The Biggest Dinosaur

INDEPENDENT EBOOK AUTHORS are having a field day laughing at this New York Times article, “Literary Lions Unite,” by David Streitfeld:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/29/business/literary-lions-unite-in-protest-over-amazons-e-book-tactics.html?_r=0

Death throes of the literary establishment?

Ebookers call it “The Land that Time Forgot,” and refer to the authors mentioned as dinosaurs.

If so, literary agent Andrew Wylie, checking in from Paris, of all places, is the biggest dinosaur of them all. He’s obviously making an extremely good living, being—what? A literary artist? No. Andrew Wylie is a middleman, nothing more, feeding off the current inefficient and top-heavy publishing system; taking a very generous slice of the profits.

Expect more about this issue at NEW POP LIT (www.newpoplit.com) either at the Opinion page, or an upcoming NPL News page.

More Mantel

HILARY MANTEL’S MUCH HYPED TALE

Predictable voices of offense and protest, as if on cue (the publicists scripted this very well) have been raised about Hilary Mantel’s story, “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.” See my review of the story:

http://kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2014/09/dueling-assassins.html

as well as this in-depth NEW POP LIT examination of the controversy:

http://newpoplitinteractive.wordpress.com/2014/09/21/the-hilary-mantel-fiasco/

The question arises: Are Mantel’s critics practicing censorship? Is this a free speech issue?

IF the amount of free speech one has is judged by the size of the microphone, then Hilary Mantel has an enormous amount of free speech, given that her book is published by not one, but two of the largest book conglomerates on the planet. Her “assassination” story was published by two of the most important newspapers on earth. If free speech is judged by with what power a writer is supported, and how widely her words are circulated, then Hilary Mantel has many times the amount of free speech as the average writer. Is it 1,000 times more? 10,000 times? That’s the way the matter should be honestly judged.

After all, both the HarperCollins and MacMillan book empires by nature “censor” writers, every day. Seeing that Hilary Mantel’s provocative story is shallow and not very interesting, in and of itself, one can conclude that the decisions made by the book giants as to which writers are published and promoted are based as much on politics as on quality.

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What’s most visible in this affair is the sad state of literature today. This great writer, Hilary Mantel, selected for massive publicity; the acme of the legacy publishing industry; lacks an artistic conscience. Not only is her story a cheap hit piece—metaphorically and in actuality—it makes no effort to examine the causes and effects of violence in society. The meaningful questions which a work of literature would be expected to address are nowhere to be found. Unlike the literary giants of past days, the Dickenses and Dostoevskys, Dumases, Hugos, and Tolstoys, Hilary Mantel lacks a moral voice. In judging the story, aside from all other considerations, that lack is everything.

Dueling Assassins

OR, THE NARCISSISM OF THE ESTABLISHMENT WRITER

The literary establishment in both the United Kingdom (united a while longer) and New York is making noise about a story by one of their “best,” Booker Prize winner Hilary Mantel. The story is “The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher.”

This interested me, because a couple months ago I produced my latest ebook, a short novella titled Assassination of X. Unlike Mantel, I don’t name my victim, a U.S. senator. My story is also written in a completely different style from Mantel’s, who can write only in the standard status quo literary fashion. You can read her tale here:

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/sep/19/hilary-mantel-short-story-assassination-margaret-thatcher

The story is not really about Margaret Thatcher, but Hilary Mantel. Which is why she has to name Thatcher—it’s a way to draw attention to herself and her politically-correct attitude. It’s a species of exhibitionism. “Look at me!” Mantel is demonstrating how much she’s always hated Thatcher—used as a symbol—and so, this demonstrates to the intellectual elite her credentials as one of them. The story is merely the excuse used to make the demonstration. It might as well be a painting; Margaret Thatcher with a sour expression on her face; examples of her social crimes depicted behind her. Waiting assassin off to the side.

The story Mantel tells is ridiculous. It’s a farce. Hilary Mantel doesn’t have a clue how such a crime would be done; or what an actual assassin would be like.

Mantel introduces the story with endless description—paragraphs full of it—as if to ensure that all but the proper “literary” audience will lose interest. This completed, the rest is conversation between a Hilary Mantel stand-in and the assassin. All very British and ludicrous. The assassin, about to commit the crime of the century, has scant focus. It’s all very casual. Make the tea, someone. “I’ll mind the gun.” (Note to Mantel: rifle.)

The narrator—these stories are almost always first person; they can only be so because the solipsistic viewpoint is all—has, like Hilary Mantel, not a clue about the weapon used, preparation needed, and such. The assassin is no professional, nor a credible facsimile of a good amateur. Instead, he’s popped whole out of her imagination, a man of stupidity and carelessness, which allows the narrator to engage with him in what might be the most insipid conversation ever—again, given the gravity of the event.

Hilary Mantel takes a pop premise and turns it into literary idiocy. Into cutesiness. This at a time when real terrorists are loose in the world; actors of serious business. With, instead of British casualness, deadly purpose. Unclownish focus. An actual assassin would dispose of the talkative Hilary Mantel stand-in within five seconds—and save himself from her self-centered conversation and precious arrogance.

The story can’t be taken seriously and isn’t meant to be taken seriously. It has no connection to reality. It serves as a way for Mantel to make a connection to the like-minded. As such, though it’s “well-written” by literary standards, it’s not literature. It asks no questions. It challenges no one to re-examine the world or themself. There are no shadings or depths to the story. It’s affirmation, not art.

Of course, I’m biased. Through a new website, at which I’m co-editor (www.newpoplit.com), I’m promoting a style of writing opposed to that of a Hilary Mantel. It’s a different way of looking at the short story art, and at the world.

In my own tale I seek to plunge the reader into the reality of a shocking event. The world itself is the focus—and not the vapid spaces of a privileged author’s head. You can read my modernist pop tale via Kindle or Nook Books. Here’s an Amazon link to it:

http://www.amazon.com/Assassination-X-King-Wenclas-ebook/dp/B00KPHLTKI/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1411143513&sr=1-2&keywords=assassination+of+x

I invite you to read both stories and judge the difference.

Diversity of Ideas

As you may have heard, I’m now Editor-in-Chief at an ambitious project called NEW POP LIT (www.newpoplit.com). The main engine behind the endeavor is a Wisconsin dynamo named Andrea Nolen. We receive ideas and support from a variety of “friends and enemies.” While we’re starting as a web site, our plans go far beyond it.

EDITORIAL POLICY

What’s our editorial policy?

Any project I’m involved in will slant toward the DIY end of the spectrum. HOWEVER, presenting one viewpoint isn’t good enough, if we’re to be all things to all readers and writers. While we aim to be at the forefront of change in the literary world, we also seek to present a diversity of ideas.

Diversity of opinion and ideas, even on questions of art, is seldom seen anywhere today.

Left-wing media present left-wing ideas, while right-wing media present right-wing ideas.

A literary journal like Brooklyn-based n+1 presents their narrow range of ideas, while a similar lit journal like The Believer, albeit in San Francisco, presents a slightly quirkier version of same; no less pretentious, with an equally narrow range.

Sides have been taken on the Amazon-versus-Hachette fight. Establishment writers and editors plead with Jeff Bezos or the universe to stop economic change— “Save us!”—while other writers embrace that change. No middle ground is found between the two camps, but castigations ARE all over the place.

NEW POP LIT stands for a new literary path. We’re asking a smorgasboard of voices to help us determine a “Third Way” between competing sides. For literary art: a hybrid. Compromise. For ideas about process and publishing, we’ll explore all viewpoints.

In coming days we’ll solicit informed opinions on current literary issues. For and against. Status quo or DIY. We welcome input even from those few writers or critics who embrace neutrality.

We hope to regularly report on the literary future. In some small way, we plan to make it.

Better Fiction?

What does better fiction look like?

If NEW POP LIT is to distinguish itself from the literary pack, we'll need to present new fiction as good or better than what anyone else is publishing. Our task is to discover hidden talent-- exciting new writers.

We're doing that! (Just three weeks up and running.) See our latest gem, "The Unshakable Kayfabe of Tommy Rage," by Andrea Gregovich-- an inside look at the small town wrestling scene.

http://newpoplit.com/portfolio/the-unshakable-kayfabe-of-tommy-rage/

A pop topic is combined with the sensitivity of a Mary Gaitskill.

Read it! This is terrific writing.

Third Way Fiction

Catch the New Pop Wave

Shooting the Messenger

AS I’VE LIVED much of my life in Detroit, and had it drummed into my head over and over that change is inevitable, I’m sensitive to economic change elsewhere in the world—particularly the inability to recognize or acknowledge drastic change.

It was with this mindset that I jumped briefly into a discussion at the widely-read literary blog The Millions. The topic of the thread, “Practical Art: On Teaching the Business of Creative Writing,” was the idea of introducing business questions into the structure of creative programs. What I found interesting in the initial post by Nick Ripatrazone, and subsequent comments, is that no one acknowledged the proverbial elephant in the room. (See the post here—you’ll have to scroll down to reach my remarks: http://www.themillions.com/2014/08/practical-art-on-teaching-the-business-of-creative-writing.html)

My comments were aggressive, but not extreme by any means. They were written with clarity and intelligence. What I found interesting in the responses was that no one addressed my point about the uncompetitiveness of the book publishing giants. One respondent finessed the issue, saying it would be a shame if the big publishers went under. Well, maybe, but that’s not the point. The point is that change in the publishing realm IS happening. It does a disservice to students in writing programs not to mention this. Students should be given all the options available to them.

Neither was I advocating excluding the big publishers from the marketplace, or from the world of literary ideas. That’s scarcely an option. I’m sure some of them will survive, in retrenched form. Like most bureaucracies—the Detroit automakers a notable example—they likely won’t change until reality comes crashing down upon them; when they can willfully ignore reality no longer.

Neither would I want to exclude literary writers from literature—though I’d suggest they learn to tweak their writing, to make it more competitive in a changing world. My co-editor at www.newpoplit.com, Andrea Nolen, and myself want to walk a middle path between the two extremes of literary and popular writing. We’ve stated again and again that the short story should be able to be both. (However, to suggest that Nobel Prize-winning short story writer Alice Munro, with her lengthy paragraphs and endless descriptions of trifles, her turtle’s pace, is readable and pop is absurd.) NEW POP LIT is designed to offer an alternative to both camps. I went on The Millions site to get word out to MFA/status quo writers who otherwise wouldn’t consider amending their art, to write what we call The New New.

After the reasonable comments of “Hot Ossuary” came a predictable demi-puppet attack by someone named “Toad.” A classic case of cognitive dissonance. I have no doubt that Toad read my remarks as he described them. It’s a condition of the human animal that when encountering sudden contrary ideas, the average person will at first see only red—the mind distorts the message, reading the words emotionally, instead of seeing what’s actually there. Toad ends up making me look moderate!

I suspect that within five years even Toad, as well as the blog he appears on (and for?) will be open to DIY ebook writing. In the face of reality, all bandwagons and their followers eventually change course.

A Cat and a Ballerina?

That’s the subject of our latest NEW POP LIT “Rate-This-Story!” feature, “Attitude En Pointe” by Christina Murphy.

http://newpoplitinteractive.wordpress.com/

Take a minute to read this short short and vote on it!

Is the Phanatic Leaving Philadelphia?

The notion of the Phillie Phanatic leaving Philadelphia has been the subject of conversation since the spring. See this article:

http://wapc.mlb.com/cutfour/2014/05/28/77028874/phillies-fans-want-to-trade-the-phillie-phanatic-for-mike-trout

The idea interests me, since my new project, NEW POP LIT—which I’m producing with writer/blogger Andrea Nolen as well as the Friends and Enemies of Pop Literature—needs a mascot!

(See our fantastic site: www.newpoplit.com )

If the Phillie Phanatic is truly available, searching for a better deal, we’d like to make him an offer. Maybe some classic Detroit–style Coney Dogs and the opportunity to watch, um, a better baseball team. (And by now he must be tired of cheesesteaks.)

Of course, since the Phanatic is a native of the Galapagos Islands, there’s the question of possible travel restrictions on his visa.

“Rate This Story!”

‘HOW A STORY FAILS” BY LANCE MANION

One of the features of the New Pop Lit website will be “Rate-This-Story” as part of our Interactive page, which is located in a side room of the New Pop Lit “Coffeehouse.” First up is short story writer Lance Manion with his “how a story fails.” What is this guy talking about? Click on the link and see.

http://newpoplitinteractive.wordpress.com/

(Scroll down for more Interactivity.)

Kudos to NPL co-editor Andrea Nolen for the striking look she’s achieved—and mucho thanks to Mr. Manion for courageously contributing his story!

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(This week’s NPL Feature Story coincidentally is also about a writer: “Harry Pinker Does It Again” by Corey Mesler. It’s also something of a short detective story. We are, after all, a pop lit site.)

http://newpoplit.com/portfolio/harry-pinker-does-it-again/

Thanks. Happy reading.

New Pop Lit Is Here!

LAUNCH DAY

www.newpoplit.com

Get the New New hyperreal hyperexciting pop stories art ideas mascots games the new entertaining literary web site. Surf the New Literary Wave.

Has the New Pop Lit era begun?

Terrific Story Writers

IF our task is to discover the best pop short story writers, we've already located two of them: Jessie Lynn McMains and Ian Lahey. Read their work NOW, "Insect Summer" and "Matt Murphy Private Eye" at New Pop Lit:

http://newpoplit.com/featured-stories/

We're finding good writers but we want more of them!

(Take our poll at http://newpoplitinteractive.wordpress.com/2014/08/05/pop-or-literary/)

@NewPopLit

www.newpoplit.com

New Pop Lit Is Coming!

WHAT is that appearing on the horizon, in the distance but moving steadily closer? Is it ISIS? Omar Sharif in “Lawrence of Arabia?” Are they good guys or bad guys? Do they carry destruction or renewal?

It’s NEW POP LIT! Launch date is in four days. Time to get on board as a writer, artist, reader or game participant. (Yes, we will have an interaction section.) What should the New New in literature look like? Will it lean more toward the literary or pop? Can we rescue the short story from its doldrums, and thereby reinvigorate literature as a whole?

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Please answer the current question at our Coffeehouse feature: “Does NEW POP LIT Need a Mascot?” Do we? If so, what should it look like?

Also, please take our poll, “Pop or Literary?” placed directly beneath the mascot post. Both can be accessed here:

http://newpoplitinteractive.wordpress.com/

We have one must as a new literary site: That everyone have fun.

What Is Art?

Probably as a reaction to the unparalleled horrors of a world gone berserk, the post-World War II generation had a passionate commitment to art. Especially to the beauty of art, as shown in these clips from the 1948 film THE RED SHOES. Note the color and emotion—it’s likely the most beautiful movie ever made.

http://www.tcm.com/mediaroom/video/469193/Red-Shoes-The-Movie-Clip-Maybe-Next-Year.html

Note the attitude of the young people in the story toward the ideal of art—real art.

The question is whether members of the millennial generation can approximate this ideal; this commitment. As co-editor of a new literary web site I’ll settle for a handful of them—writers and artists willing to break all bounds to create the otherworldly. Ultimate art which exceeds expectations, which reaches deep into the human soul.

A crazy but necessary goal.

Locating Talent

The first question: What’s talent?

For a new project, NEW POP LIT, we’re receiving a number of submissions which fit into two categories:

1.) Masses of run-on verbiage. The ex-zinester syndrome. Much of it is good, but needs to be put into a structure.

2.) Writers with too much structure. Everything is given from one viewpoint, fitting into a narrow, solipsistic world. The writers and their stories take no risks.

We want explosive writing, but we want it to be tightly compressed, jammed into the confines of a plot, which will make the writing all the more powerful.

We want structure, but we want the writing within that structure not to be careful and timid.

Our goal is to reinvent the short story art.

Launch date: August 16.

Hype: Onstage or Off?

The question is whether it’s easier to hype something when it’s not seen—or to use all current media tools and techniques which show the consumer everything?

Back in the day, promotion used to include an air of mystery.

Some say the basis of charisma is mystery.

A test case is the Underground Literary Alliance’s “Howl” reading/protest at Columbia University in 2006. Here’s an article about the event by establishment writer Rachel Aviv:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/article/178113

The article is fairly dismissive of the ULAers, yet captures some of the excitement of the affair.

Now, here’s video of the ULA that day, the first part of things anyway, our drinking from pitchers of margaritas and our own impromptu reading outside.

Which is more effective—the article or the video?

Needed: Artists and Writers

The editors of NEW POP LIT, Andrea Nolen and myself, are looking for good short stories to post at our upcoming site, as well as colorful artwork to illustrate the stories.

The theme: fun and excitement.

The site is under construction.

Email submissions or ideas to: newpoplit@gmail.com

Stay posted as to the progress of this campaign via tweets @newpoplit

Please tell your friends. Target launch date is in about three weeks.

Where’s Lawrence Richette’s Writing?

Philadelphia writer Lawrence Richette died late last year. He was a competent novelist—a throwback to another time in that he wrote with clarity and intelligence about real-world issues, using no postmodern tricks. Larry died late last year. The question is: who are his heirs? Who managed his estate? What happened to his unpublished writing?

Larry Richette self-published much of his work, but not all of it. He’d told me he’d written many short stories. I’d love to publish the best of them on-line as part of a new literary project. Where are the stories? Who has them?

If anyone knows the answer to these questions, please let me know.

“The Friends and Enemies of Pop Literature”

This is the name currently being used by a few writers interested in renewing literature through newer, clearer, more intelligent art. Several announcements about this campaign are forthcoming. Right now we’re looking for talent—talent of every variety.

If you’re interested in supporting, or becoming part of, this project, email me at ampoplit@gmail.com. Thanks.

The New New

I’ll soon announce my involvement in a new literary project with ambitious goals. It will be a campaign not of activism, but art. It will follow a principle of unilateral peace toward former antagonists. I’m prepared, in fact, to work with anyone and everybody.

Past is past.

How Does One Build a Better Literature?

WHAT KIND of team would be needed to credibly challenge status quo literature? What mix of talents? Strategy and tactics?

CAN the status quo be challenged? While their attitude is unchanging, unassailable, they’re standing on quicksand.

Short Story Ingredients

THE MODERNIST POP EXPERIMENT

Any time I write a short story, I’m reminded that fiction is a careful mix of ingredients. For it to work, the mixture must achieve some kind of balance. In my new ebook I’ve created a complex structure in order to explain a complex plot. To be able to do this, and keep the tale moving, I’ve skimped in parts on description and characterization. 

There are two versions of my story. First the “Director’s Cut,” and then a reworking, the “Producer’s Cut.” In my reworking I removed some insight into the characters, but also any trace of self-indulgent “fine writing.” I’ve done this to maintain pace—but there’s the danger of having too much pace. I’ve had to add short bits when I needed to slow things down. Complexity and flow? Perfect balance? It may not be possible. “Modernist Pop” is almost an oxymoron—but I’m nothing if not ambitious.

What’s left in? What’s cut? That defines the art of the art. Not everything can be jammed into one work. There are only so many words in one story.

(“Assassination of X” is now available at Amazon’s Kindle Store  Barnes and Noble’s Nook Books.)

Three Ways to Write a Story

OR THREE WAYS TO CREATE A MOVIE

1.) Start writing and allow the story to create itself.

In movies, shoot the world and find a theme. European directors like Fellini, Godard, and the Neorealists did this.

2.) Outline your story or novel step-by-step, setting up everything in advance. Know where you’re going and where you’ll end.

In movies, this is the storyboard technique used by Alfred Hitchcock and George Lucas. No surprises.

3.) Write a ton of material (or shoot a ton of footage) around a chosen subject—then eliminate, rearrange, edit, to discover what works best.

Film directors George Stevens and Orson Welles, among others, worked like this.

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With my own recent writing I’ve tried all three ways.

In ebook novellas CRIME CITY USA and THE MCSWEENEYS GANG I used way #1.

With THE TOWER, I designed and plotted the entire novel in advance. The ending was the first part I wrote. Way #2.

With my new work, my “prototype,” ASSASSINATION OF X, I used Way #3. I wrote more than 20,000 words on the event the tale is about. I knocked this down to 15,000 words to patch together a narrative. My first version. Then I eliminated more of it.

I find it’s the hardest way to write. To complicate matters I used a few new tricks-- “literary montage”—learning to use new tools; discovering the excitement of mastering a more difficult skill.

I hope the result is worth the effort.

Buy ASSASSINATION OF X at Kindle or Nook.

Modernist Pop

ASSASSINATION OF X

My newest ebook, Assassination of X, is now available at both Amazon’s Kindle Store and BN’s Nook Books. (Links at left.) It’s my first experimental prototype to make it out of the shop. I have others in the planning stage.

What are my objectives?

1.) To convey ideas.

2.) To engage the broader culture.

3.) To make reading a new experience. To view the world—through the prism of fiction—with fresh eyes.

4.) To present new ways of creating the literary art.

5.) To be readable.

6.) To carry a punch.

7.) Or, to write an intelligent story without alienating the reader. A difficult task, but not impossible.

Not a Pop Writer

A BOOK REVIEW/ A RANT

As I’ve long argued at this blog, there are two kinds of fiction writers in America now. The cookie-cutter genre novelist, whose work seems stamped from an auto parts stamping factory, or the “literary writer,” whose work is just as predictable and generic, only less readable, more pretentious, and deliberately unexciting.

I’ve argued for the kind of “pop lit” that’ll bridge the divide. An increasing number of writers are arguing likewise—and more, trying to themselves create that new kind of fiction which can be “pop” fast and entertaining, but also meaningful and relevant at the same time. It’s an ambitious quest and a difficult enterprise.

Former zine writer Ann Sterzinger once showed promise at creating new pop fiction. She wrote short-but-powerful stories which were dramatic and moved at a good pace. They were fun, often upsetting, always fascinating reads.

Then Ann decided to become “educated.” In the process she adopted the worst aspects of the academy-spawned literati.

That’s my conclusion anyway after reading about a third, so far, of one of Ann’s recent Nine Band Books novels, NVSQVAM (Nowhere).

The novel is an interminable narrative consisting mostly of Henry James-style interior monologues filled with doctoral-student banalities—most dialogue put in italics to further alienate the general reader. The objective is to impress rather than enlighten, much less (gasp!) entertain.

The viewpoint is impossibly solipsistic. The novel includes footnotes. Footnotes! A la everyone’s favorite unreadable author David Foster Wallace. “Look at Me!” the writer is saying. “I know something.” (Or, I did not completely waste the dollars spent on my education.)

There’s the ghost of a good story buried under the verbiage. Plenty of cynicism and wit—diluted by the banality of life. Likely the banality is the point—but who needs to read it? We live it. Most of us read to escape from the mundane and the disappointing.

An excerpt:

“He wasn’t walking toward the health center quite yet; he was walking
toward the big pink mall that squatted across the highway from the Wal-
Mart. He had planned to spend the morning editing his dissertation, but
two clauses into it his head had begun to pound. He thought at first that
he was dying of a stroke, but the pounding stopped whenever he looked
away from the computer screen. So he turned it off—why bother, when
the review committee would dutifully find fault no matter what?—and
found time on his hands. He had needed to buy new walking shoes for
months. He asked himself why, if he really needed a shrink, the mild
irony of walking through traffic to the mall so he could buy walking
shoes didn’t upset him more.”

In and of itself, it’s a fine paragraph. Well written, wise-eyed and all that—but unendurable when there are two hundred other finely written paragraphs just like it.

The old maxims of writing hold true. SHOW us on occasion, don’t just tell us. FIND a proper mix of narrative and scene. Bring pictures of what’s happening to the mind’s eye. Create a plot. Plant hooks. Have pace. BE dramatic.

There’s no effort to impose structure—sense and order—on the writing. That would be too condescending. Too beneath the intelligent writer, whose sense of intelligence, expressed solipsistically, is all. (Yet design—structure—is an expression of intelligence.)

Here I was worried about the readability of my new novella (ASSASSINATION OF X) and worked to impose order on the viewpoints and ideas—chapter numbers and the like-- so that the unwary reader stumbling upon it would be able to follow what’s happening. But let’s not bring that much-scorned creature the reader into the equation!

And so books written with clarity—no matter how shitty—control the marketplace, while authors capable of writing intelligently vomit out their intelligence in a stream of nonsensical consciousness, lest they’re thought to be pandering to the demands of the marketplace. It’s a willful need for obscurity.

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(I Challenge Ann, and anyone else, to write a pop story that’s intelligent, fast-paced, dramatic and entertaining. I know someone putting together a new project who’ll be looking for such stories. People, please let me know if you or anyone you know can create that new story: can give us exciting new art.)

What Is Literary Montage?

Can a work of fiction be both innovative and exciting?

http://www.amazon.com/Assassination-X-King-Wenclas-ebook/dp/B00KPHLTKI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1401811380&sr=1-1&keywords=assassination+of+x

DEATH OF A SENATOR!!

This is to announce the release of my new fiction ebook, Assassination of X. It’s now available at Amazon’s Kindle Store. I expect it to also soon be available at Nook Books.

What’s it about? That’s given in the title to this post.

My goal with the novella was twofold. To move at breakneck speed, and to leave the reader wanting more. Whether I achieve that or not is for you to judge.

Get ASSASSINATION OF X. New pop fiction of a kind you’ve never read.

http://www.amazon.com/Assassination-X-King-Wenclas-ebook/dp/B00KPHLTKI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1401811380&sr=1-1&keywords=assassination+of+x

Did I Edit Too Much?

Does the narrative of my new ebook, Assassination of X, move too fast? I might've been thinking as I wrote it, "race car."

The ebook is available at Amazon's Kindle Store, if you care to take a look.  (It's a mystery story, of sorts.)

(A link to Amazon is on this page.)

What Is Modernism?

To me, modernism means presenting an artwork as a collection of fragments, with the reader or viewer required to fill in the spaces using imagination and intelligence. Everything is not explained.

(Stay tuned for my upcoming ebook-- fiction as a modernist painting. Does it retain pop elements?)

What If?

A STING OPERATION?

I don’t know if anyone else has posited this yet. To me it seems obvious. Or maybe I give some people credit for being smarter than they are.

The question: What if Los Angeles Clippers basketball team owner Donald Sterling wanted to sell the team all along? What if the scandal regarding his recorded racist remarks with his girlfriend were part of an elaborate plan to set up the National Basketball Association and the general public, big-money investors included? What if he and his wife have been playing everyone all along?

It seems to have worked. They’re on the verge of unloading a perpetual money loser for two billion dollars, three times its projected value. What’s more, they have the NBA demanding they sell at that ridiculous figure.

The scandal certainly inflated the value of the team, and the cachet in owning it. It’s a first. It’s like a robber on the street holding a gun to Donald Sterling’s head and saying, “Here! Take this money! I insist!”

Is Donald Sterling (with associates, wife and girlfriend) that sharp?

What Makes Great Art?

Being an adult means seeing the world through an adult viewpoint. It means realizing you grew up in a world of lies and half truths. Not the standard accepted lies—that America is exceptional and great. It actually is. The lie was that it was perfect. Gullible idealists with childlike sensibilities took the imperfections for totality. They abandoned context and rejected the core truth.

Most of us have grown up in a culture of lies. For instance, that rock n’ roll isn’t merely entertaining, and historically important as a folk movement, but also artistically significant. From the start rock was created and marketed for thirteen year-olds. If you’re still listening seriously at age 40 or 50 to Van Halen or the Rolling Stones, or Bruce Springsteen, or Kurt Cobain and Nirvana and Eddie Vedder and Pearl Jam, it means you haven’t advanced. Culturally you’ve remained an adolescent, with the tastes and sensibility of an adolescent.

The problem is that most of us of any age aren’t exposed to great art. We can’t appreciate that which is unknown.

I offer the premise that a single opera, “Turandot,” by Giacomo Puccini, is greater art than the entire history of rock music. The Beatles and Stevie Wonder included. As does all great art, “Turandot” reaches deeper into the soul, while at the same time it connects with the cosmos; the mysteries of space and time.

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Due to fortunate circumstances, I was able to see “Turandot” twice at the Detroit Opera House during its recent run. The first time was an overwhelming experience. The second time I saw deeper into the opera, its depths and breadths, realizing more of what makes it work. Revealed to me were the commonalities it has with a handful of ultimate masterworks like “King Lear” or The Brothers Karamazov. You see, “Turandot,” not “Madame Butterfly” or “La Boheme,” is Puccini’s masterpiece.

I can’t explain why in a single blog post. For now I’ll describe part of the experience.

The two leads, Lise Lindstrom as Turandot and Rudy Park as Calaf, carry superpowerful voices. When you get into opera the first thing you realize is that this is real singing. The major leagues of voice. In comparison, widely hyped pop stars give us amplified screeching and caterwauling. I appreciate their promotional abilities (Lady Gaga performed in town the same night I was at the opera) but I also know it’s a con game.

The performance at the opera that most stayed with me afterward was not that of the two heroic-sized bigs, or the superpowerful chorus—or even the martial arts sequence!—but Donata D’Annunzio Lombardi as the tragic slave girl Liu. Never have I seen live on a stage a more emotional performance. Lombardi’s wasn’t just a physical performance, but a spiritual one. Her character seemed to rise out of herself as she sang—partly due to her perfect voice control and total identification with the character; as much due to the magic of Puccini for writing the music and developing the role. It’s the kind of performance to be remembered through a lifetime. At the same time I could watch her do the part not once or twice, but a hundred times, and not be disappointed.

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I’ve long advocated for populist art. Is there a contradiction in my becoming an unofficial advocate for an obscure and expensive art like opera?

I don’t think so. Opera is no more of an elitist art than literature. Both require an initial level of difficult adjustment. Reading must be taught. With opera, you merely sit through a few of them. If you have a mind, a heart, and a soul, the cultural barriers vanish. You realize suddenly what the art is about.

(Maybe you need scars on your psyche to appreciate opera. Pop/rock music has superficial appeal. Opera goes into your soul.)

Puccini is a populist among opera composers. A local Detroit reviewer bemoaned that Puccini wasn’t cutting edge, like Alban Berg! Or, I assume, other atonalists. The public doesn’t want atonality. They want drama and color, and passion, which is what Puccini is about.

Likewise, “literature” today suffers from a kind of a-tonality removing itself from the public. It lacks broad themes, color, drama, larger-than-life emotion. It no longer carries broad themes expressing the movements of societies and humanity, the depths of the soul or the vast reach of the universe. Until it again finds those attributes it will become increasingly distant from the public; an art that will have to be reached by accident; an unknown grail to be searched for, maybe discovered, maybe not, like opera.

Yes Men

The problem with the established literary world is that it’s filled with yes men.

I thought this in the aftermath of the NFL draft. The local team, the Detroit Lions, made a senseless first pick IMHO. Too many local commentators afterward took the management view, instead of calling the team out for what seems yet another blunder.

The Detroit Lions have won exactly one playoff game in fifty (50) years. The burden of proof is on the team. They have no track record of success. They deserve no benefit of doubt.

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Can the same be said of American literature and those who run it?

For fifty years the cultural trendline has been down. There’ve been no innovations, no growth spurts, no large personalities who’ve grabbed the attention and imagination of America. Only a continuation of the mediocre.

There are small successes, sure—enough to give encouragement to the status quo; preserving the illusion that all is well. Donna Tartt has written, apparently, a fairly good novel. Lorrie Moore has written another mildly witty book. Etc. Outside the literary realm, these successes grab the attention of no one.

THE ABILITY TO JAR

This is what American writing has lost during the past fifty years. The ability to turn the readership—ultimately the culture—upside down. To reorient the literary universe—and American culture itself.

How does one go about that?

One way not to do it is through the “everybody get along” philosophy of our friends on the west coast. If new writing isn’t upsetting the mandarins, it’s not doing its job. New art needs to be artistically provocative; provocative with its ideas as well. It needs to hold a mirror up to society, including to the intellectual class, and not simply to that smug class’s favorite targets.

Bold style and unflinching substance. New writing must be radical in both departments. At the same time it needs the ability to be read, otherwise it’ll not engage the populace.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ THIS BLOG

This is one of a scattering of blogs devoted to literature that’s not run by yes men.

Writer Friendly or Reader Friendly?

For a writer, this is ultimately the key question. Most of what we create looks good to ourselves, but that doesn't mean it works. Especially when we try hard to write well, the result is often self-indulgence. (Writers like David Foster Wallace made careers out of self-indulgence.)

Which is a roundabout way of saying I've put my chief fiction prototype back in the shop. I've begun taking it apart, then will reconstruct it, paring much of it. With the original version I took my notions of modernism too far.

With this proposed ebook I behaved first like an Orson Welles with "The Magnificent Ambersons"-- trying new ideas and a few new tricks, heedless of overall effect. For the reconstruction I need to be more like Welles's editor Robert Wise-- putting together a version that's coherent and moves.

Best TV Movie Ever?

On a brief Orson Welles kick, I found this TV movie from 1975 while searching the Internet. “The Night That Panicked America,” based on the famous Welles “War of the Worlds” radio hoax. Slow starting, but then compelling, filled with humor and pathos. Worth a look.

 

Making Modernism Work

How many writers have read The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald? Many thousands. Maybe millions. Yet not one of these writers knows artistically what’s going on in it. They don’t understand what Fitzgerald as an artist is doing with the tale.

Oh, there have been professors who’ve broken down Fitzgerald’s use of time in the novel, showing its complexity. (Fitzgerald carefully studied Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”) The profs discovered Fitzgerald’s use of modernist technique. They had part of the picture, but not all of it.

As I’ve explained previously on my “Pop” blog, in The Great Gatsby Scott Fitzgerald became a pop writer—or at least half a pop writer. The elements of a genre tale are there. A gangster. A mysterious past. Money. Murder. Speeding cars. Quick violence. The protagonist possesses a dual identity: Jay Gatsby and James Gatz. Self-creation—which Fitzgerald took from the greatest and most influential pop novel, The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas.

I advocate for the fusion of pop and literary writing. It’s been done. F. Scott Fitzgerald achieved it in his greatest work. Modernism fused with pop.

Curiously enough, his buddy Ernest Hemingway at times seemed to be on the same path. “The Killers” is close to pop. His in our time (the primitive version) with its fragments of experience is very modernist, yet Hemingway’s genre sensibility of action and violence is present at the same time.

Both writers were able to write basic prose of simple sentences to keep the narrative moving. For a modernist this is essential. It’s the only way literary modernism can work without losing its audience.

What happened to American literature? Why were these trails not followed?

Instead of combining its strands, American writing divided—until today we have opposite poles. The literary and popular inhabit different worlds.

There’s no incentive from either big publishing or academia to bridge the gap. The genre novel is expected to be as simple and formulaic as possible. The same thin product stamped out over and over with minute variations.

With the literary, we see the ideology of the well-written sentence, as perpetuated by presumed authorities like Heidi Pitlor or The New Yorker editors. Writers who follow this path create Xerox art—copies of copies of copies, no one trying to find a way out.

Meanwhile, modernism morphed into postmodernism. Extreme solipsism as practiced by the form’s presumed god, David Foster Wallace. In his fiction, Wallace escaped into his head and wouldn’t come out, describing experience in an acutely self-conscious manner. Describing his feelings instead of objectively examining the world. Self-consciousness and self-indulgence; run-on sentences representing run-on thought.

The trick for the writer, the artist, is to reverse the process. Instead of bringing the world into the mind, project the mind onto the world. Make plot and settings representations of the subconscious. This was done with the novel She by H. Rider Haggard a couple centuries ago. It’s what “Batman” in its various forms is about. It’s the essence of “pop.”

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In my coming ebooks I plan to leap ahead to where American literature should be artistically if it hadn’t been sidetracked by mediocrity and nonsense. The question is whether or not the literary world is too culturally regressed to recognize what I’m doing. We’ll see, I guess.

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In my spare time I’ve also been examining movies for clues about the nature of art. My latest study is “Body and Soul,” a 1947 boxing movie starring John Garfield, which is formulaic and fast moving, gritty and tough, yet at the same time amazingly complex. Clues, tricks, techniques, layers: meaning everyplace. Stay tuned for my thoughts.

Depth and Dimensions

My readings tell me that fifty years ago, artists in a variety of fields were striving for what some called “depthlessness.” Those creating or promoting such artworks included John Cage, Mark Rothko, and Alain Robbe-Grillet. The idea was to eliminate the human element (!) and present only “the actual.”

What I want is the opposite of this. As a writer and reader (or moviegoer) I look for depth and dimensions to the maximum extent possible. To plunge into the mind, but also to extend outward into the broader world, or even the universe. To find meaning human and metaphysical.

It’s what I’ll aim for in my next ebook, due possibly in a month or two.

The Other Choice Part II

THINKING OUTSIDE THE BOX

In the intellectual realm and the arts, commentators and critics are pushed by intellectual consensus into well-trod paths, with narrow parameters, set choices, no one thinking outside the box.

An example: A list of “Greatest Westerns” by the people at Wonders in the Dark.

http://wondersinthedark.wordpress.com/category/genre-countdown-westerns/

The list is acceptable from an academic perspective. “Auteurs” are well represented. The list is properly diverse and politically correct. The only problem with the list is that these are not the greatest Westerns, for the most part. Not when you actually watch them.

“Rio Bravo” at #2? It’s a nice, leisurely movie. Not deep. Not profound. I have it at #19 on my own list (see my ebook, About Western Movies). I thought I was being generous. Director Howard Hawks is considered a pantheon auteur. Though the movie isn’t in any way “great,” it’s a safe choice.

My own #2 Western, “The Magnificent Seven,” isn’t anywhere on the Wonders in the Dark top 50 Westerns list.

Which film is better?

WATCH them and see for yourself. “Seven” is more impressive visually. It’s better paced. It has the unity and completeness of great art—when it’s over, the aesthetic kick of the perfection of art. It has better form. It’s better scripted and better acted. It’s vastly more exciting. Heretical as it is to say this, Yul Brynner, in this film, makes a better model of an ideal leader of men than John Wayne. “Seven” has more emotion and greater heart. Also, of course, it has the magnificent Elmer Bernstein score. As fine a Western movie composer as Dimitri Tiomkin is, his music for “Rio Bravo” can’t match it.

Another example: John Ford’s “Wagonmaster” (1950) is on the list. A very good film. “Westward the Women” (1951) isn’t on the list, though it’s even better.

Ford’s film falls short of being epic, because it subordinates the wagon journey to a plot complication involving a stereotyped gang of lawless psychos. The movie’s characters, good and bad, are flat types.

In “Westward the Women,” not only is the journey epic; not only are the subsidiary characters (like Ito and Patience) more impressive and mythic ; but the two leads, played by Robert Taylor and Denise Darcel, have surprising emotional depth. Their relationship has depth. The arc of their finding each other as mates matches the epic journey, and the theme of community which undergirds the film.

At the end, when the two come together, it’s a profoundly satisfying moment—the sense of unity and completeness. The “kick” of great art.

Frank Capra, a near-pantheon director, constructed the scenario for “Westward the Women.” William Wellman directed the actual movie. I don’t know if this proves or disproves “auteur” theory. I don’t think it matters. What matters is the result.

The trick for a new thinker is to not be trapped in the mental corridors of status quo. For an artist, received wisdom exists to be demolished.

An Easter Movie Review

For Easter, I’ve posted an analysis of the 1959 movie classic BEN-HUR at another blog.

http://americanpoplit.blogspot.com/2014/04/understanding-ben-hur.html

Is the film underrated by critics? If so, why? I attempt an answer.

New Wave Writing?

New fiction needs to look radically different from what came before. It needs to be radically more exciting. Think of drastic change in other media-- music, movies, painting. New art broke rules, cut ties to the past, did the unthinkable. In art there are no rules. The art object is demolished, then recreated.

A revolution in fiction may be occasioned by a difference in technique, which creates a difference in style. Pace, structure, viewpoint-- everything subject to change.

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What are examples of sudden drastic artistic change?

You tell me.

Punk rock?

Picasso?

Jean Luc Godard's "Breathless" movie?

In fiction, Ernest Hemingway?

Anyone in the poetry scene?

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One can make countless arguments about the need for literary change. At some point the art itself needs to be that argument.

How? In what way?

I'll be presenting some of my own ideas.

Eleven Questions

The writer Ann Sterzinger included me in a group of bloggers she’s thrown eleven questions at, part of a chain letter or Ponzi scheme of some kind. (http://fineillstartagoddamnblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/someone-liebsters-you.html

I don’t do chain letters, but the eleven questions are interesting enough to try answering.

1.) WHY ARE YOU STILL ALIVE?

Don’t know. Lucky, I guess. I’m surprised myself.

2.) WHY ARE YOU STILL TRYING TO WRITE A BLOG?

(The cynicism of these questions is palpable.)  I hate to go positive, but this is an exciting time to be a writer. The possibility is there to reinvent literature. Specifically, narrative fiction, though poetry could be upgraded as well. The writer should never stop thinking about ways to improve the art. What’s the best mix of elements—of description, dialogue, pace, plot? Can one play with time and keep the tale moving, the reader hooked?

Fiction will be reinvented. By someone. Now, or in the future. I can imagine what the new story will look like. I’m not yet able to create or perfect that new product myself.

I still write a blog because I like keeping my options open—to be able to jump back into the fray in a big way if an opening presents itself.

3.) JUST WHO DO YOU THINK YOU ARE, ANYWAY?

I’m a guy who thinks he has answers.

4.) WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT WHEN YOU HAVE INSOMNIA?

I ponder dilemmas of time and space. I consider historical examples of individuals who’ve jumped through “holes” in time and space, and changed history as a result.

5.) WHICH ARE YOUR TEN LEAST FAVORITE WAYS TO DIE?

This is the kind of question twelve year-olds debate. Up there with who’s the toughest monster: Frankenstein; Dracula; the Wolf Man; or the Mummy? (We won’t get into Marvel superheroes.)

Whichever way I die, I hope I’m brave enough to face it. (Someone once told me dying is easy. Living is tough.)

6.) DO YOU BELIEVE IN GOD? IF SO, HOW CAN YOU TOLERATE HIS APPARENT INDIFFERENCE, EVEN HOSTILITY, TO YOUR HAPPINESS AND WELL-BEING? IF NOT, HOW CAN YOU TOLERATE THE VOID OF YOUR MEANINGLESS UNIVERSE?

I didn’t know it was God’s job to make us happy. We have to figure that out ourselves. But yes, I do believe in God. Science is discovering that the universe is vastly more complex and intelligent than once thought. It’s difficult to believe there’s not a mind of some kind behind it.

As to God’s apparent indifference—the greatest works of literature wrestle with that question: King Lear and The Brothers Karamazov. They were written by two men far more intelligent and wise than any of us. Worth a look.

As the Bard said in another play, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than in all your philosophy.”

7.) GO BACK TO QUESTION 6. IMAGINE THAT YOU BELIEVED THE OPPOSITE OF WHAT YOU DO, AND ANSWER THE SECOND HALF OF THE QUESTION ACCORDINGLY.

40% of the time I disbelieve; i.e., fight with my belief. But the void is unsettling. Hell is the world without God.

8.) ARE THERE ANY REALLY AMAZING NEW BANDS YOU THINK I SHOULD KNOW ABOUT?

The Detroit Cobras come to mind, but they’re not new.

9.) IS PAINTING A DEAD ART? HOW ABOUT THE NOVEL?

Dead. Rotting. Corpse-like—at least compared to where they’ve been. They’re at seeming dead ends artistically, and marginalized in the greater culture. But this means opportunity for those willing to reinvent an art. For those brave enough to break with the present and overturn the same-old ways of thinking, creating, and operating.

10.) COME UP WITH A WORLD VIEW WHICH IS COMPLETELY RATIONAL. . . . YOU HAVE 200 WORDS.

The universe is rational. Humans aren’t.

11.) HOW DOES IT FEEL TO BE ONE OF SEVEN BILLION HUMAN BEINGS?

Not all bad, when I consider the immensity of the universe and the idea that we may be the only (semi)intelligent beings in it, as many physicists now believe. (Fine-Tuned Universe Theory.) Anyway, seven billion is an anomaly, part of the age of antibiotics, which are lately losing their effectiveness. We fragile creatures could once again be open to a host of plagues. Besides, birth rates worldwide already are plummeting. Some nations—Japan; Russia—are in demographic free fall. You’re far more optimistic about the survival of the human race than I am!

I currently live in a once-vibrant city (Detroit), now depopulated, so I’m more aware than some of how quickly things can reverse themselves. There’s more terror at being alone in the universe than being surrounded by people with all their many failings. :-)

The Prototype

I COMPARE writing a story to creating a car. I want to design a story which looks unlike any story ever seen—yet remains capable of motoring at a good clip down the street.

As a writer and reader, speed (pace) thrills me.

My latest design is out on a test drive track. I want to see how it handles before I release it. Any auto shows I can display it at?

It’s a unique design, though it doesn’t go all the way in new design. Merely has new features. It’s packed with ideas. The reader might find a standard narrative in the story’s body.

A straight narrative can go fast and be exciting. See “The Red Door” in my ebook Ten Pop Stories. My new story is 15,000 words. Fast, not full-size (novel length), but not a mini-sportster either. The new features are intended to help the underlying tale go faster—and become more breathtaking. How it uses time is key.

(There’s the chance the story will instead appear misshapen.)

A story as wild ride?

That’s the objective. To make an Alice Munro kind of story look like a Model T. If I haven’t quite achieved the objective with my prototype, I hope to at least point the way toward future offerings. The story design shop I run is ongoing.

The Writing

For those still interested in the matter, I’ve given up warring with the literary establishment. I vow even to resist the temptation to shred known propagandists who’ve smeared me. (Won’t be easy.) What currently motivates me? Only writing—the writing.

The Other Choice Part I

HOW TO THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX

The media doesn’t give you the other choice. The unorthodox or unexpected solution. You have to find that yourself.

Example: There was much talk this past football (NFL) season about the best young quarterback. Who’s the best young quarterback?

Is it: Colin Kaepernick? Andrew Luck? Superbowl winner Russell Wilson? Robert Griffin III? Cam Newton, by chance?

The correct answer is none of them. The best young quarterback is Nick Foles of the Philadelphia Eagles.

Stats prove it. In the past season, despite not playing all the games, Nick Foles had a record of 27 touchdowns and only 2 interceptions. This is Tom Brady and Aaron Rodgers territory. As passers, none of the more highly touted other young quarterbacks comes close.

Stats alone don’t tell the story, of course. What struck me as much as the stats is a video of Nick Foles shooting an impromptu basket on the Dan Patrick Show:

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1942698-eagles-quarterback-nick-foles-nails-long-3-pointer-on-the-dan-patrick-show

Note how far away he’s standing. To me, it’s a demonstration of remarkable hand-eye coordination. Which being a quarterback is about. The 27-2 ratio isn’t so surprising after all. But the media is so caught up with the other guys, it seems to have missed Nick Foles.

(To be continued.)

All I Want Is the Truth

SONMETIMES I’m in the mood for a good rant. Especially when encountering nonstop lies from commentators on both the Left and the Right, each with their own axe to grind. There are few great rants in literature to find, mainly because they’re never wanted by an establishment, but a good rant expresses outrage and also a joy in language.

One of the best of them in the music world is this song by John Lennon, “Gimme Some Truth.”

The refrain is all I’ve ever wanted. I suspect many people feel the same.

Rule Breaking

ADVENTURES IN CREATING NEW FICTION

What rules should be broken when creating the new short story?

The current literary story uses sparse dialogue.

The new story should use much dialogue.

The current story focuses on the personal.

The new story should emphasize the public.

The acceptable story uses much description.

The new story should give a minimum of it. (Less is more.)

The old story has minimal action.

The new story should embrace action when it makes the plot and theme exciting.

Plot? A lot of it.

Themes need to go deeper than the delicate points of lit stories.

Instead of a single viewpoint, the new story should give every viewpoint, and do so in a minimum of space.

Is all this impossible?

Not at all. It may, in fact, be ridiculously simple.

Outside MFA versus New York

THERE HAVE BEEN  a spate of articles online about the latest goofy n+1 idea, now available in book form, called “MFA versus New York.” This has to be the most ridiculous statement made by any group of writers, at least since 2008, when the n+1 crowd publicly predicted “the end of oil”— right before vast new pools of oil were discovered across the globe, and new technologies created for obtaining it.

Their latest discussion is ridiculous because it ignores exciting real change in the literary realm: the rise of self-published ebooks.

At least some literary commentators recognize that both worlds of MFA workshops and New York “Big Six” publishing are in collapse, such as this article by Sonia Saraiya, “The Bleak State of American Fiction.”

http://www.avclub.com/article/bleak-state-american-fiction-201745

But even Sonia Saraiya is wearing blinders. She ignores ebooks and the DIY world, and refuses to consider new options. Namely, creating fiction which can be pop and “literary” (significant) BOTH. The future won’t be bleak for those who discover a way out.

Anyway, there’s more intelligence presented in the Comments section to Saraiya’s article than in the entirety of the new n+1 book.

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(An aside: Doesn’t n+1’s very title scream “pseudo-intellectual”? You just know these are the same kind of people to be found blatantly reading Derrida or other unreadable tome at the local overpriced hipster coffeehouse or bar.)

About Style

Today's "literary" fiction is ostensibly all about style instead of substance-- but what kind of style? The mass of workshop fiction being produced gives us monostyle. It all looks and sounds the same-- due no doubt to the homogenizing nature of the workshop process, and the stale influence of the stodgy house New Yorker style. (This holds true, incidentally, to the approved reviewed writers in New York, most of whom came out of MFA programs.)

Absent are writers who take chances-- writers aren't allowed to take chances. And so, there's no melodrama, color, rants-- no over-the-top EMOTION that could energize the art. (The kind of work I tried to promote when I was running the Underground Literary Alliance.)

To use an analogy from the movie world, look at the flicks James Dean made with Elia Kazan and Nicholas Ray, "East of Eden" and "Rebel Without a Cause." They're hyperemotional, melodramatic, utterly stylized. Today the films and acting styles no doubt appear dated-- but at the time they were blows against conformity. They engaged the public and enlivened the art.

Are there young writers-- who should be hyperemotional, not robots!-- who can do the same for the literary art? It would mean breaking the rules. It wouldn't be allowed.

The New Hybrid

I’m an experimental writer. Mine are a different kind of experiment. My goal is the true hybrid story, pop and literary both.

Read my fiction ebooks, Ten Pop Stories, Crime City USA, The Tower, and you’ll see a variety of attacks in this direction, from different angles. The pop story needs to be readable and exciting, with good pace. The trick is to make it innovative and intelligent from a literary standpoint, with deeper meaning. Not solely entertainment, but also art.

I have two new hybrid prototypes on the drawing board. A simpler one, and one more complex. Both will try new approaches to the short story; new ideas. The objective is to present a story unlike any before seen. Art which is aesthetically revolutionary. More, a new kind of fiction: literature which people want to read. Need to read.

No small task!

More Evidence on Awl Article

FURTHER DE(CON)STRUCTION OF A FLAWED ESSAY

Two months ago I examined an hysterical essay by ULA foe Maria Bustillos, about the 2008 financial crisis, which was receiving much promotion from The Awl, as if the essay were the best thing they ever published. (Maybe it was.) In a post, I showed the shakiness of the Bustillos argument. See:

http://www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2013/12/bad-propaganda.html

Now, we have more evidence, in the form of the actual Federal Reserve transcripts from that critical year. Read about them in this Wall Street Journal piece by John Hilsenrath.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303775504579396803024281322?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2F%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424052702303775504579396803024281322.html 

The discussion makes clear that how the crisis developed depended upon the behavior of those in charge of the Fed at that time—their ability to spot the crisis and prevent it, then react to it. To blame the crisis on past Fed chairman Alan Greenspan—and then by extension on Ayn Rand!—is ludicrous. Only a literary propagandist would—not a serious journalist.

I urge Ms. Bustillos or the editors of The Awl to respond.

Impossible

THE GENTEEL ART

It’s impossible to take the established literary world seriously. By “established,” I mean the critical/review/p.r. apparatus based in New York, bolstered by the academy, which decides what writings and writers are an approved subject for proper discussion by the proper crowd, and so, regarded as “literature.” It’s a tiny bubble world far removed from the hectic noise of America-at-large.

The Bubble Literary World has been marked by a fear of contention and conflict. No clash of ideas among this crowd. The goal has been to become as innocuous as possible.

In a recent New York Times Book Review article, (http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/books/review/do-we-really-need-negative-book-reviews.html?_r=0), two Bubble writers take tentative steps toward questioning the prevailing norms. Their words, when put into context—literature’s non-standing among the greater populace—are comical.

Francine Prose, an unexciting author and uncreative thinker, affirms the right to disapprove in her reviews of “bad” writing. She doesn’t define “bad” writing, but it has something to do with how sentences are crafted. She gives the example of “His eyes were as black as night.” Not done! If Tolstoy or Shakespeare or Dickens ever used such a phrase, you’d have to dismiss their entire body of work. Ms. Prose is locked into a single standard of value for literary work: “the well-written sentence.” This is chief value for the MFA set. Characterization; plot; pace; ideas; dialogue; form—everything else which goes into the creation of a compelling work of fiction is of secondary value, if considered at all.

What does Francine Prose make of a Debra Webb from Alabama, who has written 100 novels, the last several of them best sellers? On the first page of one of Webb’s novels, Webb talks of a character’s “piercing blue eyes.” I winced myself when reading it, because it seems like cheating—making it too easy for the reader to see the character. The larger question, though, is: Does it work?

Debra Webb is doing something right in her novels. They have an avid readership. Far more than Francine Prose (or myself), Debra Webb is keeping the art of fiction alive in this country. People purchase her books and her ebooks. The task of a critic is to figure out what Debra Webb is doing well. What compels her audience to read her books? To understand this is to take a real step toward saving literature in America; moving toward the elusive hybrid novel which can be popular and significant BOTH.

I’m not saying Francine Prose or Zoe Heller shouldn’t attack such work. I’m saying they should be open to an equal amount of attacks on themselves. It’s the only way the art can improve.

The literary scene needs contention and controversy. By such contention in this loud age, literature will be noticed. Myself, I’m from a background where we would argue just to argue. I enjoy debating. Try to do this with stuffy literary folk and you’ve broken their rules. No conflict. No contention. No noise. Everyone please get along. (Turn out the lights when you go home.)

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(For a satirical look at Francine Prose and a few other writers, buy my ebook novel, THE MCSWEENEYS GANG, affordably available at Kindle or Nook.)

More About the Great Literary Change

FROM POPULISM TO ELITISM

Has the Eric Bennett article in Chronicle of Higher Education opened a debate about the nature of American literature? Don’t count on it. This is a debate which I’m sure even Bennett’s backers at n+1 would not want to have—because inevitably they’d be caught on the wrong side of it.

Here’s a post I made on another blog about the matter:

http://happyamericaliterature.blogspot.com/2008/12/great-reaction.html

And another post I made here:

http://kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2007/01/plimpton-background.html

There are many connect-the-dots leads to be followed, for those with the time or interest. This includes others in George Plimpton’s generation like William Phillips and Robert Silvers. It includes other publications, and important literary conferences of the 1950’s and 60’s whose intent was to direct the course of American literature into acceptable channels.

Keep in mind that American populism is a style of literature, probably best embodied in the Frank Norris novel The Octopus. The style can be characterized by large themes, characters caught up in sweeping historical currents and changes, and polemical speeches. It represented a large land and broad voice. Also with a trace of old-fashioned American romanticism. The viewpoint is usually against monopoly and/or centralized control. Organic, from the people, not tops-down. It’s a style which once defined American literature and its difference from the European variety. Sadly, that difference now is gone.

In his Chronicle essay, Eric Bennett posits Jonathan Franzen as a novelist of ideas. Maybe—but his recent anti-freedom novel Freedom is more anti-populist than populist. It has more in common with By Love Possessed than The Octopus.

Seven Years Late

I NOTE there are many articles out recently about how the CIA changed the direction of American literature, including via the rise of MFA programs. Here's one of the articles, by Brian Merchant:

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/how-the-cia-turned-american-literature-into-a-content-farm

Hmm. Where was Brian Merchant, Eric Bennett, and these other folks when the Underground Literary Alliance was pursuing the story? Here's one of many of my own posts on the matter:

http://kingwenclas.blogspot.com/2007/02/trends.html

My posts were follow-ups to a ULA "Monday Report" on the matter by essayist Richard Cummings.

http://outyourbackdoor.com/ULA/mr-cummings-52305.html

Cummings made a lot of accusations in his essay. The ULA presented his essay for informational purposes, letting readers judge for themselves. The key point-- CIA involvement in the world of literature-- is what we stressed. This was seven years ago.

What happened? The ULA was attacked and ostracized by the established lit-world. Because of the flurry of pressure, five key members of the ULA resigned, virtually overnight. NOT ONE established or semi-established literary person defended us-- or even the idea that the matter needed looking into. This issue, more than anything else we did, turned the ULA and its members into pariahs.

Dare I say that the Underground Literary Alliance was right all along?

About Short Stories

THE ONE THING which can rescue literature as a cultural force is the revival of the short story. By revive, I don’t mean continuation of same. The pattern of the system “literary” story encouraged in hundreds of writing programs needs to be blown up. On every point, the new writer needs to do the opposite of what’s acclaimed today. Across-the-board rule breaking. The objective should be to present a short story which looks unlike any ever created. This is how to create excitement—the excitement of art.

Is it doable? Are there writers alive today who want to do it?

A handful, by my reckoning. If they pull it off, they’ll be artistic trailblazers. Creative revolutionaries.

The Writer Stereotype

We see the writer stereotype in the movie, “Her,” with Joaquin Phoenix playing a character named Theodore Twombley. Wimpy, weepy, withdrawn, “walled-off,” crying at the drop of a hat. Reclusive. Soft. Dependent. To call him feminized would be an insult to women.

We’ve come a long way since the days of Ernest Hemingway and Jack London!

In the 1940’s and 1950’s, Hemingway was like a rock star. He had a greater cultural footprint, as a celebrity and personality, than any actor, singer, or sports figure. That’s when literature still mattered.

MARGINALIZED

Since those days, the position of writers in the culture has become marginalized. We had a recent example of this with the announcement of nominations for the NBCC awards. NBCC? What’s that?

Meanwhile, awards for the feckless and untalented, Golden Globes and Grammies, grab the TV space and headlines. Writers don’t try to compete. They’re, uh, withdrawn. They’re absorbed with the personal. Such careful, cautious, and withdrawn thinking is why literature in America is a declining cultural phenomenon and a dying art.

WELL-REGULATED

The writing game is well-regulated. If you try to make noise, the mandarins who control things can’t stand it. The entire system from top to bottom, MFA programs to editors and agents in New York, is designed to screen out dynamism and noise.

Philadelphia novelist Lawrence Richette didn’t fit the stereotype. He was, yes, egotistical and outspoken. He believed in himself. He didn’t make artistic decisions according to the whims of the Insider literary crowd. Book editors wanted nothing to do with him, despite his talent. Imagine if this philosophy were practiced in the worlds of movies, music, and sports!

REBELS

One of the objectives of the Underground Literary Alliance was to turn the writer stereotype on its head. That’s why I brought larger-than-life macho roots authors Jack Saunders and Wild Bill Blackolive into the outfit.

To me, to be any good, and not just a mass of solipsistic sensibilities, the writer needs to be MORE engaged with the world than the average person. Outgoing and out there; amid human society and the organized chaos of nature. A public figure. The lit game needs public figures, of greater personality and larger presence than Jonathan Franzen and Alice Munro!

FOOTBALL—OR BOOKS?

Sixty years ago, professional American football was a niche sport. On Superbowl Sunday tomorrow it will be the centerpiece of the nation—focal point of the economy. What happened?

It’s not that football is very intrinsically exciting. A few minutes of action punctuated by constant breaks. Football gained prominence through:

A.) New outlets; chiefly television.

B.) Unparalleled marketing.

C.) The creation of striking characters and storylines. Richard Sherman to Wes Welker to Peyton Manning. Quick: name one character from Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom.

But as I’ve said, the literary world doesn’t even try to compete.

The Strange Case of Sheila Heti

It never ceases to amuse me that members of the literary establishment remain terrified of me and my ideas, as if I were the carrier of a communicable disease. (The disease of independent thinking.) This, despite the fact I remain the most powerless of writers, a pariah under quarantine. That, at least, is the way I feel, staying (temporarily?) in the desolate moonscape of Detroit.

Case in point: trendy writer Sheila Heti. Recently I set up a new twitter account, @literarycircus, whose intent is to promote, in a marginal way, my satirical blog, The Literary Circus—
www.literarycircus.blogspot.com
 The idea is to follow the doings of today’s literary people, and on occasion comment on them, often satirically or tongue-in-cheek. Sense-of-humor assumed.

Follow a few literary sites and Twitter will then give you suggestions of people to follow. Leading literary tweeters. It’s how I began following Sheila Heti, who I know of in a vague way only as a variety of McSweeneyite writer. On January 19th I made a cogent, informed reply to one of her tweets. Shortly thereafter she began following me—something she likely does automatically with anyone who responds to her tweets. It’s a standard way of building outreach. Anyway, I saw the note in my list of emails: “Such-and-such is now following you on twitter.” Hmm: Who would’ve thought it? A broad-minded McSweeneyite person, I said to myself? Perhaps the literary world is finally changing.

I noticed a couple days later that Ms. Heti was no longer following me. Okay. This was more predictable. Someone may have told her who was doing the Literary Circus blog; that you’re not supposed to have dealings, direct or indirect, with that person. A week later, checking my vast list of followers (all of twenty), I saw that Ms. Heti was again following that twitter account of mine. Curious. I imagined there were Soviet-style debates taking place behind the scenes. What’s the acceptable line to take with this guy? Or, as George Orwell would put it, “Are we at war with Eurasia or Eastasia today?”

Then, with another day, Ms. Heti was again not following me, and what’s more, I wasn’t following her account. In other words, I’d been blocked.

I’d done a dozen-or-so tweets during the week in question, all fairly innocuous—not one directed at Sheila Heti, beyond that original reply of mine to a tweet of hers, which she must have approved of, because it got her inadvertently following my new twitter account in the first place! Usually (I almost said “Normally,” a word which is un-p.c.) a person is blocked for sending a series of harassing tweets. Or at least one. Not for merely existing. Ah, but the quarantine!

CONTRADICTIONS

I gather that Sheila Heti is an uber-feminist of some kind. Curious then that she’s made her way as a writer with an outfit run by the most ruthless literary patriarch of them all, though that patriarch presents himself as a benevolent dictator. Ironic as well that my former “gang,” the Underground Literary Alliance, got into trouble with the literary establishment beginning in the year 2000 by criticizing the so-called “New White Guys”—that well-hyped group of affluent and trendy postmodern male writers named Franzen, Moody, Antrim, Foster-Wallace, and Company. We called them “the Big Money Boys,” among other things. A few of these individuals were abusing the literary grants process; we pointed this out; the established literary community looked the other way. We’re back to George Orwell. All white guys are equal, but some are more equal than others.

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While the benevolent dictator who leads the McSweeneys Gang presents himself to the world as an anti-totalitarian, the truth is that the literary scene is totalitarian. No criticism of the major players and their ideas is to be found anyplace. If a contrarian such as myself dares knock or mock these people—the essence of free expression—the person is considered a madman, and consigned to the farthest reaches of the literary universe. Zorxon, or Zytron. Or at least Detroit. At the simple existence of such an individual, obedient literary people become terrified, and scurry away. “Danger, Will Robinson,” the robot screams. “Danger!”

Myself, if I see anyone treated by his fans and acolytes like a substitute god; or see any ideas or premises put beyond the reach of disagreement, I’m going to say something. That’s the task of a writer. As I said, I’m a contrarian.

(I have a suspicion there’s another answer to the mystery. The real story. Which is that the “stars” of the literary scene are more-or-less manufactured. They’re intellectually challenged. They can’t even write without the help of workshops screening their mistakes—Jennifer Egan and Vendela Vida have admitted this publicly—or without the help of editors and agents. They’re not even sure what to think. What’s the consensus on that question? Which way is the literary herd going? Throw into this mix a critic like myself who wants to question or debate them, who requires them to be honest or to think, and even the best of them run the other way. Ergo, all the protections and barriers. That’s my latest theory, anyway.)

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(Be sure to read my mad ebook novel, The McSweeneys Gang, still available at Nook or Kindle. If I were “playing the game” and trying to please people I’d take it down, but as Lee Marvin says at the end of the 1960’s movie version of “The Killers,” I just don’t have the time.)

Superficiality

It’s hard to find any depth in the work of contemporary artists, filmmakers, musicians/composers, and especially writers. Today’s trendy crowd of highly-praised writers are notable only for their superficiality.

The reason may be that few of them have any kind of metaphysical relationship with God or the universe. Even atheist Ayn Rand had a metaphysical relationship with the universe. It was based on her own egomania—herself as the center of the universe—but still made for exciting reading.

The Novels of Lawrence Richette

Larry Richette was a novelist. That’s how he thought of himself and identified himself. All else meant nothing, was excess baggage. For Larry, his art always came first.

It was as if he knew he had a limited amount of years on this earth—more limited than most—to get his work done. When I met him for coffee on occasion, his work—and the art of the novel—was all he wanted to talk about. (His favorite novelists were Don De Lillo and Bret Easton Ellis.)

The novelist I compared Lawrence Richette to was John O’Hara. Novelistic competence—always readable, without too many bells and whistles but always with a point to make. Larry made it look easy.

One of his best novels, The Secret Family, is based on the history of his own family in Italy and America. The kind of thing Mario Puzo wrote when he was good, before he went for the flash and money.

Another novel, The Fault Line, of especial pertinence to Philadelphians, is Richette’s thinly-disguised take on the MOVE bombing, which Larry covered as a young reporter. It’s short, journalistic, concise and dramatic.

My favorite Lawrence Richette novel, however, is Private Screenings. Here’s a review I wrote of it when it came out. It’s an honest review. I’m never less than honest. I disappointed or angered more than one struggling author when I ran the ULA, by refusing to tell them their book was something it was not.

http://blitzreview.blogspot.com/2008/06/novel-of-year.html

When I first encountered Richette, as a matter of fact, and he told me he was a writer, I thought to myself, “Not another one!” (The Underground Literary Alliance was in its heyday and I’d achieved some notoriety. There are struggling writers everyplace.) Larry pawned a copy of his novel, Secret Family, on me. I took it home intending to glance at the first page or two and dismiss it. I ended up reading the novel most of the night. (The first couple pages in fact are a tad slow. His proper beginning comes with the description of a personality around page five.)

Larry Richette received some bad press—a mark of distinction in my eyes. The articles don’t say that he was a very generous guy. After the ULA collapsed, he was one of the few individuals who didn’t abandon me. When I was hurting financially (flat broke) after I moved back to Philly in 2009, Larry bought me dinner on more than one occasion. The last time I saw him, in fact, a couple years ago, I was walking down the street near Rittenhouse Square. A voice yelled from across the street, “Karl! Karl!” It was Larry Richette having lunch at an outdoor table at some trendy cafe. I joined him and he ordered lunch for me. I begged off out of pride but he ordered it anyway. We talked about—what else?—books and authors, and what he was currently writing. Larry was as intelligent on the subject of literature as anyone I’ve met.

Why was he never published by the big guys? You tell me. Read his books and give me an explanation. Lawrence Richette’s novels are intelligent and readable— the kind of thing intelligent readers once read by the truckload, but which today, from the current breed of designated authors, is very hard to find. Jonathan Franzen with a deeper understanding of the world and a better sense of pace.

The only reason I can see for agents and editors not touching Larry is that they perceived him to be a “difficult” personality. A pity that those delicate souls put manners and convenience above art. It’s not the way the game should be played.

RIP Larry Richette

I just received tardy word of the death of Philadelphia novelist Lawrence Richette. Larry did a lot of self-publishing, and was an advocate of good writing and writers. I appeared at several readings with Larry in Philly, including a ULA (Underground Literary Alliance) event at a rock club aptly called the Underground in 2007.

Larry received fairly bad press from local media, but whenever I was in Philly I found him to be a good friend. We had many long conversations about literature at coffeeshops (Larry was on the wagon), sometimes with loud voices, which threw people, no doubt.

What Larry was above all was a terrific writer.

I’ll have more to say about his work when I can. Here’s his obit:

http://articles.philly.com/2013-12-31/news/45710415_1_book-lawrence-a-south-philadelphia

Hidden Gods?

THINKERS from LeBon to Jung to Lacan have believed mankind is swayed by hidden forces in the subconscious mind. The notion is in line with the pagan myths outlined in Robert Graves’ The White Goddess. The idea is that the pagan gods and mythic figures are unavoidable symbols, appearing in our culture and thoughts of themselves, against our will.

I think of this when assessing my own short novel, The McSweeneys Gang, which began as a cartoon-style pop satire but soon got away from me, new characters and situations materializing of their own volition. In particular, the character of “The Assassin,” appearing in the guise of a beautiful but troubled woman. Is this character a version of Graves’ “White Goddess”? Hmm. I’ll have to reread the ebook to find out. (Available via Kindle or Nook.)

Visions

I’ve been browsing through The White Goddess by Robert Graves, which someone sent me to read. I can’t say I like the arcane work—much of it’s nonsense—but it does stimulate thought. It gives a different way of viewing the world.

I’m intrigued by Graves’s poetic way of thinking. I’ve looking through objects to see the reality behind or beneath. Of his “seeing” words in the air before him. Though he doesn’t call it that, I call it having visions.

I’ve been trying to tune into ideas myself, new and old—though one doesn’t try to do it, but allows it to happen.

I’m living a fairly Spartan lifestyle right now in barren Detroit. A mundane job. Frigid temperatures. No TV. A dead phone. An el cheapo netbook which only sporadically hooks into a network. Minimizing the world’s electronic assault, on the 19th floor of an old building, I read. Especially late at night.

In the very early morning, when awaking, the brain is alive to thoughts and speculations.

My main speculation is this: That we’ve become not an athiestic post-Christian culture, but a pagan one. The evidence is everywhere around us, in the culture itself.

Robert Graves makes it plain that paganism never left Western civilization. It’s always been present, waiting under the surface to re-emerge.

Many of us remain Christian, despite the omnipresent culture. Others of us worship different gods. (Paganism allows, almost requires, a multiplicity of gods.)

I’ve identified three main alternate gods displacing the Judeo-Christian Jehovah (leaving Islamic Allah for the moment out of the discussion). The three gods exist subliminally in the minds of their adherents, in large part controlling them. The three gods are:

A.) The Machine.

B.) The Goddess.

C.) Satan.

The truth is that those who most believe themselves untouched by faith and religion are most immersed in it. I’ll explain this, likely in an ebook—which will conclude with a provocative speculation about “Dueling Goddesses.” Or am I merely having fun with Graves’s ideas?

What’s the future of America? Of our culture and ourselves?

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(In the meantime, read my ebook novel The Tower, which plays many of these themes.)