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This week's report by...
Bernice Mullins & Noah Cicero
Underground vs. The Professionals:
The Great Literary Experiment
Intro by Bernice Mullins
The great and all-knowing Professionals, the chosen ones, the
blessed, the ones on top: Moody and his crew of goons and toadies.
The Professionals say we of the ULA are not on the display table at a
bookstore near you for the same reason people who don’t go to med
school can’t get jobs in operating rooms. We aren’t professionals.
We’re people. We’re telemarketers and bank tellers and cashiers and
unemployed miscreants. We haven’t been trained in the trade.
But above all these other claims (because after all, they don’t claim
the above arguments too loudly, because this is AMERICA and no-
matter-who-you-are-or-where-you’re-from-all-your-dreams-can-still-
come-true) they say the REAL reason is because we’re just no good.
They stroll up and down their alabaster halls with their noses smug
in the air. “They say they don’t get published just because they’re
poor. They call our lovely parties ‘circle-jerks.’ They claim snobbery.
None of it’s true, I tell you. No one would buy their books. Our
publishing empires would crumble if we printed their books.”
The Professionals are convinced that the Professionals are the voice
of this generation. The Professionals pretend to write books about
people doing people-things. I, Bernice Mullins, am a person. I know
lots of other people. I have never met anyone who summered in the
Hamptons, or rode horses at sunset along a beach in South America.
I don’t doubt those people exist. But I haven’t even met anyone who
would give a fuck about any of that.
The Professionals don’t write about reality. The Professionals can’t
write about it because they’ve never seen it. They’ve looked at it,
sure. But they’ve never tasted it, or smelled it, or fucked it, or stuck
their hands in it elbow-deep. The Professionals live in limbo, just on
the other side of everything that happens.
And here they are in a panic: running around tearing at their hair,
bawling their eyes out, because they’re losing money. WHY? HOW?
Because no one reads anymore. And no one reads because the
books you can buy at you local bookstore/coffee shop/CD emporium
SUCK.
I’m not knocking the classics. They still sell Dostoevsky and
Bukowski at all those stores and that’s fine. But what if you’re not in
the mood to plunge into 800 pages of 19th century prose? What if
you’ve already read every Bukowski story three times? What are
you left with?
Dave Eggers. Whose latest collection of short stories featured one
narrated by a dead dog, and one that he forgot to write. It was five
blank numbered pages preceded by a title. I suppose he thinks he’s
clever. Chuckling to himself while rubbing his genitals, getting hard
just pondering on the affect of his ultimate post-post-modern
offering. “I’ll write a story, with nothing there! I’m a genius! I’ll be just
like that artist who left his canvas blank!” Then he cums. Every time.
The Experiment:
Is There is an Audience for Underground Writing?
Showing of Data by Noah Cicero
The first data I’m going to show to prove my point is an experiment I
did with eight regular people. I handed eight people four short
stories and two poems and then had them answer seven questions.
The people I gave them to were acquaintances. I told them nothing
about the experiment, none of them knew who or what the ULA is, or
who Dave Eggers or Ricky Moody are, none could tell you what
McSweeney’s magazine has in it.
The stories and poems were:
Authors Stories or poems
For The Professionals:
Jonathan Franzen Break Up Stories, the Vermont one.
Tom Beller All Hail Pell Mell
William Greenway Aesop At Sixty
For The Underground:
Crazy Carl Robinson HollyWood Hulk Hogan
Steve Kostecke Empty Set
Michael Estabrook White Thong
Six out of eight of them are casual readers. My definition of a casual
reader is a person that does not write and who reads at least two to
four books a month. They will be marked with a CS by their name.
Here are the demographics.
1. Male factory worker, CS
2. Male who works two jobs at restaurants
3. Female Fed Ex worker and a state university student for sociology, CS
4. Male who works at Best Buy and goes to a state university for business, CS
5. Female exotic dancer (and a trained beautician) with children
6. Female exotic dancer with children married to a factory worker, CS
7. Female state university graduate who is getting her masters for experimental
psych. at a private school, CS
8. Male honor student at a state university who is a senior in English with a
minor in creative writing, CS
Here is the test they took. For some of the questions they were
allowed to pick as many as they wanted that explains why the high
numbers occur.
1. Which of the writings seemed most like real life
(Not necessarily your own)?
Underground: 17 Professionals: 2
2. Which one(s) did you enjoy?
Underground: 18 Professionals: 4
3. Which one(s) had a writing style you would
enjoy reading more of?
Underground: 11 Professionals: 3
4. Which had characters that seem like people
you might run into on the street?
Underground: 14 Professionals: 5
5. If all these writings were taken from full-length novels, which
would you consider buying?
Underground: 11 Professionals: 2
6. Which was your favorite?
Underground: 7 Professionals: 1
7. Which was your least favorite?
Underground: 0 Professionals: 8
It is obvious that the underground clearly won. But there is more
data I would like to present to prove our case.
All these internet sites have unprofessionalized writing on them or
sell unprofessionalized writing. Notice how many visits they get a
month. Note: some will say there are professional writers on
Identity Theory or Nth Position, and there are. But they have featured
writers that are not professionals and they publish what they like not
because of the school the writer went to.
Identity Theory: between 200 to 400 thousand a month.
Nth Position: between 50 to 100 thousand
Word Riot: 15 thousand last month and rises at
least a thousand monthly
Microcosm Publishing: Sells 1300 zines on average monthly.
Retort: 40 to 50 thousand a month.
Quimby’s: Around 100 thousand visits a month.
There is one more fact I would like to state: Charles Bukowski, a
writer who was as unprofessional as a writer could get, sells over a
million copies of his books a year, and Kerouac and Hunter S.
Thompson sell around that much too.
It is obvious from this data that there is huge interest and demand for
underground, unprofessionalized writing, and perhaps the main point
is that it can attract 100s of thousands with no publicity. It’s self-
evident from these numbers that if underground writers like Steve
Kostecke, Urban Hermitt, Michael Estabrook, or Tim Hall had the
same amount of publicity as Neal Pollack or Dave Eggers, but
directed at their certain demographic, they would without a doubt
sell more books then them. Note question number five concerning if
they would buy the book. It is eleven to two, which implies for every
two books the professionals sold, eleven underground books would
be bought.
There is a goldmine here in the underground. My question to the
people who do not publish them, and to the people who talk poorly
of us, is: “What is your excuse now? Here is our empirical data.
Where is yours?”
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