We're counting our forces, gathering our resources, awaiting official word about whether we'll invade Manhattan with voices and protest signs to fight co-optation and phoniness.
Patrick Simonelli will post our decision on the ULA site.
The ULA is on the march!
www.literaryrevolution.com
Friday, March 31, 2006
The Stakes: Defining American Literature
The stakes are nothing less than that. Is American literature the voices of the people, the land, the streets? Or is it that imposed from on high by bureaucrats in institutions and academies?
The mandarins of lit, as represented with the Miller Hall group, see literature as the society sees approved art-- of, by, and for the upper classes and maintained in exclusive museums which do nothing so much as point out the art's separation from the social world.
The stakes for underground writers are very high. We're fighting for our history-- to retain traces of our words and ideas. We're fighting against a society that would wipe us and our words out; that would extinguish every shred of memory of outsider writers. Only the approved kind will stand, according to the wishes of some. Ginsberg, a stray outsider who made noise is being embraced and absorbed by Insiders as a way to defang what he stood for; to smooth the disruption of the Beats against status quo culture and leave no ripples in the literary pond.
Mark Doty speaks in the current American Poetry Review about Ginsberg's dissent against "spirit-crushing monolithic Moloch." Re-read the Moloch passages of "Howl." Moloch today is a thousand times stronger than it was in Ginsberg's time. The corporations are a thousand times more intrusive and omnipresent. They own rebellion itself!-- which has become merely a commodity; they own the t-shirts and the hipster poses of the slave captives of consumerist culture.
The literary world today is a thousand times more conformist than it was in Ginsberg's day, when he put the words to "Howl" onto a page. There are a thousand more things now to Howl about.
The mandarins of lit, as represented with the Miller Hall group, see literature as the society sees approved art-- of, by, and for the upper classes and maintained in exclusive museums which do nothing so much as point out the art's separation from the social world.
The stakes for underground writers are very high. We're fighting for our history-- to retain traces of our words and ideas. We're fighting against a society that would wipe us and our words out; that would extinguish every shred of memory of outsider writers. Only the approved kind will stand, according to the wishes of some. Ginsberg, a stray outsider who made noise is being embraced and absorbed by Insiders as a way to defang what he stood for; to smooth the disruption of the Beats against status quo culture and leave no ripples in the literary pond.
Mark Doty speaks in the current American Poetry Review about Ginsberg's dissent against "spirit-crushing monolithic Moloch." Re-read the Moloch passages of "Howl." Moloch today is a thousand times stronger than it was in Ginsberg's time. The corporations are a thousand times more intrusive and omnipresent. They own rebellion itself!-- which has become merely a commodity; they own the t-shirts and the hipster poses of the slave captives of consumerist culture.
The literary world today is a thousand times more conformist than it was in Ginsberg's day, when he put the words to "Howl" onto a page. There are a thousand more things now to Howl about.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Abdicate!
NOTICE that the arguments of the flunkies of the Establishment Overdogs who'll be reading at Miller Hall April 17th don't attempt to put forth the rightness of their positions, the talent of their words and voices, or the justice of their cause. Like aristocrats of days past they argue from their own weakness. "Leave us alone!" they plead. "We're fragile personalities of delicate health!"
To which I respond: Abdicate.
I'm sure they have nice health plans, these tenured profs, while for myself as for so many Americans (for so many ULAers), if I get sick, I die. Shinder, Lopate, Doty, and Moody have it many times easier than most of us. If they can't survive their lives, how would they survive ours?
If they're really so weak, they should abdicate.
Because we've targeted the Poster Boy of Corruption in our arguments, we're said to have "personal" grudges, when our fight is about the System of Literature and those it puts in charge.
Abdicate!
Poster Boy travels with a phalanx of security. Columbia, supposed icon of anti-censorship, is flooded with guards to protect the professors and children of affluence. They tell us their guards are even more broke and hungry than we are! Who pays them? Who runs this society? Aren't the leaders graduates of Ivy League temples of privilege like Columbia? Didn't they create this world? Isn't Poster Boy's money-center banker father one of the rulers of the globe? Let's add to our protest a protest at the impoverished conditions of the aristocrats' guards!
Abdicate!
We're told Doty and Lopate don't even like Ginsberg's writing. They'll be on stage regardless. Their towers of privilege are scams, their poetry is a fraud. They don't deserve their lofty station and know it. Their only surprise at our outcry is that it took so long. Their art is decrepit, roadblock to renewal, unable to connect with the populace. Their poetry academy with $150 admission fee protects not the nation's best poetry but its worst. We're here to denounce their bastions and barriers of inequity and falsehood.
ABDICATE!
To which I respond: Abdicate.
I'm sure they have nice health plans, these tenured profs, while for myself as for so many Americans (for so many ULAers), if I get sick, I die. Shinder, Lopate, Doty, and Moody have it many times easier than most of us. If they can't survive their lives, how would they survive ours?
If they're really so weak, they should abdicate.
Because we've targeted the Poster Boy of Corruption in our arguments, we're said to have "personal" grudges, when our fight is about the System of Literature and those it puts in charge.
Abdicate!
Poster Boy travels with a phalanx of security. Columbia, supposed icon of anti-censorship, is flooded with guards to protect the professors and children of affluence. They tell us their guards are even more broke and hungry than we are! Who pays them? Who runs this society? Aren't the leaders graduates of Ivy League temples of privilege like Columbia? Didn't they create this world? Isn't Poster Boy's money-center banker father one of the rulers of the globe? Let's add to our protest a protest at the impoverished conditions of the aristocrats' guards!
Abdicate!
We're told Doty and Lopate don't even like Ginsberg's writing. They'll be on stage regardless. Their towers of privilege are scams, their poetry is a fraud. They don't deserve their lofty station and know it. Their only surprise at our outcry is that it took so long. Their art is decrepit, roadblock to renewal, unable to connect with the populace. Their poetry academy with $150 admission fee protects not the nation's best poetry but its worst. We're here to denounce their bastions and barriers of inequity and falsehood.
ABDICATE!
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
CHALLENGE!!!!
The U N D E R G R O U N D L I T E R A R Y A L L I A N C E Challenges
Jason Shinder
Philip Lopate
Mark Doty
Rick Moody
To read against us at Columbia University on April 17th,
inside or outside
on stage or a sidewalk or a lawn
(or at a time and place of their choosing)
to see WHO are the true inheritors of the Beat movement,
WHO can "Howl,"
WHO has the poetic and rhetorical chops,
WHO are the advocates of free expression
the word uncensored and open to all.
WE CHALLENGE them to meet us April 17th
with words not security guards
in an atmosphere of amity and equality
replacing hierarchy, bureaucracy, and snobbery.
The ghost of Ginsberg would have it no other way.
Jason Shinder
Philip Lopate
Mark Doty
Rick Moody
To read against us at Columbia University on April 17th,
inside or outside
on stage or a sidewalk or a lawn
(or at a time and place of their choosing)
to see WHO are the true inheritors of the Beat movement,
WHO can "Howl,"
WHO has the poetic and rhetorical chops,
WHO are the advocates of free expression
the word uncensored and open to all.
WE CHALLENGE them to meet us April 17th
with words not security guards
in an atmosphere of amity and equality
replacing hierarchy, bureaucracy, and snobbery.
The ghost of Ginsberg would have it no other way.
Democracy or Exclusiveness?
The chief problem with the fake poets at the fake "Howl" event is that they don't believe in free expression at all. Which is why their event celebrating Ginberg's fight against censorship is such a sham.
What have we received from these characters in response to our recent noise (other than three whiny anonymous e-mails)? Silence! Be quiet, children!
No strong confident voices to be found among the Miller Hall bunch. Definitely not. They cringe at the very hint of disagreement or debate.
Myself, I cut my teeth in free expression while working in factories and working-class bars. Uninhibited expression; nothing held back. No holds barred debate on any topic, the Sensitivity Police nowhere around.
Since I've begun operating on the fringes of the literary world, I encounter everywhere the Politeness Police, hall monitors of literature, regulating their world, keeping everyone and especially themselves silent.
This is not democracy, folks. As literature it's a sham; a con job. It's why literature is dead.
Given the overall noise of this extremely monumentally noisy society, how is lit to survive if it makes no noises as well? How can it compete when it fears any kind of messy give-and-take?
Established lit doesn't want to compete. It's about it's own exclusiveness; little else.
But the Underground Literary Alliance wants to bring lit to the people, to connect with the general populace, and we're capable of doing so.
What have we received from these characters in response to our recent noise (other than three whiny anonymous e-mails)? Silence! Be quiet, children!
No strong confident voices to be found among the Miller Hall bunch. Definitely not. They cringe at the very hint of disagreement or debate.
Myself, I cut my teeth in free expression while working in factories and working-class bars. Uninhibited expression; nothing held back. No holds barred debate on any topic, the Sensitivity Police nowhere around.
Since I've begun operating on the fringes of the literary world, I encounter everywhere the Politeness Police, hall monitors of literature, regulating their world, keeping everyone and especially themselves silent.
This is not democracy, folks. As literature it's a sham; a con job. It's why literature is dead.
Given the overall noise of this extremely monumentally noisy society, how is lit to survive if it makes no noises as well? How can it compete when it fears any kind of messy give-and-take?
Established lit doesn't want to compete. It's about it's own exclusiveness; little else.
But the Underground Literary Alliance wants to bring lit to the people, to connect with the general populace, and we're capable of doing so.
Monday, March 20, 2006
Worried E-Mails
"He pities the plumage but forgets the dying bird."
-Tom Paine
I've received a few anonymous e-mails from a person concerned about my criticisms of Bennington College and establishment poet Philip Lopate. The person informs me that Lopate is a nice guy and I shouldn't pick on him. The e-mailer also says that Bennington is a very nice place.
I'm sure it is!-- for the comfortable few who attend that private bastion of privilege. All is well in their bubble world-- except for begrimed outsiders daring to make noise!
The anonymous correspondent has the world turned on its head. (The world is crushing us down yet somehow we're able to pick on it.) Establishment lit, of which Lopate is fully part, has enclosed itself within a castle of exclusivity with raised drawbridge. They've cut off all roads into American literature except one-- the narrow path of subservience. There is no level playing field. (If there was they'd lose.)
Yet how distasteful they find those who raise their voices about this! Tea time in the plush faculty room-- several officially-endorsed "poets" secluded within become worried at stray sounds of contrary opinion outside their quiet world. "Are poets speaking aloud?" one thinks to ask, while parked in an enormous armchair. "Are they speaking about US?"
"Harumph!" another in the airless room responds, while turning yellow unreadable pages of the New York Review of Books. "How unfair. I truly must protest!"
He looks around bewildered-- he's unsure exactly who to protest TO. The kitchen staff at this exclusive club? No complaints there. Lunch was excellent. The doormen? Thoroughly accommodating as well. Voices outside the club grow louder. Who manages this facility, anyway? He doesn't even know.
The mandarin draws closer into his armchair and turns the blurry pages of his paper faster. The room feels suddenly cold. Only the sight of bustling waiters assures him of the security of this stony refuge.
*************************************************************
"At the Pet Shop": A Poem
Four fake show-dog poet pets
Presented to you direct from the Establish-ment
Shinder, Lopate, Doty, and Moody
Watch as they pretend to be Beats
Shinder, Lopate, Doty, and Moody
though they know nothing 'bout the streets
Shinder, Lopate, Doty, and Moody
Phony howlers have answered the call
On stage April in Miller Hall
Careerist bureaucrats one and all
Shinder, Lopate, Doty, and Moody
-Tom Paine
I've received a few anonymous e-mails from a person concerned about my criticisms of Bennington College and establishment poet Philip Lopate. The person informs me that Lopate is a nice guy and I shouldn't pick on him. The e-mailer also says that Bennington is a very nice place.
I'm sure it is!-- for the comfortable few who attend that private bastion of privilege. All is well in their bubble world-- except for begrimed outsiders daring to make noise!
The anonymous correspondent has the world turned on its head. (The world is crushing us down yet somehow we're able to pick on it.) Establishment lit, of which Lopate is fully part, has enclosed itself within a castle of exclusivity with raised drawbridge. They've cut off all roads into American literature except one-- the narrow path of subservience. There is no level playing field. (If there was they'd lose.)
Yet how distasteful they find those who raise their voices about this! Tea time in the plush faculty room-- several officially-endorsed "poets" secluded within become worried at stray sounds of contrary opinion outside their quiet world. "Are poets speaking aloud?" one thinks to ask, while parked in an enormous armchair. "Are they speaking about US?"
"Harumph!" another in the airless room responds, while turning yellow unreadable pages of the New York Review of Books. "How unfair. I truly must protest!"
He looks around bewildered-- he's unsure exactly who to protest TO. The kitchen staff at this exclusive club? No complaints there. Lunch was excellent. The doormen? Thoroughly accommodating as well. Voices outside the club grow louder. Who manages this facility, anyway? He doesn't even know.
The mandarin draws closer into his armchair and turns the blurry pages of his paper faster. The room feels suddenly cold. Only the sight of bustling waiters assures him of the security of this stony refuge.
*************************************************************
"At the Pet Shop": A Poem
Four fake show-dog poet pets
Presented to you direct from the Establish-ment
Shinder, Lopate, Doty, and Moody
Watch as they pretend to be Beats
Shinder, Lopate, Doty, and Moody
though they know nothing 'bout the streets
Shinder, Lopate, Doty, and Moody
Phony howlers have answered the call
On stage April in Miller Hall
Careerist bureaucrats one and all
Shinder, Lopate, Doty, and Moody
Thursday, March 16, 2006
How the Columbia "Howl" Event Celebrates Censorship
It was by lucky accident that a group of outsider writers known as the Beats became known, through the notoriety of Allen Ginsberg's censorship trial, but most especially because a fill-in-for-the-day reviewer gave Kerouac's On the Road a rave review in the New York Times. There followed a couple years of fame and mockery. A few of the Beats, including Ginsberg, were partly co-opted by the literary establishment, as curiosity pieces more than anything. Others, like Bob Kaufman, died at an early age. The Outsiders publicly sounded their drums for a few short tumultuous years-- then the placid ship of American lit resumed its placid course, in placid waters, a luxury cruise ship for the complacent and the affluent.
Amid an expanding media universe, most folk writers, America's genuine talents, have remained beneath notice. The journey of Aaron Cometbus, for instance, the underground success of his zeen, has been an important literary phenomenon of the last fifteen years. This stray outbreak of authentic culture (that not imposed from on high by institutions) received brief attention-- then Cometbus returned to oblivion, where he exists now, still riding buses and hand-writing his zeens, I'd guess.
What will the system-writers and mandarins of established lit be celebrating at Columbia April 17th?
They'll be celebrating their triumph over the underground, by raising up ONE token outsider and ignoring everyone else. ONE independent poet in a fifty-year period gains their recognition. They celebrate the fact they co-opted him. They show us, on an institutional stage, that their System is safe, the walls of privilege and hierarchy still stand around them-- still covered in ivy-- the undomesticated beast (as represented by a cardboard cut-out of Allen Ginsberg) has been tamed.
Do they care for an instant about the folk writers and outsider voices of our own day-- the Bill Blackolives Jack Saunders Urban Hermitts and Aaron Cometbuses? Will they spend one minute to find them? NO! Of course not. Present such genuine literary figures at their feet and they'd feign not to see them. It's not what they're about-- not what the Columbia circus show is about, which is to honor titles bureaucracy conformity and machine; to honor THEMSELVES, the survivors of American literature's homogenization process.
The gentrified audience politely applauds. Aristocracy triumphant.
The Underground Literary Alliance exists as the opposite of this. Our task is to record and celebrate the folk writers of our time; to create and announce this civilization's authentic literature.
www.literaryrevolution.com
Amid an expanding media universe, most folk writers, America's genuine talents, have remained beneath notice. The journey of Aaron Cometbus, for instance, the underground success of his zeen, has been an important literary phenomenon of the last fifteen years. This stray outbreak of authentic culture (that not imposed from on high by institutions) received brief attention-- then Cometbus returned to oblivion, where he exists now, still riding buses and hand-writing his zeens, I'd guess.
What will the system-writers and mandarins of established lit be celebrating at Columbia April 17th?
They'll be celebrating their triumph over the underground, by raising up ONE token outsider and ignoring everyone else. ONE independent poet in a fifty-year period gains their recognition. They celebrate the fact they co-opted him. They show us, on an institutional stage, that their System is safe, the walls of privilege and hierarchy still stand around them-- still covered in ivy-- the undomesticated beast (as represented by a cardboard cut-out of Allen Ginsberg) has been tamed.
Do they care for an instant about the folk writers and outsider voices of our own day-- the Bill Blackolives Jack Saunders Urban Hermitts and Aaron Cometbuses? Will they spend one minute to find them? NO! Of course not. Present such genuine literary figures at their feet and they'd feign not to see them. It's not what they're about-- not what the Columbia circus show is about, which is to honor titles bureaucracy conformity and machine; to honor THEMSELVES, the survivors of American literature's homogenization process.
The gentrified audience politely applauds. Aristocracy triumphant.
The Underground Literary Alliance exists as the opposite of this. Our task is to record and celebrate the folk writers of our time; to create and announce this civilization's authentic literature.
www.literaryrevolution.com
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
American Literature Today: Aristocrats or the Street?
WHAT WE HAVE with the April 17th fake "Howl" reading at Columbia University is a small clique of Insider poets and writers exhibiting their privilege. If "poetry" is that which exists inside the academy, then as an art form it's dead.
Fortunately, it's alive and healthy outside the walls. The posers and professors know this, which is why they embrace long-ago outsider poet Allen Ginsberg (and his outsider period) as a way to bolster their scant credibility.
How does their sham continue? Because of literary enablers. Because of a large flock of sheep whose brains are so stunted by academy "training" they're incapable of considering action, much less taking it. They slavishly regurgitate their schooling in snobby imitation of the aristocrats and bureaucrats. They're not poets-- not flesh and blood human beings-- are bloodless anonymous mechanical robots, continuing eternally on-line the same irrelevant discussions from their days pursuing graduate degrees.
Discuss, discuss, discuss-- the same tired points-of-view, no new perspectives seen; never an impetus or urgency for change. Cultural revolution isn't made by such people.
The struggle of writers in this country is not something to which they can relate. Either they've never struggled themselves-- never suffered or starved for their art-- or they're not really writers. Literature for them isn't an obsession which possesses their souls and minds (as art has been for the greats); is instead a career or a hobby; something to do with their time. Do they care if the state of the art is terrible? Does it matter to them if they raise literature's role in this country? Not really. Change to them is an academic question to be discussed academically, detached from the populace and the larger society.
Give me passionate writers! That's what we want in the ULA. It's what we've brought into our ranks time after time. A few years ago we conducted a ULA Survey. The first question asked writers to rate the importance of literature in their lives on a scale of 1 to 10. ULAers invariably answered with at least an 8. Many said 10. Establishment writers and their demi-puppet followers who responded by contrast seldom gave as answer more than a 5.
There are two questions now to answer.
1.) Is literature worth changing?
2.) How far are you prepared to go to change it?
The ULA exists as an activist organization. It's why we were created. We're here to inject energy into a moribund lit scene. We bring with us voices and change. Watch out! We're coming your way.
Fortunately, it's alive and healthy outside the walls. The posers and professors know this, which is why they embrace long-ago outsider poet Allen Ginsberg (and his outsider period) as a way to bolster their scant credibility.
How does their sham continue? Because of literary enablers. Because of a large flock of sheep whose brains are so stunted by academy "training" they're incapable of considering action, much less taking it. They slavishly regurgitate their schooling in snobby imitation of the aristocrats and bureaucrats. They're not poets-- not flesh and blood human beings-- are bloodless anonymous mechanical robots, continuing eternally on-line the same irrelevant discussions from their days pursuing graduate degrees.
Discuss, discuss, discuss-- the same tired points-of-view, no new perspectives seen; never an impetus or urgency for change. Cultural revolution isn't made by such people.
The struggle of writers in this country is not something to which they can relate. Either they've never struggled themselves-- never suffered or starved for their art-- or they're not really writers. Literature for them isn't an obsession which possesses their souls and minds (as art has been for the greats); is instead a career or a hobby; something to do with their time. Do they care if the state of the art is terrible? Does it matter to them if they raise literature's role in this country? Not really. Change to them is an academic question to be discussed academically, detached from the populace and the larger society.
Give me passionate writers! That's what we want in the ULA. It's what we've brought into our ranks time after time. A few years ago we conducted a ULA Survey. The first question asked writers to rate the importance of literature in their lives on a scale of 1 to 10. ULAers invariably answered with at least an 8. Many said 10. Establishment writers and their demi-puppet followers who responded by contrast seldom gave as answer more than a 5.
There are two questions now to answer.
1.) Is literature worth changing?
2.) How far are you prepared to go to change it?
The ULA exists as an activist organization. It's why we were created. We're here to inject energy into a moribund lit scene. We bring with us voices and change. Watch out! We're coming your way.
Monday, March 13, 2006
More n+1: Readings
One of the first things to catch my eye in the two back issues of n+1 was a short piece about literary readings titled, "Cancel Them."
Cancel them? Yes, establishment readings are completely lame. This fact, with n+1's reaction, illustrates the complete decline of contemporary literature.
"Cancel Them"? I can appreciate where n+1's editors are coming from, but let's recognize that writers once knew how to put on great readings-- Charles Dickens the outstanding example. Let's remember that literature was spoken FIRST; that The Iliad, greatest of epic poems, was performed and passed down orally for generations before it was ever written. Let's recall that Shakespeare himself, greatest of all writers, lived in the netherworld between oral and written culture, the power of his language attained because he thought in terms of spoken language first. Marlowe and Shakespeare were poets who turned their poetry into performance. Literature without performance is partly dead; I fear our intellectual class which n+1 lauds has reached an evolutionary stage of brain without body; words without voice. A science fiction movie of murmuring disconnected brains in jars of fluid.
This is a point at which ULAers are revivalists.
I agree with n+1 that most literary readings suck. It's a point I made in my New Philistine zeen throughout the 90's. This was the first point on which the nascent ULA asserted itself-- for instance at a drone-a-thon reading by Tom Beller in June 2000 at which I sat conspicuously reading a book. My frustration at witnessing an endless parade of fakirs explains my outraged behavior at KGB the next year (for which I'm still castigated); my attitude akin to that of an impresario in an old movie who explodes at the prospect of an art, which to him is a religion, performed by the untalented.
The criticism n+1 makes of literary readings is true-- except they place the fault in the wrong spot, with literary readings themselves, when the fault lies with the the writers. If those who publicly read are no good (as much because of their limpid words as their voices), then let them give up the stage to those who know what they're doing!
These days I make my living with my voice, employed afternoons and evenings in the lowly role of telemarketer. I have much time to ponder and practice the effectiveness of words, as I create stories and magical images to people over the phone.
A recent night I sat next to an elderly caller named Sandy who like all of us works the demanding low-pay job because she has to. She's one of a calling room of voices.
Sandy is a difficult person to sit next to. She requires a cane to help her fragile crippled body to walk; she's half-blind, and eternally disorganized, fumbling with her list of prices or in her disarrayed purse for a calculator while a potential sale waits changing his-or-her mind on the open line.
I'll sit listening in my chair in frantic suspense wondering if she's about to blow another sale; she clearly needs the commission bucks. "Sandy, Sandy, Sandy," I think to myself. "Get yourself organized."
She's merely a memory of what once was. All that sustains her on the job is a still warm and supple voice. Everything else is going on her-- she's in a state of total collapse (not unlike establishment lit). However, when it's needed for the phone, she still has the sound of her perfect voice.
One evening Sandy was more disorganized and cranky than normal, so much that it affected my own calling. A bad night for me; I hadn't made a single sale. In desperation in the closing minutes of the shift I called on all my own voice's resonance; I prodded and cajoled, but was still unable to persuade people. The shift ended.
Sandy, forever confused about everything, blinking at me behind her distorted eyeglasses, asked when was the last day of a particular offer, even though our boss had mentioned the deadline a dozen times.
"Tomorrow," I said as I put away my leads, with difficulty maintaining my patience.
"Tomorrow?" Sandy asked again.
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow!" I said with exasperation.
The fragile old woman sat straight with rare strength in response to my bullying. "Creeps in this petty pace from day to day," she shot back proudly with perfect enunciation.
I rose and spoke as if on a stage. "Til the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted FOOLS the way to dusty death!"
"Out out brief candle!" Sandy returned magnificently, drawing the words from the dust-bin recordings of a long-ago high school education. "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player who STRUTS and frets his hour upon the stage, then is heard no more."
I smiled, because I had the last line of the wonderful solilquoy. "It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and FURY," I thundered, "signifying nothing."
The other callers stared at us open-mouthed. I've done open mics and know when I'm on-- I was never more "on" than this evening. At least as impressive was Sandy. She clattered out of the calling room with her noisy cane, head back, exiting on a dramatic high to silent applause.
Literature is powerful and invigorating when spoken properly.
Cancel them? Yes, establishment readings are completely lame. This fact, with n+1's reaction, illustrates the complete decline of contemporary literature.
"Cancel Them"? I can appreciate where n+1's editors are coming from, but let's recognize that writers once knew how to put on great readings-- Charles Dickens the outstanding example. Let's remember that literature was spoken FIRST; that The Iliad, greatest of epic poems, was performed and passed down orally for generations before it was ever written. Let's recall that Shakespeare himself, greatest of all writers, lived in the netherworld between oral and written culture, the power of his language attained because he thought in terms of spoken language first. Marlowe and Shakespeare were poets who turned their poetry into performance. Literature without performance is partly dead; I fear our intellectual class which n+1 lauds has reached an evolutionary stage of brain without body; words without voice. A science fiction movie of murmuring disconnected brains in jars of fluid.
This is a point at which ULAers are revivalists.
I agree with n+1 that most literary readings suck. It's a point I made in my New Philistine zeen throughout the 90's. This was the first point on which the nascent ULA asserted itself-- for instance at a drone-a-thon reading by Tom Beller in June 2000 at which I sat conspicuously reading a book. My frustration at witnessing an endless parade of fakirs explains my outraged behavior at KGB the next year (for which I'm still castigated); my attitude akin to that of an impresario in an old movie who explodes at the prospect of an art, which to him is a religion, performed by the untalented.
The criticism n+1 makes of literary readings is true-- except they place the fault in the wrong spot, with literary readings themselves, when the fault lies with the the writers. If those who publicly read are no good (as much because of their limpid words as their voices), then let them give up the stage to those who know what they're doing!
These days I make my living with my voice, employed afternoons and evenings in the lowly role of telemarketer. I have much time to ponder and practice the effectiveness of words, as I create stories and magical images to people over the phone.
A recent night I sat next to an elderly caller named Sandy who like all of us works the demanding low-pay job because she has to. She's one of a calling room of voices.
Sandy is a difficult person to sit next to. She requires a cane to help her fragile crippled body to walk; she's half-blind, and eternally disorganized, fumbling with her list of prices or in her disarrayed purse for a calculator while a potential sale waits changing his-or-her mind on the open line.
I'll sit listening in my chair in frantic suspense wondering if she's about to blow another sale; she clearly needs the commission bucks. "Sandy, Sandy, Sandy," I think to myself. "Get yourself organized."
She's merely a memory of what once was. All that sustains her on the job is a still warm and supple voice. Everything else is going on her-- she's in a state of total collapse (not unlike establishment lit). However, when it's needed for the phone, she still has the sound of her perfect voice.
One evening Sandy was more disorganized and cranky than normal, so much that it affected my own calling. A bad night for me; I hadn't made a single sale. In desperation in the closing minutes of the shift I called on all my own voice's resonance; I prodded and cajoled, but was still unable to persuade people. The shift ended.
Sandy, forever confused about everything, blinking at me behind her distorted eyeglasses, asked when was the last day of a particular offer, even though our boss had mentioned the deadline a dozen times.
"Tomorrow," I said as I put away my leads, with difficulty maintaining my patience.
"Tomorrow?" Sandy asked again.
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow!" I said with exasperation.
The fragile old woman sat straight with rare strength in response to my bullying. "Creeps in this petty pace from day to day," she shot back proudly with perfect enunciation.
I rose and spoke as if on a stage. "Til the last syllable of recorded time. And all our yesterdays have lighted FOOLS the way to dusty death!"
"Out out brief candle!" Sandy returned magnificently, drawing the words from the dust-bin recordings of a long-ago high school education. "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player who STRUTS and frets his hour upon the stage, then is heard no more."
I smiled, because I had the last line of the wonderful solilquoy. "It's a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and FURY," I thundered, "signifying nothing."
The other callers stared at us open-mouthed. I've done open mics and know when I'm on-- I was never more "on" than this evening. At least as impressive was Sandy. She clattered out of the calling room with her noisy cane, head back, exiting on a dramatic high to silent applause.
Literature is powerful and invigorating when spoken properly.
Tuesday, March 07, 2006
Beat Down
Many people don't realize the original use of the word "beat" by the Beats was in the sense of feeling beat; i.e., tired; knocked down by life. Bedraggled, used, and abused. Gray sky broke unemployed tired-feet pavement pounding; disrespected, disoriented, no food no cigarettes can I bum a ride? They were society's misfits and knew this and felt it their every living moment. Those who will not or cannot conform to the demands of the System (oppressive then in the Fifties; many times moreso now).
I wonder how possibly "beat" could be the successful establishment Overdogs celebrating Howl's fifty-year anniversary April 17th? One can speculate.
Jason Shinder's toy poodle has sniffles and needs to be taken to the veterinarian.
Ann Douglas is miffed because of the lateness of the carpet cleaners.
Professors Lopate and Doty are having frustrating times
keeping students awake during the seven hours total of classes they teach a week. Reaction to their stale poetry has been less than dazzling. ("You blow!" comes a remark from the back after one session of professorial preening.)
Rick Moody meanwhile is depressed over a smudge of mud on one of his limousines. He's considering therapy.
I wonder how possibly "beat" could be the successful establishment Overdogs celebrating Howl's fifty-year anniversary April 17th? One can speculate.
Jason Shinder's toy poodle has sniffles and needs to be taken to the veterinarian.
Ann Douglas is miffed because of the lateness of the carpet cleaners.
Professors Lopate and Doty are having frustrating times
keeping students awake during the seven hours total of classes they teach a week. Reaction to their stale poetry has been less than dazzling. ("You blow!" comes a remark from the back after one session of professorial preening.)
Rick Moody meanwhile is depressed over a smudge of mud on one of his limousines. He's considering therapy.
Monday, March 06, 2006
Games of the Literary Establishment
Or, Institutions Are the Death of Culture.
(My take on an upcoming series of reports at www.literaryrevolution.com.)
We're witnessing a full-scale attempt by System writers and bureaucrats to destroy the literary underground; to banish the very idea of an underground. They're doing this by merging underground heroes with the System in people's heads.
It's not going to work.
The planned co-optation goes ahead regardless. The apparatchiks have little credibility of their own and can gain some only by grasping hungrily onto non-threatening (because dead) literary rebels of the past such as Allen Ginsberg.
It's a tired ploy tried in art form after art form.
The outstanding example of co-optation in the music business was Elvis Presley, bought from tiny Sun Records by a conglomerate and quickly enough cleaned-up and tamed. It's to Elvis's credit, though, that the only Grammy he ever won was for his religious music. When alive, he never found true acceptance by the cultural snobs of the time.
As neither did Ray Charles, least not when he was earthy and new enough to represent a shock of difference. Fitting, for how the music establishment works, that Ray Charles won eight Grammy awards after he was dead!
(The Year: 2040. Underground lit legend Jack Saunders is posthumously honored at a Manhattan awards ceremony, main speech given by Hiram F. "Dick" Moody IV, son of "Rick" Moody the novelist, who beams approvingly from a front table.)
Now the Sex Pistols have been voted into the white elephant rip-off in Cleveland known as the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame, there to join non-rocking industry icons like James Taylor (??) and piano bar singer Billy Joel, who was only intermittently a rocker. (Where's Midwest garage band pioneer Tommy James? Or Chubby? Between Elvis and the Beatles, Chubby Checker single-handedly kept alive the rock n' roll flame with a string of monster hits like "The Twist.")
It's to Johnny "Rotten" Lyndon of the Sex Pistols's credit that he's spoken out against attempts to co-opt himself. He says he's not going to his Rock Hall of Fame induction/embalming ceremony/cremation at the super-pricey Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City, a setting the opposite of the grubby background Johnny Rotten comes from. In his own words: "--that hall of fame is a piss stain. Your museum. Urine in wine. We're not coming. If you voted for us, hope you noted your reasons. Your anonymous as judges, but your still music industry people. We're not coming. Your not paying attention. Outside the shit-stem is a real Sex Pistol."
(My take on an upcoming series of reports at www.literaryrevolution.com.)
We're witnessing a full-scale attempt by System writers and bureaucrats to destroy the literary underground; to banish the very idea of an underground. They're doing this by merging underground heroes with the System in people's heads.
It's not going to work.
The planned co-optation goes ahead regardless. The apparatchiks have little credibility of their own and can gain some only by grasping hungrily onto non-threatening (because dead) literary rebels of the past such as Allen Ginsberg.
It's a tired ploy tried in art form after art form.
The outstanding example of co-optation in the music business was Elvis Presley, bought from tiny Sun Records by a conglomerate and quickly enough cleaned-up and tamed. It's to Elvis's credit, though, that the only Grammy he ever won was for his religious music. When alive, he never found true acceptance by the cultural snobs of the time.
As neither did Ray Charles, least not when he was earthy and new enough to represent a shock of difference. Fitting, for how the music establishment works, that Ray Charles won eight Grammy awards after he was dead!
(The Year: 2040. Underground lit legend Jack Saunders is posthumously honored at a Manhattan awards ceremony, main speech given by Hiram F. "Dick" Moody IV, son of "Rick" Moody the novelist, who beams approvingly from a front table.)
Now the Sex Pistols have been voted into the white elephant rip-off in Cleveland known as the Rock n' Roll Hall of Fame, there to join non-rocking industry icons like James Taylor (??) and piano bar singer Billy Joel, who was only intermittently a rocker. (Where's Midwest garage band pioneer Tommy James? Or Chubby? Between Elvis and the Beatles, Chubby Checker single-handedly kept alive the rock n' roll flame with a string of monster hits like "The Twist.")
It's to Johnny "Rotten" Lyndon of the Sex Pistols's credit that he's spoken out against attempts to co-opt himself. He says he's not going to his Rock Hall of Fame induction/embalming ceremony/cremation at the super-pricey Waldorf Astoria hotel in New York City, a setting the opposite of the grubby background Johnny Rotten comes from. In his own words: "--that hall of fame is a piss stain. Your museum. Urine in wine. We're not coming. If you voted for us, hope you noted your reasons. Your anonymous as judges, but your still music industry people. We're not coming. Your not paying attention. Outside the shit-stem is a real Sex Pistol."
Not Politics-- Reality
To reference Tony Christini's recent "Monday Report" at the ULA's www.literaryrevolution.com site: Speaking for myself, I've not wanted to inject politics into literature, only naturalistic reality-- truths about this country.
I have not a political agenda, but a literary one.
For instance, many of the nation's most affluent writers insist on referring to themselves as middle-class, while believing this is a classless society (it's anything but; the differences between how people live are gaping). Anything that then conflicts with this mythic belief has to be wiped out by them; removed from their sight.
It's of a piece with the attacks on homeless people recently (another beaten and set fire to yesterday). Those raised in privilege willfully refuse to see the stark inequities of our civilization. For writers-- those whose view should be unflinching-- to have this mindset is one reason why literature has become irrelevant to our time.
To answer Christini's final query of whether or not anyone will publish polemical fiction: To ask the question is to buy into the monopolistic status quo. The solution is to publish, market, and promote ourselves. This is what DIY thinking means; the foundation of ULA philosophy.
I have not a political agenda, but a literary one.
For instance, many of the nation's most affluent writers insist on referring to themselves as middle-class, while believing this is a classless society (it's anything but; the differences between how people live are gaping). Anything that then conflicts with this mythic belief has to be wiped out by them; removed from their sight.
It's of a piece with the attacks on homeless people recently (another beaten and set fire to yesterday). Those raised in privilege willfully refuse to see the stark inequities of our civilization. For writers-- those whose view should be unflinching-- to have this mindset is one reason why literature has become irrelevant to our time.
To answer Christini's final query of whether or not anyone will publish polemical fiction: To ask the question is to buy into the monopolistic status quo. The solution is to publish, market, and promote ourselves. This is what DIY thinking means; the foundation of ULA philosophy.
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
"Know-Nothings": A Poem
YOU EMBRACE Ginsberg's howls
of fiery anger and pain
but you know nothing about them.
YOU SPEAK of Blake's struggle,
Poe's insanity,
Van Gogh's ear,
but you know nothing about them.
YOU TEACH about Gertrude Stein,
Joyce and Pound,
decades of oblivion
when they generously propped one another against
the rocks of ignorance
of literature's mandarin
arterialsclerosis.
EVERY TIME you've been wrong
timid trend-following scholars,
forever wrong
continually and again wrong
once more a hundred thousand times wrong
about the true lasting poets
and prosists, purveyors of the word
relevant for their time and all time.
Clowns in classrooms
clutching syllabi reading lists
dribbling coffee with tired pontifications
while listeners doze
cultural hand-me-downs;
cannibalizers of writers you seek to emulate
attaching to their tardy fame your careerist wagons,
Proclaiming your connection to their independence and madness!
their unmatched sounds
Yet you know nothing about them.
of fiery anger and pain
but you know nothing about them.
YOU SPEAK of Blake's struggle,
Poe's insanity,
Van Gogh's ear,
but you know nothing about them.
YOU TEACH about Gertrude Stein,
Joyce and Pound,
decades of oblivion
when they generously propped one another against
the rocks of ignorance
of literature's mandarin
arterialsclerosis.
EVERY TIME you've been wrong
timid trend-following scholars,
forever wrong
continually and again wrong
once more a hundred thousand times wrong
about the true lasting poets
and prosists, purveyors of the word
relevant for their time and all time.
Clowns in classrooms
clutching syllabi reading lists
dribbling coffee with tired pontifications
while listeners doze
cultural hand-me-downs;
cannibalizers of writers you seek to emulate
attaching to their tardy fame your careerist wagons,
Proclaiming your connection to their independence and madness!
their unmatched sounds
Yet you know nothing about them.
Wednesday, February 22, 2006
ULA Mailbox
I. n+1.
I received the first two issues. The journal is important enough that I intend to devote more than one post to it. Two things stand out during quick scanning.
First, that n+1 is many times better as an intellectual journal than The Believer; maybe a hundred times better, because The Believer is about in-crowd posturing while the n+1'ers know how to think and communicate.
Second, it's curious that the two journals have been linked together in articles, though n+1 spends a lot of time in its first issue attacking The Believer and strongly asserting their differences. The editors didn't assert their differences strongly enough! Still, to use an article about n+1 to grovel to the Eggers crowd, to chain-link the two journals together, as the N.Y. Times did, is unfair and goofy.
About n+1 itself:
It's soundly constructed. It presents itself well. What the writers say is often thought-provoking. One can nod at the accomplishment and admit, "Yes, this is the best the present system of literature can give us."
But that's the point. What quickly becomes noticeable, then starkly obvious, hit-you-over-the-head obvious, is the sameness of the writing. Is this a collection of many minds-- or of one? The writers are interchangeable; the lack of individuality fills most of the pages; you check who wrote something, seeing the initials MG, MR, BK, KG, or whomever, and you're still not sure of the writer. The first few articles in each issue list no author, nor is one needed, as they're of one piece, with the same voice, the same premises and perspective, the same education, same reading list; the same masks of learning and touchstone name-dropping. (James Wood is assumed to be an important critic. The Corrections is assumed to be an important work of fiction, "a monumental renewal of the critical social novel." I'm reminded of the Yale prof a couple years back who would debate me only if I read the books he'd designate; clearly uncomfortable with the idea of a writer from a different American culture, a different American society, with a different reading list, within his own country.)
What n+1 is not is anything new. There's no attempt to create a new structure of literature, as the ULA is doing. The castle walls are cracked; water leaks from the ceiling; the floor is cold and the air damp, yet inside the castle the well-trained editors remain, unwilling to give up the tenuous safety of the walls for the unknown dangers of an unruly world of thought outside.
Don't think I'm attacking them! I'm simply discussing what makes the ULA different from them. They're locked within a rigid hand-me-down mindset and are unable to see themselves amid the waves and changes of history. Their wave, their cycle, is ending-- the vehicle carries forward toward a finish line of exhaustion, with fumes in its gas tank. At the same time a new cycle of energy is being born. A wholly new vehicle is being built.
They're polished music critics discussing Mantovani while grubby pioneers beneath their recognition named Presley or Berry or Holly or Dylan in smoky clubs or on tacky stages create the relevant music of the day.
For the n+1 critics literary history is that which is handed to them by the professors of the moldy institutions they've dwelt in. History isn't something they can renew, replace, create, or re-create. Literary history to them isn't a series of waves or clash of forces: it's a straight line. They've gotten in line and assume history is with them. For this instant it is, but the funny thing about history is it's in a state of constant turmoil.
Most obvious of all, despite their good qualities (and they have many), is the narrowness of their perspective. The window in their castle room is small. Their own words state this. Their first Editorial Statement refers to "the best people in our intellectual class." Whatever truths they speak, whatever insights they convey, this is n+1's subject and audience.
II. THE ZEEN WRITER.
Also in my mailbox was #5 of the zine authored by Ammi Emergency. She's not trying to be the best in anyone's intellectual class-- she's taken on the long-time task of the true writer to plunge herself into life and experience; has deliberately chosen the UNtrod path which has led the last several years to tough jobs, rough episodes, and poverty. She encounters the world not through the filter of reading lists, or someone else's ideas, French, postmodern, or otherwise. Her ideas are worked out through living in a community of misfits; she's been a steady dweller in anarchic corners of zinedom.
I'm not objective on the subject. The ULA's roots are in the zine community. Our founders were from this place. As we expand and bring in new people, we should never lose sight of our beginnings. We should retain regard for writers of the authentic zine community; this is where we've found our difference and our authenticity.
"Writing zines is like giving blood for practice. No real reason. Like sleeping on the floor when you have a bed, or riding your bike in a blizzard for money. No good reason at all to risk so much pain and stupidity. Except to see what it feels like. And because writing's like blood in that once it's out you can't put it back in. A puddle of bad spirits and liquid iron on the paper, and you give it away at shows."
THE ZEEN IMPULSE
I was walking down Philadelphia streets one wintry day and saw a homeless guy on the sidewalk scribbling in a notebook. I was reminded of a scruffy young man at the 2004 Zinefest who handed me his hand-written photocopied zine about vagabonding and squatting through West Philly. I was reminded of Urban Hermitt Aaron Cometbus Bill Blackolive a host of great writers scribbling crude zines in diesel buses rural shacks ratty cars flophouse rooms greasy bright pizza shops on bar stools cold sidewalks: everyplace.
MISFITS
What distinguishes the underground writer from the approved kind is that we're hopeless misfits. How many times have I been called a failure by the ULA's critics? Yet failure may be second nature to us; in this mad technological competitive world, an essential part of our being. I'd argue that it's what gives us our soul. I know for myself that only after I was knocked down by life several dozen times was I dispelled of last illusions about myself and the world, to see things not as they were constructed and presented to be seen but as they were.
Underground writers are the table of delinquents and retards everyone else ignores at the back of the school cafeteria; way back, behind the class officers and letter-sweater jocks and preppies and cool people, behind the computer nerds and a.v. people, so far back you can't see them.
Our fashion-punk zeen babe in the ULA's early days became angry when we invited the misfits of zinedom to join our ranks at our first big reading. In reality she was the biggest misfit of all of us, but couldn't see this.
THE ZEEN WRITER
If any current young writer has soul, it's Ammi Emergency, because she writes with searching honesty.
"In the town without sidewalks, I walked the street. . . ."
"It's hard to make a mess in middle-class suburbs. These places are like self-cleaning ovens, the kind people don't cook in for fear of dirtying them. Us punks, we try to make a mess. We try to make a warning. But the suburbs are a self-replicating regime. They make you, they made you and all you can do is make them again. Everything you do becomes them, goes back into the systems you intended to dismantle. Zines on bleached paper, borne of computers, exchanged for dollars that then sink themselves into corporate copy shops and fast food on the strip. Your skate shoes have gasoline on the soles and there's a new punk cd in the changer because it isn't, it isn't, what everyone else is selling."
"They have eaten our language and we have only our discontent. We have only our best friend's parent's car charging up the hill at 2 am, punk band on the cd player, volume 40. The church is enormous and luminous at the crest, where the night sky also begins again. It is coming at us, fast and silver, this monster older than the cave in which it sleeps. We have only, fuck religion fuck religion fuck religion fuck religion. Only yelling, only singing, the everything we know into the world that refuses it and by extension us. We have only our truth: that we wanted to do something right and good, something whole and beautiful. We just didn't know how."
Questioning is on every page. Ammi questions her world-- this world; this society, the structures and systems which enclose us, which she's rejected with all the complexities and contradictions this entails. If writing has a future it's here, in this zeen's simple pages.
ADDRESSES:
I. www.nplusonemag.com.
II. Ammi Emergency, $2 cash c/o
831 Elysian Fields
P.O. Box 259
New Orleans LA 70117.
I received the first two issues. The journal is important enough that I intend to devote more than one post to it. Two things stand out during quick scanning.
First, that n+1 is many times better as an intellectual journal than The Believer; maybe a hundred times better, because The Believer is about in-crowd posturing while the n+1'ers know how to think and communicate.
Second, it's curious that the two journals have been linked together in articles, though n+1 spends a lot of time in its first issue attacking The Believer and strongly asserting their differences. The editors didn't assert their differences strongly enough! Still, to use an article about n+1 to grovel to the Eggers crowd, to chain-link the two journals together, as the N.Y. Times did, is unfair and goofy.
About n+1 itself:
It's soundly constructed. It presents itself well. What the writers say is often thought-provoking. One can nod at the accomplishment and admit, "Yes, this is the best the present system of literature can give us."
But that's the point. What quickly becomes noticeable, then starkly obvious, hit-you-over-the-head obvious, is the sameness of the writing. Is this a collection of many minds-- or of one? The writers are interchangeable; the lack of individuality fills most of the pages; you check who wrote something, seeing the initials MG, MR, BK, KG, or whomever, and you're still not sure of the writer. The first few articles in each issue list no author, nor is one needed, as they're of one piece, with the same voice, the same premises and perspective, the same education, same reading list; the same masks of learning and touchstone name-dropping. (James Wood is assumed to be an important critic. The Corrections is assumed to be an important work of fiction, "a monumental renewal of the critical social novel." I'm reminded of the Yale prof a couple years back who would debate me only if I read the books he'd designate; clearly uncomfortable with the idea of a writer from a different American culture, a different American society, with a different reading list, within his own country.)
What n+1 is not is anything new. There's no attempt to create a new structure of literature, as the ULA is doing. The castle walls are cracked; water leaks from the ceiling; the floor is cold and the air damp, yet inside the castle the well-trained editors remain, unwilling to give up the tenuous safety of the walls for the unknown dangers of an unruly world of thought outside.
Don't think I'm attacking them! I'm simply discussing what makes the ULA different from them. They're locked within a rigid hand-me-down mindset and are unable to see themselves amid the waves and changes of history. Their wave, their cycle, is ending-- the vehicle carries forward toward a finish line of exhaustion, with fumes in its gas tank. At the same time a new cycle of energy is being born. A wholly new vehicle is being built.
They're polished music critics discussing Mantovani while grubby pioneers beneath their recognition named Presley or Berry or Holly or Dylan in smoky clubs or on tacky stages create the relevant music of the day.
For the n+1 critics literary history is that which is handed to them by the professors of the moldy institutions they've dwelt in. History isn't something they can renew, replace, create, or re-create. Literary history to them isn't a series of waves or clash of forces: it's a straight line. They've gotten in line and assume history is with them. For this instant it is, but the funny thing about history is it's in a state of constant turmoil.
Most obvious of all, despite their good qualities (and they have many), is the narrowness of their perspective. The window in their castle room is small. Their own words state this. Their first Editorial Statement refers to "the best people in our intellectual class." Whatever truths they speak, whatever insights they convey, this is n+1's subject and audience.
II. THE ZEEN WRITER.
Also in my mailbox was #5 of the zine authored by Ammi Emergency. She's not trying to be the best in anyone's intellectual class-- she's taken on the long-time task of the true writer to plunge herself into life and experience; has deliberately chosen the UNtrod path which has led the last several years to tough jobs, rough episodes, and poverty. She encounters the world not through the filter of reading lists, or someone else's ideas, French, postmodern, or otherwise. Her ideas are worked out through living in a community of misfits; she's been a steady dweller in anarchic corners of zinedom.
I'm not objective on the subject. The ULA's roots are in the zine community. Our founders were from this place. As we expand and bring in new people, we should never lose sight of our beginnings. We should retain regard for writers of the authentic zine community; this is where we've found our difference and our authenticity.
"Writing zines is like giving blood for practice. No real reason. Like sleeping on the floor when you have a bed, or riding your bike in a blizzard for money. No good reason at all to risk so much pain and stupidity. Except to see what it feels like. And because writing's like blood in that once it's out you can't put it back in. A puddle of bad spirits and liquid iron on the paper, and you give it away at shows."
THE ZEEN IMPULSE
I was walking down Philadelphia streets one wintry day and saw a homeless guy on the sidewalk scribbling in a notebook. I was reminded of a scruffy young man at the 2004 Zinefest who handed me his hand-written photocopied zine about vagabonding and squatting through West Philly. I was reminded of Urban Hermitt Aaron Cometbus Bill Blackolive a host of great writers scribbling crude zines in diesel buses rural shacks ratty cars flophouse rooms greasy bright pizza shops on bar stools cold sidewalks: everyplace.
MISFITS
What distinguishes the underground writer from the approved kind is that we're hopeless misfits. How many times have I been called a failure by the ULA's critics? Yet failure may be second nature to us; in this mad technological competitive world, an essential part of our being. I'd argue that it's what gives us our soul. I know for myself that only after I was knocked down by life several dozen times was I dispelled of last illusions about myself and the world, to see things not as they were constructed and presented to be seen but as they were.
Underground writers are the table of delinquents and retards everyone else ignores at the back of the school cafeteria; way back, behind the class officers and letter-sweater jocks and preppies and cool people, behind the computer nerds and a.v. people, so far back you can't see them.
Our fashion-punk zeen babe in the ULA's early days became angry when we invited the misfits of zinedom to join our ranks at our first big reading. In reality she was the biggest misfit of all of us, but couldn't see this.
THE ZEEN WRITER
If any current young writer has soul, it's Ammi Emergency, because she writes with searching honesty.
"In the town without sidewalks, I walked the street. . . ."
"It's hard to make a mess in middle-class suburbs. These places are like self-cleaning ovens, the kind people don't cook in for fear of dirtying them. Us punks, we try to make a mess. We try to make a warning. But the suburbs are a self-replicating regime. They make you, they made you and all you can do is make them again. Everything you do becomes them, goes back into the systems you intended to dismantle. Zines on bleached paper, borne of computers, exchanged for dollars that then sink themselves into corporate copy shops and fast food on the strip. Your skate shoes have gasoline on the soles and there's a new punk cd in the changer because it isn't, it isn't, what everyone else is selling."
"They have eaten our language and we have only our discontent. We have only our best friend's parent's car charging up the hill at 2 am, punk band on the cd player, volume 40. The church is enormous and luminous at the crest, where the night sky also begins again. It is coming at us, fast and silver, this monster older than the cave in which it sleeps. We have only, fuck religion fuck religion fuck religion fuck religion. Only yelling, only singing, the everything we know into the world that refuses it and by extension us. We have only our truth: that we wanted to do something right and good, something whole and beautiful. We just didn't know how."
Questioning is on every page. Ammi questions her world-- this world; this society, the structures and systems which enclose us, which she's rejected with all the complexities and contradictions this entails. If writing has a future it's here, in this zeen's simple pages.
ADDRESSES:
I. www.nplusonemag.com.
II. Ammi Emergency, $2 cash c/o
831 Elysian Fields
P.O. Box 259
New Orleans LA 70117.
Tuesday, February 21, 2006
The Mis-Education Scam Part II
Meanwhile, as hundreds of billions are spent on "higher" education-- a way to determine where people fit in a stratified caste economy-- the nation's urban k-12 schools are in horrendous shape. It's a marker of the widening gulf between rich and poor that while U of Penn expands and builds by catering to society's most privileged darlings, a mere couple miles away in North Philadelphia students struggle in crumbling prison-like high schools of guards, gangs, and metal detectors not to become educated but to SURVIVE.
Little investment in basic education but massive spending post-high school after the social classes have been sorted.
Whatever the good intentions of liberal leaders, the lip service they pay to progress and change, the existence of this disparity guarantees there will be no equality of opportunity in this country in the coming decades.
What's most amazing to me is the blindness of the participants of privilege at the elite academies to what exists right in front of their eyes.
Ever been to Yale's campus? In one part of the town are the well-protected best and brightest. Several blocks away loiter the underclass. Ditto even for a school like Rutgers, much farther down the scale of hierarchy, where the downtown area is filled with dark-skinned non-English speaking recent immigrants working low-wage jobs serving middle-class students who wander away from the campus bastion of education to spend money.
Oh, but the immigrants are following the American dream! But are they-- when the public school system is broken and little attempt is made to bring their children up to speed? When reverse assimilation is practiced (the ethos of the politically correct) to ensure not one in a thousand will have the skills, standing, or money to enter the hallowed halls of places like Yale?
The new immigrants are here to be what they are in Cali-- helots; a permanent class generation-after-generation of economic slaves.
Little investment in basic education but massive spending post-high school after the social classes have been sorted.
Whatever the good intentions of liberal leaders, the lip service they pay to progress and change, the existence of this disparity guarantees there will be no equality of opportunity in this country in the coming decades.
What's most amazing to me is the blindness of the participants of privilege at the elite academies to what exists right in front of their eyes.
Ever been to Yale's campus? In one part of the town are the well-protected best and brightest. Several blocks away loiter the underclass. Ditto even for a school like Rutgers, much farther down the scale of hierarchy, where the downtown area is filled with dark-skinned non-English speaking recent immigrants working low-wage jobs serving middle-class students who wander away from the campus bastion of education to spend money.
Oh, but the immigrants are following the American dream! But are they-- when the public school system is broken and little attempt is made to bring their children up to speed? When reverse assimilation is practiced (the ethos of the politically correct) to ensure not one in a thousand will have the skills, standing, or money to enter the hallowed halls of places like Yale?
The new immigrants are here to be what they are in Cali-- helots; a permanent class generation-after-generation of economic slaves.
Sunday, February 19, 2006
The MFA Education Scam
First of Three Parts.
Associated Press ran an article 12/31/05 by Eileen Alt Powell explaining that college tuition rates are skyrocketing so high that middle-class families are foregoing saving for retirement in order to pay for their children's education.
Why is this happening?
It's because this society has constructed a narrow gate through which individuals must pass in order to have any kind of approved success; increasingly, in order to survive. To practice medicine or law one has to pay the bill and obtain the degree. This regulated monopoly mindset has spread to other fields. Is there anyone working for a mainstream newspaper who doesn't hold a journalism degree? This wasn't always the case. (See the 1958 movie "Teacher's Pet" for an interesting take on this.) Construct a gate, hire gatekeepers, and once people have control they can charge anything they like. The sky's the limit.
Doubt this? Look at the surging wealth of universities around the country; continually expanding; gobbling up adjacent neighborhoods; new construction projects everyplace as the money rolls in; hapless individuals desperate to survive in a rat-race system paying the bill.
In the 1990's when I began my examination of the literary world I scanned through scores of literary journals. In many of them, if not most, EVERY contributor was an MFA grad. I asked, what's going on? Does one now need proper certification in order to write-- the fundamental marker of freedom in a democratic society; able to be accomplished (or should be) by anyone after, at the latest, the eighth grade?
We see the professionalization of literature; the hiring of gatekeepers and construction of gates.
It's not as if these many thousands of certified MFA grads are producing great or interesting writing. Examination of their works leads to the expected: thousands of robotically polished homogenized stories and poems which look produced by well-regulated factories.
Associated Press ran an article 12/31/05 by Eileen Alt Powell explaining that college tuition rates are skyrocketing so high that middle-class families are foregoing saving for retirement in order to pay for their children's education.
Why is this happening?
It's because this society has constructed a narrow gate through which individuals must pass in order to have any kind of approved success; increasingly, in order to survive. To practice medicine or law one has to pay the bill and obtain the degree. This regulated monopoly mindset has spread to other fields. Is there anyone working for a mainstream newspaper who doesn't hold a journalism degree? This wasn't always the case. (See the 1958 movie "Teacher's Pet" for an interesting take on this.) Construct a gate, hire gatekeepers, and once people have control they can charge anything they like. The sky's the limit.
Doubt this? Look at the surging wealth of universities around the country; continually expanding; gobbling up adjacent neighborhoods; new construction projects everyplace as the money rolls in; hapless individuals desperate to survive in a rat-race system paying the bill.
In the 1990's when I began my examination of the literary world I scanned through scores of literary journals. In many of them, if not most, EVERY contributor was an MFA grad. I asked, what's going on? Does one now need proper certification in order to write-- the fundamental marker of freedom in a democratic society; able to be accomplished (or should be) by anyone after, at the latest, the eighth grade?
We see the professionalization of literature; the hiring of gatekeepers and construction of gates.
It's not as if these many thousands of certified MFA grads are producing great or interesting writing. Examination of their works leads to the expected: thousands of robotically polished homogenized stories and poems which look produced by well-regulated factories.
Tuesday, February 14, 2006
Tolstoy
There was an excellent article in the Sunday Philadelphia Inquirer by Frank Wilson discussing a new translation of War and Peace, the second greatest novel ever written. Wilson ably explained what makes Tolstoy's immense classic a great read.
I encountered the work 20 years ago when working the night shift in a huge railyard in the industrial heart of Detroit. In a spartan office of stone walls and a steel desk on an upper floor of a narrow tower, I would look out across a barren gray landscape and take in its silence. A sole light from a reading lamp shone on the desk upon which I scanned the train consist, manifest, and invoices when trains arrived direct from Canada through an ancient underground tunnel under the Detroit River. I'd hear the three yellow diesel "pullers" roaring and straining with their train of 100 cars. As the glowing yellow light of the front engine approached, with tremendous power, the window and entire sooted stone tower itself shook from the passing thunder as I checked off the cars. I'd walk the mile-long train after it was yarded.
Back in my office, with time to kill before the next puller, I'd return to the novel. The mood of the railyard in winter, snow sweeping across it, in the brooding city of Detroit, perfectly matched the expansive Russian tone of the book.
Wilson's article caused me to think about Tolstoy and why novelists today can't achieve what he did. Could the answer lie in Tolstoy's essay "What Is Art?" in which he mocks the schools and salons of his day which cranked out not original free-thinking artists but well-trained slavishly sycophantic copyists?
Literature today is corrupt and decrepit, irrelevant to the overwhelming bulk of the populace. It's a sad statement that a novel written by a Russian dude 100 years prior had far more to say to an ordinary guy working in a Detroit railyard than any contemporary work produced by his own culture.
Our literature is beyond redemption; it's built on weak ground, with a crooked foundation; we can only tear down the house and start over-- which the ULA is doing. While surveying the landscape and designing the new home, we can at the same time pay attention to neglected novelists of our day (Philly writer Lawrence Richette has a new book out) who write with ambition, fire, clarity, and intelligence, as once did Leo Tolstoy.
I encountered the work 20 years ago when working the night shift in a huge railyard in the industrial heart of Detroit. In a spartan office of stone walls and a steel desk on an upper floor of a narrow tower, I would look out across a barren gray landscape and take in its silence. A sole light from a reading lamp shone on the desk upon which I scanned the train consist, manifest, and invoices when trains arrived direct from Canada through an ancient underground tunnel under the Detroit River. I'd hear the three yellow diesel "pullers" roaring and straining with their train of 100 cars. As the glowing yellow light of the front engine approached, with tremendous power, the window and entire sooted stone tower itself shook from the passing thunder as I checked off the cars. I'd walk the mile-long train after it was yarded.
Back in my office, with time to kill before the next puller, I'd return to the novel. The mood of the railyard in winter, snow sweeping across it, in the brooding city of Detroit, perfectly matched the expansive Russian tone of the book.
Wilson's article caused me to think about Tolstoy and why novelists today can't achieve what he did. Could the answer lie in Tolstoy's essay "What Is Art?" in which he mocks the schools and salons of his day which cranked out not original free-thinking artists but well-trained slavishly sycophantic copyists?
Literature today is corrupt and decrepit, irrelevant to the overwhelming bulk of the populace. It's a sad statement that a novel written by a Russian dude 100 years prior had far more to say to an ordinary guy working in a Detroit railyard than any contemporary work produced by his own culture.
Our literature is beyond redemption; it's built on weak ground, with a crooked foundation; we can only tear down the house and start over-- which the ULA is doing. While surveying the landscape and designing the new home, we can at the same time pay attention to neglected novelists of our day (Philly writer Lawrence Richette has a new book out) who write with ambition, fire, clarity, and intelligence, as once did Leo Tolstoy.
Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Are YOU Bohemian?
Bizarrely, this is a question which was raised by a yuppy lit-blogger about the ULA.
I hope Chris Robin's Monday Report, and my post below, help answer the question regarding ourselves. (It's obvious the feckless idiot who made the remark never met ULA poet Frank Walsh! who lives amid typifies embodies epitomizes real bohemia-- as do other ULAers.)
To help discloud the fog of confusion of our enemies, I've put together a simple checklist to be used as a starting point.
ARE YOU BOHEMIAN?
1.) If you carry a bag which says, "Kenneth Cole, New York" on it you're NOT bohemian.
2.) If you're a millionaire who stages readings for audiences of rich people in lavish Versailles-like palaces outside San Francisco you're NOT bohemian.
3.) If you're mentored by Professor Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton you're likely NOT bohemian.
4.) If you have a summer retreat on Fisher's Island you're NOT bohemian.
5.) If you attend black-tie affairs with $10,000 tables you're NOT bohemian.
6.) If you're a hard-nosed ass-kissing yuppie in a business suit working 9-5 at an office building in Manhattan you're NOT bohemian.
7.) If you support the status-quo arts establishment at every turn you're NOT bohemian.
8.) If you're from an approved School or Salon and disdain outsider voices you're NOT bohemian.
9.) If you think you need an MFA degree to be a writer or artist you're NOT bohemian.
10.) If you write for MediaBistro you're NOT bohemian.
I hope Chris Robin's Monday Report, and my post below, help answer the question regarding ourselves. (It's obvious the feckless idiot who made the remark never met ULA poet Frank Walsh! who lives amid typifies embodies epitomizes real bohemia-- as do other ULAers.)
To help discloud the fog of confusion of our enemies, I've put together a simple checklist to be used as a starting point.
ARE YOU BOHEMIAN?
1.) If you carry a bag which says, "Kenneth Cole, New York" on it you're NOT bohemian.
2.) If you're a millionaire who stages readings for audiences of rich people in lavish Versailles-like palaces outside San Francisco you're NOT bohemian.
3.) If you're mentored by Professor Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton you're likely NOT bohemian.
4.) If you have a summer retreat on Fisher's Island you're NOT bohemian.
5.) If you attend black-tie affairs with $10,000 tables you're NOT bohemian.
6.) If you're a hard-nosed ass-kissing yuppie in a business suit working 9-5 at an office building in Manhattan you're NOT bohemian.
7.) If you support the status-quo arts establishment at every turn you're NOT bohemian.
8.) If you're from an approved School or Salon and disdain outsider voices you're NOT bohemian.
9.) If you think you need an MFA degree to be a writer or artist you're NOT bohemian.
10.) If you write for MediaBistro you're NOT bohemian.
Sunday, February 05, 2006
My Bohemia
I'M TOLD that a smarmy buttoned-down writer who works for the ultimate yuppie scum ass-kiss grovel-to-the-corporate world lit site, Media Bistro, has called the Underground Literary Alliance "pseudo-bohemians."
Kind of funny to me, really, as I've lived much of my life in neighborhoods which at their mildest could be classified as bohemian, notably in Detroit's Cass Corridor during some of its rough days in the early 90's.
I'd stopped down there one winter night a few years prior after getting off work at a shitty job along Detroit's riverfront, depressed over the job or a woman or wanting to hide or get fucked-up someplace as a snowstorm settled over the city pounding the streets backing up traffic fuck, I'd just knock down a few shots somewhere.
I drove slid plowed through snowy streets in the devastated heart-and-soul of the beaten-down town within sight of looming office buildings but in its decayed Dickensian reality two hundred years away in time. A neon sign amid the blizzard: "The Bronx." I hear the Bronx Bar is now a trendy place; at this time it was the ultimate dive with two customers total both wasted, and an urchin-looking skinny young black-haired large-eyed chick bartender with large hands telling the drunks at the bar how strong she was. As I downed shots the woman told me of her dream founding a rock band someday'd be famous it was all talk I nodded my head drunkenly. She stared or glared at me as if to wonder who was this man who'd dropped in during a snowstorm unexpectedly?
A few years later when needing a place to hide suddenly for real I thought of the Corridor and moved into a nearby building on the edge of the raw neighborhood.
The neighborhood: shocking; the biggest collection of druggies drunks failures urchins panhandlers thousands of homeless crashing in wretched abandoned buildings struggling artists huge prostitute population blind-pig after-hours joints; saloons everywhere; several well-known whorehouses; many other fronts for same; crack, seediness, and violence down every street. In its deepest part-- a "Forbidden Zone"-- roamed a large street gang and packs of wild dogs.
Bohemian? Not really. More like Dodge City circa 1880. Or Paris at the time of "Hunchback of Notre Dame." I'd write a Memoir of my days in that neighborhood, only no one would believe it. I'd tell of a knife fight I was in one sleepy morning when two miscreants mistook me for an easy mark and tried to give me a shave. Just a story. Maybe I dreamed it. Yet Detroit is a city few people will step in, much less live ten years in its most infamous neighborhood. Eventually the city sent a wave of cops in to round up people; wants and warrants; cat houses shut down, bars padlocked, acres of dead buildings bulldozed, the neighborhood's vast sweep of hectic life stifled, bohemian character destroyed.
The word "cathouse" enables me to tell one story anyway, which you can choose to, or not, believe. That was one word I saw everywhere when I first moved down there-- the word posted on lightpoles, trees, abandoned cars and shattered walls of the many endless blocks of empty buildings. "Cathouse. "Cathouse!" "CATHOUSE!!!"
PART II
"What is this 'Cathouse'?" I asked a cute punk girl posting a handbill outside Bronx Bar one evening.
"Best rock n' roll band in the city," she told me. "They're phenomenal."
She continued on her way. I leisurely watched her, having no place to go, no place in the world, existing in limbo in the limbo of the Cass Corridor removed from time itself; having had a few drinks. No end to time. One of the colorful flyers fell on the ground and came rolling toward me. I picked it up. "Fourth Street Fair," the flyer announced. "Music! Eats!"
Fourth Street was a tiny one-block neighborhood crammed and forgotten between the crossing of two expressways. It was populated by aging hippies and their hippie-punk progeny. Extremely primitive and medieval. They lived like animals. I walked through the crowded block party holding two cold bottles of malt liquor, surrounded by hair dirt tattoos mastiff dogs tables of hand-made jewelry and food cooking on open fires. At the end of the street on an open lot (overpass behind it) had been set up a crude stage. As the red sun dropped, one punk band after another began playing. I stood near the front and smoked something someone handed me and the red sun turned violet then purple then the deepest dark most intense blue I'd ever seen. The vast dotted sky gave off a mystical feeling. The audience waited for something, or someone. I commented that the music wasn't all that great. Someone told me, "Just wait."
The stage was empty (existentially alone-in-the universe empty) then two tall skinny arrogant young men carrying red guitars and one skinny woman strode god-like onto it-- and slammed the audience with a sudden shock-blast nuclear explosion of musical energy. The girl singer in tattered clothes was wild and crazy with manic strength that echoed and screamed through the microphone through the sky across the universe as long black hair whipped around her face. Pure ambition and will unlike anything I'd seen; the young woman fulfilling every promise she'd made. They were Cathouse.
(I later learned the band's name came from the fact they lived in a dilapidated house full of cats!)
Was this bohemia?
Haven't bohemians thrown off every shred of convention control inhibition regulation, as had these people?
Who's to say? This is one of a thousand true stories I could tell about hungry artist-types I've known in my life. Only when I've told them all would you be able to judge if I know anything about bohemia.
Kind of funny to me, really, as I've lived much of my life in neighborhoods which at their mildest could be classified as bohemian, notably in Detroit's Cass Corridor during some of its rough days in the early 90's.
I'd stopped down there one winter night a few years prior after getting off work at a shitty job along Detroit's riverfront, depressed over the job or a woman or wanting to hide or get fucked-up someplace as a snowstorm settled over the city pounding the streets backing up traffic fuck, I'd just knock down a few shots somewhere.
I drove slid plowed through snowy streets in the devastated heart-and-soul of the beaten-down town within sight of looming office buildings but in its decayed Dickensian reality two hundred years away in time. A neon sign amid the blizzard: "The Bronx." I hear the Bronx Bar is now a trendy place; at this time it was the ultimate dive with two customers total both wasted, and an urchin-looking skinny young black-haired large-eyed chick bartender with large hands telling the drunks at the bar how strong she was. As I downed shots the woman told me of her dream founding a rock band someday'd be famous it was all talk I nodded my head drunkenly. She stared or glared at me as if to wonder who was this man who'd dropped in during a snowstorm unexpectedly?
A few years later when needing a place to hide suddenly for real I thought of the Corridor and moved into a nearby building on the edge of the raw neighborhood.
The neighborhood: shocking; the biggest collection of druggies drunks failures urchins panhandlers thousands of homeless crashing in wretched abandoned buildings struggling artists huge prostitute population blind-pig after-hours joints; saloons everywhere; several well-known whorehouses; many other fronts for same; crack, seediness, and violence down every street. In its deepest part-- a "Forbidden Zone"-- roamed a large street gang and packs of wild dogs.
Bohemian? Not really. More like Dodge City circa 1880. Or Paris at the time of "Hunchback of Notre Dame." I'd write a Memoir of my days in that neighborhood, only no one would believe it. I'd tell of a knife fight I was in one sleepy morning when two miscreants mistook me for an easy mark and tried to give me a shave. Just a story. Maybe I dreamed it. Yet Detroit is a city few people will step in, much less live ten years in its most infamous neighborhood. Eventually the city sent a wave of cops in to round up people; wants and warrants; cat houses shut down, bars padlocked, acres of dead buildings bulldozed, the neighborhood's vast sweep of hectic life stifled, bohemian character destroyed.
The word "cathouse" enables me to tell one story anyway, which you can choose to, or not, believe. That was one word I saw everywhere when I first moved down there-- the word posted on lightpoles, trees, abandoned cars and shattered walls of the many endless blocks of empty buildings. "Cathouse. "Cathouse!" "CATHOUSE!!!"
PART II
"What is this 'Cathouse'?" I asked a cute punk girl posting a handbill outside Bronx Bar one evening.
"Best rock n' roll band in the city," she told me. "They're phenomenal."
She continued on her way. I leisurely watched her, having no place to go, no place in the world, existing in limbo in the limbo of the Cass Corridor removed from time itself; having had a few drinks. No end to time. One of the colorful flyers fell on the ground and came rolling toward me. I picked it up. "Fourth Street Fair," the flyer announced. "Music! Eats!"
Fourth Street was a tiny one-block neighborhood crammed and forgotten between the crossing of two expressways. It was populated by aging hippies and their hippie-punk progeny. Extremely primitive and medieval. They lived like animals. I walked through the crowded block party holding two cold bottles of malt liquor, surrounded by hair dirt tattoos mastiff dogs tables of hand-made jewelry and food cooking on open fires. At the end of the street on an open lot (overpass behind it) had been set up a crude stage. As the red sun dropped, one punk band after another began playing. I stood near the front and smoked something someone handed me and the red sun turned violet then purple then the deepest dark most intense blue I'd ever seen. The vast dotted sky gave off a mystical feeling. The audience waited for something, or someone. I commented that the music wasn't all that great. Someone told me, "Just wait."
The stage was empty (existentially alone-in-the universe empty) then two tall skinny arrogant young men carrying red guitars and one skinny woman strode god-like onto it-- and slammed the audience with a sudden shock-blast nuclear explosion of musical energy. The girl singer in tattered clothes was wild and crazy with manic strength that echoed and screamed through the microphone through the sky across the universe as long black hair whipped around her face. Pure ambition and will unlike anything I'd seen; the young woman fulfilling every promise she'd made. They were Cathouse.
(I later learned the band's name came from the fact they lived in a dilapidated house full of cats!)
Was this bohemia?
Haven't bohemians thrown off every shred of convention control inhibition regulation, as had these people?
Who's to say? This is one of a thousand true stories I could tell about hungry artist-types I've known in my life. Only when I've told them all would you be able to judge if I know anything about bohemia.
Friday, February 03, 2006
Questions of Authenticity
Interesting to me is the fact that all these rich-guy writers like James Frey are desperate to assert their authenticity. They have to lie and become fakes to do so.
Meanwhile, a writers group whose very foundation is the authenticity of its writers and their stories is inexplicably shoved aside. (As Michael Jackman points out in his recent Monday Report up at the www.literaryrevolution.com site.) As we've stressed time and again, we're the genuine article. (Who is more authentic than Wild Bill? It amazes me that people aren't lined-up to board planes to travel to east Texas to meet the guy.)
With us, there's no phony Dave Eggers-while-backed-by-Simon-Schuster-money pose of independence. We're backed only by our efforts and voices and the struggle of our lives.
Meanwhile, a writers group whose very foundation is the authenticity of its writers and their stories is inexplicably shoved aside. (As Michael Jackman points out in his recent Monday Report up at the www.literaryrevolution.com site.) As we've stressed time and again, we're the genuine article. (Who is more authentic than Wild Bill? It amazes me that people aren't lined-up to board planes to travel to east Texas to meet the guy.)
With us, there's no phony Dave Eggers-while-backed-by-Simon-Schuster-money pose of independence. We're backed only by our efforts and voices and the struggle of our lives.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
