An Alt-List

113 Novels in reply to the New York Times (compiled with reference to recent blog reactions, etc.). A fuller explanation of this list, as well as notes on how it was compiled, appear on Starcherone Books's Starcher-Blog.


Walter Abish - How German Is It; Kathy Acker - Blood & Guts in High School; Great Expectations; David Antin – tuning; Donald Antrim – Elect Mr. Robinson For A Better World; Paul Auster – In the Country of Last Things; Jonathan Baumbach – B; Greg Bear - Blood Music; Kenneth Bernard – From the District File; R. M. Berry – Frank; Judy Budnitz – Flying Leap; Mary Burger – Sonny; Octavia Butler – Kindred; Mary Caponegro - Complexities of Intimacy; Thersesa Hak Jyung Cha – Dicteé; Sandra Cisneros – Woman Hollering Creek; Dennis Cooper – Period; Michael Cunningham – The Hours; Mark Z. Danielewski - House of Leaves; Lydia Davis – The End of the Story; Samuel R. Delany – Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Bradley Denton – Blackburn; Matthew Derby – Super Flat Times; Jeffrey DeShell – Peter; Jim Dodge – Fup; Stone Junction; Ricki Ducornet – The Word “Desire”; The Fanmaker’s Inquisition; Katherine Dunn – Geek Love; Dave Eggers – A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius; Brian Evenson – Altmann’s Tongue; Percival Everett – Erasure; Raymond Federman – To Whom it May Concern; William Gaddis – Carpenter’s Gothic; William Gass - The Tunnel; Denise Giardina – Storming Heaven; William Gibson - Neuromancer; Robert Glück – Margery Kempe; Barry Hannah – Ray; Carla Harryman – Gardener of Stars; Marianne Hauser – Prince Ishmael; Donald Hays – The Dixie Association; Laird Hunt - The Impossibly; Shelley Jackson – The Melancholy of Anatomy; Harold Jaffe – 15 Serial Killers; Gwyneth Jones – Life; Kevin Killian – Little Men; Charles Johnson – Oxherding Tale; Stacey Levine - My Horse; DRA—; Frances Johnson; Mark Leyner – I Smell Esther Williams; Kelly Link –Magic for Beginners; Pamela Lu – Pamela: A Novel; Alison Lurie – Foreign Affairs; Nathaniel Mackey – From A Broken Bottle Traces of Perfume Still Emanate; Ben Marcus - The Age of Wire and String; Notable American Women; David Markson - Wittgenstein's Mistress; Reader’s Block; Carole Maso - Aureole; Ava; The Art Lover; Defiance; Harry Matthews – My Life in CIA; Cris Mazza – Former Virgin; Heather McGowan – Schooling; Ursule Molinaro - Fat Skeletons; Toni Morrison – Tar Baby; Walter Mosley – Devil in a Blue Dress; Padgett Powell – Edisto; Tim Power - Last Call; Thomas Pynchon – Mason and Dixon; Vineland; Doug Rice - Blood of Mugwump; Mary Robison – Why Did I Ever; L. A. Ruocco – Document Zippo; Thaddeus Rutkowski – Tetched; James Salter- A Sport and a Pastime; George Saunders – CivilWarLand in Bad Decline; Pastoralia; Sarah Schulman – Girls, Visions, and Everything; Jason Schwartz – A German Picturesque; Joanna Scott – Arrogance: A Novel; Elizabeth Sheffield – Gone; Lucius Shepard – Beast of the Heartland; Nina Shope – Hangings; Leslie Marmon Silko – Ceremony; Almanac of the Dead; Jane Smiley - A Thousand Acres; Ordinary Love and Good Will; Gilbert Sorrentino – Aberration of Starlight; Little Casino; Neal Stephenson – Quicksilver; Bruce Sterling – Schismatrix; Ronald Sukenick – Mosaic Man; Lynne Tillman - American Genius; Steve Tomasula – VAS; Joseph Torra – Gas Station; William Vollman – You Bright and Risen Angels; Europe Central; Chuck Wachtel – Joe the Engineer; Howard Waldrop – Heart of Whitenesse; Alice Walker – Possessing the Secret of Joy; David Foster Wallace - Infinite Jest; Brief Interviews with Hideous Men; Joe Wenderoth - Letters to Wendy; Curtis White – Requiem: Diane Williams - Excitability; Joy Williams – The Quick and the Dead; Gene Wolfe – The Book of the New Sun; Douglas Woolf – Wall to Wall; Lidia Yuknavitch – her other mouths.

web design question

So I am totally new to this but just found out that www.nodbodaddies.com is available as a domain name so i am going to start designing a webpage. my first. so : how much bandwidth to start with as a minimum? how many gigs of storage as min? i dont have much money as we all dont...so help...also thinking of doing this through yahoo small business. any advice?
doug

"The Golden Age of the Small Press"

This blog’s two weeks old, but I’m still musing on Lance’s first post. Proclamations from the NYT (or anywhere else) about “bests” just provoke me to dig deep enough below the foundations to threaten the structure that makes such proclamations look interesting & credible to so many people. To be honest, I don’t think I’d care which book or author they proclaimed “best.” Art can’t be judged by arithmetical methods. So instead of commenting on the NYT’s arithmetical approach to literature, I’ll explore some of the thoughts I’ve had on reading Lance’s first post.

Now What. Among other things, we could add a question mark to these words and take them as a wide-open question. The discipline of History laid down the tracks for my synaptic connections at an impressionable age, so I’m wired to think that asking such a question implies the demand to see through the murk of what’s going on now and as well as some kind of sense of what’s already been. It could be that it isn’t necessary to attain a vision of either the present or the past in order to move somewhere else, but my entire mental apparatus would short-circuit if someone actually managed to convince me of that.

So, I grope about in the murk. This is especially hard to do since I’ve lately become disoriented by the discovery that a political form that once looked so hard & definite to my naïve eyes—I’m speaking of dictatorship—doesn’t necessarily come with an on/off switch. Those of us living the United States are living in the murk. And a fearful, denial-filled mess it is. I’m sure it all looks clear from the outside. But inside, there’s the babble of nonsense night and day. Here the very word “reality” is under contestation, if you know what I mean.

Just consider: The US stood at the brink of a constitutional crisis in late 2000, but Congress collaborated with the Supreme Court, & the moment passed. The United States could have had a constitutional crisis any number of times since then as the executive branch has made a practice of defying the constitution its officials have sworn to protect.

I think my most bewildered moment came when I returned home from the Delany Conference in Buffalo at the end of March and saw the Washington Post article reporting that a bill that had been signed by the POTUS had become law even though it hadn’t been passed by both houses of Congress. Even then, I expected a cry out of outrage. My partner said testily, “It’s not a law,” as if the issue were a matter of semantics & my fear that the executive could get away with doing such a thing was absurd. But the truth is, if the Supreme Court, which has been packed by the executive, rules that the bill is nevertheless a law, the two hundred year old definition of legislation will carry as much weight as any of the many “facts” the executive scorns as irrelevant, & the executive branch will know that the process by which a bill becomes law, which children used to have to learn in middle-school civics class, has become merely an option rather than a requirement for binding legislation. The moment passed, however, as of no interest to the political class, with the result that few people are even aware that a law exists that bypassed the required process.

And finally, if any hope for democracy in the US were left, it should be having one at this moment, as the massive scope of the executive’s usurpation of Congress’s legislative functions has been exposed for all to see, viz., the so-called “signing statements” that have rendered the presidential veto obsolete. It never occurred to me that the lack of such a crisis would signal the arrival of what we all know is not democracy but can’t otherwise name. I grew up thinking that violent coups d’etat were the only vehicles capable of bringing authoritarian governments into power. But although the POTUS now polls a disapproval rating of 71%, only half of those polled think that his administration has gone too far in extending executive power, including his NSA’s clandestinely appropriating and warehousing trillions of phone records of two hundred million US citizens, and 71% of Republicans polled actually approve of the NSA’s Orwellian program.

About a week ago, Republican Senator Arlen Specter warned that there “soon might not be a Congress,” because “'we're undergoing a tsunami here with the flood coming from the executive branch on one side and the judicial branch on the other.”

Paul Craig Roberts, an economist who served as an assistant secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, uses the expression “soft dictatorship” to characterize the current state of government in the US. I’m resisting the term, but even as I do, I have to wonder what a historian a hundred years hence would call the current political configuration of the United States.

The political landscape of the US is not the only area of confusion. The function and role of small, independent presses (including micropresses like my own Aqueduct Press) are changing today in swift & unpredictable ways that don’t neatly fit into the discourse we’ve developed for talking about both mainstream and alternative publishing. It makes sense, then, that in his first post to this blog Lance asks what constitutes alternative publishing and writing. It strikes me that answering such a question in other than simplistic terms would make a worthy—& on-going—ambition for this blog.

The technology of printing, from its orgins in fifteenth-century Europe, developed alongside and necessarily in relation to capitalism. For centuries, as Andre Schiffrin points out in The Business of Books, publishing was a business yielding low profits, a business in which firms balanced economic exigency against other interests—aesthetic, civic, religious, political, ethical… In the traditional model, best-selling books supported the work that publishers and editors loved, regardless of whether they could be marketed profitably. Though publishing was a hard-nosed, unromantic business, it was nevertheless a business undertaken for love.

As just about everyone living on this planet has by now discovered, postmodern capitalism does not believe in sacrificing profit to love (much less to public good, moral imperative, or even life itself). Business, in the postmodern era, exists to make as much profit as possible. For publishers conglomerated within the three remaining mammoth multinational media corporations, the math is stark: every book is expected to be a source of profit. Obviously this has been bad news for the “alternative” writing that was once associated with certain imprints of major New York publishers. Less obviously, this has also been bad news for “mid-list” writers—the authors publishers traditionally supported throughout their careers, even when one or two of their books flopped. Most people reading this post will know of examples of writers who have chosen to adopt a pseudonym in order to escape the taint of poor sales and began writing more aggressively for the market. But the shake-out of major publishers’ lists did not stop with mere flops, for it now includes authors whose books aren’t profitable enough—or whose books the publishers’ marketing departments merely predict won’t be profitable enough. This has resulted in floods of authors (and their agents) looking for alternatives to the major publishers. Recently when I was on a panel at the Science Fiction Museum in Seattle, one of the other panelists noted that the very mainstream Peter Beagle had a very mainstream, wide-appeal novel coming out from Tachyon Publications, a small press that publishes science fiction. I’ve heard of many other cases of equally well-known wide-appeal authors resorting to the small press. Indeed, I’ve had submissions for Aqueduct from some of them.

“We’re living in the Golden Age of the small press.” I’ve heard several editors from big New York houses assert this often over the last couple of years. The first couple of times I heard it, it sounded good, especially in light of my just having started my own small press; & I took it as a reference to the sophistication & variety we’ve seen proliferate in genre short fiction over the last decade as small-press anthologies, collections, and magazines have bloomed. But then I began to wonder, what does that mean? Why should editors who aren’t themselves associated with the small press be proclaiming such a Golden Age? & then I thought about how an editor of a mainstream house had said to me after I published Gwyneth Jones’s novel, Life (which subsequently won the Philip K. Dick Award), that he was glad that I had done so, that he (& another editor he named) had liked it a lot but that his house couldn’t publish it. Night Shade Books, a larger small press (that has published fiction by M. John Harrison and Michael Moorcock and Jeff VanderMeer and Mark Roberts’ celebrated The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide To Eccentric and Discredited Diseases), has just begun bringing out Gwyneth’s near-future rock-stars-in-politics series, Bold As Love, which Gollancz has been publishing in the U.K. The editors who talk about the Golden Age of the Small Press cite the proliferation of small presses with high editorial and production values and what is to some people the astonishing quality of their lists. The small presses, the editors say, are taking up the slack—they’re keeping the authors in print whom they would once have been publishing themselves.

So is this a Golden Age for the small press? Not from the authors’ point of view, since small presses usually are able to offer only smaller advances and print-runs and its book promotion must be done on the cheap, mostly through the initiative of the author. What about from the small-press publishers’ point of view, though? Granted, some very fine writing—like Gwyneth Jones’s—is now finding its way to the desks of small press editors. But consider what can happen when a small press published an author heretofore associated with mainstream publishers. From the first, the question of print-run size will be an issue, for the publisher can never be certain what a reasonable size for such authors might be. Next, a review in the New York Times (or some other market leader) of a name author will bring in a flood of orders from the big distributors, threatening to exhaust the print-run almost at once. What does the publisher do? Sit tight and wait for the returns to pour in on the assumption that the first print-run will be enough? Or go out on a financial limb, hoping to ride the wave to its peak? Baker & Taylor can take forever to pay, & small presses have sometimes been broken by such success. & yet an optimist might think that although extraordinary success is risky, the overall effect could well be to see some of the larger small presses emerge into a formation resembling that of the many independent established publishers of pre-conglomerate eras, subsidizing less financially-remunerative books with the profits of blockbusters. I myself see this as unlikely, simply because the structural conditions of the industry have changed. But I’ll admit it’s possible.

As they negotiate these shifting circumstances, small presses need to be clear about their own identities. Lance remarks in one of his posts “I know chances are I can trust a book from, say, Coffee House, Chiasmus, or Wordcraft,” and that’s the point. Yes, the small press represents an alternative to mainstream publishing. But as mainstream publishing narrows its focus, excluding many of the books it would in the past have published without question, the range of what is “alternative” necessarily expands. Aqueduct has been in existence for about two years now, and we’ve published five full-sized trade paperbacks and thirteen small trade paperbacks. Although the fiction we’ve published ranges all over the map stylistically, I have a clear sense of what it is that I want to be publishing (even if I seem only able to say what it is that I do not want to publish).When writing our mission statement I chose to use “challenging” to characterize the kind of fiction we intended to publish, I knew that such an adjective would put off some readers. But how, I reminded myself at the time, if one is offering an alternative to the blockbuster, if one is aiming to serve a small rather than least-common-denominator audience, can one not put off some readers? Last month at Andrea Hairston’s reading here in Seattle, one of the people attending the reading said she loved my openly using the word. This stood, she felt, for the character of Aqueduct’s alternative-ness to the mainstream.

If it is not exactly a golden age for the small press, it is a time in the US when the small press it not a luxury but is desperately needed, not least for preserving a diversity of voices and kinds & styles of writing. As for alternative writing: if we’re lucky, Now What will be a site for exploring what it is and why it matters.

That's when I fell for (vroom vroom)--Leader of the Stacks

Well, we know that you are simply dying to know BEST works of American Fiction from the last quarter century--and, are you ready for the toppermost of the poppermost (drum roll from a monkey wearing a shriner's cap...)--it's Toni Morrions's Beloved.

Or, so say "a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics, and other literary sages" solicted by The New York Times Book Review editor, Sam Tanenhaus. My letter, sent no doubt by carrier pigeon, must have been intercepted by someone who photographed my Toyota Corolla driving around Chicago, thus proving, tail feathers stuffed in the exhaust, that I am far from "prominent."

Danger be damned! I'll offer my opinion now.

Ok, Toni Morrison is a great writer; I met someone who claimed to be her personal assistant recently, and he had nothing but warm fuzzies for her (although, he, a poet, seemed unable to parley his work with Morrison into an academic job). And, I dig much of her work, Song of Solomon particularly, which I teach once every two years or so.

Of course, I teach it as a great novel, but also in terms of the "Oprah effect" (no explanation required--and it terms of multicultural tokenism on the college syllabus. Quick quiz Johnny Junior: name prominent African American women novelists of the last 1/4 century.

Uh...ummm...Toni Morrison?

One of the four runner-ups for the NYT is Don DeLillo's Underworld. This is nowhere near DeLillo's finest novel; it may be his longest, and it might mention baseball the most, and it may skew toward the experimental, but... Now, DeLillo is definitely a great writer, and White Noise is really a fantastic gem (also a notable on the list).

Philip Roth hit multiple times (6 of 27 books!), with The Human Stain as a book receiving "multiple votes" (American Pastoral is a runner up). Please--if this (also not his best work) is one of the greatest of the last 1/4 century, we are in as much trouble as Coleman Silk passing for whitey. Big trouble.

...with a capital 'T'

and that rhymes with 'P'

and you know what that stands for, kiddies!

So, a call to other "prominent" critics and writers, and assorted raconteurs whose invitations never made it throught the chatter. Care to proffer an alterna-list? Best American novels of the last 25 years?

Who's willing to take on the Times?

I Can't Read

I can't read books fashioned by writers and editors who insist there's such a thing as non-fiction.

In fact, I can't read because I am against non-fiction. I am of the anti-non-fiction faction. I am a non non-fiction believer. Contra non-fiction, I have a point of view. Nonsense and non-fiction have little in common, as any false positive test will prove.

The value and virtue of non-fiction lies in its ability to define itself as that which it is not. Non-fiction says nothing to me. It only designates that space inside of which writing is not false and also not not false. Non-fiction, by defining itself as the non-that, recedes into an imagined past when reality was defined as that which was, not that which was not non-existent.

Oh non-fiction, tell us who you are. Do you exist?

Dimitri

PS. By the way, I do like reading essays.

How Opal Mehta didn’t make me one dime richer

OK, the others have adequately introduced the stakes, so I will change to another Now What channel:

Lost in the initial hub-bub over the Kaavya Viswanathan plagiarism scandal was the role of a company called Alloy Media and Marketing, and more specifically, its subsidiary, Alloy Entertainment, and its subsidiary 17th Street Productions—a cross-promotional marketing firm that helps create branded items to capture the lucrative youth market.

Viswanathan’s now-pulled book from Little Brown & Company, ''How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life," seems to have found its life through indeterminate help from the Alloy firm. David Mehegan of The Boston Globe notes that Alloy president Leslie Morgenstein claims: “no one helped Viswanathan write the actual words of the book that, it turns out, liberally borrowed from at least three authors.” Yet, I’m certainly not clear on what this “book packager” (17th Street Productions) does, exactly.

There are two cogent issues here: 1) Plagiarism/copyright (reports even link passages in Mehta to Salman Rushdie’s work), and 2) Book production/fabrication of the “Author.” The first angle is about as fresh as your father’s Oldsmobile, so let’s hit the second:

Viswanathan procured her $500,000 two-book deal as a 17 year old, without a finished book! There seems to be no complete story about how this all came about, but Motoko Rich and Dinitia Smith at The New York Times sum it up as follows:

“Viswanathan acknowledged that she had help conceiving the book from Alloy Entertainment, a ‘book packager.’ Ms. Viswanathan's parents sent her to a private college counselor, Katherine Cohen of IvyWise, who is also the author of a book on writing college applications. Ms. Cohen showed some of Ms. Viswanathan's writing to Suzanne Gluck, her agent at the William Morris Agency. Ms. Viswanathan said that she had written a piece in the vein of ‘The Lovely Bones,’ the 2002 best seller by Alice Sebold, but that Ms. Gluck thought that it was too dark. ‘They thought it would be better if I did a lighter piece. They thought that was more likely to sell.’

“No one at Alloy suggested she read Ms. McCafferty or any other author's work, Ms. Viswanathan said.

“The summer after graduating from high school, she wrote four chapters and a synopsis of what became ‘Opal,’ and sent them in an e-mailed message to Alloy. After some minor editing, Alloy said it would get back to her.

“In October of her freshman year at Harvard, she received a call from Ms. Walsh, also an agent at William Morris, who told her she was going to start shopping the manuscript around. ‘Two days later, she called to say Little, Brown wants to buy the book.’

***

I don’t pretend to have all the details on this complex transaction—but let’s call it just that, a “transaction.” A piece of business foiled, in this case, because one product infringed upon the proprietary realms of an earlier products. We should think carefully before we call these things, these objects, “books,” or anything remotely akin to the broadest and lowest definitions of literature.

[NOTE: Reportedly, Viswanathan signed up initially to work with IvyWise, a company packaging “raw material” into suitable college admissions materials. I wonder if they charge a half mil? Perhaps it’s a tax write-off.]

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a literary snob (OK, bullshit), but I don’t want to see commercials at the movie theater, and I most certainly don’t want to read commercially produced texts that are in effect little more than commercials for an explicit commercial concern. Of course that angle goes against the pomo professor in me who argues incessantly about the commercialization of everything (no escape, suckers), and the attendant commodification of dissent (which Thomas Frank writes about so convincingly). You know, the fact that hippies were sell-outs from day one of the first freak flag commune. Or how some Madison Avenue wunderkind thought it would be great to sell a patchouli-smelling counter-culture to a bunch of Grateful Dead fans eating steak on a stick while watching to see if Jerry Garcia will get a boner and/or play “Dark Star.”

Don’t get me wrong, I love the Dead, and I’m humming “He’s Gone” right now, as I write this entry—but even the surliest, most jaded hippy has got to raise his eyebrows at $500K for nothing more than a target market.

Hey, call me crazy (like a fox), but this whole thing makes one hell of a book idea! Get me someone to work out the details...

levine, tomasula, ourednik

Ted's discussion of Spuyten Duyvil reminded me about something concerning a change in—or at least addition to—my own reading habits: lately I'm as likely to read by press as by author. I know chances are I can trust a book from, say, Coffee House, Chiasmus, or Wordcraft, and so I'll visit their sites for suggestions if the stack on my nightstand starts dwindling.

Three have delighted me over the last few weeks. First is Stacey Levine's novel Frances Johnson (Clearcut, 2006). It seems an exception to Ted's point about current innovative fiction being in some senses modernism's progeny, although in some strange ways Kafka's ghost does seem to be inhabiting a few of its stairwells. Imagine an episode of Twin Peaks, only on the page, and you'll have some idea of the slightly off-kilter otherness of the world Levine creates . The title character, an eccentric single woman in her late thirties, rides her bike furiously through a Florida town called Munson on whose outskirts a volcano, Sharla, fumes. A strange growth that looks like a cauliflower appears on Frances's thigh. The town doctor longs for a certain kind of chicken-beak oil for a remedy he's working on that will, it seems, cure everything. And when the quirky citizens talk to each other, their diction is as stilted, as vaguely unnerving, as the narrative universe they inhabit. Just as Frances clearly wants nothing so much as to leave Munson behind, Levine clearly wants nothing so much as to gently, ironically disrupt and leave behind the assumptions of realism's predictable plots, characters, and discourse. Why her work hasn't received more attention thus far is beyond me.

Next is Steve Tomasula's ambitious novel The Book of Portraiture (FC2, 2006), which does indeed engage with modernism's investigation of narrative fracture and what postmodern self-proclaimed surfictionist Sukenick once referred to as "the technological reality of the page," although it pushes those investigations much farther than did any modernist who comes to mind, and although its thematics land us a long way from, say, Joyce's or Stein's cornerstones. Tomasula explores nothing less than the history of representation, telling five vaguely interrelated stories—that of a desert nomad discovering the use and abuse of an alphabet; the Renaissance artist Diego de Velàzquez's struggle to rise to power in the Spanish court by means of his paintings; a psychoanalyst delving into, as it were, the x-ray portrait of himself he projects within a female patient; a group of contemporary digital manipulators caught in a complex (and often wonderfully funny) conspiracy (of sorts) in a universe of simulation and mediation; and, finally, a postmodern female artist whose oils are strands of DNA. What, Tomasula's fiction asks, does it mean to re-present "reality"? What is the nature and what are the limits of such an act, as it moves from sand to canvas to screen to inside our very cells? Embracing the idea of the book itself as wildly gorgeous art object, the text evinces colored pages, beautiful sketches, advertisements, photographs, experiments in layout and typography, and much more. One might imagine the whole, given my description, too cerebral by half, but that's far from the case. Several of the passages—one, for instance, involving the possible drowning of a little girl and her father's panicked attempts to locate her on a beach in the Middle East—are emotionally rich and rare. I can't say enough about it.

Finally, there is Patrik Ourednik's extraordinary un-novel Europeana (Dalkey Archive, 2005). Brian Evenson focused on it in a paper on post-genre writing he delivered at the &NOW conference Ted mentioned below. Since I hadn't heard of it before then, I picked it up. An alluringly unusual avant-historiography, Europeana recounts an absurdist's absurd (if all-too-true) history of Europe in a mere 122 pages by limning in childlike paratactic prose a wealth of atrocities, discoveries, movements, goofy facts, and goofier theories, all from a quirky bird's-eye perspective. The opening two sentences are emblematic of what follows: "The Americans who fell in Normandy in 1944 were tall men measuring 173 centimeters on average, and if they were laid head to foot they would measure 38 kilometers. The Germans were tall too, while the tallest of all were the Senegalese fusiliers in the First World War who measured 176 centimeters, and so they were sent into battle on the front lines in order to scare the Germans." Ourednik, a Czech who has lived in France since 1984, has invented a new form: the encyclopedic prose-poem built on painfully funny, painfully accurate non-sequiturs. Read it, read it, read it.

What these novels suggest to me is what's marvelous about alternative presses that bring out alternative prose: a wide variety of experimentalisms working within and against a wide variety of historico-aesthetic continuities and ruptures for a wide variety of reasons.

Pastmodernism Manifesto

Now, What. The title of a Beckett novel I never read.

Now What? Another demand on my time?

Now What. The activity we are presently engaged in.

Now What. It’s strange to me what we do. We are forward-looking in an activity plainly our culture is leaving behind.

Cultural conditions gave rise, if not to the form of the novel itself, then certainly to its popularity. 18th century, printing presses, the invention of middle-class leisure – all that. It subsequently became an art form, and retroactively grabbed things that had come before as harbingers and examples. Now the novel is inconceivable without, say, Cervantes.

Cultural conditions may no longer be on our side. I'd say, from what we've been saying so far, that they're not. (That is, they are in helping us produce books, but are not in terms of finding readers. You've seen the stats -- the younger you are, the less likely to read.)

I found it curious that Lydia’s (Blonde’s) asking of What Now, 2006, also involved an act of casting backward: “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.”

I approve and agree. I’m not being ironic or catty. I think it is now useful to get rid of the forward-looking-or-else formulation, or rather to think of Making it New as those guys, those old Modernists conceived it. That is, as simultaneously an act of saving the culture. I shore these fragments against my ruin.

I’ve been thinking for a while about being in a Modernism that is intensely involved in old texts, in texts themselves, which by their very nature root us in the old.

And I don’t mean old in a bad way.

Now What? All nows contain thens.

Now What.

I’ve called this tendency, this orientation in the present toward sustaining a past that is unfinished, as a joke, to friends, Pastmodernism. At a party one time back in the eighties (yeah, I’m that old, and I do mean that in a bad way), I poured a bottle of beer over my head to inaugurate the Age of Pastmodernism.

I didn’t know what the word meant then. I hadn’t made up a definition for it yet. I just liked the idea of the word.

Now I think of its definition as: the necessity to continue the work of Literature and of Art. I mean, for Chrissakes, thinking itself is under attack. World-wide. I mean, I’m just an old hippie in Buffalo and even I knew there were no WMDs in Iraq. A lot of people knew. The inspectors who had been there themselves, and whose job it had been to find them, told us. Now we’ve spent billions of dollars borrowed from China, and continue to spend them, because of the reign of stupidity.

Jesus Christ, don’t get me started.

Reading fiction, real fiction, is antithetical to all of this, though. Reading real fiction forces one to consider other worldviews than one’s own. Reading such forces us into an understanding of the world that shows us, again and again, how ill-equipped we are to control it, chastens us against even wanting to do so.

I am engaged in an act of attempted salvation, no not in any Jesus way, but just as a person, doing what I can do. Saving our means of understanding ourselves. Saving the ability to be thrilled without resorting to the TV prescription of flying off a cliff on a child’s bicycle; rather, simply by being led toward reflection by printed words.

Words brings with them the hope of saving us from madness.

That’s Now What.

II

Pastmodernism is not against Postmodernism. It seems to me it comes after Postmodernism.

The question of being Postmodern is one I encountered when I first started undergraduate schooling 25 years ago. Postmodernism, let’s face it, is old. Beckett is dead, Calvino, Borges, Creeley, Dinesen, Angela Carter, Olson, Hawkes, Sarraute.

(Sarraute’s dead, isn’t she?)

My point is that how long is one supposed to cling to something and say it’s new and the world isn’t yet catching on, when it seems instead the world doesn’t give a shit?

Then you are in the position of salvaging, of casting backward, of recovery, of withstanding erosion.

And it’s a good thing.

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 . . .