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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by JACK SAUNDERS
Another Question Nobody Asks
A: I can tell you the real oxymoron.
Q: What's that?
A: IBM PC.
Q: International Business Machines. Personal Computer.
A: That's right.
A personal computer is about empowering the individual.
Making information free. It's about the free and open,
unrestricted interchange of ideas.
Business is about keeping your own information secret, like the
formula for Coke, and using the computer to suss out the secrets
of the competition and your own employees, to either steal the
information or use it against the opposition. It's Big Brother. As
people were rightly afraid of when the IBM PC came out, and
was marketed as, "A tool for modern times," with the Charlie
Chaplin character for a mascot, like Modern Times was a warm
and fuzzy paean to industrialization and progess.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.
Black is white.
Business is personal.
The individual is a pinworm in the brain of the monster, using the
PC against the company. Like the real Little Tramp.
The company knows this.
The company is not your friend.
The company will crush you. If you aren't a company man.
They will extirpate you.
Q: Did you see the discussion on Book TV of The Cult of the
Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing Our Culture, by
Andrew Keen?
A: Yes. It grew out of an article in the Weekly Standard. The
neocon publication.
Do you know what it reminded me of?
Q: What?
A: "The Know-Nothing Barbarians," Norman Pofhoretz's attack
on beat writing, published in Partisan Review, in which he said
the beat writers' depiction of reality as they saw it, in the
streets, would lead to dope use, indiscriminate sex, gang violence,
disrespect for authority, and a lowering of standards-the death of
culture.
Q: Maybe it did.
A: Yes. It led to the anti-war movement, civil rights, the women's
movement, and gay lib. But also to the small press movement,
zines, ezines, and books published on the worldwide web.
It led to the do-it-yourself (DIY), or Pro-Am ethic, in which
amateurs work at a professional level and get their work out
there catch as catch can, to an audience of kindred souls who are
turning their back on the mainstream product because it is
boring, sold-out, and fake. It is manufactured, and lacks passion,
honesty, and street cred.
The arts have been professionalized, and self-taught artists are
kept out.
Who is excluded and who is welcomed? Who decides this, and
what are their criteria?
Well, it must be commercial, of course.
But more important, you must fit in the corporate mold. You
must be able to function in a corporate milieu, with corporate
values, and corporate rules. These are anathema to the artist.
That's why art movements always come out of the underground,
not the mainstream.
The mainstream is about protecting itself from the underground.
By freezing it out.
Calling it amateurish. Unpolished. Unedited.
It is not good enough to pass through the filter of conventional
acceptance.
The conventional filter is monkey see, monkey do. Copy what
sold last month. Repeat as necessary.
They don't know where to look.
They don't find the new because they're looking in the wrong
place.
Why don't these books sell?
Because they suck. They're written to a formula that no longer
applies to the world we live in. The world of endless war, lies and
bullshit in the media, global warming, no health care, no
pensions, no jobs, backsliding on race relations, human rights,
my God, we're torturing people and invading countries
preemptively and the whole world knows it and you'd be
hard-pressed to read a book that acknowledges it. It would offend
the advertisers on television. The sponsors of the ads. The
sponsors of ads on television are determining the content of our
literature, and the style.
Except on the Internet.
There's a lot of garbage on the Internet.
There's some truth, too.
You won't find New York publishing it, reviewing it in the media
of mass circulation, selling it in the bookstores in the mall, or
teaching it in university writing programs because it is a threat
to them.
Just like Jack Kerouac was a threat to Madison Avenue and Wall
Street in 1957.
Q: It's time for another Jack Kerouac.
A: Yes it is, and he's out there, somewhere.
Q: How do you know?
A: The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet Is Killing
Our Culture.
It isn't about talent it's about attitude. Can you be trusted to bite
your own nuts off for a seat at the banquet table?
That's what the gatekeepers screen for.
Are you a team player?
What artist did you ever hear of who was a team player?
What team do you want to play on? The corporate team?
My God, who'd want to do that. That's spiritual death.
Indeed, that's the question every artist asks himself when he faces
the blank page every day.
Is you is or is you ain't an existentialist.
Q: Harry Crews says the artist spends all his time asking himself
questions ordinary people don't want to think about.
A: What ordinary people? People who read think about the
questions artists ask. That's why they read.
Do they read to find out how whoever is on Oprah got on Oprah?
Let them read Oprah.
Let them read about Wynonna Judd in the Ladies' Home
Journal. Exclusive interview with country star.
You go, girl.
Q: They call underground writing non-commercial, but it isn't
non-commerial, it's anti-commercial, and that's always
commercial, once it squeaks past the gatekeeper.
A: Yes, then it's Katy, bar the door. The floodgates open.
Q: As they did with On the Road, Naked Lunch, and Howl.
A: As they must, again, soon.
I can feel it in the balls of my feet.
Q: Well, you're out there where he leaves tremble.
A: Of course.
Where would I be?
In a faculty lounge, with blow-out patches on my elbows?
What's happening there?
Office politics. In-fighting and back-stabbing.
Q: What is the question nobody asks?
A: Who is excluded, and why?
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Jack Saunders: www.thedailybulletin.com
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