King Wenclas Ebooks

A reminder that, when I’m slow at posting new material here, the best source for my thoughts on today’s literature is my collection of five ebooks.

-The most recent of the group, The McSweeneys Gang, while part satire and part mystery story, also contains many opinions and observations about the current literary world, and about the direction of American literature.

-My e-novel The Tower, an examination of a protest, contains a more subtle array of observations (though much of the plot is over the top). Included, for instance, is a chapter about a cultural hipster.

-One of the tales in the trilogy Mood Detroit contains a scene set at a literary reading. Another story, about two female rock musicians, could be seen as an analogy to the lit world.

-Crime City USA is a pulpish novella about a corrupt city. What’s more corrupt than today’s literary world? Is not “Fake Face” a recognizable character?

-Ten Pop Stories contains an array of new approaches to the American short story, which in the hands of workshop scribblers has, as an art form, been stuck at a dead end the past fifty years. New approaches are demanded.

The great thing about these five ebooks is they’re available at Nook Books or the Kindle Store, or on associated apps. The five ebooks are also ridiculously affordable. There’s no excuse for not having them in your ebook collection—representatives of a tiny corner of literary dissent. Read them before they’re taken down! In style and thought they’re unlike anything being published on-line or off.

The Buddy System

When I take a look at what’s going on within the literary establishment, I notice nothing there has changed. It continues to operate on the “I’m okay, you’re okay” philosophy. Everyone’s okay. Literature is okay. It’s wonderful.

See this article in The Daily Beast by Insider writer Ben Greenman:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/20/constructive-criticism-reviewing-the-idea-of-reviewing.html

(Note my comment at the bottom of page.)

What’s Greenman’s essay really about? The essay is a glorified sucking up to fellow members of the Club—and to writers in general. It’s of a piece with the mindset of trained writers; taking an insular viewpoint, from within the literary world, without placing that world within the context of the larger culture. From the outset it reflects a defensive posture, from behind the walls of the castle.

While reading Ben Greenman’s essay, one sees heads nodding: “Yeah, that’s right.” Protect the published author. The work is valued by fiat; by its existence.

Note the ready outrage and perplexity at a review not properly in line. It violates the First Principle of Insider Lit, which is the Principle of Sucking Up. The principle which undergirds the entire shaking establishment. An establishment powered by the energy of this principle. A principle, within that world, which is everywhere; on every level and in every corner.

With the essay, Ben Greenman is looking for agreement, as all writers are always looking for agreement. Consensus. Conformity to what is.

Their concerns are the concerns of privileged writers, those who already have station and standing. Many other writers, especially over the past few years, have been concerned with sheer economic survival, and with obtaining the time, energy, and availability to write.

Note that in Greenman’s view of literature there are no standards, and there are no distinctions—other than assumed workshop standards of the well-written sentence, meaningless or not, and mild situations and emotions sure not to displease writing peers. Agreement. Beyond these basics, there’s no judgment of literary works, and no way to judge them. “Some people will like the work and some won’t,” is the notion, all a matter of feelings and impressions with no thought involved.

After all, standards were thrown out long ago—again, except for making the writing sound good. Making it vaguely look like an example of literary art—a facsimile of what others are doing.

The qualities which make a good novel—pace, clarity, intelligence, structure—are never mentioned. “Some people will like it and some won’t.” Which means, it’s all good. If it’s produced by them, and approved by existing institutions, it must be good.

It’s all wonderful.

Crisis of the Culture

A RANT ABOUT TALKING POINTS

Talking points. That’s all you hear from the media. Talking points! But what do politicians or reporters mean when they say talking points? They mean they’ve distilled their lies and obfuscations down to a precise, manageable, effectively efficient number which they think or at least hope will fool people. Let’s work on those talking points! Remove this. Can’t say that. Save face. The least—the very least ignored forgotten factor in their considerations is the truth of the matter.

The activist writers group I once belonged to, the Underground Literary Alliance, was destroyed and kept down by talking points. I’ve never seen them; no one’s dared leak them to me; but when everyone who writes or comments about you is repeating exactly the same distortions, untruths, and misconceptions then they’re relying on someone’s talking points. Do the talking points sound plausible? The truth? Nowhere.

The problem we see today with current political scandals isn’t with specific bureaucracies (though it’s in the nature of bureaucracies to abuse power), or even with specific individuals. It’s with all of it. Most of the individuals involved are products of an educational system carrying an underlying philosophy that places expediency above character and integrity.

The people running this country have no character. This statement has nothing to do with political parties, but with how people in power behave—how they’re expected to behave to achieve their station.

Hillary Clinton has no character and likely never had any character. Surely you know that, as a young lawyer, she was bounced from the Watergate investigation because of her unscrupulous behavior? No?

Great attack dog. Useful in certain situations. Not a leader. No character.

Why the obfuscations about Benghazi? The truth of the situation is easy to see. The administration’s ambassador—their own guy—and his team were trapped in an eight-hour firefight. Eight hours! Trapped! The ambassador’s bosses, Hillary, Panetta, Obama included, ran away from the situation. They threw their own people overboard in the interest of what? Talking points?!

The problem starts with the university system, to this extent.

Human beings are irrational animals. Read Gustave LeBon’s analysis of the French Revolution. Our task is to fight, every day, against our own irrationality, our flaws and drives and failings, and against the distortions of information we receive: i.e., talking points. We need touchstones. Touchstones for behavior and for viewing reality. Your touchstone might be A.) Religion used practicably. A set of values; rules of good behavior. B.) Devotion to classical principles; the teachings of Aristotle and the like.

America once had both these foundations of strength, combined.

What’s being taught in the academy today?

Students are taught a mish-mash of Marx and Nietzsche, and French postmodern/crackpot philosophy, with added dashes of feminist make-believe reinterpretations/distortions of history and human nature. Students graduate with heads filled with a nightmare of contemporary beliefs and confusions and little understanding of how the world works in reality. No foundation of moral principles and ethics.

They’ve learned how to recite back to their teachers indoctrinated information thought necessary to achieve. The one thing they haven’t learned is how to think.

They’ve learned talking points.

Where's Our Culture?

The revelations of the horrors of the Kermit Gosnell case in Philadelphia should give persons of conscience pause, no matter what side of the issue they're on. It's caused me to wonder where we are as a society and culture in general.

Certainly, American attitudes and American culture are darker than they once were. There's a tone of complacency about life, death, humanity, which is approaching sociopathy. A lot of it stems from those who, indoctrinated by the academy, rigidly place ideology before humanity. One sees this in the abortion issue-- or should see it, whatever your stand-- in the corruption of thought and language through the use of euphemisms like "women's health" and "fetus" for what is at its core an abhorrent, horrific procedure. Especially when you get to where Gosnell was.

I wonder if the robotically-brainwashed Harvardite trendies at n+1 magazine are still selling their celebratory "I Had an Abortion!" t-shirts. At best, the procedure is nothing to celebrate. Under any circumstances it's more of a tragedy.
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Stand back and look objectively at American culture, and you have to conclude it's far sicker than it was fifty years ago. Is this the result of underlying philosophies/belief systems? The triumph of Nietzschean-based postmodernism? (Our culture today is aggressively Nietzschean.) It's a question worth examining.

How the Media Lie

During my time with the Underground Literary Alliance, I well learned that so-called journalists from the establishment media are in fact propagandists. Which means, they’re not seeking objective truth.
They have a set narrative in line when they begin to write—often but not always based in partisan politics. Everything in the article will comply with the predetermined narrative.

We see this from mainstream media about yesterday’s Benghazi hearings. Perhaps the most distorted account of those hearings comes from esteemed Time writer Joe Klein. It’s not really an account, but more of a diatribe in defense of the Administration, with not a speck of objectivity, and scarcely any honesty.

http://swampland.time.com/2013/05/08/benghazi-again/

Much of what Klein says is pure misdirection, away from the actual subject. For instance, the question of adequate funding provided to defend embassies and consulates. We should all be able to agree that there are adequate funds in the federal budget in general, and the State Department in particular, to move funds around, if necessary, to protect crisis points. Others have pointed out the lavish sums of money for embassies in safer places like Jordan. or Moscow, for that matter. No money to protect a mission in the middle of a global hot spot? The idea is ridiculous.

Amid the constant mentions of, and apologies for, a YouTube video, by Obama, Hillary, and Susan Rice, did the President in fact call the 9/11 Benghazi attack an “act of terror”? Yes and no. In his Rose Garden remarks Obama mentioned “acts of terror” in general. Klein’s presentation is a half-truth that fits well with the slanted thrust of his article. See the matter discussed here:

http://www.forextv.com/forex-news-story/full-transcript-of-obama-s-rose-garden-speech-after-sept-11-benghazi-attack

More important than Joe Klein’s misdirections about the Benghazi hearings are his omissions, and his outright lies.

Note the caption under the photo on the page of a “protester.” The caption says, “A protester reacts . . . during a protest by an armed group said to have been protesting a film. . . .”

Two quick comments. 1.) Note the weapon. That’s a hell of a protest! 2.) “said” to have been protesting a film? “Said”—by whom?

Joe Klein and his Time editors seem not to have listened to the hearings the article is supposed to be about. In his testimony, Gregory Hicks said there was “No protest” at the consulate. Everyone involved in the 9/11 events—everyone—called it an attack. Hicks also dismissed the idea of an obscure YouTube video being the cause, calling it “a non-event in Libya.” If anyone was in a position to know, he was.

To confirm this, we have the email from Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs Beth Jones, quoted at the hearings (Klein and Time seem to have missed it), dated 9/12, the day after the attacks, in which this assistant to Hillary Clinton said, “—the group that conducted the attacks, Ansar al sharia, is affiliated with Islamic terrorists.”

Hmm. Doesn’t sound quite like the “local street gang” in Joe Klein’s depiction.

No mention in Joe Klein’s article of the stand down order, and the Administration’s failure to act—in particular, Hillary Clinton’s failure to act to protect her own people, once the battle began—which is always the first test of leadership.

No mention by Joe Klein of the outright lies by Hillary, Susan Rice, and even the President blaming the attack on the obscure video, with no evidence presented then, or now, least of all by Joe Klein, showing that said video had ANYTHING to do with the Benghazi attacks. An administration lied to the American public—saying what they surely knew were lies. They tried to cover-up their inaction and incompetence. Esteemed journalist Joe Klein is like Sergeant Schultz from the TV show “Hogan’s Heroes”: “I see nothing. NOTHING!”

I could go on. The bottom line is that this magazine, and its scoundrel of a propagandist, are considered “legitimate” media. One has to laugh about it, because the alternative is to cry over what’s happened to the press in this country.

Visit to a Library

Recently I had occasion to spend an afternoon at the main branch of the Detroit Public Library. The visit was enlightening. It provided a graphic example of how the Internet has changed our habits of reading in this country.

On the first floor, in various rooms, were banks of computers. Each was occupied.

On the upper level were large rooms filled with long shelves filled with many thousands of books. Thousands on the subject of literature alone. Priceless information, analysis, and opinions. On the entire vast level, there sat at the tables only two women of college age who were using the quiet area as a place for study. In another room sat two librarians side by side at a small desk. Both were occupied on computers. No one bothered them for information about books, neither by phone or in person. When I asked them a question, I had the feeling I was the first person to disturb them that day, if not the entire week. If not for a month. They were covered in metaphorical dust.

I found the books I was searching for, in a room far on the other side of the floor from the librarians, and sat down at a table with a stack of them to browse and read. The floor was eerily silent. I could’ve been in a closed building. The only persons I glimpsed in my several hours reading were the faces of two security guards, making their rounds, possibly surprised at what I was doing.

Meanwhile, on the ground level, scores of ever-changing people busily sat at computer screens.

What were they looking at? A few were doing research, perhaps. The rest were likely on the Internet, surfing the web or occupied with social media. posting notes at Facebook or reading and sending tweets.

What few if any of them were doing was learning a subject deeply. The Internet isn’t set up for deep reading. People learn instead a little about a lot of subjects—much of it gossip—instead of learning very much about one topic. Deep reading is what you do when you plunge into an actual book, or into many books.

This explains a lot to me. The new generation has seemed to me to have superficial knowledge about subjects like economics or the environment. Though ill-informed, they’re extremely arrogant about their positions on those subjects, positions more often than not formed for political reasons, and not because the individual objectively weighed all sides of an argument.

The way knowledge is now disseminated to us, I fear, makes it easy to push and pull a “herd” in the proper direction. The stances taken aren’t based on thorough knowledge, but on the stances others in their camp are taking. What’s the proper side to be on? What are the cool kids saying?

Other problems with the Internet are that the potential exists to determine how many people are reading which sites, what material. To determine exactly what’s being read and learned. Monitoring. Another problem is that parts of the Internet—improper information, say—could be closed off or shut down, in an instant. With a click of a mouse. If not the entire Internet in an “emergency.” I’m not saying that it’s happening, only that it could happen. With the Internet, everyone is plugged into the same tentacled beast.

With books, old fashioned and vanishing, no one knows who’s reading what—what books or information anyone has stashed away. The way things are going, in a generation or two there will be very few books stashed away.

(p.s. Why aren’t people protesting the Internet sales tax legislation?)

The Usual Conformity

It’s amazing to me how nothing within the literary establishment ever changes. Its promoters, like Lucas Wittmann at Daily Beast/Newsweek live within a narrow cultural room. They’re unable or unwilling to see outside. You’d think they’d be aware of changing currents—Newsweek, after all, discontinued its print issue. But instead they endlessly recycle the same stale ideas.

Case in point is this piece by academy-approved poet Charles Simic:

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/05/02/charles-simic-why-you-should-be-an-immigrant-for-the-sake-of-your-writing-career.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+thedailybeast%2Farticles+(The+Daily+Beast+-+Latest+Articles)

Daily Beast, incidentally, is always in step with establishment and/or administration political programs. Does the administration want to discredit Russia? Here comes the requisite article in Daily Beast. Is an Immigration bill on the table? Here comes the pro-immigration Daily Beast article on the proper day. A question: Are they paid to behave as administration mouthpieces? It mustn’t pay well, otherwise Newsweek would still be publishing.

Re the Simic article. The four writers mentioned at the top of the piece are thoroughly status quo writers, lavishly supported by waves of funding. The late Steve Kostecke did a piece for the ULA on Yiyun Li (his essay no longer available) which pointed out how she was published in The New Yorker and Paris Review simultaneously, when she was a star pupil at Iowa, though dubious claims were made that she was found in the slush pile. As with the others Simic cites, hardly a boat person or refugee from the Mexican economy. Their style of immigration is a universe apart from the unskilled masses being brought into this country to become a permanent underclass. Becoming high-brow MFA writers is likely not their fate! Odds are they won’t even learn the language; in this “multicultural” climate they won’t be encouraged to learn it, because that would defeat the point: obedient help for rich people, combined with lower wages.

Re the literary art. NO art progresses via status quo thinking and institutionalized conformity. History shows that art refreshes itself only through rebellion. Through creative destruction. Through artists willing to turn their art on its head.

The Third Way

Many rail against corporate media—as I have—and corporate everything. An easy target. The question is: What do you replace it with?

For too many the objective seems to be Bigger Government. Top heavy bureaucracy. Yet this was tried in the Soviet Union and other places and failed.

Literature is stagnant because the choice seems to be between Monopoly Conglomerate mass market lowest-common-denominator junk, on the one hand, and NEA, university, and tax shelter-backed “literary” craftings on the other, which are as stagnant, and as junky, in their own way.

The third way is to decentralize. Not Big Government, Big Conglomerates, or Big anything. A freer and more open marketplace accommodating a wider variety of choices and new, unorthodox ideas. Neither running away from the market, nor dominating it. Letting it breathe. Idealistic, sure, but with the rise of ebooks, not completely naive.

Interesting Article

Here’s an interesting take on the Boston bombing perpetrators:

http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2013/04/21/whos-behind-the-boston-marathon-attack/#BostonBombing

Note what Justin Raimondo says in the article about the current U.S.-Russia cold war.

I’ve found it curious that Keith Gessen and his literary journal n+1 have put themselves at the forefront of that cold war. What’s the agenda?

Not a Suspect!

Contrary to rumor, this is NOT a photo of any of the alleged suspects in the various happenings which have taken place this week. Granted, the individual in the photo looks crazy-- but looks are deceiving. I have it on good authority that said individual is innocent of everything but enthusiasm for baseball and Philly cheesesteaks.

More Press for Russian Dissident

DISSIDENT AS CIRCUS ANIMAL

Here’s another article about Russian literary dissident Kirill Medvedev:

http://www.bookforum.com/review/11396

Kirill Medvedev, currently paraded on display in the U.S. by the elitist literary journal n+1, has become a kind of circus animal cynically used by representatives of American literary cronyism and publishing monopoly. (Kirill: You’re being used.) I fear the reasons for this go beyond the effete Harvard crowd seeking credibility by association with him. The motives may have to do with support for an aggressive U.S. foreign policy which sees contemporary Russia not as potential ally, but as an opponent. Shades of Encounter and Partisan Review. In this instance n+1 is following the pattern of its intellectual role models.

What’s indisputable is that Russian literary dissidents receive far more favorable treatment by the U.S. literary world than do American literary dissidents! Speak up about corruptions in the American literary system and you become swiftly blackballed.

Lit’s Class System Continued

The hugely influential New York Times Book Review has a new editor, Pamela Paul. Will Ms. Paul sympathize with, and promote, the democratization of the literary art?

The answer is no, based on an article she wrote a few years ago sympathizing with the plight of America’s privileged:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/education/edlife/being-a-legacy-has-its-burden.html?pagewanted=all&smid=fb-share&_r=0

The lower classes are not even an afterthought in Pamela Paul’s world.

Pamela Paul herself is an Ivy Leaguer, a Brown University grad, and has led quite the charmed literary life, according to her own bio:

http://www.pamelapaul.com/bio/

Does anything ever change in the elite New York literary world?

The system is incapable of reforming itself. The only solution is to knock it down and start over.

The Springsteen Problem

CRITICISM TODAY

To get a sense of how criticism is off the tracks in other fields besides the literary game, look at the various “Greatest” lists put out by Rolling Stone magazine. A “Greatest” rock guitarists list without Ted Nugent on it? From his time with Amboy Dukes alone, Ted Nugent qualifies. No Nugent, but instead, more approved names like John Lennon, Joni Mitchell(!), Paul Simon, and Bruce Springsteen. A p.c. popularity contest.

Bruce also made the Rolling Stone “Greatest Singers” list, at #36. Bruce Springsteen is many things. One thing he’s not is a singer. A shouter. Not a singer. The man never carried a tune or hit a note in his life.

Which isn’t all a bad thing, if raw authenticity is what you’re offering. Rock n’ roll was a reaction to polish and craft. It was a response to intellectual consensus about precision and talent.

Rolling Stone magazine is caught in a contradiction, because they, as New York-based cultural elitists, see their task as giving rock music intellectual respectability. A hopelessly mutant, deformed task as ever there was. Rock n’ roll music is instinct. It comes from the heart and the gut and the crotch, not from the brain. But there you have it. Without the pseudo-intellectualizing, the posing, no Rolling Stone magazine, with all that entails.

Note that on their lists, they don’t attempt to make a case for their choices. They give instead, appreciations. Ruminations centered upon how the person speaking was personally affected by the modest guitar playing of Joni Mitchell, or the impassioned caterwauling of Bruce Springsteen.

THE VALUE of a Bruce Springsteen isn’t in his objectively considered talent, at guitar, voice, or otherwise. There are millions of Americans with better voices—and likely quite a few better guitar players. Springsteen has always been the quintessential bar band guy. The value of a Bruce Springsteen comes in his anti-polish, his anti-talent. In his grittiness and authenticity. In show after show, album upon album, authenticity is what Bruce Springsteen is selling.

But here comes the problem. To make the leap from saloon to big time, Bruce became the creation and packaged product of monopoly media.

What do we make of the information that the album “Born to Run” took fourteen months in the studio, and huge sums of money, to create? (Six months for the title song alone.)

Six months for a song intended to encapsulate the rock n’ roll essence of simple emotion, working class life, and the street?

It sure wasn’t plopping the fellow down in a room with his guitar and letting him have at it!

By contrast, Elvis Presley recorded his version of “That’s All Right, Mama,” in his first day in a recording session, at tiny Sun Records in Memphis. A song that many regard as the primal blend of country with r & b. A song that also exhibited Presley’s pure, natural voice.

The Beatles’ first album was recorded in one day. One of the truly revolutionary albums in rock history.

“Born to Run,” once finished, became the subject of a massive p.r. campaign which culminated in cover stories in both Time and Newsweek news magazines. The album was news, apparently—but manipulated news. News manufactured by a giant record company in combination with a burgeoning rock music intellectual establishment seeking relevance and credibility. News created to be news, by puppetmasters behind the scenes.

All-in-all, a cynical happening. With “Born to Run” we have the example of manufactured authenticity. The fake genuine. Or, the genuine fake.

When you think of the implications, the notion becomes scary.

Who Won, Who Lost?

AT Detroit’s famed used bookstore, John King Books, I picked up a copy of Kiss Kiss Bang Bang by Pauline Kael, a collection of the film critic’s reviews and essays from the 1960’s. The collection shows Kael’s few likes (John Huston; Katherine Hepburn) and many hates (David Lean; Ann-Margret; Natalie Wood; Christianity; et.al). Her essays are revealing not for what they say about movies, but what they reveal about her and her particular resentments and hang-ups. They’re also interesting for what they say about the neurotic attitude of the intellectual establishment, then and now. Pauline Kael has been a key influence on intellectual critical thought now.

Her most notorious essay, originally written for McCall’s (contrary to myth, she was not fired for writing it) is a takedown of the 1965 musical “The Sound of Music.” It’s more than a takedown. It’s a hysterical rant out of proportion to the substance of the movie itself. Something about it, its very existence, struck a nerve.

Kael dismisses the film, as she does well-made epics (see David Lean) as “an expensive product of modern technology.” But what are all movies the product of?

She goes on: “Whom could it offend? Only those of us who . . . loathe being manipulated in this way and are aware of how self-indulgent and cheap and ready-made are the responses we are made to feel. And we may become even more aware of the way we have been used and turned into emotional and aesthetic imbeciles when we hear ourselves humming those sickly, goody-goody songs.”

Pauline Kael’s gripe seems to be that “The Sound of Music” is a “wholesome” movie. What bothers her is that the characters in the movie are happy, and the audience, when viewing it, is happy.

Kael then trashes the character played by Julie Andrews for being “perfect”: “the sparkling maid, a mind as clean and well-brushed as her teeth.” Yet the point about the character is that she’s not perfect. In Kael’s own words, “gawky,” “sexless.” That she’s not perfect—if not homely, she’s no beauty, and lacks sex appeal—is why the audience identifies with her and roots for her. (In another essay, Kael rants against Ann-Margret for being too sexy.) There’s some psychological drama going on with Kael that goes beyond a simple movie review.

“Up there, they’re all in their places with bright, shining faces.” “No, nothing mars this celebration of togetherness.”

At the horror of a depiction of a happy family, Kael wants to send the director, Robert Wise, a wire saying, “You win, I give up,” and “We both lose, we all lose.”

Is this not ridiculously over-the-top?

“—people who accept this kind of movie tend to resent work which says that this is not the best of all possible worlds,” Pauline Kael concludes. Note the word accept. Accepting this movie for what it is, is dangerous, in the Pauline Kael playbook.

Is what she said true? Even then, in 1965, one could find plenty of movies showing that this was “not the best of all possible worlds.” Don Siegel’s “The Killers”; or “The Manchurian Candidate”; or “Fail Safe”; to name three strong candidates for what she sought. I’m sure that, even then, a happy movie like “Sound of Music” was the exception. I also think that’s why audiences flocked to it.

These were people, many of whom had lived through the most terrible of possible wars, a war filled with genocides, the obliteration of cities and peoples, uncountable millions of casualties and the use of nightmarish weapons, including the atomic bomb. A little over a year before the movie came out, the nation was traumatized by the assassination of its young President. Musicals have always been an escape from reality. One can’t blame the 1965 audience, in this instance, for seeking an escape; for thinking that the world should sometimes, or at least once, be a wonderful place.

“The Sound of Music” was always an exception. Today its like, sugarcoated flaws and all, is nowhere to be found, among the barrage of nightmarish action adventures filled with flying body parts, or gross-out comedies, or death-filled mob movies, or flesh-eating zombies, hundreds of examples of such “entertainment,” a nonstop in-your-face assault of the worst of all possible worlds. Pauline Kael’s irrational fear of too much happiness was for naught. 

What the People Think

It’s always interesting to see what unbiased readers think about the product of the literary intelligentsia. Case in point is this review of Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding:

http://brownbagdiscussiongroup.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-art-of-fielding-by-chad-harbach.html

An Easter Video

For Easter, a classic Ted Neely performance in a role he played in the film version back in 1973! The guy’s amazing. Watch for the high notes. Neely plays the most fascinating and enigmatic personality ever, and does it well.

Contradictions of the Literary World

Regarding this article about Russian poet Kirill Medvedev in the New York Times by Dwight Garner:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/21/books/its-no-good-by-kirill-medvedev.html?_r=0

I don’t get it. How can individuals like Dwight Garner and Keith Gessen (or Garth Risk Hallberg at The Millions) be strongly for cultural democracy, dissent, and freedom in Russia but not in the United States? If anything, they’re apologists for the literary status quo in this country; part of the monolith; supporters of the kind of crony capitalism a Kirill Medvedev would loathe.

Do these establishment journalists actually believe the political, economic, and cultural systems in both countries are dissimilar?

The difference is that the corruption, lies, and propaganda—the political and media games in the United States—are vastly more sophisticated. In Russia, the magician plying his trade is a crude amateur. The audience glimpses the rabbit in the hat before it appears. In the United States, the magicians are slick professionals.

If the principles of a Dwight Garner or Keith Gessen aren’t honest, aren’t transferable to our own shores, or their own field, then what are these highly placed apparatchiks up to?

Accuracy Not!

SOMEONE please notify Poets & Writers online editor Evan Smith Rakoff that they’ve posted a video as news that’s nearly five years old:

http://www.pw.org/content/keith_gessen

The video has Keith Gessen discussing Dave Eggers. It was first posted May 13, 2008. At least, at the site where I recently found it. See this post at my Crime City USA blog:

http://crimecityusa.blogspot.com/2012/11/keith-gessen-on-dave-eggers.html

I had some hits recently on the same post. A P&W person might’ve googled Gessen or Eggers and found it, clicked on the link to Big Think, and posted the video without noticing or caring about the date.

Sloppiness.

Dissidents Near and Far

HYPOCRISY DEPT.

I note that Russian dissident poet Kirill Medvedev is getting a lot of play in outfits like The New York Times and n+1 magazine. They applaud his attacks on intellectual and political corruption—in Russia.

Intellectual corruption in America isn’t touched by these organs. Political corruption, elitism, and cronyism in the U.S. is scarcely looked at by them. That both candidates in the recent Presidential election were Harvard grads—that every President from 1988 has been a graduate of either Harvard or Yale—isn’t something they want to think about. No. They’re concerned about democracy not here—but in Russia! So much safer.

Neither outfit, n+1 and New York Times, will give American literary dissidents the time of day. The Times recently called such writers, like those in the Underground Literary Alliance, “unpublishables.” Yes, I guess we are. Real democracy and intellectual freedom are in short supply in a lot of places.

“Ode to Global Warming” (Reprise)

The last time I spent a winter in Detroit, in ‘08-‘09, I penned the following poem. As I’ve frozen my ass off here this winter, I feel the poem is due for a repeat appearance.

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Penguins and polar bears in the streets of Detroit;
Mountains of white, snowmen on skis;
The skaters on Woodward look like the Red Wings!
You tell me there's global warming.

Ice-covered windshields that won't defrost;
River is frozen, sun has got lost;
Thermal underwear rising in cost!
Now you tell me there's global warming.

Oh bring back the sweat and the melt and the heat,
Rising temperature, 100 degrees;
So we can take off our coats and our shoes,
and snuggle our feet
in the burning hot sands of the closest beach!
Bring back to us global warming;
Oh, yeah, global warming,
Yes we must have again global warming!

Quixotic?

THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY

When the Underground Literary Alliance was in its heyday, an oft-heard criticism, coming from outside the ULA, but also from within it, was that our campaign was “quixotic.”  Several of our members were panicked out at the very thought.

(If our campaign were truly quixotic, the ULA would not have been so feared by the literary elite, as it remains to this day.)

The ULA strategy was no doubt risky. It was also early, anticipating changes. But it was never quixotic. The campaign was based on an objective analysis of where American literature was, and where it needed to be to survive as a relevant cultural happening in American society.

I once worked for an independent commodity trader. I learned how to make a logical assessment of a gamble’s risk-reward ratio.

The risks involved with taking on the nation’s literary establishment were high—but potential rewards were unlimited.

It’s not as if any of us had much to lose. When you’re already at the bottom, and likely to stay at the bottom, downsides are few. All one has to do is look at the writing careers of those who bailed from the ULA—or even those who betrayed it. Where are they?

The situation I observed in literature twelve years ago is more true now. The publishing system is kept afloat by insubstantial “young adult” novels about wizards and vampires. Top-heavy bookstores are closing. “Literary” fiction hasn’t changed one comma in decades. The literary scene is fronted by anti-charismatic stooges like Jonathan Franzen. No excitement anywhere. An art form and scene waiting to be reimagined. To be dismantled and replaced by the radically populist, the radically new.

Solzhenitsyn at Harvard

Since most writers have forgotten-- or have no idea-- what a real literary intellectual looks like, I've decided to post a link to Alexander Solzhenitsyn's controversial Harvard speech. The reader doesn't have to agree with everything he says to see the strong vision, intellectual clarity, and moral force this man embodied. Compared to Solzhenitsyn, those put forth today as great novelists and literary thinkers, like Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace, are visionless pygmies.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/augustine/arch/solzhenitsyn/harvard1978.html

Interesting to see the speech posted at a Columbia University web site, since high academia today has scant interest in intellectual freedom-- as well as holding disregard, if not disdain, for Solzhenitsyn's kind of spiritual ideas.

The Physics of Propaganda

EVER LISTEN to the late night radio show “Coast to Coast”? Much of it may be madness. 99% of the ideas discussed on the show may be false. (Flying saucers and such.) What I like about the show is that the host, guests, and callers are attempting to look behind the appearances of what passes for us as reality.

We’re trapped in a universe which doesn’t provide us with all the answers. The answers, if they exist, lay behind the appearances. Complicating matters is the way our senses are bombarded around the clock with a constructed, artificial reality, via many cultural mediators.

I’m not saying there’s no such thing as reality. I’m saying we have to test what passes for reality.

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EVER READ the works of Gustave Le Bon? Though he wrote 100 years ago, his ideas remain ahead of our time. They may have been an influence on thinkers like Orwell and Lacan.

Le Bon pointed out that humans remain basically irrational animals. The stands we take, the ideas we adopt, are more often than not adopted for emotional reasons, more than because of reason and logic. We decide what side we’re on first, then look for arguments to justify the decision.

For example, people seem to either love or hate President Obama. The stance is that he’s all-good or all-bad. Either-or. However people view him emotionally, pro or con, they proceed to rationalize their viewpoint.  

We don’t know Obama, of course, not personally. We only know what we’re told about him by the media, mainstream or other. The arguments that we decide are right make rough sense to us. We’re still judging from appearances. We don’t know whether or not we’re being scammed. The tragedy is that each camp envelopes itself in its own viewpoint. They’re looking at the object of study—Obama—from only one side. They’re looking at the same mountain, but are looking at it from opposite sides, so for each camp, it looks different. There’s no perspective.

Lacan said that we can never eliminate God. In the same way, we can never eliminate religion. Those who think they’ve eliminated it, have merely adopted a new belief system. Say, secular materialism, which is the belief system of most in the media mainstream, and conditions their view of the world.

A good example of the need to believe is writer George Saunders, hailed by the literary elite as one of their leading intellectuals. Witness this snarky piece of his in a recent issue of The New Yorker:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/shouts/2012/10/i-was-ayn-rands-lover.html

George Saunders is playing to the crowd. The mere mention  of Ayn Rand’s name brings on a reaction among the intellectual mob—the New Yorker readership—akin to Orwell’s Two Minute Hate. Saunders has no perspective about Ayn Rand and never had perspective. As he says, he went from “lover” of her writing and ideas to full fledged hater. There’s no in-between. This esteemed intellectual seems incapable of seeing that Rand and her ideas aren’t all-good or all-bad. He doesn’t realize that however true or false her ideas, her writing itself must be fairly terrific to hook so many acolytes—DESPITE the flaws of her ideas. (In truth, she’s a terrific novelist.) The herd, however, has condemned her whole. Every part of her and her work. George Saunders is nothing if not a herd writer. (I satirize him briefly in my new e-novel, The McSweeneys Gang.)

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The Question: How accurate are the narratives we receive from the omnipresent media? Based on what happened with the Tom Bissell smear essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, on how journalists swallowed his distortions whole, then perpetuated them, I’d say media narratives aren’t accurate at all.

Think of two lines drawn from a dot on the ground. From the same starting point. The lines differ in angle by a couple degrees. If the lines extend a few feet or a few yards, this is a marginal difference. The lines appear to be on the same path. Yet the further the two lines extend, the greater becomes the gap between them. This is like the difference between truth and distortion. The distortions placed into the culture by a propagandist-masquerading-as-journalist perpetuate themselves and become more distorted versions of reality. As time goes on, more and more distorted. The false picture that goes into the herd’s mind, and becomes accepted as the true picture—whether of a watch, a mountain, or a writers group—is distorted to the point of caricature, and does real damage.

I hope I haven’t gotten too heavy with these “mad” thoughts. A few of them are better portrayed in my latest e-novel, The McSweeneys Gang. Buy it at Kindle Store or Nook Books now, before the real-life McSweeney’s gang gets it removed.

Nobody Questions

Nobody in this herd nation questions anything.

Nobody questions why the U.S. military and South Korea are holding provocative war games right after the North Korean leader reached out—granted, in an inept way—to Obama and America via the Dennis Rodman meeting. We know the guy and his country are paranoid.

For that matter, nobody questions why we still have 70,000 troops in the sinkhole of Afghanistan, when the people and its leader clearly don’t want us there. Are we in Afghanistan because of an oil pipeline? That’d make a lot of sense. We don’t build a pipeline here to bring in Canadian oil, so we can instead spend money the government doesn’t have getting our soldiers killed in a futile cause overseas.

Just asking.

Explaining the Tea Party

A REPLACEMENT POST

The media elite see the Tea Party movement through the distorted prism of their own bias. They make no attempt to view it through the eyes of Tea Partiers themselves. Yet the movement is easily explained by the world that many of us were born into—the mythology of America, and of the settling of America. By myth, I mean a blend of fact and fiction.

Never was the myth better depicted than in a movie released fifty years ago: “How the West Was Won.” Here’s an interesting Youtube compression of highlights accompanied by the film’s classic Alfred Newman score:

That’s the great western movie actress Carroll Baker shown in the above shot. She also appeared in “Giant” and “The Big Country.”

What does the movie celebrate? A world that some Americans, like the Palins in Alaska, in many ways are still living. The taming of a wilderness and the settling of a continent. The westward expansion was one of the greatest feats in human history. That a tough land was settled and quickly became the greatest civilization the world has known should give any objective observer pause. Other civilizations like China or Rome had much longer histories before they reached greatness. America, like it or not, is unique. There’s enough accomplishment to be proud of, faults, flaws and all. Humans are imperfect animals. The struggle, the achievement itself is laudable.

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(Here's a fascinating blog post about the John Ford portion of the film:
http://www.mardecortesbaja.com/2010/10/21/ten-minutes-of-exquisite-agony/ )

My Mistake!

Never write about economics when you've just woken up, because you're likely to make mistakes. Which I did with a post that was up here for about five minutes. Upon rereading it, I realized I'd mixed up a couple of my facts. I'll correct it or scrap it. I may need a break from this blog to get on to more serious writing.

The Untouched

ONE THING noteworthy about the literary elite, based mainly but not exclusively in New York, is they’ve been untouched by raging societal storms which have buffeted most of us. Look at the editors of both n+1 and the McSweeney’s empire, or a Thomas Beller, and they’re society’s privileged.

America has suffered from a deep recession the past four years. The downturn has easily damaged a third of us. Yet those who control the nation’s literature have been untouched.

We know the stereotype of the writer in a garret. For underground writers—including many once-active members of the Underground Literary Alliance—it’s more than a stereotype.

The literary establishment can’t admit this to themselves. That organizations like PEN give $40,000 to Philip Roth, instead of to struggling writers for whom the amount would make a difference in sheer survival, is something they can’t think about. That writers today in America live in unheated hovels and druggie hotels, and some of them homeless, to the swanky set isn’t a thought.

I encounter poor writers, young writers, even in a brutal town like Detroit. Their writing is fresh and distinctive, giving a necessary different perspective on America from the monothink monotone bourgie mainstream. If the ULA is ever revived I’ll show this.

Who writes about the harsher realities of life now?

To dismiss the realities which exist, mandarins construct a narrative to keep their minds comfortable.

The narrative is this: The Underground Literary Alliance was a collection of “bad” writers; “unpublishables” who deserve to be scorned. Cheaply bought hatchetmen use snarky phrases to “prove” this contention. In the cushy world of elite literature, all becomes well. The Harvard professor who writes lifeless criticism can return to his afternoon snooze in the Harvard Room. I don’t know if there is a Harvard Room, but at such an uber-elite school there should be a Harvard Room, with mahogany paneling around medieval windows, plush burgundy carpeting exuding warmth, and thick leather armchairs. There, in one of the armchairs, observe our professor, sun across his face as he snoozes. He dreams. It was a delicious lunch!

The hyper-mad Manhattan bloggers whose careers consist of sucking-up to the system and its products have one more item not to think about, their minds directed by the standard narrative.

The trustfunded Brooklyn hipsters can continue planning their next snoozefest literary event, without thinking for a minute of the thousands of long-time residents they’ve displaced from their neighborhoods, who now have nowhere to go, as gentrification has driven up rents—and the price of beer at the corner saloon! The hipsters’ minds also are directed by the standard narrative.

Bad writers! They smugly delicately smirk at the thought. Sure, the ULA’s writings were different enough, out of the norm, to be ignored or mocked.

In the history of art there is always to be found moments of closed-off systems, or “salons,” caretakers of status quo artistic deadness assuring one another of their wonderfulness, while outside the palace dwell other kinds of artists, Francis Villons eking out an existence among the beaten-down populace while struggling to create anything BUT a work of the salon.

Master of Distortion

THE SELLING OF LIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But is it?

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

Isolationist?

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

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

How does Tom Bissell get away with calling them isolationist?

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Wrong with this Picture?

Elite publications like The New Yorker and New York Review of Books parade themselves as liberal—yet the kind of literary art they promote is stripped of social relevance. Insular; personal; ornate—as reactionary an art, in fact, as could possibly be.

I was thinking about this after a discussion about boxing (that once great sport). Note the change in two great boxing movies; one from the 1940’s, “Body and Soul”; the other from the 1970’s, “Rocky.” The first one is tougher. More than this, it shows a broader context: the machinations of the boxing managers and promoters take place within a corrupt framework. In comparison, “Rocky” is a mere fairy tale.

Tao Lin versus Miranda July

NEW LITERARY SATIRE

This is a first: A shoplifting contest between two renowned lit-hipster writers. Has American literature (or American satire) reached a new low? Read about it only at the crazy new blog THE LITERARY CIRCUS:

http://literarycircus.blogspot.com/2013/02/miranda-vs-tao-shoplifting-contest.html

Groupthink at New York Review of Books

There’s an interesting blog post at the New York Review of Books website. A celebration of New York Review of Books 50th anniversary by former intern Andrew Haig Martin.

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/50-years/2013/feb/23/intern-out-cold/

In the piece, “The Intern Who Went Out in the Cold,” Andrew Martin describes the reaction of long-time NYRB editor Robert Silvers to the introduction as VP candidate of Sarah Palin: “Who is this awful woman? . . . She does seem rather sinister, doesn’t she?”

This is Robert Silvers’ first visceral response, mind you, when nothing was known about Palin. In her introductory speech, Palin went out of her way to praise Geraldine Ferraro, as well as Hillary Clinton’s “determination and grace.”

Yet Robert Silvers finds her to be an alien creature. Quite a display of class prejudice.

Why does Andrew Martin include this incident in his essay? Andrew Martin is certain that the hostile sentiment expressed by Robert Silvers will find widespread, maybe unanimous agreement from New York Review of Books’ readers. An example of groupthink at New York Review of Books and the established literary community.

Understanding the Media Mind

Because of its power over whole populations, the most dangerous force in America today is the mass media.

The Tom Bissell essay on the Underground Literary Alliance has been for me a useful case study. By taking it apart, one can understand the mentality of the person who created it, as well as of those who agree with it. One can extrapolate, from this one essay, to the entire media.

If a media member is able to create outright falsehood—if fellow establishment writers eagerly believe the falsehood—then we can legitimately ask the question: Are many other media essays and accounts falsehoods?

The overarching premise of the Bissell essay is that there is no literary establishment. Yet Tom Bissell himself has spent his entire life behaving as if there is—from his early connections to name writers; to attendance at the renowned Bennington summer workshops to obtain more connections; his internship at Harper’s in New York; his defense of powerful lit figures like Franzen and Eggers; and so on.

Why, then, the mythmaking?

As interesting is the fact that nominally intelligent writers like Garth Risk Hallberg, Maria Bustillos, and Thomas Beller not only agree with the essay in its entirety—they refuse to question it, and flee from questions about it.

This alone proves an unquestioning, monolithic mindset.

Study the New York media for any period of time and you see this worked out on issue after issue. Close to 100% agreement—if you don’t agree on every point you’re treated as subhuman and read out of their ranks. Every major question for them is Yes/No; black or white.

Question the accepted truth and you’re treated not just as a skeptic, but as an outright nut. Ostracized. An example of herd behavior.

My Twitter Account Hacked!

Earlier today my regular twitter account, @KingWenclas, was hacked into and spam sent out from it. Score another point for the literary blackballers—unless it was simply coincidence. Free speech seems to bother some people.

I don’t know how long I’ll keep this blog going, which also appears to be a target. If this goes down, I’ll keep posting at my other blogs. Look for me there.

Behind the Curtain

THE TRUTH ABOUT NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

A nation’s literature should primarily be about telling the truth. Yet we’re stuck with an established literary scene incapable of telling the most basic truth about itself, and which blackballs those who do speak the truth. Why is that?

The New York Review of Books is a case study in that regard. They’ve been busy the past weeks patting themselves on the back—for fifty years of remaining stagnant—while presenting a strictly mythicized version of their history and founding.

The New York Review of Books was created as, and has always been, an extension of and front for the publishing industry. As is well known, the journal was founded during a New York Times newspaper strike. No one mentions why.

With the famed New York Times Book Review not being published, the major publishing houses were not getting ads out about their products; their new releases. So they created what in effect was a dummy substitute, a similarly named stand-in. Co-founder Barbara Epstein was the wife of Random House big Jason Epstein. Paid ads from the big houses paid for the journal’s existence. Back in the 1970’s, long outcast essayist Richard Kostelanetz did an examination of the publication, discussing the incestuous relationship between the already large Random House book empire and The New York Review of Books. Kostelanetz showed a relationship between ad space bought and company books reviewed.

That’s it, kids. A front journal. Creature of a monopolistic book business. The much-lauded “intellectuals” writing for them, the fairly unexciting Joan Didions and Susan Sontags, for all their ability and intelligence, were likewise always products of the big houses. As is someone like Lorrie Moore now. Puppets, to the extent that they were and are allowed to be esteemed “intellectuals” as long as their intellectualizing remains within certain parameters. Criticize Capitalism, by all means—but never criticize the Capitalism of the publishing industry! Don’t even look at it.

(The New York Review of Books’ much lauded Leftist posture in this sense has been like a magician’s misdirection. Look over here, audience, but don’t see what’s really going on.)

This includes not looking at all the many ancillary pieces of that publishing industry, like nonprofit foundations handing out grants and awards at swanky black tie dinners attended by the publishing industry’s managers and high-level soldiers; the purpose of the awards to further hype and legitimize the same products being hyped and reviewed and legitimized in New York Review of Books. A cozy environment, albeit one which has always remained fairly static, while the outside world—while other cultural entities like sports and music—moved swiftly on all sides around it; mutating and growing and expanding many times over. The nation’s culture as a whole expanding—while the New York Review of Books and its sponsors remained stuck in their careful elitist niche. They’re still there now.

More Blackballing

I HAD set up yet another twitter account, @ULANews, in preparation for an eventual Underground Literary Alliance restart. The idea will be to use it to get word out about various ULA actions, should they ever come.

I’ve sent out a few tweets on the address, trying things out. A few too many. I find this twitter address already blocked by the prestigious New York Review of Books twitter account, @nybooks. “You have been blocked from following this account at the request of the user.”

Hmm. That was quick. These people don’t mess around. What was my particular offense, I wonder?

Possibly it was my blog post here: http://americanpoplit.blogspot.com/2013/02/against-creative-writing.html

--dissecting a New York Review of Books article by Lorrie Moore.

More likely it was a reply I tweeted on 2/14 to a retweet by @nybooks, concerning an article by Alissa Wilkinson on the Books and Culture web site about a swanky New York Review of Books 50th anniversary affair in New York. In my tweet I said: “Sounds elitist and stuffy. A funeral oration over the body of literature passed.”

A fair opinion, actually. A valid intellectual statement from one who believes the worlds of literature and publishing as we know them are drastically changing, like it or not. Of a piece with my post about Lorrie Moore.

Well! The literary snobs at New York Review of Books apparently are having none of it.

No, it’s for sure that you see 100 times the opinionated tweets thrown around, a free-for-all exchange of ideas, in the world of sports!—than in what passes today for the literary scene. Surely moribund, if they can tolerate not the slightest criticism. The New York Review of Books block of my twitter account proves the truth of my tweet. Static mannequins with dust over them, in a closed and stuffy room—windows sealed closed—occupants of the office removed from the hectic noise of the world below. They must be protected, at all costs, from such give-and-take, such bustle, such noise.

Little minds inhabiting a weak and fearful world.

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(p.s. I note a line in Alissa Wilkinson’s article, in which she disdains “the flattery of representation, a personal world that merely reflects ourselves back to us—“  She could be speaking about no one so much as today’s establishment literary world.)

Suspended Again!

My @McSweeneysGang twitter account has been suspended for a second time. Can we guess that the a—holes at McSweeney’s complained?

They’re such frauds. They work hard to shut down anyone who criticizes them or mocks them. They can’t take it. Dave Eggers has shown over many years he’s not a fan of free speech. He wants total agreement.

The bottom line? They’re intellectual mediocrities and intellectual cowards. All their fighting is behind the scenes. Truly reprehensible people. (Yeah, I know: say what you really think.)

I’m actually being polite.

(Strike a blow for free expression against literary totalitarians. Buy your copy of the satirical ebook novel The McSweeneys Gang at Nook or Kindle today. Get it while it’s still available!)

Intellectual Herd Alert

Liberal blogger, tweeter, and media voice Michael Wolff (@MichaelWolffNYC) has lost 900 twitter followers in the past twenty-four hours simply for saying he likes Roger Ailes as a person. The lockstep march goes on!

More Reality

Have I been unfair in these posts?

Put yourself in my place. Last year I find an anti-ULA smear essay republished, leading to smears against the organization I’m still strongly identified with, in influential publication after influential publication. (Most recently, a smear against me.)

In an interview for the book containing the essay, author Tom Bissell calls ULAers “authoritarian.” This, about blackballed writers of absolutely no standing.

The worst slur in the essay was likening us to genocidal Bolsheviks. I’m not exaggerating. (”—lots and lots of tombstones.”) Malicious? Just possibly?

An unaware reader would never know that Tom Bissell’s sponsors were the ones holding power and influence in the literary world (including his unnamed editor friends), and ULAers were the banned writers reduced to cleaning toilets. “The Big Lie” at its most egregious.

What would happen if actual Bolsheviks took actual control of the country?

Outspoken, anarchist-leaning undergrounders would be quickly liquidated. On the other hand, the go-along-to-get-along crowd, writers like Bissell and Beller, would join the Party immediately, and claim they’d always been in it.

Conformists and apparatchiks in one system would be conformists and apparatchiks under any system.

The Real Story

It’s funny, in a way, that an outfit which has been inactive for four years, the Underground Literary Alliance; many of whose remaining key members were destroyed during that period by economic circumstance, or by life; could still achieve today from the supposedly UNmonolithic established literary community widespread and unanimous hostility. Slur and smear against us continue to appear in esteemed publication after publication. Not one “reputable” writer will take our side—or acknowledge we have a side.

Instead of republishing an essay filled with distortions, with every available alleged crime of the ULA he could find, it’d have been more interesting if Tom Bissell had instead gone after the real story. If he’d presented the deeds done against the Underground Literary Alliance, beginning with the reams of hate mail we received from the moment of our founding; or bookstores pressured by the Eggers gang not to carry our zines; literary writers we were reaching out to pressured not to show at our events; publications (such as Punk Planet and Zine Guide in Chicago) pressured not to participate in or cover our events; fake letters and emails and web sites created in attempts to discredit us; endless anonymous attacks against the ULA in every public forum available, including Amazon; including this blog; ULA members pressured to break ranks and turn on us, and so on. A hurricane of hostility which continues to this day, though, for all intents and purposes, there remains no ULA. Only the name and the memory.

That story would be fascinating and revealing, but it’s a story which can’t come from me, only from those inside the established literary community, or inside McSweeney’s, and they’re not talking.

(The new ebook The McSweeneys Gang is fiction but it’s also real, if you know what I mean.)

A Cleaner Crime City?

The blog version of “Crime City USA” has been cleaned up. All the past posts about the crimes of McSweeney’s et.al. have suddenly become more readable.

www.crimecityusa.blogspot.com

The Creative Writing Con Game

The con is that hyped writers like Thomas Beller and Lorrie Moore are teaching an archaic form of creative writing that will be irrelevant in a new literary world in which writers will need to connect with readers as quickly as possible. Here’s an example of the hype of the con:

http://www.vanderbilt.edu/creativewriting/2013/01/fiction-writer-lorrie-moore-to-join-vanderbilts-creative-writing-faculty/

The question: How much will Vanderbilt students pay for a creative writing degree which will be essentially useless? There are, after all, only so many such university teaching positions to go around.

To read an examination of the art of Lorrie Moore, see the new post at American Pop Lit, here:

http://americanpoplit.blogspot.com/2013/02/against-creative-writing.html

Did Franzen’s Freedom Get It Wrong?

The new lit blog Literary Circus asks the question: Did Jonathan Franzen get the population question wrong in his novel Freedom? See what you think.

http://www.literarycircus.blogspot.com/2013/02/franzen-ponders-baby-bust.html

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Literary Circus also examines the gun control issue:

http://literarycircus.blogspot.com/2013/02/given-choice-between-n1-and-mcsweeneys.html

We didn’t invent the literary circus. We’re just living in it.

Literary Circus Concludes First Fantastic Week!

The first week of the crazy new lit blog, The Literary Circus, nears its close. Check out the week’s humorous or not-so humorous posts:

www.literarycircus.blogspot.com

New arrivals include Daniel Handler singing, the New York Times bestseller list, and (up soon) the Jonathan Franzen bird-and-birth-bust controversy.

What could be better than an entire week of Literary Circus?

Only one thing: reading The McSweeneys Gang! Over-the-top literary ebook satire sticking it to ALL the nation’s lit snobs at least those who could be fit into one narrative—EggersFranzenBellerVidaMarcusJulavitsSaundersLopatePlimptonMailerEgan—also The Man in the Black Hat and Mr. Empathy. The line-up is breathtaking.

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Upcoming: Literary Circus looks at the gun control issue.

Thomas Beller, Unreliable Narrator

Here’s the part of Thomas Beller’s essay, “River of Berman,” in the 12/13/12 Tablet Magazine, which refers to myself:

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“Sometime around 2004 we were attacked by a maniac from Detroit who had long been a fan, even a friend. His name was Karl “King” Wenclas. He had reviewed Open City’s very first issue—negatively, but still, with energy and attention. I was so impressed that his byline appeared in issue #3, though I had misspelled his first name. (Ken. He wrote me a postcard that began, “Dear Tim.”)

Then Wenclas changed titles and tactics. The hostility to Open City (among many others) moved from the page, where it was welcome, to disruptions at readings and so forth, where it was not. Wenclas and his gang were throwing out taunts and dares, calling us (to be defined as everyone other than them) a bunch of pampered wusses who were marginalizing literature. All the people being thus insulted or harassed metabolized this in their own way. Most people ignored it. I tried to engage, at least for a while, as did George Plimpton, who memorably joined the group on stage at one of their events—a press conference held at the opera house next to CBGB.

The person who handled this antagonism most gracefully and usefully, I thought, was David Berman.”

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(Beller goes on to quote from Tom Bissell’s very selective reference to David Berman in Bissell’s attack piece on the Underground Literary Alliance, reprinted in Bissell’s essay collection.)

How accurate is Thomas Beller’s presentation? Not very. He mentions 2004. The events he refers to took place before this.

The ULA press conference Beller attended, along with George Plimpton, was February 8, 2001. It took place not at the Amato Opera House, but at CB’s Gallery, a performance space then owned by, next door to, and part of, CBGB’s. The ULA did perform a show at the Amato—six weeks later. Neither Beller nor Plimpton were there.

The ULA’s attendance at a Housing Works reading, which upset Beller greatly, was also before 2004. It happened on January 30, 2003. A small detail—but a crucial one, as I’ll explain in a separate post. The timing of what was happening then had a lot to do with why we were there.

It’s not just that Thomas Beller gets small details wrong, however. He also presents the literary establishment’s standard false narrative about myself and the Underground Literary Alliance. (My “gang.”) But note the viewpoint.

Beller says, “calling us (to be defined as everyone other than them)”.

Everyone other than ourselves?

We were in fact calling out a select coterie of writers, centered around a handful of key individuals, mainly the so-called “New White Guys,” who were receiving an inordinate amount of largesse and media attention. A sliver—a powerful sliver—of the literary world. To Thomas Beller, this is “everyone.”

In Beller’s mind, the ULA was calling this select circle “a bunch of pampered wusses who were marginalizing literature.”

“Wusses” is Beller’s term, not mine. But is the statement untrue? Were and are these people marginalizing literature?

All one need do is look at The New Yorker’s “Best Books of 2012”—Thomas Beller one of those doing the choosing:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/12/best-books-of-2012.html

The books and authors named are relevant to one percent of the American population, if that. They’ve marginalized themselves. We’re dealing now with a slightly larger sliver of America. Mr. Beller’s world. They’re a tiny privileged minority even on their own island; an aristocracy hovering, at class-segregated parties, high above the mob. I attended one of Open City’s parties in the late 90’s. Trustfunders, scions, and Eurotrash. Snobs among snobs.

Even when the lit elite leave Manhattan, they take their island and its narrow tastes and viewpoints with them.

But, “wusses”? Are these people not examples of intellectual courage?

NOT! Most frustrating is that they’ll smear you in print, as Beller has done, then run and hide when called on it—as Thomas Beller in fact is doing now.

Because they’re members of a special crowd, the literary elite, they’re never held accountable. There exists no one who’ll hold them accountable. Unmentioned in Thomas Beller’s slam is the real crime of the Underground Literary Alliance—attempting to hold the literary darlings accountable for such things as abuse of the grants process. The well-connected and privileged keeping all goodies for themselves.

Why didn’t you mention in your essay, Tom, what the ULA campaign was really about? Anything else was bells and whistles intended to draw attention to our documented facts; our protests. We did draw such attention, which created outrage in your crowd.

Thomas Beller complains that his journal Open City was “attacked” by myself and colleagues. Attacked? Where? If you’re referring to the Housing Works incident, Mr. Beller, you’re getting your facts wrong, as I can prove.

Thomas Beller’s statement about my criticisms of the establishment, about “where it was welcome” is revealing. As he makes plain, at one time I was tolerable—to a limited extent. A curiosity piece for the aristocrats’ amusement. Many subscribed to my newsletter. Now I’m not tolerable. I criticized the Wonderful People too harshly (Mr. Beller’s isolated, marginalized world is muffled in wonderfulness). Unlike them, I actually believed in my stated principles and ideals. So now I’m blackballed. My mistake was in pointing out that in the approved literary scene all is not always wonderful.

Noteworthy about Beller’s Tablet essay, and all his essays, is that Thomas Beller clings, clings, to his illusions. His writings are invariably nostalgic, about a more wonderful time. The smell of bagels on Manhattan’s upper west side. Snow in Central Park. In line with this, Beller grasps at any defense he can find of the literary familiar. Don’t bother him with something different, or dissenting, or new. Writers who write and live outside the acceptable lines. Someone tweets him that books are “knowledge” and e-readers “information.” Precious! Thomas Beller hurriedly retweets this. Yes! The past! Childhood!

The literary elite comprise the mentality of children, expressed by writers who’ve never left intellectual childhood.

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(Be sure to read the new ebook, The McSweeneys Gang by King Wenclas, which contains a fictionalized version of Thomas Beller, among others. New pop fiction. Not the stale literary status quo. Available at Kindle or Nook.)

Organization Men

The ideal of the writer used to be of the fearless independent voice, the truth teller standing against injustice, incapable of being broken. That was my ideal—men like Voltaire, Marat, Tom Paine, Tolstoy, Zola, Jack London, Frank Norris—Solzhenitsyn of course—among them. These were writers. Writers!

Those who dominate the U.S. literary scene today are not of this type. We get instead the organization man—very competent inside the narrow parameters within which he’s allowed to be competent, but utterly lost away from the literary system: the Machine.

Tom Bissell and Thomas Beller exemplify this type. They’re two of the system’s approved writers. Best of the best. They appear regularly in high profile mass circulation magazines like GQ and The New Yorker. Yet one senses—one knows—they’re utterly dependent on the system which sustains them. And so, in face of criticism of his essay on the ULA, Tom Bissell doesn’t answer the criticism directly. The stance you’d expect a writer of character and backbone to take. Instead he makes posts at Facebook, seeking affirmation of the herd. He requires the literary herd’s approval and backing. As long as he remains in tight with the McSweeneyites, all is okay.

Thomas Beller is the same. In the Tablet essay, in which he takes an unnecessary shot at me, he’s also sure to pay proper homage to two supposed literary giants of our time, Jonathan Franzen and David Foster Wallace. Beller falls just short of groveling.

Thomas Beller’s reaction to the ULA at Housing Works in 2003 was of a piece with this. Beller demonstrating, in case any suspected he was not!, that he was on the approved side.

Regarding their stations in the literary community, you won’t find in either of these fellows much daring.

Beller’s remarks in the Tablet essay prove this point—and incidentally prove my portrayal of him in The McSweeneys Gang e-novel. Worth reading beyond any comedy.

Have I asked too much of the two literary Insiders when I’ve asked that they explain their portrayals of me and the Underground Literary Alliance? No. They initiated the matter. With their facility with words, their trained glibness, if they had accuracy and merit to their arguments, they’d quickly put me in my place. Yet they remain silent.

What would I do in their place?

If I were Tom Bissell, I would’ve long since admitted, “Hell yes, the essay’s a slanted, biased hit piece. What did you expect?”

This, at least, would be honest.

I haven’t hesitated to defend my own words and ideas, anywhere and everywhere, offline and online, from Columbia’s Miller Hall to HTML Giant to a Tao Lin web site, always greatly outnumbered yet wading happily into the fight. To me, that’s what being a writer is about.

Interns from Harvard

Graduates of Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, represent less than 0.1% of the American population. We know Harvard grads are overrepresented in the political realm. (Both Obama and Mitt Romney are Harvard grads.) Are they overrepresented in the literary field also?

http://www.literarycircus.blogspot.com/2013/02/hilarious-n1-rich-kids.html

The new blog Literary Circus takes a not-so-serious look at the problem, with its examination of the interns at a hipster literary journal out of Brooklyn, n+1. Further investigation of the plight of these underprivileged interns may be warranted! Stay tuned.

Proving the Point

One can show the dishonesty of Tom Bissell’s ULA essay in the micro, taking it apart point by point; demonstrating falsehood upon falsehood, distortion after distortion, as I’ve been doing. One can question it in the macro, by understanding the larger message conveyed subliminally to the reader.

We have now, with the Thomas Beller misstep in Tablet Magazine, a way to prove a distortion. To show with a photo that the ULA’s supposed “rampage” at Housing Works, as stated in Bissell’s essay, is a lie. As well, to show the selective editing done, by either Bissell or his source, of David Berman’s email exchange with the Underground Literary Alliance. Ancient history? Not when writers like Thomas Beller are repeating the false version everyplace, today.

What’s Beller’s motivation? I see him as another fall guy, conned by Tom Bissell or by somebody into taking a shot at me. The timing of Beller’s sudden attack is curious, to say the least, coming as it did a couple weeks after Johannes Lichtman’s blatant smear piece against the ULA. Beller’s remarks concerning me sound shoehorned into his essay. A writer, when doing such a piece, asks himself, “What sentence or phrase can be deleted? What’s not necessary?” Referring to me as “a maniac,” then distorting the ULA’s history with Berman (inadvertently, I believe) was hardly necessary.

Beller’s problem is that he believed Tom Bissell’s false narrative of the ULA. Because we’d attacked the nature of today’s lit scene, establishment writers like Thomas Beller, creatures of the system through every step of their writing lives, were predisposed to believe the worst about us. That we did some theater, made some attention-getting noise, added fuel to the fire. Our noise was always heavily exaggerated by our enemies. The true story about what happened at Housing Works, why we were there, is revealing.

This is a long way of saying that I’d rather not post that photo! Or give a fuller view of the David Berman-ULA conversation. The truth can be embarrassing.

Crazy New Literary Blog

Ya know what? If I'm going to be labeled as "a maniac" by the literary establishment, I may as well start acting like one. What do I have to lose? The generosity and courtesy of establishment lit people?

I've therefore started an entirely new literary blog. Yes, this blog right here goes farther, in attitude and ideas, than any other literary blog or site out there. But I can push the envelope farther. See:

http://literarycircus.blogspot.com

I may as well have fun with what I'm doing. Just possibly a few of you may have fun reading "The Literary Circus" also.

(If you like it, be sure to purchase my new ebook, "The McSweeneys Gang.")
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Remember:

For keeping up on the Pop Lit/ebook revolution, read:
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com

For updates on restarting the ULA outfit read:
www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com

For hard critiques of the U.S "Crime City" lit scene:
www.crimecityusa.blogspot.com

I have new posts up at all three sites. Something for everybody.

Missing the Boat

The New York Review of Books talks about great writers fifty years ago (Mailer and Company); “the shock and awe demonstration of intellectual firepower.”

That’s exactly what the Underground Literary Alliance wanted to bring to the scene. Some scorn me as “a maniac.” Why? Because, unlike them, I have verbal and intellectual energy. It’s why no one dares debate me—which would be truly crazy.

What’s noticeably lacking in authors today from both the literary establishment, and the big selling wizard/zombie/vampire novelists, is personality. Energy. Charisma. Who’s got it? The hyped big names, like Jonathan Franzen, represent more a lethargic anti-charisma, in their persons and their writings. Can anyone argue that Franzen’s Freedom is in any way kickass? Energetic? Explosive? Is there “firepower” in it? Intellectual or otherwise? When Jonathan Franzen tries to present ideas in his weighty tomes, they’re so banal and shallow they’re embarrassing. When he enters a room, he doesn’t enliven it. He puts it to sleep.

The ULA troupe by contrast had striking personalities in its lineup, whose writings, at its best, could be comic (Wred Fright), relevant (James Nowlan), or attention-deficit (Crazy Carl Robinson). I think of larger-than-life macho throwback Wild Bill, beat writing in a 19th century East Texas dialect. Or our original zeen babe. Or uncontrollable poet Frank Walsh, whose language sounded like Ezra Pound on speed and whose performances were never less than wildly entertaining. Original personalities. I’ll throw even much maligned Urban Hermitt into the mix, whose rules violation was authentically recreating the sound of punk kid subculture, breaking several constipated schoolteacher rules along the way.

Could the literary world have used what we were selling? Maybe. Unfortunately our protests, theater and noise panicked too many uptight overregulated literary personalities, including Jonathan Franzen, Thomas Beller, and Dave Eggers. “Hip” writers who it turned out couldn’t take or tolerate much of anything. PBS Lawrence Welk would be too threatening to them. What we’re stuck with then instead is self-important monotone meandering, or self-involved hipster posing—literary birdwatching—all of it lacking the spark of life.

Bureaucrats and Bureaucratese

ONE THING the Underground Literary Alliance, as part of the DIY movement, sought to accomplish during its active history, was to find a way to readjust the relationship between system and writer. To begin to break down a widespread bureaucratic mentality, in which literature’s chief value—the WRITER—is forced into an inferior, hat-in-hand position of “Please publish me!” In so doing, when approaching literary journals, dealing with a thousand little dictators. When dealing with the publishing system in New York of agents and editors, ten thousand dictators, each one expressing his-or-her arrogance in as officious and dismissive way possible, as if they, legalistic system bureaucrats, were the artistic creators.

I received just a little of that yesterday, when I emailed Tablet Magazine to express my legitimate dismay as being characterized, in Thomas Beller’s 12/13/12 essay, as “a maniac.” A libelous, unfactual statement. A malicious smear showing Thomas Beller, like Tom Bissell or Johannes Lichtman before him, playing to an unseen audience of literary power people.

Here’s the response I received from Tablet Magazine, from senior editor Matthew Fishbane:

“I'm an editor at Tablet. Thank you very much for writing. I'm sorry to hear you differed in opinion with the piece, but I do hope that you'll find other things to like on the site. You are always welcome to participate in comments, repeating or linking back to blog posts where you have expressed your opinions. Do let me know if you have any trouble posting in the comments.

I regret your first visit to Tablet was an unpleasant one.”

This sounds like a form response from a computer program, more than from an actual person—a human being. Can we be certain that “Matthew Fishbane” is not in fact a fictional creation?

Yes, it is a bit unpleasant to be publicly called “a maniac.” I truly don’t much blame Thomas Beller, who has a tenuous position within the system to maintain. I know what he’s doing. Beller wants to still be able to write for prestigious publications. I understand that as a writer and thinker he’s a weak person who’s required to play the game.

Why Isn’t Mr. Beller Happy?

Mr. Thomas Beller of Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood isn’t happy. In fact, he seems to be holding a ten year-old grudge against me and the Underground Literary Alliance. To my surprise I discover that in Tablet Magazine on December 13, 2012, Mr. Beller called me “a maniac.” Scroll down at this post and see:

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/music/118806/river-of-berman?all=1 

Mr. Beller, that’s not a nice thing to say! Please go to your closet, put on your blue sweater and return to being literature’s Mr. Nice Guy.

Why the unprovoked slur? Fact is, I’m not a maniac, though I’m often portrayed that way by establishment literary types. What lit people can’t handle is my unflinching honesty, logic, and integrity, which I’ve demonstrated time after time. If you’re logical and have character and integrity it causes panic and hysteria in today’s approved literary scene. If you don’t play the game, if you believe your stated ideals and mean what you say, then you’re plainly crazy.

Why is Mr. Beller resentful? It’s beyond me. The ULA has been inactive for years. In the past several years, remaining members have faced great hardship and tragedy, chiefly for economic reasons. Mr. Beller, do you know that Frank D. Walsh, the poet who in 2003 replaced your friend David Berman in a “Relevance Readoff” in Chicago, when Berman bailed, found himself a year ago homeless, thrown into the street, and on top of that lost most of his writings? Imagine what that’s like for a writer. One of the best spoken word street poets in the country (which means, way better than any of the academic variety), beat up by life and so admittedly just a little crazy, though, I’m certain, not quite a “maniac” like me.

One of our founders, Steve Kostecke, died about the same time. About the same time, another key member, the clown Jelly Boy, who in 2006 accompanied me into the lion’s den of a Miller Hall reading, was put into a coma for many weeks when critically burned in an apartment house fire. I myself have been knocked around a bit the last several years, more than I care to say. But who am I? Simply a “maniac.” It’s easy to label me and dismiss me.

Mr. Thomas Beller signed a petition in support of the Occupy movement, but he’s never yet gotten it into his head that there are two Americas—including in the literary community. We never had wealthy guys like Rob Bingham in the ULA. I’m sure Bingham was a nice, talented person. You know what? So were many of the men and women in the ULA. I helped create the ULA to be on the side of the underdog. Including underdog writers—talented people with no one behind them. We would’ve liked lit figures like Mr. Beller on our side.

I surely don’t know why Mr. Beller isn’t happy; why he felt the need to add his voice to the many taking shots at a defunct writers group. Kicking around, now that we’re down, myself and the ULA. Blackballing us isn’t enough, apparently. The mere existence of an independent voice anyplace is scary to some people.

Two additional points:

1.) To correct the record, I’ll be putting up a post showing that Mr. Beller’s remarks regarding the ULA are a misrepresentation of reality.

2.) I have a fictional characterization of Mr. Beller in my new ebook novel, The McSweeneys Gang. Worth a look. I, er, do not call him a maniac.

Have a wonderful day in the neighborhood, everybody!