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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by Karen Welsh-Puckett
of Last Literary Press
"Literary Arson,
Literary Revolution"
I started a small press in the same way (and for much the same
reason) that a pyromaniac starts a small fire. You don’t need a
million dollars’ worth of gasoline and a small army of assistants
to burn a Barnes & Noble superstore to the ground, just one little
match can do it.
For years, there was nothing I could do. It cost a small fortune to
print up books, distributors demanded a minimum for five
thousand, ten thousand copies, and even if you managed to get
books onto the shelves of the bookstores, the marketing and
promotion was controlled by a network of reviewers,
supermarket magazines that promoted sexy-looking authors or
authors who wrote about sexy-looking movie stars, and movie
deals for novels that made outrageous fortunes for impoverished
hacks of horror. Even if you could somehow get the book you
published into the network, it was stacked against you, your
chances of pushing the next James Joyce or Melville onto a crap
generation of ex-hippies turned asshole accountants no better
than walking into a Vegas casino with a twenty-five cent chip and
strolling out with a bagful of cash won at the roulette wheel. I
remember browsing a bookstore several years ago and heading
straight for the clearance table. With sinking despair, I noticed
there a stack of five or six copies of The White Stones, a small
book of poetry by one Steve McKinney. They were on sale at ten
cents a copy. I knew the people who published the book, and I
knew McKinney, and I knew his poetry.
Steve McKinney is an original genius on the scale of Robinson
Jeffers, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. And if you
find any of his books in any bookstore, they will be on the
clearance table.
So, you might then think, “Well, jeepers, the corporate
publishing monster has won, so quit yer whining!” And you’d be
dead wrong. I have lit a tiny fire that is going to conflagrate
Viacom, burn Viking, Norton, MacMillan, Simon & Schuster,
Soho Press, A.J. Knopf, and that remarkably pathetic coprolite
New Directions Press all to the ground. They’re defenseless, they’
re stupid, they’re pigasses, and they have ceded the high ground
to me and what is right now a handful of others like me, but let
me tell ya mister, we’re coming on hard and we’re gonna kick
some corporate butt.
What high ground? Uh, gee, if you’re one of those relativist
“Hey, dude, don’t you know it’s uncool to talk about Art, dude?
Real art is like paintings made outta cow shit, like outhouses
being disassembled and reassembled in neat places like corporate
plazas, and like hanging like colored fabric on bridges. That’s
what art is now, dude” types, well, then you’re talking my lingo,
pigass, because you don’t have a clue what art is, what literature
is, and neither do the shithead, pigassed suits who run the
corporate presses, and the university presses. Neither do the
politically correct pigasses who devolved from the hippie
counterculture of the 1960s.
WE ALREADY OWN LITERATURE
We own literature now. A handful of small presses own the whole
literary tradition. It’s ours. From Homer to Seferis, from Virgil
to D’Annunzio, from Chaucer to Yeats, and from the Noh dramas
to Mishima – we own it. The corporate and university presses
only print any of it in order to throw up a smoke screen, to say,
“Look, we still publish Shakespeare. We still publish The
Odyssey, and even the poems of Li Po. And the novels we publish
today are their twenty-first century equivalents.” I read the
Emperor’s New Clothes when I was fucking five years old! I
know better, and so do a whole lot of other people.
Look, a whole lot of people are fed up with the crap that was
“kinda sorta” alternative, radical, cutting edge, whatever you
want to call it, forty years ago. But, hey, that was a long, long
time ago. You can’t push the same crap forever. And here is
where we win again. The corporate presses (and the university
presses, which have mutated into corporate wannabees) have
absolutely zero imagination, zero creativity, and zero interest in
anything except raw profit. They are only staggering around the
landscape, looking for the next sensation. They feed and profit
solely on sensationalism, the next thing that teenage boys want,
or thirty-something women want, or gays, or feminists, or, in
other words, some purchasing block of robots wants. The one
thing they don’t want is literature. They don’t know what it is.
They don’t understand it. It makes their brains hurt if they try to
read it. They have abandoned Literature in a dumpster
something along the New Jersey Turnpike. And we have taken
claim of it.
We own literature. Our task is a sacred crusade against
corporate pigasses.
So, What Are We Going To Do?
Jesus, were you in a coma for the past ten years? We have the
Internet. Any single individual can seize the interest, intellect,
and intent of a few thousand minds almost overnight thanks to
the Internet. I started a blog that pulled in over a thousand
readers a day within two weeks. I grabbed at every possible link,
every possible venue, free promotional scheme or scam I could
and in less than a month I put www.lastliterary.com on the first
page of the (corporate) search engines. Maybe I should write in
terms of the old Bolshevik model of infiltration, planting my
saboteurs, linking to the corporates so they smile benignly at my
insolence and say, “She’s cute, let’s push her little press and see if
she really makes money doing what she wants to, and if she does
we’ll buy her out.” Any hundred likeminded individuals can seize
the attention of hundreds of thousands of others almost overnight
thanks to the Internet.
And as for publishing? Well, people got burned on ebooks,
admittedly. And POD makes a book cost about twice what it
should. And offset is prohibitively expensive for most of us. Try
48hrbooks.com. You can order, say, 250 copies of a 150 page
novel printed and delivered by UPS to your door in about a week
for about $1200. Or 100 copies for under $500. 50 for $300. That’
s how I had Lone Star Nirvana printed. Order 200 copies. Sell
them online and when you get down to 25 or 50 copies left, order
another 200.
Have you ever heard of viral email? Viral marketing?
This is all the asshole corporations know about how to use the
Internet. In more popular argot, it might be “Targeting the
buzz.” Do you hate what I’m publishing? I probably think what
you’re publishing gets down on its hands and knees and blows. So
fucking what? We have to ally and feed the fire that each one of
us has started until it burns away the impression that the
corporate publishing world is anything but a septic tank that’s
gone really really bad and is like spraying a geyser of shit. We
have to formalize our alliance. We have to help each other,
promote each other, talk about each other, blog each other, start
alt.we.own.literature together and make it the most active
nonporn usenet group. We have to start a single solitary URL
(hey, it only costs a few dollars a month – a few cents from each
one of us) where we focus our efforts while maintaining our own
sites linked to and promoting each other and the mother site. We
have to share ideas for promoting a movement, this Literary
Revolution, which is not a revolution so much as simply making it
know far and wide that we are taking responsibility for
literature. That ULA, Last Literary, LitVision, and all other
comers collectively, in unanimity, are the holders of Literature.
We need to send out press releases, emails, put up posters, hand
out flyers, encourage hack writers for the corporate media to
sensationalize us, smiling benignly and saying, “Aren’t they cute?
Let’s push em a little and see if they make any money, and if they
do then we’ll buy them out.” And when we do, we will show them
that viral is from virus which is Latin for poison and we’ll spew
our insecticide onto them and when they are dying, we’ll burn
their pigasses on the bonfire of relativism. One match ignites one
book, a hundred matches starts the conflagration much much
faster.
A Central URL? Many Satellite Sites? Viral Marketing? Selling
Out to the Corporate Media?
You use their tools against them. I put store:lastliterarypress on
Froogle without hesitation. I put Lone Star Nirvana on books.
google.com without a second thought. I even put a fucking piece
of shit corporate ISBN on Lone Star Nirvana precisely and solely
to get it on books.google.com. You use their tools. Use them.
Build the Literary Revolution, which is nothing more than
picking up something discarded, Literature, and saying, “Hey,
finders keepers!” We own it. Let’s make it real again. Let’s use
the tools of the Web and the corporations to make that
Revolution real. And on top of that, we have an unparalleled
opportunity and time. Right now. We have books.google and
froogle.google for free. We have ebay. We have email. We have
usenet. We have dirt cheap internet hosting. We have blogs. We
have each other. We ourselves constitute a network spanning the
United States. I’m right outside Austin, Texas.Where are you?
We can raise the black flag of anarchy, light the fire of the
conflagration, restore literature and then, like Cincinnatus, the
Roman aristocrat made dictator who saved the Republic and
then when his one year term as absolute dictator was up handed
back power to the people and went home, pass it back to
responsible parties who are not corporations. (Oh, and don’t for
one millisecond think the National Endowment for the Assholes
or any other government entity constitutes a responsible party.
Puhleez.) Please contact me at editor@lastliterary.com and let’s
share ideas and start kicking ass together, as one, with a single
big boot and one really fucking big match.
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Karen Welsh-Puckett runs Last Literary Press.
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