interview : l. timmel duchamp : part one

Lance: Would you start off by telling us a little about Aqueduct, your press dedicated to publishing feminist science (or would "speculative" be a better word here?) fiction? When, why, and how did you launch it, and what are some of the most important revelations about the small-press world you've had by doing so?

Timmi: Since April 2004, when the publication of my collection Love’s Body, Dancing in Time launched Aqueduct Press, we’ve published five large trade paperbacks and thirteen—soon to be fourteen—small trade paperbacks. Aqueduct’s focus is feminist sf, which is a term I interpret loosely to include fantastic fiction and also nonfiction. The basic criteria for selection has (so far, at any rate) been that the work must be in “conversation with” other works of feminist sf (in the sense I describe in The Grand Conversation), that I personally am able to engage with it, and that it be in some way “challenging.” When I’m been commended for the range of Aqueduct’s list, it’s usually with surprise—reflecting, I suppose, the unstated assumption that “feminist sf” must by definition be a narrow category. I’m happy, of course, to unsettle that assumption.

The story of how I came to start Aqueduct is one that alters from moment to moment. In fact, I now see so many contributing factors to its genesis that I sometimes wonder how I could not have started it.

On the most personal level, I decided to bring Aqueduct into existence as the resolution to a crisis about my own work. I hit a kind of wall in 2001. By that time I had come to realize it was unlikely I’d ever find a publisher to bring out even one of my standalone novels (much less the million-word Marq’ssan Cycle, which I needed to be assured would be published in its entirety, something I knew no publisher would ever be able to promise). For another, I found that the attitude of some of the editors to whom I’d been selling short fiction was becoming more conservative and less open to my more challenging stories. And so for a couple of years I toyed with the idea of forgetting about writing for publication and just writing for myself. Given the strength of my independence and the peculiarities of my imagination, I knew that such a strategy could result in my producing work so increasingly idiosyncratic that it might become virtually unintelligible to anyone but me. And that made me wary of taking such a decision.

At the same time, I had become aware that the major sf publishers were ditching good writers right and left. I had always wished that existing feminist presses in the US would, like the Women’s Press in the UK, become sufficiently enlightened to realize that feminist sf is a literature at the vanguard of feminist ideas and thinking and commit themselves to publishing and promoting it. But although that never happened, feminist sf nevertheless managed to thrive in the US. So when the major publishers of sf began to back away from strong, serious feminist sf, the lack of a specifically feminist press publishing sf made itself felt, and I found myself thinking seriously about what the knowledge that the publishers had become risk-averse and that anything too challenging or demanding might now get tagged as “risky” would do to feminist sf writers. As a devotee of feminist sf, this disturbed me; as a writer of feminist sf, this alarmed me. I have long understood that the intelligibility of my own work depends on the existence of a web of related work by other writers. This is true, of course, for all writers. But for one embedded in the small discursive sphere that is feminist sf, this is absolutely critical. While it is true that people who’ve never read Samuel R. Delany, Joanna Russ, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree, Jr., Carol Emshwiller, Gwyneth Jones, or Karen Joy Fowler may very well be able to read my work with appreciation, there’s no question in my mind that people who have read all those authors (and others I haven’t named) will have an easier and richer experience reading my work than those who haven’t.

Aqueduct is the first dedicated feminist sf press to exist in the US. If we’d had such a press in the 1970s, feminist sf might have gone even farther than it did. In any case, there’s considerable irony in my founding a feminist sf press in 2004, at a time when many young women want to dissociate themselves from the term “feminist” even when their values and attitudes are unquestionably feminist, and at a time when numerous men in sf keep announcing that the need for feminist consciousness is past. The reality is that an influx of women into the field is underway, and they’re talking among themselves about many of the same issues Joanna Russ and Suzy Charnas were talking about thirty years ago.

Two of the novels I’ve edited and published were rejected by the major sf publishers, probably because the publishers considered them too demanding. I heard about Gwyneth Jones’s novel (Life, which Aqueduct published in October 2004) from Karen Joy Fowler in the fall of 2003 just as I was making my final decision about starting Aqueduct; Karen had read the novel in ms and loved it. I asked Gwyneth for permission to consider it, and I fell in love with it, too, and knew I had to bring it into print. Surprisingly, despite its being a challenging book to read, it won the juried Philip K. Dick Award. Another novel not appreciated by the big publishers, Mindscape, is an immense, mind-expanding experience to read. Its author, Andrea Hairston, is a playwright and performer, and the energy and élan of her prose reflects that. I suppose that if this is a particularly “difficult” book (and I’ve heard that some people think it is), that perception is due to its utter originality. There’s nothing like it that it can be compared to, which means that it demands that its readers venture into terra incognita and learn how to read the book as they go. I myself have always loved that kind of reading experience, but I’m sure it’s what corporate publishers consider “risky.”

Anent revelations about the small-press world, the discovery that the “presence” of a particular small press, at least in its earliest stages, before it has become a institution in itself (which development is, of course, an index of its success), is linked to its identity with the person or persons who are running it has come as my biggest surprise so far. Although I had numerous examples staring me in the face when I started Aqueduct—Small Beer, Tachyon, and Night Shade, to name the first three to come to my mind—it never occurred to me that my own association with Aqueduct would need to be publicized. In fact, though a writer and friend who has a career in the advertising industry behind her advised me at the outset that I should “brand” Aqueduct with my own reputation, I’d intended to downplay that association. But I abandoned the idea of keeping my association quiet when I discovered at a party for sf professionals that saying “Aqueduct, c’est moi” was efficacious in generating interest in an otherwise invisible press. (Which is another way of saying, I suppose, that where any small press is concerned, it’s a small world.) Once I uttered those words and discovered the difference they made, I began the scramble up a steep and slippery curve for learning how to reach the range of audiences that Aqueduct’s books might appeal to. I may change my mind about this later, but for the moment, achieving presence and maintaining and communicating a clear vision of Aqueduct’s mission are, it seems to me, the most critical factors in doing that.

Lance: In your press's mission statement, you talk about feminist SF having thrived for thirty years now. How has it changed over that time, and who are some of the practitioners with whom all of us should be familiar?

Timmi: The second wave of US feminism hit sf in the early 1970s. There are earlier works of feminist sf that have since been returned to print, but at the time these had largely been forgotten; and of course there was a lot of work by women, but most of it wasn’t in any way oppositional or alternative to mainstream values and practices of the day (which, I should perhaps remind younger readers, included separate job listings for men and women and the complacent and completely legal refusal to allow women into certain academic departments or majors, as well as difficulties, often insuperable, in opening a bank account or buying a home in one’s own name, if one were a woman). Feminism came to the sf world not only through feminist texts, but via the discussion both of the role and place of women in sf texts and of the place and role of women in the sf community at large. The earliest and strongest feminist voices leading the discussion were novelists Joanna Russ, Suzy McKee Charnas, Vonda McIntyre, and critic Susan Wood. Over the next decade and a half, they would be joined by writers James Tiptree, Jr. (aka Alice Sheldon), Octavia E. Butler, Ursula K. LeGuin, Angela Carter, Samuel R. Delany, Pamela Sargent, Eleanor Arnason, Pat Murphy, and Karen Joy Fowler. Other writers like Carol Emswhiller and Josephine Saxton produced arguably feminist texts (while themselves refusing the label “feminist”), and a few writers who did not identify themselves as science fiction writers produced one or two important feminist sf texts (Monique Wittig, Marge Piercy). The late eighties and early nineties saw the appearance of another wave of feminist sf writers—Nicola Griffith, Maureen F. McHugh, Gwyneth Jones, Lucy Sussex, Rebecca Ore, and Kelly Link, among others.

Feminist sf in the 1970s took an oppositional attitude toward the genre: it challenged previously unquestioned assumptions and premises and claimed the genre’s tropes for use in developing a distinctly feminist imagination. For a while, feminist explorations of the utopian imagination flourished, breathing new life into a moribund form of political fiction. By the mid-eighties, though, feminist writers began to engage in conversation with the important feminist texts of the 1970s—raising questions, challenging earlier assumptions as naïve or needing more thought, and in some cases taking issue with other writers’ notions of the desirable; and the earlier intense focus on reproductive issues began to give way to a focus on sexuality. A third stage began to emerge in the 1990s. Building on the work of the 1970s texts, writers dropped the attitude of writing in opposition to the established tropes and engaged in subtle exploration and conversation with what had by that time become the feminist sf canon. I call such writing “alternative.” “Alternative” writing can afford to be expansive and exploratory as politically oppositional writing cannot. The best example of such writing that I can think of is Karen Joy Fowler’s story “What I Didn’t See,” which readers lacking a grounding in the feminist sf canon tend not to read as either science fiction or particularly feminist.

Lance: In your bio at the end of your wonderful collection, Love's Body, Dancing in Time, you mention that at one point your creativity was "derailed" onto "an academic track," but that you eventually "deserted the academy and abandoned" yourself to the pleasures of fiction writing. Would you connect the dots in that story, and talk a little about how the academy has informed your fiction and your sense of it?

Timmi: I spent most of my childhood immersed in music—in playing it, in writing it, in listening to it. Interesting things were going on at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign) in 1968, when I arrived as a freshman. I planned to major in music composition, but ran into a situation I was too naïve to negotiate successfully. Before I registered, I was asked to “audition,” which involved my being tested in music theory, sight-singing, taking dictation, and on-the-spot keyboard transposition of a score, all of which I performed effortlessly for an octogenarian emeritus professor who must have just happened to be on campus that day (since he was someone I never saw again at any music school function); I also played piano transcriptions of some of my own compositions. Because of this “audition,” I was exempted from taking theory (though I allowed myself to be talked into taking an experimental course in music theory, which turned out to be one of my favorite courses, taught by a wonderful instructor)—but was told that I would need to “prove” myself before I’d be allowed to major in composition. I could do this by persuading a composition professor to let me sign up for lessons with him at the beginning of each semester, and perhaps some day, I was led to understand, in the vague future, I would be considered worthy of being a major. Naturally it never occurred to me that they had made up all this rigmarole of an audition & invented a rule just for me. (And it didn’t occur to me that their administrative exclusion of me might have something to do with why there were no women composition students: for since there never had been a woman majoring in woman composition, I naively assumed I must simply be the first woman student that had ever been interested in composing music on that campus.) But once I began classes, I met the handful of young men who were composition majors (of whom I was at first in awe, because I assumed they must be enormously more advanced and talented than I) and discovered that some of them had no theory background and at least one of them had never finished composing anything and that none of them had been subjected to an “audition.” And of course none of them had ever been required to persuade a professor to teach them each term.

As one does, I did my best to swallow the humiliation and do what I needed to do to keep studying and composing. This was an exciting and challenging time to be writing music, for one tended to invent new theory and new notation with each composition one undertook. (Such a background was extremely helpful when I began writing fiction.) And I found several musicians who were into my work and eager to perform it, with the result that when graduate students and junior faculty organized New Music events, they included my work on their programs. What more could I have wanted? I told myself that the legitimacy of official recognition didn’t matter. & for a while, that attitude held. In late May 1970, a few weeks after our campus had suffered a brief occupation by the Illinois National Guard, a piece of mine that had been previously performed with other New Music in an art gallery in downtown Champaign was performed in the Composition Division’s year-end student recital and got a warm reception from an audience of a couple hundred people. For about twenty-four hours I basked in the praise of my peers. When I went to my next composition lesson, my teacher asked to see the score of the piece again; I happened to have it with me and happily handed it over. Calmly he drew cartoons all over it and explained to me that its success was a “fluke.” (I was too upset, of course, to ask him what exactly he meant.) After which, he hit on me. I left his studio in a daze. And I understood that he had agreed to let me study with him simply because of his sexual interest in me.

And that was the beginning of the end. I lost all confidence in my creativity. I remember sitting, that summer, staring at a score I was working on, contemplating half a dozen different possible places to take it and being unable to settle on which. I’d never experienced such an impasse before: always I’d heard everything in my head without thinking about it and had merely to work it out on paper. I kept recalling what my first composition professor had often told me when he was describing the principles of craft that explained the effectiveness of something that I had done intuitively: the music is right when it sounds inevitable; the ear always knows.

For several years I kept that terrible lesson of the “fluke” a deep, dark secret. (I assumed it was true: and so how could I stand to share my humiliation with anyone else?) For the first time of my life, I ceased to live, eat, and breathe music. My friends, my family, and the musicians who’d been performing my music couldn’t understand how I could just stop writing music. I dropped out of school for a couple of years, and when I went back, I majored in Music History and quickly discovered a passion for History itself. And when I finished my undergraduate degree, I began work on a PhD in History. I became enamored with abstract thinking and theory, and as anyone becoming a historian must do, I grappled with narrative and came to understand how narrative structures determine what it is possible to say. What I learned about narrative dovetailed nicely with my readings of Foucault, particularly his discussion of the politics of truth and knowledge (which resonated with the Nietzsche I’d begun reading a year or two before I started graduate school).

As to my coming to write fiction: that started through a joke. After I passed by written doctoral examines, I whipped off the first chapter of a roman a clef to blow off steam in an entertaining way. Egged on by my friends and colleagues, I continued writing chapter after chapter—in my spare time—until one day I found myself with a novel ms in hand. After that, I couldn’t stop. And then I became serious and arrived at the momentous decision to set aside my dissertation in favor of a fiction-writing apprenticeship. And I’ve never regretted it for an instant.

Without question, my fiction has been informed both by my experience composing music, which made me acutely aware of overarching structures and themes as well as the equally important microstructures and patterns so important to all aesthetic creation, and by my training as a historian, which required me to think critically about plausibility and narrative structure and gave me an awareness of and insight into different/changing social and cultural logics (awareness and insight that have been enormously helpful for creating the interior reality of characters who live in worlds where people not only behave but also think and feel differently than the norm that I am necessarily immersed in). As for my sense of my work, although it is infused with pleasure and playfulness, I am serious about everything I do, likely because of my earlier ambitions as a composer and my years as a graduate student passionately in love with high-flown, abstract conceptualization.

stay tuned:
the second half of this interview
will be posted soon

The Editorial Function

It seemed to us that it might be useful to pose a few questions re this matter of the editorial function that Joe raised some while back. We each enjoyed a brief stint of late as (executive, managing) editors with American Book Review; like all of you, we've worked with countless editors (and kinds of editors -- acquisitions editors, copy editors, etc.) over the years; and if you throw in our service on editorial boards and the like, this rather rounds out our sense of what the editorial function is all about. Editors can help good work become better (line editing); they can find work that deserves to be published (acquisitions); they can stop presumably inferior work from being published (i.e., the gatekeeping function). In the review world, they can also help to promote work -- or at least contribute to the larger discourse in which a work resides -- by finding worthy reviewers and worthy items to review. This is all very straightforward.

But it leaves us with some nagging questions as to the status of the now in such terms, particularly in light of the proliferation of those many self-publishing models facilitated by our digital technologies. In what follows we make ample use of the line of reasoning that Foucault employed in "What is an Author?"

(1) For Foucault, the concept of authorship emerged at a particular time in history, as a product of history, which suggests that it may not always be with us as such. Does the concept of the editor follow hard on the heels of the author function? What is its history? Can we envision the elimination of the editorial function, and if so, what constraints will take its place? (For Foucault, the demise of authorship as such would not imply the elimination of social/historical constraint.)

(2) Foucault does not feel that one has properly interrogated the author function simply by drawing attention away from the author and to the text. In which regard, he raises the question of the author's name. Indeed, for Foucault, the name is the clearest indication that the author function is not merely a matter of some biological entity called "the author." The author's name functions in myriad material ways -- for instance, in the way books are shelved in stores (along, of course, with genre).

Can the same be said of editors? Certainly, the editorial function does not bring with it the name cachet one finds at work in authorship. In fact the general public knows very little about editors, as a rule, or what editors do (except perhaps for newspaper editors), though within some writer/author tribes -- those who publish on the major trades -- there would seem to be a heightened awareness as to renowned (read: severe) editors. (Max Perkins, say, or "Binky" Urban.) Is this b/c, in avant circles, few can afford to do that level of editing? (We know that even the trades are straining to maintain their editorial staffs at this point.) Or is it that avant writers have a general distrust of the editorial function, b/c all too often editors are hostile to work that doesn't fit precast conceptions? Are we hereby suggesting that avant work brings with it a greater potential for editorial sloppiness? If so, is it worth the latter to maintain a more open response to alternatives?

(3) Foucault discusses how the author function differs for different kinds of texts -- the author seems much less of an issue in scientific writing generally than in literary texts. Can the same be said of the editorial function?

(4) Foucault posits the author function as arising out of a (legal) need to punish transgression. Simply put, names provide a basis for litigious action against juridically-conceived subjects. Can the same be said of the editorial function, not in terms of names, but in terms of the additional capacity for avoiding (e.g.) libel? In which regard and speaking historically, did the editorial function first emerge as an additional such safeguard?

(5) Some authors, for Foucault, author not only individual works, but also entire discourses (Marx, Freud). Can the same be said of some editors? Do editors help to create "the possibilities or the rules for the formation of other texts"? Would we want editors -- or at least, some kinds of editors -- to have such powers? (Perhaps James Laughlin's New Directions, say, or Maurice Girodias's Olympia Press speak to something along these lines.)

(6) We know that, in the small(er) presses, editors and publishers are often one and the same. Should we perhaps be looking more closely, and in the terms already articulated, at the small press publisher?

Following is the etymology of "edition/editor/edit," which we lift wholesale from an online site -- "editor" originally meant [ahem] publisher:

edition L
1551, "act of publishing," from L. editionem (nom. editio) "a bringing forth, producing," from stem of edere "bring forth, produce," from ex- "out" + -dere, comb. form of dare "to give" (see date (1)). Meaning "form of a literary work" is from 1570. "It is awkward to speak of, e.g. 'The second edition of Campbell's edition of Plato's "Theætetus"'; but existing usage affords no satisfactory substitute for this inconvenient mode of expression" [OED]. Edit is 1791, probably as a back-formation of editor (1649), which, from its original meaning "publisher" had evolved by 1712 a sense of "person who prepares written matter for publication;" specific sense in newspapers is from 1803. Editorial "newspaper article by an editor" is Amer.Eng. 1830. Hence, editorialize (1856), "introduce opinions into factual accounts."

Finally (to leave Foucault for a bit), there is an aspect of editing that arises from a feminist perspective on the process, something we like to think of as domestic editing. We work fairly closely together on each other's work, a process that is largely erased from history, because no one beyond the walls of our home has access to that process. In fact, we often forget (argue about?) whose ideas were whose. We're pretty sure we can say with fair accuracy that Joe came up with the title of Kass's Dalkey book, while Kass came up with the title of Joe's Chax book -- but that's about it. We know from history that domestic editing has often been a major factor in artistic production: Leonard edited Virginia, Toklas edited Stein, etc. We also know from the history of women writers that domestic editing can be detrimental, both to the art and to the artist, most often to women artists. Then too there is extended-family domestic editing: James edited Wharton, Stein edited Hemingway -- as with spousal units, close friends or colleagues or acquaintances can perform an editorial function difficult to track. Given the vastly decreasing editorial services offered (even by the trades), will domestic editing play a more and more vital role? And if so, shouldn't it be theorized in terms similar to those above?

Thanks for listening---

Kass & Joe

Mad Hatters' Review Issue 6 has emerged

Here's the lineup & please note that our reading period for Issue 7 is October 16th through 29th. Enjoy & please submit!!! --- Carol

Mad Hatters' Review Issue 6, October 2006

Poetry
A Room of My Own & other poems Arlene Ang
Happy Everyday Birthday & other poems David Meltzer
Truth and Untruth & other poems Suchoon Mo
THE ELEMENTALS: Exhibit H, K & M Michael Rothenberg
The Silky Weasel's Dish Float...& other poems Lynn Strongin
She & other poems Edwin Torres

Fiction
Folktale & other works Eric Darton
Personal Effects Debra Di Blasi
Creation & other works Lily Hoang
From PIECES FOR SMALL ORCHESTRA, 37 Norman Lock
Seven Faces of the Assassin Andrew S. Taylor

Whatnots
Cosmopolitan Undress & other works Benjamin Buchholz
Desire for War & other works Ulf Cronquist
A Step Inside Denis Emorine translated from the French by Phillip John Usher
Follow the Directions Erica Plouffe Lazure
I Am Unemployed Tao Lin
Shaking the Superflux & other works Justin Taylor

Animations Dart Page & others Bozarian

Antepodean Antics Selected by Brentley Frazer
The Word Fuck Without Warning & others M.T.C. Cronin
All the World’s a Pilfer Jayne Fenton Keane
Pooh & Selected & others Michael Farrel

Book Reviews
Norman Lock Reviews Chinese Checkers by Mario Bellatin
The intrepid C.B. Smith Reviews books by Olsen, Palecek, & Standaert

Comics
Patriotic Polly; Coconuts; Tristan, Miss Julie & Steve & others Carol Novack, Phil Nelson, Marja Hagborg & others

Columns
Step to the Rear Rich Andrews Goatbreath Babble Sir Castor Bayley
Strange as it May Seem Tantra Bensko
Advice to the Lorn of Love Crazy Jane
East of East Pete Dolack
Dear New York D. A. Eis
Random Acts of Insanity Shirley Harshenin
From Under the Slush Pile Helen Ruggieri
The Modern Buckaroos' Guide to the Western World Elizabeth Smith

Contests
'Fish & Plane' Contest Winning Entries Catherine Edmunds, Emily Brink & Shalla de Guzman
'The Wrong Roof' Current Contest Guidelines (October 15th deadline)

Editor's Rave Carol Novack

Featured Artist Lynn Schirmer

Featured Writer Debra Di Blasi

Galleries
Featured Artist Lynn Schirmer
Issue 6 Art Multiple Artists Issue 6
Music Multiple Composers

Interviews
Marc Lowe Interviews Debra Di Blasi
Tantra Bensko Interviews Lynn Schirmer

Mad Hatter Readings
Edwin Torres @ KGB Bar, June 1, 2006

Mental Theatre Episode 2 Don Bergland

New York Comedy Show
MAZELTOV - Yiddish Discovery Channel Lisa Ferber

interview : trevor dodge

Lance: Would you talk a little bit about growing up in Idaho, not exactly known as a hotbed of radical art (which is odd, actually, given that Matthew Barney, Edward Kienholz, and Built to Spill, among others, hail from it), and how you got from there to the experimental literary scene in Portland, Oregon?

Trevor: My grandfather was a truck driver in Twin Falls, and when I was about 10 years old, I spent a summer with him on the road. He ran a route through San Francisco down to Los Angeles, then back up the coast all the way up to Portland before he hit Interstate 84 and cruised back home. My hometown barely held 20,000 people, so the memories of those port cities are still indelibly burned into me, and I realized fairly early in my teens that I'd need to breathe the more humid air here. I know that sounds way too much like the country mouse visiting the city in those Warner Bros cartoons, but that's a pretty close comparison. I was able to visit Portland several times before finally moving here in 2001, and on each successive trip I was more and more seduced by the overall sleepiness of the area; there are always exciting things happening here, but no one seems to get too wrapped up in any one thing. Except for crystal meth, of course. We can't get enough of it.

Lance: You serve as co-editor of Chiasmus's Northwest Edge anthology series. How did you become involved in the alternative-publishing world in general, and Chiasmus in particular?

Trevor: It all started amidst a round of drinks at Ringlers back in 2002. Lidia Yuknavitch and I had kept a sporadic email correspondence going for a few years, and it just happened that she and her partner Andy Mingo came out for dinner one night. At that time, two girls review was on permanent hiatus, and Lidia was itching to start up something similar to the Deviant Fictions anthology she and L.N. Pearson edited a couple of years prior. Before the evening was over, the three of us vowed to do something together in the near future, but I didn't think too much of it at the time because I didn't know Lidia well enough then to realize that she is one thousand percent committed to backing up every word she says with her art and actions, and Andy is incredibly calculating and business-minded when it comes to pulling things together. As a team, the two of them are a true force of nature, and I quickly (and very gladly) found myself swept into the anthology project that became Fictions of Mass Destruction. It's a couple years later now, but we just followed that book up with the third installment, The End of Reality, which is both an anthology and DVD compilation of the most interesting writing and short films we could lay our grubby hands on, and we're really happy with the end result. So I tend to think of my ongoing association with Chiasmus as one of those rare instances where tavern talk actually ended up walking the walk.

Lance: Kathy Acker strikes me as one of the most important influences on your fiction and thinking. Would you talk a little about your relationship with her and her texts, and what other influences—literary, theoretical, and extra-literary—you feel are essential to contextualizing your larger project?

Trevor: Kathy was first and foremost a teacher to me, and it's hard to believe she's been gone for almost 10 years now. What she taught me was the importance of community in art, and of supporting one another's work inside whatever community that might be. I was very fortunate to work with her on a web project for a couple of years before she passed away, and I am still taken aback today by her generosity. When I started going to conferences fresh out of graduate school and began meeting other people who had been touched in similar ways, I quickly found this was simply the way she was. There's a lot of angel and devil talk out there about Kathy; you don't have to dig too far to find people who describe their relationships with her as both charmed and strained. Perhaps I didn't know her well or long enough, but my experiences were nothing but positive. But then again, I adored her completely.

I'd also say that her insistence upon writing as an act of making reverberates strongly with me. Her writing process is very similar to that of an assemblage or collage artist who uses a wide variety of materials to solve a problem. Of course, her materials are other texts, so reading and considering the work of others is absolutely critical to her process. The ability to inhabit the mouths of other writers, to use their experiences, situations and characters in different contexts, takes a true appreciation for the primary works from which she is rifting. That first section of In Memoriam to Identity where Acker puppets Arthur Rimbaud is probably the most beautiful and stirring piece of writing I've ever read, and I think it comes from her having channeled Rimbaud's agony line by line from A Season in Hell. Like Burroughs before her, Kathy understood that language isn't an indifferent conduit for human experience; it is alive and writhing, sure, but it also has a memory and it has a voice of its own. Acker's consistent claims to have no unique or deliberate "voice" in her writing comes from this understanding that could only be accessed by reading and using other texts.

Lance: In many ways, I think of the fictions in your new collection, Everyone I Know Lives on Roads, as (troubled though the term might be) Avant-Pop explorations. That is, they seem profoundly aware of and shot through by a deeply conflicted pop-cultural sensibility, while at the same time deeply committed to the avant-garde's politico-aesthetic goal of destabilization. Does that sound about right to you? If so, how does a writer so greatly invested in the popular moment resist becoming implicated in the very thing he/she seeks to critique and undermine?

Trevor: First, writers have to realize that becoming implicated or subsumed by this pop-cultural "thing" you're talking about isn't the end of all ends, because being co-opted is actually a tremendous opportunity to corrupt the entity that is doing the co-opting. You mentioned Built to Spill earlier, whose modus operandi is to maximize the benefits of being on a major recording label while making a very deliberate attempt to minimalize all the things that suck about it. This of course takes the ability to discern the advantages from the pitfalls in the first place, and to run the very great risk that your work won't reach millions of people. That is, if you care about your work reaching millions of people. Because if that's your goal as a writer, you need to think very seriously about your choice of artistic medium, especially if you're among those of us in the dead-tree-editions crowd.

So that brings me to my obviously fuzzy answer to your question. Pop culture is curbed only by its own pervasiveness, and everyone who is still reading me ramble here already knows that popular culture in the U.S. is tolerant of text-based art forms, but not at all supportive of them in sustainable or meaningful ways. In other words, few people read books on a daily basis, yadda yadda yadda (and here starts the handwringing over "What's wrong with us?" and "Blame videogames!", blah blah blah). I spent a lot of time worrying about this kind of stuff in college, and can regurgitate a lot of it using the fancy language and theory I was taught in grad school, but ultimately I really do think things are going to be fine in the long run. Ben Marcus came within a whisper of running the Iowa Writers' Workshop, folks. Relax already.

That doesn't mean, of course, that we don't push back, especially given the flattening of virtually every form of discourse in our culture over the last five years. We desperately need to break through the ridiculous either/or-isms that have squelched important conversations in this country about politics, religion, and civil liberties. We need to think primarily in problematics, and secondarily in problem-solving. Nuance. Layers. Militant possibility.

Lance: If you could give two or three bits of advice to young writers seeking to move away from predictable writing and publishing moves, what would they be?

Trevor: If you're not already running a litmag or doing a zine of some kind, start one, especially if you have no idea what one is or where to find one. You will learn infinitely more about your own sensibilities—and thus your own writing—in a few months of wading through a slushpile of cold manuscripts solicited from a post on craigslist than you ever would taking classes at some awful college. Save your money. You're going to need it.

But spend at least a little bit of that tuition fund on a bitchen laptop, one that will simultaneously allow you to download what's going on right now so you can eventually hack the future. Infiltrate places like WordPress, MySpace, YouTube, and Wikipedia and retool them to serve your personal media empire. The future will not be televised, but it sure as hell will be syndicated.

Now What

Sorry for my silence in recent weeks, a silence partially accounted for, as evidence of other engagement, with my recently posted review of April's &Now conference in electronic book review, "Long Talking Bad Conditions Illinois Blues: A Report on &Now, A Festival of Innovative Writing and Art":

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/buzz

edge reading in pdx

Last month I emceed a northwest edge 3 reading at Powells Bookstore in Portland, featuring five contributors from the anthology/DVD compilation. If you didn't or couldn't make it, lucky for you that Karl Lind was on hand to film these little gems:

raphael dagold



cat tyc



shane hinton



mia de bono



jay ponteri

All files are in QuickTime (.MOV) format. Enjoy.

Mexico City Return

From left to right: Rob Johnson, Philip Walsh, Oliver Harris, Jorge Cuevas Cid, Davis Schneiderman, Jeffrey Miller, Katherine Streip, Allen Hibbard (photo courtesy of Oliver Harris).






You’re probably all dying to know about the week-long symposium “Quién Es?: William S. Burroughs Revisited,” held from Sept. 4-8 at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) in Mexico City.

Well, wonder no more.

UNAM undergraduate (now grad student) Jorge Cuevas Cid put the entire thing together with little monetary support, no real interest in Burroughs among the faculty, and no direct contacts with any of the eventual participants. Amazingly, he managed to get an all-star roster of Burroughs scholars on board for a week of fascinating intellectual exchange and (sometimes drink-) inspired conversation.

Philip Walsh, of York University, co-editor, with me, of Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto Press, 2004), presented on the sociological manifestations of the Burroughs’ work in terms of self-identity, provocatively linking Burroughs and theorist Julian Jaynes, whose idea of the bicameral mind—where earlier human brains literally heard the voice of god commanding their actions—provided a fantastic entry point into connections between Burroughs and consumer identity.

Rob Johnson, of University of Texas—Pan-American, working on both La Frontera and the Beats, rehearsed the excellent argument of his new book, The Lost Years of William S. Burroughs: The South Texas Beatss. The text argues for the significance of the Valley (an area of South Texas) to the Burroughs canon. In many ways, this was a sociological study as well—connecting Burroughs with the “wetbacks” he employed as a farmer in Pharr, Texas, and more broadly, to his later experiences in Mexico City. Also, a highpoint was a great video interview with Ted Marak, one of the Texas “beats,” who was present on September 6, 1951 in Mexico City at a very significant moment in literary history (more below).

Oliver Harris, of Keele University, perhaps the most important Burroughs scholar of the last decades, continued his keen attention to manuscript history, arguing that Burroughs’ first three novels (in terms of writing, not publication), Junky, Queer, and The Yage Letters, actually focused more heavily on Mexico City than previously realized. Harris uses archival research to justify his argument, and proposes, that if the economics and publishing history of Burroughs’ early writing years (1949-1953) had been different, the as-now-understated Mexico connections would completely change our sense of this period in Burroughs’ work.

Katherine Streip, of Concordia University in Montreal, offered a very cool paper on the Burroughs and cut-up inspired music, art, and other DJ-culture overlaps. Her connections, particularly, with avant-garde transactions of the last 50 years, helped reinforce Burroughs’ pop-culture credentials without retreading his over-analyzed mainstream collaborations.

I discussed Burroughs’ cut-ups as not only a harbinger of later media experiments, but as tied to earlier tradition of user-intervention in book consumption. Specifically, I traced the work of Newberry Library benefactor John M. Wing in his practice of extra-illustration—the insertion of images, book pages, pulp-materials, and portraiture into separate books, expanding those books into multiple re-plated volumes. This links up with Burroughs’ use of a specific newspaper page, The New York Times front from Sept. 17, 1899, and the spread of selected phrases through his small-magazine cut-up production of the mid-1960s.

Allen Hibbard, of Middle Tennessee State University, spoke on Burroughs as literary and cultural saboteur, with evocative discussion of many theoretical couplings, including that of the Isma’ili renegade, Hassan I Sabbah, a twelfth-century figure of great importance for Burroughs and his collaborator Brion Gysin. Sabbah perfected the art of political assassination, and for Burroughs, became a representation of an alternative society set against the stultifying norms of the mainstream.

Jeffrey Miller, of Cadmus Editions, discussed the brouhaha over his publication of Tom Clark’s The Great Naropa Poetry Wars (1980) an attack on Chogyam Trungpa and the Naropa Institute, and his contract with Burroughs to shortly after publish a collection of the latter’s work called Early Routines. In a complex and thrilling narrative about the book business, the influence of Allen Ginsberg, and Burroughs’s own commitment, ultimately but not easily, to free speech, Miller—one damn fine storyteller—held the house in thrall.

And that’s not all—the Mexican audience at UNAM was fantastically responsive, responding to the papers in way that justified Jorge Cuevas Cid’s sense that Burroughs should be brought back, once again, to Mexico.

The conference, as I noted above, took place 55 years after an important literary event—Burroughs’ accidental shooting of his common-law wife Joan Vollmer in the Colonial Roma neighborhood of Mexico City on September 6, 1951. The stories of her death are multifarious, and what was apparently a William Tell gag gone horribly wrong, hung, like a spectre, over the entire wonderful week.

One of Harris’ next projects is Everything Lost: The Latin American Notebook of William S. Burroughs (forthcoming from Ohio University Press in 2007), and the title alludes to the fact that Burroughs came to Mexico on the run from the US law, with problems, no doubt, but with his family intact, and with some measure of hope for living a life free from control. After Joan’s death, the situation seemed much different.

Want to hear more? The group will look to publish the conference proceedings in English and Spanish.



Jeffrey Miller on one of the stone benches mentioned in Burroughs' novel Queer.











Oliver Harris at the door of the apartment building where Joan Vollmer was shot.










Davis

psalm

Sometimes I lose heart.

The seemingly endless chase to be the bought and sold novel—that inherited product—the form dictated it seems now exclusively by economy and some weird
literary . . . “show.”

I still believe art may function to challenge the state, and not act in the service of it.

It is a choice.

To liberate art, over and over again.

To speak a body.

Sacred song.

What may be the worth of women writers, were they to choose it.

To speak a body untethered from the so-called aims of narrative and economy.

Narratives authenticated and legitimized by consumerism—its shapes not mine.

It’s plot, trajectories ever thrusting forward, not mine.

Its leaving unsaid unwritten unseen the story of humanity and ordinary corporeal experience in favor of the story of the privileged; its entertainment value. Its wholesale price. Its distribution.

It’s inability to account for space, interval, gesture, touch, sound, retinal flash.

To speak a body.

To speak the true saga of desire—not the action driven capture of an object one—rather, the relentless and perpetual story of all creativity and being. Timeless and dark and spatial and repetitive as waves.

The what if story were repetition.

The what if story were fragments strung together as a life.

With all the chaos housed there.

Resisting narrative cohesion.

With all the disintegrations and dissolutions.

Resisting narrative telos.

Without a hero, but fully bodied, nonetheless.

The silence before.

Corporeal text enunciation.

Open your mouth.

Close your eyes.

Keep your hands loose and open and pointed palm side up.

The what if of a story dipping in and out of myth, epic, identity, spatiality.

Endlessly.

The what if story were a series of gestures, or color, or light.

Why not.

Why let the novel stick in this static and dead-end shiny product.

Consumer culture’s throw-away lover.

Easy, yes.

Thoughtless, yes.

No one needs to fight or resist or do anything but buy and watch and go to sleep well satiated with bon bons.

Why do this to language, to bodies, to stories.

I understand, we get tired. Our lives are fundamentally driven by speed and doing.

If we are writers, we want to be legitimized, even by illegitimate sources.

If we are publishers, we want our “businesses” to “profit” – isn’t that good for writers?

If we are teachers, we want to be either loved or revered.

But could we not forgive ourselves?

Surrender?

Imagine different things to do with our money?

Our desire, our psychic want?

Remember a body and its lifeline to matter?

I put my palm on the bark of a redwood tree outside of my ordinary house and I close my eyes and breath and the amplification of my own heartbeat and my imagination’s half archeological half geological drive down into the ground where earthen rootedness overtakes television buzz and freeway hum remembers me.

It is ludicrously simple, a gesture like this.

Or this: I am in a bath, just a woman taking a bath, and suddenly my cunt is more than the object of a culture’s obsession, my aging is wisdom rather than depreciation, I am not a property losing value, I am no longer a voice moving toward the silence of not being published, I am a delicious gathering of mounds and tits and caves and corporeal reality, gushing and pulsing and without edges. My blood and my piss and my cum and my tears all remembering me. My imagination let loose again, back to her breathable blue past.

Why is that?

Why is it a woman in a bath can shoot herself to her origins, and a woman in the world is a slave? Yes the forms have changed, but still we chase inherited forms: wife, mother, writer.

Why do we take that?

Where’s the story which will liberate us from ourselves?

What moves us makes us.

It bothers me less and less that I cannot achieve legitimacy from illegitimate sources.

I want to read a story which remakes me away from this death of a life.

I want to face-off with a painting—its colors and composition and textures and gestures--more passionately than any lovers I’ve had.

I want my head to lose its thinking—spinning wheel—inside the language of music—its patterns and rhythms and dissonances and improvizations.

I want to be undone by art, remade in its image, for my world and its articulations, beautiful as they have been, have left me as yet unnamed.

I want to turn away from my so-called legitimized meaning-making forms: medicine, law, religion, government, philosophy, economy—and turn toward making itself, which is my own body—a metaphor for all of experience.

Where are the Whitmans? The Steins?

What has happened that we are blind and deaf and dumb, only able to score the fancy jobs or out-publish our sisters or eat dinner out in place of cooking and cleaning or shout at the television or stand in the street with some impotent hand-painted sign, our babies in expensive contraptions securing them to our chests, or in high-powered rugged-wheeled mountain bike strollers the price of a month’s rent?

What is it that drives us to purchase shoes and drink lattes and worry about the years writing their story across the flesh of our bodies, so much so we join health clubs or buy exercise videos and compliment one another when we see the pounds of flesh leaving? Why do we let go of the power of that story—skin story—heartbeat—what we think in deeper spaces—what we feel without telling—how we love in spite of its stolen and rotten definitions?

I know a woman artist in Lithuania who fed her children on dirt and roots and potatoes and weeds and the milk from a cow and rain water for four years.

Still they grew.

There is no story of this woman.

There is no “news.”

History writes itself on the small backs of children.

Women carry.

The woman is a painter. All of her canvasses carry images of children, women, men needing care.

They do not “sell” on the art market, so to speak. But we—those who have chanced to know her—buy them. Tell everyone we know. Visit her. Bring her the domestic things that make a home generative. Write stories which carry her.

They keep her alive.

She keeps me alive.

This is my prayer for women’s writing, that it untethers itself and surrenders to the free-floating possibility of making. Timeless. Repetitive. Corporeal.

I do not mean to sound “womanly.” Or feminist. Lately these categories have been co-opted, quite slyly and sadly. I mean only to insist on the body as a metaphor for experience, generative of new forms, for everyone, but perhaps most urgently accessed by women writers, were they to choose it.

Generative of a new economy—one in the service of living and loving and making.

Intellectually stunning.

Without apology.

Calling All Women

An advertisement has come my way from Nava Renek at Spuyten Duyvil Books:

Wanted: Women writers using language, subject matter, and narrative form in new and exciting ways. Editors for an anthology featuring experimental women writers writing in the 21st century seek submissions of previously unpublished prose up to 15 pages. We are looking for serious work that attempts to reveal new truths and/or impressions about the world we live in. Submissions must be sent as WORD attachments to womenwriters@spuytenduyvil.net. Deadline: November 15.

Nava Renek
Program Coordinator
Brooklyn College Women's Center
718-951-5777

Temenos

Would you do the grad students here at CMU the kindness of checking out their work on Temenos, our literary magazine? The spring/summer online issue is now available, and there's access to online issues from the last three years.

The magazine's first print annual is now available, too--available for just the price of postage ($1.50) mailed to Temenos, English Department, CMU, Mount Pleasant, MI 48859. In it: Hal Jaffe, Lance Olsen, Cris Mazza, and many other most excellent writers.

Please also submit fiction, creative non, poetry, artwork, photography--whatever you'd like.


A related topic:

I pushed the students to produce a print annual of Temenos in part because it carries more weight with the powers-that-be. Said powers will be the ones making decisions about whether we can turn our MA into an MFA.

There's the topic, the MFA.

Part of me feels uncomfortable wanting to add to the world another terminal degree program in the humanities. Enough grad students now go wanting for successful careers. But part of me wants all the advantages for students and faculty such a program can bring to our school: the career opportunities an MFA at least makes possible, time (at least) for students to write--whatever the outcome, an energetic program, more interesting classes to take and teach, etc.

I'd love to know where other folks weigh in on (new) MFA programs.

query : fiction as architecture

I'm planning on writing an AWP talk (which I hope to grow into an essay) concerning fiction as architecture, and am hoping contributors here might be able to offer a few suggestions about what questions I should be contemplating, and what I should be reading by way of novels, stories, theoretical perspectives, and so forth that enact or address this notion.

Usually the metaphor of architecture is applied to fiction in order to italicize craft in its creation. Or occasionally one mentions the use of architecture in fiction—in, say, some of Borges's short stories.

But I'm interested in asking how it is illuminating and stimulating to conceptualize fiction's structures and discourses as spaces one lives in and moves through as one might, for instance, a Bauhaus building, a tenement, a cathedral.

1) Mad Hatters' Review Reading NYC Sept. 15th; 2) Seeking Guest Editor

Please disseminate this announcement to your friends in the NYC vicinity. Thanks! --- Carol


Mad Hatters' Review Poetry Prose & Anything Goes Reading Series
September 15, 7-9pm
KGB Bar85 East 4th StreetNew York, NY
Readers: Ron Silliman, Debra Di Blasi, and Samuel R Delany http://www.madhattersreview.comContact: madhattersreview@gmail.com


Reader Bios:
Ron Silliman has written and edited 26 books to date, most recently Under Albany. In 2007, the University of California Press will issue the complete version of The Age of Huts. Between 1979 & 2004, Silliman wrote a single poem, entitled "The Alphabet". In addition to Woundwood, a part of VOG, volumes published thus far from that project have included ABC, Demo to Ink, Jones, Lit, Manifest, N/O, Paradise, (R), Toner, What and Xing. He has now begun writing a new poem entitled "Universe". Silliman was a 2003 Literary fellow of the National Endowment for the Arts and was a 2002 Fellow of the Pennsylvania Arts Council as well as a Pew Fellow in the Arts in 1998. Visitors to his weblog are quickly approaching the three-quarters of one million mark. He lives in Chester County, Pennsylvania , with his wife and two sons, and works as a market analyst in the computer industry.

Debra Di Blasi (http://www.debradiblasi.com) received the 2003 James C. McCormick Fellowship from the Christopher Isherwood Foundation. Her books include The Jirí Chronicles & Other Fictions (forthcoming from FC2 Books in 2007), Prayers of an Accidental Nature (Coffee House Press), and Drought & Say What You Like (New Directions), winner of the 1998 Thorpe Menn Award. Her fiction has been adapted to film, radio, theatre, and audio CD in the U.S. and abroad. She is president of Jaded Ibis Productions, Inc., a transmedia corporation producing most notably, The Jirí Chronicles, a mélange of fictive audio interviews and music, videos, print, web and visual art. She is former art columnist at Pitch and taught experimental writing forums at Kansas CityArt Institute.

Samuel R Delany "is one of the two or three top living sci-fi writers. His work with porn, critical writing & comics all puts him into edgy spaces." (says Ron Silliman). He's never tame. His fictions include Dhalgren (1975), Atlantis: Three Tales (1995), Hogg (1995), and Phallos (2004). His most recent book, from Wesleyan University Press, is About Writing (2006). Samuel (aka Chip) teaches English and creative writing at Temple University in Philadelphia and at the Naropa Summer Writing Program in Boulder, Colorado.

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

Seeking Guest Editor, Mad Hatters' Review

If any of you "alternative" writers think you might be interested in editing or co-editing Issue 7 (due to emerge 2/07) or Issue 8 (due to emerge 7/07), please email me at madhattersreview@gmail.com with the subject line: query: guest editor. We have art editors and our own composers on board. The editorial decisions are generally made by groups of our editors (poetry and/or fiction/whatnot editors). This guest edited issue would be entirely yours, with some input & assistance as needed from me and our 3 associate editors. A small percentage of what we publish is solicited. Most pieces are decided from submissions sent during our 2 - 3 week reading periods.

Thanks! -- Carol

The Long Tail of (some) Lit; $; A Shift in Lit Culture; What's This Blog For?

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. – A Tale of Two Cities

And we do live in at least two cities, don’t we? I’d like to pick up a thread that runs through a number of the posts regarding literature, the market, and how one shapes the other, and the viability for a diverse/vigorous literature in a climate dominated by bottom-line publishing. (Put elsewhere as ‘What’s this blog for?’) But mainly in terms of larger sea change in culture that we seem to be living through. Joe cites John Updike’s complaining about Amazon cutting into his royalties (ease of buying used books translates into smaller print runs of new books & lower royalties for authors) and believes this phenomena signals hard times for all writers: if it’s getting harder and harder for a mainstream author to earn a living from writing, authors who write conceptually-driven fiction or poetry don’t have a chance? By extension, literature itself is in for a rough ride.


But I’d also like to bring up the flip side of this: A colleague of mine who teaches experimental/ avant-garde poetry takes it for granted that this is a golden age for said work precisely because of the availability Updike bemoans. That is, according to her, there’s never been a better time for (let’s call it) avant-garde poetry because sites like Amazon, or UbuWeb, or PENNsound make accessible work that used to only be available in bars, in the (now extinct) indie bookstore, underground. Anyone who wants to read conceptual/ avant-garde writing can get it now, and get it easily, while authors on this two-way street have accessibility to audiences that they couldn’t even dream about 20 years ago.

As Joe says, writing like this has never made money (though, yeah, it would be great if a poet didn’t have to work for Hallmark to make a living wage from his or her writing). Nor will it ever, I believe, so in a sense Updike’s sense of loss does signal an ever further financial marginalization for writing that by nature takes place in the shadow of mass culture.

A couple of statistics from Trevor Dodge’s web site seem to map out the terrain the experimental writer is up against: “78% of the titles published [in 2000] come from the small/self-publishers” (think poetry titles here) while “80% of the book sales were controlled by five conglomerates: Bertlesman, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, Time Warner, Disney and Viacom/CBS.” (Think Updike’s books here.) As Chris Anderson points out in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More (more on this in a sec.), the standard model for most mass media (e.g. CDs) is that 20% of a business’s products, e.g. songs, account for 80% of its sales. For novels, I believe, the numbers are even more skewed with a single author or two, or even a handful of titles, accounting for most of the profit from fiction by a publisher in a given year. If you put these numbers together, what emerges is a bell curve with very steep slopes: a profile similar to the silhouette you’d get if you stacked the Eiffel tower on top of the Seattle Space Needle. The shape of this graph explains why the 5 conglomerates mentioned (basically all of commercial publishing) put such an emphasis on best sellers: each title published is a lottery ticket purchased against the hope that at least one of them will have the kind of blockbuster sales needed to float the whole operation. The rest are off the map, i.e, of no consequence to the company (and, if we believe commercial review vehicles like The New York Times Book Review, of no consequence to literature. Why don’t they feature a list of ‘Best Books’ instead of a list of ‘Best Sellers’?). So, why publish a book of poetry or experimental (or even literary) fiction whose sales are sure to not rival those of Jackie Collins?

At least this used to be the standard line. But in The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Anderson makes the case that the Internet is changing this. (He has an essay in last month’s Wired, “The Rise and Fall of the Hit,” but it’s whittled down to that superficial Wired perspective so fourth-graders can understand it—an example of what a writer has to do to play to the bulge in the bell curve, I guess. A more interesting synopsis is at NPR. He argues that companies like Amazon, or YouTube, are shifting the distribution channels of culture and therefore are facilitating a change in culture itself. One of his examples is E-Cast, a jukebox system that instead of stocking CDs contains a harddrive and a modem that links to a whole on-line library of songs. Instead of the 80/20 formula cited above, 98% of the songs in the on-line catalog contribute to E-Cast’s sales—i.e., instead of a few blockbuster hits, E-Cast gets its income from lots of songs that are played (comparatively) few times. This is the long tail referred to in his title: a marginal song or book that never has the spike in sales of a hit or blockbuster, but sells at a lower level for a much longer time. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons probably fits the definition, especially if it was written today. I imagine Amazon has a number of books in its catalog that follow this same model: never a best seller, never a household name, but sells steadily in small numbers maybe for years instead of the 90 day window a book on the shelf at B&N has to prove itself by selling 1/3 of its order. (Wasn’t the rule of thumb for poetry, which depended on word of mouth instead of ad campaigns for sales, something like 6 years to break-even/sell its first print run?).

So, okay, what does this do for Joe’s concern (& Updike’s, for that matter)? Probably not much, for the authors/composers in these cases are still getting squat in the way of royalties. The people making the money are those who pool these books and songs with long tails into a catalog, e.g., Amazon, e.g., E-Cast. Even more so, how about YouTube, where the videos shown are provided free by makers, sometimes at huge expense to the maker? This seems to be the model for a lot of culture (esp. web culture): give away the music, the video, the journalism, i.e. the content, and try to make money by selling ads.

I’m not sure what this means for lit or authors. On one hand it seems to confirm that authors have two choices: either try to work within the constraints of the commercial market, and there are lots of examples where authors have done interesting, complex work within the constraints of commercial culture (Paul Auster comes to mind). But what about novels like Berry’s FRANK to use our ongoing example, and dozens of other books (Levine’s Francis Johnson, Ourednik’s Europeana; Schneiderman’s Multifesto; Amato’s Under Virga, Fleisher’s Accidental Species, Olsen's Nietzsche's Kisses, Bernstein's Girly Man, Block’s A Gesture Through Time come to mind mainly because those are a few I’ve recently read) that would never see the light of day under the constraints of commercial publishing/blockbuster thinking? Give away the content, like the contributors to YouTube, and be content with whatever forms of non-monetary payment that might fall out of the tree: prestige, like the guitar guy who lives at home with his mom but who has 8+ million views of the home video he made of himself wailing away on his axe in his bedroom? This seems to be the model poets and experimental writers have been operating under: publish a cool, or at least respected if un-massmarketable book, i.e., give away the content, and hope it wins you a prize, or lands you a teaching gig (or maybe settle for one), or just opt out completely and get a non-lit day job (the mode for most British poets), live off your trust fund or marry well--whatever will allow you to continue to write more conceptual fiction.

Those who opt for the work within the system option need read no further. Just do it! (If we had any sense we’d all be code-switching. And blessed are the authors, like Auster, who have it both ways not out of any calculation, but just because they are lucky enough to find their work in the zone where the two spheres overlap; surely none of these categories are mutually exclusive).

For the others, the question ‘What is this blog for?’ comes in. Rather than promoting individual songs, its seems like some effort could go into getting behind the jukebox: finding a way to pool resources to direct readers to the distribution system. FC2 seems to be one press that tries to function as a literary version of E-Cast. This seems to be a model that could be expanded in some fashion. I think Anderson goes too far in his claim that the age of the blockbuster is over. It may be true that TV audiences have been fragmented by cable, the Internet, etc. (Side Note 1: no one ever mentions reading as one of the contributing factors. Side Note 2, again from Dodge’s list: 58% of the US adult population never reads another book after high school.) But the “diminished” blockbusters that still exist in this age of the fragmented market are still huge enough to fuel multimillion-dollar industries, obviously, and thus the market constraints that gave us Jewel’s book of poetry, A Night without Amor [sic] (HarperCollins), will still be the elephant in the house of culture. Still, there does seem to be a sea change underway in culture that is changing both the landscape and the nature of music, film, and literature. What counts as literature is being refashioned, as it always has been, by changes in production and distribution. Maybe postmodernism is only just beginning.
Yours, Steve

small press resource

Norman Lock, author of the wonderfully surreal fiction collection A History of the Imagination, has sent along a link for a very helpful list of independent and university presses, which you can find here.

If you can't locate your favorite there or to the right of this blog page, please feel free to give whatever contact info you'd like in a comment below.

The Singing Fish by Peter Markus

(What can I say, in offering this review on the last day on August, except "I respond best to deadlines...")

Peter Markus
The Singing Fish
Calamari Press, 2005, 87p.

When I was a kid, I remember one time my younger brothers and I (we must have been about eight and five and four) went with my cousin (he was seventeen) to a country pond we’d never been to before, out beyond the far border of the property we had north of the Catskills in New York State. We were all raised in the suburbs of Long Island, but there was something elemental in the rural nature of this country region we all took to in some sense. We’d catch frogs along the pond's edge, back in those days before global warming and pesticides had killed 90% of the frog population. We took the job of killing for ourselves back then. My cousin had a bb gun and when we found this far pond, we discovered that it was a better frog pond than we’d ever seen before, a frog pond where seemingly no one had ever hunted frogs before.

Older cousin was a machine with the bb gun: pop, pop, and the frogs at the pond’s edge went belly up. But that wasn’t nearly the end of it. There was a barbed wire fence nearby and we carefully waded in and salvaged the frog carcasses my cousin created and hung them one by one along the fence, one frog-foot each twisted in the wires of the fence.

I saw my youngest brother this past weekend at the old farm where my mother now lives in a house that’s slowly being worn down by the elements until, one day soon, it will crumble in rot back into the sodden, grassy mountainside. He and I were alone together at one point when he said to me, “Do you remember the old frog pond we found that day, and Timmy with his bb gun? Do you remember how we strung nineteen frog carcasses up on the barbed wire fence?”

I remembered. It was one of those stories that you and your brothers remember and you don’t tell in mixed company unless you want to be forever regarded thereafter as having a little bit of Hitler buried deep inside you. Mixed in this case meaning in any other company than with your brothers, whose eyes you hardly wish to meet.

In Peter Markus’s The Singing Fish, the Treblinka massacre-as-spectacle scene is a creosoted old telephone pole in the backyard where the two brothers of the novel-made-of-stories nail fish heads with bent rusty nails. But lest you think Markus’s book is a straight-ahead recollection of lazy days of boyhood in the neighborhood where narrator and brother once romped and strove in their circumscribed worlds of play and violence, let me add a distinction. Markus’s slender book is written not in reflective but in refractive prose.

I take reflective here to mean the old sense of art’s holding a direct mirror up to nature: the verisimilitudinous illusion of being able to bend light away from its origin into a new location or occasion while keeping its outlines, its very nature, intact. The Latin root of reflection describes this as an act of “bending,” with its implicit assumption that the thing rerouted retains pretty much the same nature as the thing that was its source.

To refract, on the other hand, means “breaking.” This is how Markus creates the world of two brothers presented in The Singing Fish. The familiar details – repeated so as to emphasize their familiarity within this world of boyhood: brothers, fish, mud, river, father, moon, telephone pole, rusty nails, more mud – are broken apart, made into riffs, riffed upon again at further removes from the directly reflective, until they morph into dreams, imaginings, constituent elements of language, symbols, rich lumps of clay, diamond, and legend:

“Boy points with one hand up to the moon floating fish-belly-white above us, but it’s Boy’s other hand that make our eyes see. It’s the hand of Boy that is reaching back down towards the mud, and it’s up from the mud picking some other thing up. What this other thing is, it becomes clear to us brothers what it is, when the moon’s moonlight lights up for us what this something other is. What this something other is is, it is a picture, it is a photograph. But no, look again: it is not a picture of us. What it is, this picture, is it’s a picture of Boy. It’s a picture of Boy back when Boy was a boy littler than the boy he is now. In this picture of Boy, Boy is just a baby – he is just a boby Boy – and in this picture, Boy’s mouth, it is a hole with whole lot of light shining out. Boy’s mouth, that hole on Boy’s face with no tongue inside it, it is a moon in this picture, it is a lighthouse light – it is the marbled eye of a fish.”

Fishes get pulled from the river and clubbed on the head. Heads get cut off and nailed to the creosoted pole. Boys walk on water on each side of a fish, one brother each with a fin in his hand. One brother takes a bent rusty nail and rears back with a hammer to drive the nail through the other brother’s hand. One brother drives the bent rusty nail through the other brother’s eye. The father appears at the backyard door, looking out at the brothers. The brothers freeze. “’You boys remember to clean up before you come back in,’ our father said.” The brothers look at one another. “It was the kind of look that hurt the eyes of the brother who was the one of us doing the looking.

“Imagine that look.”

Markus’s book is one that makes clear the act of imagining in every act of remembering, seeing, or acting. The act of imagining which is clearly refraction rather than a simply conceived reflection.