that tribal thing

On my return from Madison, Wisconsin, where I attended WisCon, I was forced to contemplate the resourcefulness of administrative language as it was used to slot & manage me. Northwest Airlines designated me a “distressed passenger” when I found myself stranded following the failure of the hydraulics system in one of its planes. Personnel at the airport motel I was assigned to repeated the phrase, as did various other employees of the travel industry, interpellating me with a certain knowing sympathy that had the function of slotting me securely in place. Distressed? It’s a characterization hinting at a psychological problem rather than a person at the mercy of logisitical inadequacies. Used as an impersonal & instrumental categorization, it implies that any passenger’s state of being “distressed” could prove inconvenient or uncomfortable for others if not handled carefully. Certainly I felt stressed. But negotiating the ordeal that air travel has over the years become always has that effect on me. If the travel industry had chosen to use the term “stressed passenger” rather than “distressed passenger,” the emphasis would have shifted to the stressfulness of the conditions of travel rather than the state of mind of the traveler. But that would hardly have suited the corps, would it: administrative language seeks always to render potential subjects into objects that can be managed.

As if being designated a “distressed passenger” weren’t sufficiently pacifying, on arrival in Seattle I found that my home had been broken into. I prefer that clumsy verb phrase to the more efficient “burgled” because the break-in ruptured the privacy of my most personal spaces—evident in certain traces, such as open filing drawers, letters of thirty years past scattered over the floor of my office, the bed sheets and duvet cover thrown back and rumpled, drawers ajar with their contents incompletely jammed back into them… The characterization rendering me passive in this instance is “victim,” the word used on the police report. No thank you, officer. I decline the role.

See, it’s a never-ending battle against administrative language: law enforcement as well as the medical, insurance, and travel industries, all of them can’t function if those whom they administer aren’t basically acquiescent. Those who don’t accept the role of object, those who don’t acquiesce, are troublemakers. (& no doubt there are procedures & another set of labels for managing them.) Language, insidious language. Think Foucault, not Sapir-Whorf. Resistance isn’t futile, but unintelligible.

WisCon, though. Some of the conversation of Now What resonates with some of the conversation I engaged in (or listened to) at WisCon. For the uninitiated, WisCon is a feminist science fiction convention. Its attitude is inclusive, which means that conflicts spring up & are never resolved, just endlessly deferred over papered over. (Tribal identification at WisCon is as loose as it gets.) This year, a thousand people attended, among them Samuel R. Delany, Carol Emshwiller, Andrea Hairston, Ursula K. Le Guin, Wendy Walker, Kelly Link, Alan DeNiro, Nalo Hopkinson.

Caught up in my preparations for WisCon, WisCon itself, and the considerable aftermath following the event, I’ve slipped out of the loop of the conversation here that’s moving so fast. Blonde’s inciting us to Virilian speed, and reading all the posts in one go, the words go racing past. For a moment I’m the animated figure surrounded by sentences whizzing past in every direction, my head spinning around like a top as my eyeballs extrude on eyestalks chasing after them. Back when my body was young and could take the stress, I’d eat speed to write brilliant seminar papers. That was around the time I learned to think, to consciously make connections, which I’d do by putting words on an unlined page and drawing lines and arrows and circles, something I don’t think I’ve done even once in the last twenty-five years. Maybe because I think now in sentences, sentences with lots of subordinate clauses denoting relations. Thirty years ago, thinking was painful, effortful—but exhilarating. For a long time, engaging in the activity of thinking felt exactly like taking speed.

Thinking is an altered state of consciousness. Some people live in that state almost all the time. Do they ever watch television? Which activities are compatible with the altered state of consciousness that is thinking? And when people think & write about what they’ve watched on television, do they slip out of that state while they are watching television, or are they able to watch television without slipping out of that state? What is it that happens when we watch television? I ask because I’m starting to wonder if television has something fundamental to do with the numbed quiescence of the administered classes of the United States, passive spectators to the destruction of their future.

If I had hours & hours of time, I’d write pages & pages in response to the many contributions made to Now What since my first post. Instead, I’m just going to pluck a few fragments out of context & comment.

Kass: you ask how we respond as intellectuals and artists (or artists and intellectuals) to the fact that the public has gone to sleep. It may be that that’s the Big Question of the Moment (portentous capitalizations & all). It’s not a question I’ve ever seriously asked myself as an artist & intellectual (or an intellectual & artist), though for most of my life as an artist & intellectual, political consciousness has informed my work. It strikes me that this question is one for artists & intellectuals (or intellectuals & artists) to address collectively—but never individually. How, after all, can the artist (& the intellectual) do their imaginative work if that particular Big Question informs the work? Not so with the collective approach. Part of the reason of forming an intentional community or tribe is to create & expand the discourse in which the artist & intellectual lives, breathes, works. (& yeah, I hope we can talk more about this.)

Another thing about this Big Question you pose, Kass: it might help if we broke down “public” into something made of distinct parts rather than taking it for a blob that amounts to “the masses” etc. There are so many different publics. & it seems to me that there are different problems with different publics (though yeah, the effect of all those publics falling into inattentiveness or indifference or comatose absence feels near-Total).

“the masses slumber as we jack off, i guess”

That’s the late capitalist system at work, Kass, making us think that work is masturbation. (If it’s not validated by the usual criterion of success—the almighty dollar—then it’s got to be just wanking. Meaning, you’re doing it for yourself. Meaning, artists who don’t make a living off their work are just self-indulgent sluts contributing nothing to the culture.)

Kass: you ask, “In Opposition To What?” Sometimes “existing in opposition” is what’s needed, in which case no one has to ask about what the “What” actually is. Sometimes, though, that kind of reactive focus isn’t what’s needed. In which case, it’s not opposition that’s needed, but an alternative. Consider: we can be in opposition to the Iraq war. But that won’t solve the larger problem we’re talking about on this blog, will it? Or we can be in opposition to the US’s use of & rationalization of torture. Or we can be in opposition to the US’s determination to eradicate all reproductive freedom for women and effective AIDS education programs. But these are all issues (or clusters of issues). For me, the imaginative construction of alternative narratives, alternative ethics, alternative worldviews, alternative aesthetics, is key. It’s harder to talk about the alternative than it is to talk about the oppositional, sure. But the point is, refusing both the status quo & the oppositional to embrace an alternative is a refusal to get trapped within the parameters of the mind-numbing nonsense that’s constantly shrinking the imaginative possibilities available to public discourses. We need fresh directions, fresh paths for our imaginations to take. We’re being killed by the narrowness of our culture’s notion of “reality.”

You also raise the more general question, Kass, of the relation between art & politics. Adrienne Rich recently addressed that issue in an essay titled “Permeable Membrane” in the Virginia Quarterly Review at http://www.vqroline.org/articles/2006/spring/rich-permeable-membrane/

I suggest reading it alongside Lyn Hejinian’s “Who Is Speaking?”(which can be found in her collection, The Language of Inquiry. Together, these might give us some ideas about that tribal thing we don't know how to talk about.

interview : ted pelton

Lance: Some might say it's pure self-destructive lunacy, in the current socio-economic environment, to try to launch an alternative press. What motivated you to do just that with Starcherone in 2000? What have you enjoyed most about it? What have you found most difficult?

Ted: The main impetus at first was to get my own book published. I’d won an NEA in Fiction but despite sending out my work all over for years and years I remained in the strange position of being an award-winning but essentially unpublished writer. So one day during a time when I had been undergoing an unrelated, life-changing experience, I said, Why not, and started Starcherone.

Slowly, it became more than that. Ray Federman asked me in 2001 if I could reprint The Voice in the Closet, which had long been out of print. I think Federman is a terrifically important writer, as any number of national audiences outside the US (France, Romania, Germany, etc.) attest, so I jumped at the chance. Two years later we incorporated as a non-profit and a year later we adopted our current 4 books/year schedule.

What I have enjoyed most about it is that it was in some way all ridiculously easy–that for the amount of money that one might have otherwise used to buy a middling car, one can become important in the world of literature, or at least in the certain select part of that world I had always cared about and admired the participants of, whether one calls that avant-garde or small press or whatever. The importance didn’t really translate into much for which one could supply data. But nevertheless, very suddenly, people were talking about the press, teaching and discussing our books in some impressive universities, and for the first time in my life I began to have the flattering and uncanny experience of people already knowing who I was before I met them in person and actually seeking me out–and as well knowing my work. I was on the radar.

At the same time, what I have found most difficult is how entrenched the true mainstream, hegemonic discourse of Literature is–that while it is easy to break into the avant-garde, which after all is not a single place, but multiple, ephemeral environments always in flux, there exists this other definition or characterization of contemporary writing that is truly bound up with money, class, and corporate power. I already knew these things in an abstract way, I’m sure. But I think I had also always naively credited the literary world with values that transcended these base concerns–art was a province where the assumptions of power were dismantled, critiqued, and a new world, at least potentially, gestured toward.

But now I see that The New York Times doesn’t write about our books not because they don’t think our books are good enough, nor even because our books are not geared to a commercial marketplace (because there are arts that The Times does acknowledge that are esoteric and rarified tastes), but because we are not part of the establishment that they are trying to uphold–an establishment which includes the (dying) New York publishing industry, and in which someone like John Updike is considered a major artist. What was an ART to me has been revealed as a business and a constructed and protected social strata. I really feel in many ways like a true dissident–and there is of course a thrill in this–in that I am sure there is an active effort in these places (include Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus, etc.) to ignore what we do. I have seen The Times, the paper of record, flat-out LIE about contemporary literature, how it is made and produced. But the frisson of being an enemy of the establishment is ultimately overcome by the tedium and disappointment of seeing what continues to pass for American Literature among these people and among the people they report to, because obviously we’d like to reach the large audience of smart people who read The Times and don’t realize that there are alternatives to the construction of contemporary literature one finds there.

Lance: If you could offer three bits of advice to someone reading this who might be interested in starting his or her own press, what would they be?

Ted: One, join CLMP, the Council of Literary Magazines and Presses. This will not only give you a measure of credibility and community for your enterprise, but it will gain you inclusion of the CLMP listserv, which is the best resource available for any question you might have about publishing, an open forum where you can network with people all over the country who have been doing this for years. You will have a thousand questions, in time, and there’s no single source for answers, the technologies and other factors are changing so rapidly.

Second is a piece of old-time advice I saw in a short essay by Robert Creeley in Was That a Real Poem describing the early days of Black Mountain Review back in the 1950s. He said that when he started BMR, he wrote to Pound asking for words of guidance. Pound wrote back that just as verse is comprised of a constant and a variant, a magazine should be likewise constructed. Have roughly half of your content be from people whose work you know and trust. Then have the other half–and I still remember these phrases from when I first read the essay at least 20 years ago, when I edited my first magazine–“be as hogwild as possible, so that any idiot thinks he has a chance of getting in.”

With Starcherone, that’s translated to our making certain that works that come to us either through our contest or our open reading period have a place on our list. Even though there are particular writers and traditions we seek to uphold and maintain, we’ve always wanted to make sure we also provide a way for new talents to break out, people unknown to us. A press that just publishes friends or acquaintances or members of a designated crowd or writing program doesn’t do much good, I don’t think, even when the work is generally strong. The 50% figure has worked out pretty well to date: 4 of the 8 single-author titles we’ve done, excluding my own book, have been by debut authors. “Idiot,” by the way, is Pound’s word, not mine.

Finally, third, don’t be discouraged; specifically, don’t be discouraged by poor sales. Books are hard to sell, even for the big New York houses. What was initially very frustrating to me was to discover that although a lot of folks will talk about how they support small press literature, it is terrifically deeply ingrained in the American character to look for bargains and discounts, and this desire may well supercede all others among my fellow citizens. So that even one’s friends, the ones you expect would be quickest to make sure your enterprise recovers its costs and stays afloat, frequently try in every way they can to get the books from your struggling little non-profit for free or in trade, etc. Don’t be angry with them; Americans can hardly help themselves from behaving this way. Stay persistent.

Sadly, a great deal of your time will almost always be given over to raising money. Accept that. And don’t feel bad if you have to play guilt cards on people to pry some cash out of them. As someone who is devoting so great an amount of your time and energy in the service of art, and not in the least to making a profit, you are always beyond reproach, an angel flying too close to the ground.

Lance: You're a writer as well as a publisher. Malcolm & Jack, your first novel, is due out next month from Spuyten Duyvil. It's a wonderfully hip, energetic imagining of a meeting between Jack Kerouac and Malcolm X, with cameos by the likes of Williams Burroughs and Billie Holiday, during the late forties and fifties. That is to say, it engages with a re-envisioning of the past, a fictionalization of history—something we've only touched on glancingly in this blog so far. Would you talk a little about how such a project shaped your dynamic use of point-of-view and narrative structure? What interested you about reshaping yesterday?

Ted: Thanks for reading it. Every person who reads one’s work feels to me like they are bestowing a gift. There are a number of things to say in response to your question. For one thing, I wanted to write a book that tried its best not privilege any particular gender or racial perspective. Now of course this is an impossible task, to remove one’s experiences, as it were, to become so utterly the negative in negative capability, to disappear, and I’m not even sure one would ever want to entirely disappear, but I certainly wanted to have different voices drive the novel. The novel has narrators who are black and white, male and female, straight and gay. I don’t do this in the old sense metafictionists used to be after, of virtuosity. I’d never want to make any such claims, and I find them really cloying and self-aggrandizing in a way that’s not only off-putting but I think destructive to the art of fiction writing, how it’s received.

So I don’t view every different style or voice I can ventriloquize as a writer as an achievement, another victory; rather, I view everything I’m not particularly good at representing or creating as limitations. For years I have been trying to do better, forcing myself to things I don’t do well, to decrease my limitations, to escape myself. That is a great joy to me as a writer. To make a metaphor, I can’t experience sex as a woman in real life; I am not a woman. Yes, I could I suppose go out and approximate it in those creative ways people do in their lives, dressing up, blurring boundaries, but that isn’t me, for one thing, and, for another, it seems like it would always come up against limitations. I’m also not unsatisfied with who I am; I’m just curious about things I’m not. As a writer I can satisfy this, and it’s particularly good to hear that I got this or that thing right. That’s one thing I’m after, anyway. To me that’s a big part of what literature is and does–tells you what it’s like to be other people.

Another part of the reason, I think, besides the simple thrill of being “other,” is democracy, what it really means. Malcolm X is my countryman; he is an inspiring figure in my history as an American citizen, even though I am so-called “white.” It’s funny that literature, which is supposedly a sophisticated art form, finds itself hamstrung by things that many popular art forms really have no problems with, and haven’t had for years. The Rolling Stones played Howling Wolf more than 40 years ago, respectfully, and found themselves and their own sound in doing that; there are many such examples in music. But when I was writing this book, many people said to me, “Ooh, you’re going to get into trouble for writing as Malcolm X. People are really going to be angry with you.” None of them personally had a problem with what I was doing, but there were all these “that’s not allowed” assumptions going on. I feel like the true nature of democracy is to some extent to dismantle the simpler assumptions of identity writing, and I think it’s shameful how aesthetically conservative literature has become, where everyone’s assumptions about novels, certainly mainstream publishers but even readers presumably interested in “innovative” writing, presuppose narrative as, first and foremost, barely disguised confession. I think writing certainly does have elements of confession, but words aren’t interested in the truth, to quote Creeley again. Maurice Blanchot also told us this, among others.

Anyway, there was another aspect to your question, about remaking the past. I think this was basically just a side-product of writing about my heroes, Malcolm X, Jack Kerouac, Billie Holiday, and, sure, Alfred Kinsey. And it was also certainly prompted by political resentments against a generation of politicians who have now pretty much passed from the scene, though not entirely–and certainly their assumptions haven’t. I was interested in taking on the 1940s, the period of the development of American Empire. I mean, yes, we fought a war that saved the world from fascism, not rhetorical but real fascism, and that was wonderful and necessary, but what has followed from that, the national valuing of war, has been disastrous, and keeps repeating.

I started the book following on the heels of the Reagan-Bush years; Reagan and Bush were both of that war generation. Malcolm and Jack were both part of an underground in the 1940s that became the different parts of the powerful counter-culture discourse of the 1960s. I wanted to meditate on the 1940s mythmaking that fueled the rise of conservatism in the late 20th century and trumped 1960s pacifist and socialist impulses. Remaking the past is something everybody does. It is the job of fiction writers, I think, to clarify this. Reagan isn’t in the book, but he so clearly exemplified this: I mean, in his stories, as was well documented (see Gary Wills’s book on him, for instance), he believed he actually fought in the war, even though he had worn the uniforms only in war films, and believed as well he was actually present at the liberation of the death camps, so powerful and convincing had his narrative reconstructions about these events been.

So in Malcolm & Jack we’ve got American Empire, hegemonic national narratives, historical crimes (as Malcolm never stopped telling us), and a bunch of sexy people at the heart of it–why shouldn’t I enjoy the activity of remaking the past? Susan Sontag says somewhere that the past is the greatest, most tantalizing imaginative space we have. It’s supposed to be stable. Of course, it isn’t at all; it’s all stories, being remixed and recreated all the time.

Lance: In a recent comment here on Coetzee's Disgrace, you wrote: "I would contend that while innovation is a path to the beautiful, it is beauty itself which is the goal, to my mind." Would you please expand on that a little? What, by your lights, constitutes innovation in fiction? And what do you mean when you say "the beautiful"? How did such an aesthetic impulse inform your writing of Malcolm & Jack?

Ted: I think I’ve already now gone into that in the rest of that thread on the blog, and I can’t help it that I remain a sucker for Romantic constructions of the purpose of literature. It seems real enough to me to talk about beauty being truth and learning as an artist to trust that sense, given one’s own particular historical and aesthetic circumstances, which are always changing, it’s true, and should always change; nevertheless, beauty and the search for beauty, the desire to make beauty, is a constant. It even sounds maudlin to me to hear myself speak this way. But beauty, as you pointed out in that thread, can be embodied in a work of hideous ugliness such as Samuel Delany’s Hogg, which is so brave, so uncensored, so transgressive, indeed so uncomfortable, that it becomes an aesthetic experience of a very high order.

How this impulse informed Malcolm & Jack? I wanted it to be a good book, so I kept trying to make it more beautiful in fulfilling the tasks it had created for itself. Billie Holiday not being able to sing because she’s in jail for drugs she takes because she’s miserable about her life and, goddamn it, oppressed in white America, allowed to appear on a marquee at a hotel club but having to enter the hotel through the back door, and then finding herself in an interracial affair in the segregated jail ... I wanted to create such complex situations out of little-appreciated histories in a way that fit my sense of the complexities of lived experiences–beauty is truth, and truth beauty. That’s all I know, as the poet sez, and I’m sorry some find that a maudlin or politically unsophisticated construction. I want to move thoughtful and sophisticated readers; part of that is political, certainly, but, as Williams says, bad writing never helped anyone. Beauty is what makes a political art successful or not. What is beauty? You tell me.

Lance: In your posts about alternative publishing here, you come across as a born optimist. Does that hold true with respect to where you see the enterprise in, say, another ten years?

Ted: Jesus, I don’t know. I am an optimist, it’s true, but I think I’d have to be a pessimist to see myself still doing this same thing ten years from now. I’ve always liberated myself from such things after a certain amount of time; I love my life and my own writing too much to remain so long serving (and I do mean serving, not as a jail term, but definitely in the sense of service) as Starcherone’s director.

Ten years from now, in 2016, I would hope, optimistically, that Starcherone still exists, and that I will have passed on guidance of it to someone else. But it is also true that I can’t foresee a time when I will willingly let Starcherone die. I owe that to our authors. Starcherone can’t get its books into Barnes & Noble coinciding with release dates, with coordinated advertising campaigns and orchestrated reviews to maximize sales over the short-term, so what we do offer authors is that their books will stay available and that we will keep talking them up and pushing them, with our books’ shelf life measured in years rather than months. That requires us to stay in business. Literature is a long-view art form; it is perhaps the most difficult art form to consume, so time is always needed to allow a book’s audience to be nurtured and developed, particularly when the work is new and challenging and requires its audience to learn how to read it, as is the case with practically any new innovative artist in fiction.

That’s the drama. Will I escape my own creation eventually and get back to my own life and writing (make no mistake: Starcherone takes up hours, weeks, and months, and most of that time is not spent creatively)? Or will I sacrifice the greatest part of my creative years to a larger cause that in the end even I will see as having been fruitless, pointless, a useless and unappreciated waste of time and energy that in the end becomes no more than a footnote in a very large history of our literature, if anyone in the end ever cares about that again?

Who knows? In any case, even if I was born an optimist, I have studied other subjects over the years since, in school and on my own.

Top 10 Reasons Not to Fart in an Elevator (or, why passing gas is sometimes a lot like passing prose)

N.B. For those who stumble on this post, its contents respond to Kass Fleisher's recent post "Art|Politics|Beauty|Power," where, at the end, she writes...

"other than that, can we just have a moratorium on the list thing? unless we can manage, say, Top Ten Reasons Not to Fart in an Elevator...etc...."

And so,
*****

10. Because while farting is often strangely appreciated (although often unacknowledged) by the sender, cracking wind in front of others can be taken as an insult.

9. Unlike an escalator, where people and their ideas move mostly in a linear manner, from point A to point B (unless one gets her shoelaces caught in the mechanism), an elevator is an enclosed space where riders assiduously avoid each other’s bodies.

8. For what may be beautiful to one rider (the sender), in the presence of others may be taken with horror—as in the terror of the Kantian sublime.

7. Because beauty and truth in writing, while eloquent and meaningful and etc, become shot full of shit once someone cuts the elevator cable and a boxful of strangers plunge to their deaths. And when this happens, of course, the ventilation stops working.

6. When Willy Wonka launches the great glass elevator into the sky, above his candy empire, the last thing he wants is to be reminded that Charlie stole “fizzy lifting drinks.”

5. Because with 99 ways to tells the same story, how many of those aren’t visual? Letting it all out after a plate of beans would simply confuse the issue through another sensory dimension.

4. If power were a discussion to be had over a sophisticated intellectual dinner atop a high-rise building, the gaseous passage of such contents through the bowels in a downward moving elevator at the close of the meal would surely never be mistaken, by those guests not privy to the previous conversation, for a suitable dessert.

3. Humankind has never produced a working elevator; rather, the government “produces” elevator shots in Area 51, and thus, the act in question is technically impossible.

2. In 1853, when American inventor Elisa Otis invented the brake that would stop an elevator with failed cable from falling unfettered (see # 7, anyway), public confidence in the devices increased—and thus, the modern skyscraper rose over the typhoid-sodden streets of Chicago New York London Paris. Had Otis focused on flatulence, instead, as his primary concern, because you didn’t know enough to keep a tight lid on things, well, then, we’d have never reached the astounding heights of present-day narrative (for where would our publishers house themselves?).

1. In other words, elevators, of course, don’t exist when we write about them, anymore than truth, beauty, originality, genius, authorship, or the other methane-filled constellations of fickle word winds swirling—a vortex of reeking syllables—through the lost shafts of the descending colon.

0. Even so, all in good fun, you may smell something untoward emanating from your motherboard.

matt madden : 99 ways to tell a story

In 1947, Raymond Queneau—mathematician, poet, fiction writer, and member of the Oulipo group dedicated to using formal constraints imposed on one's own work as a method of generating creativity—published Exercises in Style. He took a simple story and told it in 99 different styles: as a letter, a sonnet, a moral lesson about The Youth of Today, etc. The narrative itself is wholly unremarkable: a young man gets on a crowded bus, complains about being jostled, and then sits down when a seat becomes available; later, the narrator sees the man who jostled him in another part of town talking to a friend.

In 99 Ways to Tell a Story (Chamberlain Brothers, 2005), Matt Madden performs a kind of homage to Queneau by doing much the same thing, only in comix. The narrative itself is, if possible, even more unremarkable than the original nonstory story: a man who has been working at a computer stands, closes his laptop, and walks to the refrigerator; his partner asks him what time it is from upstairs; he responds 1:15; then he bends in front of the fridge, looking puzzled, wondering "What the hell was I looking for, anyway?" Madden retells that narrative in a variety of comic-book styles, from a variety of points of view, in a variety of different settings, from a variety of different angles, with a variety of different characters, without one of the two leads, without the refrigerator, as a paranoid religious tract, as an existentialist parable, and so on.

The outcome is fascinating, stimulating, and a micro-education in both narrativity and the history of comix. Its mechanism of production is the simultaneous use and abuse the past, and its aesthetic impulse harmonizes well with what some of us back in the mid-nineties referred to as the Avant-Pop, a mode of telling that amibivalently accomodates pop culture while using many of its assumptions of comfort, predictability, and spectacularization against itself.

One of my litmus tests for a "successful" text is that it makes me want to go out and write. Madden's accomplishes that like few I've come across recently. And, to tie back into our earlier discussion of pedagogy and the difficult imagination, I'm guessing it might have a vibrant life in the classroom as well.

Art|Politics|Beauty|Power

let me do a couple of things here:

first, lance said in his post that American Book Review is “in crisis,” and i thought i should let yall know that “crisis” isn’t quite the term at this point. “flux” would be more like it, and if what i was TOLD is happening does happen (so this is qualified), the situation may even be somewhat improved. illinois state had removed its long-time funding for a full-time, professional managing editor, which meant that the 2 people on the editorial wing (joe amato and me) and the 2 people on the production wing (tara reeser and sarah haberstich) were tasked not only with the expected duties but also details like...”um, has anyone checked the mail in the past month?” it didn’t work. (no shit? really?). if the editorial wing does move to another institution, it would seem that that new institution will restore that funding and position, which would allow the ed staff and prod staff to do what they’re best at. the person who has been proposed as the editorial point person for the journal in its new home is a very capable guy, and if this all goes through i think ABR will be in good hands.

if anyone has anything more up-to-date on this deal, please chime out. i’m no longer entirely...um...informed. hah.

so that’s done! (check.)

next: dear blonde (although only her hairdresser knows for sure...), i loved your post. (i’d say it left me ecstatic but that would be too...TOO.) lovingly, i’ll point out that this was my favorite section (perhaps b/c i have a short attention span...):

>Why can’t making art be the politics of making art?

>What’s the problem with creative and passionate dissent?

>Is it useful to ask ourselves questions about being, even if it might draw criticism or open us up to being accused of jacking-off?

one thing striking about your post is that it’s primarily composed of questions, which i find much more comfortable than monologues, this latter being what most of our posts have been. lance’s tyler gowan excerpt sounds a resonant tone for “us” (this tribe, whatever we are...)----how do we respond, as intellectuals and artists (or artists and intellectuals---this latter would be my personal ordering) to the fact that the public has gone to sleep? the masses slumber as we jack off, i guess---all of us in bed, then? (i don’t cum via dissensus---in times of conflict, most women’s capillaries shrink up, which is why a lot of women aren’t very into make-up sex...but hey, if that does it for others, why disrupt it?)

art is always the politics of making art, but apparently any insistence to that effect sounds to most of our citizens like a very shrill alarm clock. if we don’t control our readers, how do we respond to the fact that they just hit the snooze button and roll over?

i have a pretty bad jones for the russians myself; i’ve often been told i should “move on”...get “up to date”...but i still find them far better at discussing power than most thinkers, bar foucault, etc. here’s a shklovsky snippet from his memoir:

"So we see that Gorky is made of disbelief and piety, with irony for cement.
Irony in life is like eloquence in literature: it can tie everything together.
It makes a substitute for tragedy."

ouch! shit!

and so, ted! i love arguing with you, so let’s have it (note: there will be no sex afterward). keeping the power problem in mind, i’m thinking that what i loved greatly about poststructuralism was the suggestion that we could keep 2 ideas in our heads at one time. you wrote that altho...

>innovation is a path to the beautiful, it is beauty itself which is the goal, to my mind. Where I become doctrinaire about innovation is where I see conventionality hampering an artist's ascent to the beautiful....

do we as a group have a problem with the notion of innovation for the sake of innovation? (i’ll assume yes.) does our “tribe” have troubles with folks hoping to join b/c they have some notion of wanting to be an artistic rebel---just to be an artistic rebel? little of this has much to do with addressing power (to my mind). we have a habit of setting ourselves up as existing (“being,” blonde said, echoing heidegger maybe, ironically?) In Opposition.... many of us are old enough to flash to james dean and the anti-hero hero etc etc. but what plagues is, In Opposition To What?

my concern with beauty is that i want to do beauty (yes, i’ve failed, sue me) even as i’m conscious of beauty as a construct and as a commodity, a thing that can be romanticized right along with james dean, who ultimately served as (many things but also) a fabulous billboard for cigarettes.

sure; i want beauty as much as the next guy: the elegant turn of phrase, the well-turned ankle. i just want to maintain also the awareness of how violent those sorts of “turns” can turn out to be (and violence isn’t always bad in this context). the artist’s ascent is already hampered, yes? or perhaps we could say that the artist’s ascent will be a struggle against the powers of gravity, the baggage on her back, cigarette smoking, etc.

is it possible that one of us may be able to compose the utterly unexploitable piece of art? if “beauty,” and all its commodity-driven problems, is a good-size ascent, could unexploitability become...K2?

because, listen, al-zarqawi is dead. so is the pregnant woman (and her driver and, as many anti-abortion republicans have *interestingly* failed to point out, HER FETUS); and, you know, we’re still committing my-lai’s (anyone else shocked by this?).

seems to me there’s plenty that needs doing culturally, much of which has to do with abuse of power, and whether we want it to or not, or notice it happening or not, our work is going to do work. beauty does work. i can’t control my reader, but maybe i can attempt to ascend the slope that has to do with (at minimum) half-assed attempts to...attempt. to direct. against.

i mean, i’m obsessed with truth, but i can’t help but trouble “truth.” this is ok, right?

lance: check out drew gardner’s Petroleum Hat. great poems, brutal, smart, funny as fuck.

other than that, can we just have a moratorium on the list thing? unless we can manage, say, Top Ten Reasons Not to Fart in an Elevator...etc....

kass

A Call for Submissions

Emboldened by the fc2 sukenick award posting, I would like to invite all offbeat-onbeat writers, particularly of the female variety, to submit to Mad Hatters' Review, as our reading period for Issue 6 is officially due to close on the 14th (at midnight wherever you are). My staff and I are attempting to make our online journal a haven for offstream ("innovative") writers. We welcome book reviews, interviews, "non-fiction," short shorts, longer shorts, poetry, prose poetry, drama, multimedia projects, collaborative projects, and what we call whatnots (the indefinable glorious delicious outrageous). I've said "of the female variety" because we're getting many submissions from offstream male writers, but very very few from women. This is an issue for a future discussion, I'm sure.

I've been working on a schpeal (sp?) about the role and importance of online journals in promoting and disseminating fresh, sociopolitically aware/sophisticated and non-commercial writings. My own journal is only one of an increasing number.

ronald sukenick innovative fiction prize

Beginning this fall, the Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize will be awarded annually by FC2 to an outstanding book-length manuscript of formally innovative fiction. Hosted by the University of Notre Dame Creative Writing Department, the contest is open to all writers who have not previously published with FC2.

Contest entries will be accepted bewteen September 1, 2006, and December 1, 2006. The winner will be announced May 2007.

Full manuscripts, accompanied by a check for the reading fee of $20, should be sent to:

Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize
c/o Steve Tomasula
The Notre Dame Review
840 Flanner Hall
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN 46556-5639

Final selection of Sukenick Prize winners will be made by the FC2 Board of Directors: Lance Olsen, Lidia Yuknavitch, Michael Martone, Noy Holland, Susan Steinberg, and R. M. Berry. Selection criteria will be consistent with FC2’s stated mission to publish “fiction considered by America’s largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu,” including works of “high quality and exceptional ambition whose style, subject matter, or form pushes the limits of American publishing and reshapes our literary culture.”

The Sukenick Prize includes a $500 advance on royalties and publication of the winning manuscript by FC2, an imprint of the University of Alabama Press. In the unlikely event that no suitable manuscript is found among entries in a given year, FC2 reserves the right to award no prize.

For contest updates and full information on FC2’s mission, history, aesthetic commitments, authors, events, and books, please visit the press's website.

Tsipi Keller's Jackpot

The most recent novel I’ve read is Jackpot (2004) by Tsipi Keller, the first of what is intended to be a trilogy (the second book is just out, both by Spuyten Duyvil). I’d give it a B-plus, but then that’s because I’m a teacher and that kind of evaluation comes easily to me. And any good educator should define criteria. B-plus in my gradebook suggests good effort, but just short of highest achievement.

Maggie is a single, late-twenty-something New York clerk who hates her boss and is bored with her life. She has a friend, Robin, who always seems to have more fun than Maggie does (Robin’s page 10 brag about a vacation, “I fucked my brains out,” haunts Maggie the entire novel). She also has an older work-colleague, Susan, who is more stable and sensible. Against Susan’s advice, Maggie goes with Robin on vacation to Paradise Island.

Well, Maggie shows Robin a thing or two about fucking and brains once she gets to Paradise Island. Or rather, Robin immediately shoving off on a companion’s yacht, abandoning Maggie, Maggie shows herself. It’s like The Damnation of Theron Ware, to cite a novel from a completely different context and century: a naif gets a whiff of something much too heady and then outdoes her original influence to such an extreme as to show complete misunderstanding of the nuances of selective transgression, horrifying everyone, including ultimately the protagonist herself.

The movement of the book is clean and delivers on a very deft narrative strategy – the heroine’s descent is unexpected even though, when we look backward, all the signs were there. There was her ex-husband’s ridiculous accusation that she was an alcoholic, for instance. The early exposition seems innocent, and then, ka-blam, you’re in a cesspool of vomited-up Bahama Mamas and men who are only remembered as vague spectres from the previous night, even when they appeared in teams.

This is where Jackpot might have been a more courageous novel, to my mind. The descent is perhaps too clean. I found myself thinking of J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace – there, the descent is painstaking, delivered in excruciating, never-anaesthetized increments. Maggie’s blackouts in Jackpot, at the gaming tables and the nightly journeys afterwards to her now solely occupied hotel room, are a little too blurry for the reader to register the full horror of what is being represented. The novel comes in at a little under 200 pages. Maybe it needed to be 250 and to linger in anterooms on the way down to hell.

But maybe we’re not in hell yet, for Keller has the next novel in the sequence, Retelling, just out. Full disclosure: I also have a book with Spuyten Duyvil this summer; Keller and I are “stablemates”.

Given that, you’d think I would have given her at least an A-minus....

r.i.p. : review outlets & indie bookstores

Since today marks the one-month anniversary of Now What's launch, I'd like to start off by thanking a thousand times our contributors, commenters, and readers for what has begun to develop, at least from my perspective, into an engaging, energetic, rhizomatic conversation, as well as an intriguing, important, and downright addictive experiment. In his blog Samizdat, Robert Archambeau describes us as "a grubby left-bank cafe of the twenties, only available right on your lap-top, in a bring-your-own-absinthe environment." That sounds about right to me.

In a recent post, Davis Schneiderman wondered aloud if we had any figures on those who in one way or another are participating here. The answer, thanks to Site Meter, is yes. Now What has had 2,672 visitors so far, with an average of 112 a day. Each visit lasts, on average, four minutes and eleven seconds. Not only have people dropped by from around the U.S., but also Bulgaria, France, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, Poland, the U.K., Spain, Australia, Germany, Canada, and elsewhere around the world.

What I take away from those stats is this: there really is an extended tribe of readers, writers, and publishers Out There interested in the notion of perpetuating alternative prose as a space of resistance and celebration. That's a good thing, since the outlets for announcing and thinking about such projects are few and becoming fewer. At the Small Press Festival hosted at the University of Colorado in April by Jeffrey Deshell and Elizabeth Robinson, Ted Pelton and I found ourselves on a panel bemoaning the loss of traditional review channels for experimental fiction. As those of you who subscribe will have noticed, The New York Times Book Review, hardly a friend of the innovative, writes about fewer novels and short story collections of any kind than ever before. The American Book Review, one of the most ardent supporters of alternative writing in all its forms, is in crisis. In the hardcopy world, that leaves the inimitable Rain Taxi and a small handful of others.

In the digital world, however, it's a slightly different story. Excellent blogs—a good number of the best noted to the right of this post—are helping get the word out via an updated version of word-of-mouth. I don't know how many readers each actually has, but I suspect many fewer than those in the meat world.

Another dark sign for adventurous prose is the gradual folding of America's great indie bookstores. In a recent article in Slate on the subject, Tyler Gowan announced the closing of Berkeley's famous Cody's. The infiltration of chain bookstores into local shopping malls in the sixties and seventies began the slow erosion of the culture of literacy, inclusion of the odd, and sense of community fostered by the indies. Worse—and get this—there is only one buyer of fiction for the whole Barnes & Noble empire. Think about what that means for alternative publishers bringing out alternative prose. FC2, for instance, considers itself wildly lucky if B&N will carry even a few of its titles, but said titles remain on their shelves for less than a season before any unbought are returned.

Gowan goes on to argue, both provocatively and depressingly:

The real change in the book market is not the big guy vs. the little guy, or chain vs. indie stores. Rather, it's the reader's greater impatience, a symptom of our amazing literary (and televisual) plenitude. In the modern world we are more pressed for time, and we face a greater diversity of cultural choices. It was easy to finish Tolstoy's War and Peace when there were few other books around and it was hard to find them. Today, finishing it means forgoing many other options at our fingertips. As a result, we tend to consume ideas in smaller bits, a proposition that (in another context) economists labeled the "Alchian and Allen theorem." Long, serious novels are less culturally central than they were 100 years ago. Blogs are on the rise, and most readers prefer the ones with the shorter posts. Our greater access to books also means that each book has less time to prove itself. A small percentage of the books published account for a large share of the profits, thus setting off a race to track reader demand. Many customers want very recent best-sellers, often so they can feel they are reading something trendy, something other people are talking about.

And so, as Now What continues to become whatever it will become, if it becomes anything at all, let me make a suggestion: that its contributors and commenters post—in addition to whatever else strikes their fancy—reviewlettes of books they love in order to let others know about them. Let's try to stay away from title dropping, since that doesn't illuminate much for those who haven't read said title.

It's sometimes easier and/or more interesting to talk around novels and short fiction collections, formulate those reductionistic lists The New York Times Book Review seems bent on hawking, or remain afloat in a perpetual theoretical drift, but it's equally if not more important work to embrace praxis and help pass the word. Think, too, about doing a short interview with or profile of an experimental author or publisher and posting it here. Think of other ways of telling readers about books no one else will tell them about. And, naturally, always support your local indie bookstore—if there are any left in your neighborhood (the nearest to me is more than two-hundred miles away).

If I'm sounding especially pragmatic today, well, you caught me.

That NYTBR Best List revisited again: The Rest of the Best

CRITICAL MASS: The Rest of the Best
CRITICAL MASS
the blog of the national book critics circle board of directors
Wednesday, May 31, 2006

The Rest of the Best
As you may have heard -- unless you are, for example, living in a steamer trunk -- the New York Times Book Review recently polled 125 writers in order to determine "the best work of American fiction of the past twenty-five years." When the Times presented the results of its survey, only books receiving multiple votes were listed. Since we're book critics (and therefore not too hung up on numbers), it seemed to us that the difference between getting one vote and getting two was ... not much. So we set out to find the books that received a single nomination, thinking that readers might be interested in the complete list.Thanks to the kind cooperation of many judges, as well as the deep inboxes of several of our Board members, here's the first installment of ... The Rest of the Best.*

- Wonder Boys, by Michael Chabon (nominated by: Edmund White)- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon (nominated by: anonymous)- Little, Big, by John Crowley (nominated by: David Orr)- The Hours, by Michael Cunningham (nominated by: Roxana Robinson)- Carpenter's Gothic, by William Gaddis (nominated by: Cynthia Ozick)- The Cider House Rules, by John Irving (nominated by: John Irving)- Ironweed, by William Kennedy (nominated by: anonymous)- Collected Stories, by Grace Paley (nominated by: Rick Moody)- On Glory's Course, by James Purdy (nominated by: Paula Fox)- Collected Stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer (Library of America Edition edition - 3 volumes) (nominated by: Norman Rush)- Aberration of Starlight, by Gilbert Sorrentino (nominated by: Geoffrey O'Brien)- Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, by Anne Tyler (nominated by: anonymous)- 60 Stories, by Donald Barthelme (nomination listed in NY Times Podcast)- The Corrections, by Jonathan Franzen (nomation listed in NY Times)In addition to compiling this list, we've asked judges for commentary on why they chose they books they chose. Some chose to remain anonymous -- others didn't. Like John Irving:"I voted for myself," Irving told us, "for "The Cider House Rules" -- suspecting that, otherwise, I might not receive a single vote. We all know presidents vote for themselves, and they do far more harm than writers do. I confess to being underwhelmed by most of the books (and authors) receiving multiple votes, with the notable exceptions of the four novels by John Updike, and the six by Philip Roth. Clearly the TBR should have admitted that it asked the wrong question; the most admired writers of the past 25 years are Updike and Roth, and it's no surprise to me that among all the writers receiving multiple votes, Updike and Roth have the most readers. In fact, I just wrote Roth a letter, in which I said that, if the poll in the TBR had been a fight, he would have won by a TKO in the first round."* We're still collecting information from several participants in the NYT survey. Over the coming days, we'll be updating this list -- (see rest of article & commentaries).

A few items of possible interest:

In the spirit of Carol's post abut MHR...

1) Some thoughts on this blog from poet and all-around cool cat Bob Archambeau, at his Samizdat blog.

2) An interview/conversation I conducted with Lance Olsen at the cooler-than-cool indie mag EconoCulture.

3 Spuyten Duuyvil fiction reading, Chicago, this Sunday, June 4:

Davis Schneiderman and Tod Thilleman, at Myopic Books, 1564 N. Milwaukee Avenue, 7 pm.

from physics, through sentences, to ecstasy (without organization or apology, but warmly)

Why does it matter that ideas we seize in the present have made appearances in the past—through other mouths, minds, hearts? Does that mean we shouldn’t keep thinking them alive and reshaping them? Energy never dies. It just changes forms.

Does it matter that this space is heteroglossic and even carnivalesque (my man bakhtin)—many headed, many voiced, no main character, no identifiable telos, no consistent logic, a buncha interruptive sentences and languages and histories and theories and questions and possibilities crashing into each other or cozying up like lovers—or is this the chaos of matter itself?

Is there more to genres and sentences than we think, stuff we keep forgetting? Can genres and sentences teach us something about social change?

What if we viewed genres metaphorically as "the drive belts between the history of language and the history of society" (more m.m. bakhtin)? What if shifts and transformations in genre conventions are “both indexical of social change and contribute accumulatively to social change?”

Why do we need or want to unify anything we are saying or doing here, if it is miraculously opening up a space where the social, the literary, and the body (for me) are making intimate and creative exchanges (still riding the back of m.m.)?

Why do we pretend we have any real power over students or readers, when what is at stake is the possible space of human relationship? I’m speaking of the difference between the market’s reach to buyers and consumers (even in education) and the possibility space of intimate human connection (fast in danger of being subsumed).

Is resistance to power something we all have to call by the same name, or funnel into the same strategy?

If I say “words of creepy shit-head zombies” instead of “language of the oppressor,” does that make my words less powerful? If I say “my government makes me want to rearrange a fucking face” instead of “we must endeavor to de-center and expose hegemonic authority,” does that make me sound unintelligent? If academia would have me change my language and move it away from my body and its disturbances, what does that mean?

Why can’t making art be the politics of making art?

What’s the problem with creative and passionate dissent?

Is it useful to ask ourselves questions about being, even if it might draw criticism or open us up to being accused of jacking-off?

Do we want to know each other’s histories? Why or why not?

If I am in love with the things that the people here say, whether or not I ever agree with them, can’t that in itself be a creative practice which busts up and through the things we complain about? Can my willingness to be in that relationship lovingly be a form of hope, a peek of insight beyond the fog of the present, the possibility of artists and writers and thinkers interrupting the flow of economy and war? Can I say lovingly in a discussion like this? Love and beyond, into the ecstatic.

What can ecstatic mean?

If I keep reinserting the body into the discussion, putting it dangerously close to sentences, narrative, will it matter?

Why can’t passionate thinking and writing be understood as ecstatic states? The root understanding of the word ecstasy — ‘to stand outside’ —comes to us in those moments when we dive so deeply into the act of thinking and writing that everything else falls away.

Right here—in this space--I get to be in a chronotrope. Time-space--“the spatio-temporal matrix which governs the base condition of all narratives and other linguistic acts” (m.m. b. again). Right here I get to risk the ecstatic state.

Tribally yours.

Readings and such

While I'm trying to think up something remarkable and insightful to say about eccentric, gifted new wave groupettes vs old guard elitist, boring & mundane groupettes vs proud, charming, irritating & eccentric individualists vs "tribes" vs "kibbutzes" vs conscious collectives vs unconscious collectives vs task vs process vs chlorinated swimmings pools, socioeconomicpolitical stratispheres, homogenous & incompatible hemispheres, offbeat universities in the Midwest, subway systems, sentences & narratives & the relevance of my cultural roots in old Russia & my Electrac attachment to my past father, I'd like to follow Mark Wallace in announcing a reading in NYC. It's on Thursday this at the KGB Bar, East Village, 7 - 9 pm. Tis the second in the Mad Hatters' Review Poetry, Prose & Anything Goes Reading Series, and features Edwin Torres (the "experimental" theatrical/performance poet) and lyrical "innovative"/"avant-garde" prose-narrative writer Dawn Raffel. We will also present an actor reading selections from our journal, issues 1 through 5, a live saxophonist playing original abstract music, & for a reasonable price, signed posters depicting a torture victim of The Homeland Security Dept. of the US of Ameerica (our issue 5 cover art). Admission is free For details, please proceed to MHR.

Thanks for listening!

Carol

We’re ready for our close up, Mr. DeMille

[Thanks to all for the scintillating and complex views, and for the several glimpes into the classroom. I’m always happy to hear what my colleagues are up to…]

What’s that old Hollywood saying...something like, if you want to send a message, go to Western Union…? And we all love moving pictures.

Not sure, as per Lance Olsen’s (I'm using last names for readers) recent post, what unifies any of the people on this blog—except that fact that we are on the blog. Follow?

An I.Q. test is a test of how well you take an I.Q. test, and if so, then the GREs are a test of well, you guessed it, how well you take the GREs. And, a dissertation becomes a test (word “test” used broadly) of how well you comport to the various institutional rules that govern what constitutes a dissertation in your particular field, at your particular moment, with your particular committee etc. Roll over, Pierre Bourdieu, and dig these rhythm and blues.

In other words, I’m with Kass on focusing on “power.” Of course, Kass Fleisher and I had the same dissertation director at SUNY Binghamton (now called Binghamton University, in its privatized phase), although we were a few years apart. I can’t pin this down for sure, but knowing the Bingo scene, Kass and I were probably relative anomalies from the still to some degree John Gardner -influenced zeitgeist going on that-a-way.

[I deliberately do not want to be John Gardner…can’t ride a motorcycle, not much of a hard drinker, etc, and found The Art of Fiction to be real snoozer.]

Lance’s point about affiliation in an important one. We may not all be academics, or small press/journal editors, or even however-you-want-to-define-it “innovative” writers, but we are still, of course, on this blog. We’re all passing this test of how well we write on a blog rather well, it seems. But, how’d we get here?

Invitation from Lance and Ted Pelton perhaps (?), who, I believe, both came up with the idea while at a Colorado writing festival with Jeffrey DeShell. Maybe the seed emerged at an earlier meeting, AWP in Austin, the &NOW Festival at Lake Forest College? A number of us are alums of a short-lived list serve from the late 90s (Prosaics…was it called?), which was kind of like this blog, but not quite so public. [Like multicolored legos, we’ve got plenty more connections I won’t bother to enunciate here.]

If it ain’t writing until it’s read (as Doug Rice notes), then perhaps there is the public internet aspect to muse upon…? Is there anybody out there? Clearly, a few, maybe more. Do we have the visitor stats for the blog thus far? But otherwise, perhaps we are still engaged very much in a tribal enterprise. Seems to me, though, that tribes are often eradicated, marginalized, or, if things carry on long enough, given points on lucrative casinos.

Watch the ball bouncing over the roulette wheel; ignore the keno zombies staring cold and catatonic over the empires of the senseless.

I’d be very interested to know about affinities this group shares, about articulations, even tentative, that can offer a way to point toward some collective interrogation of the contemporary writing landscape.

For my part, I’ll venture a very tentative hypothesis that what makes members of a group like this coalesce is some collective recognition, albeit drawn from myriad different experiences, of what makes art signal difference from whatever definition of traditional/mainstream/narrative/sentence-based/etc stuff it is not.

We may not, and should not, all agree of any of the specifics of how this occurs, but to shoot back to an earlier idea (Bourdieu’s)—we are to some degree acculturated into our likings, and for some (and here’s a problem), such aesthetics are markers of “privilege” (education, exposure, leisure time). A trap in the radical possibilities of our broadly defined aesthetic? Production for producers? Rewarded with symbolic capital (academic jobs…) for not engaging in a certain type of self-promotional capitalist game? Pick a card, any card.

Let me throw out another possibility for what our stuff is not—for the most part, we don’t control the means of widespread distribution for our work. Even our most financially successful enterprises can’t compete with most of the cookbooks Joe Amato probably reads.

I dropped out of the Culinary Institute of American at 17, and since have never made a béchamel again.

tribal identity : tentativeness

What is it, if anything, that unites the works or perspectives of those participating in this blog and beyond in the world of "alternative" writing?

Initially, the answer strikes me as not much to nothing. Some of us don't like the word "experimentation," others "postmodern," others "avant-garde," others still the very notion of the "alternative." Some embrace the rhetorical pyrotechnics of theory; some eschew it. Some want to talk about the economics of writing; others find such discussions dull. Some foreground language and minimize narrative; others don't. Some get antsy around conversations concerning genre. For some, it's "all writing" (except, apparently, nonfiction, which is something to be scorned); for others, such assertations are proof of the lack of precision and rigor. The very books that some cherish, others find failures.

To make matters more tricky still, writers/artists in general are iconoclasts by nature (and, yes, I use the term loosely) who don't like to belong to things, don't like to be associated with trends and movements, since such chimera seem to minimize their individuality and originality (as if these traits are the ones that make artists artists). Yet, of course, all of us writers/artists do belong to things. Some of us "belong" to universities or colleges. Some "belong" to presses or magazines. All of us "belong" to the category "writers" and "contributors to this blog." All of us, for better or worse, "belong" to the politics of the present.

But simply because what we have in common may be complex to pin down and even more complex to articulate shouldn't by my lights be a cause for making a difficulty into an impossibility.

I've been thinking about the notion of the tribal lately in an effort to begin to begin to make sense of these continuities in the midst of myriad divergences. The dictionary definition works thus: A unit of sociopolitical organization consisting of a number of families, clans, or other groups who share a common ancestry and culture and among whom leadership is typically neither formalized nor permanent.

I find appealing the notion of many families and clans being part of something that is both them and not them. The notion of shared ancestry and culture. The notion of impermanent, unformalized leadership or center.

If we start there, and proceed tentatively, then the following are some questions that bloom:

1. Why make an effort to search for common ground?
2. What sort of sociopolitical (or, perhaps in this case, aesthetico-political) organization(s) are we?
3. Can we/should we in fact enumerate some of the common ancestry and culture we share? That is, what are our histories? Who are we?
   
4. The dangers of such enumerations are obvious, it seems to me, in this age of difference and deferredness, but what are the opportunities and benefits?
5. If the metaphor of the tribal doesn't seem illuminating, are there others that might function more effectively for helping us contemplate who we are and what we're doing?
   

As I mentioned in my comment to Ted's last post: Once upon a time we knew all this stuff (and all the stuff Sukenick et al. wrote) before. That's no longer the case.

Speed is all about forgetfulness. I'd like this to be a small space of reminding.