what

...first lemme thank you all for putting this together, since mostly i sit around having too many thoughts and too many words about what fiction in our country (this country run by chimps) is and is not. i mean it depends on what is, is, yes? jesus.

at any rate.

the question for me lately has designed itself in my mind's eye as: whatz fiction? circa 2006?

and i find i have trouble answering that.

i mean i know what it is not, because i see what gets legitimized and prized and commodified and honored and oprah-ized.

and i get it pretty clearly and painfully that fiction is not that. though it makes lots of people smile.

all bullshit aside, fiction ought not fall victim to commodification.

but of course it has.

of course it always will.

still, i have a memory, and in this memory there were writers whose souls and perfect vision were to make readers think, struggle, visit the discomfort of imagination, dream, taboo. in other words, visit the place where art is born and dies and rebirths perpetually.

like i need to list names here.

i'm all for small independent presses. hell, i run one.

but there is something bigger and deeper to talk about, and that is the state of art.

of fiction.

i think things are currently dire.

i think things like the body is in danger of disappearing from the page.

i think things like language has to wrestle itself back into the collective unconscious.

it is NOT a precious place, language, meant only for academics and philosophers and admitted recluses.

it is NOT a specialized category, "fiction writing" that matters. though everyone and everything associated with high capitalism means to suggest that it is useless (meaning without "use value").

famous writers exhibit themselves in ways that make my soul sick.

talented writers are snatched up and made iconic in ways that shame the art, and yet, can you blame em? i mean,
one of my "friends," a person whom i admire and wish the best for, chuch palahniuk, is an example. he should have been born in a different time and stuck his manuscripts in a brown paper spit-soaked bag and sent it to city lights. but he got sucked up into the capitalist machine, now he's famous. mr. big.

somehow this makes my heart hurt.

let's just say this: fiction writing in the category of art has been vanquished, and yet, when you've nothing to lose because you've lost everything and beyond, you are, as franz fanon said, as leslie silko and joy harjo have said, in a position of pure resistance.

couldn't we?

resist?

what would it mean?

what (the title of a samuel beckett novel which didn't really make it...)?

Tod Thilleman/Spuyten Duyvil

What’s paradoxical and bizarre and strangely wonderful about our present moment to me is that, at the very time when corporate control paradigms would seem to be the most oppressive, it has suddenly also become possible for individuals – yes, remember them? – to make a mark on publishing and written art in a way one would think was so quixotic as to be practically insane just a few years ago. It’s hard to get real numbers from the big publishers – I can’t afford Nielsen Bookscan, which monitors sales for the industry. But an industry exec recently said that 90% of fiction titles for which there had been ISBNs issued (so not chapbooks, but trade paperbacks) currently sell fewer than 1,000 copies. The dying print fiction publishers of New York, by and large, aren’t selling any more books than small presses. Several small presses started in the last few years by sole proprietors of one sort or another -- and see Lidia Yuknavitch’s Chiasmus ad below as well).

A case in point is Tod Thilleman and Spuyten Duyvil Books.

I’ve invited Tod to be on this blog, but before he gets here, let me talk about what he’s done. Spuyten Duyvil has over the last eight years put out close to 100 new books, half poetry, half fiction. He talks about things like “changing literature,” in the face of what Lance rightly points out to be the ways in which the money-presses have abandoned this project. I’ve only come lately to his list, but there’s real good things on it – for instance, Elizabeth Block’s new novel, A Gesture Through Time; also, from a couple years ago, Noam Mor’s Arc: Cleavage of Ghosts. A lot more interesting SD books are also sitting on my shelves, waiting for me to get more time to read! – and all are gorgeously designed.

Tod was in Buffalo this week (where I took photo above) and read from his own novel with SD, Gowanus Canal, Hans Knudsen. Full disclosure, I blurbed the book on SD’s site –

"Gowanus Canal, Hans Knudsen is a novel of ideas unlike most written these days. Knudsen is a new Stephen Daedalus—but lacking a coherent tradition to rebel against as he misfires his way through doctrine and avant garde theatre into a deep sadness, one that exists in direct confrontation with the elated “new new world” of late capitalism. In Knudsen’s world people speak in fits and starts, and understand one another little better. In his portrait of a character ground down in a world where logos have replaced logos, Thilleman gives us a compelling novel, leaving us to clutch after what really matters."

“Unlike most written these days” – when I saw about a half-dozen SD authors read from their works at &Now, the great Innovative Arts (fiction, poetry, performance, music, video) conference just held at Lake Forest College, Illinois, last month), this was a feeling I brought away. In these times when mainstream publishers work mostly from within very basic ideas of what narrative accomplishes, generally assuming a (not very) Creative Non-Fiction model that highlights the importance of author’s biographies in choosing what they bring out – in such an environment, SD publishes what used to be called Serious Fiction. Their writers are contemplative, taking seriously fictive discourse, the ways in which fiction provides ways of knowing about the world. They take questions of the complexity of narrative seriously, understanding that storytelling is the engagement of various threads of narrative, workings of voices, narratives that take us over for their own ends, like the Calvinism that enraptures and possesses Hans Knudsen in Thilleman’s book. In a sense, this is almost a culturally conservative function (if it’s possible to strip that term briefly of its horrible political connotations, especially in the late-Bush era); Modernism, after all, has been with us for about 100 years. The NY publishers have now pretty much waved goodbye to Modernism for good (except for particular books by established writers they believe they can still make a buck off of, or token phenoms like Jonathan Saffran Foer). But this assumes that investigations into narrative practice by 20th century writers were simply fashion, instead of a necessary practice in the advancement of the art. Simply put, the big guys of publishing are no longer interested in Art. That has now become what establishes the necessity of the existence of new small presses like SD, and ennobles them.

chiasmus press contest

Chiasmus Press Announces:
Undoing the Novel—First Book Contest

Eligible fiction: innovative novels, anti-novels, novellas, graphic novels, short story collections, hybrids

Deadline: July 30, 2006

Reading Fee: $20.00

Award: Publication

We are looking for new writers at the front edge of fictional form. Our mission is to continue to publish fiction that burrows underneath the commercial market and busts up and through consumer culture book-as-product bunk.

We believe new writers ought to share the space with accomplished writers.

Send Manuscripts, SASE, and fee by July 30 to:
Chiasmus Press
9970 Bull Run Road
Corbett, OR 97019

Make checks payable to: “Chiasmus”

Manuscript announcement: August 2006

testing . . . one, two, three . . . testing

The worst already happened in the world of books. By and large they have come to seem over the last four decades an increasingly conservative mode of communication. Even bestsellers exist in a secondary position in our culture to the spectacles of film, television, the web, the Xbox, the iPod, the cell phone. Three behemoth media corporations dominate Manhattan publishing. These Brobdignagians employ the print arms of their swollen conglomerates as tax write-offs, considering low sales figures and small audiences tantamount to failure. That is, they view their products exactly the same way executives at McDonald’s view their death patties. More disheartening still, many independent presses have decided to mimic in miniature this preposterous paradigm rather than trying to subvert, re-imagine, or otherwise stand in opposition to it.

That isn't, of course, to suggest Manhattan isn't bringing out some wonderful and surprising work (think José Saramago, David Mitchell, David Markson), but it is to suggest it is bringing out less of it—much less of it—than it did, say, during the sixties, when over 100 big houses thrived in New York. Nor would I want to suggest that alternative presses don’t bring out some bland, simple, sloppy stuff in innovationists’ clothing. Still, in our current sociohistorical reality (and I use the term loosely), alternative presses by and large remain sites of aesthetic, political, and philosophical resistance. They remind us that our fiction, and hence our world, can always be other than it is. They exist, in other words, as a possibility space where everything can and should be thought and attempted.

It was with that in mind that Ted Pelton and I came up with the idea for this collective blog while lunching at a sushi bar in Boulder, Colorado, one blustery blue day late last month during the Small Press Festival hosted at the University by Jeffrey Deshell and Elizabeth Robinson. What we decided to do is bring together a number of diverse voices from the universe of alternative prose and publishing to discuss—well, to discuss anything that interests them. What, for instance, consistutes the "alternative"? What trends do they find engaging? What authors and what events? How does one go about starting an alternative press? Why? What are the politics of such an enterprise?

In addition, we hope to see reviews of engaging new and overlooked alternative books, announcements of upcoming publications and conferences and readings and the appearance of new presses, reports from the front, lists of resources, interviews, photos, conversations about experimental prose, you name it.

Needless to say, the goal isn't for us to agree, but for us all to engage in what we hope will be a stimulating, diverse, and revealing polylogue that both celebrates and interrogates the assumptions of alternative prose and publishing, while reminding ourselves all the while of that stingingly dead-on observation by Ronald Sukenick that summarizes the whole: If you don't use your own imagination, someone else is going to use it for you.

And so, onwords . . .