Uh-huh (You tell them, Trevor!)

Authors don’t apologize for writing their books!

Authors don’t apologize for writing their books!

Authors don’t apologize for writing their books!

Kat

hey hey Johnny

‘Scuse me while I cross/dupe-post, but I know a lot of readers here will be interested in knowing that Rolling Stone is streaming Jann Wenner’s 1970 interview with John Lennon (it’s also available as a podcast download at the iTunes Store). Totally for free.

I’m particularly struck by Lennon’s comments about the Vietnam War, and how he could just as easily be talking about our current clusterfuck in Iraq. It’s also difficult to think that this very bright, talented, articulate young man would be shot and killed less than 10 years after the recording.

I was barely 7 years old when Lennon died, but I remember that day quite vividly because it is the first time I can recall seeing my father cry. At the time, the only thing I knew about John Lennon was he sang songs on the radio and my parents liked those songs an awful lot. Now that I know more about John Lennon, I like those songs an awful lot, too.

And the more I think about this, the more I wonder: who is our 21st century John Lennon? I’m not talking about music, of course. I’m talking about using art as a monkeywrench, about Brecht’s sledgehammer. This was an easier question to answer, by the way, when all those luminaries Lidia mentioned were still swinging their arms.

Who, then?

what is the writer’s role in the current narrative of culture, or, who is writing this novel anyway?

most writers make me feel pukey.

really.

the vast majority.

could be I’m just an asshole.

or, could be I like to be moved deeply intellectually, emotionally, physically, spiritually—more than I like to be entertained or impressed by prize-winners.

i like it when writers flash up in moments of danger and interrupt the flow of excremental state-sponsored fictions.

i liked it when ben marcus wrote that harper’s thing.

i like it when eurydice creates “embroideries:  (http://www.eurydice.net/evi/ART/art.html)

i like it when andrei codrescu says irreverent things on NPR.

it helps me to sleep at night when joy harjo writes about love and war.

noam chomsky gets the “never give up” award. seriously.  he just keeps calling a spade a spade.  and I laughed my ass off when chavez waved his book around at the un.  plus we named our dog after him—due to the dog’s linguistic and philosophic prowess.

i’m sad kathy acker and gloria anzaldua and ed said are dead, among a loving list of other resistance writers.

leslie silko’s book ALMANAC OF THE DEAD was pretty much dead on right.

i cried when I read susan sontag’s piece on abu grahib.

my point:  if we put aside the marketed product of writing and the market-driven “use” of writing as either entertainment or bestselling consumer crap-mill, what could writers be doing right now about the story being written over our minds hearts and bodies?

how much has to happen for writers to “remake” writing into a site of creativity in the service of resistance to narratives of the state or economy?

how do we ween ourselves away from the juicy tits of economy and brand recognition?  is that what a writer is these days?  money and a name?

take the novel—that whorey cunt for hire . . .

what if we let go of the novel or at the very least LET IT RIDE and SLIDE into other genres?

what if we viewed genres metaphorically as “the drive belts between the history of language and the history of society” (m.m. bakhtin)? What if shifts and transformations in genre conventions are “both indexical of social change and contribute accumulatively to social change (m.m. bakhtin)?”

or would we like writing to be untethered from social change these days, so we can watch it as the “show” on oprah?

lidia

interview : trevor dodge

Hi, all.

Some of you/us might be interested in checking out my interview on the Now What blog with the one and only Trevor Dodge, in celebration of the arrival of his wonderful new avant-pop fiction collection from Chiasmus, Everyone I Know Lives on Roads.

If so, just click here.

Lance

911 (Unknown Caller I.D.)

Zizek:

The power that presents itself as being constantly under threat and thus merely defending itself against an invisible enemy is in danger of becoming a manipulative one. Can we really trust those in power, or are they evoking the threat to discipline and control us? Thus, the lesson is that, in combating terror, it is more crucial than ever for state politics to be democratically transparent. Unfortunately, we are now paying the price for the cobweb of lies and manipulations by the US and UK governments in the past decade that reached a climax in the tragicomedy of the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

Rumsfeld (The Tragicomic Actor):

The message is: there are known “knowns”. There are things that we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.

There are also things we don’t know we know. It’s what we sometimes call instinct. The commercial captains of consciousness continually do whatever is necessary to kill our human instinct. They do this by bombarding us with their rhetoric of mass distraction, so that we unknowingly obliterate any chance of generating what we intuitively know to be creatively human. To lose your creative instinct is to no longer know what you don’t know you know.

It doesn’t take a genius to see how large masses of citizens in the US are having their Reality TV minds manipulated by the ruling elite’s PR engineers.

They don’t call these “reality” shows Big Brother, Fear Factor, and Survivor, for nothing.

Please return to your regularly scheduled programming.

language as clusterfuck

now that the circle-jerkoff set of un speeches is over, i’d like to breathe again:

how can a whole parade of old man balls be more interested in listening to themselves pontificate than they are in the human crisis PRESENT RIGHT NOW in darfur?

how can the illegitimate president of the united states of apathy claim humanity will be saved through bellicosity, violence, war?

how come no one pays attention to the eloquent brazilian guy’s thoughtful remarks on humanism vs. bellicosity, his astute observations that alleviating hunger and poverty decrease the conditions which breed hatred, hopelessness and violence, interrupted by even the loser npr talking heads as they did their pre-bush banter ushering in the shrub’s senseless and disgusting diatribe on war?

jesus christ please tell me no one is buying this bucket of bile that the shrub is the special envoy for peace and democratic reconstruction in the middle-east?

are you fucking kidding me?

and chavez waxing lyrical about devils and sulfur. somehow THAT’S crazy?

and mahmoud ahmadinejad, going on about spirituality, ethics, and justice—

they may be whack jobs, but you gonna tell me their fictions are somehow smelling of poo and lies more than our man in washington’s?

who you gonna believe, my fellow man?

here’s the thing.

this narrative is rotten to the core.

this novel—oh, and it is a novel—needs to be invaded by radical forms and themes.

these men should be ashamed of themselves. while they exercise their idle chatter and persuasive speech—which don’t be fooled—is a LITERARY endeavor, people are dying.

in turkey novelists are being prosecuted for putting anti-turkish words in the mouths of fictional characters.

canadian citizens are being snatched from their lives, secretly spirited to Syria, tortured all to fuck, and then returned—years later—under the rules of engagement dictated and revised by our man bush.

our brothers and sisters originally inhabitants of new orleans have been left high and dry and fucked nine ways from sunday. the ones not dead. a city no longer winning a spot on the nightly news. a story no longer making itself present except on the anniversary of the tragedy.

the anniversary of the tragedy? are you fucking for real?

tell me language isn’t in crisis—isn’t subject to the clear and present danger of theft and revision.

who you gonna let define the language of our present?

“torture.”

“human dignity.”

“war.”

“civil rights.”

“border control.”

“civilization.”

“axis of evil.”

“those united in the quest for peace (also the countries supplying the war).”

“free world.”

“god’s will.”

“terrorist.”

“outlaw regimes.”

“peace and stability.”

“extremists.”

“religious fanatics.”

yours,

lidia

Dear James Frey

Dear James Frey,

I just found out you and your publisher worked out a deal with readers who are pissed about your novel A Million Little Pieces being a novel. Apparently you will be giving refunds for the full cover price to anyone who claims he is the victim of consumer fraud by purchasing your book.

God, I totally fucking hate you.

But before I get into that, let’s talk about Oprah Winfrey. What’s she like in person? And by “in person,” I mean in front of a daily national audience of 40 million? Because I saw you on her show apologizing for Your Novel Not Being Called A Novel But Really Being A Novel Anyway, and I couldn’t help feeling sorry for the two of you. I was especially sorry for the way both of you had to sit there and explain this like you were Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky copping to playing peek-a-boo with the cigar, frowning and sighing and shifting in your chairs and wringing your hands. It’s not too often we get to see Oprah apologize and actually mean it. And I’m wondering if that was your sense of the situation. I mean, she really looked sorry anyway. And she is totally smokin hot when she rumples up her face and stares into the camera with those big, liquid eyes, don’t you think? You were certainly in the best position to judge. For sure.

Now let me explain where I was when I heard about this consumer fraud settlement thing of yours. My wife and I were watching Supernanny on the Tivo, and there was this stay-at-home mom whose major problem was she smiled too much. According to her, people who smile all the time are usually trying to hide how miserable they are. During a break, a teaser commercial came on for a local morning talk show, and one of the topics was going to be how you and your publisher were giving people their money back because you’re both scared about getting sued in a class action. I Googled you and sure enough it was true. Goddammit.

It’s important to know where I was when I caught wind of this. Tivo is supposed to enable me to block out or fast-forward through teasers for TV morning shows, but it’s not a perfect system. Sometimes the programs don’t start recording at the exact time they begin; a lot of times, they stop recording before they’re supposed to. When fast-forwarding, it’s easy to overshoot the section breaks of the program I’m watching, and I end up seeing things I didn’t want to see. And when I see things I don’t want to see, I get incredibly upset. I work way too hard earning far too little to waste on things like Tivo that don’t do what I want them to do. That isn’t the America I grew up in, sir, and I’ll be damned if it’s the America I pass on to my children.

Because in the America I grew up in, authors don’t apologize for writing their books. That’s the primary reason for writing a book in the first place, or at least it used to be until you decided this for everyone. If people who write books now have to be held accountable for what they write, well, that’s kind of a problem for me personally. I have a book that is only a week or two away from hitting stores, so I’m incredibly pissed that you’ve changed things with this stunt of yours. Thanks a lot, asschunk.

Because in the America I grew up in, if you bought someone’s book and felt ripped off, well, tough shit.

In the America I grew up in, writers didn’t write memoirs. Only the greatest Americans got to write memoirs, and they sure as hell weren’t writers. Chuck Yeager. Richard Nixon. Lee Iacocca. Sam Walton. I’m looking at your bio right now on Wikipedia and I don’t see anything comparable. I do see that you spent five hours in jail and went through drug rehab. Dude, I live in Portland, Oregon; show me someone here who hasn’t been in a clink of some kind. Now I’m looking at your blog (BigJimIndustries.com?? are you serious?), and it is some weak sauce, brother. I keep a blog too, and it totally kicks your blog’s ass. (BTW, if you’d like to settle this over a game of Call of Duty 2 sometime, my XBox gamertag is “asa turpentine.” Bring it.)

But I really didn’t write this to pile on. I wrote this to make a larger point, and that point is this: books don’t have warranties. You and your publisher are setting a dangerous precedent by asking readers to tear out page 163 from their copies of AMLP and mail it back to you along with a sworn affidavit. More than that, though, you’re underscoring John Grisham’s points in that godawful essay he wrote about Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, the one where he argues for suing producers, directors and studio executives for the films they make. He argues this, of course, having made a lot of bank from–yes–film adaptations of his books.

So if you do nothing else, you should remove yourself from the company of John Grisham. You and I probably don’t agree on much, but the one thing I’d like to think we could agree on is how John Grisham is a complete twat; let’s at least start there.

Whattya say?

Sincerely,

Trevor Dodge

War, the Serial

Given the current state of the nation and its sadistic thrusts, it seems as useful as anything I’ve come across lately to state this plainly:  that we have hit a moment in history where “warspeak” has taken on a particularly literary trope.

Why am I throwing the word “trope” around?  Because two of its definitions include:

1. any literary or rhetorical device, as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, that consists in the use of words in other than their literal sense (imagine here the load of utter bullshit oozing from the mouth of our so-called president and his mis-use of about a gazillion terms in an attempt to distract you with figurative hoo-doo).

2. (in the philosophy of Santayana) the principle of organization according to which matter moves to form an object during the various stages of its existence (I just like this.   So there).

And what I am saying is, the talking heads of warspeak—Bush, his cronies, the media, “experts in the field”–are stealing language and literary devices right and left.  From us.  Writers.  Artists. Activists.  Ordinary people.

Proof:  what we’ve got now is war the serial, the ongoing story, the television production, the mini-series, the movie, the show—and the events—the so-called war on terror, war in Afghanistan, war in Iraq, war on illegal aliens, war on Islamic fascism (particularly dunderheaded idea)–and the representations are no longer distinguishable.  The rhetorical and the discursive and the representational have, in other words, done that Baudrillard thing to the nines.

Aside from, of course, the matter of dead bodies, which, conveniently, are ushered off screen or slipped into statistical data so as not to interrupt the narrative flow.  Dead bodies are someone’s “report,” or “special segment” on CNN, or an Op-Ed piece—again, all representational.

But the literary troping of contemporary “war”—a term which by the way has lost its moorings representationally and ethically—has utterly atomized the reality it may have at one time attempted to metaphorize.  Literature may have troped war, but now war tropes literature, and it aint pretty.

It’s not like I’m the first person to think this up.  About a gazillion people have noticed this war troping business, all across history.  See list at the tail end of this bad boy.

Some humorous and at the same time serious contemporary manifestations:  Cindy Sheehan and John Stewart . . . humorous because apparently the poet activists can appear in the least expected places, and serious because they are doing our work for us.

Then there is the frightening facet of pure fiction and stylized persuasion masquerading as the nightly news . . . simply put:  pukedom.

Don’t even get me started on how shitty it is – no, beyond shitty – that these so-called “wars” are displacing event horizons like Darfur.  How the Darfur “story” keeps failing to “get air time” or narrative weight.  Or Katrina—how bout that?  One day of commemorative punk-ass shows while thousands of humans drown in their country’s apathy.

Or our crappy ass shrub-of-a-loser brainless commander in chief saying “we’re in a battle for civilization.”  As if the front for the battle of civilization is Iraq.  This dude has been reading the bible a little too literally.  Jesus Christ.

So what, right?

Well, here’s the thing.

I still believe art can and should stand up to the state rather than suck its dick by producing mindless entertainment and supplicant pigshit.  In fact, even though we live in times deadened by consumerism and economy, I still believe it is the best use and function of art to speak the emotions, truths, and realities that organized society refuses to legitimate.

Call me crazy.  Call me naïve.  Call me not academic enough.  Call me a girlie man.

You’d be dead wrong on all counts, because artists need not fit the category of sane, they need not become good and proper citizens, they need not score the big touchdown in academia.  And women—since I am the one saying this I’d like to speak from my actual corporeal position instead of pretending it doesn’t matter–need not apologize for being pissed off enough to use their bodies and language to say fuck you, stealers of language.

We—writers, artists–just need to make art.

If writers wanted to, we could effect change, and not simply in candlelight vigils and highly publicized and sanctioned literary “events.”  If we wanted to, we could go underground and punch our way up and through this shit.  Because between you and me, I’ve about had it with relegating writers and writing to some impotent realm of academia and prizes and conferences.  Or worse, snagging a spot on a talk show.   Interviewed by NPR (god love em, but still…).  Sidelined like bat-boys.  Ball-less in our pretty utterances.  Do we really want to look like congress?  What a bunch of punks.

So.

I’m throwing it out there as a challenge.  Any writers or artists want to make some noise not sanctioned by the okey-dokey meisters?  Anybody want to steal language back from the artless and spineless morons currently controlling it?

Anybody want to interrupt war the serial with a linguistic insurgence?  One coming from a place of love (hey, love can be loud too, baby) and fierce creativity, rather than death, killing, and economy?

If so, lemme know.

Oh and by the way:  nationalism ought not be confused with religion, buying and consuming ought not be confused with being, and US citizens ought to wake the fuck up—because we’re the ones doing it.

With love and a pounding heart,

Lidia, an ordinary person, writer, mother, wife.

———————————————————————————————————
Paul Fussell, Robert Hughes, Paul Virilio, Andrei Codrescu, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Noam Chomsky, Czeslaw Milosz, Fredric Jameson, Walter Benjamin, Edward Said, James William Gibson, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Kathy Acker, Marguerite Duras, Monique Wittig, Leslie Silko, Doris Lessing, Baudrillard, Derrida, Adorno, Joy Harjo, hell, remember Don DeLillo’s White Noise?  Before he was Mr. Big and writing tomes about baseball?  I’m sure you can all think of other even better examples as well.