rain taxi fundraising auction

In order to raise ever-needed and well-deserved funds, Rain Taxi Review of Books is holding an auction this week on eBay.

There are lots of great first editions, broadsides, artwork, etc.

For a full listing, please click here.

a conversation with jeffrey deshell : part one

Lance: In his podcast interview with Frank Giampietro, R. M. Berry defines experimental fiction, essentially, as that which knowingly poses the question: what is fiction? Would you agree?

Jeffrey: So we don’t get a chance to get warmed up or anything, then, do we? R.M. and I had the briefest of conversations about this at the Attention/Inattention Conference at Denver University a year ago last fall. I have a couple of approaches to this question.

On the one hand (and I haven’t yet listened to the podcast, as the word “podcast” frightens me), this seems like an adequate, working definition. There are a couple of words here that seem key: the word “knowingly” and the word “fiction.” In order to fit this definition, one must be (self-)conscious about the questioning, one must set out to question, as it were—the questioning is the project, the questioning is the problem. This questioning quality, I think, indicates the open(ing) and process(ing) of the fiction we’re talking about, its movement and restlessness. And it’s not just a questioning of its own status, it’s the questioning of fiction (and by extension language, reality and the self) itself (themselves). The question of What am I as writing? becomes the question of What is writing? becomes the question of What am I?

I’m curious, however, if we’re saying enough. Doesn’t all fiction, all literature, question itself on some very basic level? Isn’t even the most genre specific formulaic and trite mass-marketed trash, self-conscious? Doesn’t it demand (self)conscious (at least on some level) choice and effort to make a piece of writing fit the genre? Isn’t all writing, on some very basic level, an experiment? In the very act of writing, does anyone know, when they write the first word, what the last word’s going to be? When I wrote the word “When,” six words ago, did I know that the final word of the sentence would be “be”? No. And that’s just with a single sentence. Every word, every sentence, every page, every chapter etc.: all experiments.

Barthes wrote somewhere that writers are those for whom language is a problem. If you already have the solution before you start, it’s not a problem. This is something I’d like to ask a more traditional writer someday: do you really know how your sentence, paragraph, novel or chapter is going to end when you write the first word? One might have a general idea, a bright and shiny figure idea in one’s head, but in the translation to imperfect, dirty and stubborn language, doesn’t something get lost (gained)? Not to mention life getting in the way. The vicissitudes of writing something long, like a novel, when you have to live with the thing for years, and the kids are making noise, and you get sick, divorced, remarried, and it’s a nice day to go for a walk, and you want to watch all of Robert Mitchum’s movies, and you have to grade papers etc. etc. etc.: how can you say that you know what you are doing and what you will be doing? How can you say that you’ll know how your sentence will end? How can you say that’s not an experiment? So is it a question of degree or intensity?

On another hand, the word I’m most concerned with in the R.M.’s definition, and the one that causes the most trouble for me, is the word “is.” By saying experimental fiction is, aren’t we arresting its experimentalness, its contingency, openness and restlessness? Doesn’t the is stabilize the fiction, make it into a thing, into an object like other things? An object with use-value, with existence, with presence, with a status that is predetermined and fixed? This is why I objected so strenuously to the metaphor of fiction as architecture in a discussion a couple of months ago: can built (realized) architecture question its own existence in the world? I don’t see how (this could be my own blindness). To my mind, music, with its ephemerality, with its existence and yet non-existence, seems closer to literature. If we takes Berry’s definition seriously, the is is the first place we have to question. Does experimental fiction exist? Yes and no.

Still, on another hand, the western tradition often defines (advanced) human life as requiring self-consciousness, the ability to question one’s existence. I like that Berry’s definition connects experimental fiction with this human life, making it lively, open, animated, uncertain, indeterminate, indefinite. Experimental. Experimental fiction puts itself in play, as well as the self in play. And if we say that all literature is experimental, then let’s take that label off, and say that all Literature, indeed all Art (and I’m very invested in these terms), rigorously asks these questions: What is a text? What is a reader? What is a writer? Literature asks these questions (serves as the ax for the frozen sea within us etc.) while other, more “popular” forms of writing, do not.

Your turn. I know, from your posts and other writings, that you consider self-consciousness a key component to experimental fiction. How does your thinking differ from mine?

Lance: I very much like your troubling questions and caveats, think they’re right on the mark, believe in many ways we’re thinking along much the same lines about experimentalism—or, better, as I've mentioned here before, experimentalisms. Let me respond quickly to a few points you make, however, that may help delineate a few difference in our approaches. I don’t seem to be as convinced as you that all literature questions itself on some basic level. Or, perhaps, I want to assert that different sorts of writing ask different sorts of questions of writing. Authors of Harlequin romances, for instance, surely pose questions about genre to themselves, as you suggest, maybe questions about market forces, but for me the questions their texts pose are neither interesting nor enlightening about the nature of fiction and the culture/languages that speak through it. On the other hand, I don’t see a clear binary between experimental writing and whatever we might conceive of as the other thing. Would it be helpful, therefore, to think of experimentalisms as existing along a continuum? At one end, we would posit cookie-cutter texts like those romances; at the other, we would posit something called, say, Finnegans Wake. Other texts would then situate themselves somewhere in between.

Texts begin to become engaging for me at that point where they become much more than predictable, much more than texts I’ve seen before, where they begin to impede my easy understanding of them, where they begin to challenge me to invent a modified and fairly complex way of speaking in order to converse with them. So, yes, self-consciousness is a key component of experimental fiction, as far as I’m concerned, but, equally if not more important is a certain textual density and difficulty of imagination at the strata of language, structure, character, voice, vision, and so forth. Of course, my threshold for difficulty will be different from other readers’, and perhaps that’s enlightening as well: that is, not only are there different experimentalisms (Burroughs’ project isn’t Coover’s isn’t Diane Williams’s isn’t Shelley Jackson’s isn’t Jeffrey Deshell’s), but it is also the case, I think that I think, that different texts will strike different readers as more or less experimental at different times in their lives. One’s first engagement with Ulysses will not be one’s third or thirtieth. Moreover, different texts will strike different readers as more or less experimental at different times in the conversation across time and space called literary history.

Do you sense something about what you think of when you say “contemporary experimental fiction” that separates it from the experimentalisms of, say, the 1960s? The 1760s? What, I mean to ask, makes the experimental experimental for you in 2007 that might not have made it experimental in 1907?

part two of this conversation
coming soon . . .

The Shifting Literary Landscape

In reference to Lance and Davis's posts, Yeah, the nature of lit has changed a lot. Just look at what gets written about as if it were literary: the museum without walls as it used to be called in the visual arts where, after Duchamp’s urinal, anything could be an art object. Seems like the same thing has been going on in literature, though not necessarily in a liberating, or genre-expanding way as was the case with Duchamp’s FOUNTAIN, given that one is as likely to see critics expend their energy in analysis of Survivor, The Sopranos or Grand Theft Auto as contemporary lit (which raises a point Joe Amato makes elsewhere: when are critics going to start considering the ramifications of the choices they make in selecting the objects they do for analysis?). That Steven Johnson book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter seems to be a popularization of an idea that has dominated literary studies/American culture for some time now.

But I digress. More specifically, when I think of the number of things all of us do now in comparison to say 20 years ago, I think it’s not hard to conclude that there’s been a seismic shift in what literature is, what is considered literary. It wasn’t that long ago that a monthly calendar of readings was alien. Readings were a thing that poets did in a bar. The reading fee was a free beer. Now in Chicago, to use a typical city, any month’s calendar is made up of authors of financial-advice books, cookbooks, history, etc. etc. That is, there seems to have been a real rise in the author as celebrity, or at least a rise in the importance of face time in literature. (It’s also odd how readings have come to dominate the hiring of faculty authors: as part of the hiring process, a visiting candidate’s reading is the one thing everyone in the dept. attends, and they vote on the basis of the reading, not the written work.) As someone who writes for the page, i.e, uses the page as a visual element that is part of the story, this emphasis on performance has caused me to make pieces that can be used in these performance venues—it’s shifted what I do as an author, and I only mention my own case as an example of how widespread this phenomena is, slam poetry aside. Then there are all the other things all of us do—creating pieces for the web, contributing to blogs, etc. and all the other kinds of creation that aren’t necessary writing or reading in the traditional sense.

Hand in glove with all of this is the market as coauthor. It’s been true for some time now that the movie that doesn’t play at the mall doesn’t play, the same is true in lit. As Trevor and Ted note elsewhere, poetry, experimental writing and other kinds of writing that don’t have mass market demographics are invisible to the commercial newspapers of record, and all of this has helped to redefine what counts as literature (or a movie, or anything ‘mass’ for that matter). This too has had a trickle down effect in terms of determining what is and isn’t part of the literary conversation: you can’t buy, teach, read a book you don’t know exists, and the narrow-view of lit taken by the mainstream reviewers/papers has certainly shaped what is read, or taught in schools, written about by critics (see above). (Not coincidentally this dynamic makes the few publications that have a broader view of what lit is and can be all that much more important, e.g. RCF, ABR, Rain Taxi).

But finally, and I guess this is what Davis is actually talking about, the word-image hybrids that dominate e-writing are certainly a different animal in every way from traditional print: the assumptions behind what is considered "literature," what is considered “writing” and what goes on during “reading” are certainly different. All writing is writing under constraint, be it the constraints of realism or OuLiPo, and electronic writing certainly has its own particular constraints: the reluctance of readers to go through dense prose on-line, for example; pressure there is for e-writers to basically think in terms of screens, chunks, or blocks of text that would fit on a notecard. The genre expectations that we bring to e-lit demand that it do something other than print-lit, have a sound track, move around. If nothing is happening, don’t we start clicking the mouse? These differing constraints and assumptions, not to mention the marketplace as co-author, allow a different kind of literature to emerge, one that is stunning for its ability to be multimodal, as the English call it. Check out Heavy Industries’s DAKOTA [http://www.yhchang.com/DAKOTA.html]. Check out the great anthology of e-lit just put out by ELO (Hayles, Montfort, Rettberg, Stickland eds.), Electronic Literature Collection, Vol. One [ http://collection.eliterature.org/1/]

(Anyone who still doubts how clueless/apathetic commercial newspapers are about the wider world of aesthetically-driven literature need only note how invisible e-lit is to their reviewers. Speaking of which, does anyone know where e-lit is reviewed in a meaningful way? Seems like I only hear about works I should read/look at by word of mouth or by stumbling across them, and there’s so much junk online I never want to spend the effort wading through it find the pearl. The great thing about the web is that it has no editor/the bad thing is that it has no editor.)

I don’t know if any of this is good, bad or neutral. There seems to be a diminishment in the appreciation of poetics. There certainly seems to a bleed over from one sphere to the other; as someone who also teaches lit, for example, I’ve noticed that students no longer come into a classroom understanding that poem or novel might have to be read more than once to be understood. Or as Silverblatt once said on Bookworm (to Gilbert Sorrentino, I think), not as many people can APPRECIATE ‘difficult’ books today (think Faulkner) because not as many people can READ ‘difficult’ books (think of NY Times ‘critic’ James Atlas who once wrote that Proust, along with Joyce, etc. bore him--this from someone who writes for the paper of record, not someone who lives under a rock). That seems to be the downside. The upside is that no one know what literature is anymore, and that seems exciting. This shifting literary landscape reminds me of an essay by Morton Feldman on the art scene at the dawn of abstract expressionism: “What was great about the fifties is that for one brief moment—maybe, say, six weeks—nobody understood art. That’s why it all happened. Because for a short while, these people [the artists] were left alone. Six weeks is all it takes to get started. But there’s no place now where you can hide out for six weeks….” Or as Dylan Thomas might have put it, “Rage, rage against the dying of the light”?

happy new year

A very warm happy new year to all readers of and contributors to Now What, and many, many thanks for making this experimental conversation about experimental fiction the success it's been so far.

Back on 3 June 2006, one month after our launch, we had had 2,672 visitors. As of this morning, we've had 18, 804. We continue to see readers drop in regularly from around the country and from as far away as Norway, Turkey, and Australia.

Originally Ted Pelton and I conceived of Now What as a fairly stable entity. The plan was for us to invite a dozen or so innovative authors and publishers to be full-time contributors—and that, we figured, would be that. But this blog has proved to be deeply Heraclitean in nature. Because of time constraints, some of our initial contributors have had to bow out. Because of interest in our project, others have come aboard. Still others have remained more or less constant from Now What's inauguration. I suspect that this will remain the case, that Now What will remain a polyphony in process. I can't imagine a more perfect manifestation of its goals.

The same has seemed to prove true for Now What as for alternative prose and publishing in general—i.e., that there's a real and substantial audience out there for this sort of engagement, despite the fact that, as David Fenza, executive director of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs, points out in the latest issue of Poets & Writers, our culture has

entered an era of trickle-down belligerence to artists and the arts. Congress cut the budget of the NEA by 40 percent in 1996. The NEA lost resources with which it could support small presses and literary service organizations. Many states cut funding for their state and local art agencies. This also limited support for nonprofit presses and literary programming. Private philanthropic support for the arts, including literature, declined. In 1991, the arts received 8.4 percent of all private charitable giving; that giving fell to 5.2 percent in 2005. The advocacy group Americans for the Arts estimates this decline to be a loss of $8.4 billion in support.

Despite, in other words, that even relatively mainstream art has found itself under attack over the last decade and more, there remains a real and substantial audience for what we at Now What do, what we care about, what we stand for. The only problem, from what I can see, is finding increasingly effective ways to reach that audience. To that end, let me start the new year by making a request of you: please continue passing the words.

And here's to a 2007 that makes 2006—one of the most dynamic and diverse years I can remember in the field of innovative writing, apparent proof, in light and in spite of Fenza's sobering statistics, that this enterprise is never ultimately about money, but rather in many respects about the very opposite of money—look downright flat and faded.

Sometimes this feels like a beginning.

Sometimes this feels like a first sentence.

the death of metafiction & other malicious rumors

I received an email from Marc Lowe this morning pointing me to a strong essay by Michael Boyden in ebr about American Oulipo writer Harry Mathews. Marc directed me particularly to the following provocative paragraph, which he asked me to post here so that those interested might engage with it:

In the conclusion to her chapter on postmodern fictions for the seventh volume of The Cambridge History of American Literature [1999], Wendy Steiner argues that the 1990s have signalled the end of the experimentalist period of esoteric metafiction in American prose writing. Whereas outside the U.S. such writings continue not only to be produced but also to be appreciated, Steiner claims that in America critical taste "has moved on" (Steiner 529). As a possible reason for this turn away from self-reflexive fiction, she notes the fact that several of the most renowned American experimenters, notably Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Robert Coover, John Hawkes, and William Gass, have passed their creative peak. A more compelling factor, however, would have been the so-called "culture wars" in the American academy which seem to have undermined the cultural validity and vitality of postmodern "high" fiction. According to Steiner, the controversies in the universities have resulted in the gradual erosion of the boundaries between "art" and "reality" (530). Further, the development of new media as well as dramatic changes in the marketing of books have made such distinctions between "high" and "low," or "popular" and "serious," even more precarious. More and more, apparently, novelists are moving away from elitist game playing and instead are drawing inspiration from mass culture and the lives of "ordinary people" (brackets in Steiner's text, 535).

Marc responds elsewhere in part:

Note that, as it says here, metafictional, or "self-reflexive fiction," is still popular in other countries, primarily Europe (and also Japan to some extent, particularly in the form of autobiographical fiction -- i.e. shishosetsu, or "I-novel"-inspired work). . . . To say that American "critical taste" has "moved on" to stories about the lives of Joe the mechanic and Jane the doctor says nothing so much as that American readers have gone from lazy to lazier.

While Steiner's comments were composed more than eight years ago, and may therefore be granted a certain by-default out-of-dateness, they nonetheless strike me, even for 1999, in equal parts preposterous and as strong evidence for her apparently parochial reading habits. (Much the same, by the way, could be said for Fredric Jameson's pronouncements about postmodern fiction, which are based exclusively—and, for an unflagging Marxist, ironically—on a small sample of texts produced by mainstream corporate presses.) I want to say, rather, that all experimental fiction—from Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy to this past year's The Open Curtain (Brian Evenson) and The Exquisite (Laird Hunt) and on to next year's Parabola: A Novel in 21 Inersections (Chiasmus) by new-comer Lily Hoang—is to some extent metafictional: to some extent, that is, self-consciously about its own processes, about the nature of language, about the structuality of structure, about its own (and hence the world's) uses of narrativity, and hardly "esoteric" or "elitist," hardly cut off from "reality," but rather deliberately challenging, difficult, against the narratological grain, profoundly political, oppositional to the status quo on the page or off by its very being .

Still, I'd very much like to hear from others on this, especially with regard to Steiner's comments about those so-called "culture wars" ongoing in the American academy.

back to the future : fc2 podcasts

Speaking—apropos of the link to the wonderful Bernhard interview Jeffrey Deshell provides below—of interviews, FC2 has inaugurated a series of monthly podcasts that will contain interviews with and readings by its authors.

The first takes the form of an extended conversation (55 minutes) with R. M. Berry, who will be stepping down as publisher of FC2 this spring after nearly eight years at the helm. Among other topics, he touches on the founding days of the Fiction Collective in the seventies, its present, its possible futures, the state of alternative publishing in the U.S., and how one way of defining experimental fiction is to say it is the sort that has always seriously asked the question: What is fiction?

You can download that podcast and forthcoming ones at the FC2 website here, or you can subscribe via iTunes by doing a search there for FC2.

Mad Hatters' Review Reading, 1/27, NYC

Madhatters' Review
Edgy & Enlightened Literature, Art & Music in the Age of Dementia

Poetry, Prose & Anything Goes Reading Series

Curated & Pickled by Publisher/Editor Carol Novack
5th Reading Friday, January 27th, 2007, 7 – 9 pm

KGB Bar85 East 4th St. 2nd Floor (between 2nd Ave and Bowery)
212-505-3360
http://www.kgbbar.com

Features

Norman Lock

Norman Lock is the author of The Long Rowing Unto Morning (Ravenna Press), A History of the Imagination (Fiction Collective Two), Land of the Snow Men (Calamari Press), ‘Notes to the Book of Supplemental Diagrams’ for Marco Knauff’s Universe (Ravenna Press), Trio (Triple Press), Emigres & Joseph Cornell’s Operas (elimae books and YKP, Istanbul), Cirque du Calder (Rogue Literary Society), and The House of Correction (Broadway Play Publishing). Two Plays for Radio is due fall '06 from Ravenna Press. His stage plays have been produced in New York, Los Angeles, in Germany, and at the 1996 Edinburgh Theatre Festival. Women in Hiding, The Shining Man, The Primate House, and Money, Power & Greed were broadcast by WDR, Germany. He wrote the film The Body Shop, produced by The American Film Institute. He is the recipient of the Aga Kahn Prize for fiction, given by The Paris Review. He lives in Philadelphia. Two of his book reviews and a short fiction can be found in MHR.

Terese Svoboda
Terese Svoboda has been described as “A fabulous fabulist,” in Publisher’s Weekly review of her fourth novel and ninth book, Tin God. Her writings have appeared in The New Yorker, New York Times, Atlantic, Slate, Bomb, Lit, Columbia, Yale Review and Paris Review, and her honors include an O. Henry for the short story, a nonfiction Pushcart Prize, a translation National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship, a PEN/Columbia Fellowship, two NYFA Fellowships in poetry and fiction, an NYSCA grant, a Jerome Foundation grant in video, the John Golden Award in playwriting, and the Bobst Prize in fiction and the Iowa Prize in poetry. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence, Williams, the College of William and Mary, the University of Hawaii, the University of Miami, the New School, St. Petersburg, Russia and is currently Writer-in-Residence at Fordham. She lives in New York City and will be teaching in Kenya Christmas '06 and Bennington next spring. Her opera WET premiered at L.A. Disney Hall in December '05.

Deb Olin Unferth
Deb Olin Unferth's fiction has appeared in Harper's, Conjunctions, Fence, NOON, the Pushcart Prize anthologies, and elsewhere. Her first book is forthcoming from McSweeney's.

For info, email madhattersreview@gmail.com

Bernhard Interview

Here's a link to a great Thomas Bernhard interview, courtesy of my friend Patrick:

http://www.signandsight.com/features/1090.html

Happy holidays.
J

the best of 2006

I'd like to pick up on Trevor's post below and extend it by asking:

Which one or three works of alternative prose you encountered this past year most startled and/or delighted and/or influenced and/or infected you, and, in a sentence or three, why?

Note the works in question don't necessarily have to have been published in 2006. You just have to have engaged with them then—and not necessarily for the first time.

I'm naturally as leery as the rest of you when it comes to the simplicity and sucker's game of lists, yet think this one might serve us all well, both by bringing to our attention works that might otherwise be overlooked, and by generating a resource for readers and writers searching for texts The New York Times Book Review would like to pretend don't exist.

virtue, virtuosity, virtuality,

I recently had the pleasure of visiting Joe Tabbi’s graduate seminar on “World Fictions” at the University of Illinois-Chicago. Tabbi asked me to discuss my response to Ben Marcus’s scouring of Jonathan Franzen in Harper’s last fall.

My essay, “Notes from the Middleground: On Ben Marcus, Jonathan Franzen, and the Contemporary Fiction Combine” (Electronic Book Review) proffers that Franzen’s position—non-mainstream fiction (read: the stuff we talk about on this blog) is destroying American literature—and Marcus’s well-meaning response, to some extent, makes an aesthetic argument out of an economic problem. I ultimately suggest that the most interesting works express the tension between art and the market in their material substance, and cite Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland and good ol’ Tristram Shandy to this point.

I’ll leave the nuances of this to those interested, and instead comment on a provocative notion Tabbi articulated during the session:

Tabbi argues, quite convincingly, that the first generation of postmodern authors (Barth, Gaddis, etc…) focused on the literary work above all else. They may have indeed been/be great show(wo)men, as demonstrated by William H. Gass at the &NOW festival at Lake Forest College last spring), or by Raymond Federman or Kathy Acker any time those two, well, do/did anything at all…yet, Tabbi says, many current writers who have moved into non-textual environments sacrific this same intense attention to literary production.

Not that there is any less value in multimedia endeavors, but that these writers, if I take Tabbi correctly, are perhaps not writers in the same sense. And, just maybe, the literary tradition suffers, because literature becomes, well, something else entirely.

My first instinct, as one of these sometime-multimedia folk, is to recoil. I see my non-print, non-text work, really, as writing in different forms. But then I start to wonder if the technological transformations overtaking the work that we now do may not be fundamentally changing what is it is, exactly, we end up doing. No great lament from me about these changes, and if we take Gilles Deleuze seriously, the death of the book has been a long time comin'.

As someone who schedules many writers on the academic circuit, I must admit often considering entertainment value, in many different forms, before extending an invitation. This doesn’t mean that great writers can’t be damn entertaining, but perhaps reinforces Tabbi's claim that writing has lost real cultural ground in the age of the Xbox.

Against my better judgment, this takes me back to Franzen’s seemingly ridiculous claim that literature needs to compete with things such as extreme sports.

Bungee jumping while reading Swann’s Way anyone? Or am I just expressing the bowhunter’s fear of the gun?

--Davis

NY Times' best of 2006

Yet again, the NY Times Book Review's annual best-of list is a predictable yawner. All of the "best" fiction books are from NY houses (I list them, respectively: Random House, Scribner, Knopf, Knopf, Viking), and the only marginally innovative book on the list is Amy Hempel's Collected Stories.

Of course, this comes as no surprise, but it does tease a larger conversation: what *were* the best books for 2006? Here's my short list; most of the names should be familiar:

Steve Tomasula, The Book of Portraiture
Lance Olsen, Nietzsche's Kisses
Gina Frangello, My Sister's Continent
Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls

Others?

"What is a reading?"

A recent trip I made to San Diego to read at UCSD started me thinking about readings and audience and publics. And I found myself recollecting an anecdote by Richard Wright that Juliana Spahr relates in her book Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity. Spahr argues that “complex works” empower readers by granting the latter equal authority with the author, and among the works she focuses on are texts by Gertrude Stein and Lyn Hejinian. The anecdote occurs in a page-and-a-half end note discussing how what Spahr calls the “indeterminancy” of Stein’s race and gender dislocations (via the use of racialized language that she wished to defuse and disempower) in “Melanctha” has opened that text to charges of racism. Here is Spahr quoting from a magazine article published in 1945:

Believing in direct action, I contrived a method to gauge the degree to which Miss Stein’s prose was tainted with the spirit of counter-revolution. I gathered a group of semi-literate Negro stockyard workers—“basic proletarians with the instinct for revolution” (am I quoting right?)—into a Black Belt basement and read Melanctha aloud to them. They understood every word. Enthralled, they slapped their thighs, howled, stomped and interrupted me constantly to comment on the characters.

Spahr argues that often in her work, Stein, whose first (and even second) language was not English and whose childhood years in the US coincided with a great wave of immigration, explores “how people with different levels of fluency speak to each other” and “encourage readers to bring to them different levels of connection, of meaning, of resonance.” Using her immigrant experience, Spahr says, Stein is writing for everybody, not just those schooled in English conventions. (The latter are named as those “schooled in Dick and Jane” and trained to the mastery of “close reading.”)

Earlier, in her introduction, Spahr notes that her emphasis is “less on deciphering works, and more on what sorts of communities works encourage.” (5) Spahr means a variety of things by “communities.” In light of my reflections on readings that authors perform in public, I think it would be interesting to use her words as a different way of thinking about a problem we’ve been talking about on this blog since it began.

I wrote the following narrative during the first couple of days after my trip, then put it aside, for I thought it was a bit too much of a “day in the life” sort of piece to be interesting to anyone but myself. But I’ve decided that since my experience that particular day, however unexceptional, provided the focus for my thoughts, I’ll go ahead and post it and let people decide for themselves whether to bother reading all of it

Nov. 2-3, 2006. Waking up the morning after, it all seemed like a dream—flying down to San Diego for the ParaSpheres reading and stepping out of the terminal into sunlight so dazzling I had to grope in my bag for the sunglasses I’d remembered to pack; spending the day on the UCSD campus; going to the reading; and then flying straight back home. By contrast, it’s dark today in Seattle. The little light there is in the world seems to be located in the gold and red leaves that glow against the dark gray sky, swaying madly in the wind as rain spatters against the window. Indoors, lamps burn all day. Maybe it’s the contrast between here and there that makes it seem more dream than memory, or maybe my memory was warped by sleep deprivation (for by the time I arrived home, I’d been awake for 42 hours).

The long, disjunct day had an interesting shape to it, full of curiously parallel—or should I say mirror?—experiences. It began at 4:30 a.m., when I rose after a night spent sleepless but relaxed, to dress, drink coffee, and put in my contact lenses. Leaving the house and entering the frozen darkness, it felt like the middle-of-the-night rather than early morning, but even at that hour I-5 had a lot of traffic. And so with SeaTac. Expecting a quick pass through the checkpoint on my way to the gate, I found myself one of hundreds of sullen, anxious travelers crammed into the zig-zagging files of the coach-class queue at the security checkpoint. They were mostly silent, except for those who fretted in low voices about missing their flights or whether their hand lotion or contact lens fluid would be taken from them as contraband. (We are all school children now, it seems, endlessly subject to changes in the rules.) A tape loop blared interminably, oppressing our spirits with a stupidly hectoring male voice (what canthey be thinking?) delivering a barrage of instructions (including a new one that annoyed a guard when I slavishly obeyed it). Perhaps it was the hour, but as I stood in line watching my fellow travelers, gray and dreary and bleak, I couldn’t help thinking that all that was missing was an enormous image of the dictator staring down on us. Instead, an enormous banner advertising Toyota hung above the entrance to the checkpoint proper. The point wasn’t lost on me.

The crowning moment following forty minutes’ wait came after I had entered the checkpoint and managed to strip off the outer layers of my clothing (including, it goes without saying, my shoes) and get everything onto the conveyer belt while still holding onto my passport and boarding pass. I had to wait to pass through the metal detector for the family being processed through the adjacent station (which shared the metal detector with the station currently processing my shoes, coat, and carry-on bag full of books and papers) to precede me. The man and woman with a baby and small child, unfortunately, were being given a hard time. First it was the baby’s stroller: one guard yelled at them for trying to take it through the metal detector and ordered them (juggling babies, passports, and boarding passes) to collapse it and put it on the conveyor belt. And then it was the baby’s clothing: a second guard snarled at the mother because she hadn’t removed the baby’s jacket, and when she had done that snarled at her a second time because the baby was wearing a cardigan sweater that the guard said had to come off, too. The mother was so frazzled and worried they would miss their flight that she yanked at the infant’s sleeves in a panic. (Miraculously, the baby didn’t freak out.) By the time I left the checkpoint, I had the taste of acrid disgust in my mouth.

This was the first time in my experience since the institution of the airport checkpoint ritual that even the semblance of politeness had been absent. (Had I just been lucky? Or has something changed?) It seemed that the security personnel had been reduced to gray elements of a clunky, clumsy machine, brainlessly enforcing rules for no reason but that they existed, while we travelers had been reduced to the anxious herd, enduring what we must without protest, knowing only that if we want to travel, we must submit. Never had it been clearer to me that airport security personnel are mindless enforcers of arbitrary rules that have nothing to do with “safety”: certainly that morning at that checkpoint they knew it and we knew it. And surely of those many women old and young, so anxious about hand lotion and toothpaste, most knew as they shuffled in line that if they had the clout of the merchants who lost money when the Bush Administration decided to make bottled water verboten and now have miraculously been saved by the revised regulation permitting water bought after passing through the checkpoint, their problem with items of personal hygiene, would, like the merchants’, have gone away by now, too.

After all that, imagine my 5:55 a.m. chagrin when—rushing to the gate—I passed by the egress of another checkpoint I could have passed through: this one almost completely deserted of all but security personnel. Why in the world hadn’t the security personnel let those of us queuing for the other checkpoint know?

But the rest of my morning went smoothly. Although the shuttle I’d made a reservation with didn’t show, a driver for another company agreed to take me to the UCSD campus. Perhaps because I was the only passenger, he felt obliged to make conversation with me. We began (naturally!) with the weather, with my past visits to San Diego, and from there to the local issue of the airport’s expansion. (He favored a plan in which the Navy would share its base at Miramar with the civilian airport that he said the Government was opposed to.) After a brief silence, he asked me if I was a student or a professor. I said, simply, that I was just visiting for the day, to give a reading. And here’s where the conversation got interesting. What is that? he wanted to know. What do you do at a reading?

His question made me do some thinking. This man who was likely in his early forties really had no idea what a “reading” was: he was asking me because he actually didn’t know. And it occurred to me that “readings” aren’t often given representation in popular media (like movies and television) and how else would he have known? So I offered him a general description and added the comment that when readings are held in bookstores they also usually included book signing, where people buying the book ask the author to autograph it. He chewed this over for awhile, then said, “Does that mean you write books?” I said that yes, I did. Another silence set in, and I thought that was the end of it. But a few minutes later, he said, “I don’t read much.” I said, “I gather most people don’t.” Another silence, then: “I guess I’d never’ve heard of you.” (How wonderful that he didn’t ask “What name do you write under?” as strangers usually do.) He went on, “The last books I read were the Left Behind books.” I know these have been big sellers, but this was the first person I’d ever met who’d actually read them. I was glad I was wearing sunglasses, because I wanted to keep my voice and face neutral, and at that point I needed all the help I could get. “Were they gripping?” I asked, curious that he’d apparently read more than one of them, which from all accounts (bestseller status notwithstanding) were long and tedious and turgid in the extreme. “Did you get hooked?” “For awhile,” he replied. “But I stopped after the fourth book.” A fairly lengthy silence set in after that, and I thought maybe he’d let the subject of books drop now for good. But it seemed that he just couldn’t stop thinking about my being a writer (as though he’d discovered he had some exotic animal sitting in the van with him), for about half a minute after I’d decided that the conversation had dead-ended, he said, “So have you written many books?” He didn’t sound as though he was asking this just to keep the conversation going: rather, he sounded anxiously curious. (And of course it was the anxiety in his curiosity that made me curious.) “Yeah, I guess I have,” I said, not wanting to get too specific. We exited I-5 about then, and I knew it wouldn’t be far to campus. “What’s the name of your latest?” he wanted to know. That was a tough moment, because I had a hard time not breaking into giggles at the thought of a Left Behind reader picking up the next book (or indeed any book) in my Marq’ssan Cycle, parts of which take place in San Diego county. Tsunami, I said. It’ll be out in January.” “I’ll have to try to remember to look for it,” he said as he made the turn to enter the campus. And at that exact instant, the fact that I’d gotten no sleep the night before and had been through that surreal 5:30 a.m. scene at the airport and had shifted from 32F to 61F in the space of three hours clobbered me with a moment of impossible disjuncture as I tried to imagine what it would take to communicate the reality of the typical writer’s situation to this man who was both interested and reasonably intelligent but in no way equipped to understand.

This odd, awkward conversation and the issues it raised in my mind recurred to me throughout the day. In the end, I found my reflections on the conversation more interesting that the actual experience itself (which I’d characterize as stiff and halting in the moment and though not painful, not pleasurable, either).

After exploring the campus to satisfy my curiosity about its differences from the same campus eighteen years ago (when I’d last seen it), I settled at a carrel in the library for a couple of hours to jot notes about my morning, read, and think. At three, I wandered into the food court at the Price Center where I sat down with a bagel and iced tea. I’d planned to read but instead ended up observing the students surrounding me—talking on cell phones, working math problems, gossiping in pairs, or just passing the time in groups, laughing, joking, flirting. Several were logged onto the internet, and a couple were doing math homework on graph paper, but I didn’t see a single person actually reading a book. (But then I saw people online or reading magazines in the library, but not a soul reading a book there, either.) It occurred to me to wonder whether any of these people had any more idea of what a reading was like than the shuttle driver, which led to a what-if moment. As an undergraduate music major back in the 1960s, like every other music major, every Thursday morning I was required to attend a convocation that usually featured a recital. (We were also encouraged to attend several recitals a week. Recitals are, I suppose, the musical equivalent of readings. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, frequent attendance of recitals allowed me to be exposed to a wide variety of music. Sure, among the range of recitals given there were occasionally some stinkers, but it proved to be an easy and pleasurable way to broaden my musical experience.) What if, I wondered, attending readings regularly were a requirement of all English and composition courses? Might not at least a few students find their way to work they’d ordinarily not even know existed? And might not even a few of those few afterwards choose to attend readings voluntarily? Nothing is more important for shaping aesthetic and entertainment tastes than exposure, and of course we all know that there is little more powerful in one’s life than habit…

Since I’d arranged to meet Aqueduct author Kimberly Todd Wade at 4:00 outside the Visual Arts Performance Facility, at about 3:45 I headed in what I thought was the right direction. When I realized I’d probably taken a wrong turn somewhere, I stopped and looked around to take my bearings and contemplated cutting through one of the campus’s groves of eucalyptus trees still left standing. “Can I help you find your way?” a young guy called out (lanky, clean-shaven, articulate, and gay), and without further ado swept me under his wing and walked me to my destination. Of course he knew the Visual Arts Performance Facility. “It’s a perfect black-box space,” he said. He himself had attended events there when his organization helped bring in gay and lesbian authors and performers. He played the role of the responsible tour guide to perfection, for as we walked—necessarily skirting the huge construction site—he informed me that UCSD is constantly expanding and hopes to reach an enrollment of (gasp) 30,000 students. He waved his hand at the massive construction sites and blithely chattered of vitality and “growth.” The campus’s expansion filled him with obvious pride and excitement, which took me aback a bit.

I met Kimberly as arranged, and we chatted for about twenty minutes before we went in. The space the reading was held in was indeed a black box. Near the door a couple of women were seated at a table with a cash box and stacks of ParaSpheres. At the front of the room, in the far corner (to the left of the lectern), Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan (the editors of ParaSpheres and the publishers of Omnidawn) had loaded a large round table with fruit, shrimp, smoked salmon, cheese, crackers, raw vegetables, and madeleines. The second person I asked pointed Rusty out to me, and I approached her and introduced myself. I was given a form to sign, granting UCSD permission to record the reading and the rights over any recordings, audio or video, that might be made, and in short order met the other writers who were reading— Carol Schwalberg, Noelle Sickels, William Luvvas, and Mark Wallace. At once everything snapped into place, becoming familiar and comfortable, and I lost my sense of being a stranger. I hadn’t actually met anyone there in the flesh before (although I’d had brief email correspondences with three people present). But now I was among other writers, and that was enough to make me feel at home. Strange, isn’t it? Writers are notoriously solitary and independent souls. (“Organizing writers is like herding cats,” I recall hearing Vonda McIntyre once say.) The works we read and the answers to the questions the audience asked us marked us as very different in style, formative experience, and ideas about narrative. But after a day spent moving in a world in which readings and writers are exotic and alien (at best!) or irrelevant and invisible (for most), I felt a rare appreciation of what we shared in common. Adding to my sense of ease was the speed with which Rusty helped me resolve the problem of getting back to the airport (due to the shuttle company’s flaking out on me that morning).

As well all chatted and nibbled, an audience assembled around us. I spotted a few young undergraduates attending, but most of the audience was older people, likely not students. Anna Joy Springer spoke first and introduced Ken. Then Ken spoke for a few minutes about how ParaSpheres came about and talked a little about “New Fabulism” and “New Wave Fabulism.” And then I read, for the first few minutes struggling with a microphone that persisted in drifting lower and lower over the lectern until finally it blocked my view of the page I was reading and Anna had to come up to adjust it. Mark Wallace read next, and as he read, I imagined the shuttle driver in the audience. And I thought: though Mark’s story is “odd” by conventional narrative standards, the fact is, it’s both entertaining and accessible. Anyone whose literary taste hadn’t gotten stuck in a hopeless, habit-driven rut must surely enjoy hearing this story read. When Mark finished, Carol, who was sitting on my right, whispered into my ear, “His humor’s like Kafka’s, isn’t it?” And another moment of trying to imagine what the shuttle driver would make of the readings worked powerfully on me. And so, for the rest of the event, I listened with a sort of dual-perception. I especially loved the idea of him listening to Carol read about a woman who conducts an extramarital affair in serial dreams, night after night, with the husband of the woman she buys fish from. The dry wit of Carol’s performance would surely seduce just about anyone into wanting to read her story for themselves. I don’t know if Ken and Rusty just happened to get such a diverse stylistic mix of stories to be read for the event or if they planned it that way, but the range of styles represented in the five stories we read from offered a fair representation of the diversity of the anthology itself.

After reading, the five of us, joined by Ken Keegan, lined up in a row behind the lectern, facing the audience, and fielded their questions. Two different young people asked us questions about how we had become writers and when we had realized we were writers, and each of us offered answers testifying to just how different such stories can be. Though after so many hours without sleep I wasn’t exactly a model of alertness, the questions about non-realist fiction actually got my brain working. Anna Joy Springer commented from the audience that too much of the fiction we need is getting “thrown away” into the genres and expressed a sense of frustration that there’s little interest in the mainstream for fiction that doesn’t conform to realist conventions and forms. Echoing his earlier opening remarks, Ken said that that was one of the reasons he decided to publish an anthology of “New Fabulism” and “New Wave Fabulism” stories. He then said that such stories “transcend” their genres. I’m leery of “transcendence” generally, myself, but in the case of fiction, I think it’s a serious error to suggest that good work “transcends” its genre (though it’s a claim that many people—including Steve Erickson, for instance, in a recent interview in Black Clock with Samuel R. Delany—make, when work they consider first-rate uses genre conventions and requires genre reading protocols of its audience. Someone else asked what fables are, which led to a collective attempt to offer a description. Another question from the audience asked us to talk about the difference between “New Fabulism” and surrealism. And finally, someone asked if there was a reason why so many writers were writing fables or fable-like stories now. I suggested that we live in a time in which we find it difficult to speak the truth, and nonrealist stories provide us with the space to speak freely. William Luvvas asserted that such writing has nothing to do with the political. And Mark Wallace offered an interesting, complicated elaboration on the difficulty of breaking past clichés at this particular, postmodern stage of capitalism. In another context, this could have been an opening to a fruitful, possibly fascinating discussion.

I regretfully said good-bye to everyone—wishing I could stay long enough to join the Omnidawn contingent for dinner—and left with Eileen Miles, who had generously offered to drive me to the airport. We stepped out of the room into night, which I found a bit disorienting, since, living in Seattle, I tend to associate warm temperatures with long days. The talk flew so fast and easily between us that the drive to the airport from campus could be taken as the polar opposite of the drive from the airport to campus. Eileen is best known for her poetry, but she writes fiction, too. And she is one of those rare individuals who came new to the academy in middle age—someone suddenly inside the academic world after years of experience as a working writer outside. So we talked about the academy—my decision to abandon it came up during the Q&A—and cities and the pedagogy of writing, all with amazing fluency, considering we had just met. Afterwards, I was struck by the observation that we share a good chunk of the same language, as the shuttle-driver and I so painfully do not.

When I arrived at the airport, the terminal was all but deserted. Nevertheless, a woman security officer stopped me from entering the checkpoint in order to give me a mini-lecture about liquids in carry-on luggage; and she insisted that I trade my transparent sealed plastic bag for an identical one of hers. Surely this was pointless mystification! Looking from her bag to mine, it struck me that our world had taken a shift sideways, into a fantastic baroque dimension where officials wield arcane rules the ordinary citizen knows nothing about with bizarre, arbitrary inflections. Soon our fashions and architecture will begin resembling the rococo grotesquerie that rules Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. My head spinning, I entered the checkpoint and was greeted politely by name by a dapper little man in a suit & quickly processed: the mirror experience of 5:30 that morning at SeaTac. And whereas I boarded the plane almost as soon as I arrived at the gate that morning, here I ended up waiting for hours. The monitor said the plane was on time, but it did not show and did not show. Though the population around the gate remained sparse, as I tried to read I was constantly distracted by indiscreet conversations about office politics or intimate exchanges shouted into cell phones of the few passengers sharing the space around the gate with me. Finally, though, the plane arrived—the same one I’d flown in on—and the few of us taking it boarded, and I spent the flight stretched across the row of seats, lying in the dark, staring out at the stars, listening to music. And so, eventually, to home and bed.

****

Writers don’t live in “ivory towers.” Most of us write about the world we all live in, using language anyone willing to make the effort can grasp. And yet, the contrasts I experienced that day, outside my daily round, a thousand miles from home, argues it’s not that simple. (Big news: as though we didn’t already all know that.) Juliana Spahr gestures toward one possible way of refusing the gap, but her discussion is, in a sense, mostly a glorious assertion about what could be without any hint of how to get there. The fundamental problem, as Andrea Hairston told me when we faced the abysmal turnout to her reading in Seattle last April, is how to get people to leave their homes, their television sets, their computers, and physically into a performance space. She’s been running a theater for years and years: and the hardest part, she said, is getting people to attend performances that will give them pleasure, if only they could be coaxed into the theater.

I’m interested in the ideas Lyn Hejinian expresses in her essay “Who Is Speaking?”

At stake in the public life of a writer are the invention of a writing community; the invention of the writer (as writer and as person) in that community; and the invention of the meanings and meaningfulness of his or her writing…But the invention of oneself as a writer in a community is only part of a larger question; it should be accompanied by the necessity for inventing that community, and thereby participating in the making of the terms that, in turn, themselves play a crucial role in making invention possible (or, in bad scenarios, impossible)…

…Do we need community? Do we want one? One quick way to answer this is to say that, want it or not, we have it. And this is the case not just because the world is with us. To the extent that humans know about humans, community occurs. A community consists of any or all of those persons who have the capacity to acknowledge what others among them are doing…

I’ve understood different things in these passages every time I’ve read them. What I’m thinking now is that we alternative writers don’t just need readers, we need a more expansive invention of community than the one that just happens to form among and around us. How do we do that? I think many of us are working at it in diverse ways. (I know I have been doing so!) This blog, obviously, is one. I think it could be helpful to be more conscious of it, to conceptualize it more clearly.

electronic literature collection: volume one

The first volume of the Electronic Literature Organization's anthology of new-media work turned up in my mailbox last week, and it's simply stunning.

Edited by N. Katherine Hayles, Nick Monfort, Scott Rettberg, and Stephanie Strickland, the collection has brought together in one place for the first time 60 of the most influential and significant digital texts from the last fifteen years or so. Included are projects by Edward Falco, Shelley Jackson, Michael Joyce, Deena Larsen, Talan Memmott, Judd Morrissey, Stuart Moulthrop, Kate Pullinger, Jim Rosenberg, Alan Sondheim, Rob Wittig, and others from the U.S.A., Canada, the U.K., France, Germany, and Australia. Each work is prefaced by a brief editorial description and author bio, and tagged with descriptive keywords for easy cross-referencing.

The compilation presents a broad overview of the field of electronic literature: hypertext, kinetic language experiments, generative and combinatory forms, network writing, codework, 3D, and narrative animations. Sampling the results, you can't help sensing distinctions between such unicorns as "poetry" and "fiction" (even "text" and "image," or "language" and "film") seem ever blurrier and more anachronistic—except in the minds of marketing engineers, librarians, book sellers, and reviewers.

Interestingly, the anthology is being published under a Creative Commons License, so readers are free to copy and share any of the pieces—or, say, install the whole on every computer in a school’s computer lab—without paying any licensing fees.

E.L.O., established in 1999 to promote and facilitate the writing, publishing, and reading of e-literature, is offering the collection in two formats at no cost: CD-ROM (which runs on both Windows and Mac) and web-based. For the former, the editors ask that you request a copy by writing to: Electronic Literature Organization, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), B0131 McKeldin Library, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. For the latter, just click here. The collection will also be included with N. Katherine Hayles’s book, Electronic Literature: Teaching, Interpreting, Playing, forthcoming from Notre Dame University Press in 2007.

abr:call for innovative books to review

In my new role as one of the associate editors at American Book Review, I'll be keeping my eyes peeled for significant just-published or (better yet) about-to-be-published innovative fiction, poetry, theory, and hybrid texts that should be reviewed in ABR.

If you ever know of one—by beginning or established authors, by yourself or others, from independent presses or corporate, in digital or dead-tree format—would you please email me (lmo AT lanceolsen DOT com) with an announcement that includes author, title, publisher, brief description, publication date, and contact information?

And if you're a publisher, would you please add me to your emailing list?

Many thanks, and please pass the meme.

Kent Johnson Speaks

Kent Johnson himself was drawn our way by the recent discussion of his work. But since his comment was the 15th reply to a post that is now over a week old and well down the page, I offered to post it here for him. The image of Yasusada was found in a past issue of the great Australian online poetry mag, Jacket.

--
A belated commentary here.

There are some really interesting remarks in this discussion, and thanks to Ted for putting up the generous post.

Just to throw something into the mix, I thought I'd comment briefly on Joe Amato's thoughts on the "genre" location of the Yasusada writing. (By the way, please see, if you haven't, Joe's amazing new book, Industrial Poetics, just out from Iowa--what its genre should be called, I'm not quite sure! It's fabulous.)

Actually, I wouldn't necessarily see Doubled Flowering, etc. as closer to Poetry than to Fiction, nor would I make the vice versa claim. And I don't say this just because the two AY books have as much "prose" in them as "poetry": Generic identity, I think, is not so much a matter of textual form as it is of Authorial identity and identification (i.e., how does the Author frame the form and how does the Author frame herself or himself?). And of course, the Yasusada writings refuse, in important senses, to mark themselves in ways that provide for ready placement.

Clearly, though, Motokiyu's writing *is* fictional... But I'd say it's a fiction in a decidedly non-conventional sense, since it also--and this would be at the core of its controversy--gathers into its poetic-fictive space a number of "real" and relatively unquestioned paratextual categories: ones that are almost always kept distinct from the imaginative "essence," so to speak, of literary writing, traditional and experimental alike.

Most relevant here would be the Yasusada work's departure from the expected projections of Authorship and the standardizing rituals of taxonomy and axiology that flow from its function (as they do, no?). And it's the paratextual category of Authorship, in particular, innocuous and normal as it appears to be, that provides the character roles we all fill and which the Literature institution absolutely requires for its overall stage effects--including the ongoing tragicomic display of the "avant-garde's" auto-recuperation into the Culture industry (Ron Silliman's post on Barrett Watten the other day, by the way, seems blind to the fact that there could be nothing more *inside* High Museum culture than a tenured, academic [winner of the Rene Wellek Prize for Criticism, no less] writing in arcane theoretical language about the negative dialectics of poetic opposition!). Er, Ideology, meet Language Poetry...

Not that Yasusada totally succeeds in escaping those dynamics... Far from it, since one could argue it's a pretty provisional, even flawed gesture of resistance to what I mention above. And not that these kinds of "theoretical" considerations are the major impulse or meaning of its writing. In fact, what I've said in this comment seems more than a bit uptight and stilted, now that I read it over. Well, too late now, I guess. Maybe a briefer way of putting it is that I think Motokiyu's work wishes to unfold not only as a fiction on the page, but as a fiction within the world. A poetic fiction, I suppose, that hopes to enchant and confuse the scenery in some modest, but useful and unpredictable ways. In that, I think it's had, and is still having, some impact.

Kent