PP/FF in Brooklyn

Hey, cool cats one & all,

Join us Wednesday, July 26, 7pm, at Night & Day, for our Brooklyn PP/FF Anthology Party! If you haven't heard about PP/FF, it's the newly released Starcherone Books anthology featuring 61 of today's leading practitioners in the in-between prose-poetry/flash-fiction form that editor Peter Conners has named "PP/FF." See http://www.starcherone.com/ppff.htm for more info on this first-of-its-kind book, ideal for creative writing classes and for just hanging around in the park reading and looking cool with in these summer dog days...

Readers: Kazim Ali, Brian Clements, Peter Conners, Geoffrey Gatza, Christine Boyka Kluge, Ted Pelton, Anthony Tognazzini, Jessica Treat, & Mark Tursi.

Location: Night & Day, 230 5th Ave (cross street: Presidents St.), 7pm

Reader Bios:

Kazim Ali is the author of a novel, Quinn’s Passage, and a book of poems, The Far Mosque. He is the publisher of Nightboat Books and assistant professor of English at Shippensburg University.

Brian Clements is the author of several collections of poetry in print and online, including Essays Against Ruin, Burn Whatever Will Burn, and Flesh and Wood. He is the editor of Firewheel Editions and of Sentence: A Journal of Prose Poetics, and he coordinates the MFA in Professional Writing at Western Connecticut State University.

Peter Conners is founding co-editor of the online literary journal, Double Room: A Journal of Prose Poetry & Flash Fiction, as well as editor of PP/FF: An Anthology. His third poetry collection, Of Whiskey
and Winter, will be published by White Pine Press in fall 2007. Conners works as Marketing Director/Associate Editor for the poetry publisher BOA Editions. He lives with his wife and two sons in Rochester, NY.

Geoffrey Gatza has dedicated himself to protecting the downtrodden of his city from a continuing series of deadly poetic schemes by the insidious School of Quietude. He is editor and publisher of BlazeVOX
Books. His web site is Geoffreygatza.com.

Christine Boyka Kluge is the author of Teaching Bones to Fly, a poetry collection from Bitter Oleander Press, and Domestic Weather, which won the 2003 Uccelli Press Chapbook Contest. Her prose poetry and
flash fiction collection, Stirring the Mirror, is due out from Bitter Oleander Press in 2007.

Ted Pelton is the author of three books, most recently the novel, Malcolm & Jack (and Other Famous American Criminals) (Spuyten Duyvil, 2006). Recipient of an NEA Fellowship for Fiction, he is an Associate Professor at Medaille College of Buffalo, NY, and Executive Director of Starcherone Books.

Anthony Tognazzini has published work in Swink, The Hat, Sentence, Quarterly West, Salt Hill, La Petite Zine, The Mississippi Review, Quick Fiction, Ducky, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, among other journals, and
in Sudden Stories: A Mammoth Anthology of Miniscule Fiction. He has received a Pushcart nomination and an award from the Academy of American Poets. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Jessica Treat is the author of two story collections, Not a Chance (FC2, 2000) and A Robber in the House (Coffee House Press, 1993), and is completing a third. Her stories and prose poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. She is the recipient of a Connecticut Commission on the Arts Award.

Mark Tursi is one of the founders and editors of the literary journal Double Room, and he is an Assistant Professor at College Misericordia in Pennsylvania. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Denver and his MFA from Colorado State University.

Hope to see you all there! It's not too late to book a flight!

Who owns this blog anyway?

Catching up with this blog is some task, let me tell you, which is why I propose, in light of the recent “digerati and literati” thread, that we find a publisher, and bind all of this web-babble into a book for easier reading. Then, we get corporate support with enough cash to splash a two-page in the Sunday Times, and watch our IRAs get phat, fat, phat….ahem. Sorry about that….but actually, who owns these words anyway?

I noticed something while printing out the above-mentioned thread to read on a bus back to Chicago from St. Louis--something more than the odd homology between my reading, in hard copy, about an (in-part) web-critique located on a blog.

I’m struck by Joe Amato’s comment: “the sense that the (digital) work itself might “automatically” incorporate criticism within it” (in relation to Bolter and Landow), and Lance Olsen’s response that perhaps this integration of criticism into the narrative flow might in some ways serve as a jumping off point for the innovative. Strangely, this all brings me back to where I almost always go: William S. Burroughs.

For the last six months or so, I’ve been involved in a close examination of Burroughs’s cut-up work, particularly in terms of a collaborative manifesto (with Brion Gysin) called The Third Mind (1978, English edition). The text is about as polyvocal as they come—merging tracts about how to do cut-ups, with significant pieces that demonstrate the theory of the practice within the practice itself. This is the pattern of Burroughs “Nova/Cut-Up” trilogy novels, The Soft Machine (1961, 1966, 1968), The Ticket that Exploded (1962, 1967), and Nova Express (1964), with exposition on process followed by rearrangement and interpolation of this exposition.

For those unfamiliar with cut-ups, or Burroughs (although I’m sure most Now What’ers are familiar), the cut-up ethos is multiform. A few important vectors: 1) to do something, now, in what Burroughs called the “pre-sent” time, mirroring populist poetic slogans “Cut-ups are for everyone.” 2) to rearrange words through the random factor (scissors, folding, tearing), redefines “quality”: “Rimbaud announces himself with some excruciatingly bad poetry, Cut Rimbaud’s words and you are assured of good poetry at least if not personal appearance.” 3) to cut-up is, most importantly, to explicitly plagiarize and in many cases infringe on copyright.

This last part is what I am particularly interested in just now (and what I will discuss at the upcoming conference, ¿Quién es?: William S. Burroughs revisited), in that the plagiarism of the cut-ups offers collaboration as explicit (when Burroughs and Gysin and others work on a cut-up piece together), or implicit (when a “single” writer uses other texts in her work). While I do not mean to trivialize the difference between the two modes, I do see an important correlation between the commonality of cut-ups as in some way “collaborative,” in their most effective form also serving as an auto-critique, and the manner by which traditional print media, in two dimensions, generally hides the collaborative stain.

When Picasso sticks a postage stamp on a canvas, we can see multimedia at work (and, if “he” did not “create” the stamp, we might call this the second type of collaboration). Yet, when writing is produced collaboratively, often through a mode of plagiarism, the page does not necessarily reveal its hidden multidimensionality.

And so I am obsessively tracing textual markers of collaboration in Burroughs’ work, looking at bibliographic codes (fonts, copyright notices, repetitions, etc.) that reveal the material hand of plagiaristic collaboration (following some excellent textual work by Burroughs scholar Oliver Harris, most recently in an essay called “Not Burroughs' Final Fix: Materializing The Yage Letters” at Postmodern Culture—but what I am getting at for this space is the supposition that our much-discussed theories on electronic art/writing might profit from (re)visiting the matrix of collaboration/plagiarism/copyright/authorship/ownership/ originality/genius/ad nauseum.

We know where people like Federman stand on this question in terms of print, and I can imagine his electronic thoughts are the same—and Steve Tomasula, both in VAS and The Book of Portraiture, offers very cool takes on same. From the latter text, aping painter Diego Velázquez, and so echoing the work of countless writers and scholars antagonistic to the legal fictions of a singular copyright regime: “Truly, the imagination, which may seem to bear much individual fruit, is root’d in a compost of forgotten books.”

So, while I am no doubt conflating a number of different problems here, I’d be interested to know if others see the mark of the “many” on the electronic “one,” and how, if so, an electronic praxis of plagiarism might evolve in this topsy-turvy, auto-critiquing, consumer-as-producer space-of-no-space non-space?

Burroughs, William S. "The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin" in Re/Search: William S. Burroughs and Throbbing Gristle. San Francisco: RE/Search, 1982: 35-36.
Tomasula, Steve. The Book of Portraiture. Normal/Tallahassee: FC2, 2006: 71.

Literary Capital

Seems like a good time for us all to have a look at this review essay by Louis Menand, which appeared in The New Yorker at the end of last year.

------------------------------

ALL THAT GLITTERS
Literature’s global economy.
by LOUIS MENAND
Issue of 2005-12-26 and 2006-01-02
Posted 2005-12-19

In 1987, “Paco’s Story,” by Larry Heinemann, won the National Book Award for Fiction. The acclaim that greeted this selection was less than universal, and the reason—no fault of Heinemann’s—is that 1987 was also the year of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.” Morrison’s novel was a finalist for the award, and it had been widely regarded as the favorite. We can assume that she was disappointed, and we know that her friends were, because, after “Beloved” also failed to win the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (which went to Philip Roth’s “The Counterlife”), forty-eight of them published a statement in the Times Book Review. “Despite the international stature of Toni Morrison,” they complained, “she has yet to receive the national recognition that her five major works of fiction entirely deserve: she has yet to receive the keystone honors of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize. We, the undersigned blackcritics and black writers, here assert ourselves against such oversight and harmfulwhimsy. The legitimate need for our own critical voice in relation to our own literature can no longer be denied.” A few months later, “Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Five years after that, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize.

James English has a lot to say about this episode in “The Economy of Prestige” (Harvard; $29.95), his ingenious analysis of the history and social function of cultural prizes and awards. He thinks that Morrison’s champions crossed a tacitly accepted and well-established line when they printed their protest in the Times. The transgression was not the complaint that the award had been given to the wrong writer. That criticism is as old as literary prizes themselves. When the first Nobel Prize in Literature went to Sully Prudhomme, in 1901, the choice was regarded as a scandal, since Leo Tolstoy happened to be alive. The Swedish Academy was so unnerved by the public criticism it received that its members made a point of passing over Tolstoy for the rest of his life—just to show, apparently, that they knew what they were doing the first time around—honoring instead such immortals as Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, José Echegaray, Henryk Sienkiewicz, Giosuè Carducci, Rudolf Eucken, and Selma Lagerlöf. When you have prizes for art, you will always have people complaining that prizes are just politics, or that they reward in-group popularity or commercial success, or that they are pointless and offensive because art is not a competition. English believes that contempt for prizes is not harmful to the prize system; that, on the contrary, contempt for prizes is what the system is all about. “This threat of scandal,” as he puts it, “is constitutive of the cultural prize.” His theory is that when people make these objections to the nature of prizes they are helping to sustain a collective belief that true art has nothing to do with things like politics, money, in-group tastes, and beating out the other guy. As long as we want to believe that creative achievement is special, that a work of art is not just one more commodity seeking to aggrandize itself in the marketplace at the expense of other works of art, we need prizes so that we can complain about how stupid they are. In this respect, it is at least as important that the prize go to the wrong person as that it go to the right one. No one thinks that Tolstoy was less than a great writer because he failed to win the Nobel. The failure to win the Nobel has become, in the end, a mark of his greatness.

The Nobel Prize in Literature was the first of the major modern cultural prizes. It was soon followed by the Prix Goncourt (first awarded in 1903) and the Pulitzer Prizes (conceived in 1904, first awarded in 1917). The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences started handing out its prizes in 1929; the Emmys began in 1949, the Grammys in 1959. Since the nineteen-seventies, English says, there has been an explosion of new cultural prizes and awards. There are now more movie awards given out every year—about nine thousand—than there are new movies, and the number of literary prizes is climbing much faster than the number of books published. When a prominent figure in the cultural world—a benefactor or a distinguished critic or professor—dies, the friends and family often establish a memorial prize in his or her name. (As English points out, the friends and family often have no conception of how much even a minor award costs to administer. The price of administration, in fact, usually far outstrips the value of the prize itself. The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition costs more than three million dollars a year to run; the winners receive twenty thousand dollars.) This doesn’t mean that everyone gets a ribbon. In the awards economy, the rich tend to get richer. Michael Jackson has been given more than two hundred and forty awards in his career. Steven Spielberg has ninety. “The Return of the King,” the third movie in the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, won seventy-nine prizes. English estimates that among poets John Ashbery is the leader, with at least forty-five prizes and awards. John Updike sets the pace for novelists, with thirty-nine.

English interprets the rise of the prize as part of the “struggle for power to produce value, which means power to confer value on that which does not intrinsically possess it.” In an information, or “symbolic,” economy, in other words, the goods themselves are physically worthless: they are mere print on a page or code on a disk. What makes them valuable is the recognition that they are valuable. This recognition is not automatic and intuitive; it has to be constructed. A work of art has to circulate through a sub-economy of exchange operated by a large and growing class of middlemen: publishers, curators, producers, publicists, philanthropists, foundation officers, critics, professors, and so on. The prize system, with its own cadre of career administrators and judges, is one of the ways in which value gets “added on” to a work. Of course, we like to think that the recognition of artistic excellence is intuitive. We don’t like to think of cultural value as something that requires middlemen—people who are not artists themselves—in order to emerge. We prefer to believe that truly good literature or music or film announces itself. Which is another reason that we need prizes: so that we can insist that we don’t really need them.

In English’s view, therefore, Morrison’s friends and admirers violated the protocols of prize-bashing not because they publicly criticized the choice of the National Book Award judges but because they acknowledged that the award really matters, that it is (in their words) a “keystone honor” that helps to validate a book and establish its author. Their statement pointed out, in the frankest terms, that there is a literary marketplace, and that power and authority—“cultural capital,” to use the term that English borrows from the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu—accrue to those who succeed in it. Art does not receive its reward in Heaven; it is one of the things that belong to Caesar.

English speculates that this willingness to speak without embarrassment about the significance of prizes and awards, and about the whole economy of cultural production and consumption, may, paradoxically, signal the demise of the prize system. “As we lose our ability or our willingness to see the prize as a fundamentally scandalous institution”—scandalous because art ought to have nothing to do with winning and losing—“there is bound to be a period of painful contraction in the awards industry,” he says. “Faced with the withdrawal of what has been by far their richest and most reliable source of publicity, prizes may after so many years of uncontainable expansion at last show some signs of fatigue.”

Another indication that the prize system may not be working as it once did, English suggests, is that it is no longer cool to refuse an award. Once, Jean-Paul Sartre could turn down the Nobel Prize (which he did in 1964) and see a nice jump in the price of his stock as a result. Marlon Brando and Woody Allen enhanced their reputations as artists by their disrespect for the Oscars. (Of course, they had to win the thing first for the disrespect to have any value.) Today, the principled refusal of an award looks not just ungracious; it looks phony. Hollywood movies are a business—no kidding. If you’re not above accepting money for acting in them, how can you pretend to be above participating in the awards ceremonies that the industry uses to sell them? According to English’s theory, though, someone has to refuse to participate—someone has to insist that moviemaking is its own reward, that it is not about competition or material gain—for movies to retain their value in the symbolic economy.

One of the richest of the stories that English tells about the circulation of cultural goods is the saga of “The Bone People.” The book was published in New Zealand in February, 1984, by Spiral Collective, a nonprofit feminist press run by three women in Wellington. Its author, Keri Hulme, had published poems and short stories, but “The Bone People” was her first novel. It had been rejected by every major publishing house to which it was submitted; English describes it as “a long and somewhat perverse mixture of genres, styles, and languages, sloppily edited and riddled with typographic errors—by no means an obvious winner in the marketplace.” Still, two print runs of two thousand copies both sold out. Then, in the summer of 1984, “The Bone People” won two awards. The first was the New Zealand Book Award for Fiction, a leading book prize in New Zealand but of little note internationally. The jury, English says, was impressed by the novel’s “fusion of Anglo (‘Pakeha’) and indigenous (Maori) elements within a dreamlike narrative of trauma and recovery as a kind of national allegory.” Though Hulme herself is only one-eighth Maori, and was reared and educated in Anglophone society, “The Bone People” was consequently branded as “Maori fiction.” And it was under this description that it won its second prize of 1984, the Pegasus Prize for Maori Literature.

The Pegasus is an instrument of ExxonMobil. It was founded, in 1977, in order to promote international awareness of marginalized literary cultures, and it circulates among countries in which ExxonMobil has subsidiaries—a neat example, as English says, of “glocalization,” the official respect for (or colonization of) local cultural ecologies that is one of the contemporary features of international business. In 1984, New Zealand was the lucky host of the Pegasus, and “The Bone People” was the beneficiary. On cue, the choice was attacked on the ground that Hulme was not a real Maori. This was exactly the scandal needed to get the book onto the international stage, and, in 1985, after it was published in Britain, by Hodder & Stoughton, it won the most prestigious literary prize in England, the Booker. It was thus elevated to the canon of what is now called world literature. It is the “Maori novel,” and, English says,

"it is taught as such in contemporary world literature and postcolonial survey classes; it is discussed by journalists and scholars of world literature in articles and at conferences (one bibliography lists more than a hundred articles); most tellingly, perhaps, it remains in print in the United States and the United Kingdom some twenty years after its original publication, while other novels from the same period, including virtually all of the others that won the New Zealand Book Award, have long since disappeared from the international marketplace. It is not as a New Zealand novel that 'The Bone People' has become a classic, but, as declared on or inside the cover of every paperback edition since the late 1980s, as a world-certified, globally consecrated Maori novel."

English’s point is not that “The Bone People” is inauthentic. In his scheme, after all, accusations of inauthenticity are crucial to the successful functioning of the cultural economy: they shore up our faith that there is such a thing as authenticity. When people complained that “The Bone People” was not a genuine Maori novel, they were saying, in effect, that there is, or could be, a genuine Maori novel, and that they, and not functionaries in some multinational corporation’s public-relations apparat, were the ones in the proper position to recognize it as such. What the story of “The Bone People” reveals is that, whether or not a work of “indigenous” literature is the product of pure indigenes, if it is to achieve international recognition as world literature it must carry certain markers. For one thing, it cannot be identified as national literature. A book by a New Zealand writer would be unlikely to make it into the world-literature canon. The Pegasus Prize was for a work of Maori literature. Once, nationality was something that an ambitious writer hoped to transcend. A novelist aspired to recognition not as a New Zealand writer or a Nigerian writer but as, simply, a writer. Now nationality is transcended downward. Recognition comes from having one’s work identified with a marginalized or “endangered” community within the larger national or global polity—with Ibo culture (rather than Nigerian), or Maori (rather than New Zealand).

Although there are some minor differences, English’s discussion of this development parallels Pascale Casanova’s in her rather brilliant book “The World Republic of Letters” (translated from the French by M. B. DeBevoise; Harvard; $35). Casanova is also writing about the system in which books circulate in the competition for recognition. The standard practice is to understand works of literature as products of a national tradition, as examples of French literature or American literature; Casanova’s argument is that, on the contrary, the system has always been global. As she puts it, literatures are “not a pure emanation of national identity; they are constructed through literary rivalries, which are always denied, and struggles, which are always international.”

Casanova thinks that every ambitious writer aspires to be recognized for meeting the standards of the metropole. In her book, the metropole is Paris, the eternal center of the literary universe (she is, after all, French); but it might be London or New York as well. “Paris” is the place where art and literature are always truly modern and up to date, and the rest of the world measures its lateness by that meridian. For centuries, meeting the standard of Paris meant escaping the provincialism of one’s own culture—the constraints imposed by the Church, or the state, or the Party, which all want literature to serve their interests—and making art for the sake of art. James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, Gertrude Stein and Richard Wright, Milan Kundera and Danilo Ki‰ all went to Paris in order to escape the fate of being national writers. They assimilated, not to Frenchness (as Casanova points out, Joyce and Beckett, although they lived in Paris for much of their lives, had no interest in French literary life) but to the universal modern idea of the artist. Now, she thinks, the strategy for acceptance has shifted from assimilation to differentiation, and differentiation means not being modern.

The challenge now is to combine elements of non-metropolitan indigenousness with elements that metropolitan readers recognize as “literary.” A subnational novel, such as “The Bone People,” must be what English calls “world-readable.” The judges of the Booker Prize probably didn’t know the difference between Maoris and Mallomars, but they knew, instinctively, how a work of “Maori fiction” should look. It should be a hybrid of postmodernist heteroglossia (multiple and high-low discursive registers, mixed genres, stories within stories) and pre-modernist narrative (conventional morality, the simulation of an oral story-telling tradition). Between them, English and Casanova list the features of the world-literature prototype: a trauma-and-recovery story, with magic-realist elements, involving abuse and family dysfunction, that arrives at resolution by the invocation of spiritual or holistic verities. If you add in a high level of technical and intellectual sophistication, this is a pretty accurate generic description of a novel by Toni Morrison.

“The Economy of Prestige” and “The World Republic of Letters” are not debunking exercises. They are simply efforts to understand literature sociologically. “Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings,” says the Martian, about books, in Craig Raine’s famous poem, “and some are treasured for their markings.” The Martian doesn’t know why the markings between the covers labelled “Beloved” are more treasured, or represent more cultural capital, than the markings inside the covers labelled “Paco’s Story.” The Martian sees only that human beings attach high value to some of these otherwise identical and interchangeable objects and low value to others, and he/she attempts, by analyzing the system in which the objects are produced, circulated, and consumed, to figure out how this happens. From the Martian point of view, it certainly looks like a competition, because the value of “Beloved” is determined by all the things that make it different from “Paco’s Story.” It’s a relational system: the value of a cultural good is relative to the value of every other cultural good. That most of us on planet Earth deny that competition has anything to do with the esteem that we, as individuals, confer on a particular book or painting or song or movie does not mean that the Martian is wrong. Our denial is just one more thing that needs to be explained. The Martian is experiencing literature from the other side of the looking glass.

Of course, as English and Casanova would agree, books are read on this side of the looking glass. We are ourselves products of the culture whose products we consume, and we can’t help taking it, for the most part, on its own terms. Still, their very strong books belong to a general challenge to the usual practices of literary pedagogy. Literature departments are almost always organized by language and country, but Casanova’s book gives us many reasons to doubt whether this captures the way literature really works. She has an excellent account, for example, of the international influence of Faulkner—once his novels had been translated into French. He was, as she describes him, the first of the glocal writers, an acknowledged model for the Colombian Gabriel García Márquez, the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa, the Algerian Rachid Boudjedra, and the Spaniard Juan Benet, not to mention the African-American Toni Morrison. Faulkner was the novelist of the American South who demonstrated to novelists of the global South how to represent a marginal community in an advanced literary style, a style that could gain the respect of “Paris.” English’s and Casanova’s books also challenge the conventional “shock of recognition” idea of influence, which imagines literary history as one soul speaking to another across time and space. The soul may speak, but the international context is the reason it is heard. The appeal that Faulkner had for García Márquez had everything to do with the place that Faulkner occupied in the global literary system, and with the place that García Márquez occupied as well.

Literature is conventionally taught as a person-to-person aesthetic experience: the writer (or the poem) addressing the reader. Teachers cut out English’s middlemen, the people who got the poem from the writer to us, apparently confirming his point that we have to deny the economics of cultural value in order to preserve the aesthetics. But, once we’re outside the classroom, how rigidly are these conventions adhered to? How many people today really imagine “art” as a privileged category, exempt from the machinations of the marketplace? The literary marketplace has always been a theme of literature: “Tristram Shandy” reflects on its own status as a cultural good; Aristophanes’ “The Clouds” is a satire on literary competition. Since the nineteen-sixties, the constructed nature of the art experience has been one of advanced art’s principal preoccupations. Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s-soup-can paintings are all about art as commodity. The frenzy of prize-creation in the nineteen-seventies and eighties that English describes may have been a panicky middlebrow reaction against the demystification of culture that was already well under way, or it may have been a symptom and agent of that demystification. It is difficult to see it as a reinforcement of the ideal of autonomous art. That ideal disappeared a long time ago. The Martians have already landed.

Lightness & Dark: The Beacon of the Online Journal

A while back, Lance and others addressed "dark signs for adventurous prose." Yes, many an indie bookstore has fallen in the violent wake of corporate hurricanes, and of course the big (commericial) publishing companies are generally looking for NOVELS that mimic mainstream television taste (sitcoms, crimes, domestic horror shows, idiotic urban romances, suburban nymphomania, celebrity divorces, coming of age tales, etc. etc.): easy watching, easy listening, easy drive-by thinking for people without time time time in a culture that doesn't put a premium on the nurturation/maturation of the creative imagination and the beauty of language and thoughtfulness (see eg: Memory of the Writing - July 7th entry in Daniel Green's blog).

And naturally, surprise of surprises -- established publications bearing the weight of authority (eg New Yorker & NYT) hardly promote what most if not all of us would call "outstream" writers. If the prose (correction – STORY) doesn't have an obvious plot and doesn't make people cry or laugh out loud, or at least want to commit suicide or join AA or come to a totally awesomely inspired realization about free will and/or a god or the redeeming power of LOVE and/or FAMILY, it won't grab people's attention and it won't sell. Period. Unless you happen to be famous and can therefore get away with anything -- well, almost.

So, what's the poor, giddily adventuresome writer to do, aside from submitting her/his crazies to the many wonderful, burgeoning innovative small presses, hoping to get a few reviews and features at readings? How does the outstream writer get ATTENTION? (see ATTENTION)
MOMMY!!! MOMMY!!! LOOK NO PLOT!!! What did the little lady in blue say? An agent? You must be joking!

Yes, agreed that litblogs & related creatures have a great poetential to bring writers of offbeat prose together to commiserate, promulgate, vitiate, eviscerate, promote, exuberate, excoriate and even DEMONSTRATE by means of posting writings, including ongoing solo "experimental" works and (I'd love to see more of this) dynamic collaborative/interactive projects, accompanied ideally by visual and audio delights (eg FLYING PUPPET -- the Europeans seem to be beating the Americans in the Experimental Multimedia Cup). Yes, we here and in our own blogs can post reviews and event announcements. We can increase the girth of our literary ellipses beyond our immediate environments, academic and otherwise. We can and do make connections, find new friends, build communities. The Internets [sick] are [sic] the vehicle (oh dear, this sentence a mess is) for boundless multimedia creative projects and limitless gleeful and cantankerous artful interactions, and endless discussions about who's who and who's doing what and the what is and isn't the state of contemporary and "postmodern" literature and post-postmodern literature and neo-con literature and its impact or not on our culture and vice versa, and maybe an occasional non-writer will pop by, and it's all fascinating and elucidating and of course educational, BUT BUT…

Oh yes… there's the e-book as well. I can't tell you what I think of where it's going to go. Will it come with audio and visuals of superior quality? If not, what's the big fuss? Oh yes, accessibility. Hard to argue with that. Democracy, as long as the monopolies aren't allowed to charge us for every click. So forget Democracy if the corporate shit hits the fans -- if you don't know about Save the Internet, get thee to GBay. But do I personally speaking moi-meme really want my gorgeous words accessible solely in "book" form, without "gorgeous" visuals (maybe animations) with creative audio maneuvers? Not multimedia-oriented I! Horreurs! I want the Internets to give me and my readers and listeners what the Internets can offer, no holds barred. Otherwise, maybe someday I can coerce someone into producing a visually gorgeous print version of my works with an accompanying DVD, a book I can display on my coffee table and carry about to readings. I want animations, music and recited recordings --- everything we haven't had all these centuries.

Now here comes this, something obvious. I am happy to announce (in case anyone's been sleepwalking) the creeping ascension of the Internet literary-multimedia zine in the history of this ravaged planet. YOOWHO! (and Yahoo). There are THOUSANDS of them things, no doubt at least one born a day. Now anyone can be published – not in the big prestigious print mags, of course (sigh), and not in la crème de la crème (hideous expression) of the online zines, like maybe "Narrative." But in cyberspace, there's a mag for everyone, all over the globe, and the published author is read by people all over the globe, which is kinda cool. Is easy publication a good thing or a bad thing? I'll leave that to another discussion, if anyone wants to address the issue. I mean, it's kinda like the music business where every other kid becomes a hip hop star in his or her own head and sometimes in a few other heads. And that can make the kid either extremely hiphappy leading to ego-strength, or ridden with ultimately self-destructive delusions of grandeur and destined for a crash.

My point is that online literary journals are obvious vehicles for spreading the gospel of exploratory prose, which encompasses exploratory thinking. (For me, it's a given that such prose mirror, in some recognizable though fresh shape or form, the frightening ugliness of the culture from which we and our writing spring.) Yes, there are thousands of onliners, but most of the well known ones, like the vast majority of print mags, are not open to exploratory prose, unless the author has a name. It's difficult for fledgings of an innovative and rebellious nature to figure out who's going to "get" what s/he's doing. Like persistently relative newbie me. In a fit of lunacy (induced by cheap vodka), I once submitted a prosetry trilogy to one of biggies. Here's the letter I got: "Thanks for sending your work to the …. .Interesting stuff, but a little avant-garde for our taste. Good luck with it."

Hmm. Have you ever noticed that while quite a few of the magazines (mostly those affiliated in with academic institutions) say they want "innovative" work, they don't actually publish it, unless it's by a well-known author or otherwise maybe a relative or lover of one of the editors, not to mention by one of the students? Okay, I'm speculating.

So… Here's my premise. Quality online magazines are going to rise in prominence and gain the respect that quality print magazines have. Selby's List contains well, a list of most mags (online and off) that consider themselves open to "experimental" literature. But many of these mags only publish poetry (you know, poems with stanzas, whether they're language poems or not), and many others are mixed breeds searching for identities. Mags like Black Ice and Exquisite Corpse seem to be in perpetual comas. 3rd Bed went under. Other outstreamy net journals come and go, often arriving as soon as the editor or editors have emerged from offbeat MFA programs (eg Naropa), proudly bearing great youthful hopes of creating the most significant avant-garde mag in cyber space. Quite a few mags are borne on the shoulders of prominent, or at least frequently published writers whose names entice other prominent writers to submit (like hey dude, our editor used to edit [fill in name of big name print mag] & we got all this big GUYS subbing & all the right people are reading us). But are they big OUTSTREAMY guys?

Here's my proposition. Maybe it's going to sound like self-promotion, but I hope you grasp that what I'm saying is beyond that. It's about what we can do with the language (whether it be so-called "innovative" or "non-linear" or "post postmodern" or not, via Internet journals, and what we can do via cyberspace, in terms of experimenting with audios and visuals to our hearts' and minds' content. E.g., see Davis Schneiderman's writings, with audio and video, in the current issue of my multimedia/lit mag Mad Hatters' Review. See also Canadian Professor Don Bergland's wonderful multimedia project, accessible to all readers with a sense of humor: Bergland. In our next issue, you'll be treated to a lovely piece by Debra Di Blasi , accompanied by our visuals and her own unique and of course very appropriate audio treatment (voice and more).

What I'm saying bottom line is that the independent, alternative presses (like those listed here) are absolutely essential and fabulous, but so are journals, particularly online journals capable of providing audios and visuals to readers and listeners who can't afford subscriptions to more than a handful of print magazines, with or without visuals and cds/dvds (eg, Rattapallax). What we should be looking at is ACCESSIBILITY. What we should be doing is supporting and promoting online journals with vision. So yes, I want everyone here to submit to my magazine and/or others with vision. Go ahead and spread yourselves all over the world, via cyberspace, like Better than Butter but Better.

Do I think that most people are going to read these journals and that sociopolitical transformation will occur as a result of our efforts (yes, I do believe that progressive literary journals must address the unheeded, desperate needs of human beings, and yes, everything is "political" because we're all products of our "environment," in all senses of that word)? No. But let's do what we can do, with passionate commitment.

And good night, little redheads.

digerati & literati

I recently came across a slightly snarky column by Alex Beam in the Boston Globe that won't simplify the conversations we've been having lately about podcasts, audiobooks, and John Updike's clearly provocative (if belligerently ignorant) lament of the continuing McDonaldization of the book world and critique of many things digital.

The article, entitled "The Brave New Book," mentions the Updike essay that we touched on here and discusses the (second) coming of the electronic book. Rather than summarizing Beam, I thought it might be fruitful to quote a few of his most salient paragraphs, and then raise a few questions of my own about them in particular and the possibilities inherent in the cyber-beyond (especially for innovative and/or alternative prose) in general:

Who can forget the hype attending "electronic readers" like the $600 SoftBook and the $1,500 EB Dedicated Reader, which were going to make paper-and-paste books obsolete? The chief executive of SoftBook called his product a "booklike experience," perhaps one of the great euphemisms of the digital age.

Now the e-book may have a second shot. Sony has shown geeks its forthcoming Reader, which looks a lot like the old SoftBook but supposedly uses improved, Reader-friendly "e-ink," developed by Cambridge's E Ink Corp. In a grandiose public relations flourish, e-book e-vangelists Project Gutenberg and World eBook Fair plan to "publish," or make available for download, 300,000 free e-books starting July 4.

The new hype differs from the old hype. Everyone acknowledges that the boxy readers like SoftBook bombed. Now the e-bookies insist the Game Boy generation wants to read books on their tiny iPod or cellphone screens. "You wouldn't believe how many people read books on their PDAs [personal digital assistants]," says Gutenberg founder Michael Hart. OK, how many? He has no idea.

. . .

As it happens, the e-book is the solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Check out my Personalized Literacy Unit, a 2003 release from the Bantam Dell labs. It's an $8 paperback called Persuader by Lee Child, and it weighs the same as my stripped-down cellphone and less than my Palm Pilot. (A friend's reaction upon learning that I carry a Pilot: "How 1997!") I've used my PLU on an airplane, in the car, and in a few other places where you wouldn't take electronic equipment.

I am giving the last word on this subject to Cambridge's director of libraries, Susan Flannery. Instead of theorizing about libraries and the future of the book, Flannery and her board are building a new, $60 million main branch to provide state-of-the-art library services for the next 20 years. Barely a mile from Flannery's office, Google is scanning the books in Harvard's libraries for eventual inclusion in Kevin Kelly's "liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas."

. . .

Flannery calls herself "a big fan of the printed book" who now does more "reading" of audio books on her iPod than between hard covers. "I am part of a transitional generation," she says. What about digital books? "I would think the reference collections would be target number one for being replaced by electronic sources. We are prepared to reduce their shelf space accordingly."

But some publishing trends favor print, she notes. "Graphic novels are a whole new publishing area that is purely print. They're very popular, and the category seems to be growing. I don't think electronics will replace children's books—their visual beauty won't translate to the screen, and parents want the kids sitting on their lap."

I find myself left, not with answers, but with questions—including several perhaps painfully obvious ones, like who in the world still considers graphic novels "a whole new publishing area" or conceives of the act of listening to an audiobook as "reading"?:

1. The book has been and done various things at various times in various places in various ways. Five thousand years ago, for instance, baked clay tablets in Mesopotamia recorded deeds to land and other business records. Egyptians, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans used the inner bark of the papyrus plant to fashion their books, pasting sheets together in strips sometimes 144 feet long. The codex, made up of several sheets of vellum, existed for centuries after its appearance in 300 AD. Is the movement toward the e-book (if not now, then in the not-too-distant future), given certain economic and environmental necessities, simply an inevitable change in what an information package looks like, and, if so, what's the big deal? Or is it is something else altogether—a loss, a supplement?

2. E-books and audiobooks (especially iPod-friendly ones) will, at least theoretically, make fiction, innovative and otherwise, more accessible—much like the World Wide Web has allegedly done. But if anyone can, and anyone does, "publish" via podcasts and the Web, if "publish" is indeed the word I’m looking for here, where will the quality of publication go—whatever we may mean by quality? Or, to put it another way, as I did in an earlier comment: does anyone really want to know what everyone thinks about anything?

3. What will become, in other words, of the idea of literary value—however we might define such a dicey term? How will we discover it among the sea of linguistic dross, should we wish to? And, should we not, what precisely are we reading for in the first place?

4. Ten years ago, writers like John Perry Barlow used the energetic metaphor of the wild west for what was going on on the Web, where all fences were down, and one road as good as another. Now, though, a more apt metaphor seems to be the Mall of America, and, quite possibly, the advent of the Web has signaled little more than the beginning of a new technocracy that ultimately discriminates between computer-haves and computer-havenots, techophiles and technophobes. What possibilities still exist there for innovative fiction?

5. What aesthetic forms, innovative and otherwise, lend themselves to digital space?

6. What zones of resistance and refusal continue to exist in digital media like the Web, and can we imagine a way to keep them from becoming coopted in, say, another five years? In another ten?

7. Is the Web in fact the new worldwide café that early media hype proclaimed it to be, a new global meeting ground for, among others, the disenfranchised, the marginalized, the alternativized—aesthetically, socially, politically? Or is it merely the commodified simulation of community populated by isolated aliases uncomfortable about interfacing one-to-one in what some geeks refer to as The Big Television—namely, the real world? Where, that is, is the body going? Where has it gone?

8. What are we to think of RAND Corporation senior computer scientist Jeff Rothenberg’s assertion that “the contents of most digital media evaporate long before words written on high-quality paper. And they often become unusably obsolete even sooner, as media are superseded by new, incompatible formats . . .”? How will the longevity of the digitized book, digitized space, affect how we think about enduring art and the cultural cliché of the "timeless masterpiece"?

9. Back, for a moment, to pedagogy: will education become more interactive, I wonder, and hence more captivating for students, bringing them back to the acts of reading and writing with renewed vigor through the advent of, say, email’s and text messaging's immediacy and the dynamic experience of hypertextual interconnectivity offered by the meta-book called the Web? Or will education become increasingly a simulation of itself through distance learning programs that make good economic sense only by extracting genuine human connection and genuine Socratic inquiry from the learning experience? Will education become, in other words, simply one more version of commodified television with its MTV-ized rhythms, surfaces, and shine—more and more fiscally justified form, and less and less reflective, historically situated, and humanely interactive content?

10. Please don't get me wrong. I apologize in advance if these questions seem too deliberately and predictably shrill by half. But I think their tone, which houses something like urgency in my mind, simply underscores how interested I am in what's going on in the digital realm, how much of what I see vexes me, what the possibilities are for tribes like ours. I've collaborated on the hypermedia version of my novel 10:01, teamed up with Ted Pelton to form this blog, urged us to explore the potential of the podcast, and headbangingly adore a number of electronic texts from Michael Joyce's still glorious afternoon: a story and Shelley Jackson's brilliant My Body (another wonderful unwriting of the Frankenstein myth, by the way), to Stuart Moulthrop's Reagan Library and ongoing experiments at The Iowa Review Web. But I'm also impressed, given how long said realm has been around, and given how many people have been involved in its workings, how few really fascinating pieces of writing it has produced and how so much of it functions as little more than another site for teaching us to desire more things we don't have and don't want. Why?

Guidelines and 2007 titles

Hello all, just a brief announcement for the authors...

* * *

Raw Dog Screaming Press is pleased to announce a new imprint dedicated to nonfiction: Guide Dog Books. Our newly appointed Nonfiction Editor is Stanley Ashenbach. All nonfiction queries should be directed to stanleyashenbach@yahoo.com.

We are looking for innovative nonfiction in all its manifestations…creative nonfiction, academic works, experimental forms, critical works, letters from the opposition, etc. All subject matter will be considered, although we are most interested in work that examines popular culture. Queries should include a 500 word abstract, author biography, and a sample chapter. Please do not send entire manuscripts by email.

* * *

Just announced! These titles will be released by Raw Dog Screaming Press in 2007:

Dr. Identity by D. Harlan Wilson (hardcover)
Fish, Soap, and Bonds by Larry Fondation (trade paperback)
Health Agent by Jeffrey Thomas (special edition and hardcover)
The Million-Year Centipede; or, Liquid Structures by Eckhard Gerdes (trade paperback)

For more info, please visit RawDogScreaming.com.

FRANK & THE NATURE OF LIT

Like any interesting novel, R.M. Berry’s FRANK is a multilayered work; but there’s one reading of it that I thought people on this list would really relate to. In case you haven’t read it yet, FRANK is a re(un)writing of Shelly’s FRANKENSTEIN. Berry stays faithful to Shelly’s plot though it’s all transposed to the present-day America, and the monster FRANK (Victor’s doppelganger in Berry’s book) is (and here you’ll see where I’m going)—HA!—an experimental novel. In this regard, the novel is an embodiment of a number of the worries, rants, pissing and moaning, that run through a lot of the NOW WHAT posts: a writer being unable to be less savvy about language than he or she is in order to write a book that is “pretty,” that the general public would find “attractive”; a novel creating the novelist as surely as the novelist creates the novel (or at least the work determining what kind of novelist/thinker/person its maker is); a novelist trying to run from his creation.

That is, once Victor’s created his monstrous collage of language, and the NY establishment, i.e., commercial houses, reviewers etc. see it for what it is—that most odious of creations (save possibly poetry), the novel with miniscule sales, Victor does his damnedest to distance himself from his creature. It follows him wherever he goes, though, insisting that he create a bride, a sequel, which Victor realizes would be the death of any chance he would ever have of being recognized as a “real” author by most of civilized society’s standards: appearances on Oprah, NYTBR ads, etc. Like I say, this is only one slice through a very funny and philosophical novel that takes up ideas of realist authors killing family members by turning them into characters in their thinly veiled memoir-novels; how a text can take on a life of its own once its brought into the world; how fictions have real-world consequences; author as artist vs. author as blacksmith of commercial product; an artists/author’s responsibility; an author-artists being responsible for what they write. This last point seems most apt given Joe Amato’s earlier points about critics not taking any responsibility for the ramifications of valorizing crap by making it the subject of their studies (a subject I’d love to see someone—Joe?—explore/develop). Lastly, did I mention how FUNNY this novel is?—especially if you get the “inside” experimental/Wittgenstein/Cavell jokes….
Yours,
Steve

the californication of history

In light of our recent discussion of the postmodern (please, oh please, note: I always eschew the ugly ism and everything it suggests) and feints in the direction of a conversation about innovative fiction and history, I thought some of you might be interested in a guest column I wrote called "Twenty Digressions Toward the Californication of History" for the current issue of PIF magazine.

____________

1. Back in Nam, I was one of those guys they called the Tunnel Rats—the ones small and thin enough to shinny down the camouflaged holes in the Cu Chi jungle and crawl on their bellies through the marshy-hot burrows twisting in near faultless darkness in a seventy-five-mile-long maze, rattle and pop of automatic fire above them, millipedes skittering over their arms.
   
   One June morning in 1970, I took a deep breath, clicked off the safety on my .45, and dropped down to find smack in front of me this ungodly
   
   No. Wait.
   
   Or was that the History Channel?
   
   
2. A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the Red Hot Chili Peppers about Californication: Space may be the final frontier/ But it’s made in a Hollywood basement.
   
   
3. What I mean to say is that, despite frequent claims to the contrary, innovative fiction is neither necessarily ahistorical nor dehistoricized. Rather, it continually questions our culture’s suppositions about what constitutes historical knowledge, embracing the counter-intuitive recognition that texts are simultaneously self-conscious linguistic and formal systems shut off from the world and active participants in larger sociopolitical contexts.
   
   
4. Once upon a time, Linda Hutcheon about postmodern fiction: It knows it cannot escape implication in the economic (late capitalist) and ideological (liberal humanist) dominants of the time. There is no outside. All it can do is question from within. It can only problematize what Barthes has called the "given" or "what goes without saying" in our culture. History, the individual self, the relation of language to its referents and of texts to other texts—these are some of the notions which, at various moments, have appeared as "natural" or unproblematically common-sensical. And these are what get interrogated (xiii).
   
   
5. In the good old days, of course, we had heard all this stuff before. That’s no longer the case.

__________________

For the full version of the essay, click here.

Updike, "The End of Authorship"

Reposting from the back page of today's New York Times Book Review. I suspect we all have a lot to say about this.

Joe

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Essay
The End of Authorship

By JOHN UPDIKE
Published: June 25, 2006

Booksellers, you are the salt of the book world. You are on the front line where, while the author cowers in his opium den, you encounter — or "interface with," as we say now — the rare and mysterious Americans who are willing to plunk down $25 for a book. Bookstores are lonely forts, spilling light onto the sidewalk. They civilize their neighborhoods. At my mother's side I used to visit the two stores in downtown Reading, Pa., a city then of 100,000, and I still recall their names and locations — the Book Mart, at Sixth Street and Court, and the Berkshire News, on Fifth Street, in front of the trolley stop that would take us home to Shillington.

When I went away to college, I marveled at the wealth of bookstores around Harvard Square. In addition to the Coop and various outlets where impecunious students like myself could buy tattered volumes polluted by someone else's underlinings and marginalia, there were bookstores that catered to the Cambridge bourgeoisie, the professoriate, and those elite students with money and reading time to spare. The Grolier, specializing in modern poetry, occupied a choice niche on Plympton Street, and over on Boylston there was the Mandrake, a more spacious sanctum for books of rare, pellucid and modernist water. In the Mandrake — presided over by a soft-voiced short man, with brushed-back graying hair — there were English books, Faber & Faber and Victor Gollancz, books with purely typographical jackets and cloth-covered boards warping from the damp of their trans-Atlantic passage, and art books, too glossy and expensive even to glance into, and of course New Directions books, modest in format and delicious in their unread content.

After Harvard, I went to Oxford for a year, and browsed for dazed hours in the rambling treasury, on the street called the Broad, of Blackwell's — shelves of Everyman's and Oxford Classics, and the complete works, jacketed in baby-blue paper, of Thomas Aquinas, in Latin and English! Then I came to New York, when Fifth Avenue still seemed lined with bookstores — the baronial Scribner's, with the central staircase and the scrolled ironwork of its balconies, and the Doubleday's a few blocks on, with an ascending spiral staircase visible through plate glass.

Now I live in a village-like corner of a small New England city that holds, mirabile dictu, an independent bookstore, one of the few surviving in the long coastal stretch between Marblehead and Newburyport. But I live, it seems, in a fool's paradise. Last month, The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy article that gleefully envisioned the end of the bookseller, and indeed of the writer. Written by Kevin Kelly, identified as the "senior maverick" at Wired magazine, the article describes a glorious digitalizing of all written knowledge. Google's plan, announced in December 2004, to scan the contents of five major research libraries and make them searchable, according to Kelly, has resurrected the dream of the universal library. "The explosive rise of the Web, going from nothing to everything in one decade," he writes, "has encouraged us to believe in the impossible again. Might the long-heralded great library of all knowledge really be within our grasp?"

Unlike the libraries of old, Kelly continues, "this library would be truly democratic, offering every book to every person." The anarchic nature of the true democracy emerges bit by bit. "Once digitized, books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page," Kelly writes. "These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves. Just as the music audience now juggles and reorders songs into new albums (or 'playlists,' as they are called in iTunes), the universal library will encourage the creation of virtual 'bookshelves' — a collection of texts, some as short as a paragraph, others as long as entire books, that form a library shelf's worth of specialized information. And as with music playlists, once created, these 'bookshelves' will be published and swapped in the public commons. Indeed, some authors will begin to write books to be read as snippets or to be remixed as pages."

The economic repercussions of this paradise of freely flowing snippets are touched on with a beguiling offhandedness, as a matter of course, a matter of an inexorable Marxist unfolding. As the current economic model disappears, Kelly writes, the "basis of wealth" shifts to "relationships, links, connection and sharing." Instead of selling copies of their work, writers and artists can make a living selling "performances, access to the creator, personalization, add-on information, the scarcity of attention (via ads), sponsorship, periodic subscriptions — in short, all the many values that cannot be copied. The cheap copy becomes the 'discovery tool' that markets these other intangible valuables."

This is, as I read it, a pretty grisly scenario. "Performances, access to the creator, personalization," whatever that is — does this not throw us back to the pre-literate societies, where only the present, live person can make an impression and offer, as it were, value? Have not writers, since the onset of the Gutenberg revolution, imagined that they already were, in their written and printed texts, giving an "access to the creator" more pointed, more shapely, more loaded with aesthetic and informational value than an unmediated, unpolished personal conversation? Has the electronic revolution pushed us so far down the path of celebrity as a summum bonum that an author's works, be they one volume or 50, serve primarily as his or her ticket to the lecture platform, or, since even that is somewhat hierarchical and aloof, a series of one-on-one orgies of personal access?

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap. As the author is gradually retired from his old responsibilities of vicarious confrontation and provocation, he has grown in importance as a kind of walking, talking advertisement for the book — a much more pleasant and flattering duty, it may be, than composing the book in solitude. Authors, if I understand present trends, will soon be like surrogate birth mothers, rented wombs in which a seed implanted by high-powered consultants is allowed to ripen and, after nine months, be dropped squalling into the marketplace.

In imagining a huge, virtually infinite wordstream accessed by search engines and populated by teeming, promiscuous word snippets stripped of credited authorship, are we not depriving the written word of its old-fashioned function of, through such inventions as the written alphabet and the printing press, communication from one person to another — of, in short, accountability and intimacy? Yes, there is a ton of information on the Web, but much of it is egregiously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, surprisingly, to inflame what is most informally and noncritically human about us — our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant "Aw, shucks," disarming in its modesty, disquieting in its diffidence.

The printed, bound and paid-for book was — still is, for the moment — more exacting, more demanding, of its producer and consumer both. It is the site of an encounter, in silence, of two minds, one following in the other's steps but invited to imagine, to argue, to concur on a level of reflection beyond that of personal encounter, with all its merely social conventions, its merciful padding of blather and mutual forgiveness. Book readers and writers are approaching the condition of holdouts, surly hermits who refuse to come out and play in the electronic sunshine of the post-Gutenberg village. "When books are digitized," Kelly ominously promises, "reading becomes a community activity. . . . The universal library becomes one very, very, very large single text: the world's only book."

Books traditionally have edges: some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained. In the electronic anthill, where are the edges? The book revolution, which, from the Renaissance on, taught men and women to cherish and cultivate their individuality, threatens to end in a sparkling cloud of snippets.

So, booksellers, defend your lonely forts. Keep your edges dry. Your edges are our edges. For some of us, books are intrinsic to our sense of personal identity.

———————

John Updike's most recent novel is "Terrorist." This essay is adapted from his address to booksellers at the Book Expo convention held last month in Washington.

Marianne Hauser Changed Tense

Email from Raymond Federman:

marianne hauser changed tense yesterday - have you read The Talking Room - if not order it imediately --

it came out from FC at the same time as TIOLI and Marianne and I became friends immediately -- she was a fabulous writer -- she was 93 yesterday when she changed tense [and still smoking pot which we did together regularly once upon a time -- she had an antique silver cigarette box full of joints and she would offer them to her friends or even to strangers -- she was quite a woman -she was from Alsace had traveled all over the world -- she had married some mediocre orchestra conductor who conducted the kirkville municipal orchestra in nebraska -- she dumped him -- but not her son michael whom she loved and still loves -- and became an outrageous lesbian -- at 80 she was more gorgeous and seductive than those young broads [excuse the term] who walk around with their jeans exposing the crack of their asses and they boobs falling out of their blouses --

I swear the world is full of such exposed young ladies -- and too many of them are fat around the hips

but marianne hauser she was something else

when she published that marvelous little book called ME & MY MOM I wrote her to tell her that Erica and I had just gone through that with Trude [E's mother] -- if you have not read ME & MY MOM -- drop everything -- it's explain to you your relationship with mother or your mother in-law --

I am sad that marianne is gone and at the same time happy to think that she hung in there and still wrote a couple more fabulous books before she decided that she was fed ufp with this fucking world of ours --- if you want to read about the demolition of the father read SHOOT OU WITH FATHER by Marianne Hauser -- it's as great as the letter Kafka wrote to his father --

she was complaining one day to me after ME & MY MOM came out that no one payed attention to her work -- maybe we were complaining because my work was also being ignored --

and so I wrote a little piece for Marianne

you may have seen it before - but here it is again

ETERNAL RETURN

For Marianne Hauser

As we old bums [you & me & your mom & the other bum in peeoria] contemplate what appears to others to be l'âge [vieillesse ou vieilles fesses] as we admire [with a touch of disdain] our own amazing present mental agility [and virility too] as we delight in the fact that we are becoming so good [so dexterous] so much better with words as we get older [perhaps even wiser in spite of the cliché] as we listen [especially at night] to those protracted echoes of the void [excuse the terminal lyricism] but without asking [as in days of youth] whence the original sound [I almost said original sin) came [sometimes unwanted] as we contemplate the landscape of words we designed and left behind us [not without pain] yes as we contemplate the not too distant moment when we will have to change tense [inevitably so] we wonder [often aloud] how the hell have we managed to come this far [to do that much] with words [words words our whole life was but a pell mell babel of words] and look oh look how they fall in place now so easily so quietly our words as they say [or fail to say] what they want to say before crumbling into the great void [excuse the romantic agony] alright crumbling into the motherfucking abyss of forgetfulness [le grand abîme de l’oubli]

Hear ye, hear ye!

We (the royal and literary we, together) might be interested to learn that the definition of a book is as follows (in part):

“A book is a collection of sheets of paper, parchment or other material with a piece of text written on them, bound together along one edge within covers. A book is also a literary work or a main division of such a work. A book produced in electronic format is known as an e-book.”

Following along with the various threads and this oh-so-helpful definition, I suggest a radical publishing maneuver: audiobooks of innovative fiction.

To my limited knowledge, there are no independent press audiobooks. Steve Tomasula has been working on audio for his excellent novel VAS, and I have dabbled in audiocollage and audiotext, but think of it—a collection of spoken-word audio books, perhaps under an umbrella coalition of small presses, ready for the sweatshop-produced Ipods of the technological multitude.

Sound good?

event of language, a duet : lidia yuknavitch & lance olsen

1.

“Breathtaking”–I’d like to claim that word inside of my own experience of language both literally, as in to stop one’s breath, to steal it, and figuratively, to astound. I’d like to say that the language of literature which most compels me is performed language, the drama of language, language let loose enough to occupy the stage of page in and of itself, especially when it abandons the dictates of narration. What takes my breath, what arrests my being is the drama of language. When the real drama of language is staged and played out, it carries something underneath plot, narrative cohesion and the so-called psychological development of a character. When the real drama of language is staged it carries something underneath what passes for story—gesture, implication, shapes, silences, intervals, momentary relations, memories, fleeting states of being. These breathtaking moments I would term as the event of language.

To say that language is an event is to remember that language bears language. Artistically, it is as if language could be an organic and chaotic motion reflected only by the motions of corporeal desire and being.

Form—language’s lover—either revels in that chaos, or tames it.

2.

A return, then, to our ongoing conversation about language. Since the sixties, the death of the novel has been announced bi-weekly, but whatever happens, however else the geography of the imagination might modify in the future, written fiction—especially the innovative variety, as I shall explain in a minute—will always be able to investigate and cherish two things that music, painting, dance, drama, and most other arts can’t: the luscious, extended changeableness of human consciousness and the effulgence on the page called words.

That’s why, I want to say, no director can ever make a fully satisfying rendition of a novel like Lolita. Stanley Kubrick and Adrian Lyne seem to believe the heart of that book has something to do with a naughty narrative about pedophilia, but nothing could be farther from the truth. The heart of the book has to do with how a brilliant, funny, amoral, and excruciatingly besieged mind subtly crumples, and it has to do with a love affair, as Nabokov reminds us in his afterword, not with “topical trash” and “the copulation of clichés,” but with the “English language” and “aesthetic bliss.”

3.

If you will bear language with me I will let her loose:

Gertrude Stein: Language as a real thing is not imitation either of sounds or colors or emotions. It is an intellectual recreation and there is no possible doubt about it and it is going to go on being that.

Marguerite Duras: Around us, everything is writing; that’s what we must perceive. Everything is writing. It’s the unknown in oneself, one’s head, one’s body. Writing is not even a reflection, but a kind of faculty one has, that exists to one side of oneself, parallel to oneself: another person who appears and comes forward, invisible, gifted with thought and anger, and who sometimes, through her own actions, risks losing her life. Into the night.

Kathy Acker: Art is a cry.

4.

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins—what astonishes about those nine words, makes them immovable in my memory, is how they announce, not only a murderous narrative about hobbled love, an acidic satire about the bubblegum-chewing brashness named America, but also the Event of Language.

Closer to the phrasings of resonant lyric than the vapid transparencies of fictions that aspire to be screenplays, this luminous opening houses Nabokov’s novel in miniature: a misshapen consciousness in motion, yes, but, equally, if not more so, the drama of alliteration, assonance, rhythm, self-reflexive verbal surprise, the pleasure of lovingly sculpted prose, the delight in density and detail, each phrase of it written on the back of an index card until it was right beyond belief by that distinguished, trilingual, virtually apolitical Anglophile, so that the reader can hear in this initial linguistic fervor, if he or she listens attentively, the foreshadowing of Humbert Humbert’s burning dyspepsia during the famous seduction scene at the Enchanted Hunters half a book later; in the clash between the spiritual housed within the first bright metaphor and within the fiery sinfulness of the second the ghost of St. Augustine’s brutally conflicted Confessions; in the “lee” comprising the second syllable of the nymphet’s pseudonym (Humbert has stolen poor Dolores Haze’s name from her just as he will come to steal everything else) Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee,” and hence the Annabel Leigh who unreliable Humbert blames (by way of that Viennese quack, Freud) for his, Humbert’s, fixation.

No wonder, then, that, in addition to Kafka’s Metamorphosis, Bely’s Petersburg, and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Nabokov included Joyce’s Ulysses on his shortlist of greatest twentieth-century novels.

5.

Let’s momentarily and in a single breath go underneath the chatter of the contemporary so-called novel. I think the majority of acclaimed novelists, with a very few exceptions, are involved in the process of creating products for consumers. In these novels there is a certain storyline that ignores corporeal experience in favor of some brutally absurd cockamamie fako-script life. The cockamamie fako-script life makes people worry less about the disruptive nature of living a life and also it makes them feel better about themselves like television and cookies do. Mostly I’m talking about plot, and writers who suck the dick of plot in order to maintain a secondary, whorey, without artistic integrity, harem of consumers.

Corporeal experience, on the other hand, works more like language does, if you let language happen. In this way both corporeal experience and language are events. Untamed, beautiful, terrifying events.

What I mean when I say let language happen, as an event, is let form open language rather than close it. Let form be in relationship to language. Like a lover. Inside their passionate embrace emerge: fragmentation, spatiality, intervals, states of being, dream, intuitive landscapes, relational free-for-all, memory glimpses, retinal flashes, orgasmic pulsings, action broken back down into its parts, silence and sound and rhythm and image. These constitute the event of language. These reconnect writing to painting, music, performance, sculpture, philosophy, bodies.

So.

Those opening citations, and this word “breathtaking,” I mean for them to bring us to the event of language as I understand it.

6.

Gertrude Stein: She was living very well, she was gay then, she went on living then, she was regular in being gay, she always was living very well and was gay very well and was telling about little ways one could be learning to use in being gay, and later was telling them quite often, telling them again and again.

Samuel Beckett: my life last state last version ill-said ill-heard ill-recaptured ill-murmured in the mud brief movements of the lower face losses everywhere.

Walter Abish: Ages ago, Alex and Alva arrived at Antibes, and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex’s admonition, against Allen’s angry assertion: another African amusement.

7.

I know not everyone cares about what I am getting at. I also know that a small handful of people do. For you I am telling the secret: intimacy is a woman’s realm. This fact puts women close to language let loose. This fact puts a woman’s body close to language.

Male or female or anyone in between, if you understand just now that intimacy and desire and bodies are exactly the space of language, then I can go a step further with you few and say that fucking is a metaphor for language.

I am aware that my ideas, my speaking, and my fiction will lose readers. I am making that choice. I’m going to start saying “I” now, differently. I’m going to activate that Whitmanesque thingee and scatter that “I” out across all territories of being and knowing, transgressively and without permission or apology. I’m saying my I can move inside your body. I’m saying my body—father ravaged and shamed daughter, excellent athlete, ex-heroine armed heroin, sexual explorer, mother of a dead daughter and a live exquisite son, mapmaker of intimacies and loss, hearer of voices, seer of images not there, body of arthritic twists in spine and hand and hip, wife of three men, lover of many women, sister, fallen angel recovering catholic touched by those meant to guide her, sinner without apology, experience addicted flower, daughter of the drunk southern belle liar, great mother storyteller, writer—my body is in you.

I’ve got some years now written across my skin. I’ve got the graham crackers and a flashlight and a blue blanket from childhood. I know what foreplay is and how it is its own story. I understand how grief makes you crazy and haunts you like a sado-masochistic lover or a bruise at the shoulder that speaks to you in the night the rest of your life, or how disease relentlessly brings a body to its lifedeath line, or how desire wrenches a person to the bone and beyond, out of oneself and into surrender and on and on, or how death disfigures a face, shifts the horizon, tilts the earth on some new axis. I understand how a heart beats out a life and beats down a self. I know loss lives in you like metastasizing cells, joy is fucking unbearably fleeting tense, love is a word definitionless and cast adrift across loneliness, the skin and touch of a woman can save a person’s life.

I know the crouch of dreams lives in the tips of our fingers and at the edge of breathing in all waking moments.

8.

I emphasize innovative fiction’s focus on language because conventional mimetic fiction usually—although not necessarily—thinks of sentences as spotless windowpanes onto the world. In innovative fiction’s phrasings, you can always hear a joyous indifference to or scrupulous exploration of convention. Its page becomes laboratory where anything can happen, where an opacity of discourse becomes as much a protagonist as Flaubert’s Emma or those little stick men running down the poorly drawn corridors of The Da Vinci Code.

That opacity can do many things. Why limit its purposes? Among myriad others, it can, as in Mark Leyner or, in a completely different register, Michael Joyce, dislocate in a self-conscious aesthetic maneuver that calls attention to the medium itself in a method similar to how cubist paintings announce themselves more about the act of painting than the thing painted. It can, as in Burroughs and and Acker and Leslie Scalapino, function as conscious political disturbance, an unmasking of dominant modes of articulation in an effort to critique them. It can, as in Carole Maso, delight in sensual linguistic performance, a gendered aural skin.

Whatever else it does, innovative prose’s syntax and grammar search for other ways and means of saying that lead us to express things other than we might otherwise have expressed.

This is a space of resistance, refusal, celebration, possibility, opposition, alternative, openness, freedom.

Language becomes laboratory, then, but it also becomes architecture. In innovative prose, you want to notice the drama of the complex building through which you’re strolling because it’s no longer simply the local mall, the corner Conoco, the 7-Eleven, the institutionalized tract housing of the mind.

9.

Which is how I am able to understand this:

A novel is what you dream in your night sleep. A novel is not waking thoughts although it is written and thought with waking thoughts. But really a novel goes as dreams go in sleeping at night and some dreams are like anything and some dreams are like something and some dreams change and some dreams are quiet and some dreams are not. And some dreams are just what anyone would do only a little different always just a little different and that is what a novel is.

I know she is right.

I know breath can be taken by the event of language.

I wish you a book worthy of night.

10.

Last October in Harper’s, Ben Marcus wrote a provocative, vibrant defense of experimental fiction that was primarily a defense of experimental language. Granted, I have more than a few qualms with it. Marcus goes on at length about something called the Fog Index, for instance, a test for determining the density and readability of a text, which he applies to passages by Jonathan Franzen, Stein, and Gaddis. The net illumination is zero, the move an odd digressive intellectual red herring. More important, I wish Marcus’s definition of innovative prose were more catholic, including mention of formal aerobics, politically transgressive content, problematizations of characterization and spatialization, and so forth.

Still, his essay is an important long overdue rallying cry in the mainstream press for what innovationists do and why. In it, Marcus recalls that, “in the literary world, it’s not polite to suggest that the brain is even involved in reading. . . . It’s the heart that writers are told they must reach in order to move readers, to stir in them the deepest, most intense feelings.” Marcus challenges such a fatuous notion, arguing in favor of the cerebral challenge the foreign and astonishing provide.

Although we have recently been taught that liking “new concoctions of language that might set off a series of delicious mental explosions” in a reader makes you an elitist who hates your audience, the literary industry, and “probably … even yourself,” Marcus champions exactly such rewarding concoctions, urging writers not to settle for mere competence, mere mimetic mimicry, not to “behave like cover bands, embellishing the oldies … while ensuring that buried in the song is an old familiar melody to make us smile with recognition.” Further, he contends that “the true elitists in the literary world are the ones who have become annoyed by literary ambition in any form, who have converted the very meaning of ambition so totally that it now registers as an act of disdain, a hostility to the poor common reader, who should never be asked to do anything that might lead to a pulled muscle.”

In essence, Marcus heralds a return to what I have been referring to as the Difficult Imagination, a replenishment of an impeded accessibility where everything can and should be considered, attempted, troubled; a return, through complexity and challenge (not predictability and ease) to perception and contemplation.

coda

Here are a dozen sentences that Nike commercials don’t want you to remember.

Ronald Sukenick: Theory is a sign of ignorance. It becomes important when we are no longer sure what we are doing.

Ludwig Wittgenstein: The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.

Kathy Acker: And I’m working at trying to find a kind of language where I won’t be so easily modulated by expectation. I’m looking for what might be called a body language.

John Hawkes: The only thing that exists is torment, lyricism, and the magnificence of language.

William Gass: Language is … more powerful as an experience of things than the experience of things.

Adrienne Rich: The matter of art enters the bloodstream of social energy. Call and response. The empathetic imagination can transform, but we can't identify precise loci of transformation, can't track or quantify the moments. Nor say how or when they lead, through innumberable unpredictable passageways, toward recreating survival, undermining illegitimate power and its cruelties.

Ben Marcus: Language is a social form of barely controlled weeping, a more sophisticated way to cry.

Repeating the Done and Over

i think it's a bit untoward of me to post again after only a couple of days but felt a strong need to share this with you. in the current issue of _the economist_ is an article called “painting by numbers” (page 64 in June 10th if anyone else is into that rag).

it notes the recent sales of chinese art at sotheby’s and christie’s (one auction brought $27M for 150 works, or an average of $180K apiece); wang guangyi’s “pop art revolution paintings featuring Western consumer brands” are selling for $500K apiece; zhang xiaogang sold a work for $1M. ergo, chinese art is improving as it becomes more open to western influence, etc. (is warhol spinning in his grave, or only chuckling?)

but that’s hong kong. on the mainland, where exposure to art is limited, there is a place called the “oil painting village” in dafen. there are 700 galleries there. what is sold there are mostly fakes, “hand-copied with startling accuracy,” that sell for a coupla bucks.

“painter workers” produce these works in an assembly-line fashion. each painter works on several canvases at a time, filling in the same patch on the canvas, then hand it off to the next painterworker. a p.w. produces about 200 paintings a month, and earns about $188/month, which ain’t hay in that part of the world. 5000 p.w.’s crank out the replicas, and there are also 3000 skilled artists are known as “painters.”

gallery owners take orders from mostly international customers---a popular order of the moment is to paint the last supper to include mary magdalene, a la _da vinci code_ (!). the customers are nouveau rich russians and middle easterners, as well as folk with florida condos (i can hardly bear to think of this last). the rising chinese middle class is buying too, as home ownership and interest in decor has risen.

a movement toward original art is starting, but these paintings are bringing only about $200 apiece.

sorry to trouble you with this belabored tale, but what struck me as i read this dismaying article is that we in this country HAVE the freedom to stop repeating the old and done---and for the most part, we don’t use it. these are people who DON’T have that freedom.

i like blonde’s suggestion (tho perhaps i only inferred it) that movements may be cyclical rather than linear (i can’t deal with the whole linear premise myself), and i like lance saying “getting over it” to curt’s “get over it.” i hear lance saying “writing is writing,” and in a way i’m agreeing when i say we have to follow our impulses (even, i add, as we analyze their sources). i see art as being very much tied to the sorts of economic machinery described in _the economist_ (and other kinds of machinery too---other fora for oppression such as sex, race, etc.), so i would not say “writing is writing” so much as i would say “writing is what we make it as per our individual capacities to evade said machineries.”

thanks,

kass

Self-Publishing -- What Do You Think?

OK, so I have a question (or, questions) after seeing the full-page IUniverse ad today on p. 2 of the NYTBR:

What do you folks think about IUniverse, XLibris, Author House and other such adventures in POD self-publishing? ( I mean, the kind where you have to fork over your own cold hard cash. The ad for IUniverse is asking for a grand in exchange for a quotient of marketing support courtesy of Barnes & Noble.)

I'm seriously considering doing something like this, and somewhat aware of the associated (esp. contractual) hazards. But to be candid, I'm tired of the hoop-jump I'm experiencing wrt certain of my manuscripts, and thinking that I generally have to invest in my own PR anyway. $1000? Sounds like a lot, but it isn't. And like the rest of you, I presume, I figure I've been around long enough to drum up some interest in my work.

I've read the comparative (online) reports of these services. It seems to me, at any rate, that they're altering the publishing landscape by offering publishing models somewhat betwixt & between vanity press and standard publishing arrangements.

But really, I'm less interested in the more abstract ramifications than I am in sheer down & dirty pragmatics. Love to hear what you all have to say.

Best,

Joe

Postmodernism: Sublime, or Over?

is a posting of what was previously a comment. by request. some will have read this already, in which case, surf elsewhere.]

jeffrey, liberation, or a return to ethics, would be fabulous—would that it were so.... and as to your analogy with regard to definitions of beauty and sublime, i *do* have sublimely dark brown eyes....

and lance, with regard to _american book review_, yeah, jeffrey di leo in houston may take it over---if he did it would be in great hands---but i have heard *nothing* to indicate that this deal went through so i hesitate to name names (too late!).

but that's a side bar to jeffrey's interesting nudge. i like lance's seconding nudge to recall that with pomo sublime we

>put forward the unpresentable in presentation itself

terrific!, and just say no to "consensus of taste"; say yes to "openness"—it all sounds lovely. i don't think it's happening much, but it all sounds lovely.

should i say it's not happening much "any more?" are we ("we") going to grapple at some point with the ... consensus ... that pomo has come and gone and we should be investing in something known as "now what"? i love lytotard too and we need to be conscious of such constructs (is there a collapse that needs to happen between “next” and “now”? are we getting too linear?). presenting the unpresentable is certainly my goal, but we're also going to have to strike out a bit on our own. talk about "open"—unknown territory!—or so i HOPE. i feel like i'm seeing a lot of rehash, even DOING a lot of rehash—maybe all of that is even necessary—but what now? what next? beyond? please not between. to think that we are all writing between movements is just too disabling to me.

what comes beyond presenting the unpresentable? of course, some folks are telling me that the logical next step is presenting the presentable. duh. backwards much? where is *forward*? it's like i can't find the gears on the drive shaft. but forward could be too...linear. where is “the third way”? given a choice between forward or backwards, i would like to see what’s behind door # 3.

which door i do not intend to imply would be a hybrid of representation (realism) and nonrepresentation (the meta- stuff lance suggests). not a hybrid---a THIRD WAY.

sorry to get all buddhist on everybody’s asses. i’m not one, really, i just groove on some of the ways pomo can be very zen....

but what do we think? is pomo over, or what?

thanks,

kass