Nobody Questions

Nobody in this herd nation questions anything.

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

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

Just asking.

Explaining the Tea Party

A REPLACEMENT POST

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

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

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

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

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

My Mistake!

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

The Untouched

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

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

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

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

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

Who writes about the harsher realities of life now?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Master of Distortion

THE SELLING OF LIES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But is it?

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

Isolationist?

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

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

How does Tom Bissell get away with calling them isolationist?

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

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

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

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

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

What’s Wrong with this Picture?

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

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

Tao Lin versus Miranda July

NEW LITERARY SATIRE

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

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

Groupthink at New York Review of Books

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

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

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

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

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

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

Understanding the Media Mind

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

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

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

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

Why, then, the mythmaking?

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

This alone proves an unquestioning, monolithic mindset.

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

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

My Twitter Account Hacked!

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

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

Behind the Curtain

THE TRUTH ABOUT NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Blackballing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Little minds inhabiting a weak and fearful world.

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

Suspended Again!

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

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

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

I’m actually being polite.

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

Intellectual Herd Alert

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

More Reality

Have I been unfair in these posts?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Story

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

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

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

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

A Cleaner Crime City?

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

www.crimecityusa.blogspot.com

The Creative Writing Con Game

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

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

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

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

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

Did Franzen’s Freedom Get It Wrong?

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

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

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Literary Circus also examines the gun control issue:

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

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

Literary Circus Concludes First Fantastic Week!

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

www.literarycircus.blogspot.com

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

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

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

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Upcoming: Literary Circus looks at the gun control issue.

Thomas Beller, Unreliable Narrator

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Everyone other than ourselves?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Organization Men

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What would I do in their place?

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

This, at least, would be honest.

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

Interns from Harvard

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

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

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

Proving the Point

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

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

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

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

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

Crazy New Literary Blog

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

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

http://literarycircus.blogspot.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

Missing the Boat

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

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

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

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

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

Bureaucrats and Bureaucratese

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why Isn’t Mr. Beller Happy?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two additional points:

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

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

Have a wonderful day in the neighborhood, everybody!

Digging into the Narrative

RELATIONSHIPS TO POWER

While I’ve fairly well eviscerated Tom Bissell’s Believer Books essay about the Underground Literary Alliance, at the same time I’ve barely scratched the surface of it. I’ve yet to dig into what’s actually taking place. For instance, I haven’t looked into the essay’s relationship to power.

The entire literary establishment, which writers are approved or not approved, is determined by relationships to power. Nonsense, you say! Yet the point is easily demonstrated, as I may show in an upcoming post or two. I’ve yet to become bored by the topic. Understanding propaganda, and a propagandist like Bissell, can become fascinating and enlightening.

Know this: The purpose of Bissell’s essay was to defend certain powerful literary figures like Rick Moody and Jonathan Franzen, at the behest of another powerful literary figure, Dave Eggers. This is why the essay was written—stated or unstated; consciously or unconsciously. It’s not an accident that those Bissell was defending were known collectively at the time as “The New White Guys,” or that Bissell threw a defense of another of that group, Jeffrey Eugenides, into his essay. On Tom Bissell’s side he was making a clear statement—to them—showing his support of them and of the system he’d worked for and had wanted to be part of his entire life. The sell-out point.

Ask yourself: Is Tom Bissell an objective journalist, or a propagandist? What do we make of the Robert Kaplan essay? Is this not an intentional hit piece? In it, is Tom Bissell showing his support for a larger cultural area than literature, by going after a neo-con? In this instance, as in the ULA instance, it’s acceptable for Bissell to write a hit piece, a piece no doubt (in my mind) filled with slants and distortions. This is acceptable because Kaplan has been designated, like the ULA, as an enemy of the proper people. Of the politically correct herd.

Tom Bissell isn’t fair and objective, and Johannes Lichtman, in writing about Bissell’s book, doesn’t have to be fair and objective, because that’s not what the game is about. What game, you ask? You should know the game. Many of you reading this blog are playing it. Or have played it.

Here are two contradictory statements to think about. Understand them and you understand what’s really happening with Bissell’s essay. You’ll understand the “game,” and something of the nature of sophisticated propaganda as practiced by contemporary media. It takes examining different levels of intention and meaning in the same essay.

The two statements are this: The theme of Tom Bissell’s essay on the Underground Literary Alliance is that there is no literary establishment. At the same time, the theme of this same essay is that there very much is a literary establishment.

The Writer's Job

The writer's job is to see through the lies and layers of falsehood around him. To cut through the noise and cries to get to the heart of the matter. To the key to the situation; the truth of the world. From Brothers Karamazov to Heart of Darkness to Rebecca this has been the novelist's goal.

A writer, especially a novelist, should have one overriding concern: getting to the truth. It's what fiction at its best is about. What really happened? This is the task of the true writer-- maybe his only true task. All else is posing.

Why This Blog Is Necessary

This blog is the only spot in the entire vast Internet and analog realm of literature presenting a counter-story to literature’s Dominant Narrative. The only independent voice. Members of the totalitarian intelligentsia read it, because, instinctively, they know their world is totalitarian. McSweeney’s, fully part of the Dominant Narrative, is totalitarian. Close me off, shut me down, and they then fully close off their minds. There will not remain one spark, not one sentence, not one word of dissent and anti-conformity and Truth about their world entering their brains. Their smugness and complacency will further harden. Their minds will lose all flexibility—will turn, even more, if that’s possible!, into concrete.

They know that those who pass and pose as “critics” and commentators in the establishment literary-media world are glorified prostitutes. System hacks, domesticated pets, bought, paid, and trained.

I give here a different narrative. The truth as I see it, undiluted by bureaucratic career expediency. I’ve never compromised. Nor will I.

The Structure

THE MCSWEENEYS GANG EXAMINED

It’s obvious from the first couple chapters of the narrative that at the beginning I had no idea where I was going with the story. I started the serialized satirical novel as a gag. Then, before I knew it, the story got away from me.

In the middle third of the book images from my subconscious intruded against my will into the narrative. The tale got off track. Writing a novel is a battle between the reasoning part of the mind and the shadows beneath. The last several chapters, however, show me fully back in control of the thing.

How exaggerated is the story? Not at all. The literary establishment was fearfully obsessed with the rise of the ULA, and remains so to this day.

The Payroll

THE MISSING POST

Should I show the missing post? I suppose so. Then again, why should I? I guess I'm worried that if I start outing the spies et.al. who follow this blog, I'll lose the most loyal part of my audience. It's like the apocryphal story of the last meeting of the Utah (or Idaho) Communist Party, disbanded when it was realized that everyone there was working for the FBI!

At some point, the war of McSweeneyites vs ULA (or me) becomes a waste of time. It's a battle I can't possibly win. But it is aggravating to see what was an honorable and necessary project, the ULA, libeled across the literary realm. Whatever missteps we made, they were nothing compared to the scoundrels we were up against. Scoundrels those people remain.

But, the post. One of the more bizarre I've put up. 1.) There might be more to its premise than I thought. Otherwise, why would someone be so interested in reading it? (Or even know about it.) 2.) At the end of it-- or rather, end of the three comments attached-- an actual bitter enemy of myself, with no credible reason for his animus, possible member of the McS's payroll, makes a strange appearance.

I don't want anyone to think the post ranks with "The Day the Clown Cried" for absent strangeness. What it does, is point to the strangeness of those thrown out of joint by a low-rent noisemaking campaign from a tiny band of broke zinesters, to the extent that some of the most powerful figures in literature pulled out all stops in their eagerness to run us permanently out of town. At that, they've been quite successful.

(I hope the moles and spies involved have bilked the insecure mandarins-- Eggers, Handler, & Company-- for a substantial amount. Somehow, I think not.)

(The McSweeneys Gang may be a trifle bizarre, but not as bizarre as real life.)

The Latest

I removed this blog from view for a day because someone was getting into the html code of it. They were trying to get into one particular blog post from a couple years ago-- a post, moreover, which I had taken down a while back. Why that particular blog post? That's an interesting question.

ON THE PAYROLL

The premise of my satirical ebook novel, The McSweeneys Gang, is that the ULA was afflicted with a host of moles and spies tracking the ULA's every happening. How true could that possibly be?

The real story would be fascinating.

Notice!

I notice that someone who lives in Sunnyvale, California, IP# 98.137.207.224, is trying to get into the html code of this blog, either to mess things up or shut this blog down. Please stop it.

The Representative of Power

Tom Bissell doesn’t see himself as powerful. In himself, he’s not.

But he’s employed by some of the most powerful entities in literature. It’s not just Tom Bissell smearing the Underground Literary Alliance. It’s the highly influential and connected McSweeney’s organization. It’s ICM, one of the most powerful talent agencies in the business. Who’ll dare go up against them?

Someone at McSweeney’s had to have read and screened and approved Tom Bissell’s dishonest essay before it was included in the Believer Books collection Magic Hours. Presumably Heather Schroder, Bissell’s agent, an ICM partner, read that essay as well. They were perfectly fine with depicting a tiny band of DIY zinesters, currently inactive as a group, backed by no funds or connections whatsoever, as genocidal authoritarian Bolsheviks(!) whose quixotic campaign for a sliver of attention was liable to lead, in Bissell’s hysterically absurd words, to “lots and lots of tombstones.”(!!!)

The publication of this dishonest smear essay, backed by power, money, and influence, then allows other powerful entities, such as, oh, the New York Times(!) in reviews to pile on against that inactive band of nobodies.

An elephant panicked at the sight of a mouse.

Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor?

One doesn’t exclude the other.

Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor were the two legendary screen actresses/sex goddesses of the 1950’s. Which was the better actress?

Technically, Elizabeth Taylor was the more accomplished, more disciplined actress. She could play Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee without a hitch. Everything Marilyn Monroe played was with extreme difficulty. Yet Monroe could go places emotionally, subliminally, that Elizabeth Taylor couldn’t. Contrary to what some may suggest, art doesn’t exclude emotion. Art IS emotion.

The same principle holds true for literature and writing. System writers have this idea that because they’ve learned, technically, the current model, their style of creative writing is the only style there is. They’re eager to exclude all others. Which is what the war against the Underground Literary Alliance was about.

No art can advance if it allows nobody to take a different path to that art. No art can live if it permits no one to be different.

What Are the Facts?

THE ULA VERSUS THE LITERARY ESTABLISHMENT

As I'll further show, in his Believer essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, reprinted in Magic Hours, Tom Bissell ignored every point about the grants controversies embarrassing to Jonathan Franzen, and everything that would throw the ULA's protests in a positive light. Some of those points can be found in an objective article written at the time of our protests:

http://www.mobylives.com/Franzen_NEA.html

Instead, Tom Bissell turned one small mention of Josip Novakovich by the ULA into the centerpiece of his discussion on the grants matter. Bissell expressed mock outrage at our "treatment" of the man, while ignoring the main story.

Was Tom Bissell's Believer essay part of a vendetta by Dave Eggers against the Underground Literary Alliance?

A few months after the appearance of Bissell's essay, we have this story by Amy Harmon of the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/14/us/amazon-glitch-unmasks-war-of-reviewers.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm

Note that Amy Harmon treads carefully. Notice also the hysteria back then from Dave Eggers and Jonathan Franzen regarding the ULA, seeing us under every bush and around every street corner. Fact is, though, that the ULA had a strict policy of never posting anonymously, or under false identities.

This policy had two motives. One was to show our honesty and transparency. To demonstrate our difference from the corruption of the mainstream literary scene. Second, and at least as important, the ULA was intended as a promotional campaign for good underground writers. Shut out by organs of publicity, we needed to utilize every opportunity to use our real names. At Amazon or elsewhere. That was the whole point! It would've been senseless to waste time posting anywhere anonymously. We'd already been exposing corruption under our real names. We had nothing to lose and nothing to hide. (I've never altered that philosophy, as anyone who reads this blog can testify.)

"--what kind of person has time to write them?" Jonathan Franzen asks rhetorically in the article about anonymous negative Amazon reviews. As ULAers were working regular jobs, it wasn't us. Fact is, no one was able to expose the ULA as author of such reviews. They couldn't now. Franzen, Eggers, Handler, Moody, and the rest of the Big Money lit boys have ample funds to investigate the question. What they haven't realized themselves (Daniel Handler caught posting scores of anonymous comments on this blog) is that there are no secrets on the Internet. All postings are a permanent record.

Note in the Amy Harmon article how Jonathan Franzen defends his new-found friend Tom Bissell against those dastardly ULA whistleblowers. Narcissist that he is, Franzen never thought that in accepting the taxpayer NEA funds he did anything wrong. He doesn't hesitate to falsely smear, in a national publication, the whistleblowers. For Tom Bissell, his defense of the Big Boys in his essay ensured their approval. Entrance into the Club.

Jonathan Franzen and Tom Bissell remain buds to this day. Witness this 2011 Willamette Week article in which Franzen compares Bissell to David Foster Wallace-- a dubious honor-- and calls Bissell "a true talent."

http://www.wweek.com/portland/article-17989-professor_xbox.html

Do the proper thing by the Powers of the Literary World and all is good.

Corruption Buddies

IT’S NOT A SURPRISE that essayist Tom Bissell is a friend of author Jonathan Franzen. The Underground Literary Alliance exposed abuse of the grants system by Franzen back in 2002. The question is whether Tom Bissell became friends with Jonathan Franzen before or after Bissell misportrayed the Franzen grants controversy in his Believer essay on the ULA, since reprinted in Magic Hours.

Tom Bissell could’ve changed that misportrayal before Magic Hours came out. We’re left with lit-world cronyism at its worst.

Today's Contest

****TODAY'S CONTEST TESTING YOUR LITERARY KNOWLEDGE****

(A test to see if you're qualified to be a contemporary writer.)

CORRECTLY NAME THE PHOTO OF JONATHAN FRANZEN:

A.)

B.)

C.)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Literary Cover Ups

SPORTS JOURNALISM VS LITERARY JOURNALISM

Sports journalists have finally gotten around to investigating a couple sports stories, in the case of Lance Armstrong and Manti Te’o. Reporters had to be dragged to the truth kicking and screaming. But they got there.

What about literary journalists? When it comes to literary cover ups, haven’t lit reporters been MIA?

In the short time the Underground Literary Alliance was most active, from 2001 to 2007, we covered a number of scandalous happenings in the literary scene. The reaction? Cover ups and enmity.

Today, writers acting in the role or position of journalists are more interested in crafting gushy puff pieces than breaking or covering an actual story. Document the truth for the likes of Garth Hallberg, Maria Bustillos, Johannes Lichtman, Katie Ryder, et.al., and they refuse to look at it. “We don’t want to know!” they scream.

And so they’re able to applaud a dishonest essay by a dishonest writer. Despite available evidence.

These “journalists” apparently also believe in the Easter Bunny.

Bookforum Mention

GIVEN my many literary opponents eager to shut me down, I don't get a fraction of the attention I once did, ten years ago when the ULA was kicking literary butt. However, I notice that the review journal Bookforum was generous enough to give my new ebook a mention last month:

http://www.bookforum.com/paper/archive/20121210

I do get mentioned ahead of luminaries Salman Rushdie and Vladimir Nabakov. Quite the honor for a lowly rebel undergrounder.

I appreciate the open mindedness of the BF editors.

(The McSweeneys Gang is now out and available at Nook or Kindle.)

The Josip Novakovich Matter

THE GRANTS CONTROVERSY PART I

The portion of the ULA’s activities which created for us the most animosity among the mandarins of American letters was our uncovering of apparent corruption in the awarding of grants monies to writers. It should be, and should’ve been, a major part of any in-depth examination of the Underground Literary Alliance.

The focus of the many articles done on the topic of grants corruption, and the ULA’s exposure of same, whether in Page Six, Moby Lives, Alternet.org, Soma, Boston Phoenix, or many other places, was on two successful and powerful writers: Rick Moody and Jonathan Franzen. With a dash of Dave Eggers thrown in. One writer not mentioned in any of the coverage was a writer named Josip Novakovich. Yet Tom Bissell made Josip Novakovich the centerpiece of his discussion, in his Believer essay, on the grants controversies.

Here’s a portion of what Tom Bissell said about the man:

“Novakovich (I do not think he would mind me saying this) also has a family; ‘university professors’ do not, by and large, roll around in piles of money, and they typically see their writing time vacuumed up by teaching. The money was probably crucial manna for him and his writing life. That the ULA can take a fine, unsung writer such as Novakovich—a writer, moreover, hitherto neglected by the larger publishing world—and single him out for opprobrium is nauseating. He is exactly the type of writer whom the ULA should be championing,—“

Was Josip Novakovich at the center of the ULA’s attacks on the literary grants system? Were we somehow unfair to the man?

With the ULA web site finally resurrected late in 2012 after a long period of being unavailable, I was able to track down the reference to Josip Novakovich. I found him discussed in ONE report out of many ULA reports during the years of our active existence. You can read that report here:

http://ulaliterary.com/jfranzgrant02.html

Note that we used Josip Novakovich as a representative example of the grants business, with our emphasis on the fact that Novakovich had both sat on a panel for, and been a recipient of, grants awards. The idea being that if you have the same small circle of individuals both giving out and receiving grants money, you have a flawed system.

Tom Bissell painted Novakovich as something of a hardship case. What’s the truth? What’s the real Josip Novakovich situation?

Josip Novakovich is listed at wikipedia and other places as a Canadian writer. He currently is a professor at Concordia University in Canada.

Quick investigation shows that the average professor salary at Penn State University, where Novakovich was employed at the time of our report, is $132,000. Given ten years of inflation, we can still give him $100,000 at the time. He likely makes at least that now, or he wouldn’t have moved.

Josip Novakovich has published ten books as well as hundreds of short stories. His book publishers include Graywolf Press, HarperPerennial, and HarperCollins. Presumably much of this came the past ten years.

Here’s a partial list of the awards and grants Josip Novakovich has received over the years, in addition to the two NEA grants and the Guggenheim Fellowship mentioned in our report:

-Whiting Writers Award

-Ingram Merrill Foundation award

-American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation

-Black Mountain Fellowship

-Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship

-New York Public Library Center for Scholars and Writers Fellowship

-Tennessee Williams Fellowship

-Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant

-Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship

-W.K. Rose Fellowship

There may be a few in the pipeline.

I suspect that Novakovich’s valuable writing time is “vacuumed up” not by teaching so much as filling out grants applications, at which Josip Novakovich is assuredly a master. Is he a great writer? It’s a matter of opinion and viewpoint. I’ve read a couple of his short stories, and found him to be a typical literary writer. Indeed, he’d have to be, to encounter such widespread approval. His work couldn’t upset anybody—or at least, not refined society. Literary writers are not a rare commodity in this society. Throw a rock on any university campus and you’ll hit a dozen of them.

The point is that Josip Novakovich is mentioned in this sole ULA report as one of a number of “awards professionals.” Can anyone deny that an awards professional is exactly what he is?

Note how Tom Bissell, in his essay on the Underground Literary Alliance, takes out of context and distorts our treatment of Mr. Novakovich. At the same time, Bissell finessed his coverage of our actual targets, Moody and Franzen, as I’ll show.

(To be continued.)

Victims of Dishonesty

If I had to name the single greatest failing of today’s status quo literary scene, I’d name its intrinsic, thoroughgoing dishonesty.

The first victims of this dishonesty are the purveyors of dishonesty. The first victim of a false presentation is the person who created it.

For example, Johannes Lichtman created a false presentation with his 11/27/12 review of Tom Bissell’s Magic Hours, in the way he presented the Underground Literary Alliance. Virtually every sentence or phrase pertaining to the ULA is false. I’ve shown them, at this blog, to be false. Does Lichtman admit this? No. He doubles down. He ignores all evidence countering his false narrative, willfully refusing to look at any evidence, while continuing to insist on the lies he’s presented. (The ULA is “generally untalented . . . conspiracy theorists” etc.) His mind is made up. Closed. From the start—and never can he be prodded to open it. Two plus two equals five, in his mind, simply because it does. It’s what he’s been told.

Who is he hurting by his false presentation? Mainly himself. He’s taking his intellectual integrity and blowing it up.

For what price? What reason? Lichtman admits the Oxford American web site (despite large sums of money pumped into it), has few readers. His payment for the piece, he’s said again and again, is $25. What’s the payoff? As far as I can see, merely in being allowed to be part of that creature known as “mainstream publishing,” a dying animal.

OTHER VICTIMS

Johannes Lichtman is a victim of false presentations in the micro. His mistake is believing wholeheartedly in Tom Bissell’s false essay. That essay has been shown to be false. Does it matter? Bissell’s fans cling to the essay—but so, apparently, does Tom Bissell himself. Which makes him his own victim. He, like Johannes Lichtman, is content to take his intellectual integrity and dynamite it. The payoff: Being part of “mainstream publishing,” but on a somewhat higher level.

Above Tom Bissell is Dave Eggers, who has his own false presentations to perpetuate. In his case, a great many of them.

The ultimate victim of all the falseness is literature itself. Failure in the macro. Can a status quo literary scene maintain itself as a construction of lies? When you build your reputation on lies, you’re unable to defend yourself. You can blackball, censor, lie more, but the one thing you can’t do is engage in honest and open debate. You’ve created a legacy of dishonesty. A record of untruthfulness.

Some day someone will come along—whether a renewed ULA, or others—and knock down the tottering house of cards.

Jonathan Franzen Isn't in The McSweeneys Gang

THE MCSWEENEYS GANG IS ON SALE

There's a character in The McSweeneys Gang, a new American Pop Lit e-novel by King Wenclas, who resembles acclaimed author Jonathan Franzen. But it's not Jonathan Franzen.

Not the Real Dave Eggers

THE MCSWEENEYS GANG EBOOK NOVEL IS ON SALE

The Dave Eggers character in The McSweeneys Gang, a new ebook novel by King Wenclas, is not the real Dave Eggers, and has no resemblance to the wonderful real person.

The Elite and Effete

HIPSTER ALERT

Here’s a couple of writers found in the New York Times Style Magazine, courtesy of a piece by Stephen Heyman:

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/29/book-forum/

Don’t they look just unpacked from a box? (The people as well as the clothes.) Pricey duds for a mock-bohemian look. I bet these two know a great deal about the hardships, tensions, and divisions wrenching this country right now. Writers!

Literary World Wrestling

Literary World Wrestling is an apt way to describe Tom Bissell’s ULA essay. The essay’s narrative was created in advance. The outcome was assured. Rehearsed and ready. Bissell then jumped into the ring to toss around a stuffed dummy named Ranger Rick, while the herd audience cheered loudly. “Yaaaay!!” Gullible reviewers in the audience like Maria Bustillos, Garth Hallberg, and Johannes Lichtman were too brainwashed to see the presentation as staged hoax. They believe Literary World Wrestling is real.

At the end of the fake match, smirking Bissell raised his arms in the air, while Literary World Wrestling chief Dave Eggers, dressed in a referee’s costume, declared him the victor. The verdict, of course, though it was fake, can never be appealed.

Tom Bissell took the L.W.W. trophy home with him. There it sits on his mantle, glittering and fake. I’m sure he believes in its reality. Let’s hope he never has to meet a live opponent.

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Support dynamic new literature. Buy The McSweeneys Gang by King Wenclas. Affordably available via Nook or Kindle.

A Different Take on Warwick Sabin

Here's an interesting online piece by Marc Smirnoff, founder and former editor of the Oxford American. It's curious what you find when you do some superficial digging in the realm of the literary world:

http://www.editorsinlove.com/editor-smirnoff-on-editor-hodge

Things get curiouser and curiouser. The piece does provide us with a glimpse of the Big Money boys who stand behind so much of the establishment literary world. It's a part of lit that Tom Bissell will never cover, and which writers like Maria Bustillos and Johannes Lichtman refuse to know about.

I like Smirnoff's point that journalists are supposed to get both sides of a story. This is what those who've applauded Bissell's faulty ULA essay have determinedly refused to do.

Response from Warwick Sabin

RESPONSE FROM WARWICK BARON REID SABIN, PUBLISHER OF OXFORD AMERICAN, TO TWO EMAILS SENT HIM ABOUT THE BOOK REVIEW WHICH SMEARS THE UNDERGROUND LITERARY ALLIANCE:

What's to Be Done?

THE LOBOTOMIZED WRITER








THE MCSWEENEYS HAPPY FACE

I know I’m wasting my time with these posts—though venting keeps me from, say, punching somebody out. I’ll move on to other topics soon enough. I know the literary world is immovable. All my research and experience shows that it’s thoroughly corrupt. Upside down and sideways. Through and through.

One thing for sure. Every criticism the ULA made of today’s established literary world has been shown to be true, many times over.

Does anyone care if Eggers, Bissell and Company sell “The Big Lie” over and over? Of course not! It’s not their place to care. Not Hallberg-Bustillos-Lichtman’s place to care. Less to think about the way things are done. They’re merely “writers.” Which means, not the stand-up fearless figures of the past like Zola or Solzhenitsyn. Today, “writer” is a euphemism for “bureaucrat,” “apparatchik,” or “tool.” Truth? What’s that? If there were such thing as truth (they don’t believe there is), they wouldn’t want to know.

Character? Integrity? Backbone? Unknown concepts.

Literature—real literature—in the final analysis isn’t a product of smoothly crafted sentences or certificates from everyone-think-alike workshops. It is, instead, a function of heart, conscience, and soul. Of seeing the world as it is, and with unflinching honesty, speaking about it. “Get along to go along”? There’s no place for that for the real writer—but the real writer today is a rare creature, hard to find among the hordes of see-no-evil go with the flow conscienceless sociopaths who populate the established literary world.

Fortunately the world of publishing is changing. The insular corrupt tower of arrogant mandarins is crumbling. Their day will soon enough be over.

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

(Be sure to buy the new ebook, "The McSweeneys Gang," by King Wenclas. Available at Nook or Kindle. Fictional satire-- but maybe not so fictional after all.)

How Corrupt Is Corrupt?

THE INTENT TO SMEAR

If the 2012 republication by McSweeney’s of Tom Bissell’s attack essay against the Underground Literary Alliance was the continuation of a vendetta by McSweeney’s against the Underground Literary Alliance, the Oxford American review of Bissell’s book by Johannes Lichtman takes the feud one step farther. The review condenses several of Tom Bissell’s misrepresentations and falsehoods into one paragraph at the top of the review for stronger effect.

The intent behind the smear has to be questioned, in that Oxford American editor Roger D. Hodge is Tom Bissell’s long-time friend and patron. They worked together at Harper’s magazine in 1996-97. Bissell has singled out Hodge for thanks in book acknowledgments. Hodge, while a Harper’s editor in the 2000’s, was apparently key in establishing Bissell’s career as an essayist.

Roger Hodge was at the center of questionable behavior while a Harper’s editor—behavior which the ULA covered.

(For an objective look at one of the issues, see this article by Tom Scocca-- http://observer.com/2004/05/off-the-record-54/ Scroll down the page to get to the Centralia fire matter. I covered this story as a follow-up to another possible Harper’s plagiarism issue early in 2005.)

Can we believe that Bissell and Hodge had no role whatsoever in Lichtman’s hatchet job review? Consider the history, then reread Lichtman’s review, which viciously goes after the ULA from the outset: http://www.oxfordamerican.org/articles/2012/nov/27/indiecent-exposure-tom-bissell/

Tom Bissell won’t answer questions here about his ULA essay—he’s been caught laughing at these posts on Facebook—but he’s apparently not above encouraging more smears, coming from once-reputable sources.

It’s an example of how corrupt the established literary world is now. Once-prestigious literary journals like Oxford American are mere tools to use for the personal settling of scores. To use the Oxford American in this way smears the journal itself as much as it smears the Underground Literary Alliance. Truth, objectivity, and integrity have been trampled.

Is the established literary scene in such shaky shape that it needs to spend a year smearing a writers advocacy group which is no longer active? Esteemed outlets like New York Times, L.A. Review of Books, Kirkus Reviews, and many others have joined in kicking around a whistle-blowing outfit whose crime was exposing cronyism and corruption at the highest levels of the literary scene, involving some of the lit world’s most powerful figures. You don’t do that and easily get away with it—and so the vendetta by the literary establishment against the ULA continues.

Writers of Conscience?

Intellectually, Tom Bissell knows that his essay about the Underground Literary Alliance is filled with distortions and slurs (“lots and lots of tombstones”), and that it has spread malice against the ULA across the literary world. Yet he’s willing to have that Frankenstein’s monster of an essay represent him and his career. He’s willing to live with the fraud.

Tom Bissell’s friends and supporters should also know by now that the essay is false. Willfully, like stubborn children, they continue to support it.

The journalists and writers who applauded the essay, Garth Risk Hallberg, Maria Bustillos, and Johannes Lichtman among them, have been sent evidence that the essay’s narrative is false. Will they confront the slurs and misrepresentations, the distortion of truth? Or do they choose convenience over conscience?

If the writer has no conscience, who in society will?

The literary establishment has the power to close me off and shut me down. They’ve been doing it. It’s a victory for a clique but a crime against conscience. If not one writer has integrity or conscience, then the false narrative becomes accepted truth.

If it can happen in literature, it can happen anywhere.

The Fall Guy

Johannes Lichtman seems willing to take sole responsibility for the Oxford American smear of the Underground Literary Alliance, as if the review, and the malicious way it was written, was entirely his idea.

It’s possible Lichtman bought the Bissell/Believer false narrative wholly. There’s no accounting for gullibility. Lichtman may have thought ULAers were indeed semi-sentient backwoods “Ranger Rick” Neanderthals scarcely capable of writing their own names. Like the sneering villain in a bad World War II movie, jackbooted and monocled, Lichtman assumed he could casually stomp us without blowback or complaint.

It didn’t occur to Johannes Lichtman that Tom Bissell’s essay on the ULA is essentially one giant lie from start to finish—from the opening premise that all writers are outsiders inhabiting no literary world to speak of.

Such ideas are propaganda for suckers. Have Dave Eggers and the McSweeney’s Gang behaved as if there were no literary world and no Insiders? Not for one minute. Dave Eggers was assiduously networking with every well-connected literary Insider and big publishing conglomerate he could find from Day One of his operations. Any unknown writers thrown into the mix were window dressing. Eggers went after the Moody-Minot blueblood New Yorker crowd. Those were the kind of writers he most wanted to buddy-up with and highlight.

Any quick investigation shows that the networking, the accommodating to Money and Power, has never ceased. Outsiders indeed!

Yet, as part of the game, Eggers continues to pretend that aside from the connections to Google Microsoft Amazon, to assorted and various big investment types, he’s actually an “indie” kind of guy. With the clueless, including Johannes Lichtman apparently, Eggers gets away with it. A variation of the Big Lie. Nobody questions the scamming, nor desires to question it. Take your meds. Don’t worry. Be happy. The state of the American literary world today.

(Be sure to buy the fearless satirical novel, The McSweeneys Gang, available via Nook or Kindle.)

One More Inaccuracy

FOURTH IN A SERIES

Re the Johannes Lichtman review of Magic Hours.

Leaving out crucial information isn’t being accurate.

In his remarks about the Underground Literary Alliance, Lichtman says, “—they group Rick Moody together with Jonathan Franzen because both are members of the ‘elite.’”

This isn’t true. One has to distort language and meaning to make it true. The statement, as it’s presented, is a falsehood.

I’ll give the link again to the backstory of the ULA’s encounters with Moody and Franzen:

http://www.mobylives.com/Franzen_NEA.html

Much more, incidentally, remains to be said about the dishonesty of the pertinent section of Tom Bissell’s ULA essay.

Abuse of the grants system is why we wrote about Rick Moody and Jonathan Franzen. We didn’t cover their writing in our pieces on them, because that wasn’t the topic in question. Neither did we “hate” them. That’s projecting emotion where it doesn’t belong.

We—or at least most of us—criticized the grants system not because we wanted grants ourselves, but to point to the corruption of establishment literature in contrast to the zine world. We were also acting as advocates for writers of every stripe.

The word “elite” is not a synonym for “corrupt.” It’s not a synonym for “cronyism.” With even his choice of words, Professor Lichtman isn’t accurate.

I always thought “elite” meant the best individuals—not the worst.

Accuracy means hitting the bulls eye. In the portion of his review about the Underground Literary Alliance, Johannes Lichtman missed with every shot.

Another Inaccuracy

THIRD IN A SERIES

Here’s another inaccuracy in Johannes Lichtman’s review of Tom Bissell’s Magic Hours.

Lichtman writes, about Bissell, “—he probes the deeper motivations behind their inchoate anger.”

This isn’t simply an inaccuracy. It’s an outright falsehood. As I explain in my “Believer Essay” parts I and III, linked at the left of this page, Tom Bissell did shallow research on the Underground Literary Alliance. He never met a one of us. This might’ve been okay if we were just like all other writers. But we weren’t.

What Bissell gives us in his ULA essay are the motivations of system writers like himself. It’s an example of his narrow-mindedness that it never occurred to him there was a difference. Yet the ULA’s founders and most of its members came to literature on a different path from those who are “taught” how to write in university programs.

Tom Bissell’s misinterpretation of the meaning of zine nicknames, or his failure to comprehend (or even try to comprehend) the idea behind Urban Hermitt’s writing, strongly show that zine literature was an alien creature to him.

Zinesters were and are Do-It-Yourselfers. Most zinesters simply begin writing and publishing. They take literature entirely into their own hands. Most have their own angle to pursue. Their task is to sell the zine by connecting immediately to an audience, no matter how they must do it. The rule book is thrown into a dumpster.

There are no thick layers of bureaucracies like those which confront the system writer. No expensive writing programs at impressive campuses of imposing stone buildings. No banks of agents and editors in plush offices in New York skyscrapers; no phalanxes of mandarins in metaphorical robes granting or disallowing approval. Yet, through the system is the way Tom Bissell views literature. It’s how he chose to view us. He imagined us struggling to attain certificates of approval. That we didn’t have any could only mean we weren’t very smart, and not very good. He saw us like other writers attending high-priced bourgie seminars (we’d attend a seminar only to “crash” it), and circulating and recirculating manuscripts through the mailrooms of status quo journals and publishers. No doubt some of us had done so, briefly, at some point. But to become a serious zinester is to throw that over, because you’re going into alternate territory, where the means of survival are something other. Which is why the style of zine writing isn’t literary. The connection with readers has to be as fast as a punk rock song. You’re not out to impress with “craft,” but to shake the reader in the quickest or harshest or most fun way possible.

Tom Bissell didn’t know this. Manufactured creature that he is, I’m sure he still doesn’t know it. But it didn’t have to be that way. Not long before Bissell did his essay on us, I met a local Philly journalist at a famous local saloon named McGlinchey’s. I brought with me several of the most amazing specimens of zines I’d collected over the previous ten years, so she could see the extreme variety of design, styles, writing, graphics, ideas, and viewpoints there embodied. She took those priceless DIY objects away with her. I never saw them again, and her article was killed by her editor, but she became a zinester herself, and today is one of the leading figures in what remains of the scene.

The ULA was an extension of zinedom, a more ambitious project. Naive fools that we were, we sought to bring our discoveries about writing and about readers into the literary mainstream. We brought with us a different viewpoint toward literature. A different mindset. Differently wired eyes and brains, from a different, newer literary planet. Tom Bissell didn’t want to know. “Probes.” “Deeper.” The words are absurd. They’re laughable. Throughout his essay on the ULA Bissell shows a complete misunderstanding of, and unconcern with, zine literature and the zine scene.

Johannes Lichtman behaves the same way, of course. In his email to me, Lichtman pleads deliberate ignorance of the subject. “What your organization is about is not of great concern to me.” He doesn’t want to know! It’s not his place to judge the truth of Bissell’s essays. If Bissell says it, it must be so. Like an unintelligent housecat listening to its master, Johannes Lichtman enjoys the style of writing, the patter of words. For him, the typical trained literary person, that’s good enough. That’s all.

“—he probes the deeper motivations behind their inchoate anger—“ 

This single remark marks Bissell’s failure as an essayist, and Lichtman’s as a reviewer.