Another Critical Establishment

I looked at Rolling Stone magazine's "500 Greatest" songs of all time. Very revealing.

First, they obviously mean recorded songs, from the rock era. Otherwise, Cole Porter, Irving Berlin,, & Co. would be on the list.

Even so-- when Del Shannon's "Runaway" is #472 and Joan Jett's "I LOve Rock N Roll" #491, you know something is severely wrong with the list and with those who made it.

One could write a volume on everything bad about the list, from the underrating of artists like Janis Joplin ("Down on Me"?), Jackie Wilson, and Bill Haley, to the many songs which don't belong on a rock n roll list ("Wichita Lineman"; "Penny Lane"; "Mack the Knife"; "Piano Man"; "Blue Eyes Crying in the Rain"; etc.), to the promotion of musicians favored by the intellectual establishment who weren't very good and scarcely rocked (Bonnie Raitt; Jackson Browne; James Taylor). The list, you see, is a POLITICAL list. It's all politics. One quesions whether Joy Division would've made the list had not two recent movies made the band acceptable to elites. Or, Johnny Cash, a mere country singer in the 1960s, gained cred by recording Bob Dylan songs.

What the list truly reflects are the biases of rock's intellectual establishment-- the professors and magazine writers who compiled it. The list is centered on the years 1964-65, which happens to be when the nation's intelligentsia at long last embraced rock after many years, if not decades, of scorning it. Being intellectuals, they favor intellectualized rock, not seeing that the two words are oxymoronic, or that the intellectualizing of rock n roll was the first step in the form's artistic death.

The list is top-heavy with Bob Dylan, the Rolling Stones, and the Beatles, as would be expected, in that these artists, for the intellectual crowd, marked the birth of rock n roll. Not rock's actual birth in the mainstream culture, which happened in 1955, but the late birth of rock n roll in the intellectual head, when the form was so popular there was no choice but to accept it.

Methinks, though, that they still don't understand rock n roll, which is why they overvalue songs which moved away from it like "Hey Jude." Sacrilegious to say, but a fun ditty like Herman Hermits' "Henry the Eighth" is more in the spirit of rock n roll than the McCartney-penned standard.

Because the intellectual mind promotes the myth that rock died before Beatles arrived, monster hits pre-Beatles like Chubby Checker's "The Twist" (#457) and Ricky Nelson's "Hello Mary Lou" (not on list, despite having just enough cowbell) are undervalued.
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The real greatest rock n roll song? I'd nominate "Gloria," possibly the most played-by-garage-bands song ever, and which boasts four classic versions: Them's great original; Shadow of Knight's smash hit cover; The Doors' amazing live version; and Patti Smith's 70's punk vision version, which goes beyond, and is the culmination of, just about every other rock song. recording.

Be a Literary Pioneer

THE LITERARY STORY IS DEAD

No one disputes this, though few wish to publicly acknowledge it. Even if the audience for literary stories were truly healthy, and not kept on artificial life support through universities and nonprofits, the literary story writer would be one of 400,000+ other literary writers whose product is pretty much the same as yours. Those aren’t very good odds. The alternative is to create a different, better product.

The place to do this is at the American Pop Lit blog— www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com —where the writer becomes one of less than a handful of daring story writers willing trying to create a new pop story model. A much better mathematical ratio, ya know, accompanied by the satisfaction of blazing a different path. Once you accept using a pop/plot framework, with readable prose, the experimental possibilities become endless. Try it. History remembers the pioneers of an art, not those who blindly follow stagnant things-as-they-are.

Deliberately Pop

My American Pop Lit blog is what I say it is: Pop. Literary pop. Lit as Pop. Pop lit. Art=Lit. Lit as Art. There's nothing secretive about it. I try to write with clarity and use motifs as brushstrokes because I want the stories clearly understandable and seen. I want them to be as simple and there as a Lichtenstein painting. I hope this isn't too "avant-garde" for some people!
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com
(Good pop submissions wanted. Be daring. Give it a shot.)

The Old Avant-Garde

IT AMAZES ME that some lit writers still cling to obsolete notions of “avant-garde” which haven’t been relevant for fifty years.

In the chapter “The Avant-garde Dies” in his 1995 book, The Age of Extremes, historian Eric Hobsbawm argued that mass entertainment like rock n roll destroyed the old avant-garde. Some quotes:

“—the rise of a revolutionary popular entertainment industry geared to the mass market, reduced the traditional forms of high art to elite ghettoes, and from the middle of the century their inhabitants were essentially people who had enjoyed a higher education. The public of theatre and opera, the readers of their country’s literary classics and the sort of poetry and prose taken seriously by the critics, the visitors to museums and art galleries belonged overwhelmingly to those who had at least completed secondary education—“

“—higher education increasingly provided employment, and constituted the market for men and women with inadequate commercial appeal. This was most dramatically exemplified in literature . . . More dangerously, academic demand encouraged the production of creative writing that lent itself to seminar discussion, and therefore benefitted by complexity, if not incomprehensibility—“

“—in the 1960s a few intelligent critics began to investigate what had previously been overwhelmingly dismissed and rejected as ‘commercial’ or just aesthetically null, namely what actually attracted men and women on the street.”

“The achievements of post-war modernist painting and sculpture were incomparably less and usually much inferior to their inter-war predecessors. . . . It consisted largely of a series of increasingly desperate gimmicks—“

“The smell of impending death rose from these avant-gardes. The future was no longer theirs. though nobody knew whose it was. More than ever, they knew themselves to be on the margin. Compared to the real revolution in perception and representation achieved via technology by the money-makers, the formal innovations of studio bohemians had always been child’s play . . . What were concert experiments  with electronic sound in modernist compositions, which every impresario knew to be box office poison, compared to rock music which made electronic sound into the music of the millions? If all ‘high arts’ were segregated in ghettos, could the avant-gardes fail to observe that their own sections of the ghetto were tiny and diminishing, as any comparison of the sales of Chopin and Schoenberg confirmed?”

Now Up: "Kevin and Koreena"

My newest story, "Kevin and Koreena," is now up at
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com
It's longer than most of my tales, be forewarned. My goal with the story was, first, to present imperfect characters who weren't chic yuppies. Second, to give a sense, however imperfectly, of the nature of a city. Whether the result is successful I have no way of knowing, but I hope it's a decent read!

(Also be sure to check out other "Experiments in Pop" at the same blog site.)

About Difficulty

TOO MANY WRITERS today confuse difficulty with complexity. They're not the same. A story, novel, or poem can be simple and readable in style, yet enormously deep and complex at the same time.
An example of this is Scott Fitzgerald's Great Gatsby. Fitzgerald presents a compelling storyline filled with pop motifs (the mysterious hero) within a complex narrative framework. Despite its simplicity, the presentation allows for the use of symbols and allusions toward greater meaning.
I've been discussing the art of movies at my premium blog, (www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com)
It's not an accident that two children's movies, "Wizard of Oz" and "Lili," have great reach into the subconscious. As do many superficially simple Westerns.

The Narrow Viewpoint

EVERYTHING WRONG with the contemporary literary story is embodied in “The Young Painters” by Nicole Krauss in the current issue of The New Yorker and at http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/features/2010/06/28/100628fi_fiction_krauss

The story’s subject isn’t young painters. Instead, the subject is the narrator; the always precious SELF. Note the point-of-view, which never leaves the narrator’s head. Context—society; the world—are mere vague ephemera, a distant chorus to the playing out of the eternal “I,” which is not just the center of the universe, it IS the universe. The story is nothing more than a monologue at an overpriced therapy session with “Dr. Lichtman.” Solipsism ever triumphant. Jonathan Franzen by contrast, for all his narrowness, appears broad and relevant.

WHAT’S HAPPENING is that, as even Bret Ellis admits (see below), the focus of The New Yorker is a narrow class of narrow interests. The magazine is one part of a society more and more geared to cater to the tastes of the affluent monoclass, seen in other cultural areas from burgers to beer—designer tastes—seen most of all in the nation’s literature.

THE TRAGEDY is that The New Yorker, for all its narrowness, sets the standard for the American short story, maybe because it’s the only venue which pays well for short stories. Workshop writers across the country model their art on the New Yorker’s example. The result is the severe narrowing of the short story art.

COINCIDENTALLY, my next story for the “Pop Lit” blog is about two young painters. “Kevin and Koreena” will be its title. I should have the finished story up a week from now. When I do, I invite you to compare the story with the story by Nicole Krauss, their viewpoints so different they could come not just from different parts of America, but from different planets.

Today's Question

Who's the best living American short story writer? Who sets the standard-- is most admired, envied, modeled after, when it comes to the short story art?

Interesting Quote

Here's a quote from Bret Easton Ellis in yesterday's Metro newspaper, responding to a question by Dorothy Robinson about The New Yorker's list of best writers under 40:

"Who cares! Who cares! Who cares about these writers? Sure, they're pretty good. But for the most part, they're white and educated, so they're The New Yorker's audience. That's why they choose them."
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Let's put aside the fact that ex-Bennington student Ellis is from the same kind of background-- or that whether the writers are "pretty good" is debatable. His remarks are a sign that not everybody in the lit world is asleep at the switch.

American Sholokhov

Jonathan Franzen's short story, "Agreeable," in the May 31 New Yorker magazine is yet another example of the plight of the literary story. His story is competently made and written, revealing that Franzen is a step above the "20 Under 40" crowd. Competence, though, is all it has. The story takes no risks whatsoever, neither artistically, nor with the narrowly wrought New Yorker readership. Nowhere is there to be found a new idea or a new approach. The story's outcome is predictable. The tale, about the rape of a female high school athlete, is understated. To say it's understated is an understatement. Franzen represses the emotion, represses the anger, represses the outrage. We're left with a collection of WASPy pods phlegmatically exhibiting flaws in their societal milieu circa 1975.

Here's where we come to what the Franzen story is really about. It's politically correct. That's all we can say about it. What else?

The story presents an acceptable moral-- rape is bad; equality is good-- which of itself isn't art. The competent, dispassionate way Franzen treats the subject ensures it's not art. The genteel audience's beliefs are confirmed. Sexism is bad. Patriarchy is bad. Our society used to be flawed. But we're not.

And so with this story Jonathan Franzen is an American Sholokhov, writing what the Overdogs of Literature want, presenting a reliably correct story reliably in synch with the standards of the status quo.

Bucking the System

The literary world is closed minded. To say this brands one as a crank. This is itself a marker that literature does NOT welcome harsh criticism. It flees from it.

The current literary system should be questioned on two points. 1.) The system which produces our literature needs to be questioned. 2.) The artistic standards of the current system need to be questioned.

For example, the novels, stories, and poems which have been designated by the system’s authorities as the “best” or most significant of the second half of the Twentieth Century aren’t the best or most significant. The standards are wrong—which is why American literature today is irrelevant and flawed.

If your standards produce a chair that’s crooked and which no one wants, you’ll question your standards, your blueprint. Likewise, we should question the literary world.

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I’ll examine this subject in more depth on my ideas blog at www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com. (Access restricted to real people.)

Among the points I’ll touch on is that the problem isn’t confined to literature. Even with a healthier art form, like film, one finds among well-schooled critics a failure to understand the nature of the art.

EXAMPLE: On the stands at bookstores at the moment is a film magazine proclaiming its selection of the 100 greatest Western movies of all time. The magazine’s top three choices, in order, are

1.) "High Noon.”

2.) “The Ox-Bow Incident.”

3.) “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.”

Have you seen them?

Fine movies all—but their selection is revealing. Think about it. What defines film as film? What distinguishes the art form? What characterizes a Western as a Western?

Answer these questions and you’ll be on the right road.

Futbol or Football?

American football is fifty times more complex than soccer, and so is a better reflection of, and training ground for, the complexity of the contemporary world.

Another Disaster

Originally uploaded by King Wenclas

NOW THAT the U.S. Congress is questioning heads of giant companies about disasters, it's time for the execs from the big publishing monopolies to be questioned publicly about the disaster that is American literature.

(DEPICTED: Mysterious mutant creature photographed near the Philadelphia Free Library. Question: is this creature the product of a New Jersey toxic waste site, or an offshore oil spill-- or what results from reading too many brain-exploding postmodern novels?)

Blinkered Towers

“Soviet writers, far from reflecting the vital processes at work in the social context during all these years, have continued to behave like dusty engineers of musty minds. The country has passed them by. . . .”

--Giovanni Grazzini about the state of Soviet literature in 1971.

THE QUESTION is the health of the American literary system. The American literary art has been frozen place for forty or fifty years. Today’s avant-garde is yesterday’s avant-garde. Which means, it’s not an avant-garde at all.

The inhabitants of the system are complacent. All is okay. Many insist there is no literary system, though they have their costly MFA degrees  just in case. The apologists of the status quo, of literature-as-is (see Francine Prose) are utter mediocrities hailed by other mediocrities (see B.F. Myers) in the system’s collapsing organs.

The literary elite peer out from blinkered towers with fissures in them, hostile to alternate sources of literary activity but confident that the New Yorker New York Times walls will remain against approaching storms.

Go Greene?

Is South Carolina's Alvin Greene a Capra story in the making? Right now he's the ultimate anti-establishment candidate.

Another Mutant

14690001
Originally uploaded by King Wenclas

This must be another of those test tube experiments, like in the current movie. I haven't yet determined if these bizarre and somewhat goofy-looking creatures are or aren't harmless. Why, for instance, are his hands out? What does he want? Will giving him a lager placate him? This is not yet known.

Hitting the Demographic

THE PROBLEM with the New Yorker “Twenty” is that their stories aren’t hitting the New Yorker’s own demographic, much less going beyond it. The Twenty are writing their stories for themselves—the Twenty, as if they were another workshop group. Few non-literary readers will be interested in these concoctions. The only other folks Jonathan Foer’s piece could possibly be written for are hard core academy lit critics. “Genre busting” in this instance means a work nobody could read. Joshua Ferris’s is written for arts social climbers, with tacked-on stock literary ending where the character ruminates through his own stupidity while falling, falling, through something. (Which has been done only 5,000 times.) With the others, you see them being read in some class or Brooklyn apartment with hipster members of the workshop nodding their heads in a pose of significance.

A business woman, say, on a plane, headed for an important meeting involving complex machinations will find in the stories: nothing. The stories are either stupendously boring or they read like childishness, because they reflect the mentality of children.

Say what you will about my own fledgling pop story attempts at www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com, they’re written for people to read; from “Mr. Box” to “The H Group” to “Jezebel” to “Saturday Night in Detroit.” Perfectly accomplished or not, they aim at a general demographic every writer should seek.

Hipsters II

Well, I went to a bookstore and opened the "Twenty Under Forty" New Yorker issue, found a spread of drawings of the twenty writers and discovered-- HIPSTERS! To a person, each with the same smug cherubic patented hipster expression, as if they were en masse about to gentrify a neighborhood.
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In the past I've been challenged to discuss art and ideas, in objective fashion. Okay-- let's read the stories in the much-hyped issue. I'd like to see your honest assessment of them. I've read several of them so far and formed some opinions. But I want to know what you think about them.

The Fastballer

Today marks the major league debut in D.C. of the rookie with a 100-mile an hour fastball. Much excitement has been generated for the sport of baseball.

Where is the young writer with the literary 100-mile an hour fastball?

A New Course

IT’S ALMOST COMICAL the way The New Yorker and the New York Times (which hyped the affair) proceeded with the unexciting “Twenty Under Forty” writers as if this were fifty years ago, and what they said matters. Intently they mark up their “special issue” (see the Times photo), unaware, apparently, that the buildings themselves within which they work are collapsing. Their circulation and ad revenue are, ahem, dropping. Plummeting. The nature of the writers they chose to spotlight will do nothing to turn this around.

EVEN among the apparatus there must’ve been more compelling personalities, more thrilling writers, to grab onto. You know that when your centerpiece is Jonathan Safran Foer, you’re in trouble.

The opportunity is there for a new course—for writers of vision to realize what’s happening and work to turn the stagnant condition of American literature around. A rare opportunity—one that calls for a blare of trumpets to awake the literary community, and alert the greater populace.

Hipsters

There was an interesting discussion, here--
www.laeastside.com/2009/02/awkward-moments-in-los-angeles
last year. It came to my attention because my name is dropped in the middle of it.

Nonentities

THAT few of the New Yorker’s “Twenty Under Forty” are known to literary people, far less to the general public, shows the extent to which literature has become marginalized in American culture, pushed into a smaller and smaller corner. Every decade the condition deteriorates. The trendline is clear. Yet establishment promoters insist that “All is well.”

THINK that once such a list could’ve consisted of the names Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, DosPassos, Steinbeck, Porter, among others, and you realize the extent of the drop off.

Synthesized Lit

THE MANDARIN PROCESSORS of literature insist that I accept established lit’s failed standard—the old aesthetic. But with the ULA I was bringing, from the outside, a NEW aesthetic to the table.

In a way I’m glad that the ULA’s publisher didn’t clean up James Nowlan’s short novel, “Security.” As is, the work stands as a blatant assault on literature’s regulators, on the processing system. “Security” is a demonstration that a work can be unprocessed yet at the same time literature.

Art isn’t something that can be contained inside a box. Art breaks free of all shackles. Art demands that we continually view it with fresh eyes.

I invite everyone to buy “Security” and read it in its entirety, and tell me it’s not literature. It’s the essence of literature. If you nitpick this word or that word you’re missing the point.

What we have now in lit-journal after lit-journal is synthesized lit. Processed. Plastic. Dead.

Take a standard award-winning literary story and place it next to Nowlan’s novella. One work is clean and tidy: processed. It takes no risks, offers no narrative strength. No artistic vision. Alongside it, “Security” is a mad chaotic mess. All it does is speak the truth. It rips the mask of cleanliness off the world around us, to show us things as they are.

The Processors are great rationalizers. Like arts apparatchiks of any era, they have turf, jobs, and reputations to protect. They have much to lose if their system with its narrow vision of literature is overturned. They will fight hard to protect the status quo. They’ll squelch all outside ideas, all dissent. So fearful are they, there’s no room, in their eyes, for a single contrary voice.

As we’ve seen in comments on this blog, and may see in more of them, they’re able to exert pressure to conform. If even I’ve felt the pressure, it’s easy to see how young writers are swiftly brought into line. Every lever of power lies in the hands of status quo apologists.

Their chief justification for the refined art they offer is “language.” For them, “language” is a euphemism for the processed article.

Truth and immediacy are rejected. Instead, endless revisions. The first emotion or first view are lost within layers of processing.

A punk rock band is allowed to attack the listener with raw, untrained emotion. With lit, all the reader is ever given is a Mozart string quartet.

Accept the Nowlans of the world as writers? Impossible! The Processors, Synthesizers, and Regulators fluster. “Illiterate! No talent!” Dare someone write without system training and approval? No. Not in their eyes. Literature belongs solely to them, kept in a well-guarded glass museum case at Columbia, Princeton, or Brown.

Synthesized lit dominates literature. In bookstores it sits packaged in slick lit-journals which, with one or two exceptions, are never sold. There’s no excitement to a one of them—certainly, definitely, not the excitement of new art.

Literature’s highest purpose is the presentation of truth. Ever has it been. That purpose is bolstered by powerful words, by strong writing.

Yes, I understand this isn’t the only standard. Some writers follow less ambitious paths. They’re content simply with the play of words. They accept the sole criterion of language.

You’re free to follow that standard. But please don’t try to impose your narrow vision upon myself!

Non-Punk

Punk began, like most everything else in this country, as a high school mentality. "Punks" were the outcasts, the losers. The kids sleeping in the back row, or not showing up half the time. Completely alienated, as the punk ethos represented total alienation, about society; about everything.

The New Yorker Twenty Under Forty by definition can't be punk; not just because they were selected by the Ultra-Approved snob magazine, but because they went through the selection process, jumping through hoops as they have their entire lives. Do I have to read all their stories to know it's bland unsurprising ultra-approved pod shit??

These are society's anti-punks. The kids raising their hands in the front row, eagerly, many wearing bow ties (see Jonathan Foer) beaming with approval of the teacher and the system, sucking up to power and approval their entire lives-- it's all they know-- leaving twenty polished apples on the New Yorker desk in their wake. Pets. Toss them a dog biscuit or give them a ribbon. They don't need my approval, certainly. It's ridiculous for anyone to ask for it. Exactly how much conformity does the literary world need?

Serious

One of the problems with today's literary writers, including the kind examined below, is their seriousness. Art is serious business! Probably because they've invested so much money in becoming certified as "Artists." There it is-- it says so right on the piece of paper.

Possibly it's the David Foster Wallace influence. The Artist so consumed with his Art it destroyed him. Art with a capital A. The broad humor of what had once been the main stream of American writing (see Mark Twain) which so captured the American con-man personality, has been pushed to the side. And after all, let's face it. "The Jumping Frog" story is simply not very literary!

Serious literary writers today write important "Fictions." Serious Serious! Important! Well-wrought. What they don't do is tell stories.

Another One!

Originally uploaded by King Wenclas

Another strange psychedelic creature spotted on the streets of Philadelphia. No, I'm not hallucinating. At least, I think I'm not. No, I haven't begun holiday weekend partying too early. Have I?

Where Are the Pop Writers?

It's funny to me that today's system writers are attracted to punk, yet avoid the fact that the ULA was the most punk group of writers EVER. We not only dared to hype the untutored-but-real writing of the Urban Hermitts and Emerson Damerons of the underground zine scene, but went so far as to publish a novel with typos in it to match the raw, in-your-face narrative. Too punk for some.

THE CRUX of the problem was that the ULA's attitude and aesthetic was a bridge too far for the ultra-standardized lit world. We asked lit-folks to open their minds too much. It was more than the processors could process. This is why I've pulled back my aesthetic goals, and am now looking to promote writing that's only part punk: "pop." Think Shonen Knife. I still seek an art "Explosion!"-- one done in more subtle fashion.

ART AS RULES.
ART AS INTELLECT.
ART AS EMOTION.
These are the choices-- or a mix of same. The key is how our minds as writers are set up. I don't care about the first. I understand the second. I look for writers who can do the third.

Too many system-trained writers are just about the first. The postmodernists seem about only the second (think David Foster Wallace, who pushed the envelope of intellect so far his brain exploded). The literary journal n + 1 is about only the intellect, and it's boring as hell. Intellect, training, and form are relevant to art only in how far they go toward achieving the third part of the equation.
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In looking over the "Three Question" responses so far, I find interesting each writer's different approach. Higgs's answers are purely intellectual, as might be expected. Others' are more personal. Wred Fright shows the pop/punk attitude, in that he's purely relaxed and involved in the concept of the art-- he's not looking objectively at art so much as plunging into it, and so his answers are lively.

I especially like Ms. Lacey's answers also, because they're honest and convey emotion without trying to-- a person who lives on the edge of her emotions, is my uninformed guess. Someone with upside as a writer.

These are random speculations on my part which likely mean nothing.

Being Subversive

It's not subversive to fight for the irrelevance and marginality of an art which is already marginalized. Being subversive means undermining a dominant ideology.

What's known as avant-garde today is the posturing of a highly-placed artistic aristocracy, who've been through the academy, whose thoughts and actions often take place within the academy or other approved institutions such as government regulated non-profits. Which turns "avant-garde" into a contradiction.

Those who work toward the unpopularity of literature; those who make the literary art more jargon-filled and inscrutable, follow a concept of avant-garde which has been out of date for fifty years.

Three Question Challenge #7

MINI-INTERVIEW: Catherine Lacey.

(Catherine Lacey writes, has written, and will continue to write whatever makes sense at the time. www.catherinelacey.com)

1.) What makes you a revolutionary?

CATHERINE LACEY: I don't think I am a revolutionary at all. I guess you would have to ask Matthew Simmons why he chose that title for the chapbook to which I contributed for Happy Cobra. I have never thought to ask him why he chose that title. Maybe he chose it because Ellen, Chelsea and I are all women publishing stuff on the internet and that's not very common and Young Anomalies is less sexy sounding than Young Revolutionaries. The story that I gave him is very un-revolutionary, very Lorrie Moore-ish.  I think I knew then that it was very Lorrie Moore-ish and I still think that's ok. Since then I have been overwhelmed (in a good way) by a nonfiction project and I haven't completed hardly any fiction.

2.) Is there such a thing as hipster lit?

CATHERINE: I guess that all depends on a person's definition of hipster and literature and their stance on genre. The more books I read, themore I realize that non of those distinctions are all that important to me anymore. In particular, the debate over what 'hipster' means becomes exponentially more boring every minute, so I think the only answer I can really give is that while there certainly are writers who are called 'hipster writers' it all seems pretty inconsequential to me and more an issue of publicity and marketing. Calling something 'hipster lit' seems to be a really lazy, short-hand way to not confront what's actually in the text.

3.) What’s your ultimate goal as a writer?

CATHERINE: Basically, it's to put something in the space that is between other people and me. Complete strangers, close friends, people who dislike me, people I dislike, other southerners, people who come from a totally different world than me and every other person in the world. For me, real communication is equivalent to what other people call God. It's that important and expanding and huge to me. More specifically, my goal is to finish and publish what I am working on right now, a book about the contemporary Protestant South and its enormous failure to cultivate the kind of peace that is supposedly the core of any religious practice. It's a very personal book that I ended up writing by accident, or rather out of the failure to not write it. Does that make sense? It think that's another goal I have-- to fail to be able to write anything other than that which feels most urgent.

What's This?

Originally uploaded by King Wenclas

Strange creatures are about in Philadelphia in recent days.

The Hard Thing

The hard thing is to step back and look at contemporary American literature within the context of society and history. To do so is to realize it's been in decline.

Once, some of the biggest celebrities in America were writers-- dynamic talents like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway who were popular as well as literary.

What went wrong? Blaming everything on TV or computers isn't good enough. The rise of the Internet means more people are reading and writing. Other art forms like popular music have thrived in the past fifty years, while literature has stagnated. The real cause can be found in structural flaws-- including the prevailing philosophy and aesthetic used as foundation for the literary art.

It's not enough for me to state this. My task is to find or create new writing to rescue the art.

Bios and Backgrounds

I've been challenged to discuss my "real" biography-- the actual Karl Wenclas outside the known, somewhat simplified version. An incautious request, certainly, when addressing a known talkaholic/ alleged egomaniac such as myself.

Anyway, I was thinking about the matter last night. I did a little self-examination. What I've concluded is that we're all constructs to some extent. (What songwriter said "Part fact, part fiction; a walking contradiction"?) Sometimes we're contradictions because we're our fathers and mothers both-- often those are two very different personalities, as in my case.

I've realized I'm a product of my parents. I am them. I can't be understood without knowing about them. But then we need the background to the background, plus other influences. In my case, Detroit. In my parents case, Catholicism, and more their Polish heritage. Which opens up more contradictions, because like many countries, Poland has been a contradiction, a strange mix of high and low.

There wasn't a Poland for a few centuries, so that "Poland" was a realm of the imagination. And then, which Poland? Austrian Poland? German Poland? Russian or Ukrainian Poland? Then there are the smaller tribes within the Polish identity, such as the Kashubians. It's all a mess. Even the Polish racial identity can be questioned, as one sees a mix of types. The red-haired German-looking Pole (my father), or the dark Asiatic cast Tartar (my mother). Those mixes of course are inside me. Thinking about it, I was programmed more by my mother, who was very much a striver. Oh, very much, and wanted to live her ambitions through her children, and as she told us many times, we failed her.

This is a subject likely of interest only to myself and my siblings, who anyway would disagree with everything I say. I may expand on it anyway in the comments to this post, along with a discussion of other things.

Three Question Challenge #6

MINI-INTERVIEW: Christopher Higgs.

(Christopher Higgs is the humble author of an amazing novel called The Complete Works of Marvin K. Mooney at http://www.satorpress.com/)

1.) Does American literature need to be overhauled?

CHRISTOPHER HIGGS: The idea of “American literature” is too vast to be reduced to a single homogenous unit from which one can make the claim that it does or does not need to be overhauled. Am I in favor of experimentation? Yes. Am I in favor of challenging persistent paradigms? Yes. Am I an advocate for the burgeoning field of small press/independent publishing? Yes. But I’m not sure what exactly one would overhaul, were one interested in overhauling. If you mean: should other people win awards besides Rick Moody? I don’t really care about that. I just do my thing.

2.) Is the professionalization of the art a good or bad thing?

CHRISTOPHER: If by “professionalization” you are referring to academic creative writing programs, I would say that in my experience those institutions are machines that tend to produce other likeminded machines. They rarely produce artists. More often they produce entertainers. But I don’t make distinctions between those who have formal education and those who do not, when evaluating literature. I only make distinctions between boring material and interesting material. Many boring works come out of writing programs, and many boring works come from autodidacts. Similarly, many interesting works come out of writing programs, and many from autodidacts.

3.) Is the literary world open to contrary ideas?

CHRISTOPHER: Like the real world, the literary world has different neighborhoods. There are gated communities housing literary aristocracy; suburbs filled with midlist writers; gritty inner city scribes, and those who write from the projects. There are those who write from property on the edge of town, or way out in the wilderness, and then there are literary nomads who move between or away from other neighborhoods. Obviously the ideas found in one neighborhood won’t necessarily correspond with another neighborhood, and within each neighborhood there will inevitably be levels of differentiation. Probably some neighborhoods are more open to contrary ideas than others.

What Is Avant-Garde?

The kind of art which can be considered avant-garde depends upon its context-- its time and place.

Both dada and surrealism, for instance, were responses to the chaos of World War I. They were of their time. The two arts movements were intentionally and specifically revolutionary, seeking a cultural revolution and also political revolution. They're understandable as avant-garde art within their historical context.

An avant-garde attacks the cultural precepts, institutions, and lauded icons of its time. It stands out against the mundane crowd. Otherwise its rebellion has no meaning-- isn't rebellion.

Robin Hood

I have no plans to see the current “Robin Hood” movie. Dour Russell Crowe; ultra-violent CGI battle scenes—not in the spirit really of the legendary tale. Ridley Scott made one movie masterpiece-- “Blade Runner”—because it fit his brooding artistic personality. The subject of Robin Hood is his opposite.

I’ll take the 1938 Errol Flynn version; a storybook legend come to life. The spirit of anarchy and rebellion portrayed there (like the free spirit of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” which itself was inspired by the same ballad-and-broadside legends) was an influence on the creation of the Underground Literary Alliance. I wanted the same mix of playfulness and commitment, comedy and seriousness, as found in the film. We were as much a different class as the Saxons confronting the overdog Normans. We faced our opponents, bursting into their camps, with a similar attitude.

We also were a kind of outcast—literary outlaws, in a way—and came, many of us, from the untamed “forest” of the zine scene. Those writers of passion and energy wanted nowhere else found a home in our ranks. Our kind of writer WAS different—the aforementioned James Nowlan only one example. (I’m thinking of the scene in Nowlan’s “Security” when his character is hired to guard a prestigious French cultural institute. He asks who to watch for—who not to allow in. “Well, someone like you,” comes the reply.)

Marketing

No one should be surprised that a DIY writer like myself is interested in how to market. Over the years as a zeenster I've been writer, editor, graphic designer, publisher, distributor, publicist, promoter, entertainer, and all parts between. This is directly opposite to the nannied authors of the mainstream, who struggle through a manuscript, send it out, and from then others have control over every aspect of the work.

When you sell your own work, you wonder how to get it more attention. This is marketing.
**************************************
Fact is that one of my blogs is now devoted solely to a discussion of marketing--
www.happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com
Access is free, but you have to ask for an invite. I generally allow everyone to read it, with the occasional exception of pods, moles, spies, ghosts, bankers, Nottingham sheriffs, Sholokhovs, O'Briens ("How many fingers do you see?") and the like. The current post is "What Is Talent?"-- in which I present my unique perspective on what I look for in writers, which I guarantee is different from the strictured criteria of the mainstream.

Another Pop Story!

"Saturday Night in Detroit" is now up at
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com/2010/05/pop10-saturday-night-in-detroit.html

Primary Preview

There's a part of me which almost wants "Senator Crupt" to win next week, so I can write another quick story about him. See
www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com/2010/02/pop05-fake-face-meets-senator-crupt.html

Bureaucracy versus Art

TRADITIONALLY artists have been the most disordered of personalities; the least likely to stay within the lines. What we get now from our writers, however, are individuals most likely to conform in order to make it through the long MFA winnowing process. They’re not living in unruly bohemia. They’re raising their hands, for years, at the head of a class. They’re taught that the process, the rules, the obedience, is more important than the art. The survivors of the endless hoop-jumping are those best able to put their personalities and their craft within a box. They could just as well be bankers or accountants.

The result is the creation of bureaucrats more than artists. To the bureaucrat, following the regulations is all. Our literary bureaucrats can produce spotlessly clean well-regulated manuscripts. What they’re not giving us is great art.

I’m proud of the fact that when I ran the Underground Literary Alliance I recruited many writers from the underside of America, underdogs who’d been otherwise ignored. Those who came from broken families and broken worlds—truly broken—who’d been kicked in the head once or twice and hadn’t known only achievement and success. Who’d viewed this mad society from the bottom up and railed against it, seen the disordered world, knew the inequities, brutalities, and tragedies so fully part of the world and wrote about them.

A Quote

“Looking at the world through the eyes and with the intuitions of the artist, the writer discovers many social phenomena before others and in unexpected forms. Therein lies his talent, and from this there follows his duty to tell society what he sees, or at least to tell it what is unhealthy. . . .”

                         -Alexander Solzhenitsyn, 1967

Phoniness of the Apparatchiks

THERE’S A GROUP of well-hyped well-esteemed well-approved American writers whose identity and credibility are based on their stated scorn for commercial publishing. They disapprove of the “McWorld” nature of the industry which places profits and sales over quality.

Their argument and their credibility are undercut by the fact that they themselves are published by this same industry. Though their books don’t sell all that well (most are awful) they’re the industry’s favored pets.

They have their own power base, of course—this group of writers. Their own bureaucracies, if you will, namely the literary nonprofits like PEN, National Book Foundation, National Critics Circle, and the like. Do they use these bases of leverage against the detested book monopolists? Not at all! In fact, these foundations are so intertwined with the big book companies as to be indistinguishable from them. (Think of the ending of Orwell’s “Animal Farm.”) PEN gets its books published through outfits like the Murdoch-owned HarperStudio, for instance. Their monetary awards go to writers published by the bigs.

When you examine the individuals who work as publishers and editors for the conglomerates, you find they’re largely the same crowd as the group of writers who feign opposition to them. They attend the same schools and frequent the same swanky parties and benefits. There’s no actual opposition to the giant corporate bureaucracies anywhere to be found. The opposition is feigned—a fiction.

Bureaucracies strangle art. Ever has this been so. Our literature today is captive of various sorts of bureaucracies—corporate, foundational, academic—whose memberships overlap and feed one another, and whose aesthetic premises are of one piece. If our literary culture is stagnant—there are no great writers visible anywhere right now—then the blame can go only onto them.

Three Question Challenge #5

MINI-INTERVIEW: Jaime Fountaine.

(Philly writer Jaime Fountaine runs the "Toiling in Obscurity" reading series and is at http://www.jaimefountaine.com/ )

1.) Is today's literary world too bourgie oriented?

JAIME FOUNTAINE: The “Literary World" has always been pretty bourgeois. When you put together any group of people who are relatively educated, intellectual, and convinced of their own creativity, one can assume that they are either of a certain mindset, or aspire to it in one way or another. This is not to say that anyone that considers himself a writer is therefore bourgeois, but that to assume that much of the world revolves around your idea of creativity as self-worth is reductive, and, well, bourgeois.

2.) What are the challenges of being a writer in Philadelphia?

JAIME: Philadelphia, like anywhere else, is made up of cliques that cross over each other like Venn Diagrams; they intersect, but just barely. This is especially true of writers. Because it’s always easier to work with yourself than others, and because in something so insular otherwise, small differences can divide people widely, most groups keep to themselves instead of overlapping. Short of battling it out, the only way to interact with various others is to be diligent and reverent, which is difficult enough when you're interested in what they’re doing, and much worse if only for the sake of networking.

3.) What are your goals as a writer?

JAIME: I would like to write stories the provoke the wrenching feeling in my stomach the first time I read Joyce’s “Eveline,” Flannery O’Connor, Light in August (and Faulkner in general), and The Easter Parade. To quote Richard Yates, “I don’t want money, I just want readers.”

Literary Theater

AN INTERESTING POINT made by Wred Fright in my Three Question interview of him concerns the perils of stepping too far outside the box when promoting a literary product.

The ULA (Underground Literary Alliance), of which we're both past members, went farther in its promotion than any lit group ever has. Those raised inside a preppy bubble-- like the Eggers crowd-- were completely thrown. (Refer once again to the Tom Bissell Believer article.) Yet what the ULA did was mere literary theater-- done in the great American carny tradition from Barnum to Screaming Jay Hawkins.

The post below this one is hyperbolic-- obviously so. Hyperbole wrapped around a core of truth. Literary people have so disdained the creation of entertainment for so long they've lost all notion of how to do so. They can't recognize a story which is intentionally melodramatic, nor criticism which is purposely provocative. Should we all be super-serious Sven Birkerts and James Wood standing self-importantly behind Harvard lecterns destroying through sheer blathering dullness the minds of their students?

(The Eggers era, by the way, will someday be seen as a phenomenon of WASP chic. If you've seen one of their self-congratulatory events you'll know what I'm talking about. The Dave's well-advertised excursions into the Third World, or Third World America, pith helmet and compass, are part of this. I think The Believer will be used as a kind of zoo exhibit of a particular insular American cultural mindset.)

Was I Too Tough?

WAS I TOO TOUGH ON HTML GIANT?

Not if, as seems possible, the HTML Giant site is one piece of a megagimongous media monopoly that extends across the planet and controls millions of minds.

Not if, as seems likely, the HTML Giant site is a cynical operation pushing establishment machine thought under the guise of DIY.

Not if, as seems certain, HTML Giant readers and writers so buy into the puppet monstrosity they’re incapable of seeing the reality.

One can never go too far in revealing the truth about how the current mad monopoly system of media and culture operates.

Hans Christian Anderson left out part of his story of “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” In many respects it was the most important part. This is when, after the boy reveals the truth about the naked idol, the angry mob grabs the boy and stomps him into the ground.

Three Question Challenge #4

MINI-INTERVIEW: Wred Fright.

(Wred Fright is the author of the ongoing novel Blog Love Omega Glee at http://www.wredfright.com/)

1.) Are there too many writers in this country?

WRED FRIGHT: No. In a democracy everyone should be a reader and writer. Of course, earning a living from one's writing is made more difficult when everyone can do it though, and that's where some, indeed many, people are going to be disappointed if they are expecting to be the next Ernest Hemingway or J.K. Rowling. We're probably there already, and have been for ages. However, I feel the same way about scribblers as I do about garage rock bands: I wouldn't mind at least one on every block. It makes life more interesting. It's why I like blogs and zines. Hundred!

2.) Should a crazy writer like yourself become more or less crazy?

WRED: Both. The crazier the work gets, the more interesting it gets. However, the crazier it gets, the more it scares the timid reader away. In retrospect, wearing a Mexican wrestling mask for the author photo and putting a toilet on the cover of The Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus book probably weren't the best career moves, but both still delight me to this day. Writing a 250,000 word novel about conspiracy theories and professional wrestling and serializing it on a blog while everyone else is writing six-word memoirs and writing Twitter and cell phone novels also was a bit mad. Hundred!

3.) Why is pro wrestling more popular than literature at the present time?

WRED: Well, I'll tell you what, brother. A lot of people are saying that literature is down for the count, but I know my peeps and they're still in its corner. Literature is going to get off the canvas and piledrive many more readers and give them the 1-2-3 or make them tap out. Wooooo! There's nothing in any wrestling ring like a story smackdown, a poetry palooka, a drama drilldriver or an essay eartwist. I'd tell you some more brother, but I have to go watch on the TV Team 3D put their opponents through a table. Hundred!

Wred Fright is a figment of your imagination and you have just hallucinated this entire blog post and the doctor in your skull is telling you to stop drinking so much damn coffee so maybe just once you ought to listen, but instead you'll ignore it all as usual and click on instead to http://www.wredfright.com/

Worst Rock Singer

WORST ROCK SINGER OF ALL TIME?

A conjunction of events: We've been discussing rock n roll on this blog. Simultaneously, I was thinking about Wred Fright's first book (originally a long-running zeen), about a garage band, "Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus." This prior to posting a "Three Question Challenge" re Wred, which will be up tomorrow, or next week, or in a month.

With these thoughts in my head, I heard on the radio a Jackson Browne song.

Is Jackson Browne the worst rock singer ever?

To me his music always was very mealy wimpy as un-rock as you could possibly get.

Is he worse even than the likes of Kelly "Caterwaul" Clarkson and James Taylor?

Let me know.

Now Up: "Jezebel"

UP at the American Pop Lit blog is my story, "Jezebel," which I first put out about six years ago in a zeen called "Detroit River Stories"-- my version of Detroit-style garage lit.
Find it at http://www.americanpoplit.blogspot.com/2010/04/pop09-jezebel.html

For comparison, here are links to stories by two of my biggest critics.

1.) LEE KLEIN: A long-time blogger and Iowa workshop grad. Last time I saw Lee he informed me I wasn't a writer. Lee writes solipsistic postmodernism, as shown by "Prequel to 'The Telepathic Beauty.'"
www.hobartpulp.com/fiction/ho4klein.html

2.) JUSTIN TAYLOR: A member of the HTML Giant herd, Justin is receiving a big push right now from the Murdoch-owned conglom Harper-Perennial. As expected, the story HP has posted, "Tennessee," is standard domesticated literary fiction, what I call narrow realism.
www.fiftytwostories.com/?p=1112

I don't know-- maybe my writing philosophy is clearly inferior to theirs. I believe I'm on the right path. Judge for yourself.

Context

THE PROBLEM with America’s establishment-stamped approved writers is they’ve been trained to be so solipsistic they’re incapable of seeing the context within which their narrow art is placed.

America is being churned by huge societal forces. Much of the population feels under economic assault—because they’re under economic assault. The working class has been broken; devastated. Those in the middle fear they’ll suffer the same fate. I’ve seen myself, in the course of a few decades, a major American city literally destroyed. No, not by a hurricane—by economic factors alone. Detroit. By the crushing force of sweeping societal change.

Where is this portrayed in our literature? Where is the full scope and impact of our machine society anywhere portrayed?

Our writers instead have been infantilized, drooling in html sandboxes, minds stunted into permanent childhood while the art drifts into oblivion.

“Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves”

The old Cher hit could’ve been the theme song of the zine explosion of the late 1990’s. In the form of the self-made zine, American writing achieved new excitement and freedom. Foremost, from a literary perspective, were the personal zines/travelogues of Aaron Cometbus, Bill Blackolive, Jen Gogglebox, Urban Hermitt, and many others. The style was the presentation of raw experience, unrefined, direct and immediate.

Zines are an example of how the kind of vehicle used to present writing—the package or product—determines the style of writing. Prominent zine writers, like Wred Fright with “Pornographic Flabbergasted Emus,” or Hermitt, or Doug Holland of “Pathetic Life,” or Cometbus, sold their art to the general public through unorthodox outlets—often to segments of that public who weren’t reading anything else. Zinesters sold through the mail, at zine readings, punk rock shows and art fairs, on buses and in coffeeshops: everywhere. Those zines which didn’t build an audience didn’t last. The criteria for survival were readability, verve, and personality: creating, and connecting with, an audience.

The situation of lit-blogs of the past ten years has been different. Lit-bloggers haven’t been of the vagabond, punk, desperado personality. They’ve not been hawking their wares out in the world. Instead they’ve been domesticated, operating through approved channels, mainstream in focus, almost obsessively conforming to the trends and touchstones of the academy. Run down the list: Maud Newton, Mark Sarvas, Daniel Green, Lee Klein, Ed Champion—one could easily list a hundred examples. Lit-bloggers without MFA’s, like myself, can be counted on one hand.

The lit-blogger audience consists of A.) suits within the publishing world; B.) other lit-bloggers.

The art, then, isn’t outward-directed, as with print-zines, but insular and inward. Inward into the existing lit-world, and into the self, both. The objective is to confirm, and conform to, the standards of the status quo. With no need to create a new audience, readability is a low priority. Often it’s scorned.

Missing is risk, originality, true creativity. The wild vagabonds of the 90’s have been replaced by conformists.

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