Let the record show I foretold this if....

Tonight, Michael brought home the Post-Gazette, whose front page bears the following headline (above the fold, no less): "Constitutional convention call gains traction". What's this mean? They're seeking to incite a movement to alter the Constitution. Let the record show that, if this actually begins to pick up speed and it is not handled with care, I foretold this development with this story, "Conceived in the New Liberty".

So, to all the journal editors who have rejected it, one of whom responded: "this doesn't resonate with us," I welcome you to think more deeply about what you feel is relevant and what should resonate with you. Contemporary literature is becoming too insulated, too inward looking, too sexually obsessed. Wake up! We can express ourselves freely only because we still have a Constitution that permits it. Start messing with it, and censorship might be the new American way. It can happen insidiously slowly, in ways we might not even realize until it's too late. Believe it, kids. I feel like I've been yelling at the top of my literary lungs over the past few years, and no one listens, no one cares, no one wants to hear it. And because I can't say it any better than my boy, social satirist George Grosz, I'll refer to his criticism of the socially detached avant-garde in the 1925 essay "Art is in Danger". Grosz, who collaborated on the manifesto with Wieland Herzfelde, wrote:
           Today's artist, if he does not want to...become an antiquated dud, has the choice
           between technology and class warfare propaganda. In both cases, he must give up “pure art.”
          Either he enrolls as an architect, engineer, or advertising artist in the army (unfortunately very
          feudalistically organized) which develops industrial powers and exploits the world; or, as a
         reporter and critic reflecting the face of our times, a propagandist and defender of the
         revolutionary idea and its partisans, he finds a place in the army of the suppressed who fight
         for their just share of the world, for a significant social organization of life. ("Art in Danger")

Shouldn't we writers be at the barricades and use our voices to advance a message that matters?

General Doings...

It's Thursday and incredibly hot, a fact we have been unfailingly alerted to and reminded of by the news for the past week. I can look out our living room window, from where I'm writing this post and see trees and haze. The ciccadas are screaming, so that (according to popular lore) means there are only six more weeks of this hard-to-breathe, quick-to-sweat searing thickness. We hope. To heal my broiled (and now perspiration-drenched) spirit, I envision approaching surf and cooling breezes. Happy place, yes. 

Kate Zambreno's
first novel, O Fallen
Angel.



Kate Zambreno's wonderful blog (like this post or this one) always reconnects me with what it means to be a writer. She is a thinking writer, an intellectual, very analytical, but also forceful in her emotion, and sometimes her uncertainty. At her blog are the best three parts of humanity: head, heart, soul. More on her new book Green Girl very soon...



What I worked on from 7:33 A.M. until about 11:30 today is "Conceived in the New Liberty", a fictional commentary on how easily we might allow our rights be dismantled. I'm happy that it's flowing pretty steadily.  During my daily hour of penance on the exercise machines in the basement, I flip between HLN, CNN, and Fox (all three are on consecutive stations on our cable box) to get a feel for the tenor and language used to deal with contemporary issues. My perceptions are, in part, what spurred my Two Minutes Hate post on Tuesday.



Lapith fighting a Centaur
Metope from The Parthenon



I may have mentioned this before, but I finished the Lord Elgin story, which I retitled "The Metope Prophecy." A 'metope' is a  decorative architectural element, a carved spacer in a freize that usually appears between fluted trigylphs. On the Parthenon, there are 92 metopes. Many of these are what Elgin brought back to England to sell to the British Museum.

If you remember this post and the excerpt it contains (all the way at the posts' bottom), here is the paragraph that follows it:



"The image haunted him the following morning, even though he’d had other, less vividly remembered dreams afterward. He knew he could not save Phidias’ immense Athena. She was already lost. The military leader, Lachares, had used the gold plates that comprised the goddess’ drapery to mint coins to pay his troops in the third century before Christ. Resplendent then in copper and ivory, she survived two fires before disappearing with the rise of the Ottoman Empire. So, as he sipped at the dark brew that passed for coffee while his wife moved sulkily in her chair down the long table, he began to think of the statue’s plea in metaphorical terms. It is a message, he thought, staring at a triangle of buttered toast. I’m supposed to rescue what is still there." -- from "The Metope Prophecy" 

The Beginning of Exodus

I'm working on a new story for the Winter '11 issue of the online sci-fi and fantasy magazine Strange Weird and Wonderful. Here are the first three paragraphs of a story with the working title, "Exodus":

The sun came up red and angry. It glowered through the gauzy fog, washing with a frail pink light the collapsing bridges and broken, graying asphalt that lay in chunks where highways had once been. While three of the small travel party still slept, protected from immediate sight by an overpass, Tina was awake, and so was Bible. She watched him sitting on the ledge some twenty yards away, looking east and staring with calm concentration into the sun. His braids, grown fuzzy at the roots, filtered the light around his skull so that it looked like a nimbus. Tina shuddered and turned over on her side, looking away from Bible.

Tina had known Bible before the apocalypse. That’s what they all called the invasion. It had come at the end of a very grim economic time. Even the Americans, who were fighting an endless war with sand colored tanks and ground harrowing missiles, were unable to muster the resources necessary to produce suitable weapons. But it did not matter, American science was not yet a match for the baffling nuclear arsenal the invaders had arrived with. Nearly everything around them had been either heavily irradiated or vaporized. In fact, at least two of the people lying near Tina snored quietly in front of human-shaped shadows burned into the concrete.

Tina again turned to look at Bible’s thin back. The sun had shifted. The red halo had disappeared. She could see his vertebrae, his humanity. Her nausea passed, and she remembered the man she had known. His birth name had been Leonard, and once, she and his other girls called him ‘Rayray’. As Rayray, he sat deep in his Cadillac Fleetwood, like it was a velveteen throne, and slowly wet his thumb and forefinger while he counted out twenties, fifties, hundreds. His girls took turns visiting him, went with their money to the Fleetwood at different times. Tina remembered how she drank in the air conditioning while she sat there and he counted, the motor humming beneath them.  Most of his girls hadn’t survived the apocalypse.  When the invaders landed, incinerating most of the inhabitants of buildings that burned and fell, the population in the Metro area fell by three-quarters. The survivors, before dying of radiation sickness or other equally fatal wounds, moved like cockroaches in the darkness, finding shelter for the daytime. Now, most of the city lay in quiet ruins that gently phosphoresced by night.   -- from "Exodus" (in progress)

Shivani's American Fiction in a Dismal State

Anis Shivani wrote the very astute essay, "American Fiction in Dismal State", which originally appeared in the magazine Pleiades. His main idea makes incredible sense. It made my heart beat faster to read it. Why? Because he has put into words all the inchoate thoughts I've had about the state of writing now. Specifically, why is American fiction so obsessed with microcosms, with the largely inconsequential. Write about anything broader, more political, anything that lacks sexual content or personal degradation, and you are likely to be marginalized or ignored entirely.

Just below, read the first paragraph of Shivani's essay and be sure to read the whole essay by clicking here:

"Contemporary American fiction has become cheap counseling to the bereaved bourgeois. Its scope is restricted too much to the trivial domestic sphere. It promotes grief, paralysis, inaction: a determinism for the post-politics society, where ideology has no place. Mired in appreciation of beautiful (or rather prettified) language for its own sake, without connection to ideology – although that is an ideology of its own, and perhaps the most corrosive and debilitating ideology of all – serious fiction writing today has lost any connection with a wide, appreciative readership. There are no more writer-oracles in America, nor even writer-visionaries, or writer-sages. There is only small writing, with small concerns, and small ambitions. Very little fiction today aims for a universal audience: the market segmentation of specific niches of writing forces writers to address discrete audiences, those who already read their particular brand of writing, while great possibilities of disrupting the fixed manners of reading go ignored."
                                                                           -- Anis Shivani, from "American Fiction in Dismal State"


Yes, yes, yes!!!!!! Why do we not hear more about this man's criticism?

Thoughts on Contemporary American Fiction...

In searching for some info on the New Yorker's slushpile, and whether stories submitted there ever emerge in the magainze, I found this page, and the following Q & A (you'll find the question below about mid-way down the page):

Q: What was your reaction to [the Swedish Academy member] Horace Engdahl’s comments that American writers are “too isolated, too insular” and “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture”? Do you know of any writers who defy this characterization? --Philip Bestrom

A: I would hope that writers everywhere are sensitive to trends in their own culture. We rely on them to notice, to dissect, and to record social behavior so that we can learn from it, build on it, or improve it. As for insularity among American writers, I have yet to encounter any."
-- Deborah Triesman, for the New Yorker

Horace Engdahl's diatribe (you can read it in its entirety at The Guardian by clicking on the word "comments" above) is a generalization--certainly not every American writer is exclusively introspective...looking into his or her own personal, regional, or national concerns, although this exists, I think, among younger writers. But, but, but....I qualify this statement with the idea (expanded below) that this tendency towards personal (and as Engdahl calls it, "insular") interests also has the potential to teach humanity, at large, something about itself and where it stands...perhaps also where it is going, if it continues on the current path. But more on this in a moment.

First, I want to say that I like Deborah Triesman's answer, and I've inadvertantly used a version of Triesman's idea to justify and explain the value of studying fiction to my more reluctant Gen Ed literature students. Through reading fiction, poetry, and drama, they (hopefully) learn how to analyze and understand themes--the underlying meanings that are intended to teach something about life, about ourselves. Often, literature reveals (for the students who take the time to read and understand the works presented) a similarity of experience. And important to remember is that stories, poems, and drama are frequently the avenues by which a writer deals with his or her own experiences (right now, I've got The Glass Menagerie in mind as an example) or helps to make sense of the seemingly inexplicable. Writing is catharsis for both writer and reader (Now I'm thinking of Sophocles and Aristotle...tragedy as didactic catharsis....)

Certainly, these characteristics are true of literature from decades before, when we, the readers, recognized in dynamic characters a similarity of experience: We were not alone in our difficulties, our inability to pay the rent or to find happiness. And I admit that this perception, too, is a generalization. And even as American storytelling has become filled with microcosmic cataclysms and personal neuroses that seem significant only in their trainwreck-worthy ability to fascinate, this fiction--this contemporary literary expression--reveals a great deal about the state of the human condition now. We are in a particular mind-set that informs how and what we write about.

So, this brings me back back to what I promised two paragraphs ago. What does America's contemporary fiction--meaning the fiction of right now, in all its fragmented and shortened formats--tells us objectively about our mental state now? Well, for one, we are obsessed with crime and disaster. We are frequently giddy with schadenfreude, and we are subject to short bouts of concentration. Contemporary flash--as it is coming out of online writers now--is, in broad terms, a portrait of our disaffected culture. Our 180-degree view of the world (like that of the 19th-century) is considerably narrowed, even as our everyday expectations are higher. This is what fuels contemporary literature, and by contemporary, I mean work appearing in online literary journals, from which indie and sometimes mainstream books are later born. Here the most prominent indie voices reveal our world view, which seems to be getting smaller, more concentrated on the dark, showing us to be less optimistic. We no longer seek solutions or life prescriptions, like Thoreau and Emerson. We don't hitch our wagons to stars. We don't necessarily seek political engagement. We appear not to be a hopeful bunch, but one focused on human weakness in its myriad forms.


So what are we now, if contemporary literature gives us a clue to our identities? I'm open to discussion.