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current Monday
Report below!
This week's report by Cry Bloxsome, www.crybloxsome.com
A Writer Is Not A Camel
Something as important as literary fiction is dying, because the people at
the top have decided that the most important thing is to take care of their
own interests, and the interests of their fellow gangsters, by imposing rules
and modes of judgement that exclude the good fiction, the fiction that does
what lit fiction is supposed to do – which is plant the seeds of change by
being interesting, entertaining, stimulating and world-view changing.
The lit gangsters are catering to each others tastes, and to the tastes of the
mis-comprehending administrators, and exclusive markets, who fund their
projects. It’s incestuous, and their ‘creative’ works are the horribly deformed
and ugly children of that incestuous union. Children that would die at birth if
they weren’t kept alive by the artificial support systems of arts funding and
literary networking.
The lit gangsters and their supporters have grown so used to staring at
these sadly deformed children of theirs, that by comparison the real thing
looks ugly to them now.
They justify this incestuousness by saying that the market for literary fiction
has dried up, and that the only market left consists of the lovers of their
irrelevant, convoluted and annoying rubbish. This is a cop-out, and a
rationalisation, and so obviously a corruption of the truth. A corruption of the
truth, incidentally, which conveniently serves their ends.
They have closed ranks around the means of production (the remaining pool
of wealth and resources) in order to suck it dry and to bathe their horrifying
creations. They would rather see literary fiction die, than admit the shameful
wrongness of this scene.
They need to throw a real (strong, vibrant and big hearted) creation into the
waters and watch it dive down to the source and tear that spring of life open.
To pull out the cerebral garbage that clogs its flow.
Writers have performed this feat before. From a whole list of possible
examples, I’m looking at Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut’s son was once asked by
an interviewer what it was like growing up as the son of a famous writer, the
son answered that when he was growing up his dad was a car dealer who
couldn’t even get a teaching job at the local high school.
Vonnegut was ignored and considered a light-weight populist for most of his
early career, and why? Because you could understand him, that’s why! Plain
and simple. Because he said what was on his mind with language and motifs
and imagery that everybody was familiar with. He spoke so clearly that the
critics wouldn’t accept that it was literature. Vonnegut himself said that, for
him, talking to the kind of writer who responds to literary history (and not to
life itself) was like talking to someone who worked in a completely different
field.
His early books were not given the respectability of hardback and went
straight to paperback, where they were read by truck-drivers and ignored by
literary critics.
Now, I know it is unfashionable to say it, but: literature is, was, and always
will be, about HEART. And I know I can’t define that term, nor do I give a fuck
that I can’t.
If lit fiction is to survive, it needs to find it’s way down to the people who’s
interest in lit has been clogged up, and backed up, by garbage load after
garbage load of the kind of ‘wonderful’ incest that only totally gawky self-
serving over-privileged auto-glorifying pissants would be rude enough, and
ignorant enough, to call good writing.
In an attempt to clear that blockage I am trying to establish an online literary
journal that caters to the tastes of the average punter. It can be found at
www.crybloxsome.com. The emphasis is on unpretentiousness, and the
genuine voice. The site needs your support and you submissions as it is
100% independent, and taking a risk on a different kind of writing. The real
kind.
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Check out www.crybloxsome.com
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