potential criticism with interviews in places like the Harvard Advocate declaiming strenuously against critics, deeming all negative commentary that a writer or literary group might receive as coming from places of resentment and envy. Over the next few years he continued to blast and destroy any and all who said anything bad against himself and his organization. This was accompanied by a facade of niceness.

The result? Absolute phoniness from what passes for literary media. Tom Bissell was able to smear the Underground Literary Alliance in an essay-- reprinted this year in his book of essays-- and receive applause from reviewers everyplace, because the smears were made in a setting of empathy and niceness. Reviewers' brains were short circuited while reading the essay.

An example of this, and of the essential contradiction of those reviewers concerning the McSweeney's empire, are these quotes from two of the reviewers of Bissell's Magic Hours. The remarks are about Tom Bissell's essay on the ULA.

Ron Hogan at Beatrice.com:
“I was struck by his willingness to approach them with empathy, even when he was unrelenting in his analysis of their deluded assholery.”

Brian Wolowitz at Spectrum Culture:
 “he often attempts to understand or defend easily dismissible figures like the clownishly clueless ULA members. . . .”

Do these remarks make any sense?

With their facade of niceness, all the McSweeneyites have done is reach new levels of hypocrisy. "Niceness" has been a way to enforce absolute conformity. Doubt it? Try to find anything critical about Dave Eggers and the McSweeney's organization appearing over the last seven or eight years in mainstream media. What you get now, about their publications and themselves, is an unending stream of puff pieces. Any semblance of legitimate literary media has vanished. We encounter instead a series of gullible pod people, for whom everything produced by insider literati is by definition deemed to be great. Dare criticize these wonderful people doing such wonderful things? You're not being nice!

The niceness works only for them, of course. Behind the Fake Face masks they're liable to kick and stomp opponents as ably as anybody. More ruthlessly, in fact. Wearing the faces of nonstop niceness must be wearing on their psyches. They take ample advantage of opportunities for release.

Stay tuned for more examinations of the literary world and how it operates at
www.crimecityusa.blogspot.com

The Quarantine

The truth is that a quarantine was erected around the Underground Literary Alliance. Our ideas of populist literature were deemed too dangerous for the mainstream. Barriers were constructed around the contagion. The one thing the literary establishment fears most is free and open debate. Strict instructions were issued to the literary herd. Have nothing to do with the ULA! So has it remained.

But you can’t forever keep out reality.

American Literature and Football

THE LITERARY WORLD RELATED TO U.S. COLLEGE FOOTBALL

This post was prodded by two news items. 1.) Former Penn State president Graham Spanier arraigned on charges of covering up the Jerry Sandusky child sex abuse allegations. 2.) The USC Trojans college football team accused of cheating by deflating game footballs.

One very big story and one much smaller one, both giving indications of a pattern.

CONSPIRACIES OF SILENCE

Conspiracies of silence seem to happen a lot in the college football scene. My question: Does it also occur in the literary game?

I’ve shown that Tom Bissell’s recently republished essay on the Underground Literary Alliance contained outrageous smears against our organization. (The extensive “lots and lots of tombstones” portion of the essay, comparing ULAers to homicidal Bolsheviks.) But I’ll also soon address the question of whether the essay is filled not just with distortions and ridiculous slurs, but blatant dishonesty. It will involve Bissell’s take, in the essay, on the arts grants corruption matter—likely the one area of the ULA campaign that created for us the most hostility.

One of the questions to be asked is whether the literary world, right now, is engaging in a conspiracy of silence, in that many prominent literary persons reviewing Bissell’s book for esteemed publications didn’t see the slurs in the essay in the first place, and are refusing to discuss them to this date. (One of the reviewers, as readers of this blog know, began to discuss the issue then quickly ran away. Strange behavior for a journalist, who should be upfront and open at all times.)

DISHONEST PERSONALITIES

Though a low level manager (towel handler and gofer) has become the fall guy at USC over the deflated footballs controversy, the real focus is on USC coach Lane Kiffin, because he has a track record of skirting the boundaries of honesty and dishonesty. The entire record is too lengthy to post here. You can google him and see, for instance, what was said when he was fired as coach of the Oakland Raiders by Al Davis, among other things.

The question here is whether Tom Bissell, despite all the many plaudits he’s received, has a dishonest personality. Yes, I’m biased on the matter. Of course I am. I admit that. But didn’t Bissell carry bias toward the ULA going in, when he originally began writing the essay in 2003, based on the crowd for whom Bissell was writing it? Based on those he needed to please?

The matter should be settled strictly on an objective look at the facts. On what’s available for us—all of us—to see, laid out in black and white. I’ve always invited such a transparent examination.

The question of Bissell’s honesty came up previously, in January 2005 when I questioned whether or not he’d engaged in plagiarism. I’ll repeat: questioned whether he’d engaged in plagiarism. I simply took the examples that’d been given to me, laid them out on this blog, and asked the audience and the literary world to decide.

Most interesting to me was the flurry of reaction and hostility I received. Led by Maud Newton, a host of lit world apologists expressed outrage—not at Bissell, but at me, for raising the question. The explanations and excuses offered still strike me today as sheer sophistry. When I began winning the ensuing blogosphere debate, Maud and others simply cut off all further discussion. The matter was suddenly closed. I was virtually ostracized.

Do we see a pattern, analogous to today’s college football scene?

It could be the nature of clubby and closed worlds to allow corrupt behavior; to cover up and defend it whenever possible, in the interest of the overall game, or the interest of the specific team. I’ve said before that the McSweeney’s Gang carries immense leverage in the tiny world of the U.S. literary scene. They continue to have legions of defenders, admirers, and apologists, Maud Newton only one of them. The admirers run through every level and nearly every institution—as we’ve seen, including among them those like Garth Risk Hallberg able to review books for the New York Times. These admirers are notable for refusing to speak publicly about any topic uncomfortable for literature’s power teams like McSweeney’s. We find written about that particular team only very positive, glowing, puffy, airy and brainless kinds of things. I’m asking whether or not this is analogous to the college football situation; to the steadfast closing of ranks, the conspiracies of silence, at places like Penn State and USC.

The difference—it’s an enormous difference—is that regarding college football there are a number of sports reporters behaving not like sycophants, but like legitimate journalists. They uncover bad behavior. They rah! rah! for the game, but also print on occasion uncomfortable, sometimes extremely revealing, stories.

Ten years ago the ULA was doing this, to a tiny extent. We barely raised the tarp covering the literary playing field, then wrote about what we’d seen. The hurricane of reaction and blowback to our revelations caused the eventual collapse, not of the bad guys, the miscreants, but our own organization. Members bailed. Taking on an entire scene that had closed ranks against us became too great a task even for the shit disturbers, the “room wreckers”—the truth tellers—of the ULA.

In the U.S. literary world, since the Underground Literary Alliance ceased its activities, nobody—nobody—is credibly examining the workings of today’s literary game.

Process

THE TOTALITY OF A MINDSET

Those who saw what they wanted to see in Tom Bissell's essay on the Underground Literary Alliance live in a world of professionalization. Of offices, deadlines, work. The system they're in has a tangible reality. They work very hard. Nothing is assured. Criticisms of the system, then, especially those which address the inequities and hierarchies of the system, appear to come from another planet. They, personally, those working within the reality of the system, are doing nothing wrong.

The tangible reality of their careers gives total credibility to system ideas; none to ideas outside it. The ideas and premises of the tangible reality can be the only ideas. From Day One of their contact with literature, they are the only ideas, and they're everywhere. This includes writing styles, and kinds of approved and applauded writers and writing. The all-encompassing nature of literary reality gives that reality credibility, yet at the same time, it's everything that's wrong with literature, because a new reality, new ideas of art, will never arrive. Things are done and believed because that's the way they've always been done and believed.

The conformity of bureaucracy is how any system maintains itself.

How could these writers, editors, agents et.al., not scorn the ULA? It'd be like asking lawyers who spent years, much study, and much money obtaining degrees of certification, then passing the bar examination-- all the difficulty; all the necessary conformity to the jots and dots of the law-- to accept on an equal footing self-read self-educated backwoods rubes from log cabins with no certifications or standing at all.

Doesn't this make perfect sense? It makes sense when you're talking about something meant to be contained by bureaucracies, regulated, monitored, and controlled, carefully practiced by intensively screened professionals ready to carry forward an official doctrine of precedents, judgments, consent.

It might be great for law, but it's not great for ART, which wasn't meant to be contained anyplace, but to flow free. To break on occasion from any precedents and consent.

It's easy enough to jump into the head of the system writer; to see as they see, from within the system machine. Far more difficult for those whose minds are placed within this special realm to see outside it. To credibly jump within the head of a literary rebel; an intentional actual outsider.

This kind of "empathy" Tom Bissell failed at, as did his reviewers and praisers.

About My Blogs

Here's how I plan using my blogs over the next two months:

THIS place will remain my main venue for ideas I most want to get out there.

American Pop Lit, www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com will continue to cover ongoing changes regarding ebooks, pop literature, and publishing.

Happy America Literature, www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com will address plans to restart the notorious Underground Literary Alliance.

My most severe rants will now be reserved for Crime City USA, www.crimecityusa.blogspot.com, a follow-up to one of my ebooks-- a short novel about severe phoniness and fakery in a fictional city operating not unlike today's literary world/

What else? I may get my Detroit blog underway someday. I'll not be completing my "Election Follies" novel. My sudden move out of Philly undercut that. Frankly, the election campaign lasts so long I lost interest. The two candidates aren't compelling personalities. One cares to confront them as little as possible. Besides, I have two new ebook projects I'm slogging through. They deserve more effort.

My other blogs will remain more-or-less on hiatus. Everything subject to being shut down without notice, depending on such things as the free speech climate, my time, and my mood. READ THEM while you can. There are only a handfull of dissenting locales, all of them tiny, in the entire literary world.

Figure This Out

Figure this one out. I can't.

http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/books/james-wood-at-top-of-critique-heap

It's an article by Malcolm Forbes in a new cultural journal called The National. (The name itself is a contradiction to what the site is about.)

Why is a website of the United Arab Emirates printing such an Anglophile article? Why are they designating an Anglo-American writer as the "best" critic? Don't they have their own literary critics? Aren't they trying to create some? Shouldn't they present their own perspective? Or do they accept Imperialist culture whole, even when-- as in this case-- the philosophy of the critic is unalterably opposed to theirs? James Wood, after all, is a narrowly-focused athiest who buys all the current postmodern premises (or most of them). He's the polar opposite of even the most moderate Islamist. So what's going on? What or where is the payoff? Is this the price of Imperialist navies in port?

Is this what's meant by "world literature"? A continuation of the British Empire? I don't think James Wood should be posing as an authority on American literature, much less lauded by an even vastly different culture. This looks like the homogenization of culture-- which is what tops-down imposed-from-above literature is about; which is exemplified by James Wood, an Insider's Insider. Eton, Cambridge, Harvard, and The New Yorker.

(Send him back to Britain, I say. Why did we fight a revolution? Can't we embrace what's best in us? Note to Tom Bissell: I'm being hyperbolic.)

While I certainly wouldn't want Islamic culture imposed on us, on Western civilization, that once-glorious thing, I also don't believe we should be imposing our current decadent stale stagnant insular aristocratic literary figures upon Islam. Sorry, maybe I'm a dinosaur, but ideas of world monothink and monoculture leave me cold.

Thoroughly Corrupt

Not only is the literary establishment thoroughly corrupt—as is easily documented—but there is not a single journalist in establishment media, or among literary media, with backbone enough to expose the corruption.

The result is akin to a dystopian novel about a totalitarian world, where everything is a lie; with sycophantic literary fans of the status quo gushing over smear artists; with sick novelists producing massive mad volumes of incomprehensible postmodern nonsense hailed as geniuses, before and after they kill themselves in final nihilistic acts. It’s a world of vacant eyes, unthinking brains, and intense phoniness, with the actors in the tragicomedy of American literature themselves not believing in the substance of their work—titles of journals like “The Believer” notwithstanding. They more than anyone know it’s an empty house. They’d be afraid to defend what they produce. Fortunately they never have to. So overwhelming is the conformity of today’s applauded literary scene that they’re never called on their dishonesty. Those lauded as “critics” like George Saunders and James Wood are those most guaranteed to always take the most narrow view of literature possible, staring straight ahead at large signposts guiding them through the Acceptable Narrative while making sure to never glance to the side at what’s really happening.

Writers, Outsiders, and the Monolith

THE BEHAVIOR of established literary persons toward Tom Bissell’s ULA essay itself gives the lie to his thesis that all writers are outsiders.

From literary agent Heather Schroder, to reviewers like Garth Risk Hallberg, Ron Hogan, and Maria Bustillos, the attitude toward reading the reappeared essay had to have been, “These are writers beyond the pale”—and so, able to be smeared to the extent Bissell smeared us: linking the Underground Literary Alliance bizarrely to the worst crimes of the Bolsheviks. To “lots and lots of tombstones.” Not one of the literary personages who read Bissell’s essay called him on his blatant slurs. We were the Other-- “not writers” surely—and so very much outside the groupthink walls of those who identify with the literary status quo.

That not one of these articulate people will now defend the essay, or answer questions about it, or retract their support of it, shows the literary monolith at work—a monolith of behavior and thought. Not one of them is capable of breaking from the conformity of the herd.