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the
current
Monday
Report
below!
This week's report by Steve Kostecke, ULA
The Black Flag of the ULA!
Don’t confuse the acronym NYRB with the acronym NYTBR. The
New York Times Book Review (NYTBR) declared the ULA website to
be one of the top lit-sites of 2004, calling us “rough-and-tumble
populists” who are “determined to shatter the snotty New York
publishing scene” (check out our Oct 11th 2004 report on this in our
Monday Report Box). The New York Review of Books (NYRB), on the
other hand, declares in their Feb 9th 2006 issue that the ever-
challenging and corruption-exposing ULA consists of a “sodality of
soreheads.”
This phrase nauseates on two distinct levels: first off, it contains
alliteration, since that’s what good undergrads learn as “artistic” in
their creative writing courses; and second, I had to look “sodality” up
in the dictionary, and I’m an English Lit major who’s been teaching
English for the past eight years! (The word means, for those of you
pretending that you know: “A society or an association, especially a
devotional or charitable society for the laity in the Roman Catholic
Church”.) The snobbery of the language – of this phrase and dozens
of other phrasings throughout the article that it’s in – is an assault
on the vast multitude of readers who are not at the tip of the literati
pyramid. And: it’s the typical verbiage utilized by reviewers for both
the NYRB and the NYTBR. They present literature to the masses as
something too ethereal, too aery-faery for mere humans to appreciate
and comprehend. They turn it into an avant-garde classical music
station that people by-pass on the radio dial, tuning it in for a
moment and then quickly realizing that this is nothing from them or
meant for them. The end result is that people get turned off – as they
should at any rate with the offerings that the cabal of media
congloms has deigned to provide us with over the past several years
(search through our Monday Report Box for many specimens of this).
Let’s pull the lens back a notch. The larger phrase which the one
above appears within is: “A sodality of soreheads under the black flag
of the Underground Literary Alliance…” I’ll go with “black flag”
being in reference to the skull-n-crossbones of the Jolly Roger, since
there’s more entertainment that way. This is how the literary
agitators of the ULA are inevitably perceived by the elites of lit, and
rightly so: a wild band of jeering pirates – knives clenched between
teeth, patches hiding gouged-out eyes, whiskey dribbling from lips –
in hot pursuit of the ivory-hulled ship. And we can’t wait for the
moment we catch up to that ship and swing aboard, swashbuckling-
style… Reviewers like this one at the NYRB need to fear the blood-
thirsty. The last thing he ever hears just may be: Yaarrr!
...More on the NYRB’s article in next week’s report.
Read the NYRB article at: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18679
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Steve Kostecke is the Editor-in-Chief of the ULA, and a total sorehead.
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