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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by ULA member Adam Hardin
"Incidents of Ego-tourism in a Temporary
World: How We Are Not Writers"
This is the age of the poem-thesis and novel-thesis, the age where
the writer gives up his freedom and washes the feet of the academic
hack, the age where literature is dragged down to the cellar of the
university and locked away in journals, but it isn’t literature that is
locked away down there. Difficult is the new aesthetic, but difficult
comes real easy and cheap in garrulous stumbling prose and sloppy
poetry. How many writers have we lost because they went into the
workshop and returned sterile and stillborn? One alone is a tragedy.
What if we lost Franz Kafka, what if his friend Max Brod had burned
his manuscripts as he requested in his will? What if we lost Emily
Dickinson, what if her sister Lavinia had just stuffed her poetry away
in a trunk?
As underground writers we are not subservient to philosophers.
We ignore the latest French Philosopher who leaves in his wake the
corpses of writers who followed his ideology of texts to the death of
their own work. It is the fault of the M.F.A. student who misreads
Jacques Derrida (brilliant as a philosopher, but never wrote fiction or
poetry), and then writes retardedness to the desecration of his name.
As underground writers we are not subservient to literary scholars.
We ignore literary critics who reduce literature to a gender, a race, a
historical document, theories created for their own self-righteous
academic careers under terms like new historicism and neo-marxism.
Those who dissect literature as though it will yield vital organs and
their function, are cutting into what is indivisible, whether it be
Dickinson’s poetry or Faulkner’s prose.
As underground writers we are not subservient to the M.F.A.
system. A long curriculum vitae does not bode well for the real
writer. Fellowships to the Breadloaf Writing Conference* is a mark
of a good careerist. Publication in Fence and Tin House and most
other literary journals heralds pretentious unreadable drivel. Contest
winners? The ones where judges fix the contest for their former
students, lovers, and friends and publish their work by soliciting entry
fees from the unknowing public. The D.A. calls that mail fraud.
Degrees? Well, those you can shove up your ass if you fold the paper
small enough.
Each of us began not as writers, but as readers. We sure as hell
did not read the ponderous analytics of post-colonialism in relation to
Kantian metaphysics as foregrounding to anything. Franz Kafka, for
example, wrote “The Trial” to each of us, and each of us will
interpret it a little differently. You need nothing else to understand it.
Read someone’s interpretation or literary theory if you like, there is
nothing wrong with that, as long as you remember that you as a
reader are as much an authority as the scholar, the critic, or the
philosopher.
In the underground, we are conscious of all the fatuous pontificating
these M.F.A. writers put between their writing and themselves, all the
extraneous noise that confuses and distracts them and muddies and
mars their work. Young writers are remade in the workshops to the
worst connotations of the word “literary.” I think the title of Lee
Klein’s** first novel could serve as their artistic theology: “Incidents
of Ego-tourism in a Temporary World.”
Literature is an artistic discipline in itself, and subservient to
nothing else, and no one else, and needs no theory to justify it.
Writers have always been their own authority. We burn clean and
furious, alone with our work, and the work of those who wrote
before us.
very painful to write this
of course. But most poets are just big
titsuckers
accepting readings
taking university chairs
praying for tenure
writing books on poetic
technique and
giving
lectures
---Charles Bukowski
Notes:
*Breadloaf is the premiere writing conference in the literary world. It
is the whitest place on the face of the earth, a fantasy land for third-
rate academic hacks granted fellowships so that they can have their
ass kissed by young writers in the green hills of Vermont. If you get
in it will cost you over $2,000 for ten days of schmoozing, but some
are given waiterships where in addition to sucking up, they serve
coffee and food. Don’t miss the drunken hay ride and the drunken
barn dance.
**Lee Klein is the M.F.A. system apologist who runs eyeshot.net that
typically publishes boring self-indulgent(see his novel) essays and
short fiction. Lee once asked the ULA for an interview, and Michael
Jackman and Steve Kostecke responded solidly to his questions, after
which Lee Klein published his own running commentary after every
one of their answers. Lee is currently a workshop brat at Iowa
serving a two year sentence of thumbsucking.
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Adam Hardin joined the ULA in 2005.
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