SUBCULTURE AND MEGACULTURE aka "GET ME IN CONTROL OF ABC FAMILY AND I WILL FUCK THIS COUNTRY UP"

“All of writing is a huge lake. There are great rivers that feed the lake, like Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky. And then there are mere trickles, like Jean Rhys. All that matters is feeding the lake. I don't matter. The lake matters. You must keep feeding the lake.” - Jean Rhys

"Get me in control of ABC Family and I will fuck this country up" - Steve Roggenbuck

A couple days ago, the literary review site I AM ALT LIT asked its readers for feedback, and I sent them a couple emails about how I was sometimes disappointed by the reviews.    If I had to boil down my emails to a couple bullet points, they’d probably be:

• the reviews aren’t serious enough
• the reviews aren’t literary enough
• the reviews aren’t ambitious enough

Josh Spilker emailed me back, asking if he could post my emails on his site along with a response, and I agreed.  Josh wrote a very interesting and thoughtful article about that, which you can read here.

  

But, after thinking about it for awhile,  I don’t really have a complaint with I AM ALT LIT.  On a regular basis, they are promoting books and writers that might not otherwise get covered, reviewing books that might not otherwise get reviewed.  Even when I disagree with them about this or that review, I almost always come out of with a different perspective on the book, a perspective that I might not have otherwise thought about.  They have a different writing style and a different personality from me, but they’re doing their thing, and I’m definitely glad that the site is around.

I think a lot of my criticism was misplaced…the things that annoy me are much more vague and general, although it does concern what I see as a lack of ambition and purpose in some of the Alt Lit community. So.

Here’s this monster essay.

I wish I had another week to really revise and organize this thing, but I don’t want to wait too long to post this.  If I wait another a week, I feel like far less people would read it.  Which hits on a major aspect of the internet—the need to keep up.  I wrote this entire essay over the last two days…right now I’m at a noisy Bubble Tea café, furiously typing this into my laptop, trying to revise it again. 

With a few exceptions that I know of, most of the writers in Alt Lit either have day jobs, or go to school full time.  Most of us live extremely busy lives.  We have girlfriends and boyfriends and families…we have social lives and friends…we have a billion projects going on at once.  We’ve got bills to pay.  Even the writers who do nothing but write, who don’t have day jobs, such as Guillaume Morissette and Steve Roggenbuck, have huge amounts of other stuff going on…there is travelling to book readings, there’s building a fan base and networking.  And all of it is moving at a break-neck speed…internet speed.  (I’m not saying that’s a good excuse for lazy or sloppy work, but sometimes I really do want to say: give people a break.

Almost nobody is getting paid for their work.  Almost nobody is getting any help from agents or book publishers.  People are doing things almost totally DIY…sometimes with the help of friends, sometimes alone.  I feel like people who loudly complain that all Alt Lit is lazy and uncoordinated, often ignore the incredible work ethic that so many writers in the community have.  Beach Sloth is almost like a character from a Greek myth at this point: his work ethic is heroic.  People are curating and editing beautiful ebooks and literary journals like Cityscapes and Shabby Doll House…people like Daniel Alexander and Steve Roggenbuck are sometimes spending nine hours a day on social networking sites, talking to readers and building literary communities.  It’s amazing. 

So don’t let people tell you that all Alt Lit is just lazy, and sloppy, and uncommitted.  Don’t believe them.

This brings me to the first thing I’d like to talk about:

Sometimes Alt Lit can be lazy, and sloppy, and uncommitted.

In this period of our literature we are producing mainly insular works, as if all our writers were all on an airplane in economy seats, beverage trays shading their laps, faces averted from one another, masturbating furiously.  Consider, for instance, The New Yorker fiction of the past few years, with those eternally affluent characters suffering understated melancholies of overabundance.  Here the Self is projected and replicated into a monotonous army which marches through story after story like deadly locusts... 

THE RULES 

1.  We should never write without feeling. 

2.  Unless we are much more interesting than we imagine we are, we should strive to feel not only about Self, but also about Other.  Not the vacuum so often between Self and Other.  Not the unworthiness of Other. Not the Other as a negation or eclipse of Self.  Not even about the Other exclusive of Self, because that is a trickster-egoist's way of worshipping Self secretly.  We much treat Self and Other as equal partners.  (Of course I am suggesting nothing new.  I do not mean to suggest anything new.  Health is more important than novelty.) 

3.  We should portray important human problems. 

4.  We should seek solutions to these problems.  Whether or not we find them, the seeking will deepen the portrait. 

5.  We should know our subject, treating it with the respect with which Self must treat Other.  We should know it in all senses, until our eyes are bleary from seeing it, our ears ring from listening to it, our muscles ache from embracing it, our gonads are raw from making love to it.  (If this sounds pompous, it is perhaps because I wear thick spectacles.) 

6.  We should believe that truth exists. 

7.  We should aim to benefit others in addition to ourselves.

 - William Vollman, "American Writing Today: Diagnosis of a Disease"

PART 1:

ALL I CARE ABOUT IS BOOKS

When I was thirteen years old, I had to write a book report.  The book I chose to read was Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury.  I picked it because it was the thinnest book.  I didn’t like to read books.  But this one convinced me that books were almost holy.

Ten or fifteen pages in, I got hooked.  It’s hard to say exactly why, I’m sure a lot of things were involved…but before I knew it, this book became nearly everything that existed.  The whole world fell away.  I read it all night.

The next day, I was still reading it.  I was reading it at the end of the day.  I was reading it while everybody at school was getting ready to go home…excited to be done, yelling their asses off and generally acting like thirteen year olds, running around and having fun.  And there I was… sitting in the corner alone, wide-eyed, looking like a just took a hit of acid, staring at the open book in my hands like it contained all the secrets in the world.  My hands were shaking.

If you haven’t read it, Fahrenheit 451 is a book is about the future, where everyone spends their free time:

• watching gigantic, wall-sized tv screens
• talking with anonymous friends on video phones about soap operas and celebrities
• eating brain-numbing prescription pills
• with electronic earplugs constantly plugged in their ears
• mostly listening to commercials

Books are outlawed—which is fine because no one wants them anyway—and instead of putting out fires, firemen burn books.  In the alternate reality of the novel, books are outlawed because they are too controversial…they offend people, they make people unhappy…they’re too confusing, too disturbing.  They make you think about all sorts of things.  And, in a general sense, people don’t want to think about things.  People would much rather just have fun.

The higher-ups catch onto this, and realize that people who don’t like to think can be more easily controlled, easily sedated.  You just have to keep people constantly distracted, like children.  Give them a million fun things to do, a million flashy things to look at.  An infinity of entertainment options.  Keep them so distracted that they don’t even realize the country is at war, and jets are flying over their heads, and the bombs are coming soon.  And so in this alternate future, books became illegal.

About halfway through the novel, the protagonist Guy Montag, who’s never read a book in his life, steals a Bible and tries to read it on the subway, which keeps blaring loud commercials through the speakers.  This is the passage I was reading that day in eighth grade, the passage that made my hands shake.

He clenched the book in his fists. 

Trumpets blared. 

“Denham’s Dentifrice.” 

Shut up, thought Montag.  Consider the lilies of the field. 

“Denham’s Dentifrice.” 

They toil not—

“Denham’s—” 

Consider the lilies of the field, shut up, shut up. 

“Dentifrice!” 

He tore the book open and flicked the pages and felt of them as if he were blind, he picked at the shape of the individual letters, not blinking. 

“Denham’s.  Spelled: D-E-N—” 

They toil not, neither do they…” 

A fierce whisper of hot sand through empty sieve. 

“Denham’s does it!” 

Consider the lilies, the lilies, the lilies… 

“Denham’s dental detergent.” 

“Shut up, shut up, shut up!”  

It was a plea, a cry so terrible that Montag found himself on his feet, the shocked inhabitants of the loud car staring, moving back from this man with the insane, gorged face, the gibbering, dry mouth, the flapping book in his fist.

- Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451 

The moment I read that passage was, more or less, the moment when I decided that I wanted to become a writer. 

It’s almost patronizingly obvious to say that we live in a world that's increasingly noisy, full of distractions and trivial, time-wasting bullshit.  Yesterday a gas pump told me to watch Kim Kardashian get stomach surgery on live tv.  My car tires have mp3 players.  There’s an app that can keep track of how many seconds I've spent thinking about undressing Lana del Rey.  At almost any given moment I can see what Joseph Gordon-Levitt is wearing RIGHT NOW.  I'm not saying that I don't enjoy the distractions sometimes, that they can't become interesting and fun side trips, fruitful tangents.  But didn't you ever hear the story about the little kid who got lost in the Funhouse, couldn't find his way back out, and ended up eating his own legs and arms to stay alive?  You probably didn't hear about it because it's not a real story, but my point is...wait what was my point...oh my god, did you click that last link?  Did that guy actually cut his own legs off? 

The internet sometimes makes it hard to stay focused.  As writers, we have to ask ourselves if we merely want to add to all that mostly meaningless and chaotic noise, or try to serve as some kind of remedy against it.

Someday I’m going to die.  I have a limited span of existence.  This idea makes me very nervous and anxious.  This idea makes me feel very lonely and disconnected from everyone.  And here are all these billions of noises all around me, squawking and screaming about toothpaste.  They’re aren’t helping me.  They aren’t designed to help me.  They're designed to keep me distracted.  They’re designed to make me buy more toothpaste.

But.  Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow.  They do not toil, neither to they spin.  And yet I say unto you, that not even Solomon in all his glory was arrayed such as these.

There’s a voice, trying to tell you something, show you something that’s truly important.  It’s showing you the lilies of the field.  It doesn’t want you to buy toothpaste, it wants to shake you out of your slumber and make you really look at something for a minute.  That’s the voice of literature.

PART 2:

SUBCULTURE AND MEGACULTURE

Everybody knows that less and less people are reading.  Poetry is so far gone that it’s nearly dead.  Almost none of my real life friends ever read books.  The last books they read were in high school, and even then it was probably just Cliff Notes.  The number of “serious readers” in this country has shrunk so far that it’s become a subculture.  Pretty much anyone who cares deeply about books is, by default, a very marginalized and unusual person.  It doesn’t matter so much if you’re a realist or an experimentalist…if you prefer Philip Roth, or Dennis Cooper, or William Shakespeare, or Tao Lin, or David Sedaris, or Stephen King.  You’re already in the minority.

I believe that the internet can go a long toward changing this trend.  I don’t want to re-hash the entire argument why…I feel like everybody already understands the various ways that the internet represents a game changer in terms of how art gets promoted, and distributed, and manufactured.  The main point I want to make is that literature itself is a subculture.  The dominant culture…I’m calling it the megaculture because it makes it sound like a Godzilla monster, raaaaah scary…is not seriously invested in literary novels, and poems, and ebooks.  (However, one might argue that it IS becoming more and more invested in twitter feeds and facebook accounts, and tumblrs, and blog posts.) 

But there are also subcultures inside of subcultures, and Alt Lit is most definitely a subculture inside a subculture.  The world of cheering, half-drunken Alt Lit poetry readings in people’s basements is extremely far removed from this year’s tuxedoed, red carpet National Book Awards, which tried to infuse the literary world with some Hollywood glamour.  (“Celebrity” Molly Ringwald will be there!  Wow, this must be an important event!)  But both the awards show and the underground basement reading are part of a subculture, a literary subculture.

It’s totally up to you to choose which world you appreciate more, which world you’d like to belong to.  Personally, I don’t want to limit myself to one subculture.  I think the basement reading would be much more fun and cool than the red carpet in Manhattan, but I also wouldn’t tear up a ticket to the National Books Awards if one were to fall into my hands.  Some people might not feel that way…they might feel that attending a posh, industry ceremony like that would be “selling out.”  Which is fine, people are free to feel however they want.  But personally, I don’t want to limit myself.  I go could to the awards show, and possibly learn a couple new things.

Almost more than anything, I believe in pluralism.  I appreciate Steve Roggenbuck’s straight-edge stand, even though I’m not straight-edge.  I appreciate Zachary German’s pessimistic view of the world, even though I don’t really share that same view.  I appreciate it because I can tell that they believe in something, and I respect that.  Hearing their points of view enlarges me, it makes me see the world better.  It gives me something to think about, it challenges me.

I like lots of different things.  I like the Internet Poetry tumblr and macros by people like Angela Shier and James Ganas.  I like novellas like otherlow by JDA Winslow and online ebooks like the ones at Bear Parade.  I like reading academic literary criticism by people like Northop Frye and Viktor Shklovsky.  I like Christopher Marlowe and John Milton.  I like Gertude Stein and James Joyce. I like twitter feeds by writers like Mira Gonzalez and Blake Butler.  I like a lot of things.  I don’t want to limit myself.

What I sometimes see being produced in Alt Lit is work that is specifically meant to only appeal to other people in the scene/community.  And that’s fine too.  Some of that is really valuable.  But I don’t want to limit myself.  I sincerely do want to speak to a larger audience than just Alt Lit.  I’m not abandoning anyone…I try to be as big a supporter of the community as I can.  But what I worry about sometimes is that the subculture might get too fixed on certain pre-conceived ideas of what “Alt Lit” is and isn’t, and then just start mindlessly duplicating those pre-conceived ideas, those cliches.

I want to get as large a readership as possible.  But here’s the important part: I want to get a large readership because there’s something I really want to communicate.  I don’t care about being internet famous…I don’t even care that much about being validated.  I have something that I desperately want to say.  My stories and poems obsess me.  They’re things I believe in with my whole being.  

Ultimately, I’m writing because I want to change the dominant culture.  That’s my ultimate goal. 

There are certain things I believe in:

• I believe in books…I want more readers in the world.
• I believe that a lot of our culture tacitly encourages and rewards the lowering of human value.  That’s an essay in and of itself, but I believe that art should try and promote a feeling of common humanity, try to break down social hierarchies.
• I believe that we are all going to die eventually, and that we should spend our lives trying to do something meaningful.

I believe in a lot of things, I could go on and on and on.  I’m not saying I’m always right, and that I don’t make mistakes and can’t change my mind, but I have a core set of values that I want to promote.  I want to cut through all the inane commercials and say something directly to another human being.  And I’m hoping that, if I can do it enough…if I can reach enough readers…that I might be able to sway the culture one way or another, even if it’s only a micro-inch.

To quote Gandhi: “Be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Some people believe in different things, and that’s good.  They’re fighting for what they believe in, and we don’t necessarily have to disagree because usually the answer lies in several places at once.  One of the great powers of literature is that represents a legion of voices, carrying through time and place and class. 

                

It’s not a collective voice, it’s a million individual voices.  But the megaculture speaks in a collective voice.  It speaks the language of propriety.

“Since the Renaissance with the help of oil we have been building a nightmare, an absolute nightmare.  But we’ve been working so slowly building it, and each person does their own little thing, that we haven’t noticed that we’ve built a nightmare, an absolute nightmare we don’t want, and we get older and we still don’t want the damn thing.  But we’re trapped in it.  We’re all closed in by it, either we obey the machinery of this monster, or the monster starves us, the monster exiles us to be alone, and who wants to be alone against the monster.  The monster is too big, too enormous, it has too many arms, legs, eyes, and guns.  The monster even has bibles and constitutions, the monster has laws with police men and armies guarding the laws.  It has television shows, book companies, radio stations, it has the food, the water, the electricity and the oil.  It has everything, and it is not operated by Man any longer.  Back in the day one tribe could kill another tribe and take their shit, but there is no tribe.  There is the monster, and even if one of the big business men decided one day to not be part of the monster the other big business men would kill him, because there is no human behind this.  This monster we call civilization, this giant we have built with our minds and hands is now beyond our control.  We don’t control the monster anymore, it controls us,” Chang says.                

“It terrifies us into submission by being so huge.”                

“It encompasses everything, there is nothing the monster has left untouched.  We eat the monster’s food, we drink the monster’s water, we watch the monster’s television, and all at the same time we are the monster.  The monster has a place for everyone, if it be homelessness or the owner of a Subway.”   

_

Noah Cicero, from The Insurgent 

What are the chances that I, as a writer and poet and stubbornly literary person, will ever make a dent in the dominant culture?  Almost zero.  So small and minuscule that it’s nearly Quixotic.  Most likely, the books I write will never get a large audience.  Most likely, neither will yours.  But you know what?  I don’t give a shit, I’m still gonna try.  Because who can say what will happen?  Even the fact that you’re reading this sentence right now is amazing.  It’s amazing that right now I’m sitting in this noisy Bubble Tea café, typing this thing before I have to get up for work Monday morning, and you are sitting wherever you are now…maybe in another country, another city…maybe you’re reading this two or three years from when I first wrote it…maybe you found this article completely randomly, by accident.  And yet my voice is getting through.  You’re reading this.  I’m telling you something.

On the internet, things can go viral in flash.  It’s so difficult to predict, it’s so unwieldy.  You never know what can happen.

“I was born with a chance / And I’m gonna have my chance”

PART 3:

MAINSTREAM CULT STATUS

"...the day > kill author reaches Paris Review status – and that's just not going to happen. We're probably aiming more for "mainstream cult status" – we'd like to still see ourselves as a place not everyone gets, not everyone understands, a bit out on the margins, but which still has a readership wide enough to take it beyond just those people who read and submit to literary magazines." -- Talking with Ghosts: An Interview with > kill author

In an interview on the great Brad Listi Other People Podcast, Scott McClanahan was asked what he thought about Alt Lit, and he said (paraphrasing):  The nice thing about being weird/different is that you don’t have to do all the boring things that normal people do.

I feel like most of the people in Alt Lit appreciate literature that is weird, that is at the margins.  If I had to pick one person to be the representative face of Alt Lit, it would probably be Mike Bushnell:

I mean, just look at this fucker.  This guy is a freak.  He’s also an amazing, very exciting poet who writes really interesting things.  He’s different.  He’s a weirdo, and I truly love him because he is a weirdo. 

In the Carter documentary, Lil Wayne was asked why he has so many tattoos.  He said: “I like to get in the elevator with some people, and they look, and they move over a little bit.  I love that.  And I like to go to some other places and people look, and they move closer."  I like Alt Lit’s irreverence.  I like its rebellion, how it’s breaking rules.  I’m not arguing that anyone should become “more normal” in order to have a larger popular appeal.  Actually, I believe the exact opposite.

okk yeh it’d be good for ‘everyone’ for milliionsss of htmlgiant rumpuses to read us 

if we started writing to the ‘default’ style we’d probably ‘lose’ readers, b/c then we’d all ‘appear’ normal 

part of the reason those sites ‘don’t care’ is that they don’t know these authors, and wouldn’t ‘necessarily’ read these authors anyway, b/c they’re not part of the ‘big 6’ / ‘big 5’ however the corporate mergers ‘pan’ out (((not always the case, obv, those sites do support ‘indie’ lit, but then alt lit is even ‘different’ than those))) 

to appeal to ‘them’ i do not want to leave any alt lit behind, as previously stated in ‘our’ twitter feed
--  'reflectionx' from I AM ALT LIT re: Chris Dankland

Reaching a large audience doesn’t necessarily mean that you have dilute and hide all the things that make you different from everyone else.  It doesn’t mean that you have to iron out all your weirdness, all your rebelliousness.  Art is (or at least should be…it isn’t always this way, unfortunately) a human activity where most of its greatest value comes from its unusual voices and points of view.  In fact, that's one of the key ingredients to being a successful artist…differentiating yourself from the pack.  The more you define yourself by popular trends, the more likely it is that you’ll fade out along with the trend.  Will your novel or poetry book ever be as popular as the hot new song, the blockbuster movie, the latest internet meme?  Probably not.  But if you write with an original voice, as opposed to a momentarily popular one, I think your work stands a greater chance of surviving into the future. 

Some writers and artists who I think broke into the popular culture exactly because they were/are unusual and weird:

Kurt Vonnegut

Cormac McCarthy

Haruki Murakami

David Lynch

Andy Warhol

Of course, you could go on and on and on.  The point is I don’t think these artist sacrificed originality for popular appeal.  Actually, their popular appeal is directly linked to their originality.  Lil B has hundreds of thousands of fans, and he’s still weird as fuck.  Sometimes weirdness can be an impediment to a large readership, but it doesn’t have to be.

PART 4:

MOTHERFUCKING TOLSTOY

In 1897, Leo Tolstoy wrote a book called “What Is Art?”

I’m just gonna quote the wikipedia article because it sums everything up pretty well and I have to get up early in the morning:

According to Tolstoy, art must create a specific emotional link between artist and audience, one that "affects" the viewer. Thus, real art requires the capacity to unite people via communication (clearness and genuineness are therefore crucial values). This aesthetic conception led Tolstoy to widen the criteria of what exactly a work of art is. He believed that the concept of art embraces any human activity in which one emitter, by means of external signs, transmits previously experienced feelings. Tolstoy offers an example of this: a boy that has experienced fear after an encounter with a wolf later relates that experience, infecting the hearers and compelling them to feel the same fear that he had experienced—that is a perfect example of a work of art. As communication, this is good art, because it is clear, it is sincere, and it is singular (focused on one emotion). 

However, genuine "infection" is not the only criterion for good art. The good art vs. bad art issue unfolds into two directions. One is the conception that the stronger the infection, the better is the art. The other concerns the subject matter that accompanies this infection, which leads Tolstoy to examine whether the emotional link is a feeling that is worth creating. Good art, he claims, fosters feelings of universal brotherhood. Bad art inhibits such feelings.

I disagree with a lot of the things that Tolstoy says in that book, but in general this is how I tend to judge literature.

Part 5:

LET WRAP THIS UP

If you've read this far, I want to thank you sincerely.  This isn't the best essay, but I do feel like it is representative of what I believe.  What do you think?  Feel free to send me a message and say whatever you'd like to.  Thank you again.

I gotta go to work now.