Bissell’s Distortions

ASSESSING TOM BISSELL PART II

What of Tom Bissell’s essay itself? Retitled for Magic Hours as “Grief and the Outsider,” it appears to the eye roughly similar to the original version, though an additional “grief” or two may have been added to the narrative, for effect.

“Literature is always written by outsiders,” the essay begins. This is ridiculous on its face. Bissell’s statement is a refusal to make distinctions. It’s an attempt to strip the words “outsider” and “insider” of meaning—but it appeals to the self-image of Bissell’s audience: The Believer’s upscale staff and its hipster readership, who truly want to believe in what Bissell is selling them. Tom must believe he’s dealing with quite the gullible audience, because he goes on to say that John Updike, who virtually lived at The New Yorker, was an outsider. Bissell likely threw this in as a test of how much he could get away with.

In the essay, Tom Bissell presents a bizarro universe where down is up, up is down, victims turn into victimizers and victimizers into victims. We see in the real world Bissell and his mentors circulating their words everywhere, including in mass circulation flagship publications. ULAers, meanwhile, aren’t to be seen anyplace. From 2003 Tom Bissell has received the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Not quite an outsider himself.

Quickly enough in the essay, the members  of the Underground Literary Alliance are called “no-talent whiners” (from a New York editor) as well as “thuggish, cruel, and petty.” They, ULAers, “cause distress to fellow writers” Bissell assures us-- I guess by the ULA’s very existence-- and “they manage to achieve true menace.”

Tom Bissell does concede a few innocuous points. With the “fair” part of his presentation over with, he descends to the heart of his attack. Bissell paints the ULA as having “a stolid refusal to accept anyone who goes about his or her artistic life differently than the ULA.”

All evidence demonstrates, then and now, the opposite: the refusal of those who wield real literary power to accept writers who don’t play by the accepted rules or who don’t take the acceptable path. Chad Harbach: “We’re all MFA’s now.”

Tom Bissell then begins a long analogy between the Underground Literary Alliance and the censorship of the Bolsheviks. The ULA, mind you, was protesting the stagnation of literary bureaucracy, but dare not let truth intrude into the conversation. Bissell tells us that in Russia, “hundreds of independent newspapers . . . were crushed.”

Never mind that the ULA sprung from a diverse scene of hundreds of independent publications, with no ties whatsoever to any monolith. What side does Bissell think we’re on? He compares us with Soviet Glavlit, of all things, when a tops-down Glavlit mentality was the very thing we were fighting. Bissell talks of writers being “tarred,” of being forced to clean floors for a living. He discusses banned writers, banned because “—they did not write about the correct subject matter. . . . They were not real writers.”

Isn’t it funny that the ULA’s members weren’t considered “real writers”; that Bissell’s statements applied to no writers so much as those of the Underground Literary Alliance? To make his points, Bissell turns truth on its head.

“I am not suggesting that the ULA wants to exterminate writers in a Stalinist burst of classocide.” !!! This sentence disingenuously suggests exactly that.

Bissell targets our goofy nicknames; “King”; “Wild Bill”; “Urban Hermitt”; and the like. “To rename oneself in such a way is a gesture of both concealment and aggression.”

No it’s not. It’s ballyhoo. We were using those names before the ULA was ever thought of and formed. But Tom Bissell is caught up in the malevolent creation of his imagination, and takes it beyond all bounds.

“—I suspect, too, that very few writers would want to live in a world in which the Underground Literary Alliance could determine who could and could not write.”

Well, maybe, if such a thing were conceivable. When did that question arise? At no point in our history were we not the lowliest, brokest, most powerless of writers. There are hundreds of well-funded institutions involved with the creation of literature, operating out of large and impressive edifices wielding great power, from prestigious university writing programs to the Big Six book giants dwelling in gigantic skyscrapers. A great deal of determinations are made in these thick-walled, castle-like structures. The Underground Literary Alliance, a collection of street writers, has never inhabited a one of them.

The ULA’s attacks were against a closed system, an insular mentality that does, in fact, in the real world, determine who can or cannot write. Our goal throughout was to break OPEN that system, to allow different writers, with different ways of writing, a voice in the culture; a seat at the literary table. One can disagree with our premise, but to impute to the ULA the very things that were being done to us, as Bissell did in this essay, was either malicious or goofy. What it was, was branding—tarring us with a series of labels that were in effect smears. Bolsheviks, Stalinists, terrorists, thugs—he had no trouble slinging words around, knowing that in the memory of everyone who read his essay—which meant a great many literary people—the words were going to stick. I truly believe Tom Bissell is in the wrong business. He’d make a great political campaign strategist.

Tom Bissell then corrects me for using the term “the real America” to describe collapsing industrial cities like Detroit.

“The ‘real’ America,” Bissell states, “is not poor and desperate, just as the real America is not young and wealthy and hip. They are both America, and both can be written about in revelatory ways.” So it is determined by the authority himself.

This is true, as far as it goes, but Bissell misses his own point. One America was being written about, in novel after novel, book after book. The other America, seldom. Or at least not written about often enough, or in a passionate enough way—as the likes of a Frank Norris or Jack London or Theodore Dreiser or John Steinbeck would once do—to outrage a sleepy American populace. The ULA was a naive endeavor in many ways. We were naive or idealistic enough to believe that literature could be relevant. That words alone could change America.

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Tom Bissell’s entire essay on the Underground Literary Alliance is a mass of misinformation, distortions, and half-truths. Most of them are minor. Taken together, they add to the essay’s severely slanted effect. I’ll give three examples, one resulting from Bissell’s laziness, the other two from his dishonesty.

1.) Bissell mentions a short piece of mine from 1997 that was posted on the ULA site. He sees it as an “early” work of mine, and states that its “less hysterical tone suggests a writer whose voice has not yet been calcified by rejection—“

Though this sounds credible to the reader, it isn’t true. I’d published my zine, New Philistine, beginning in 1992. My first serious writing. Its tone was nothing if not “hysterical,” as those who’ve read it know. Before 1997 I’d also published a few essays in lit journals. At least one of the essays, also about Detroit, was far stronger than the short, later piece that Bissell cites. Though it’s most polemical parts were cut out, no doubt wisely, by the journal’s editor, the printed work was still more un-p.c. and in-your-face than the kind of writing usually found in such places. To the extent that this essay is still unavailable online, though a brother essay, about baseball!, is up. Tom Bissell could have easily found out about my other writings. But he didn’t. He was already viewing ULAers through the prism of his own literary experience. To this day he hasn’t altered that viewpoint.

My voice, incidentally, had been “calcified” before I ever started writing. It was why I began writing. As with Michael Jackman, to express my outrage and sense of injustice at the crumbling world around me.

2.) In the reprinted version of the essay in Magic Hours (I can’t seem to find it in the original), Tom Bissell says that McSweeney’s was “fronted with its own money and printed independently, which, as I understand it, pretty much defines a zine, but what do I know?”

Note the disclaimer at the end of the sentence, and the “pretty much.” Bissell has fudged the truth, and he knows it. He could’ve checked the definition for “zine” in any number of online dictionaries. Here’s what I found:

“an inexpensively produced, self-published underground publication”  --The Free Dictionary

“a noncommercial often homemade or online publication”  --Merriam-Webster

“a cheaply-made, cheaply-priced publication, often in black and white, which is mass-produced via photocopier and bound with staples.”  --Urban Dictionary

“a small circulation publication . . . self-published work of minority interest usually reproduced via photocopier.”

What zine does not mean is a slick, professionally-produced journal created by a paid professional staff working at a leased office, printed in Iceland and shipped back to the United States via cargo container, and selling in the neighborhood of twenty-five bucks.

The Tom Bissell disclaimer: “Who? Me?”

3.) Tom Bissell cites a challenge to the ULA from poet David Berman requesting a debate with us. When I responded in semi-polite fashion, Berman gave me a snarky response and ran off. He wasn’t serious in the challenge, of course, but merely looking to make a smirky rejoinder, which Bissell quoted in his essay, I suppose because he saw it as an available dig. When we kept after David Berman about the challenge, he begged off. Bissell’s presentation of the trivial incident is untruthful. As is so much else in the essay.

What’s curious about this particular incident is that Tom Bissell seems surprised that I wasn’t a thug or a terrorist in my response to David Berman. Bissell is puzzled. “Several people told me,” he writes, that ULAers are “basically polite.” Tom Bissell created in his head and in his essay a stereotype of the ULA as a collection of thugs and terrorists, then wondered why we didn’t fit the stereotype. Never, of course, did he meet us and find out for himself. That we were writers, pure and simple, engaging in occasional theater and a lot of ballyhoo in order to draw attention to ourselves—old-fashioned promotion—was something Bissell didn’t consider.

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What of our whistle blowing?

Tom Bissell selected a couple points out of scores of points, then again turned reality on its head, transforming arts grant victimizers into victims. Our chief target, one of the most connected writers in America—who Bissell portrayed in his essay as Jean Valjean!—was especially adept at gaming the system for his own benefit and that of his cronies. The scion of two hyper-wealthy families, this person sat on numerous grants panels, influenced the selection of heads of organizations like PEN America, awarded taxpayer money to his friends, and himself applied for and received a Guggenheim grant while residing inside America’s most exclusive private enclave, an island reserved for names like the Duponts and Firestones. Want to discuss the 1%? This individual was and is the cream of that 1%. Jean Valjean indeed.

The same person is also good friends with some of the wealthiest and most powerful figures on the literary scene, names like Daniel Handler and Dave Eggers, those able to decide in reality who’s blackballed from literature or not. To decide who is turned into a real-life Valjean, “branded as an outcast,” as Victor Huge portrays the character in his novel.

I could go into the literary corruption matter much further, and may say more in a few days in a comment to this blog post. Tom Bissell’s treatment of the NEA award to Jonathan Franzen—which Bissell both sidesteps and misdirects the reader about—is thoroughly dishonest. What’s interesting to me is that, though Bissell addressed some complex and controversial issues, he included no sources to his essay. No links to the ULA’s reports or to articles about the issues, in Page Six and elsewhere, where readers could find out about the controversies themselves. If I’m able to dig some of them up, I may include such sources in my comment about the whistle blowing subject.

Know that our whistle blowing presentations were thoroughly documented, unassailable, unless attacked in a quick, pithy and distorted way, as in Tom Bissell’s essay.

In retrospect, for the ULA band of nobodies to take on the powerful literary figures mentioned here, or not mentioned, was insanity. The ULA’s crime was stating the case for the 99% ten years before Occupy.

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To summarize Part II of this impromptu series:

--To deny our legitimate outsider status, Tom Bissell claimed that all writers are outsiders.

--He accused the ULA of the very sins and crimes engaged in by the established literary and publishing mainstream.

--He tarred us, without a shred of evidence or speck of connection to reality, as akin to Leninists, Bolsheviks, and totalitarians.

--He defended the “young and wealthy and hip,” and by extension defended the extreme inequities of American society, which many ULAers were and are in a unique position to appreciate. Writers cleaning floors indeed! Not in Tom Bissell’s fervid imagination, but in American reality.

(NEXT UP: I’ll address the case made against underground writing. Watch for the next post about this, possibly up by this weekend. Responses and counterarguments to what I’ve said here are welcome. Will we see any? I doubt it.)

The Bissell/Believer Back Story

TOM BISSELL’S DISTORTED ESSAY PART I

Reviewers and readers who take Tom Bissell’s 2003 Believer essay on the defunct Underground Literary Alliance, “Protesting All Fiction Writers!”—now reprinted with a different title in Bissell’s Magic Hours book of essays—at face value make a huge mistake. They should be aware of the essay’s context—the reason it was written and published. For the previous two years the ULA had been engaged in an intensely bitter feud with Dave Eggers and McSweeney’s, which kicked off when we protested an award to the publication for “Best Zine.” Things from there escalated. This was the backdrop to Bissell’s essay.

Bissell admits that Dave Eggers was initially opposed to the essay’s publication. A scant few months after its appearance, Eggers himself was caught posting anonymous attacks against the ULA on Amazon. Eggers carried extreme animus toward the ULA—from his perspective, with good reason. Could the essay have been approved if Bissell hadn’t assured the editors that it would be a proper takedown of the Underground Literary Alliance? A takedown, moreover, which fit the happy-face McSweeney’s/Believer image of pristine innocence. No easy feat.

In the essay, Tom Bissell presents himself as an innocent bystander; a disinterested observer objectively weighing facts. Gullible journalists today like Katie Ryder accept the presentation at face value. They swallow it whole, to the extent that Ryder, in an interview with Bissell, speaks of his tolerance, and absurdly applauds him for giving his subjects a “fair shot.” Yet in 2003 the essay was a partisan attack, and in it Bissell behaved like a partisan. He would not have been allowed the assignment otherwise.

The effectiveness of Bissell’s takedown can be judged by the result. The ULA was branded as a collection of no-talent whiners and thuggish authoritarians. His essay became the accepted source on us; the standard text. When I made a 2007 appearance on a PBS radio station, the host was still influenced by Bissell’s text, asking me wide-eyed and believing why the ULA wanted to ban Jeffrey Eugenides from publishing. A truly ill-informed statement. As evidenced by snarky or hateful statements still made about me online, the branding remains to this day.

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Journalists and reviewers wishing to understand Tom Bissell’s essay on the Underground Literary Alliance should realize that he did very little research on us. He exchanged several emails with one member out of forty. He made no effort to meet any of us, though many of us were a short bus ride away. He asked for none of our zines, though we were a writers group that sprung from the print zine scene and defined by it. He did read our web site, which contained a smattering of our writing.

To understand the ULA you’d have to understand the background we came from. The three initiators of the project, Steve Kostecke, Michael Jackman, and myself, were from Detroit. We’d witnessed wrenching social change and economic devastation, up close. First hand.

David M. Sheridan’s 1999 Michigan Quarterly Review essay about Detroit, “Making Sense of Detroit”-- http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0038.301;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg -- is a great source, because it was written at the very time that plans for an underground writers group were being discussed and formed. It gives a compelling picture of what was happening to the city. Sheridan’s essay also quotes from an essay of my own about Detroit, an essay which alone would be a good source for my mindset at that moment of time. Without understanding Detroit it’s impossible to understand the Underground Literary Alliance.

Tom Bissell, in his Believer piece, dismisses Jackman’s talk of “injustice”—yet thoughts of injustice were inescapable from our brains. Sheridan states that I wrote about “violence and racism and poverty.” With trademark snarkiness, The Believer, in one of its tags to Bissell’s essay, mocked the ULA’s concerns as “alienated socioeconomic posturing.” I urge people to read Sheridan’s essay and then decide if our concerns were posturing.

Tom Bissell never did the hard research to find out where the ULA was from and what we were about, because he didn’t care what we were about. That wasn’t the point of his essay.

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Tom Bissell’s own striving-writer background included an editorial position at W.W. Norton in Manhattan, at the very heart of the tops-down Big Six publishing system. By accommodating himself to powerful individuals he made his way through the heart of the machine. This was the perspective he brought to his essay, to his look at ULAers and our writings.

Bissell made no  attempt to understand our alien style of literature, our psychology, or the DIY/ print zine ethos of the 1990’s. That ethos determined how the ULA operated—by consensus, with no hierarchies and no real leaders. Our titles were a game. The “Director”—Michael Jackman—in personality was the most detached and laidback of the ULA’s major players.

The DIY/punk aesthetic determined our occasionally provocative, in-your-face behavior, which we saw as theater. We were sending up, in our way, the sober self-seriousness of the literary elite, and the pronounced pin-drop solemnity of the standard literary reading. The punk aesthetic determined many of our various styles of zine writing—expressions of the sound of American reality, of a Greyhound bus or a punk show or the street, in all its crudeness, emotion, immediacy and spontaneity. It’s why in 2006 we protested a tepid establishment “Howl” celebration at Columbia University. ULAers saw ourselves as the legitimate heirs of the Beats, and heirs of Dada and other arts movements outside the walls of the canon and the publishing machine. Our stylized and impudent zines were our proofs of our authenticity and credibility. In his Believer essay Tom Bissell scorned the very idea of this kind of alternative writing. Yet it was the kind of writing we’d been selling, mostly to alienated young readers who otherwise wouldn’t have been reading anything.

Authoritarian? That was the opposite of what we were about. We were a rebellion against rules, regulation, constipation, and authority. We were a disorganized blast of noise. We did have strong voices. In one of his recent interviews with Katie Ryder, Tom Bissell still refers to our no-hierarchy group as “authoritarian.” This is an ignorant, know-nothing statement. Also an ironic one, seeing that Bissell works and writes in a world of hierarchy and authority.

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Bissell admits that his essay on Robert Kaplan was a “literary assassination.” His essay on the ULA was no less an attempted assassination. Unlike Kaplan, we had no standing, no resources, no body of powerful and connected friends with which to withstand such attacks.

(Much more to come on this blog.)

(Also see @KingWenclas for other remarks.)

How Do You Fight a Smear?

I've written before here about false narratives-- deliberate distortions which through widespread perpetuation become labels; shorthand substitutes for the truth. The most effective false narrative against the currently inactive Underground Literary Alliance was Tom Bissell's smear essay, "Protesting All Fiction Writers!" which appeared in The Believer in 2003. That essay has been retitled and become "Grief and the Outsider" in Bissell's new essay collection, Magic Hours. I don't know what changes he's made to the essay. I just reread the original and it was more malicious than I remembered. If I judge by descriptions of a couple other of the essays in the new collection, Bissell has made his way as something of a self-described "literary assassin," not only in our case. I'll likely be posting more about this matter. In his mentions of the ULA in interviews about his new book, Bissell doesn't seem to have learned anymore about us than he knew about us nine years ago-- which was not much.

I have a twitter account-- @KingWenclas. I can't say I've learned how to use it. I may have to do so, in order to counter Bissell's false narrative, which no doubt was a factor in the blackballing of ULA writers.

Rome versus Carthage

I admit I’m taken aback by the reappearance of Tom Bissell’s hatchet job essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, “Protesting All Fiction Writers!” The essay, whose very title is a distortion, originally appeared in The Believer literary journal and has been included in Bissell’s new collection of essays, Magic Hours. The flawed essay is bad enough. Worse are the reviews of it, many of which mention the ULA with gleeful hostility. What’s the point? It’s a sudden rush of extreme animus toward a defunct organization whose writers were knocked out by the recession, their movement broken. It’s as if McSweeney’s (which published Bissell’s new book) and their many acolytes are ancient Rome, wishing to see every Carthaginian shred of our past literary threat knocked down and buried into the ground.

The Back Story

AS three of the six founding members of the Underground Literary Alliance were from the beaten-down city of Detroit, David M. Sheridan's 1999 essay (link posted a few posts below) is crucial background information in conveying the kind of crazy environment we came from. Indeed, while Sheridan was researching and writing his essay in 1998, I was meeting ULA co-founder Steve Kostecke at Elmer's Bar at the very heart of Detroit's Cass Corridor, the southern part of the neighborhood then like the Wild West, full of rowdy and bawdy saloons, houses of ill-repute, stray youth gangs, and violence. It was a neighborhood into which the police themselves would seldom venture. In our discussions Steve and I put together the ideas that would lead to the creation of the wildest American writers group ever.

In the 90's I was cranking out not only terrific essays like the one Sheridan references in his piece, but also explosive zeens. I was one of the best underground writers in America-- which means one of the best writers in America, period. But so what? As with others of my kind, my writing was too dynamic, too real, for the literary mainstream. We were denied access to avenues of publicity. So we banded together to obtain some publicity. What followed was the ULA's tumultuous history.

From The King Wenclas Fan Club

Some recent plaudits about myself and my writing:

"Detroit has a lot of crazy people in it, and he was one of them, the postcard writer, Karl Wenclas."
-Charles Baxter
(For some background, see the previous two blog posts. I've not sent anonymous postcards, which would defeat the point, but I have criticized established and successful writers.)

"Someone unleash the feminized mandarins of American literature on this fatuous, florid crackpot."
-D.E. Rasso
(Uh, D.E., they were unleashed on me, some time ago.)

"His shit is BORING, not to mention badly crafted."
-Glenn Kenny
(Everyone's entitled to their opinion, but Kenny gives no examples, and I note his post was made before I released any of my serious writing via ebooks, which makes me wonder if he was simply recirculating the accepted narrative re me.)

In the same post, Glenn Kenny also says this:
"What the fuck are we gonna do, ban everybody with a privileged background from participating in the arts, or in criticism for that matter?"

But Glenn, the question is whether someone NOT from a privileged background can participate in the arts, without sacrificing his-or-her integrity. I'm one literary critic anyway who seems to be banned from the arts. Exactly why could be a matter of debate, if debate about such questions were allowed in the literary mainstream.

But at least my three fans spelled my name right!

About DIY Postcards

One of my favorite promo efforts is sending out colorful hand-made postcards announcing this or that project. I still do this, mainly because I enjoy creating them. Several writers and editors over the years have objected to receiving such mailings, including a few prominent names.

I can’t claim to have invented the practice. I first became aware of DIY postcards twenty years ago, when I jumped into the middle of the nation’s zine scene, and began receiving such postcards and other curious concoctions myself. Zines were an outgrowth of punk rock and anarchist politics. I’m sure that DIY mailings to announce concerts or political events have been a staple of these activities for many decades. There’s also a long tradition of mail art, which automatically fed into the general print zine stream. In the 90’s I received hundreds of such mailings, such art, such lit, such necessary and vital cultural noise.

To get to the origin of zines themselves, you’d have to go back at least to the time of Tom Paine.

I can’t say I understand uptight bourgie folks who would object to this kind of expression, this variety of speech. Especially writers. DIY postcards are the poor man’s promotional device—or they’re at least mine. I’d hate to see such activity squelched in the name of well-regulated conformity. My motto is always: More free speech! Less conformity!

NOTE: My new ebook, THE TOWER, contains scenes of independent DIY activity. Also, a previous ebook, MOOD DETROIT, contains a story, “The Zeen Writer,” depicting free expression of art and speech. They’re both available at the Kindle Store or Nook Books. I know that the established literary community detests what Amazon is doing to their literary monopoly—but ebooks provide an outlet for writers like myself who would otherwise not—save for print zeens—be given any kind of a voice in this society. I see that as a good thing.

Making Sense of Detroit

On-line I stumbled into an excellent essay, "Making Sense of Detroit," by David M. Sheridan which originally appeared in the Michigan Quarterly Review in the summer of 1999. The essay, despite a smidgen of academic jargon, gives a feel for that beaten-down town, and among other things references and quotes from an essay of mine, which happens to be one of the stronger pieces I've written. Sheridan's essay is worth checking out, and can be found here:
http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=mqr;c=mqr;c=mqrarchive;idno=act2080.0038.301;rgn=main;view=text;xc=1;g=mqrg

In the summer of 1999 I was living in a Cass Corridor apartment building that'd been half-gutted by a fire the previous February. I was working a decent-paying job along Detroit's riverfront, but simultaneously making plans with other underground writers which were to result in the infamous decade of experience of the Underground Literary Alliance. One could say that as a writer I've bounced around.

The essay of mine Sheridan quotes from isn't available on-line. As he suggests, it's quite impressionistic, with my view of the city then perhaps mediated by alcohol and other things. I led a wild and tough lifestyle in the 90's. But what I wrote was also completely true. Possibly some of that same style of tough impressionism has made it in to my new e-novel, THE TOWER, now available for a Detroit-style price at Nook or Kindle. If you like the excerpts of my Detroit essay, you might consider purchasing my ebook. You'll find more unflinching and truthful writing noplace.

The Fake Category

Intelligent writers should know better than to get hoodwinked into every fake category put forth by marketing professionals. Such is the “Young Adult” category in the book business. If the major buyers of Young Adult fiction (see The Hunger Games and Harry Potter) are older adults, the category has lost all meaning, if it ever had any.

After all, Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn could be considered a “Young Adult” novel. So could Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Or Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and other fine American novels. The truth is that a good novel will appeal to young and old adults alike.

The Cloudy View of an Establishment Commentator

WHERE ARE THE POLITICAL NOVELS?

There was recently an interesting article at The Guardian (UK) site by Aditya Chakrabortty, here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/apr/09/english-american-novels-gutless

As far as it goes, the essay is on target. The problem is that it doesn't go very far. Note that Chakrabortty limits the discussion to contemporary "literary" novels.

"Literary." They have to be "literary"! Which means, almost by definition, non-political, focused narrowly on "the perfect sentence" in contrast to the broader world. Chakrabortty looks for his political novels among the well-regulated established conglomerate-heavy literary system itself. He's not searching down in the muck of struggle and life for what he desires.

A quick check shows that Aditya Chakrabortty himself is an Oxford graduate. His essay thus comes across, for all its value, as standard university bubble whining. He's been force-fed "literary" novels by the system-- then realizes suddenly that none of them is meaningful or relevant. The authors were all selected from the privileged class, a tiny sliver of a slice of the populace. If any writers have no reason to be political it's these folks! After all, they're doing fine.

"Why aren't they political?" Aditya Chakrabortty muses from his high-up tops-down guarded Guardian perch in the clouds overlooking the world. "Where are the political novels?" A few stray Franzen-like literary birds pass by, daring the thin atmosphere. Cumulous formations float alongside. "Why can't I see any political novels?"
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Read THE TOWER by King Wenclas

Life Mimicks Art

Word has it that rain is dampening the Occupy Wall Street activities in New York City. Curiously enough, there's a rainstorm during the key protest in my new e-novel, THE TOWER. Buy it now at Nook Books or Kindle Store and see.

Fits Many Genres

The publishing world today is dominated by narrow genres, which is oh-so-predictable.

Where does a fusion novel like THE TOWER fit? THE TOWER is mystery, literary, political, pop, romance, thriller, sports, and likely much else. It doesn’t narrow itself. It aims to present contemporary America in all its complexity and madness. Buy the ebook at Kindle Store or Nook Books and find out.

Before May Day

Tomorrow promises to be a day of much activity. Many Occupy protests are planned across the country. Those looking for insights should read a new novel which is in effect an anatomy of a protest-- THE TOWER, authored by myself, King Wenclas, now available at Kindle Store and Nook Books.  I have enough of a background at activism and engagement to know what I'm talking about.

E-Book Reading CHALLENGE

I, King Wenclas, independent writer and ebook publisher,

CHALLENGE

any literary person, or defender of the publishing industry's price-fixing,
to read my new e-novel,
THE TOWER,
and name a better novel produced by publishing's Big Six this decade.

Two Points:
1.) Many good writers are shut out of mainstream publishing for reasons that have nothing to do with quality, marketability, or art.
2.) Some indy ebook novels are already competitive with the very best from the book conglomerates. By virtue of their independence-- their ability to take artistic risks-- they may be better.

The gauntlet has been thrown. Who'll respond?

(THE TOWER is available for $1.99 via Nook Books and, yes, Amazon's Kindle Store.)

Fascinating New History Book

Those interested in the history of social movements, including the history of early Christianity, should take a look at The Sign by Thomas De Wesselow, which posits the Shroud of Turin as playing a major role in the secret of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ. There are holes in De Wesselow’s theory that one could drive a truck through. (The most obvious is that the image on the shroud clearly shows the face of a European man, with a long face and square chin, and not that of someone from Palestine.) Despite this, there’s a large amount of credibly-sourced history in the book. More important, few other works give the reader such a sense of what a historical miracle the rise of Christianity truly was. The narrative makes real and fascinating the questions raised by history’s greatest mystery. The ultimate detective story. As De Wesselow shows, history goes very close to the event, even without the shroud—yet the mystery remains unsolved. Thomas De Wesselow provides a novel possible solution which captivated, though not convinced, this reader.

Overheard

A customer talking in a coffeeshop: “Print books are going the way of rental videos.”

The Need for Amazon

The literary establishment is in panic, worried, because of affordable ebooks, that their tottery and moldy empire will come crashing down. Yesterday saw a shaky editorial in the New York Times from lit writer Ann Patchett complaining that brick-and-mortar bookstores are in trouble. She’s frantic that the Pulitzer board awarded no Fiction prize this year. Patchett said that the Department of Justice, by coming out against price-rigging, “has decided to be Amazon’s bodyguard.”

In the same issue, in a different piece, New Republic honcho Leon Wieseltier is quoted on a similar theme: “People who know how to publish books are in danger of being put out of business by people who think they do but don’t.” I guess he can’t see the obvious contradiction in his statement (apart from the fact it’s not true). If publishers are going out of business, then they don’t really know how to publish books—at least not in the current environment.

For some writers, like myself, the ebook revolution spearheaded by Amazon and Barnes and Noble is a godsend. Our current great literary system has designated me blacklisted, a pariah, untouchable, however you wish to term it. No one in the entire system from writers to editors to agents to journalists will allow themselves any contact with me. Whistle blowers like myself are banished to the far reaches of the literary universe. In exile. But now, even if few people know about them or buy them, I’m at least able to get some of my writing via ebooks out there, available for public view. It allows me to prove that I can in fact write. I’ll go further and say that my newest fusion novel, The Tower, is competitive with anything the conglomerates produce. It’s also that rare animal, pop and literature both.

Apparatchiks like Ann Patchett and Leon Wieseltier believe the current moldy system is wonderful, because for those inside the system it is. Neither of them cares two cents worth about corruption within their realm, or what happens to writers who don’t conform. They’ve been trying to shove their stale conception of literary art, centered around the so-called perfect sentence and nothing else—bureaucratic lit—down the public’s throat, through writers like David Foster Wallace, for decades, but the public refuses to swallow it.

It’s truly funny that the great success the big publishers are having at the moment has nothing to do with “literary” fiction. Instead, fed-up readers desperate for readability and plot—and no longer offered that by mainstream novelists—have found it in the obscure or scorned categories of fantasy, romance, and Young Adult. The publishers’ success has come through publishing’s back door, and has been despite the guidance of mandarins. The total dominance of hack authors like George R. Martin highlights the utter bankruptcy of literary fiction. No Pulitzer award? Never has the granting of no award been more fitting.

The Hypester

Have to give a nod to Dick Clark, one of the hustling low-rent entrepreneurs who turned rock n’ roll into a cultural phenomenon. Clark, for all his slickness, operated in the Barnum carnival barker American tradition of ballyhoo. He defined America, selling good clean innocent not-too-sophisticated fun. The salesman who could put over anything—and sometimes did.

p.s. Let’s get Chubby Checker in the Rock Hall of Fame! That he’s not in is a disgrace.

Controversy Sells?

GOOD CAREER MOVE?

I note Ted Nugent is suddenly back in the news, receiving tons of free publicity.

The Craziest Novel?

Occupiers take on the national religion—NFL football. Meanwhile, a radio host is voluble, a security expert is worried, a team mascot is frantic, and the plutocrat who owns the team can’t be bothered. Until it’s too late? Where does all this madness take place? Only in The Tower by me, King Wenclas, now available on your Nook or Kindle.

The Better Choice

Between the unappealing poles of the unreadability of Ben Marcus or the superficiality of George R. Martin, is there something better? Yes! The Tower by King Wenclas (me) is intelligent and also readable. You won’t discover this if you don’t read it!

Oprah Art

Those who believe that Freedom by Jonathan Franzen is a great novel are the same people who think “Titanic” is a great film.

The Question

The question is whether those within the current literary system will read a work outside their experience, from a writer who has broken every one of their rules.

THE TOWER by King Wenclas. Get it! (Nook Books or Kindle Store.)

First Occupy Novel?

Is The Tower the first novel inspired by, or in some way about, the Occupy Wall Street movement? To be honest, the Seattle protests of 1999 were as much of an inspiration, but I observed extensively Occupy Philly’s encampment at Philadelphia’s City Hall late last year, heard dozens of speeches, spoke with many occupiers, and saw first hand the enthusiasm of marches. I also noted the movement’s increasing disputes and divides. I took away much which influenced my novel’s characters, words, and ideas.

The Tower is not only about protest. Its themes go deeper. Much else is examined, including music and sports. Much of the narrative centers around a football team and its organization. A key set piece is a depiction of a game. In many ways the novel is about “the games.”

What am I blathering about? Order The Tower at Kindle or Nook Books and find out. The novel’s release date is right now.

Harvard versus Harvard

The literati and dominant media should be happy. It’s now official. It’s been willed into being. Aristocracy lives. The hierarchical society.

Control Freaks

There are two new books out which describe how diificult it is to succeed, and dominate, in a particular field in this country. One, Inside Apple by Adam Lashinsky, concerns the workings of Steve Jobs. The subject of the other, The Big Miss by Hank Haney, is golfer Tiger Woods. Both are fascinating reads.

Then again, regarding golf, we have the example of Masters winner Bubba Watson, who is very Do-It-Yourself, with no entourage and no coach. He doesn't even study video of himself. For Bubba, natural is best-- and yet he wins.

The Imitators

I was walking through Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square yesterday. A perfectly beautiful day. Near the entrance, a group of young hippies, early 20's, were playing guitars and singing nothing but songs from the 1960's. It was an image right out of the 60's. Therein's the problem. What kind of generation is this? Where's the originality? The different and new? Everything is retro. I touch on this even a little in my upcoming novel, via a hipster character who feeds on nostalgia for the past.

The situation of course is little different in established literature. What's referred to as "avant-garde" is anything but. Instead, recyclings from the 20's, 50's, 60's, 70's.

What's the attitude the new generation should have?

They should be out to destroy the 1960's and everything connected to it. They should take a sledgehammer to that ridiculous era with its feeble posings and shallow ideas. Detonate it. Blast that culture away and start over. Create something original from the shards that remain.

Balkanized Lit

American literature has been sliced up into a score of separatist ghettos to which the novel is expected to conform. Is your book: detective; sci-fi; fantasy; vampires; horror; literary; Christian; YA; what? It's all cookie-cutter stuff, writers imitating imitators, every one of them safely in their predictable niche, nothing original anywhere to be found. Writers as cattle, each one obeying pre-ordained rules.

What happens to a novel which fits comfortably in no slot, which obeys no system rules? Which follows only the author's integrity and devotion to the values of art?

(Coming Soon: the complete 51,000-word version of THE TOWER by King Wenclas.)

Social Justice

Who publishes novels about social justice?

I know they’re being written, by Tony Christini and others like him. Do the bigs ever touch them?

My new novel will have a chapter or two devoted to social justice. The book’s theme is character. It’s centered on a single personality. A subsidiary theme is revolution, but that’s a plot motif. A reason for plot activity.

By social justice, I don’t mean work like Franzen’s “Freedom,” which is a diatribe against freedom and against poor people.

I get the sense that in this country, those who control publishing and media tolerate only those books and ideas which conform to their pre-formed beliefs. Work that fits with the assumptions of their class. Don’t kid yourself. Intellectual and cultural thought in America is dominated by a single social class. A solitary mindset. Nothing allowed which they might possibly disagree with. That’s certainly been my history. But I wonder if the thinking has changed. If they’ll someday reverse the blackballing. My new novel is very, very good, and I’d like people to read it.

What Literature Is Missing

First, let's get away from the notion that the contemporary world is too crazy and complex for novelists to compete with and write about. That's a defeatist attitude. The historical chaos of the French Revolution and resulting Napoleonic Era didn't hinder the creation of some very great novels about that greatness and tumult. The years from 1938 to 1945 were filled with a couple centuries worth of history, war, drama, madness, tragedy and pathos. This was an invitation to the novelist. Our own time is tame and comprehensible by comparison.

What American literature is missing:

1.) ARTISTIC AMBITION. The ambition to portray, interpret, and explain our world. Fantasy, sorry, is a copout. Even magical realism. It's an attempt at a shortcut that I take as an insult to the reader's intelligence. It's an admission of failure-- the failure of the novelist to make the natural world seem magical and fantastic.

2.) INTELLIGENCE. All the great novelists were not only artistically ambitious, they were highly intelligent. They had large, comprehensive intelligence, of a kind that comes with a great deal of experience in the world, and being challenged, hurt, even terrifed by that awful and awe-inspiring world.

3.) CHARISMA. I don't know what fields the great minds of this society are going into. Likely there aren't any such minds. We know the great, larger-than-life personalities over the last several decades have been joining rock bands. Are there any in literature? The most we get from today's approved writers is cuteness and glibness. Superficial wit. Most of them walk around with negative charisma. Walking voids. Black holes emitting no energy, and when they read from their books, suck all energy from a room.

4.) PERSPECTIVE. What the entire intellectual establishment lacks is perspective and distance about their ideas and these times. There's no sense of the millennia of great minds who've preceded them-- they, in their unknowing smugness, are superior to the intelligence of the past. Even the recent past. There's also no sense of the future, of how more wise and more human intellligences in the future might judge our worlds of art, literature, and culture, those messy swamps of now.

Zen Tebow

Football authorities like John Elway are leery of Tim Tebow because of his unorthodox style of throwing and playing. Tebow doesn't look like a quarterback is supposed to look. The experts are locked in to an orthodoxy mindset.

The styles of Tebow and his replacement, Peyton Manning, couldn't be more different. Manning comes to the playing field with a tops-down attitude, seeking to impose his intelligence and will upon the game. Very western. Tim Tebow, by contrast, has a zen way of playing football. He becomes one with the flow of the game and the playing field, instinctively more than consciously.

Some quarterbacks are hybrids. The early Tom Brady wasn't a stats guy. He relied on instincts as much as knowledge. Nowadays he's clearly playing in the Peyton Manning style.

Peyton Manning is great at acquiring numbers, accumulating data. Yet, in both college and the pros he's had difficulty closing the deal and winning the number of championships he's supposed to win.

Could there be attributes to Tim Tebow's game the experts are missing?

They Did Me a Favor

It's occurred to me that thanks to the reluctant writers of the ULA, who balked at my style of doing things, I've been forced to pick up my game as a writer, having no one but myself now to promote. I spent ten years neglecting my own writing, cranking out the occasional poem or zeen but not taking it seriously. I had all these "stars," you see.

The past year I've focused on my own work-- and on pushing my abilities. I don't know how good my work ultimately is, or will be, but it's significantly better than it was. My soon-enough-to-be-released novel isn't perfect-- nothing is-- but it contains some very good things.

St. Paddy's Aftermath

This morning the streets of Philadelphia are filled with wrecked cars and the sidewalks are covered in vomit.

It's Jackie Wilson!

BEST ROCK SINGER
Elvis Presley could sing in any style and genre-- gospel, country, pop, r&b, rock, even mock-opera. His voice had great range. Yet the one rock n' roll singer Elvis was in awe of was Jackie Wilson. Hear a number of his recordings and you see that only a few others even come close. I put Presley at #2, the fabulous Roy Orbison #3.

Best Rock Singer?

Who's the best rock/rock n' roll singer of all time? I've thought about this question for a long time and have finally settled on a definitive answer. We're talking rock, or a variation therein, not straight pop. Whitney doesn't qualify. We're also talking singer, not star, dancer, persona. So, no, it's not Elvis Presley, though he's probably Top Three.

Is it: Jim Morrison? Bruce Springsteen? James Brown? Mick Jagger? Bob Dylan? Bono? Prince? Sting? Buddy Holly? Otis Redding? Cher? Blondie? Siouxsie Sioux? Del Shannon? Little Richard? Roger Daltrey? Marvin Gaye? David Lee Roth? Robert Plant? Freddie Mercury? Ray Charles? Johnny Cash? Aretha Franklin? Van Morrison? Sam Cooke? Cheryl Crow? Courtney Love? Jerry Lee Lewis? Fats Domino? Chubby Checker? Tommy James? Etta James? Axl Rose? Rod Stewart? David Bowie? Iggy Pop? Janis Joplin? Grace Slick? Kurt Cobain? Chrissie Hynde? Eric Burdon? Bjork? Pat Benatar? Tom Petty? Who am I missing?

Is it a contemporary artist? Does Adele qualify?

Stay tuned.

Peyton and Tiger

A SPORTS REPORT

Those football teams looking to gamble on quarterback Peyton Manning's return to health should look at the example of golf's Tiger Woods, who after an injury a few years ago has yet to regain his championship form.

Destroying Our Roots

I note that last week the New York Times carried a huge ad attacking the Catholic Church. The ad was paid for by the Freedom From Religion organization.

Can there be a freedom from anything? The only way to have freedom from something is to wipe it out.

If you're really going to have freedom from Christianity, say, you'd have to destroy western civilization itself. There's no end of writers and artists you'd have to toss out of the canon, Tolstoy and Milton and Rembrandt, Dostoevsky and Dante and Michaelangelo only among the very most prominent of them. For 2,000 years, most of the intellectual progress in the west, for all the missteps and conflicts, was spawned by Christianity and Christians, including the preservation and renewal of classical thought.

In this country, most of today's bastions of secular intellectual thought, such as Yale, Princeton, and Harvard, were established by believing Christians. Do their graduates know this? The two great social justice movements of American history, the Abolitionist movement in the 19th century and the Civil Rights movement in the 20th, were initiated and led by Christians putting Christian ideals into practice.

Many Americans aren't believing Christians. Many like myself aren't very active or practicing. But most of us are cultural and historical Christians. I was raised in a Roman Catholic milieu. I can no more take that tremendous heritage out of my being than I can freely cut off my right arm. Neither can we remove the Christian heritage from our civilization without greatly altering that civilization, taking a giant leap of faith-- a gamble that by killing all trace of God and the church all will proceed as before.

Lacan and Writers

I've been trying to grasp the ideas of Jacques Lacan, which I find intriguing. I'm using the filter of Slavoj Zizek, who's a more readable writer than Lacan himself, whose prose, like that of so many French philosophers, is deathly boring.

I take Lacan's core idea that of the divide between conscious and unconscious which leads to paradox. For instance, the most upstanding man in church, the model of uprightness, might on Saturday night be the biggest sinner in the community-- or even a serial killer. On the other hand, the athiest who publicly rejects God in fact internalizes him, and may be more rigidly obsessed with rules than the believer. I'm not sure Lacan's notions are often true, but they're at least sometimes true.

How do Lacan's ideas apply to writers? I think of two instances where they might.

I remember in 2006 when the ULA protested a "Howl" celebration at Columbia University for its phoniness. When Jellyboy the Clown and I entered Miller Hall, where the "celebration" was taking place, it was like walking into a morgue. These upscale folks honoring the Beats were the most unalive uncelebratory unBeat rigidly constipated people I'd ever seen. They listened to a creaky recording of "Beat"-- not a lively version-- and you could hear absolutely nothing else. We'd entered a church service, and not a very lively one at that. High Mass at its most stifling. The Beats? Wild men? Joy? There was none of this. The Beats were treated by the unBeat audience as dead mummies to be silently worshipped, but dare not one behave in any manner resembling the actual Beats! It was a Lacanian paradox. Those who'd ostensibly rejected all rules had imposed upon themselves their own-- or really, brought the same rules and uptight behavior that the Beats thought they'd destroyed, back.

A second example might be the 3,000 or 30,000-- by now it might be 3 million-- system writers who signed a public petition proclaiming their support for the Occupy Wall Street movement. The petition, of course, asks them to do nothing. There's no commitment, and since everyone is signing it, including literature's One Percent, there's absolutely no risk. Most if not all of these writers gave no support to the Underground Literary Alliance when it was around making noise last decade. Some of them were actively hostile to it. The ULA was a very Occupy-like organization ten years ahead of the fact, with the difference that we wanted to apply our ideas of democracy to the literary realm itself. (And of course found, "You can't do that!")

What's a Lacanian analysis of the current petition? Mine is that by signing it, the writers publicly demonstrate their commitment to abstract concepts of concern and change-- without having to actually change anything. It's like walking around with a badge or sign on themselves that says, "I Care." Now designated publicly as virtuous, they're absolved from being so in reality. The Lacanian paradox is that those writers on the list are least likely to put Occupy ideas into action; to try to make them, in their own field-- where they wield actual influence-- a reality. They don't have to make them a reality! After all, they're on the list.

I'd look then, to find establishment writers of character, honesty, and integrity, for those names not on the list. Those not playing the phony game. I've spotted two surprising names not on the list, who you'd think would automatically be on there. I think I may have misjudged those fellows-- they may have more honor than I thought-- and wonder if I owe them an apology.

False Narratives

I empathize with Sarah Palin regarding the endless cultural destruction campaign on her character and personality which-- don't kid yourself on this-- is a sophisticated destruction of American democracy.

On a vastly, vastly smaller scale, this is what happened to myself and the Underground Literary Alliance. A distorted image of the target was created, one with just enough of a tangential connection to reality to make it believable. I was portrayed as a semi-rational megalomaniacal dictator to enough extent that as I tried to keep the team moving, some members believed the portrayal. By the ULA's end, major ULA figures believed I was the campaign's major problem. When I finally had enough and stopped pulling the wagon, the campaign stopped moving. I'm sure those ULAers who bought the portrayal are still standing with mouth agape, wondering, unknowingly, what happened to the ULA.

The ULA itself was characterized by established lit's hatchetmen as "terrorists" and Stalinists. Also, a favorite trick was used, one I've seen used again and again in different places and situations. That's to turn the marginalized voice into a threat able to marginalize the dominant mindset. The ultimate absurdity for us was The Believer's false 2003 claim that we wanted to-- or ever could-- shut out a writer like Jeffrey Eugenides. In 2007 this was still being thrown up to me, such as in a radio interview with a local PBS station. It's as if, once it was printed in The Believer, it became reality.

What was the truth? Does anyone care about the truth? The truth is that Jeffrey Eugenides continues to be published and win Pulitzer Prizes, while ULA writers are blackballed, nonpersons for eternity.

Of course I waste my time just typing this. It does no good to correct the false narrative if you don't control the culture or media. As with Sarah Palin, the narrative has become the reality. Truth shredded. Our establishment doesn't need Putin-like strong arm tactics. So primitive! Our subtle authoritarian anti-democrats are exponentially more sophisticated. There's also no Masha Gessens anyplace to investigate, to examine credibly such things as a Harvard versus Harvard presidential election choice-- for that would be to investigate themselves, those who are consciously or subconsciously doing the selecting and the distorting.

Or, to make counterarguments, to bring up facts afterward doesn't matter. The victimizers never apologize.

(p.s. And Julianne Moore, please stop the endless rationalizing. You've participated in a nasty smear project. In doing so you've besmirched yourself as much as Sarah Palin.)

Dilemmas of Leadership

The dilemma of leadership in “Westward the Women” for the trail boss, Buck, is that he’s had to turn his personality into a harsh, unforgiving one in order to accomplish his job of getting wagon trains to the west. Which includes dominating a contingent of tough men.

As the wagon train sets out from St. Louis, his usual challenges have multiplied. He and the hired men are escorting 140 single women. Disallowing fraternization between the hired men and the women appears impossible—yet the women are promised for the Whitman community 1500 miles or more away. An added problem is that Buck himself has been wandering the west to get away from women. As the Robert Vaughn character says in a different western movie, “The Magnificent Seven,” he is “trying to hide—in the middle of a battlefield.”

Forget the idea that a strong leader isn’t required—that naive idea. Until the community finds its legs, order is maintained, in this circumstance, only through Buck, who has to be an alpha-male to maintain it.

We see quickly into the St. Louis meeting-with-the-cowboys scene that there’s a rival alpha male around. He’s a bad alpha male. He couldn’t care less about community, about anything but his own selfish desires. We know instinctively that Buck will have to eventually deal with him.

There also turns out to be three alphas among the females. Two of them fully support Buck and the mission. One, of course, is gigantic and world-wise Patience, widow of a sea captain. The other is the sharpshooter, who does indeed save Buck’s ass at crunch time. The third is Fifi, who has the strongest personality of anyone on the wagon train—at least the most charismatic-- and as the journey progresses shows evident physical strength as well. Buck doesn’t know where she stands. He assumes, because of her background, that she’s a troublemaker. This provides a major strand of uncertainty and conflict within the story.

In other words, the major plot complications are numerous (there are also subplots, like Mrs. Moroni, and Rose, the schoolteacher-with-a-secret). The plot threads and dynamics are so well integrated into the fast-moving story we don’t even see them, but they’re there. The movie is a master class at plot, especially when you consider that by the end of the journey, and the end of the film, the plot complications will all be resolved. The movie is in perfect balance from start to finish.

Why Do They Hate Sarah Palin?

Why does the cultural establishment and the intellectual elite continue to hate, and hate on, Sarah Palin? It’s a question  I continue to ask myself. The latest example is the HBO movie “Game Change,” which by all accounts is yet another vicious hatchet job on the former politician. The TV movie is based on  a book which included many other plot lines, from the John Edwards scandal to the Hillary versus Barack contest. Yet Sarah Palin  is singled out. Give it up already! She’s not even in office and right now isn’t running for office.

There’s something going on beyond a mere difference in issues, or stated questions about her fitness for an office she’s not running for; questions which can be raised about any candidate or prospective candidate. No, the constantly expressed hatred, manifested the moment Palin appeared on the scene, goes much deeper. It’s emotional: visceral.

Something about her very being, the fact of who she is, rubs the elite intelligentsia the wrong way. It’s partly a regional thing—they hate her pronounced accent—and no doubt partly a class/snobbery issue; that she dared aspire for higher office without having an elite degree from a place like Harvard or Yale. There may be something more—that Sarah Palin in her life and in herself, like the women in the movie I’ve been reviewing, “Westward the Women,” represents a fuller version of feminism, a gun-toting earth mother fertility symbol version, quintessentially American, a rifle on one arm and a baby on the other, than the rather restrictive uptight version which comes from the east coast. Just wondering, yo.

Democracy and Community

In the 1951 film “Westward the Women,” one can see the influence of Frank Capra, who wrote the original story. The idea of bringing everyone into the community exists, though it’s an incomplete idea. The movie contains layers of outsiders, with Ito seemingly the ultimate outsider, until the Indians who attack the wagon train are considered. Of course, the Indians have no intention of joining this particular community, which turns out to be, guns and all, a domesticated community. It will be a community centered, in California, on land, stability and family. At the beginning of the movie, the trail boss, Buck leads an Indian-like nomadic existence, not tied to a spot of land but free to roam anywhere on his horse. Fifi likewise isn’t tied down to the idea of family or domesticity. She’s a very different kind of nomad.

Capra-style inclusive populism is shown by three of the characters frequently speaking their native languages: Fifi (French); Ito (Japanese); and Mrs. Moroni (Italian). Yet all want to be American, to become part of the American idea of community.

The Lacanian-style irony in the film is that community within the wagon train doesn’t occur until after the train has left civilization. It occurs as a natural process, absent any government. By the end of the journey, the women themselves—the community—is in charge of the train. The patriarch is dead. Circumstances, as well as an encounter with Fifi, have demoted Buck from dictatorial leader—though he still serves as a loud voice, a prod, and a guide.

Masha Gessen on CBS Radio

I heard on the radio this morning journalist Masha Gessen say, "The elections are a sham from beginning to end." I thought, Finally! Finally someone speaking the truth about politics in this country. Then I realized she was talking not about the United States, but Russia!

I suggest Ms. Gessen turn her attention to the election circus in the U.S., that she do some investigating so she can please explain how every U.S. President since 1988 has been a graduate of either Yale or Harvard, with the election this year looking to be a contest of Harvard vs. Harvard. Can we seriously claim to have democracy here?

Granted, our system must be less heavy-handed, vastly more sophisticated, than what Mr. Putin accomplishes. But the results seem to be the same. Unraveling our system might take a bit more work. Let's see how skilled an investigator Masha Gessen truly is! (I put my money on big money combined with a superpowerful media being the determining factor.)

The Lovers Part I

“Westward the Women” continued.

The fascinating thing about movies is that the actors bring themselves, their conscious and unconscious selves, to their roles. They can hide under makeup, but subliminally they can’t hide themselves. They’re humans naked in front of the camera. Their personality comes through—which is of course what gives us stars. The actors themselves are a subtext to any movie.

What do Robert Taylor as Buck, and Denise Darcel as Fifi, bring to their parts? Here is where it gets interesting, why this is perfect casting.

Robert Taylor was born Spangler Arlington Brugh. As a young man his goal was to be a concert musician. He later admitted he was a studious introvert. He fell into acting because of his pretty boy looks. His first big role was opposite Greta Garbo in “Camille.” Afterward his studio, MGM, put him on a physical fitness regimen and sent him out hunting to toughen him up, so he’d be suitable as a leading man in other roles. Taylor eagerly adopted the program. By 1951, when “Westward the Women” was made, he’d been playing tough guy roles for ten years. He’s believable in the role—but with him, rather than an oversized John Wayne, it’s to some extent still a role, part bluff, part will, and part intelligence—and it’s only through bluff, will, and intelligence that the character of “Buck” will be able to control his men—and the women—and get the train to California. This makes the situation more of a challenge. Subliminally the audience picks up on that. It also helps explain the character’s extreme “macho” attitude.

What of his opponent/partner in the matter, Denise Darcel? From what we know of her, the young Denise Darcel was the opposite of Robert Taylor. Apparently she was known for accompanying an American pilot in a small observation plane, at the end of the Second World War, buzzing the happy crowds of Paris. Like her character, she worked as a dance hall girl. She was apparently fearless and an extrovert. She brings that to the part, as well as her obvious natural attributes.

We already know that Robert Taylor was as self-created as Jay Gatsby. The character of Buck, as we’ve said, has to be that. The character of Fifi Danon is a self-creation also. We first see her as a flashy prostitute, ultra-feminine, a caricature of femininity. Fifi and her partner-in-crime Laurie realize the only way they’ll get onto the wagon train is by appearing “normal.” While other hookers are chased out, Fifi and Laurie leave to disguise themselves—or, in effect they drop their disguises. Laurie is able to pass as a normal woman in demure dress and bonnet. Fifi by contrast looks ridiculous in the get-up. Her outsized figure and her outsized personality, and her grotesque accent make her ridiculous, and she knows it. She’s a freak, an outsider. It’s probably what she’s been running from.

A movie screen, by the way, emphasizes Denise Darcel’s build. She comes across as a force of nature, a physical presence, even among a collection of the strongest women MGM could no doubt find, rivaled only by towering Patience, who’s kind of an Ajax with a sense of humor to Fifi Danon’s dynamic Achilles. Since we’re dealing with an epic, filled with heroes, the analogy is apt. Which I guess puts Buck in the role of Agamemnon, with Ito as his advisor Odysseus. (Or if you prefer, Ulysses.)

The patriarch, Roy Whitman, sees right through Fifi and Laurie. He presses Fifi as to why she wants to go to California. She finally admits, in an utterly sad voice, “To change.” Her facade has dropped. She stands exposed before us. What does she mean? What does she want? Likely she doesn’t know herself, only that she’s desperately unhappy in her current role, and hopes that in California she can find a role not available in Chicago. Whitman has been around enough to see this—as Buck surely doesn’t—so he allows them to sign on.

This is the subtext for the dynamic between the two lead characters. Stay tuned, if you’re still reading.

Universities and Indoctrination

Do universities indoctrinate people, as was claimed by one of the presidential candidates? In one sense indoctrinate is too strong a word. In another sense it's not.

Universities are institutions. They're bureaucracies. Any institution imposes its standards, its internal codes, values, ideas, ideology, and message, not upon every member of the institution but upon the successful members of the institution. Or, if you don't accept the values of the institution you're not going to rise through it.

Those who aggressively rise through the military are those who most thoroughly accept, internalize and externalize, the military ethos-- who in their person embody that ethos. More than this, those who rise are those who best accommodate themselves to their superiors.

In a university, the "best" students are those who best give the professors what they want to hear. The best students accommodate themselves to the professors' own assumptions, premises, prejudices, and beliefs. They're the students raising their hands in the front row, eagerly being guided, eagerly providing answers which make the professor happy. They're the students talking up the prof before and after class. Ingratiation is part of the game in every field. I have a quote from a character in my novel-in-progress in which he talks about government, and offers up a favorite slogan from within government: "There's the right way, the wrong way, and the government way. Do things the government way."

I've already shown on this blog how writing programs perpetuate a sameness of writing styles and thinking.

Think of an institution or bureaucracy as a living organism. It will reject disruptive bodies that cause disharmony within the organism. An institution likes harmony and compliance within that institution.

The "Best" students aren't those who question the university or the codes and values of the university. It's those who most thoroughly and successfully buy into them. Is this indoctrination? When the student climbs the ladder through receiving a Masters or Phd, he/she has to give a professor an acceptable plan of work and acceptable thesis. I'm told that professors in these situations have almost total control over what the student is going to write and present. If the thesis presents new ideas, those ideas have to be presented in acceptable ways-- ways that conform, that take place within what are in fact fairly narrow boundaries.

The "best" students are the best in high schools, the most pliable, receiving all A's, and being accepted to the "best" schools which means the Ivy League, and performing "best" there-- then moving on from there and taking jobs at the New York Times! Conform, conform, conform. It's how American literature, once it began relying on schools instead of life to provide its writers, became a hyperregulated swamp of mediocrity.

There's an argument to be made that those who rise to the top via the educational system are the most indoctrinated. The most loyal to the values of the system. It makes sense, whether consciously or unconsciously, from the system's standpoint. It's how any system perpetuates itself.

A Cliched Milieu?

In today's New York Times, Janet Maslin makes an unintentionally funny remark in the middle of a review of the novel The Starboard Sea by Amber Dermont. The novel is set in a prep school. Janet Maslin calls prep schools a "cliched fiction-writers milieu." No shit! Do you ever wonder why, Ms. Maslin? Could it possibly be that so many novels chosen to be published by the big New York publishing companies, and designated to be reviewed in the New York Times, are set in prep schools? Is that why they've become a cliche? Either prep schools are all today's fiction writers want to talk about, or possibly, just maybe, the fiction writers chosen for publication attended prep schools. Take your pick.

Themes and Undercurrents

ART is about playing themes and undercurrents. It's about getting into hidden and unhidden corners of the human brain. Touching and creating experiences and memories. Assaulting the senses but also going deeper than the senses. Into subterranean depths. Deep. Even into the soul.

Maybe this can be done with modernist fragments. I don't know. You tell me. We know it can be done through plot. Through traveling from point A to point B without us knowing exactly how it will turn out. A journey of adventure and mystery.

Film Forum is showing a movie this Friday which is about undercurrents, "The Guns of Navarone." To those raised on ridiculous junk like the Tom Cruise "Mission Impossible" movies, an old film like 1961's "Guns" must appear creaky. But it's not just a roller coaster ride. It's a classically structured adventure story with meaning. Like "Westward the Women," it starts with a recruitment scene. In the case of "Guns" the recruits are hardened commandos. Their task is to blow up two gigantic guns-- German war guns on an island near Greece.

The minute the tasked team enters the sea on a flimsy boat, beginning their journey, they and we are in the world of dreams. The land of myth.

Everything in the film, from the sea, storm, cliffs, mountains, caves, the symbolic monster-like guns, to the impressionistic Tiomkin music and mood-inducing Cinemascope color photography, even the character of the alluring girl, serves the purpose of creating a believable or somewhat believable and enchanting dream. The job of the moviegoer is to sit back before the big dream-screen and enter it.

Likewise, "Westward the Women," though not nearly so impressionistic, has moments, like the climactic chase between Buck and Fifi, when we're not simply on the prairie. We've momentarily left the prairie and entered the strange psychological unconscious world that the unspoken love between the two characters has created.

This is the essence of art. This is what it's about-- entering that area.

"Fifi Danon"

SPOILER ALERT

It's a shame that Denise Darcel didn't make more movies. She had real charisma. "Westward the Women" may have been her only starring role. Because of her figure and accent, she was usually relegated to cartoonish parts. Yet she was one of those rare actors capable of conveying a Chaplin-like pathos. Why this was, I don't know. We don't know what experiences she went through as a teenaged girl in France during the war-- but she certainly brought her life experience to this particular role.

We see this pathos toward the end of the film. With her fellow bad girl friend Laurie dead, Fifi is more alone than ever. She hangs back at the celebration. After the arduous journey, all the things she's gone through to get to California, she still sees herself as different, outside the community. An outsider. We sense for a moment a prostitute's sadness, which Darcel conveys merely by standing there.

There are two crucial moments before this. First, the critical interview when the patriarch breaks through her embarrassing jokey-prostitute facade. She's just disgraced herself with a display of utter stupidity. It's how she goes through life, her adopted role. How she deals with men and with the world. The wise patriarch isn't having it.

The second moment is on the trail when Buck accidently/intentionally punches her while showing her how to shoot. This shocks us and it shocks her. It signals there's some dark under-the-surface sexual or at least psychological stuff going on between them. But there are two other points to note. One is that by her game-playing with him she's signalling she's after him. With the punch he's telling her, "Back off." His entire identity as loner trail boss is seriously threatened. On that score Fifi is as serious a threat as one could ever have! But also, Buck's backstory is that he had a past untold bad experience, likely with a prostitute, which has forever(?) soured him on women. The punch comes right after Fifi lapses back into her stupid-prostitute role, acting feebly incompetent and saying to him, "I'm not very bright."!! Which he knows A.) isn't true, B.) isn't what he'd want in a mate, if he wanted one. The only word for her expression after his display of cruelty is sad. The paradox is that they're both, on the surface, overpowering personalities, one ultra-male, the other ultra-female. Yet both are in fact seriously screwed up.

The movie works through alternating moods of joy and sadness. The oppositions are everywhere. For the characters of Buck and Fifi, the only way they'll survive the journey is to break from their self-created and restrictive roles, their overdone facades. They're both forced to change. Each one's change is dependent on the other's change. The impetus for that change and the impetus of the film is that subconsciously they both desperately need each other.

Or, this is a superbly written and acted film. (More to come.)

The Alter Ego

ANOTHER SPOILER ALERT

The final major character of the 1951 movie “Westward the Women” is introduced when Buck meets up in St. Louis with the fifteen cowboys hired to escort the wagon train of brides-to-be to California. Noticed sitting among the cowboys is a young and quite short Japanese-American cowboy. This is after Buck has given a short speech to the men telling them to stay away from the women.

We and Buck know, by the tenor of the tough men, that this will be no easy feat. Least of all to fail to notice this is the short cowboy, Ito. (Henry Nakamura.) Buck kids him for his lack of stature. Laughs all around. We begin to cringe, thinking, here we go, a stereotype. Ito stops the laughter by offering to fight any of the other hired men. He turns to Buck. “I fight you too, Big Boss. I lose, but I fight.” We realize this is a guy who for obvious reasons has been fighting his entire life, and will do so again. For me it was another of those great surprising moments.

More important to the course of the film is that Ito knows Buck, and knows the situation he’s in, and with his few words has let Buck know that he knows. As an outsider used to taking on fights bigger than himself, he knows Buck has taken on a big fight. He knows Buck’s challenge and knows his isolation—one against fifteen. It’s already clear that this is what the journey may boil down to, if Buck can’t assert his will. Ito also knows that Buck is no mammoth John Wayne figure whose mere presence will cow a herd of men. Ito in effect says, “I’m one against fifteen—but as the ‘Big Boss,’ so are you!”

Buck quickly enough bonds with the young cowboy, because he’s the only one of them he can rely on and trust.

Ito plays a variety of roles in the story. One is as a kind of Shakespearean fool, offering commentary on or to the hero, being wiser than the other characters. For sheer survival in this tough world, Ito has had to become observant and wise. Another is to be Buck’s inner voice and sounding board. This is shown on a number of occasions. One is when he tells Buck he’s wrong in the way he’s treating Fifi Danon, who, as Ito points out, is doing double the work of the other women in her effort to prove herself. Or during another critical moment in the story, when Buck says he doesn’t know what to do, Ito tells him, “You know what to do.” Buck then does it. Since Ito sees Buck from the outside, he knows him better than he knows himself. (As does the other outsider, the irrepressible Ms. Danon.)

As the obstacles of the journey mount, so does Ito’s importance. I like the scene when they’re ready to sleep at the end of another tough day, not knowing what faces them the next. Ito begins talking in Japanese. Buck asks him, as he does continually, what he just said. Ito tells him he’s saying his evening prayers. Buck grimaces and endures it. The unsaid message is, “I’m doing what you should be doing right now, Big Boss. I’m doing it for you.”

The jumping off from outside St. Louis, by the way, is a great moment. We feel the sense of adventure that the pioneers must’ve felt, heading out into the dangerous unknown for they knew not what. Leaving safety behind to start over—and there are a few of them who very badly need to start over. The challenge, the journey, the obstacle, is what life is about.

Well Deserved

AT THE MOVIES CONTINUES
The Best Picture award to "The Artist" was a good choice. This is the only motion picture in quite a while which provided that most elusive of artistic goals: surprise and wonder.

Meanwhile, stay tuned for more about the 1951 classic, "Westward the Women," starring Robert Taylor as Buck and recently-deceased Denise Darcel as Fifi.

"Cleaning Up"

Note in "Westward the Women" how at the end both the men and women, quite realistically grubby in the middle of their respective labors, rush to clean up and do clean up. This gives the lie to current television or movie westerns which are bent on showing those days as relentlessly dirty. This was even the case with the otherwise fine Coen Brothers version of "True Grit," where Jeff Bridges's Rooster Cogburn throughout the film looks like the worst kind of street bum. Sorry, but no one, then or now, would hire him to go get a cup of coffee, much less track down a wanted man. No person in business, then or now, would present himself like that. Particularly not in a day when "Cleanliness is next to Godliness" was the norm.

There's a marked arrogance among today's intellectuals, in which any other period by definition is inferior to our own, populated by uncouth half-imbecilic Neanderthals. It's the essence of snobbery, elitism, superiority complex, call it what you want. They'll tell you how they can't stand Hollywood toga epics of the 1950's because the Roman nobles and their palaces are too clean! What do they think those villas looked like? Why would rich Romans not clean up? What were they doing with all their baths? Not using them?

The difference with the western is that most of the classic western movie directors, like William Wellman, were born in the 19th century, roughly still in the same time period depicted in their films. They saw those who inhabited the towns or rode the plains in their stories as people like them, like you and me-- because they were like you and me. Not the knuckle-dragging Other. It's why the original "True Grit" is more realistic than the remake. They didn't try too hard to be "authentic." They didn't have to. Today's hipsters especially are fixated on authenticity-- see their buying of vinyl and love of bluegrass-- but they try too hard. They have no idea what the genuine article looks like. It's why the only fiction allowed to be published by working class writers or about the working class is filled with moronic grotesques and caricatures. It's how the intelligentsia sees anybody who is not them.

Their attitude has killed the western, a genre which became popular because the figures depicted were colorful and romantic. They did on occasion know how to "clean up." An auteur who doesn't show the occasional beauty of the characters is doing the art form a disservice.

Sorry for the impromptu rant. "Westward the Women" is grittily realistic, but the characters do know how to "clean up."

(Added point: It's one of the few westerns of any era which shows how you point and fire a revolver if you actually expect to hit anything. The lady marksman in the flick is completely believable, looks and acts like someone who's been around weapons.)

Setting the Scene

SPOILER ALERT

(More on "Westward the Women.") From a writer’s standpoint, one can look at the extended Chicago recruitment scene that takes place in a hall, and see how many things this one scene accomplishes while keeping the narrative running smoothly. It introduces all the important characters except one. This includes wonderful Patience (Hope Emerson), and an Italian woman and her son, and Rose, a schoolteacher with a secret. The scene also introduces two flashy prostitutes attempting to join, Fifi and Laurie, and shows how they’re able to do so. It gives us a glimpse into Fifi’s personality, and with two words, when Whitman presses her on her reasons for wanting to go, gives us a profound moment, understandable more in hindsight than when we view it. That he allows them to join after questioning her, against the advice of the trail boss, shows his wisdom. The end of the scene will introduce the dynamic between Fifi and Buck.

Before this, however, there’s the climax of the scene. Buck has asked if any women of the 140 gathered there know how to shoot a gun. Only a few stand up. Cynically, and skeptically, Buck silently tosses his revolver to one of them. This is an epic story about heroes, mind you. This is the first test, in a series of tests. Every epic has for its heroes tests. The prim-looking woman looks around for a target, carefully aims and puts a bullet directly through an eye on a poster of an authoritarian man looking down from a side wall. (Needless to say, the target is significant.) She tosses the pistol to a second woman, who aims and takes out the second eye. One can hear Buck’s jaw dropping. “Whoa!” he and the audience think. “What have we here?” We’ve suddenly entered a new world, where gender stereotypes are broken—as they surely will be on the journey to come.

Sex and Movies

In his book on Lacan, Slavoj Zizek points out that Hollywood movies made under the Code are often sexier than the more overt movies of now. Back then, sex was contained under the surface, waiting to explode. This is the case with “Westward the Women.” The plot, after all, is about a handful of cowboys tasked with getting 100 women to California to mate with 100 sex-starved men. The minute the wagon train leaves civilization, the sexual tension between the cowboys and the women begins. (Don’t get the wrong idea. This is covert. The hardship of the journey itself dominates the film.)

The tension and longing is best exemplified in a scene when Fifi, in her broken-English way, tells her fellow prostitute-trying-to-reform friend Laurie that she’s hopelessly in love with cranky trail boss Buck. “Don’t get ideas,” Laurie tells her. Fifi responds, as the camera angle includes her ample chest, “Ideas, they get me.” Buck’s impossible task is keeping the men and women apart until the end of the journey. As we’ll see, he not only has to wrestle with his own men, and the more-than-formidable Fifi, but himself.

The Forbidden Classic

AT THE MOVIES PART II

As a forbidden literary critic, I’m well qualified to speak about forbidden classics. “Westward the Women” is ignored for at least four reasons, any one of which would disqualify it for proper consideration in today’s politically-correct climate, when true free expression is a chimera. These are the four reasons:

!.) A PROBLEMATIC RELATIONSHIP. The relationship between the two aptly-named leads, “Buck” (Robert Taylor) and “Fifi” (Denise Darcel) is one of the most fascinating in all film, but it starts out as a very dysfunctional relationship, because these are two complex, and in their own ways, dysfunctional personalities. There’s at least one surprising moment of cruelty between them. An almost shocking moment, or two moments, which must throw people. Yet the moments help to explain their relationship, as I intend to clarify.

2.) A PROBLEMATIC THEME. The movie is about the settling of the West. The settling of America, which is one of the great feats of human history, given that the settling led to the creation of the greatest civilization the world has known. It’s extremely unfashionable to say this, even though it’s true. The settling was accomplished with an amount of cruelty, hardship, and pain, no doubt, but that doesn’t detract from the achievement. The movie gives an indication of what a great achievement it was. Anyone who’s driven out to Cali and back has an idea of the nature of the difficulty, the vastness of the space. Sorry, but that a couple million or so people were scattered across that enormous emptiness beforehand is no argument against the achievement.

3.) ALTERNATE FEMINISM. The movie depicts an alternate feminist vision. One might call it Sarah Palin feminism—a world where women can shoot better than any man. (A side note. In another life before I ever started writing, I spent a lot of time pistol shooting. The best target shooter I knew then was a woman.) Worse than shooting, the women in the film also are interested in having babies! This is kind of a necessary corollary to the settling of a continent idea. Let’s keep in mind as well that the film was made in 1951, during the postwar baby boom, when babies were on everyone’s mind. Guns and babies! This isn’t Gloria Steinem feminism, folks. The date of the movie, and the exhibited strength of the women in the film—likely the strongest collection of women in any film-- shows that the alternate version of feminism actually came first. (The women in the movie are stronger than the men.) (Another side note: It’s no accident that western states like Wyoming were the first to grant voting rights to women. In those spaces of nature, women had long since demonstrated and taken their equality.)

4.) WISE PATRIARCH. If I haven’t already lost all of my p.c. readers, the fourth problem should chase any laggards away. “Westward the Women” contains a wise patriarch, Roy Whitman (John McIntire), the Moses-like visionary who settled the valley the wagon train is headed to. Whitman serves the purpose of one of three tutors or guides to our hero, Buck. The other tutors are Fifi, and an unusual cowboy named Ito. Whitman, who’s a minor character compared to the revealed heroes of the film, dies halfway through the journey, which leaves the new generation abandoned, but also allows them to complete the journey themselves. Like all good artistic journeys, it’s not simply a journey to a physical destination, but a journey toward fulfillment and understanding of themselves.

Despite all this untrendy matter, it’s a fabulous, fabulous movie. If you’re not moved and entertained by it you’re not a human being!

At the Movies

It’s been a good year for movies, hasn’t it? Not 1939, or 1959, or 1961, or 1967, but a good year. To celebrate Oscar weekend, yesterday I took a cheap bus up to NYC to see a great American movie at Film Forum, “Westward the Women.” (1951; William Wellman.) It’s not acknowledged as a great movie, so I’ve decided to make half-a-dozen or so posts over the next week to explain it. It might be the most pro-woman film ever made—yet there are reasons why it’s ignored, having to do, as with so much else in this culture, in not meeting the culture’s acceptable narratives.

Among the posts will be “The Forbidden Classic,” “Setting the Scene,” “Cleaning Up,” “The Dilemmas of Leadership,” “Community and Democracy,” “The Alter-Ego,” and “The Lovers,” and whatever else I come up with. Obviously, there’s more going on in the movie than first meets the eye.

What makes a great movie? For one thing, moments of surprise and awe. “Westward the Women” has such moments, beginning with the recruitment meeting in Chicago. I’ll explain the plot as i go along. Basically, in mid-19th century America, the founder of a community in California travels to Chicago with a trail boss to recruit 150 women for their 100 women-starved hard working men. (They figure on losing one-out-of-three on the journey. Events will show this is no exaggeration. This is the plot.)

The recruitment scene contains a few good moments—but an unexpected shooting exhibition stands out. If you rent the film, note the choice of target! One of a few surprises through the course of the movie.

At the showing I attended, the audience was mostly men. Understandable, since this was a western, and Film Forum had not given the lower part of a double bill much attention. There were three young college-aged women two rows ahead of me. After the film, a man asked them how they liked it. “It was great!” they said, and meant it. The film should be required viewing for women at colleges around the country. There was also an older woman sitting two rows behind me. When the lights went up I glanced her way. Her face was tear-streaked from crying. I’ll explain how the movie could have that effect, I hope, as I go along.

Writing in Longhand

How many writers still write their first draft in longhand?

For semi-serious work, like a novel, I find advantages to using longhand. If you’re not sure of a particular word, you can write other options in the margin. You see all the choices before you make up your mind, and do it in a way not to disturb the flow of the writing. Another advantage is that you have saved all the drafts, every version of a particular scene, again useful if you change your mind and decide another version was better. Replace a word or paragraph on-line and you wipe it out. It’s gone. Or maybe I’m just a dinosaur.

Writing the Thing!

I wrote two novels twenty years ago or so when I first started writing to any great degree. If I remember, I belched them out quickly. I wrote them just to do it-- to see if I could do it. I'd heard it's good to practice first, as with anything.

Now that I'm again writing something that will be more than a novella, of actual novel length, I find a couple interesting things about the experience.

One is that it puts a strain on the brain. Especially when you start obsessing over details, holding the entire thing as a piece in your mind, every character and plotline, every view and feeling, including every word and trivial item of punctuation. Especially when you're up all night thinking about these things-- reading it over and over in your mind's eye to see how it reads. I can see a little, just a little, of the mental stress the novelist DFW put himself through in writing his massive tomes. He should've got out and freed his mind.

Another discovery is that I-- unaccustomed to editing my writing-- find myself rewriting a few of the sections again and again and again. They're not even particularly key sections, but more of bridge sections. I swear I've spent as much time writing two of them as the other 40-some sections combined, most of which came extremely easy.

This doesn't include two key chapters near the end, crucial scenes, which I have rough drafts of but have put off finishing because I find them somewhat depressing. One of them, more than somewhat. Getting into the minds of the characters at this point of the story gives me a headache. Things were so much easier when I was drinking heavily! I now have no defense, no mediation.

Very Good or Very Bad

“Very Good or Very Bad” will be the marketing theme of my upcoming novel. Given my reputation, I can’t write a bland, bourgeois book a la Harbach, Eugenides, or Franzen. I need to take a few chances. Will they work? I have no idea! But it should make for an interesting read.

The Murray Divide

I wonder how many American writers are like me-- you pick up the New York Times Book Review, begin reading about the various hip and knowing writers, the trendy names, and realize, "I have nothing in common with these people, and what these people write about has nothing to do with me"? I suppose that feeling was a big reason for my long-time aversion to, and rebellion against, the literary scene.

Acceptable Narratives

HONESTY?
Don't kid yourself. The most important player in determining the nation's President is the all-encompassing media. It's why the race will once again be Harvard v. Harvard.

I was thinking that, along with the thought that the media is going to utterly destroy Rick Santorum. Utterly destroy him. It's already begun, courtesy of a diatribe in today's NY Times by Charles Blow, and the recent interview by media attack dog Charlie Rose. Did you see or hear the interview?

As Santorum tried to point out, none too well, there was something fundamentally dishonest about the Charlie Rose line of questioning. Santorum wanted to talk about the economy. Rose's job wasn't to talk about the economy! His job was to destroy Rick Santorum. He knew it, Santorum knew it, and we knew it. Whichever side you're on, you know it.

Why is Santorum a particular target? Because his ideas go beyond the acceptable narrative. If you don't hew closely enough to the media's own in-bred beliefs, you're beyond the pale. A "crackpot."

HONESTY
The one question asked by nobody is whether what Santorum's supporter said was true or not. The "aspirin between the legs" quote. Is it true?

Of course it's true. That there were way fewer out-of-wedlock births fifty years ago, and fewer social problems, is an easily documented fact.

We have to be honest enough to admit that.

MORE HONESTY
Let's be honest. We love liberal social ideas, myself included. (I don't say "liberal values," because that's an oxymoron.) We love them.

Why do we love them? Because they're easy. They ask of us nothing. NOTHING. They say, go have fun. Indulge yourself, with no consequences. If there are consequences, the government will pay for them. Pursue every appetite, bar none.

People hate Roman Catholic doctrine because it's not easy. It's in fact very difficult. Even the Church's hardest core advocates, its priests, have trouble living their own doctrine. Catholic philosophy is a difficult model to follow. It believes life was meant to be a challenge, a spiritual journey full of obstacles.

Then again, wisdom comes only from difficulty.

We don't ask the practical question-- no one wants to ask it-- of whether Santorum's social ideas will work. (Once, they more or less did work.) We don't ask if his ideas are true. The media won't ask that. Truth is irrelevant to them. "What is truth?" Their philosophical foundation is a convenient and expedient disbelief in truth. All they know is they have a job to do-- to get the candidate closest to their own viewpoint into office. To enforce, as they always enforce-- not just on Santorum's issue but other issues-- the acceptable narratives.

UPCOMING at this blog: "Lacan and Liberal Bias." Yes, an idea or two from a recent French philosopher that might have application to something in the real world. I'm surprised myself. Stay tuned.

Blitz Review Continues

-- with a review of All Her Father's Guns by James Warner, a new satire by an interesting new writer. See the review at
http://www.blitzreview.blogspot.com/

Dostoevsky Vs. Nietzsche

An interesting quote from Fyodr Dostoevsky:

"Evil is hidden much deeper in man than is supposed by the socialist machine men and cannot be avoided whatever the organisation of society."

I've been trying to read current philosophy-- trying also to understand it, though much of it is gasbag doubletalk. The problem with philosophers is that their ideas float in bubbles without context or consequences.

Unlike Nietzsche, Dostoevsky "tested" ideas in his novels. It's remarkable how prophetic his books were. They foretold the crimes and monsters of the 20th century. Nietzsche, by contrast, wasn't able to envision the result of "killing" God-- the nihilistic wars that he in part unintentionally caused.

A Necessary Book

In Coming Apart, Charles Murray documents what I've been talking about at this blog and elsewhere for quite a few years-- that America, including white America, has cleaved in two. There's clearly an upper caste and lower caste. As Murray says, it's a cultural as well as economic divide.

In the literary field, much of the upper caste won't even acknowledge that writers exist outside their bubble. When the ULA was going strong, they steadfastly denied this. (Tom Bissell: "All writers are outsiders.")

Those writers who do acknowledge the divide hold a caricaturized view of lower caste white people. For whites without money to be portrayed at all in American letters, they have to be depicted as angry grotesques. (See David Means or Jonathan Franzen.) Only the mutual skin color keeps this from being a nasty kind of racism.

Upper caste writers like Barbara Ehrenreich have occasionally been sent for brief forays into the Other America, as if they're Margaret Mead or Dr. Livingstone entering an unknown land full of unknown and scary inhabitants.

When lower caste individuals break out of their cultural isolation, and demand to be treated as equals-- see Sarah Palin-- they're hit with instant hostility, even visceral hatred. Bad enough was where she came from-- imagine, attending a few colleges to get her degree, and entering a beauty pageant to pay for it! Worse than her origin, is that she left that origin-- she made tons of money through Fox, and now has acquired a station where she clearly doesn't belong-- with them!

(So we get yet another election of Harvard v. Harvard.)
********************************
As for myself, how do I break out of my own blackballing? The fact that I'm excluded to the max, because I exposed corruption, and dared talk back to literary Overdogs? (And was too articulate and provocative in doing this?) The only way out I see against a wall of Overdog blackballing is to write a novel better than anything their own writers put out. A novel that'll blow overblown books like Franzen's Freedom out of the water. But you know, it still won't be enough. The closed-minded organs of literary power will refuse to read it.

Censorship and Self-Censorship

I WONDER what the effect will be of the Jeanette Winterston screed about Henry Miller in the most recent New York Times Book Review. Will it have a chilling effect on already too-careful male writers? How many aspiring young men are right now going over their manuscripts, ensuring that they don't come on too strong?

American literature is already too politically correct, too feminized. Old fashioned authors like Norman Mailer if starting out today would never get in the door. It's one reason of many for the inferior condition of our literature.

Who are our top male writers right now? Jonathan Franzen and Stephen King, in the literary and popular realms respectively. Franzen's confessional Freedom is Oprah fare, a feminized novel through and through, as I'll explain in an upcoming essay at another blog. Stephen King's nonsensical and childish fantasy represents infantilism, a retreat from the adult world into the mindset of a twelve year-old. The old fashioned Tolstoyan novelist patriarch can't be approached.

What distinguishes the male novel is a need to dominate and control the world, and those who inhabit it. An expression of male ego. This is shown blatantly with Mailer characters like Rojack. More subtly, it's demonstrated by the lead characters of James Gould Cozzens's Guard of Honor, in which the generals have put together a complex authoritarian machine for training those pilots then sent out to dominate the world. The creation of American empire. A depiction of the here and now. It's the essence of maleness-- the very assertiveness and aggression that Winterston complains about. The need to dominate. To be, well, male. Nature's programming. To know the world and how it works. Literary critics and academics can't handle that, so Cozzens is excluded from their canon. He's replaced by irrelevance.

When I read Winterston's essay, I thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald's remark, when he said something to the effect of, "They complained about my subject, my material, but my God, that material was all I had!"

Jeanette Winterston objects to Henry Miller being Henry Miller. Miller was blackballed once. There's no doubt if he was a new writer, today, he'd be censored again. CAN ANYONE DOUBT THAT?

Part of the problem with the ULA's (Underground Literary Alliance) Bill Blackolive and Jack Saunders wasn't just their unfamiliar-looking writing, but that they came across to today's well-regulated literary world as too male.

In 1994 I wrote two long essays for North American Review. Why is it that they've posted on-line only the weaker, more inocuous essay-- about baseball!-- and not the other, stronger, vital one, about Detroit, which does contain un-p.c. moments because it tells the truth? (I realize now how fortunate I was it was ever published.)

The biggest lie going is that there is free expression in American literature. It'd be better if editors and publishers were upfront with their rules and biases from the get-go, so we know where the boundaries are. Otherwise it's guesswork.