Hi. Stephen Tully Dierks here. The third issue of Pop Serial is being serialized online here. A print edition is forthcoming. The magazine also has a regularly updated tumblr with news and things concerning past, present, and maybe future contributors.

The third issue features writing and/or visual art by the following people: Tao Lin, Luna Miguel, Ben Brooks, Sam Pink, Steve Roggenbuck, Blaise Larmee, Frank Hinton, Timothy Willis Sanders, Richard Chiem, Ana Carrete, Crispin Best, Poncho Peligroso, Andrew James Weatherhead, Cameron Pierce, Shaun Gannon, Michael Inscoe, Cassandra Troyan, DJ Berndt, Madison Langston, Zachary Whalen, Liam Bjartrun Adams, Spencer Madsen, Elaine Sun, Jackson Nieuwland, Omar De Col, Stacey Teague, Meggie Green, James Duncan, Cassandra Nguyen, Marshall Mallicoat.

To celebrate, I asked random questions to friends of mine who were on gchat at the time. Omar De Col and I came up with some questions while intoxicated. I gave each person a choice of question. The vague topics/subjects from which to pick were: bloodthirsty Lappet-faced vultures; otters; poop; Omar De Col; fish butt-rape. Some people picked the same question as each other. Fish butt-rape was the most popular question. Below are the questions and responses.

Interviewer: If you were somewhere, lost, and a pack of bloodthirsty Lappet-faced vultures was pecking away at your flesh, and your death was definitely going to be achieved in two hours or less, and you had the choice to either: A) browse Pinterest at-will for the duration of your two-hour death (only Pinterest); or B) consume as many Taco Bell Dorito Locos Tacos as desired from an infinite supply for the duration, to weakly distract you from the flesh-ripping/blood-hemorrhaging, et al. leading, inevitably, in exactly two hours, to the point of fatal blood loss, permanent nonexistence for the rest of time–which would you pick? Unlimited Pinterest browsing or unlimited Taco Bell Doritos Locos Tacos?

Maggie Lee: Listen I don’t get Pinterest at all, my mom is obsessed with Pinterest, we talked about Pinterest so much at the table for Easter dinner and I still don’t get it, I barely participated in conversation, I straight up fell asleep at the table. Wtf is Pinterest really. One time my mom sent me an email with a link to a poem on Pinterest about ‘moms’ and how she loves me and will always be her baby or something. Ok SO, tacos, definitely. The one time I ate those, I felt very tired as a result, like immediately upon consumption, so it’d probably be really good, I would get very tired and then die, seems right.

Interviewer: OK so you’re accidentally placed in an aquatic-animal prison, and you have to share a cell/get butt-raped by either a Shovelnose sturgeon or fat-puffer blowfish? Which do you pick, and follow-up question, what did you want to be when you were a kid?

Mira Gonzalez: Holy shit. OK let me google those fish.

Interviewer: Lol.

Mira Gonzalez: I just googled those fish and I think I would pick a Shovelnose sturgeon even though it has a flat sharp looking face because puffer fish are round and covered in pointy spikes and that seems more painful. But that is assuming that I would get butt raped by the entire fish. I couldn’t figure out what their penises were like via Google.

I think I wanted to be a painter/astronaut when I was a kid. Like at the same time.

Interviewer: OK so you’re accidentally placed in an aquatic- animal prison, and you have to share a cell/get butt-raped by either a Shovelnose sturgeon or fat-puffer blowfish? Which do you pick, and follow-up question, what did you want to be when you were a kid?

Will Bechtold: Haha it looks like pufferfish have a lot of needles and Shovelnose sturgeon is the ‘smallest species of freshwater sturgeon’. I guess sturgeon then seems less painful maybe. I think when I was a kid I wanted to be a teacher.

Interviewer: If Omar De Col had already enthusiastically pleasured you for three continuous hours and was out-of-breath/visibly exhausted, would you: A) force him (you’re strong and intimidating) to give you another hour of pleasure; B) somehow reciprocate; or C) let him take a fifteen-minute break/nap?

Stacey Teague: Feel like if he pleasured me for 3 continuous hours I would bloody take that boy out to lunch, and then do a nap together afterwards.

Interviewer: If the ocean like had otters on the surface like an otter carpet on their backs opening clams and shit, and it was real difficult to go up for air cause you had to push otters out the way and they are violent sometimes, would you swim in the ocean?

Marshall Mallicoat: Do the otters come all the way up to the beach?

Interviewer: I think the otter carpet starts once you get out of the initial shallows if you’re entering via a beach. But the ocean is essentially full to the brim with otters.

Marshall Mallicoat: I might swim in the part without otters, but not in the rest.

Interviewer: OK so you’re accidentally placed in an aquatic-animal prison, and you have to share a cell/get butt-raped by either a Shovelnose sturgeon or fat-puffer blowfish? Which do you pick, and follow-up question, what did you want to be when you were a kid?

Carolyn DeCarlo: OK I am looking these fish up on Google Images.

Are these fish actually entering my butt?

I think for obvious reasons I will choose the Shovelnose sturgeon in case the fish themselves are actually going up my butt. Its snout seems like it might actually be pleasant, like, it might be like a dick or something. Is a dick in the butt good? Idk. I have never really had a dick in the butt.

When I was a kid I wanted to be an adult. I wasn’t really good at being a kid. My favorite summer activities were: 1) searching for things on the bottom of the swimming pool and 2) reading. Maybe it would have been nice to become a treasure hunter and not a writer. Maybe I would have already achieved sturgeon butt-rape if I were a deep-sea diver or something. Maybe Jacques Cousteau got fucked in the butt by fish.

Interviewer: If you felt like you had to poo but there were no toilets around however you have an empty Chinese food container but you’re in public so it might be weird and also in this reality there are no other options you basically have to poop in the Chinese food container or you will poop your pants in public on camera (yea you’re on camera lol), would you poop in the container?

Zoe Young: I would probably poop my pants and be discreet as possible. And go home. And just like pray probably idk I wouldn’t even really know what to ask God in that situation. “Please God let this bowel movement be imperceptible.”

Interviewer: If you were somewhere, lost, and a pack of bloodthirsty Lappet-faced vultures were pecking away at your flesh, and your death was definitely going to be achieved in two hours or less, and you had the choice to either: A) browse Pinterest at-will for the duration of your two-hour death (only Pinterest); or B) consume as many Taco Bell Dorito Loco Tacos as desired from an infinite supply for the duration, to weakly distract you from the flesh-ripping/blood-hemorrhaging, et al. leading, inevitably, in exactly two hours, to the point of fatal blood loss, permanent nonexistence for the rest of time—which would you pick? Unlimited Pinterest browsing or unlimited Taco Bell Doritos Locos Tacos?

Jennifer Fallingstar: I’ve never done either of those things in my whole life I just want to die like a real man.

As an animal lover I would consider what was in the vultures’ best interest. Vultures like dead things. Tacos are dead things that taste good.

Tacos definitely. I don’t even have a Pinterest account. But I have a taco account.

But I wouldn’t want to fuck up the natural ecosystem. Omg. By bringing in a foreign invasive species. But I just googled Pinterest and it looks really dreadful. I would eat all the tacos and make little origami vultures out of the wrappers. The
end.

Taco Bell Doritos Locos Tacos is my final answer.

This follows Roxane’s Tuesday post, and Jami Attenberg’s initial observation/criticism of something she heard Franzen say. Their defense of Twitter/Facebook/etc. is of course right: small press writers and publishers need those tools to promote themselves and their works. But I’m less convinced that Franzen has “lost perspective,” as Attenberg puts it, or “doesn’t understand what Twitter is for,” as Roxane claims. Instead, I think Franzen is making a deeper, more disturbing criticism—the latest salvo in a decade-long attack on certain writers, certain kinds of fiction, and ultimately, a certain construction of art itself.

To grasp all of that, let’s look more closely at a different part of his complaint:

[Twitter is] like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’…It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium.

Um—huh? What do lipograms have to do with social networking? And how are they irresponsible?

To understand what Franzen’s getting at here, we need to exhume his ten-year-old attack on William Gaddis, “Mr. Difficult” (which is relevant again, anyway, with Dalkey Archive Press having recently reprinted The Recognitions and J R). There, Franzen took Gaddis to task for being too much of a “Status” writer. What’s that, you ask? In Franzen’s purview, it’s a writer who operates under the assumption that

the best novels are great works of art, the people who manage to write them deserve extraordinary credit, and if the average reader rejects the work it’s because the average reader is a philistine; the value of any novel, even a mediocre one, exists independent of how many people are able to appreciate it. [...] It invites a discourse of genius and art-historical importance.

Opposing that (Franzen continues) is the “Contract model,” in which

a novel represents a compact between the writer and the reader, with the writer providing words out of which the reader creates a pleasurable experience. Writing thus entails a balancing of self-expression and communication within a group, whether the group consists of “Finnegans Wake” enthusiasts or fans of Barbara Cartland. Every writer is first a member of a community of readers, and the deepest purpose of reading and writing fiction is to sustain a sense of connectedness, to resist existential loneliness; and so a novel deserves a reader’s attention only as long as the author sustains the reader’s trust. [...] The discourse here is one of pleasure and connection.

There are numerous problems with Franzen’s two-model account, which has been dissected and criticized extensively elsewhere. (Here, e.g.) For starters, Franzen implies that writers and readers of difficult fiction aren’t pursuing pleasure, but cultural capital. (Franzen confesses that he himself once did that, and everyone must be like him, no?) He also subtly (subconsciously?) assigns “fathers” to the Status side, “mothers” to the Contract—yeesh.

Returning to that novel lacking a P. It’s easy to see why Franzen would file lipograms, and presumably all constraint-based writing, under the dreaded Status heading. When Georges Perec sat down to write La disparition, he didn’t do so because it would be easy! And his constraint—to write a novel without using the letter E—was a rule that couldn’t be broken, regardless of whatever that Perec might have wanted to do: make the writing funny or sad, thrilling or boring, plausible or implausible. It entailed its own artistic logic that trumped everything else. (The missing E was his dominant, that which could not be sacrificed lest the text lose its integrity.)

In Franzen’s eyes, this is pure Status fiction—the novel as a means of showing off. We can practically see his eyes narrowing in suspicion: it’s nothing but a stunt! From here we can rehash the reasons why some folks today don’t take, say, Tao Lin seriously: as Joshua Cohen characterized it (wrongly, I’d argue) “the writing is beside the point.” (Well, let’s set that one aside for another time.)

Of course, Franzen’s putdown disregards the fact that it’s difficult (ha ha) to imagine a more mischievous, more generous, more fun-loving novelist than Georges Perec. Sure, Gilbert Adair’s mid-90s translation of La d (A Void) is pretty rocky, but Perec wasn’t a showy, “look at me” kind of guy. (And so what if he was?) He genuinely loved puzzles, which are—fun! Although, admittedly, they’re sometimes hard to solve … (Incidentally, I’ve heard that the Oulipo have a secret constraint that governs all their works: “Be charming.” And what is that if not an explicit acknowledgement of the Reader?)

But I think Franzen understands all this—that some people love difficult, challenging things. I think that’s precisely what unnerves him. He reminds me of nothing so much as the fellow who’s so concerned that others are constantly pulling one over on him—telling jokes designed to go right over his head—that he resolves to abandon the conversation entirely: “I’m not going to play your mean, tricky games! I’m heading home, to read something comforting!”

Thus, it makes sense that Franzen would pooh-pooh social networking. He understands exactly what it is, and what people often use if for—and he severely disapproves. It’s obvious in his quote that he is Not Happy with this new technology—hence his calling Facebook “sort of dumb.” (That’s what you are, silly, if you enjoy it!) Hence, too, his extremely loaded acknowledgement that “it’s a free country,” which is obvious code for “while you may be free right now to be doing these things—you shouldn’t be doing them!”

I mean, c’mon—Franzen can’t be blind to the myriad ways in which social media has assuredly helped his publisher make him a Great American Novelist. And here you and I are, discussing the guy once again. Take that, independent lit! (Independent from what?) No, what I think dismays Franzen about social networking is its potential for constant performance, for constant broadcasting of status—which is, in the case of Twitter, a super-constraint-based performance! 140 characters or less—why, it’s the New Oulipo! (I would have called it “the noulipo,” if that name weren’t already taken.)

But Franzen is pretty clever, and knows well to mask his social anxieties as “looking out for others”:

People I care about are readers…particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people. And we do not like to yak about ourselves.

The man’s first rule of writing is: “The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.” You’ve got to do nice, not play tricks on one another. Focus-test your novels, revising any sentences that folks don’t get right away. Cut some slack, use synonyms for the more impracticable harder words. Ask what readers want to read.

Does Snow White resemble the Snow White you remember? Yes ( ) No ( )

In the further development of the story, would you like more emotion ( ) or less emotion? ( )

Do you feel that the creation of new modes of hysteria is a viable undertaking for the artist of today? Yes ( ) No ( )

Would you like a war? Yes ( ) No ( )

Has the work, for you, a metaphysical dimension? Yes ( ) No ( )

What is it? (twenty-five words or less)

Do you stand up when you read? Lie down? ( ) Sit? ( )

In your opinion, should human beings have more shoulders? ( ) Two sets of shoulders? ( ) Three? ( )

Young authors take note: extensive demographic research presumably lurks behind Franzen’s rules. “Write in the third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly”—that’s what most appeals to readers ages 18–34. (He and James Wood should form a club.)

For anyone who finds these criticisms unfair, rest assured that this is the telos of Franzen’s logic. Remember, it’s the Status writer who believes that “the value of any novel, even a mediocre one, exists independent of how many people are able to appreciate it.” Folks didn’t buy or like The Recognitions in 1955? That doesn’t mean it wasn’t great. But from the POV of the Contract, a book’s greatness can be measured by how many copies it sells, or fails to sell. The logic of the Contract is the logic of capitalism—not art. Sure, Franzen pokes fun at this view—

Taken to its free-market extreme, Contract stipulates that if a product is disagreeable to you the fault must be the product’s. If you crack a tooth on a hard word in a novel, you sue the author. If your professor puts Dreiser on your reading list, you write a harsh student evaluation. If the local symphony plays too much twentieth-century music, you cancel your subscription. You’re the consumer; you rule.

—but he also endorses it. Worrisome. (This endorsement frees Franzen up to confess that he’s never finished Moby-Dick, The Man Without Qualities, Mason & Dixon, Don Quixote, Remembrance of Things Past, Doctor Faustus, Naked Lunch, The Golden Bowl, and The Golden Notebook—despite the fact that those books are all really enjoyable.) (OK, I haven’t read The Golden Notebook—yet!)

This would be funnier if Franzen’s “free-market extreme” were, you know, more imaginary. But that bit about harsh student evaluations? I’ve seen that happen. And most large presses don’t feel any need to keep difficult classics in print. The damn things don’t sell—the hell with them! But don’t cry for those teachers or authors: they were being “irresponsible.” (Beware you disrespectful Twitter users! You’ll get yours, too!)

Here’s something I don’t fully understand, though—Franzen’s current use of “serious.” (“People I care about are readers…particularly serious readers and writers, these are my people.”) In “Mr. Difficult,” it was the Status crowd who commanded that term:

It wasn’t until the nineties, after I’d wasted a year on the screenplay, that I tried to rekindle my collegiate excitement about really hard books. I needed proof that I was a serious Artist [...] and “The Recognitions” was perfect for the task. Reading the whole thing would also confer bragging rights. If somebody asked me if I’d read “The Sot-Weed Factor,” I could shoot back, No, but have you read “The Recognitions”? And blow smoke from the muzzle of my gun.

“Serious” there was a thinly-disguised synonym for “fake” (or “hip,” or “cool”)—so it makes sense that Franzen would want to reclaim if for his Contract peeps. Today, it apparently means genuine. Your status should be apparent from what you do, from what you read and what you make—which should be sincere expressions of yourself, not pretensions:

I have heard of your paintings too, well enough; God
has given you one face, and you make yourselves
another: you jig, you amble, and you lisp, and
nick-name God’s creatures, and make your wantonness
your ignorance. Go to, I’ll no more on’t; it hath
made me mad.

The more I poke at this, the more it reshapes itself into what might be the most central debate in the literary arts since at least 2000: “What, if anything, is now genuine?” (See, e.g., the New Sincerity.) Which makes perfect sense, given the way in which the Internet is increasingly colonizing our lives. What if the journal that just accepted my story is secretly a middle-aged, pedophilic, sentient robotic cat?

Beyond this, I have to say (I am honestly compelled to confess) that I was struck by how the conclusion of Roxane’s post echoed Franzen: “do what you like” (my emphasis), “keep it real.” Mind you, I’m not attacking Roxane (or the New Sincerity)—and I absolutely don’t want to accuse either of pursuing the same odious end as the market-driven “J F.” but I doubt that Roxane’s rhetoric, while admirable, will do much to rescue us from the Franzens of this world.

OK, time to wrap this up—before I started writing, I set an arbitrary 1969-word limit (the year Perec published La disparition). Here’s what I see Franzen as having “genuinely” said:

I say, we will have no more publishing:
those that are published already, all but one, shall
remain in print; the rest shall keep as they are. To a
bookstore, go.

[I'm assuming, of course, that Jami Attenberg's transcription is accurate. So are you.]

In some ways, we’ve brought this on ourselves; it is a slippery slope. First you wonder what Angelina Jolie had for breakfast because she was so great in that one movie or whatever and then you’re buying cereal and thinking, “Does Oprah eat Raisin Bran?” Eventually, you even start to give a damn about what famous writers think about the weather or, say, social networking, and someone like Jonathan Franzen revels in his dislike of Twitter and other means of social networking from his Important Writer perch and we respond because if Franzen hates Twitter does he hate us too? The angst is unbearable and yet it’s all sort of inevitable.

Franzen’s A Great American Writer and all but I don’t give a much of a damn about his opinions on anything (see: Edith Wharton obvi). Or I do. Is it really surprising that Franzen doesn’t care for Facebook or Twitter? His overall comportment does not suggest an affinity for the levity of social networking. I can’t really say I love Facebook, myself. It has become increasingly hard to make sense of the interface and I keep getting invited to parties and readings in Bali and Temecula and I don’t live in those places so the experience is, at best, fragmented. At the same time, I don’t need to proselytize my dislike unless I’m on Twitter. Who cares? My opinion doesn’t matter nor does Franzen’s, though he is Very Fancy so in the calculus of mattering, his irrelevant opinion is less irrelevant than mine. Math.

J. Franz talking smack about Twitter, though, thems fighting words.

Jami Attenberg wrote down some of what Franzen said last night at Tulane:

Twitter is unspeakably irritating. Twitter stands for everything I oppose…it’s hard to cite facts or create an argument in 140 characters…it’s like if Kafka had decided to make a video semaphoring The Metamorphosis. Or it’s like writing a novel without the letter ‘P’…It’s the ultimate irresponsible medium.

Is anyone really using Twitter to craft complex rhetorical arguments? What does responsibility have to do with chattering online? It’s like Franzen is saying, “I cannot swim in my car and therefore my car is not useful.” He doesn’t understand what Twitter is for. Of course he dislikes it. He’s working from a place of profound ignorance. His stance is one of those things where you have to say, “There, there, Mr. Franzen, here is your Ovaltine.”

Attenberg smartly concluded that

he doesn’t understand that a lot of writers have to use the medium as a promotional device as well as a way to build networks. He doesn’t have to do anything! He has a publicist who probably has dreams about him every night, whether he has a book coming or not. He is free to write and just be himself, while the rest of us are struggling to be heard and recognized.

Team Franzen has the infrastructure to publicize and promote Franzen. Who knows how he wastes time, but clearly it isn’t online, so he has no need for people to “Like” his pithy Facebook updates or Retweet his deepest or shallowest thoughts about, say, yogurt. He has reached a niveau where he can make ill-informed statements about something trivial and in turn we spend the next several hours, days, weeks, parodying, poking, and otherwise pondering those ill-informed statements on the very networks he denounces. The circle of life.

When you’ve got it, you’ve got it.

If you attended the bookfair at AWP, you saw four rooms filled with magazines and publishers, and these attendees represented only a sixth of the magazines and small presses out there. It was a total zoo. Also, it was beastly hot. We were being punished. As I stood in the bookfair day after day, talking to writers, I was reminded of how we are all guppies in a very big pond. For those of us among the unFranzen, there’s an intense amount of competition for any kind of attention. We are guppies together. Most writers write to be read. How the hell do you get read when there is so much to read? Sure, you have to do something interesting but you also need to do a little more. There are countless writers doing interesting things. Excellence isn’t enough. Make your peace with that already. As J. Attenberg says, the rest of are struggling to be heard and recognized but fortunately, there are great options to help us with that.

I was also on a panel at AWP about Literature and the Internet in 2012 with Blake and Kyle and Stephen Elliott and James Yeh. I had no voice so I awkwardly whispered into the microphone a couple times and it was very difficult because I had way more to say. Alas. One of the audience members asked about if she needs a blog because she had heard in another panel that she needs a blog. She did not seem to actually want a blog. It was a good question. Last night a friend on Facebook asked if she needs to keep her Google + profile she never uses. In fact, one of the questions I am asked most frequently is, “Do I need a [insert social networking platform]?” There’s a lot of anxiety out there about what we need to do as writers to reach readers.

Necessity.

What do we need?

I need to stay black and die. Everything else is relatively optional.

What do we need to do as writers?

We need to write. We need to write well and hopefully that will at least get our work into  places where we might be read. We don’t need to do anything else. However. If we want the work to be read by more than say, our parents, we should probably get connected, in thoughtful, non-annoying ways, to other writers and readers.

Social networking is a convenient way of creating these connections in a low-pressure environment. Franzen already has a million connections and a million readers so it is easy for him to sneer intellectually at social networks while using words like semaphoring. I looked up semaphore. It is an apparatus for visual signaling (as by the position of one or more movable arms or a system of visual signaling by two flags held one in each hand.

It’s interesting that Franzen wants to make social networking a conversation about responsibility because it is a little irresponsible to make such deliberately provocative statements a. about something relatively silly and b. without knowing anything substantive about the platforms.

When it comes to the social networking, do what you want. This is not as complicated as we make it. Ignore most of those well meaning articles about writers and social networking. Some of those articles are a little crazy and written by people who want you to Market Yourself and Be a Product.

Do what you like. Do what you want. Don’t stress. This should not be stressful. Social networking should not feel like a burden or obligation or something to be resented.  At the same time, get over the “self promotion is gross” thing. If you don’t like what you write enough to want to tell people about it, in moderation, don’t publish and that problem is solved.

If you want to be on Facebook, do that too but perhaps don’t ask people to like your Fan Page or whatever because if they haven’t already, they probably don’t want to anyway. If you want to be on Google + with me and like six other people, do that, but know it’s very lonely there and lots of strangers who speak different languages will talk at you in those different languages and it can be confusing. If you want a blog, create one but update it and put more content on your blog than updates about your writing. Find something to talk about. I hear rejection works well or movies. The problem with social networking is not its triviality but rather its half-assedness. Writers feel this “market pressure” to “network” so they create social networking presences they have no idea how to use, that they have no interest in using, and then those presences languish and make the writer look like they don’t give a damn.

Do something where you are willing to show that you give a damn, however you interpret giving a damn.

Twitter is my favorite thing. If you like babbling about nonsense, and current events, and occasionally sharing links to your work, get on Twitter. I love that people willingly listen to me talk about Fage yogurt, One Tree Hill, Scrabble tournaments and my writing, in that order. I love listening to you talk about your cats and babies and your drunkenness and all the other things you want to talk about in 140 or fewer characters. I love when you send me things to read because most of the time, those things are great. Most importantly, let’s keep it real—no platform is more conducive to collectively watching an awards ceremony than Twitter.

Franzen approaches social networking with far too much gravitas. If he had been on Twitter during, say, The Grammys, he would better understand what it is all about. He doesn’t want to be on Twitter, though. The desire is not there and it’s not a matter of necessity for him. In that regard, Franzen is modeling the right attitude toward social networking—do what you like.

Threats by Amelia Gray is out, and I can tell you it’ll do to your head/brain/skull all things promised, and more. (I had the pleasure of reading an advance copy, borrowed from someone who had borrowed it [now I have my own], but it is available HERE)

Picador has been reprinting the novels of Donald Antrim with new intros: George Saunders (The Verificationist), Jonathan Franzen (The Hundred Brothers), and Jeffrey Eugenides (Elect Mr. Robinson for a Better World). Elect Mr. Robinson… will be out this June.

Kaleidoscope is a randomized novella by Jianyu Pên.

Madras Press recently released a special edition of “Stone Animals” by Kelly Link, with illustrations and a letterpressed cover.

The second issue of The Coffin Factory just came out, with work by Aimee Bender, Lydia Davis, Edwidge Danticat, Justin Taylor, Adam Wilson, etc. (more later)

The Guggenheim has digitized many of its (out-of-print) publications.

Redivider FINALLY (yes I’m calling you out) has an updated website with the new issue, featuring the talented Mike Young, Mary Miller, J.A. Tyler, Melissa Broder, etc. The cover is nice:

Some of these things will be available at AWP. Do you think someone will write a blog post soon called “AWP recap?” What if that didn’t happen?

1. A gender breakdown of articles and stories submitted & pitched to magazines. In my experience with slush piles, they can be quite male-heavy and I’ve heard the same from editors.

2. A gender breakdown of books submitted to agents and publishers. (See above)

3. A breakdown of how many books written by men are marketed as “literary” or serious works versus how many by women are marketed as such. This, I think, is the one of the biggest and harder to tackle problems. Books written by women get a picture of a bare shoulder or a pair of legs on it and then men don’t buy it and “serious” reviewers don’t want to review it. Pretty simple. Pretty much a bummer.

4. A gender breakdown of how many male writers are solicited by these magazines. Because, you know, your short story probably isn’t going to make it out of the The New Yorker slush pile. It just isn’t. We know the major magazines (hell, even a lot of the smaller ones) are made almost exclusively out of solicited material. We know that. And because of the same problems that the VIDA numbers point out each year, editors know less women they want to solicit.  So, yeah, it’s a vicious cycle, blah blah blah, but one thing you can do about it is be a woman and work hard and submit everywhere until you cannot be ignored.

So I hesitate to use this space to self-promote, but in this case I will make an exception, for a number of reasons, beginning with the fact that the project is online and free.

Exits Are is a series of collaborative stories that are also games. The games borrow their format and many of their conventions from text adventures (“interactive fiction”). From the about page: “A text adventure is a game that takes place in prose. The computer describes a world to you one room at a time, writing in the second person. ‘You stand in the center of a cool, dark cave,’ says the computer. ‘Exits are north, south, east, and west.’ The computer waits for you to tell it what you want to do. ‘Go east,’ you might say. Or if there is a key, you might say ‘take key.’ The computer parses your commands as best it can and tells you what happens next. . . . love text adventures, but they usually disappoint me. I wanted a way to make them more open-ended, less about puzzle-solving and more about language: its weirdness, its beauty. So I started playing a game with some of the writers I knew. Using gchat, I pretend to be a text adventure. The other writer is the player. We use the form of the text adventure to collaborate on some kind of strange, fun narrative. The only rule is that we take turns typing. We never discuss what we’re going to do in advance, so the results are improvisational and surprising/exciting/stressful/upsetting for both participants. Every time, the player does things I never could have seen coming.”

The project is a cooperative project of my press (Uncanny Valley) and Artifice Books, who have been kind enough to host it.

I post a new game to the website every Monday and Wednesday. So far I’ve posted the games I played with Blake Butler, Tim Dicks, Matt Bell, and Aubrey Hirsch. I have more games coming with Brian Oliu, Elisa Gabbert, Robert Kloss, A D Jameson, and many more. Including, potentially, you. The response so far has been really strong, to the point where I’ve got some dozen people scheduled or waiting to play, but my goal is to play a game with everyone who asks, so if you write to me about it, the answer will very likely be yes — as long as you have patience.

The series has been a real joy to make. I’ve always wanted to write collaborative work with other people, but in fiction this seems difficult to negotiate. The text adventure framework gives me a way to do it, and I get to have the fun of working with a lot of different people — people I know well, and people I don’t know at all. Every game is exhausting, uncomfortable, fun, and really weird. James Tadd Adcox interviewed me about the process here, and Gabriel Blackwell interviewed me here. Those cover most of what I could say about the project at this point. In the future I want to do a couple really hellishly long ones, and I have other ideas for the project, but for now, this is plenty.

I hope that you enjoy them, and check back Mondays and Wednesdays for more. I hope, most of all, that this opens some people up to different ways of thinking about how to interact with writers and readers: normally, the idea in this game is that you spend a lot of time perfecting one story to share with as many people as possible. The number of people is usually quite small, in practice: a handful, a dozen, a hundred. With these games, my collaborators and I eventually do share the results with as many people as we can, but it begins with an intense engagement with one other person. I wonder what other projects might be built around a similar model. I wonder why we try to share what we make with the world when we might begin with other people.

Roxane recently mentioned one of those weird, unspoken things about writers: we are constantly pretending to buy and read each other’s books. Publish something yourself and you’ll quickly see what I mean. You get an e-mail every time someone makes an order. The e-mail tells you the buyer’s name and even where he or she lives. So when someone says on Facebook, “I can’t wait to get this book!” and they tag you in the post so you’ll definitely see it, you get really excited about the order and you look forward to mailing them the book that you’re sure they’ll enjoy, and you wait and you wait for that e-mail with the person’s name and address, but the order never comes, and because you want to stay friendly with the person you tell yourself that it wasn’t a lie, that they probably just forgot. And sometimes they really did forget.

Sometimes they say, “I just ordered this book, you should too!” and you can plainly see that they haven’t ordered the book, and this is harder to forgive, but really, who cares? Why should anybody care?

I get why people do this. There is a general perception, probably inaccurate, that Writers Don’t Buy Enough Books. There is also intense pressure, within the “indie lit community,” to spend as much money as possible supporting said “indie lit community.” In these circles, buying a book is a valuable investment in social capital. You can first be seen to buy the book, making sure that as many publishers as possible witness the purchase (or “purchase”), thus building a reputation as a team player. You can enhance this rep by posting links encouraging others to buy the same book, post pictures of the book’s cover, or otherwise assist the publisher in the hard, thankless work of promotion. If you do actually make the purchase, then you can post about your excitement to read the book when it arrives. If you do ever actually read the book (a real commitment), then you can post quotes from the book as you read it, fawn over the author, and generally abase yourself at the altar of its genius, performing the role of a reader/consumer swept up in the bliss of your purchase. You can go still further by writing blog posts about the book and eventually publishing reviews of the book in various venues. This is what we call using the entire buffalo.

In this ecosystem, you feel certain pressures. We call this mess a community because we want to believe that we’re all sharing something. We have limited resources: limited time, limited money. And yet we want to share. And so we share our praise. We praise things we don’t really like. We praise things because we see other members of the community praising them. And it feels good to praise, to be generous. The less sympathetic motive, the core one, is that we pretend to care about others so that others will pretend to care about us. We do not believe our writing demands readership, deserves attention, merits love. And so we give too freely, because we want to believe that others will give us the same. The result is a lot of mediocre books published by a lot of presses that barely count as presses (not because they are small, but because you can feel with every second looking at their websites and their books that they don’t really care about their books, that they exist primarily to exist) being promoted with awe-inspiring fervor by half my Facebook feed for brief, intense periods. Most of the time you never hear about these books again, either because no one really bought them or because they were, like the last book to blossom all over your social network, totally underwhelming, forgettable, and more or less identical to the previous beneficiary of the Internet’s wild, drunken hype cycle.

The tragedy is that finding genuinely great writing in all this noise becomes painfully difficult. The tragedy is that mediocre writers are allowed small, brief, mediocre careers that stunt them forever when they should probably be learning more, failing better, etc.; they become complacent in their adequacy. (We become complacent in ours.) The tragedy is that I can’t believe anyone loves anything until they say it some ludicrous number of times. I don’t trust them. I don’t trust you. It shouldn’t be like this. Because we are so frequently insincere, people who make the mistake of trusting our recommendations usually end up regretting it. Because we rarely bother to describe the books we recommend except in terms of vague hyperbole, nobody outside our little circle of readers and writers can figure out why they would want to read the stuff we flog in the first place. And because we recommend so many things so highly, our friends and family can tell that we are lying most of the time, and they can’t be bothered to figure out when we’re telling the truth. All these roads end in the same sad place. By making a show of promoting literature, we are in fact turning people off on reading. We are making them feel that it is not worth their time.

I suspect most remotely serious writers are already spending plenty of time and money on books. Most of us are buying more than we can actually read, which is a good argument against pressuring us to buy still more. Sales for most independent publishers are still quite low, but it’s not because writers aren’t supporting them: it’s because there is a finite number of writers. You have to sell to other people if you want better numbers. This market is tapped out. And your endless stream of insincere recommendations? They are actively counterproductive in any and all efforts to reach out to new readers.

If you were more honest (if we were), then better books would sell more often. As it stands, I have become dead to your book recommendations. I no longer believe you love anything. I no longer believe you know what love is.