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the
current
Monday
Report
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This week's report by King Wenclas
FORTRESSES OF
THE STATUS QUO:
EXCURSION TO NYC
THE OBJECTIVE
Our January 16th visit was something of a scouting mission: to
touch the reality of literature's Imperial City; a way to test our
opinions and our prejudices, with conversations and encounters,
by journeying through the heart of the monster.
THE VISIT
The four ULAers who disembarked from the Chinatown bus
looked like the authentic bohemians we are. Frank Walsh was
dressed in a wild costume including scarlet jacket with green
scarf and hat. Unkempt Patrick King was long-haired and
bearded. Eric "Jellyboy" Broomfield wore a paint-spattered old
black leather jacket and a dilapidated cap. I had on a long
black-and-white overcoat. Grubby denizens; outcasts.
Underground artists.
Our visit was a collage of experiences. Naively, we thought we
could set up a zeen table outside office buildings and hawk our
zeens, books, and ideas to those officially interested in American
literature today. Not so!
There's a scene at the end of "Three Days of the Condor" when
Robert Redford sees the New York Times as a refuge from the
corrupt madness around him; an island of truth and honesty.
Today he'd be thrown into the street.
Is Times publisher Sulzberger aware of his building's security?
We'd been set up outside the Times entrance on a lonely
sidestreet for one minute when a large white-shirted attack-dog
head of security burst from the glass doors like a hurricane and
tried to throw myself and our zeen table into the street. "This is a
public sidewalk!" we said as he grabbed for our box of zeens. The
bulky angry-faced thug was directly in my face.
"I'll put you down! I'll put you down!" he yelled again and again
as another guard joined him. "What are you going to do?" he
asked me as he pushed me as I held onto the ULA property he
was trying to take away from me. "What do you want me to do?"
"I want you to raise your hand to me!" the mad dog screamed,
almost choking.
"He can't. He has a box in his hands," Frank Walsh pointed out
rationally, distracting the guard, who was a kind of large
unthinking bulldog. The two of them then stood face-to-face. The
guard paused from his screaming long enough to spit on our
flyers.
Quite a welcome from the New York Times! : A sadistic madman
waiting behind the glass door for the slightest pretense for
violence. No attempt from him at explanation. No excuse; no
provocation for his behavior. He reminded me of the unchained
beasts protectively roaming the estate of the rich people in
Wuthering Heights. Stray into his territory and you'll get torn
apart and eaten.
We were to discover that every established home of printed ideas
and speech in Manhattan is guarded by phalanxes of security.
At the Conde Nast Building we were put in a corner to the side
used as a smoking area. At the sight of us the well-dressed
Conde-Nast employees stopped smoking and scurried away. (The
ULA Health Campaign.) We waved about our flyers, facing
hurried robotic indifference to our presence. "Literature! New
ideas!" we shouted. The robots coming out of the building ran
robotically faster away. Jelly Boy did some impromptu
sword-swallowing for our presumed audience. Not a smile from a
one of them. Faces as hardened as the concrete on a nuclear
missile silo.
The buildings we visited were congregated around Times Square,
a monstrous Moloch-like alien planet where huge M&Ms looked
down upon the populace, alongside a gigantic ad for Special K. A
hellish vision; celebration of all-powerful Mega-Monopoly. The
gleaming new buildings were glass mirrors reflecting the
bankrupt narcissism of the age.
At another huge office complex, a security guard at an endless
desk gave me a phone number for Rolling Stone magazine. I
called from the lobby and was eventually put with staffer Kevin
O'Donnell, with whom I tried to set up a tour of the offices, or an
interview. I was met with a panicked voice. "No, no. We can't.
Out of the question. Appointment only!"
We were frozen out at every establishment venue. From every
building issued the same suited and clean unblinking unthinking
unregistering preppy automatons, supposed purveyors of words
and ideas who had no curiosity whatsoever about our words and
ideas.
We had no trouble connecting with actual people; from the
young man who inquired about us as we began to set up outside
the New York Times; to a construction worker who pointed us to
an inexpensive bar (Jimmy's Corner, at which he later greeted
us); to the staff at Langan's, who warmed up to us as we sat
drinking at the bar and Frank Walsh like an ancient bard began
reading aloud his poetry, which magically transformed a room of
suits discussing money into a warmer, more human location. The
power of poetry! Before we left, the bartender and waitstaff
eagerly gave us directions to a cheaper spot to drink at. (We'll be
back to Langan's also-- when we have more money in the ULA
treasury!)
We stopped at the New School, and at New York University, and
gave a poetry reading to the chilled air in historic Washington
Square. Then the disarrayed vagabonds from Philadelphia were
greeted effusively by Gary at the Bowery Poetry Club. We
promised to return later that evening for their open mic, but
became sidetracked and never made it.
Settled into the darkness of DBA on First Avenue, mischievous
Patrick King bringing himself and us more and more pints of
beer, we met first a freelance journalist, then small press icon
James Chapman and one of his writers. Chapman was filled with
wisdom and information. Then, back onto the streets. The lower
east side was a stark contrast to demonic Times Square, seeming
far away from and far below the gleaming palaces of falsity. The
grittier neighborhoods we now walked through, filled with
historic 19th century buildings, gave a better sense of a New
York City that is swiftly vanishing. (Witness what's happening to
the Bowery.)
Back in Philly, worn out by the cold, walking through the
underground subway corridors after midnight, when most trains
stop running, we were shocked by huddled homeless everyplace;
against the walls; in corners and shadows like a vision out of
Dickens, or Hugo's Middle Ages; bodies under foul-smelling
rags, sleeping bags, and blankets; hiding from the wintry night
and from the frigid indifference of a mad society.
ASSESSMENT: A RANT
The established print media and established literature are closed
to outsider voices. This is true for a variety of reasons.
Chief among them is the divide caused by their impressive
institutional settings, which warp their view of literature in
society.
A Robert Polito at the New School, for instance, might be
expected to be open to all kinds of writers and writing. He
receives a mailed flyer from the ULA. A mailed flyer! What is a
mailed flyer to him, who sits atop a bureaucracy and is
surrounded by expensive walls, furniture, staff, and carpeting?
He wears invisible institutional robes, markers of a literary
priesthood. What are underground writers to him? How could
we be in any way his peers and equals? The flyer goes into a
wastebasket.
More enclosed than academics are the paid grunts of the
publishing machine. In dress, bearing, breeding, and attitude
they stand apart from the 99% mass of the population. (In
Manhattan this is starkly seen.) They're encircled by a set
world-view which is totalitarian in its effect on them. Ideas come
to them through approved, filtered channels. Their imaginations
are stunted by the enclosement of their offices, their clothes, their
genteely expensive restaurants, their private cars or taxicabs; by
their background and schooling.
Television, which spews nonstop conglomerate consumer
products, will not stir them from their intellectual slumber. Even
the blogs they read (MediaBistro etc.) are reflections of
themselves, of the complacency of their embedded ideas.
They give us in their glossy magazines not reality, not American
society, but their own class and privileged attitudes. They can
give us only a weak simulcrum of reality, which they view
through periscopes from the 47th floor of their skyscrapers.
They are, in other words, an Overclass. They're not a separate
species, no, not yet, or even a separate race. For all that, they're
very different human beings from those less well-positioned and
less well-bred. The Myth they live with, that they are in any way
outsiders or bohemians; that they know-- or can guess-- what
those terms mean, is fantastic. Yet THESE are the folks who
determine our culture; who decide what IS American culture. No
wonder our literature is irrelevant and dying.
They're the Machine's foot soldiers. Do they have anything in
common with us? Yes. They're still human beings who eat, shit,
pay rent, and endure other necessities of modern life. Otherwise
they're our opposites. They stand inside the institutions, paid
subservient extensions of the Monster, every bit as much as are
obedient security personnel who push writers into the street. By
contrast, underground writers stand outside, on the street, with
ordinary people; the people's voice; opposite not just in physical
reality but in the images and notions of the world inside our
brains.
Why should they acknowledge us? Daily they're pestered with
flyers, vendors, and beggars, as they travel, as if on conveyor
belts, through the aesthetic corridors of their rat-race lifestyles.
They're inside the corridors: the cost of their careerist jobs. To
those on the outside, they appear to be robots. Do they ever halt
to speak to the homeless woman on the sidewalk in rags and a
mud-stained sleeping bag? Do they pause to note the realities of
American life? They can't. They're on a treadmill. The mad
exhaustion of their frigid faces matches the mad exhaustion of
their lives.
Stressed unforgiveably to the breaking point; the mere use of a
term like "demi-puppet" will send them into hysteria. They also
are victims of the madness.
CONCLUSION
There is no challenging, there is no approaching, there is no
possibility of directly disturbing the monoliths. They're protected
by guards and surrounded by walls of insularity as thick and
hardened as the gleaming structures in which the Soldiers of
Conformity spend their time.
One can stand outside these fortresses with books of originality
and truth and shout, "Here is the truth!" The words are not
heard, much less acknowledged. They're stray sounds of the
cacaphony of a city's realities to which the Overdogs long ago
closed their eyes, ears, and minds.
As a result, Literature is a frozen block impervious to change
from the outside. It doesn't accept contrary ideas and doesn't
WANT contrary ideas. To continue operating, the System
requires only constant reaffirmation of itself.
This is artistic suicide.
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KING WENCLAS - www.kingwenclas.blogspot.com
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