[This is a comment--regarding some recent posts here--that I. Fontana posted and also sent out to me & Ken, and we thought it was worth presenting on the main page for those who missed it.  I. Fontana knows whereof he speaks, and he's one of my favorite "new" writers out there.  Love his short stories, which I've linked on HTMLGIANT before, and I know he's got some other stuff in the works that I'm very, very excited to see published. –N.A.

Nick says it: I. Fontana says it. Presented with no further ado: –K.B.]

Superagent Nat Sobel said in an interview last summer that he chooses at most one in 500 unsolicited manuscripts to represent in a given year. Grove/Atlantic, HarperCollins etcetera — all the major New York publishing houses, in other words — explicitly announce that they will not read any manuscript which does not come from an established agent.

In the early 19th century, literature (and in particular the novel) evolved into a popular art form generally serialized each week in newspapers, which meant that in order to keep the particular novel being read, there had to be narrative pull, even cliffhangers — in general, plot. But this meant that the socalled “unwashed masses” now were exposed to such writing, so that writers no longer had to hang around court or otherwise suck up to aristocrats, publishing their books by subscriptions to the wealthy (which constriction obviously required that the wealthy find such books pleasing). Democracy means including the lowest common denominator as well as the connoisseur.

Nowadays, in order to expose one’s work to the masses, to reach the largest audience, one has to go through a New York publisher. They know how to do it, they have publicity departments and pre-existing connections to the bookstores — though even all of this is by no means a guarantee of significant sales.

Some small presses are finally beginning to become a viable secondary alternative, and it’s possible access to these is strictly meritocratic rather than often based on recomendations from oh, the Head of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Iowa or some lesser light. The most sensible or realistic route for the aspiring young author is now to get an MFA and pay to attend the Summer Writing Workshop at Cannon Beach run by Tin House — less perhaps (perhaps?) to develop one’s writing skills than to cultivate connections.

How far is this from sucking up to the son of the Earl of Pembroke in days past? Certainly if you took Gordon Lish’s cultlike writing workshops for $10,000 in the 1980s and 90s you had a much better shot at getting an agent and/or a contract for a book at Knopf than if you were Josephine Blow working at a cannery in Juneau, Alaska.

On from the MFA to the Ph.d, a teaching job and tenure. Yawn. This sort of life has produced so much real world experience and hard-earned wisdom it’s taken the world by storm. Or not. Oh, wait. Feminism and increased visibility of gays — and multiculturalism produced a new demand you could fit if you could please the emerging demographic. There are a lot of new-style courts and court-artists.

And this has been pretty much entirely good, don’t get me wrong. When Norman Mailer in 1958 in his essay surveying “the talent in the room” and explicitly stated that there were no women writers worthy of consideration… well, he left out, at a minimum Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor, and O’Connor’s novel “Wise Blood” is a far better novel than Mailer ever managed his entire over-publicized, vastly overrated career. (If you want to bring up “The Executioner’s Song” then answer this: How much of that was Lawrence Schiller? How come Mailer, so proud of his overwrought purple metaphors, never wrote anything remotely similar stylistically to such lean prose again?)

OK. Bringing in Norman Mailer brings us directly to the realm of publicity and thus to Tao Lin. In the old days (the 60s into the 70s, more or less) authors of well-regarded novels appeared on Johnny Carson (forerunner of Letterman and Leno) — though sure, I imagine this depended somewhat on their gift for repartee and ability to generate some “cult of personality” in fifteen minutes or less. There also existed more extended formats… Dick Cavett and William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line.” I’m testifying from hearsay at this point.

Who were the most publicized writers of those days? Mailer, Truman Capote and Gore Vidal. Philip Roth(Thomas Pynchon, the most written about in critical circles, maintained his “cult of invisibility” — a novelty at the time. But I have the idle suspicion he died in 1973, after the publication of “Gravity’s Rainbow,” and the ‘Pynchon’ product-line since has been agent-generated and ghost-written.)

Tama Janowitz received enormous attention in the late 1980s. She had worked her way into Andy Warhol’s circle and her mother was an editor at a major house to boot. Who since? Martin Amis gets on TV once in a while, doesn’t he? Who else? We’re dependent on the major review-organs to hear that some new book has a “buzz.” And these places have much closer relationships with the New York publishing houses than is generally known or understood. Sonny Mehta under truth-serum could tell us a great deal.

None of Tao Lin’s four books has been reviewed by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books . He is published by a small press. He doesn’t teach writing workshops or have tenure anywhere. His dad isn’t a rector at Stanford (I think that was David Leavitt) and his godfather wasn’t Morgan Entrekin the head of Grove/Atlantic like Nick McDonell who got a novel out there with bigtime publicity at the age of seventeen. Tao isn’t Joe McGinness Jr or (John’s son) David Updike, nor Mona Simpson who got a gig at the Paris Review when she was twenty-four. Let’s not even get near the family connections of Susan Minot. He’s not Mary Gaitskill who got Greil Marcus to call her the best writer of her generation or something in Bookforum which she repaid (in Bookforum, possibly in less than a year) by reviewing Greil in turn and graciously anointing him the conscience of aging Boomers married to an heiress everywhere or some such shit.

Hey, this is the way the world works. Most of those writers have had their moments, though I think it’s safe to say they’ve been edited up the wazoo. How much did Joe McGinness Sr reshape and otherwise assist Bret Easton Ellis? Anyone seen the original manuscript of “American Psycho” lately? But who cares. I like most of Bret Ellis’ work. All I care about is what ends up on the page.

The question is how our attention is ever drawn to these pages, and how unlevel the playing field may be. When Proust was first published, he fully expected to pay for positive reviews. Tao Lin, published by a small press, ignored by the big time reviewers, wanted his books to be noticed, so that they would reasonably sell and be read. There’s only so much you can do by doing readings, as those who attend are a limited, incestuous demographic.

Tao has with great invention and wit thought up all kinds of ways to get himself and his books some attention. The obvious model is Andy Warhol, down to the attempt to characterize the books as in effect “money art” (Warhol’s term) and to extend his persona into other fields (Tao’s hamster-drawings and so forth). It’s all a joke, but it’s deadpan, and the MFA strivers seeking to be the eight-thousandth next Raymond Carver or Amy Hempel — or maybe they’ve done a tour in the Peace Corps, trying to achieve at least some pastiche of the Hemingway-style “cult of experience” — hey, William Vollmann does this shit, and Denis Johnson did before writing his college-professor-has-affair-with-tattooed-stripper novel, a fantasy explored (snore) by no less than Robert Stone — hey, literature is supposed to change the world, it’s supposed to tell you all the shit you already know, like war is bad and evangelicals are uncool and there’s homophobia everywhere even if you never leave your college campus –

No, Tao Lin in what seems a totally serious, deadpan manner trying to sell shares in his career — that’s just not funny at all. Worse yet, it’s gets him noticed. He even sells fucking t-shirts of himself on Hipster Runoff, the website you have to penetrate about fourteen levels of in-jokes to even be sure we’re all speaking English.

Edgar Allan Poe’s literary criticism of the 1830s is instructive in that he railed against trends in the response to literature that are still with us now. The New England literary salons which ran things then thought art had to be “uplifting” in order to be worth wasting time on. It ought to “improve” you. We sure still see this attitude today. Let’s expose injustice. Yeah, then we’ll feel good about ourselves. We’re virtuous, and now this has been reified. Any sneaking suspicion we might be a scumbag, or an asshole — hey, we’re writing our master’s thesis on “Beloved.” Maybe we don’t tip the waitress, but they factor the service charge in when you’re in France.

Chuck Palahniuk works real hard on fostering a cult of personality at his readings. So does T.C. Boyle. This is what the big publishers want these days. Personally I don’t like to be read to. Neither did, for one, Paul Bowles. He said he could never remember a word.

Tao’s doing this, and he achieves some originality even here. Reciting the same sentence about eating whale for seven minutes straight offends some who want to be “improved.” The same motherfuckers would have gone to a reading by John Cage and listened to him recite words out of the dictionary for half an hour while somehow sitting still. But that’s High Art. He made choices according the I Ching. Whereas you know Tao Lin is just fucking with you.

When he asks for people to send him money via eBay or any other venue he can think of, I just see it as a joke. It’s a better joke if someone actually sends some money in. Pornstars (female) sell their dirty panties to “true fans” all the time. Showbiz is image. Showbiz is illusion. Tao Lin’s writing does its job. It amuses and there all kinds of hinted and half-perceived real moments of intelligence as real as anything that was ever in Jay McInerney’s one decent book or the entire oeuvre of Bret Easton Ellis. He’s funnier than the writer he professes to admire, Lorrie Moore (who tries too hard).

He’s only twenty-seven years old.

Jessica Berger was born and raised in Chicagoland, where she is now a graduate student in UIC’s Program for Writers. She has worked as an illustrator and is especially interested in the coupling of text and her other great love: the visual arts.

Davis Schneiderman is a multimedia artist and writer whose works include the current or forthcoming novels Drain (Triquarterly/Northwestern), Blank: a novel (Jaded Ibis), Multifesto: A Henri d’Mescan Reader (Spuyten Duyvil), DIS (BlazeVox) and Abecedarium (Chiasmus, w/Carlos Hernandez); the co-edited collections Retaking the Universe: Williams S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization (Pluto) and The Exquisite Corpse: Chance and Collaboration in Surrealism’s Parlor Game (Nebraska, 2009); and the audiocollage Memorials to Future Catastrophes (Jaded Ibis). His creative work has been accepted by numerous publications including Fiction International, The Chicago Tribune, The Iowa Review, and Exquisite Corpse. He is Director of Lake Forest College Press/&NOW Books, where he edits the series The &NOW AWARDS: The Best Innovative Writing; he also directs the NEH-funded Virtual Burnham Initiative.

Anyone with HTML G sensibilities (have no idea what that means, so or not) has a reading during AWP please comment here with time, place/sarcophagus of shouts. This is a selfish post (but not, people wanna know). My emails bury me, like all. I am at AWP Denver interviewing professors for a job (at BSU/work), but would love to strike (hunger, bass lure, match box, beauty, etc.) mad readings every single night, 7pm to oblivion. List them here. For those in town Tuesday to Sunday of AWP, where should we go, when? And how exactly are the nachos?

Josh Cohen double shot! If this doesn’t get you out of bed, it’ll put you back in. JC considers The Sabbath, among other Jewish contributions to the science of keeping Time.

Shmita

The Torah ordains every seventh year a Sabbatical Year, as it says in Leviticus 25: “Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard.” This septennial respite is known as shmita, Hebrew for  “release” or “freeing.” After seven of these seven-year cycles, Leviticus declares a Jubilee, a special fallowing during which all debts are forgiven and all slaves must be manumitted—two tenets not currently observed in the State of Israel, though the  agricultural component of the shmita year still is.

And “Thirty Six Shades of Prussian Blue,” which I think was previously mentioned in the Triple Canopy post the other day.

At the Bombsite, Susie DeFord interviews (new to me) poet Damian Rogers.

At Moistworks, noted fictionist and writer-on-music Ben Greenman remembers Alex Chilton of Big Star. This is a short, affecting piece that is worth reading. Also, there are some mp3s to download there.

I remembered beginning to date the woman I’d later marry, playing lots of Chilton’s music for her, and trying to figure out his secret: the way his try-anything-once aesthetic was both forthright and evasive, how he could combine an anarchic sense of humor and an unironic ability to convey pain, his addiction to the brilliant throwaway, his graceless grace. He drew lines back to Slim Harpo and Ronny and the Daytonas and Danny Pearson, so many it seemed he’d get trapped in the tangle. He escaped, again and again–but escaped to what?

And finally, I had always heard that SxSW was some sort of music festival, but apparently it is some sort of international conference for the dork industry. perennial home-girl Rachel Fershleiser and her partner-in-brevity Larry Smith present a flickr album of the nerdiest tee shirts at SxSW, which for some reason is also being referred to in some place as SxSWi. No idea what that’s about but please, don’t anyone tell me, as I’m finding the ignorance very soothing. The picture up top is drawn from their album, as is this one here, which happens to be my favorite of the lot, and on which note I leave you.

Uber cool Kate Durbin has created a new journal called Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga . Right now it features work from Meghan Vicks (a doctoral student of Comparative Literature at CU Boulder) and htmlgiant comrade Brian Oliu. Here’s the scoop:

Gaga Stigmata: Critical Writings and Art About Lady Gaga is a new technological breed of journal that intends to take seriously the brazenly unserious shock pop phenomenon and fame monster known as Lady Gaga.

Submit:

Critical Work (any format; any length) and Art (Creative Writings, Visual Art, Music, etc.), or any combination thereof, that intelligently interacts with the pop cultural manifestation that is Lady Gaga.

We are also interested in critical writings on the web that already exist, so please call these to our attention if you come across them.

Those who follow Gaga know that she moves as the speed of pop, which is far faster than the speed of critique; therefore, we have chosen the blogger format for now to allow us to keep pace with Gaga. We encourage pieces that are immediate (for example, critical responses to her newest performances, interviews, and music videos), though we are also eager for your more thought-over works as well. If your work is accepted, expect it to be published quickly–likely within a day or two of acceptance. You should also expect to interact with others in the comment boxes of the blog; permitting the peanut-crunching crowd of monsters to further the conversation’s evolution.

Our goal is to eventually create a book of the best works on this site, both in technological and physical form, possibly in collaboration with the Haus of Gaga.

Send all submissions to gagajournal@gmail.com

Chatroulette screenshot

I want to see this image as a sad reminder of our past, of how divided we are — but, at the gross risk of being insensitive, I see the humor. The humor is not aimed at Jews, Nazis, or the Holocaust, but at the contemporary absurdity of Chatroulette, which has grown more into a role-playing forum than an actual place for strangers to meet, the latter perhaps being most absurd.

Of the many “best of” or “top” Chatroulette screenshots securing their meta-web presences, my favorite is this WWW take on WWII. Here, “Israelite” and “Nazi” (I use quotes because I wonder how much they themselves believe their roles) seem both happily complicit in self-consciously acting out the obvious narrative of their political history, giving a thumbs-up either in solidarity with their respective alliances, or, with an irony only possible in a virtual world, to each other.

The Jew even ducks away from camera, either facetiously, or more solemnly, with a visceral intuition which brings to mind the true horror of hate. Anybody with a flag on their wall is asking to get into a conversation (just like any male in college with an acoustic guitar in his room secretly wants a record deal or to get laid). The Nazi (or, skinhead) has a wonderful smile, which is very out of character, key word being “character,” as that is all we are, and can be, online. If “all the world’s a stage,” then the internet is where we rehearse our lines, sharpening our tongues for a chance at real life.

Mario and Luigi meet

These bros (literally) take their roles a little further, abandoning any narrative which may be construed as “life like,”optimistically braving the statistical waters for the grand pairing. The gratification comes not from the Super Mario Bros. motif, but from the lack of probability that these two would ever meet. It’s as if they are testing the chance. When your partner appears on screen and there is any mutual relation, however small, there is a moment of epiphany — of a connectedness we all seem so desperate for. Short of wanking off or having tits, I’ve failed miserably at Chatroulette; people hit “next” instantly upon seeing my face and I’m left with that ever humiliating line “>Your partner disconnected.”

Twins

One can argue that this twin kinship was staged, or at least that one of the girls began imitating the other, though I doubt it. The younger one below seems to be gazing into a version of herself years later, imprisoned by her countenance as we all are. Fate is too big to chew here, but I will say the slightly sullen, bored look on both their faces is not a stretch. The internet, as much as it is built on novelty and anomaly, as about boredom (its precursor television was about advertising — shows which merely acted as buffers between commercial breaks). Chatroulette is what it is because people, put simply, are not doing other things. (The same can be said for htmlgiant, or any blog, so thank you for being here.)

Hate killed 6 million people, and the world is still broken. Maybe the opposable “thumbs-up” above is proof that we have evolved, but probably not. I guess I do see that image above as a sad reminder of our past, for which we are all responsible, because hate only changes borders, undying. Genocide is not a threat, it’s a plan.

In the mean time, let’s waste some time. For every girl in a her bedroom sometime after dinner, a halo of 70 watt light behind her head, band posters on the wall, LCD incurred corrective optometry, perhaps homework being ignored, and a head so lazy only a cradled hand can keep it off the table, I say to you: Hello lovely, how is it possible we never met?