Three Question Challenge #3

MINI-INTERVIEW: Brady Russell.

(Writer/cartoonist Brady Russell can be found at
http://www.thistoowillpass.com/ )

1.) How do you avoid categorization as a hipster writer?

BRADY RUSSELL: Man, I hope no one puts me in that category, because I turn hipsters off. If all the non-hipsters look at me and say "he's a hipster" and all the hipsters look at me and say, "he sucks" I'm out of luck with everyone, aren't I? Honestly, I just don't think about it. Beyond that, I don't know that I've made enough of a mark for anyone to put me in any category, but it will be a milestone when someone does.

2.) Do you place too much faith in new technology?

BRADY: I get excited by everything. I can convince myself to try painting, drawing, movie making, theater... but the Internet is this still largely unchartered territory. Sure, a lot is entrenched out there, but new things keep upsetting the way things worked. Remember MySpace? Remember when it was the biggest site in the world? Now it's a hasbeen. That was 4 years ago! For those of us in the underground, the Internet presents a chance to make a mark. The problem for me, though, really, is choosing a format and a medium I want to really give the old college try to and sticking with it. At the end of the day, though, it's just a medium for promotion. Of course you need to create something compelling for people to see and read.

3.) What are your writing strengths that set you off from the pack?

BRADY: I wish I knew. I just finished listening to Steve Martin's audiobook of BORN STANDING UP for the second time. It's all about how he participated in inventing the "new comedy." I've been trying to invent a new humor myself, though I don't think I've successfully exported it to a fictional story yet. It's something that I can do on-the-fly, when talking to people (or myself). There's a way I think it can be done on the page, but that part of my brain doesn't click in as well when I'm writing. It's the humor of not-quite-logic: things that almost seem to make sense but don't when you look closely. It yields a quizzical sort of bemusement, rather than the rather played humor of beat-beat-pause-beat, the rimshot or any other traditional joke.

Non-fiction is tempting. I also read Matthew Josephson's LIFE AMONG THE SURREALISTS. It's about his time with the avant-garde, but also how he was an avant-garde poet who eventually realized that his real strength was writing biographies. I know that I can write about complex political and economic subjects in ways that make sense to normal people, but it doesn't exactly get my skin tingling to think of
(EDITOR'S NOTE: Answer halted for far exceeding word limit. Sorry!)

(Brady Russell is a community organizer in Philadelphia.)

To the New Writer

THE NEW WRITER should be the last person defending the status quo, unless you're already published by a conglomerate.

The New Writer shouldn't see me as the enemy. I dabble in writing in an effort to create the badly-needed new literary vehicle. An effort to accomplish what New Writers should be doing. What they're not doing.

I'm a salesman more than a writer. I'm a low-rent, anti-establishment promoter. If I was successful I wouldn't be searching after new ideas and new writers. I'd be in a comfortable office twiddling with paper clips or doodling with my computer. I'd go with the flow. Like what everyone else is doing.

That I'm not successful (I'm at the bottom) demands I discover a new road.

The New Writer should realize that literary art hasn't changed in fifty years. The art isn't just stagnant. It's sat unmoved for so many years, collecting excrement, it's become a cesspool.

What if football teams used the same playbook and followed the same strategies as fifty years ago? That's the current state of American literature.

To the New Writer: You have your MFA degree. This qualifies you to write like 500,000 other degreed writers. Move beyond it. Rip up the certificate.

The task of the New Writer is to realize that the current literary art is at a dead end. It's time to create new art.

The Best Literary Criticism

The best literary criticism in America is right here. Any scorn or hatred this blog has received is because it tells the truth.

Three Question Challenge #2

MINI-INTERVIEW: Frank Marcopolos.

(Small-press promoter Frank Marcopolos oversees http://frankmarcopolos.com.)

1) Is Brooklyn a hipster town?

FRANK MARCOPOLOS: Brooklyn is massively large, and culturally extremely diverse. There are some neighborhoods, like Williamsburg or Brooklyn Heights for example, that are hipster-havens, sure. But there are also plenty of neighborhoods that are not, for better or worse, and offer their own unique blend of cultures and attractions.

2) Does the printed book have a future?

FRANK: Certainly the printed book has a future, but it's a diminishingly significant one. Devices like the Kindle make one's reading life better, since you can carry around so many books at once, but there will always be books that are better suited for print -- I'm specifically thinking about the kinds where you want to make notes in the margins, stick post-it notes in, etc.

3) Where do you see yourself in relation to literature five years from now?

FRANK: I'll first, foremost, and forever be a lover of literature. I'm striving to have an impact as a writer/editor/audiobook performer as well, but with those things, predictions can be dicey. Too many factors are beyond my control to clearly see that far down the road.

(Frank Marcopolos is the former editor of the critically-acclaimed litzine, The Whirligig; he is currently shopping a college love-triangle novel and performing audiobook versions of public-domain stories on his website, http://frankmarcopolos.com)

The Debasement of Language

THE SOFT ORWELLIANISM OF THE LITERARY WORLD

For all the emphasis by system writers on words, their respect for the meaning of words is low.

This was seen in Tom Bissell’s 2003 Believer essay about the Underground Literary Alliance. The centerpiece of his argument was that all writers are outsiders. There are no distinctions among them. John Updike was an outsider. He maintained an office at The New Yorker, was published by conglomerates, lauded by monopoly media, heaped with lit-system awards. But, by Bissell’s reasoning, even he, John Updike, was an outsider.

Which is to leave the word “outsider” with no meaning.

No doubt this was Bissell’s intent. If everybody is an outsider, no one is. The Insider cliques resume their paid-for partying in good conscience.

Jonathan Lethem did a similar trick in an essay in Harpers when he defined the term plagiarism through convoluted language and thought into ridiculousness.

I’ve noticed the same phenomenon at work at HTML Giant. Mild statements by Christopher Higgs are referred to as “provocative.” His audience realizes there have to be provocative ideas and writings somewhere. Maybe this is it!

Creating mild disagreement isn’t provocative.

What results from the debasement of language is a soft Orwellianism, where the words and stances used mean their opposite.

And so, when Tom Bissell says “outsider,” he really means, “insider.”

When an essay by Christopher Higgs is called “provocative,” you can bet it’s the opposite of provocative writing, but instead remains within the acceptable bounds of his audience.

When the PEN organization releases a book celebrating dissident writing, all the contributors will be system-approved safe. (Including Updike!)

When a book comes out titled “Revolutionaries,” the contributors and their art will be so representative of today’s literary hipster status quo, there won’t be a smidgen of revolution about it.

And so on.

Becoming a Literary Outlaw

The mythos of the outlaw in American culture and history is powerful. Todd Moore recognized this, and expressed it well in his "Dillinger" essays.

The stance has appeal even for those who live and work in established worlds opposite to that of the rebel outsider. They don't become the reality. They borrow the trappings.

A handful of genuine literary outlaws continue to exist in America. A mere handful. They live on the margins. Some have denounced mainstream corruption. They represent a sliver of dissent in American literature. A tiny, tiny sliver of literary dissent.

A QUESTION
Is this a valid viewpoint? Ask yourself why there's hostility to the expression of a mere viewpoint. Ask why the Overdogs of literature have worked hard to shut that viewpoint out.

For Your Info

WHEN I criticize other writers, it's nothing personal. My objectives in so doing are A.) to set myself apart from the conformist pack; B.) to create space in today's literary culture for my unorthodox ideas. (Which aren't so unorthodox, but common sense.)

Three Question Challenge #1

MINI-INTERVIEW: Colin Meldrum.

(Colin Meldrum is the founding editor of A cappella Zoo (www.acappellazoo.com), a web & print journal of magic realism & slipstream.)

1.) Is experimental writing an overdone dead end?

COLIN MELDRUM: Not overdone, but yes.It’s hardly probable to be truly innovative anymore. But while there’s little uncharted territory left to discover, this “dead end” alley is worth keeping open and alive. So, perhaps “experimentalism” has settled into a cul-de-sac, a genre, rather than a movement. We made it to Oz, learned the language, even became desensitized—but some of us would still rather not resettle Kansas. The task, then, is to distinguish personal experiments (exercises) from results worth sharing, results in which once groundbreaking—now secondhand—techniques frame or accent an independently worthwhile story, rather than distract from it.

2.) How does your journal stand out from the solipsistic hipster pack?

COLIN: I don’t read our contributions as solipsistic. Not most of them, anyway. I certainly doubt that our contributors intend to be obscure or self-indulgent. We’re about hybridizing and building bridges, rather than alienating or shocking readers for the sake of defining an antagonistically unique niche for ourselves. We’d like to stand out as adaptable, as communicative and teachable within the reading and writing communities. We’d like to stand out as publishing not the product of a writer sitting and trying to write something/anything, but the well-rounded, memorable stories which ached to be constructed, obsessed over, and communicated.

3.) What's your goal with A cappella Zoo?

COLIN: Not to change or enslave the world. And probably not even to prove a point or to stumble upon a new movement in contemporary storytelling, though I confess the dream was tempting in our earlier phases. We do intend to explore the spaces between mainstream and genre, adult fetish and childish fancy, my perspective and yours. We’re not ready to push any dichotomous categories off their pedestals, though; I’d say we’re more interested in providing a home for the writers who already wander these in between spaces, and to connect these writers with the readers hungry for them.

(If you visit any of Colin’s own writing, he’d like it to be his contribution to issue two of Sideshow Fables.)

Literature's Herd

THE SCARIEST THING about the herd I encountered is the realization that this is the literary intelligentsia for the next forty or fifty years. The new bureaucracy is the old bureaucracy, with more exaggerated apparatchik characteristics: intellectual complacency; narrow-mindedness; intelligence replaced by glibness; unearned arrogance; personal timidity; hostility to dissent; unquestioning acceptance of dominant institutions; and so on. You could drop them into a German bureaucracy circa 1937, or a Soviet one circa 1973, and they’d fit in well. Every criticism I made at the outset of my discussion with them, they later demonstrated to be true. The only thing surprising about this herd was the speed at which it closed ranks against the intruder. The Internet has served to quicken the actions of LeBon’s “Crowd.”

Their put-downs of me were revealing. –I was referred to as a broke James Patterson. Unexamined is what Patterson does right. After all, people are reading him. The thinking individual—one not buried under clouds of conceit—would look to the Pattersons of writing as a template to improve or build upon. (The irony is that the James Pattersons pay the bills for publishing’s house of cards. And surely, his art is no more empty than theirs.) –Any mention of strategy or marketing was scorned. These blogging DIYers seek to be not-DIY as quickly as possible.

Their art, meanwhile, is herd art. Utterly insubstantial; meaningless and largely unstructured; unplotted collections of words; endlessly self-referential; free of real-world ideas (“unjudgemental”); their art is beyond criticism—or beneath it—because it takes no risks and upsets no one. The world outside the bourgie apartment or the unchallenging discussion of a faculty cocktail party is far removed. The interchangeable writings aren’t solipsistic so much as narcissistic, in that they’re mirror images of one another. The members of the herd see in the writings reflections of themselves. It’s the perfection of bureaucratic art. It would be an art fitting for an Orwellian 1984.

A final clue was an email I later received, not from an individual, but from TheHerd@theherd. (Or similar.) An acknowledgement that collectively they’re a machine?

Look at their title. Study it for a minute, and see how fitting it is for a dawning Orwellian world.

Related Story

Here's a link to a story of some relevance to the topic at hand.
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com/2010/02/pop06-museum.html

The Insular Viewpoint

MOST AMAZING about my brief foray onto HTML Giant is that few of that crowd can conceive of the idea of writers existing outside academies or other kinds of institutions. Yet many great American writers did exactly that, from Jack London through Kerouac. (Even F. Scott Fitzgerald was a college dropout.) American lit has never before depended upon such a narrow class, with corresponding narrow outlook.

Not that the MFA degree has improved their kind of art. Most of them discuss issues through layers of academy jargon. Is that considered how to write well?

The focus of their art and their debate is as restrictive as academy’s walls. They’ll discuss vendors at the AWP conference, but not the AWP organization itself, which over the years has had its full share of corruption and scandal.

Still, a few HTMLers assert their intellectual independence. “I’m not a puppet!” a marionette cries, waving his arms about, though the audience can clearly see the strings attached.

HTML Giant Follow-Up

POSITIONING

The HTML Giant gang has positioned themselves for the short term. They've moved to the most status quo position on the literary game board. They're a defense of the system-as-is. They may be little more than a puppet-mouthpiece for lit's Billionaire Boys Club (that infamous troika) occasionally seen at places like Rumpus. As such, HTML Giant should drop the word "future" from their site. What they represent isn't the future, but business-as-usual, promoting the same moldy postmodern aesthetic posing of the lit-hipster crowd. A more apt word than "future" for them might be "static." Or, "stale." Or the phrase, "been done," with the possible addition, "too often." Or, "Literature's Dead End." Once you've put yourself into a corner there's nowhere to go.

I'm not running my mouth on this blog simply to bury Caesar. I'm creating an alternative to Caesar. First, an alternative literary philosophy. Second has to be an alternative literary art.

Too Much to Process

FOR THOSE accustomed to the polite pseudo-debate of the literary world-- found at spots like HTML Giant-- the post below about PEN is too much truth too soon. Their minds can't handle that kind of contention. It's beyond the bounds; outside their bubble of illusion. Their instinct is to close it off. They think they believe in open debate. In fact they want debate if it's not discomforting to their view of literature and the world. (Would one of HTML's thousands of "independent" thinkers sign the Petition to PEN, which is fairly inocuous in that it calls for the obvious? What do you think?)

PEN World Festival

Another go-round of the PEN “World Voices” International Writers Festival is upon us. Last year’s included such overwhelmingly exciting highlights as Rick Moody “interviewing” fellow Insider Mark Z. Danielewski. Compelling stuff. This year well-hyped Insider Jonathan Lethem is given cred by being paired with punk retread Patti Smith, who was relevant thirty years ago but now is in the phase of cashing in.

The question is why every year PEN blows half-a-million dollars on a writers festival no one’s heard of. It’s not easy to spend that amount of money on a week of readings. The PEN folks are either spectacularly incompetent or spectacularly corrupt. Probably both.

Thoughts come to me of the last days of the Soviet Union when the leading apparatchiks—generals; ministers—lost control of events and spent most of the time drunk. American lit is filled not with dynamic personalities, but ticket-punchers; literary bureaucrats and conformists. It faces accompanying institutional decay and inertia.

WORLD BOOK BUSINESS

It’s curious that the rise of PEN’s World Festival was simultaneous with the takeover of the American book industry by multinational conglomerates like Bertlesmann and Murdoch’s News Corp. It’s in the interest of these conglomerates to develop a showroom of international literary figures whose products can be sold in a variety of markets. This is no different than Ford producing a vehicle which can be sold in Europe, or India, or America, with few changes. Local individuality and local control are gone in the name of cost-effectiveness. Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Orhan Pamuk, Paul Auster, Jhumpa Lahiri, Pico Iyer, Laila Lalami, Michael Ondaatje, Ian Buruma: stables of jetset writers who subscribe to the same multinational ideas and belong to the same affluent and sophisticated international intellectual class. A highly-placed well removed elite.

PEN INSULARITY

PEN’s World Voices is designed supposedly to end America’s cultural isolation, to make the nation more global and sophisticated, like New York. Where, then, do the geniuses at PEN with their half-million dollar festival budget to spend hold their International Festival to be able to reach us ignorant folk? In the center of Manhattan itself!

This shows that the festival show isn’t staged for the American masses, but for the conglomerates—for global decision makers in their Manhattan skyscraper offices. (And, to be fair, for other NYC plutocrats who help fund the outfit.) PEN has to justify to their puppetmasters their existence as puppets. Standard bureaucratic practice.

MAKING CHANGE

Established American writers caught up in the giant machine-system are so comatose they can’t contemplate change. With their stunted imaginations the thought never enters their heads. PEN staffers, supposedly serving PEN writers, receive comfortable paychecks ensuring their silence. Money maven Karen Kennerly made $77,000 as PEN exec Director in 1997. Ten years later Director Michael Roberts received close to triple that. Quite a pay spike. One can guess at the current Director’s pay.

Writers who are outside the system will discuss change, but expect it to be done moderately. Establishment pawns encourage this attitude.

Moderation changes nothing—is an excuse for doing nothing. The essence of the bureaucratic mindset: the delays of process.

Status quo doesn’t change itself. It has to be forced to change, through pressure; leverage. The REAL interest of the American literary world is to change, before, like the Soviet Union, it simply freezes up and collapses. PEN members need to wake up and take back their organization. They need to embrace the adventure of change.

www.penpetition.blogspot.com

New Feature

I'm starting a new feature for this blog-- a series of mini-interviews I call "The Three Question Challenge." I'll be inviting a select series of writers and editors to take the challenge. If you want to be included, and feel I may leave you out, you can email me and invite yourself. I'll take the request under advisement. (Obviously, I need to have some familiarity with you and your work before I can ask questions.)

IN THE MEAN TIME, anyone who lives in Philly can help me in a search outlined at
www.phillyliterary.blogspot.com

Either I'm going insane, having flashback hallucinations, or I've been seeing real colorfully bizarre creatures everywhere in this town!

HTML Giant Assessed

This is done at my premium blog,

www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com

in a post titled “Paper Tiger.” Email for free signup as a regular reader of the Happy America Literature blog.

Deliberately Pop

I’d bet that few who read “The H Group” at www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com completely get it. It looks like a traditional short story, but there are subtle differences. I’ve written it to mimic the traditional—more to be a pop artwork. The pop motifs are the point.

(Next at “Pop”: neonoirish pop-- “Jezebel”!)

American Shakespeare

"I wonder what's doing in Buffalo?"

This is the final sentence of one of O. Henry's finest stories, "A Municipal Report." The sentence is a return to the beginning of the tale. The piece opens as a simple essay, an academic lesson-- a discussion of the suitability of various American cities as settings for stories.

From this starting point O. Henry begins a story about Nashville. He's artless. He's experimenting. He plays with the idea of writing a story, introducing a few characters while testing, through simple narrative, what he can do with the characters.

An expansive mind is playing with the reader, which isn't made clear until the final sentence. In the few pages between beginning and end O. Henry takes us through a morality play. As the story lopes along in its brief space, its meaning dawns, at first hidden to us, then expanding outward within the space of a paragraph until we realize he wasn't talking about cities at all. The theme, as with all his best work, is how to be a human being. It's about character and honor, about how to live.

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

"It seemed that the old miller, who had known so much sorrow himself, was a magician in driving it away from others."

-"The Church with an Over-shot Wheel"

O. Henry is the most underrated American writer. He's dismissed as a mere jokester, or a local colorist, or a crafter of trick endings. Sure, at times he was a low-rent con artist-- he'd known con artists in his life. Many of the many hundreds of short stories he wrote were tossed off to be quick entertainment, and look to be made out of cardboard. When we examine them, nothing is there.

But O. Henry also wrote a few dozen fabulous stories which show a knowledge of character, of place, of humanity, possessed by no other American writer. No writer has written better and more famously about the city of New York-- yet at the same time, more realistically about the American West, or more sarcastically about the post-Civil War South.

The Llano Kid in "A Double-Dyed Deceiver" jumps from the page. You feel the Texas sun on his face, see his clothes and revolver.

You see, just as clearly, the walking caricature of the Antebellum South that is Major Pendleton Talbot, with frock coat and black string tie fifty years out of date, in "The Duplicity of Hargraves."

You see, though, also into the soul of characters like hero soldier Willie Robbins of "The Moment of Victory"-- a character O. Henry gently mocks yet simultaneously understands.

O. Henry was the greatest of all short story writers, because he had the largest soul. Like the play "King Lear," O. Henry's masterpieces begin simply, even crudely, but keep expanding and expanding in significance until the meaning has become universal, even cosmic. This is surely the case with two amazing reads, "The Renaissance at Charleroi" and "The Church with an Over-shot Wheel." At their key moments they have a sudden largeness about them which goes beyond time and space, as if the works have been transported beyond their own boundaries. Their conclusions aren't surprise endings, but something more. If there are coincidences, they're not really coincidences. They have a point. The coincidences ARE the point. O. Henry is telling us that something else is happening. The something is left unsaid, but we feel the currents, like the movements of nature, or the pattern of stars.

O. Henry could speak to people, reaching their hidden emotional depths, as few writers have spoken to them-- a handful of writers over the course of storytelling, including a literary history stretching thousands of years-- because of the life he'd lived. He spoke about his life only through his stories. But the facts, the realities, and the meanings of that life are spoken about, indirectly, again and again.

The bare facts are few. William Sydney Porter was born in the South during the Civil War. A time of chaos and destruction. To make his way in the world, as a young man he went to Texas, where he worked various jobs. While employed as a bank teller in Austin he was charged with embezzlement. Porter abandoned his wife and young daughter and became a fugitive from the law, ending up in Honduras. He returned to America as his wife was dying. Porter spent three years in a penitentiary in Ohio.

These are bare facts. We can surmise that Porter-- "O. Henry"-- faced hard choices. Questions of character, courage, and honor had to have been on his mind a great deal. They were, perhaps, an obsession. At times he'd flinched. At least once, he'd not flinched. At some point-- surely at some point-- he was psychologically, morally, in every way broken. Like a few other writers-- Malory and Cervantes come to mind-- Porter had gone thoroughly through the fire of life and the world.

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

"There was one word that controlled his theme-- resurrection. Not a new creation, but a new life arising out of the old. The congregation had heard it often before."

-"The Day Resurgent"

O.Henry had a continual theme in his work, a theme which seems to have never been picked-up by academics and critics. Only once, in a mid-level story, "The Day Resurgent," did O. Henry slip up and advertise it. But it's a theme-- resurrection, as O. Henry describes it-- with tremendous implication and impact. A theme that reverberates far. It's the idea that man can change, or be changed, can be redeemed, can start over. Can, like safecracker Jimmy Valentine in "A Retrieved Reformation"-- or like "Deceiver" the Llano Kid-- be rescued from himself. Can, like the bohemian artist in "The Last Leaf," or Uncle Caesar in "A Municipal Report," prove himself by coming to the rescue of others.

O. Henry in his deceptive, trickster, often masterful way, comic and cosmic, got to the core questions of what being human is about. This marks him as among the greatest of American writers. He shouldn't be underrated at all.

Past "Baseball" Article

An essay I wrote in 1994 for North American Review is now available online at
www.jstor.org/stable/25125837

"The Last Day of Baseball."
An early writing piece, at the time my "New Philistine" was making waves. Not the better of the two essays I wrote for them, but might be worth a look.

Now Up at Pop Lit: "The H Group"!

Check the pop story out at www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com

Caste America

A GREAT IRONY is that American liberals today are as incapable as anyone of recognizing, and acknowledging, the caste nature of U.S. society.

Many differences in this country aren't simply differences of circumstance. Our brains are wired differently, according to how we were raised.

For example, I'm unable to listen to National Public Radio. The bloodless, monotone presentation puts me immediately to sleep, as it does to many. I'm convinced that much of the appeal of a Sean Hannity isn't what he says, so much that he looks and sounds like a "regular guy." (No accident that he used to work as a house painter.) This puts him on a level of instant acceptability with much of the public.

Sarah Palin is a classic example of caste. Her homey, twangy presentation bonds her with her fans, at the same time it creates instant, incredible hostility from the Genteel Caste; hostility unaccountable for simply because of her ideas. (Where's comparable hatred of Mitt Romney?) The like or dislike of Palin works on a conscious but also unconscious level. Emotion from below drives the positive or negative reaction-- extremes of sympathy and unsympathy outside the bounds of reason and logic.
**************************************
Much of my conflict with the established lit world has been because our tastes are radically different. The writing of postmodernists like David Foster Wallace does nothing for me. I see them as fakirs; semi-talented poseurs. On the other hand, the innate snobbery of the Genteel Caste prevents recognition of Jack London and O. Henry as great American authors. Why do those two writers from 100 years ago speak directly to me in ways that many well-hyped authors of now can't? In this case, caste trumps era.
****************************************
Caste America becomes more noticeable when you examine the underclass. In 2005 I worked as an uncertified substitute teacher in Philly schools, sent to inner city high schools most subs wouldn't touch. An example of financial desperation on my part. Tough places! The thing that hits you quickly enough is that these kids have NO chance in today's America. In the worst schools, of 5,000 kids, perhaps five a year took the SAT exam. Maybe things have improved-- but when you factor in the high dropout rate, the odds of upward mobility for these young people aren't good. The problem isn't confined to schooling. In punctuality, dress, dialect, presentation, these kids are in no way suited for entry into a workworld dominated by the Genteel Caste and its variants. (I'm not sure I was ever suited for it myself!) The advantages higher caste people grow up with are enormous. They're beyond quantification.

In a more challenging caste circumstance is the Hispanic situation. These people are slotted for bottom caste roles. They're not encouraged even to learn the dominant caste's language! Much less be acculturated into the subliminal nuances of those at the top.
*****************************************
Yes, we have the example of President Obama, seemingly shattering caste stereotypes-- until you consider that he was raised by upper-class grandparents, and educated at the top upper-caste universities of Columbia and Harvard.

Caste trumps race also.

"Mistakes of the ULA"

An examination of what went wrong with a previous project of mine is now up at my premium blog,
www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com

Most of the mistakes of course were mine. It was my plan!

Hard Times

It's always troublesome to meet a woman you dated when you first moved to a city now out hooking on the street.

"I'm hungry," she told me.

"So am I," I agreed.

The Unknowing

The intellectual establishment reveals its bankruptcy when, for instance, it regards Alexander Dumas as a mere writer for young people. Yet it's only when one has been around awhile, been knocked around, that his two great novels, Count of Monte Cristo and The Vicomte de Braggelone, can truly be appreciated. Both works have vast penumbras of meaning beyond all but a few of all other novels by all other novelists.

New Story at Pop Lit!

I've managed to get a great new story from one of the best young underground writers in America, Brady Russell. The story is "Ezra Meets Esther." You can read it ahead of the crowd at
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com
NOW!

Programming Note

At American Pop Lit I'll be interspersing pop stories with short cultural remarks designed to put the stories into context. (There'll be other features as well.)

Up now: The remark, "Color It Up," at
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com

What Is "The H Group"?

As Fake Face would say, The H Group The H Group Is Coming Coming.

Wenclas Premium

A REMINDER THAT my hard-core ideas about literature are now being posted at my premium blog,
www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com
by registration only. There I'll be giving thoughts and tips for the individual writer, and perhaps about individual writers. This may include Writer Case Studies with names left out. I'll also be posting my unorthodox ideas about "How to Save Literature" and other topics. If you're in any way involved in creative writing or in promoting writers, this is can't-miss info you'll get nowhere else. Email me for an invite.

Do I know what I'm talking about? Judge for yourself.

Introducing the Eternal Senator--

-- "Fake Face Meets Senator Crupt" is only at
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com

The kind of fiction you won't find anywhere else.

The H Group Is Coming

Soon. . . .

Pop Lit Question

Imaginations, please!
I have another question regarding my new Pop Lit blog.
See the post, "Opponent for Fake Face?" now up at
www.phillyliterary.blogspot.com
Thanks.

Pop Story Request

I need a name for the city in my latest pop story, "Introducing Fake Face," now up at
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com

-- something generic like "Metroville," but more noirish, more melodramatic. Any ideas?

Hodge Firing: Long Overdue?

That, at least, is the opinion of this commentator regarding the departure of Roger D. Hodge as Editor of Harpers magazine. See my post at
www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2005/02/profound-arrogance-other-harpers.html

One small step toward cleaning up the New York literary world.

Pop Lit!

WRITERS WANTED for an exciting new lit blog whose modest goal is to change literature-- or at least revive the American short story. I seek to bring adventure, imagination, drama, and fun back to the art form. Care to join along?
(Now up: an excerpt from Wred Fright's latest novel.)
Coming soon from myself: the Introduction on the blog of a bizarre but exciting new character.
Only at--
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com

The Timid Generation

A Rant

EXCEPT FOR A SMALL SEGMENT OF THE UNDERGROUND, this is the worst generation of poets and writers ever. An army of timid uniform stooges obediently scribbling their mimicries and similitudes of what everyone else is doing.

Except for a segment of the underground, never have there been so many writers satisfied to be loyally unoriginal, and unimportant, safely worshipping from a great distance models of the past without for a microinstant considering being models themselves.

Yes, celebrate Robbe-Grillet, or Ezra Pound, but while doing so don't tell anyone don't even whisper that these men were REBELS anxious to change literature and the world.

There was the case some years ago of the British Beat Poet who was a staunch admirer of Pound, mentioned the man on his blog, very daring, even flirted with literary rebellion himself-- until he realized the rebels weren't playing were actual shit-disturbers pissing people off while fighting with themselves kind of poets, you know, Pound-like, and the British Beat Poet blanched and fled immediately back to the safety of the academy or whatever secure-walled refuge from the turmoils of life had launched him, where he issued proclamations to the effect, "There are no street poets"; atoning for his rebellious thought-crime which might if he hadn't been so safely carefully timidly cautious have turned into something worse! Not Ezra Pound, in other words.

Yes, this is the worst of the worst.

Bukowski and Kerouac are admired by legions of writers with the proviso that unlike these two forceful figures the admirers inside the safety net would never consider living their art.

Kerouac was disgusted at the conformist world his entire life, loathed these people, ended drinking self-medicating himself to death while smoking cigarettes with his mother, in Florida, but the yuppies have lately produced books arguing this wasn't the real Kerouac. The real Kerouac is still living today with a two-car garage and an all-American family in the suburbs. The idea of Kerouac the nonconformist is to them an outrage. It's what caused Phillip Lopate to incoherently bluster at Miller Hall that Kerouac died without health care. Imagine! No tenure or pension. Rewrite that bio faster.

But they love Kerouac, they do, Literature's Loyalists, from tenured Columbia profs to conglomerate editorial servants to skyscraper power execs-- every one of them residing securely within the conformity of the unchallenging boxes of contemporary literature.

How did this situation result?

I've figured it out. Instead of dealing with the inconvenient independence of real writers, the Overdogs of Literature instead obtained a puppet catalog from the puppet factory, and ordered puppet writers, puppet editors, and puppet critics, who arrived special overnight delivery into New York offices in their puppet cartons-- a variety of types. You could have your older cranky Phillip Lopate puppet with perpetual frown, or your younger hipster Jonathan Lethem puppet, or blandly inocuous smarmy Jonathan Safran Foer puppet, or even a certified "DIY" Miranda July puppet with interchangeable hats and scarves.

Puppets, puppets, everywhere! Watch them speak! Watch them dare! Dance upon the cardboard floor; hope your fans will yell for more. Puppet audience, that's real cool, shipped direct from Ivy League school. Jump to borrowed hipster beat; puppet clothes that look real neat. Now we've reached the end of show. Politely clap and watch them go.

Goodbye puppets! Farewell, one and all.

New Post

My latest post, "New Literary Art," is at my now-private blog at
www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com
available by invitation or request.

New Lit-Blog

My latest project is up at

www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com

Call it an experiment, or an outlet for some of my work-- though I seek for it other popwriters as well, if any be interested. Deeper analysis of why we need new lit will be at my private blog.

Rate-A-Story

This is how I objectively rate my latest story on the essential elements. Keep in mind the scale is relative to the current state of the art.

READABILITY: A-
PACE: A-
EXCITEMENT: A-
PLOT/STRUCTURE: A
CHARACTER: A
SETTING: A-
MEANING: A
***********************
My first goal is to be the best short story writer in America now. (Given the dearth of competition, this is easily accomplished.)
My second goal is to write the best American short fiction seen since the days of Hemingway and Fitzgerald.
My third goal is to reinvent the short story form.
The fourth goal is to discover and develop story writers better than myself.
www.detroitliterary.blogspot.com

Elvis at 75

The triumph of the career of Elvis Presley was a populist triumph. His success revolutionized the style of popular music. Elvis was scorned by New York gentry then and he's still scorned by them, for class reasons.

Great Detroit Fiction

My latest story, "Death of a Detroit Drug Dealer," is now up
www.detroitliterary.blogspot.com

The Short Story Model

What is, or should be, the model short story?

What should be the form's goals? What objective are necessary to reach the goals?

I love classic stories. Contemporary stories are inferior. They're either too solipsistic, or weighed down by the perceived need to "write well" from a literary standpoint.

The short story is not about the writer, but the reader.

Happy New Year

I wouldn't say this was the hardest year I've been through, but it ranks right up there.

Quick Quiz

WHO would win a steel cage match between King Kong and Godzilla?
(Serious responses only.)

"Untitled"

Those who missed the brief run of the Jonathan Parker-Catherine DiNapoli flick "Untitled" missed a thought-provoking work. While it shreds the pretentions of New York contemporary art and "serious" music, it also offers an explanation, of sorts, or how we got there. (The scariest part is that I mildly enjoyed some of the film's mildly stimulating David Lang background music.)

Questions raised: What is art? What is the avant-garde?

To me, the connection between serious and commercial art, depicted regarding the art gallery at the center of the movie, was most intriguing. It mirrors the situation of literature's "serious" postmodern works a la Jon Lethem, with the bills paid by the "back room" produce of the Brad Thors of the publishing world. In literature, as with art, both categories are junk. (Or, as a Russian singer notably proclaims in the film, "This is shit!")

This realization-- that it's all shit-- turns the film from comedy into tragedy: the depressing knowledge that art has reached a dead end, with no apparent way out.

New Detroit Fiction

"The Zeen Writer"-- a story about Detroit at

http://www.happyamericawriting.blogspot.com/

and

www.detroitliterary.blogspot.com

Programming Note

Like many millions of people in this country, I don't own a computer, and rely on libraries and cafes in order to access the Internet. Of late, branch libraries in this town have cut their hours. Starting in October, all library branches including the central branch will close for budgetary reasons. (No libraries in a major city??) Internet cafes at the same time have been raising their fees.

WHICH MEANS I'll be doing a lot less posting on this blog and my other blogs. It's a miracle that I've kept them going the past few years as it is, given my up-and-down (mainly down) life circumstances during that period. Right now the recession is as bad as it's been, which makes it a little more difficult to make a living in any of the kind of jobs I work. I probably need a break from fighting the corruption of the demi-puppets!-- and will be focusing for once on my own writing.

In the meantime:
-There's a Youtube video purporting to be an interview with me, about the ULA!, conducted by a person I've not heard of, in which I talk up the organization-- why I would is a mystery as their top guys won't even sign the Petition to PEN, though it's clearly in their interest. (I also think I'm better looking and more articulate than the character in the video.)
-Said Petition still exists, and welcomes any lit person interested in the plight of writers-- everyone concerned about leveling a grossly distorted playing field:
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

Letter to "Poets & Writers"

To the Editor:
When I saw your new "Indy" issue I was ready to applaud your coverage of a literary movement long on the scene. However, your presentation of DIY is curiously truncated.

Where is mention of the major players of the Do-It-Yourself literary movement today? No Zine World, no Underground Literary Alliance, no Outsider Writers, no ZineWiki, no WeMakeZines. The historical overview Kimiko Hahn gives in her article has thrown the past 20 years of exciting DIY activity down an Orwellian memory hole. Where is mention of Factsheet 5 (either incarnation)? Or of unique DIY writing talents like Aaron Cometbus, Jen Gogglebox, Doug Holland, the Urban Hermitt, Bill Blackolive, Ann Sterzinger, and many others? Ms. Hahn hasn't done her homework. She mentions a "Chapbook" show-- apparently unaware of the hundreds of zine fairs, shows, and readings which have taken place, and continue to take place, this decade across the country.

Most mysterious of all, I can't find the word "zine" anywhere. (How-to-Make-a . . . Chapbook??)

Most of those involved in DIY see themselves as making ZINES, which encompass a range of talents-- art, graphics, DIY marketing and selling-- that traditional chapbooks only scantly embodied.

Real DIY is rooted in the punk happenings of the 70's and 80's. It carries forth that philosophy-- creating art apart from badges, institutions, gatekeepers, bureaucrats, and controllers. ("We don't need no stinkin' badges.")

Culture from the ground up. To paraphrase Zine World's motto, American literature belongs to everyone.

Sincerely,
Karl Wenclas

A Che T-Shirt

THE FAKE ARTAUD PART II

Appropriation is the name of the game for the upper classes. If they want something, or want to be something or someone, they purchase it. They adopt a role as easily as buying a Che t-shirt. What they most desire is ownership.

This is how, for instance, rich guy Hiram F. "Rick" Moody III operates. "Daddy-Society, buy me that." In a recent Believer essay Moody decided he wished to be the next Antonin Artaud. "Voila!" American Express or Diner's Club? Antonin Artaud he's become.

The curious thing about it is that Artaud wanted to destroy the walls put up around art and artists; between artist and audience. Rick Moody lives surrounded by walls: institutional walls; class walls; walls of security and guards.

Twice I encountered the man when I led the ULA. I spoke up at events, from the audience. Briefly, I broke down walls. Both times security quickly shut me down.

They were exciting events! The kind of encounters the real Artaud would've loved. The second time, at the ULA's "Howl" protest in 2006, at Columbia's Miller Hall, I was with several notably crazed Artaud-like avant-garde characters whose lives and art consist of destroying walls-- "F.D.W." Walsh; Jelly Boy the Clown (whose sudden appearance onstage panicked the genteel audience); and surrealist underground novelist Patrick King. The Fake Artaud in a chair on the stage, Mr. Moody, sat silent while a cranky member of Moody's marionette entourage, one Phillip Lopate-- a rather red-faced marionette-- angrily denounced us.

The conflict released the bourgeoisie for a moment from their psychological fetters, but they didn't like this. We departed. Behind us the invisible walls slammed immediately down. The controlled puppets onstage and the controlled audience continued their stuffy, mind-wasting program.

We were denizens from the street thrown back to it. The difference between the two camps on that occasion was stark. No matter! For Columbia, ownership of "Howl" was more important than the spirit of the work. "Howl," or Ginsberg, or Artaud are objects they can place in a showcase, or lock in an airless room, or nail onto a wall like a trophy pelt.

These days the literary establishment has decided it wants DIY, and is busily moving to possess it.

Meanwhile the corpse of Antonin Artaud, absent of its spirit, can be found nailed to a wall at the controlled and clean offices of The Believer in San Francisco. First door past the lobby. They've got it! Bought; appropriated; credit card receipt in their hand; their name on the title.

A Summary

Here are several of the key posts concerning the Petition to PEN protest.
www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2009/04/pen-background.html
www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2009/04/does-pen-support-needy-writers.html
www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2009/04/more-pen-facts.html
www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2009/04/facts-about-pen.html
www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2009/05/pen-yacht-parties.html
www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2009/06/more-pen-corruption.html
www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2009/06/just-facts.html
www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2009/05/when-did-pen-lose-its-soul.html

This is just part of the argument. As well, more is to be added.

Pseudo-Liberals

I've had an interesting email from writer Jacqueline Sarah Homan, latest to join the protest at
www.penpetition.blogspot.com
She pointed out the importance of "presentation" (image) to the bourgeois personality. We've also discussed the strange case of super-liberal Barbara Ehrenreich, who's made millions out of speaking FOR working and lower class people, yet to date has refused to sign the Petition to PEN herself. (She knows about it.) In many ways she's more detrimental to the plight of underground writers than a straight-up opposed reactionary, because she displaces our authentic voice, leaving our kind of writer more shut out than ever.

A similar case to Ehrenreich is PBS TV liberal Thomas Frank, a former zeenster of sorts who's ignored three packets of information mailed to him about the PEN matter. It seems that, given a choice between career fortune and supposed principles, they easily throw the latter overboard. Which tels me they weren't very genuine to start with.

The chief example of the pseudo-liberal mindset is PEN American Center, which postures as the defender of the underdog-- raising funds and throwing lavish parties in so doing-- at the same time it shuns said underdog in this country. They're able to compartmentalize their ruthless blackballing behind a Potemkin-style facade of goodness.

My readership has followed this protest for five months. I've posted a ton of argument and evidence. What do you think? I'm opening the blog to unrestricted comments.

Das Komisar

THE SERVANT OF POWER
There's a fundamental contradiction to PEN American Center. They're supposed to speak for the powerless. But, in this country, if you have no power PEN will not even acknowledge that you exist.

If I were Cormac McCarthy or Philip Roth they'd be rushing to help me and my compadres. But Roth and McCarthy don't need help. Not at all.

PEN's own genteel protests are in fact about advancing megaconglomerate power into every corner of the globe. PEN's every action can be gauged according to how it relates to power.

Witness Director Isenberg. Read his bio. Is he about anything but the attainment of position; of power?

Was Isenberg given his latest position to reform PEN-- or to squelch dissent and reform?

If this were the Soviet Union, Director Isenberg would be standing loyally behind Brezhnev on the Kremlin wall.

NO RESPONSE
Tom Hendricks and myself each sent emails to new Director Isenberg notifying him of the Petition to PEN. The door is open for dialogue. We've received no response.

Why haven't YOU joined the Protest? History celebrates the rebels; the trailblazers: the dissidents. Memory of the timid and the corrupt vanishes into dust.
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

For All Writers

THE VARIETY of signers of the Petition to PEN shows that it's for all writers-- ALL writers-- from the lowest to the highest. What it's really saying is this: "We writers are taking back control of our art."

PEN members THEMSELVES most of all need to join the cause, as they've lost control of their own organization.

Remember, we're the good guys.
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

Media Circus

GRANTED, it's difficult to interest people in the corrupt and grubby little world of literature against the Two-Minute Hate Orwellian Noise Campaign of the ongoing health care media show. In one corner, smooth-sounding Benevolent Big Brother Barack Obama. In the other, clinically insane drama queen Glenn Beck.

COMPETING PLUTOCRACIES
What's really happening is a war between media giants; GE/NBC/MSNBC and the Democratic Party their handpuppet versus Murdoch/News Corp/Fox and the Republican Party their handpuppet. It's a power struggle over spoils; a war over WHO is going to control the Machinery of Monopoly. On the fundamental questions there's little difference between the two camps. Okay, Republicans are Hard Imperialists and Democrats are Soft Imperialists, but NAFTA, WTO, and the Afghanistan bombing continue.

This is similar to the last days of the Roman Republic, when the political competition was between competing plutocrats, Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus, over WHO would control Rome's power and wealth. Real reform could never happen, because the Reformers would have to reform themselves.

I find it amusing to hear talk of a "government option," as if the government were independent, when it's owned and controlled by one gang or another of corporate plutocrats. This was proven over the past year when the corporate banking world turned the Treasury piggy bank upside down and emptied it into their own pockets.
*************************************
WHAT ABOUT PEN?
Actually, the Establishment power structure DOES still care, for whatever bizarre reason, about literature. This is proven by the appointment of one of their best, most loyal soldiers, one Steven L. Isenberg, as Exec Director of the PEN organization, which Once Upon a Time was run by writers themselves.

Can PEN allow real writer dissent against our nation's Power Structure when it IS (part of) the U.S. Power Structure?
http://www.penpetition.blogspot.com/
(That Mr. Isenberg resembles an old Roman plutocrat adds to the amusement.)

The Prisoner

Noted imprisoned writer Cassidy Wheeler is the latest to join the Petition to PEN at
http://www.penpetition.blogspot.com/
It was not easy getting him information on the protest. The facility he's at opens and screens all mail. They have a bureaucratic checklist of more than fifty reasons for rejecting correspondence. Nevertheless, a small information packet was eventually allowed through to him.

Cassidy signed immediately and mailed back the Petition. His name has been added to the list of literary heroes. At the same time, many hundreds of writers who aren't in prison have easy access to the Petition, and the reasons behind it. They can read it at will, at the click of a computer mouse, and have not signed. How many more rights do they have than Cassidy; how many more opportunities to speak out?-- for their own rights and for all writers' rights, yet they fail to do so.

We either use our democratic freedoms or lose them-- use our voices or see those voices marginalized, so that the only voices which remain are those for the rich and powerful-- as we've seen with the transformation of PEN the past twenty years. Plutocrats will have all the media, all the space, while our own room to maneuver in this society will be squeezed as tight as a prison cell.

The Petition to PEN is an affirmation of purpose; a statement of existence as citizens and writers. Please join our cause.

Posted at PEN

(Posted on a thread at PEN America Center's main blog, http://www.penamerica.blogspot.com/):

Here are facts for PEN's new Director to consider:
In 2001 the Underground Literary Alliance began bravely and openly documenting and exposing corruption in the literary world. Included in our reports were questionable grants to trendy writers like Rick Moody and Jonathan Franzen. We also looked into questions, originally raised by others, of plagiarism, and squelched articles.
In response the Eggers Gang (to competitors they behave like a gang) engaged in a several-year dirty tricks campaign against myself and the ULA. This has also been documented-- beginning with a 2004 New York Times article which revealed that Dave Eggers himself had been posting anonymous attacks against the ULA on Amazon.
As a lawyer, Mr. Isenberg knows the importance of evidence. The overwhelming mass of evidence is on our side of the issue.
********************
PEN's stonewalling raises questions about its integrity as an organization. I hope Mr. Isenberg cleans up the place. Until then, I'll continue documenting, and documenting, and documenting.
http://www.penpetition.blogspot.com/
August 7, 2009 10:56 AM

Gorbachev or Chernenko?

Here's bio info on PEN American Center's new Executive Director, Steven L. Isenberg:
www.pen.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/3734/prmID/170

The choice seems to indicate that the takeover of PEN by the establishment is complete. Steve Isenberg is as establishment as you can get. Is it fair to assume that he'll be a representative of money and power? I had hoped for a new face; forward-looking in attitude.

One interesting point in his resume: that he was President of the newspaper Newsday before it went under. He has to know that the world is changing-- and that literature needs to change also.

Will he reach out to the DIY movement? The door is open for him to do so. Continued stonewalling works for no one.
www.penpetition.blogspot.com
**************************************
I find it humorous to see PEN's talk supporting "free expression" in this country. There is no "free" expression in America. You have the expression you can pay for-- and so plutocratic aristocrats have more of it. Others are required to buy their way into the system in some manner; usually by accumulating credentials to prove your conformity to things-as-they-are. It's the road toward stagnation. Classic democracy presupposes equal access to speech: a level playing field. This is what an organization like PEN should be working toward. Lately they've been going in the other direction.

See other thoughts on this topic, "Ignorance," at
www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com

The Ultimate Suit?

I just got word that PEN American Center has named a new Executive Director, Steven Isenberg. Contrary to my hopes, he doesn't seem to have a background conducive to dissenting instincts. I hope I'm mistaken. His bio, laudable to some, to me is scary. I'll post it on this blog when I have more time.

That said, let's hope he reaches out to the Petition,
www.penpetition.blogspot.com
and establishes a dialogue-- or at least answers legitimate questions about the organization he's now running.

The Movement

Two points that have to be made.
1.) The underground literary movement is a legitimate literary movement.
2.) The movement is being stonewalled and suppressed because it's a movement; i.e., for ideological reasons.

STATIC OR DYNAMIC?
The movement needs to decide whether it's going to remain inert, as it's been since 2006, or if it can recapture its dynamism. One of my reasons for starting the Petition to PEN at
http://www.penpetition.blogspot.com/
is to help restart the literary rebellion's momentum. Many outstanding undergrounders have joined the protest-- the two most recent names among the more notable.

WHO'S WHO
The Petition is becoming a Who's Who of underground literary figures. The list shows the diversity of talent within the movement. Several more names remain to be added. There's no reason not to join. The Petition is an affirmation that there is, and needs to be, an underground literary movement.

WHAT'S NEEDED
It'd also be cool if writers who'd been tangentially part of the underground literary scene early in their careers, notably Thomas Frank, and who remain allegedly activist now, would join the protest.

INSURGENTS
Meanwhile, the privileged members of the narrow world of the literary establishment, from David Haglund to Patricia Cohen, have closed all doors to the Petition. There has not been one budged inch from them toward dialogue. THEY have defined us as beyond the pale, pariahs apart, unworthy of respect or notice; in so doing, creating an insurgency: a movement. We're insurgents in that we promote literary democracy, renewal, and change.

Conflicts of Interest

IT APPEARS that PEN American Center buys its immunity from criticism through its wining and dining of leading editors and journalists like David Remnick, Henry Finder, Adam Gopnik, Margo Jefferson, Patricia Cohen, and others. I hope these people can see the extent to which they're compromised right now.
*********************
If anonymous poster "Harland" is indeed Rick Moody, as now seems likely, then this throws light on the behavior of PEN staffers like David Haglund, given Moody's documented influence in the organization. PEN's impetus to shut down the whistleblower or dissenter then becomes comprehensible. Their behavior runs counter to PEN's mission-- but is the natural result of PEN's embrace of money and power.

FURTHER, if Rick Moody has engaged in anonymous attacks, then this adds to the record of dirty tricks carried out by his friends Dave Eggers and Daniel Handler against the ULA and myself, as has been well-documented. We have the outlines of a covert campaign to destroy a competitor. Such behavior is unethical, if not illegal.
*********************
As for PEN's David Haglund-- given that he's been published by The Believer, and given that he represents a regulated tax-exempt charity with obligations to the public, he needs to demonstrate SOME fairness and cease stonewalling the Petition to PEN's, and this blog's, legitimate questions.
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

The Real Failure

The noteworthy point about the literary establishment is its utter mediocrity. This is something I realized as far back as 2001, when at CBGB's in New York the Underground Literary Alliance destroyed the preppy Paris Review staff in debate.

Even when the System tries to be imaginative, as with HarperStudio, it's dependent on time-serving ticket-punchers-- apparatchiks-- who've made careers out of being unimaginative.

In its various aspects-- including HarperStudio; including PEN-- when encountering hard criticism and whistleblowing the System knows only how to stonewall, only how to exclude and block; to put tape over its eyes and cotton in its ears, black paper over its windows, to ensure it sees, hears, and knows nothing. "Don't tell me!" is the prevailing attitude.

Stonewalling-- the unwillingness or inability to engage-- is not the sign of a dynamic establishment but instead of a stagnant and frightened one. NONE of its bureaucratic occupants, from the highest Francine Prose/James Wood critic to the lowliest Murdoch HarperCollins staffer, is able to debate, which means having to think. They've lived in an airless room for so long without questioning or dissent that to let questions in now-- fresh air-- would turn the lot of them into dust.

DIY change is coming and coming fast. Some of the apparatchiks recognize this-- and so the desperate grasping of DIY language by desperate outfits like HarperStudio desperate to hold onto their control over writers.

If authentic DIYers were better able to network and work together they'd bring the house of cards down now.

The real failure lies with media watchdogs like the New Yorker; too part of a corrupt system to cover the corruption-- or stagnation-- at places like HarperStudio or PEN. And so these media giants risk their own Soviet Union-style collapse when the tidal wave of change finally hits them.
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

Literary Suicide

Creative writers of all stripes had best wake up at the news that TV celebrity Lauren Conrad has the best-selling novel in America. This is the explicitly anti-writer trend conglomerate publishing is following. It's no accident that Lauren Conrad is published by HarperCollins, which is also the force behind HarperStudio, whose stated mission is to publish celebrities.

For American literature this is suicide. It's the publishing conglomerates admitting they can't create their own stars, so they're going to borrow some from other realms. It's as if Indy Car racing, in its attempt to regain its once-lofty status, stopped developing talent like Danica Patrick and instead put TV personalities into its cars. For any business, any sport, any art, it's to become a joke.

Development of writing talent is what HarperStudio specifically doesn't want-- which is why it's stopped paying advances to writers, instead offering them a share of "profits." (Accounting no doubt done Hollywood-style by HarperCollins itself.) There's no thought of taking a loss on a couple books while building a writer's brand-- unless perhaps said author is independently wealthy, or willing to starve. The bottom line is all. Developing a novelist or poet, building their name and their audience, isn't wanted. This is considered old-fashioned according to HarperStudio's "Publishing on the Edge." (The edge of a cliff?) Instead: "Bring on the TV stars!"

That PEN American center is complicit in this should cause every PEN member, and every writer everywhere, to vomit.

(Underground writers may occasionally dress up like clowns, but we're also dedicated writers. HarperStudio has bypassed the writing part and gone directly to Ringling Brothers.)

www.penpetition.blogspot.com
A Protest for Authentic Radicals Only

The Fake Artaud

(First of Two Parts.)

OUR CIVILIZATION is the most sophisticated of all time. Its tricks go beyond the ability of commentators to catch them. Intellectuals-- historians, literary critics, political scientists-- are themselves bamboozled by the onslaught.

For instance, the ability of the Machine to quickly co-opt all dissent and difference-- to claim ownership for itself of every cultural happening and quirk.

If Imperial Rome had been that sophisticated, it would've co-opted the Jesus Movement by presenting a slicker alternative. Jesus without the edge. The replacement version would've been better-looking, more patrician-- more Roman-- would not have carried any anger, and not been so poor. He wouldn't have been crucified-- how gauche; what a loser-- and above all would've been pro-Imperial Rome.

Those doing the coopting today are today's patricians; our own Imperialists; indoctrinated and credentialed at the most prestigious schools, then given high positions in the highest academies or the conglomerates. The young priests live in a high-up realm from which they look down upon the rest of society. They don't comprehend this other world, but their insularity and arrogance assures them they do. The world is something the highest caste owns.

Young priestess Debbie Stier at HarperStudio, in the upper realms of publishing hierarchy, imagines herself to be an insurgent. Real literary insurgents of course are socially and economically crucified, eliminated from caste vision, they and their writings tossed into garbage dumpsters to be seen by no one. Stier easily steps into their role. She's oppressed and oppressor in one. It's the split identity of a comic book superhero. Debbie Stier is both INSIDE the towering office of power, on the 26th floor, and simultaneously OUTSIDE the building, on the streets, protesting herself. It's how her mind resolves the conflict generated by her station, by her power, by her main career role.

Another example of the phenomenon of high caste power is an essay by Rick Moody in that organ of Imperialist literature, The Believer: "Analects on the Influence of Artaud," in the June issue. Moody not only discusses Antonin Artaud, he identifies himself with him, as if he, Rick Moody, is the latter-day Artaud; or, at least, the leader of today's avant-garde. In his mind, Moody fully believes he is.

Are other latter-day Artauds mentioned? Kathy Acker perhaps? No.

Rick Moody explains to us how he came to become the new Artaud. It was in the academy; the illusion factory; at Columbia or Brown-- Moody doesn't specify which one. He's performing in an Artaud play there, for a course. In his enthusiasm-- rare enthusiasm (I've witnessed him read and saw no enthusiasm)-- Moody cuts his hand. This is his baptism into Artaud; his license to inhabit the role. As Moody tells us:

"It took a long while for the wound to heal. I was launched on the world. I was a graduate."

Now safely put into the superhero uniform of Antonin Artaud, because of a cut on his hand, in college, Moody is able, through agreement with the man's life and ideas, to further strengthen the identification.

The agreement, mind you, remains in the essay. Needless to say, Rick Moody isn't another Artaud. The idea is ludicrous. He's made his way in the lit-world by being as conformist and bourgeois as possible; gathering credential and credential, award after award; bonding with arts institution upon arts institution: becoming, beyond all else, APPROVED.
(To be continued.)

See a related essay now up at
www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com
and join the protest at
http://www.penpetition.blogspot.com/

Literary Monopoly

I intend to tie the remaining loose threads together and show that the current literary system is a monopoly which excludes critical and contrary voices. This monopoly is maintained through implicit control of literature's watchdogs, from PEN American Center to the New Yorker.

NEW YORKER FOLLIES
Can we expect the New Yorker to cover corruption at PEN, including the public charity's close relationship to the handful of media giants, when the New Yorker's leading editors and writers-- David Remnick, Henry Finder, Adam Gopnick-- are PEN members who attend PEN's swanky galas and participate at PEN events; who in many cases are published by the media giants, and in some instances (Steve Coll) are the recipients of PEN largesse?

HARPER STUDIO
The reason I'm hyper about HarperStudio and Burn This Book is because it marks the coopting/stealing/destruction of the underground brand by a monopolistic giant; an underground brand which was launched in 2001 with large ads in major publications like Village
Voice. The "ads" weren't paid for-- they were feature articles obtained through ballyhoo-- but they were ads, generated with a purpose, all the same.

Now we have the fake-DIY employees of a fake-DIY section of Harper-Collins/Murdoch gushing in mock-amazement ("Wow!) at the appearance of their fake-radical PEN book appearing on a shelf at an independent bookstore in Brooklyn, as if they were genuine impoverished undergrounders who did it on their own. Left unsaid is the fact that they and that book are backed by billions of dollars.

BOOKSTORES
Sweetheart deals cut by the media giants with the huge book chains Borders and Barnes & Noble is itself an important topic. Who's covering it?

DESTROYING THE UNDERGROUND
I've documented on this blog the actions of Daniel Handler and his apparent agents (Tao Lin; "Quilty10") to derail the underground cause. The motive was to squelch even the weak competition we offered.

STONEWALLING
The motive for PEN's stonewalling against questions and criticisms is the same: to shut out competition to things-as-they-are. What they've done, through their silence, is create an irrefutable record of bias and inaction. Someone should remind them they're a public organization, accountable to the public.

Who's giving PEN its marchingorders?
Is there enough here for anti-trust action?
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

The Surprise

It's amazing to me that I can present an overwhelming case for changing PEN American Center, bolstered by argument after argument after argument, and the entire organization continues to stonewall. At what point does one reach memories of integrity and conscience in them; the recognition of their own principles? They're monolithic stones. Their attitude toward criticism, toward free expression and debate, has gone beyond mere hostility, into immunity. Pathological unreachability, as if they're floating far away from other writers, above humankind; above the planet, far above, in the vicinity of Pluto. When I post a comment on one of their blogs, it's as if a switch is flipped turning off their minds. They become blind deafmutes. They see, hear, and speak nothing.

THEY have become the strongest argument proving the literary world's corruption.
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

(Happy Bastille Day! Long Live the Revolution.)

Reviews

I have three book reviews in the works, which I'll be posting either here or elsewhere. Stay posted. In the meantime, check out the recent posts at one of my other blogs,
www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com

PEN History

Here's PEN background from the 1990's, detailing the transformation which led to the condition the organization is now in. Not a good thing! (Note: these are to some extent establishment viewpoints, and the picture painted is still scary.)

www.nytimes.com/1996/01/24/arts/invite-in-the-rich-pen-is-pondering.html


www.nytimes.com/1997/03/12/arts/stung-by-dissident-a-divided-pen-ponders-its-role.html?.

www.villagevoice.com/1999-06-08/news/no-union-label-at-a-pen-gala/.

To work to turn this around, join the protest at
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

Book BCS

The U.S. Congress has held hearings about the college football BCS system; alleging that 90% of funds generated are monopolized by six conferences. Senator Hatch called the system "elitist."

How much more so is the lit-bizness, centralized in New York, monopolized by a handful of giant media conglomerates; and within the system, influence wielded chiefly by the graduates of a handful of east coast universities. When does Congress hold anti-trust hearings about this monopoly?

The problem is exacerbated by the actions of legal public charities like PEN American Center, whose charity is used to subsidize the multi-national giants. Most recently, this "charity," instead of seeking an arrangement with a true independent press (much less a radically indy press like the one run by the ULA), chose instead to have their book of allegedly dissident essays published by new boutique press HarperStudio, a fake-indy outfit run by Murdoch Media.

As kicker, HarperStudio seems to be aggressively anti-writer, in that
A.) it doesn't pay author advances;
B.) most of its authors are mass media celebrities.

Writers have become unnecessary in this scary "new" world of establishment publishing. Very uncomfortable, ya know, keeping around actual writers. . . .
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

Rationalizations

I've had some inklings at to the REASONS used to justify PEN's stonewalling; rationales to support established literature's blackballing. Judge how valid they are.

A.) I'M AKIN TO A SMELLY BUM OR A MADMAN.
It's true that someone would have to be mad to take on literature's totalitarians.

B.) THOSE WHO SIGN THE PETITION ARE AMBITIOUS.
Are writers ambitious for wanting to be heard? For expecting to be part of a democratic conversation by and about literature? A serious charge.

C.) I'VE USED A DISPARAGING TONE.
When you approach the Overdogs of Lit, do so with a submissive mien on your face and your hat in hand.

D.) PEN AMERICAN CENTER IS IMPOTENT.
This is strong argument for changing it.

E.) I'M NOT A WRITER
The quickest way to exclude writers you disagree with is to designate them "not writers."

F.) MY ARGUMENTS ARE UNPERSUASIVE.
The arguments are persuasive enough that they have to be stonewalled. Any argument becomes unpersuasive when it's censored; when it's not heard.

There must be other rationales for PEN's stonewalling. We don't know what they are, because PEN's staffers and bloggers aren't talking.
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

George Garrett (1992)

A 1992 quote from George Garrett which appeared in the Rollyson-Paddock Sontag biography on page 241; originally in Garrett's hard-to-find My Silk Purse and Yours:

"Most of the writers (practically anybody you ever heard of) are involved in a close symbiotic relationship, cozy you might say, with the publishing world. Without the acquiescence and tacit support of the writers (especially the most successful ones), the whole creaky system might collapse. They can fool you, though, the writers. Take PEN, for example, forever using our dues to battle against some form of overt censorship here and there, against racial separation and segregation in South Africa if not, say, Kenya or Ghana, firmly committed against torture everywhere in the world except in certain Eastern Bloc nations, and mostly keeping their own mouths shut about the inequities and injustices, trivial and profound, perpetuated on the American public by the same folks who give writers their advances against royalties and publish their books. Whatever the price is, it doesn't include a vow of silence or even very much self-sacrifice."

I wonder about that vow of silence!
www.penpetition.blogspot.com
Have a Happy Fourth, writers. Show your own independence by joining this protest FOR free speech and AGAINST stonewalling.

Man Bites Dog

There are three levels to the Petition to PEN American Center protest, centered at
www.penpetition.blogspot.com
I.) The well-documented corruption of PEN itself, including grants, parties, and salaries, as well as its incestuous relationship with multinational conglomerates.
II.) The refusal of PEN to respond to questions regarding these matters. PEN staffers and bloggers remain silent. A stone wall has been erected around the organization.
III.) The failure of media outlets, other than Z Magazine, to cover this. That a "public charity" whose mission is to protect dissenting writers, is instead ostracizing them, is a bizarre enough happening to warrant press coverage. Yet where are journalists from outlets like the New Yorker? Has their presence at swanky PEN affairs swamped their judgement?

All Welcome

ALL writers, high and low, are invited to join the campaign to return PEN American Center to its original principles.

I'd love to see a "popular front" of writers develop to support this. Only a mere handful of reactionaries could want to oppose a move for openness and democracy in the literary world.

The timing of this campaign is crucial. Current PEN Executive Director Michael Roberts is stepping down from his post. Roberts was installed a decade ago to serve the interests of New York plutocrats. He did that well-- but times have changed.

Is it too much to ask for a Gorbachev-like moderate to take his place? It's time for some Glasnost (openness) and Perestroika (restructuring) in PEN, and in the literary world as a whole.

Join the cause!
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

The Literary Underground

How does it benefit literature to wipe out an entire class of writers?

Underground writers face two strong obstacles.
1.) The indifference (or hostility) of the literary world.
2.) The daily struggle for survival-- money to eat; a roof over one's head.

Such battle makes one in parts tough, angry, resourceful, and, of all things, hopeful; for if one can survive the continual assault of lower-class American LIFE, one can accomplish anything.
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

Phoniness Dept.

The literary establishment wages constant war on independent publishers and writers, by co-opting them. I've previously written about establishment darling Miranda July's portrayal by her promoters as "Do-It-Yourself." It turned out she wasn't DIY at all.

Latest maneuver is "HarperStudio," a project from the Murdoch-owned HarperCollins publishing empire. Note the web site--
www.theharperstudio.com --
and the claim of publishing "on the edge." (Anything but.) Click "About" and note the yuppified staff. See the pose of DIY. What's lacking from these system pets is the hard-knock AUTHENTICITY which comes from true independence.
*********************************
HarperStudio's claim to be "publishing on the edge" is a lie. Underground writers, on the other hand, ARE living, writing, and publishing on the edge. Outfits like PEN should be defending and celebrating them.
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

"The Literary System"

"The Literary System":
A short essay now up at
www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com

(Have you joined the protest at
www.penpetition.blogspot.com
yet?
Show your independence! Join an all-star cast of fearlessly exciting writers.
The future is with us.)

Burn WHAT Book?

PART I
The media monopolies have a way of skewing perception and turning reality on its head, so that any attempt to stall their totalitarian dominance becomes viewed, bizarrely, as censorship.

This is the impulse behind the in-your-face title of PEN American Center's new collection of essays, Burn This Book. The contributors include bonded members of the literary establishment like John Updike. Even though Updike is dead, his words still never fail to find outlets. He's hardly a writer who's been in any way ostracized or restricted. (As some dissident writers in this country are.)

Who, you ask, is the publisher of Burn This Book? WHO?

Harper-Collins, a giant book conglomerate which is part of the Brontasaurian-sized Rupert Murdoch media empire.

Or: A gigantic media monopoly is co-opting dissent, with PEN's assistance. The book monopolies, akin to Starbucks or McDonald's, want not just most of the market. They want ALL of it. They want every streetcorner; every shelf of every library and bookstore; every corner of the globe. PEN eagerly offers their help.

Opposition is steamrolled.

Join the movement for literary change at
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

(p.s. In response to requests to cover "popular" conglomerate authors, I'll soon be presenting a review of neocon novelist Vince Flynn. Stay tuned.)

Reactionary Lit

WHAT'S HAPPENING to American literature today is insane. At a time when unemployment in America is nearing depression levels (in Michigan it's already there), the New York literati and media hold swanky parties celebrating 80's wealth-icon Jay McInerney.

I've documented the swing of PEN toward New York money power in the 90's; and mentioned PEN's own lavish party last year on the Queen Mary.(At the time I was examining the lit-world's celebration of Marie Antoinette!) Snobby "Gossip Girl" books have become a publishing staple. Literature's rush toward plutocracy shows no sign of slackening.

What's happening with this blog?

I've been accused of engaging in class war, because I've objectively described literature's transformation. But at some level it's true: the literary rebellion of this decade has been an argument between rich and poor; more specifically, between rich writers and poor writers. The rebels' whistleblowing angered a clique of very wealthy, very powerful writers-- those who have the power to dictate even to PEN about who to appoint, or how to behave, or what to say, or not say.

The argument at its starkest is between rich writers and poor writers, but it's about more than that. The Petition to PEN is a battle for the soul of PEN. It's a battle for the soul of American literature.

The choice is clear:
-Underdogs vs. Overdogs;
-Democracy vs. Aristocracy;
-Openness vs. Secrecy;
-Dissent vs. Silence.

PEN American Center has thrown its principles overboard and chosen the wrong side.

Which side are YOU on?
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

The Beautiful and Damned

IT SAYS EVERYTHING about the insularity of the New York literary world that in this time of economic calamity it conducts a massive hype campaign for rich guy author Jay McInerney. (Including an egregious cover story in Poets and Writers.) The photos of the recent Brooke Geahan-hosted soiree say more than everything:
www.patrickmcmullan.com/site/event_detail.aspx?eid=29970&page=2&pgSize=16&sortdir=DESC

Curious, isn't it, that the best and bravest outsider writers are ostracized, while the superwealthy are feted? Dare we say that McInerney's days of relevance were over circa 1989?
******************************
Jay McInerney has forever posited himself as another F. Scott Fitzgerald, in that both chronicled the wealthy, but there's an enormous difference between the two writers. Scott Fitzgerald's best work is imbued with an intense sense of striving. As much as any writer ever has, he captured the desperate melancholy of the born outsider. It's the very theme of Gatsby-- that most class conscious of American novels. By contrast, the closest careless McInerney would ever come to identifying an American underdog is if he ran over one with his limousine.

Jay McInerney, son of a prosperous insurance exec, has been at the top of American society his entire life. His only brush with economic hardship, as once-documented by the now defunct Saturday Review, was not having a summer retreat during college days.

Scott Fitzgerald's moment at the top was spectacularly brief. By the end of his life he was barely hanging on, physically and financially, in Hollywood, writing stories in which his point-of-view was again on the outside.

If any Fitzgerald novel is relevant to Jay McInerney, it's The Beautiful and Damned; a tale of the dissolute lifestyle, puerility, and intellectual feebleness of a clique of wealthy people during the Jazz Age. The title of the book, IN THESE DAYS, during these scrambling-hard-times, is a fitting appelation for carelessly clueless Brooke Geahan and her white-clothed partygoers, including red-faced, talent-passed-him-by Jay McInerney.

You can support literary underdogs by joining those at
http://www.penpetition.blogspot.com/

Note a related story from June 7th at
www.nypost.com/seven/06072009/news/regionalnews/charities_look_like_parodies_173029.htm

Just the Facts

The case for change of public charity PEN American Center is fact-based, centered in six areas.
1.) PEN hostility to criticism and free expression from writers.
2.) Questionable PEN grants.
3.) Hyperexpensive PEN parties.
4.) Embrace of New York wealth.
5.) Embrace of multinational book conglomerates.
6.) Excessive salaries to high-level PEN staff.

I've spent three months on this blog documenting the argument. If you agree that the case should at least be heard, then join the courageous voices at
www.penpetition.blogspot.com
who are trying to open up a closed literary world.

Information Blackout

Iran isn't the only place which has clamped down an information blackout. The same phenomenon is happening at PEN, which believes that if it ignores criticisms of its organization, and stonewalls them, they'll disappear.

Two inklings of hints of rumors of happenings within PEN American Center.
1.) PEN staffers aren't allowed to read this blog.
2.) PEN members are kept disconnected, as much as possible, from other PEN members, in that there's no internal PEN member email list.

As to the truth of these inklings of happenings within PEN: How is anyone to know?

Join the fight for literary openness at
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

The First

WHO'LL BE FIRST?
Who'll be the first establishment writer to join the growing list of names at the Petition to PEN?

The person will have to be unconventional, daring, independent, forward-looking, and on the side of the underdog.

Is such creature out there among the legions of timid apparatchiks? I believe the answer is yes.

Join the noise. Help create a new literary world.
http://www.penpetition.blogspot.com/ --
bravest of the brave, boldest of the bold.

Stonewalling of Ideas

Worse than the stonewalling and blackballing of writers by organizations like PEN is the stonewalling and blackballing of ideas-- notably, examinations of the workings of the machine of established literature. This is simply not allowed. "Critics" like Sven Birkerts, Luc Sante, and James Wood gain their station and status through implicit agreement not to glance outside the bounds of the acceptable. They stay inside their Kremlin walls. Which makes them not critics, but glorified p.r. flacks for the literary machine as is.
http://www.penpetition.blogspot.com/
Democracy or Aristocracy:
WHICH SIDE ARE YOU ON?

More Swanky Parties

PEN isn't the only New York-based literary outfit consumed with catering to rich people, even as other sections of the country suffer economic collapse. There's also the Accompanied Literary Society, whose name is a rich folks rip-off of the Underground Literary Alliance, and whose web site can be found on this blog's Links under "Piggy Plutocrats." To be fair, ALS shares many of the same players as PEN. It's more-or-less the same privileged pleasure-seeking Insider party crowd.

Latest shindig for ALS was a celebration of Jay McInerney at the Montauk Yacht Club. According to Page Six, "150 bibliophiles dressed in white for a dinner hosted by the Accompanied Literary Society's Brooke Geahan in a compound of fantasy cottages built by impresario Florenz Ziegfeld to house his three mistresses during Prohibition." Can anyone say, about New York literati, "out of touch"?

The lowlight of the party was when actress Claire Danes and beaux Hugh Dancy danced to the song "Nobody Loves You When You're Down and Out." A poke in the eye to the rest of America?

ALS is one thing; PEN another. Let the Manhattan rich have ALS. PEN should return to its principles.

For photos of the big literary shindig, revealing how detached this crowd is, see
www.patrickmcmullan.com/site/event_detail.aspx?eid=29970&page=2&pgSize=16&sortdir=DESC

To speak up for literary change, join the petitioners at
http://www.penpetition.blogspot.com/

Enablers

THE PROBLEM of Rick Moody isn't entirely Rick Moody himself. His actions and his words, and the words of his mouthpieces (Harland) show that he's clueless.

An accompanying problem is the way the literary system has enabled his behavior. Even when his actions received notice, the impulse of literati was to defend him-- which meant, of course, defending corruption.

Where were his friends, from Mary Gaitskill to Dave Eggers, to tell him, "Hey, you don't need to be on those panels; you don't need those grants; you don't need your people placed everywhere: back off."
***************************************
Where have literary journalists been the past nine years? Moody's behavior has been treated with such kid gloves, by lit-bloggers and journalists, it amounts to a cover-up. I've found only one person who's asked him a single tough question about the lit-world's grants process. That was Claire Zulkey, when Rick Moody submitted to one of her "Twenty Questions" interviews.

Moody's reply to her on the grants topic:
"I just have nothing interesting to say about this at all."
***************************************
What's been created with PEN's stonewalling is an irrefutable record inaction. My case has been proven. Where once there was doubt about the nature of the U.S. literary system, all doubt has been removed. The Kremlin nature of the literary establishment is clearly defined and visible-- painted for us by the lit-establishment itself.

I can now take the case from blog to blog, person to person, reading to reading, speech to speech, and say, "Look! Here is the System, outlined in front of you, closed and corrupt"-- and no one will be able to contradict a word.

Join the push for change at
www.penpetition.blogspot.com

More, and More

THE DISCOVERED CORRUPTION
KEEPS ON COMING.

How could I have missed this one? Shortly after the events described in the post below, and while the noise from the whistleblowing was still fresh in everyone's head, Mr. Moody received from PEN the 2003 PEN/Martha Albrand Award. This, shortly after he'd shown himself to be, with the naming of Joel Conarroe as PEN President, PEN's Insider's Insider.

Oh, the corruption!
***********************************
IF Rick Moody is behind the stonewalling of the Petition to PEN matter,
(www.penpetition.blogspot.com )
by PEN American Center, an organization with which he's been seen to have tremendous clout, then this is an abuse of PEN, whose mission is to support, not suppress, dissident writers. It's incumbent upon PEN to offer an explanation.

More PEN Corruption

THE DILEMMA of the whistleblower is that when he gives the name of a person involved in corruption, he's accused of making "personal" attacks, no matter how evidenced his report. If the person engages in more corrupt actions, and you mention him again, and again, as occurences require, and throw a necessary spotlight on his activities, this is characterized as a "personal vendetta."

Such was the case earlier this decade when the ULA, which I was then leading, blew the whistle on Fisher's Island resident Rick Moody's receipt of $35,000 from the Guggenheim Foundation-- scarce grant money which should go to struggling writers being handed instead to the blueblood scion of a powerful banking family. At the time, much of the literary media and even some well-known writers (according to the New York Post) agreed with the ULA's protest of this.

If you'll recall, despite "Page Six" level publicity, Moody's activities with grant-giving agencies increased. Shortly thereafter he was handing taxpayer money to his literary buddies while sitting on a National Endowment for the Arts grants panel in Washington D.C. More whistleblowing.
**************************************
How does this concern PEN?

There's an interesting scene in Sidney Offit's recent memoir of literary New York, Friends, Writers, and Other Countrymen, on pages 277-278. With gushy prose Offit describes how circa 2002 Mr. Moody dropped in at a PEN American Center nominating committee formed to select a new PEN President. In the narrative Rick Moody suggests Joel Conarroe, as quoted by Offit:

"How about Joel Conarroe? He's just retired from the Guggenheim. We can't do any better than Joel for President of PEN."

Apparently, like eager and loyal retainers, Offit and the rest of the committee rushed to make Conarroe their choice.

Who was Joel Conarroe? What was the context?

As Guggenheim Foundation President, in 2000 Conarroe had overseen the questionable monetary award to Rick Moody. In early 2001 Conarroe strenuously defended the Moody award in a letter to the ULA. Shortly thereafter came payback time-- as well as ensuring Moody's strong influence with the PEN organization, which with the selection of Conarroe was amply demonstrated.

This is how this clubby little world operates. Using your influence with a publicly-regulated charity to reward, with a prestigious position, the person who had rewarded you is the essence of corruption. There's no way around it.

Will there be a Rick Moody explanation, or an apology? There never is.
**************************************
With Joel Conarroe on board, the two men sat on a grants panel together at PEN. Curiously, despite the bad publicity he'd received, Rick Moody again and again was named to arts panels-- such as when he chaired the National Book Foundation Fiction panel in 2004, which gave its prize to blueblood writer Lily Tuck. You'd think a sense of shame or propriety would've prodded Moody to cease his grant-giving activities, but such was not the case. (More recently, Rick Moody was seen as a participant at PEN's drunken party last year on the Queen Mary.)

How does one explain his steadfast relationship with these foundations? From where his amazing clout?

His banker father, Hiram Moody Jr., himself ran a New York foundation. Perhaps, through him, son "Rick" (Hiram the III) learned how to manipulate the system.

More questions remain to be answered.
www.penpetition.blogspot.com