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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by James Nowlan, ULA
"The Mollusc Nacre of the
Hollywood Hill's Sign"
As everyone knows us poor brain damaged losers here at the
ULA come off all anti-social like but hey it’s just childish acting
out because our parents were passed out drunk or in some
institution so they couldn’t give us the attention that we needed.
This being the case we are truly in a quandary or dilemma (or
what ever is the right word for it that a better educated person
than my sadly ignorant self would use) when actually getting
some of the recognition that we’ve been anxiously awaiting for so
long. A complimentary mention by Jack Engelhard, a man who
actually had one of his books made into a Hollywood movie
(which is what every writer out there really wants even though
they might not want to admit it), has us in the biggest tizzy since
Dave Eggers anonymously mocked us. In a few short years, be
assured Mr. Engelhard, all those that are now mocking us will be
praising the perspicacity that permitted you to be amongst the
first to recognize us as a possible future for American letters.
Unfortunately not yet being in a position to repay you we will at
least take into consideration the theme of your article which this
multi-traumatized cerebrum seems to recall being something like
the death of fiction from the ghost of comedy which is something
we ULAers morbidly obsess about when we’re not watching a
strip show or passed out drunk. Who could we blame for this or
perhaps credit for this for perhaps it’s not necessarily a bad
thing (the death of fiction I mean not the stripping or the
drinking). The most obvious target is Hollywood. Not simply
because film has replaced the novel but because they have altered
the expectations of the reader so that he feels more comfortable
with a book that would make a good film (and of course I’d like
to write a book that would make a good film my own self so I’d
have some money to buy myself a lot of sex and alcohol but I can’
t write anything that will ever interest any Hollywood producers
because I’ve drunk too much and been clubbed over the head too
many times by bouncers at striptease bars where I’ve made
trouble). One could also accuse the publishing industry and their
slavish search for viable product. Those more in the know might
well point the finger at academia and their excesses. I’d say it’s
all a concerted dysfunctional interaction of all three. I wouldn’t
call it a conspiracy (though there are definitely conspiratorial
elements in the mix) but something much more sinister.
Something instinctual, an excretion that will envelope a grain of
sand that has happened into the mollusc.
We might ask why have any fiction at all. Why not just watch
television or read the bible. Perhaps the novel as it is has out
lived its usefulness. Why would you need to identify with a
theoretic personage and the allegory of his struggles when the
television gives us “real people” who are exceeding to the heights
(becoming stars) before our very eyes. The thing is literary prizes
are still being given and novels are still being picked up by
publishers and made into films. Large sums of money are being
spent upon literature programs. Why should something so useless
be kept artificially alive? Hemingway didn’t need no stinking
literature program.
The thing is that Hemingway wasn’t Hemingway. A fair amount
of calculation went into building the Hemingway myth but there
was much more substance to this myth than those that we are
now asked to believe in. Of course some would postulate this
“free market” as a modern mythic realm from which today’s
heroes shall emerge.
The idea of the free market is this: that the customer will
naturally select the best product and so the best producers will
be favored and so be more productive and those who create
inferior products be pushed aside. One can question how this
might work in the production of other goods but here the
question is more of what this might entail in the creation of a
cultural product and here the model breaks down for culture is
not just product but creator of need.
We’re asked to see this market as a wilderness from which the
exceptional individual shall emerge. The problem is that it is so
planned and contrived that its lack of spontaneity can create no
product of hazard or conflict begun in another domain that finds
its resolution in the theater of language.
How should I feel about it? About having been in this war?
Maybe kind of mutilated? Dave Eggers appears to be posing the
question “how should I feel about not feeling anything for the
generation who aren’t really feeling anything but not really
feeling too bad about it”. Norman Mailer made a very bad film
(I can commiserate I’ve made bad films myself) but at least he
livens it up by getting hit on the head with a hammer by Rip
Torn, someone could hit the Dave on the head with a hammer
and it probably wouldn’t change anything. His HIVSQPR does
for its audience the same thing that “American Idol” does for
someone watching it on a wide screen TV in a small trailer in a
tornado swept region of the US and allows them to see themselves
as superior. Belief makes the future not truth but when this belief
is too far divorced from truth then it falls apart…America’s
unquestioned faith in its meritocracy is just what is making it less
and less meritocratic.
But anyway I’ve some ideas. First a Prague novel, yes I know it’s
really bullshit but this wouldn’t be some kind of Prague as the
new Paris sort of crap but the Prague as a CIA covert op to lure
disaffected recent college grads to a place where they could be
effectively neutralized with sex, drugs and alcohol. The story that
others don’t dare tell that of those who were castrated and
lobotomized and sent further east to work as christian
missionaries, those that were hung up by their heels to have their
throats cut and be made into ersatz McDonalds hamburgers and
those that took some bad drugs were sent back to the US in a
straight jacket and finished roaming the streets of an American
“kultchural mecca” mumbling to themselves wrapped in a state
hospital blanket. This would make a fun film.
Another idea, a frat boy who really goes to the state penitentiary
and has to fight to protect his butthole and not just the tender
tissue of his anus but his life itself because some of the
motherfuckers after his ass are aids infected. You see this one is
great because it’s like hey your manhood is your existence you
know, fighting for your manhood is struggling to exist. The
accompanying media event could be him being exposed as having
been used for sex by many members of the prison population and
having gotten aids as a result a fact that is “uncovered” tearfully
on TV. The now contrite supervisor of the rape gang weepingly
admits that his own prior victimization compelled him to abuse
others.
At last of course there is always the ULA. We could be not only
the event but also the voice emerging from the event as well as
those announcing the coming of this event from which the voice
shall emerge. We’ll see what happens. If this mind might conjure
up from these tortured and abused neural pathways a reason why
fate decided it should be so treated and the words that might
make this reason known to you.
*Englehard’s ULA mention at http://www.amazon.
com/gp/product/B000FI90OY/qid=1147579497/sr=1-
1/ref=sr_1_1/103-0132108-2605465?s=books&v=glance&n=5
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