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a On
the Impotence of Small Presses or The
Need for Literary Terrorism[1] by Natalija
Grgorinic & Ognjen Raden Literature
unlike, or at least more than any art form has become the object of
commerce, in the sense that any word attains its public value not
through its meaning but by whether it is marketable or not. This has
resulted in the fact that it is impossible to utter anything unless it
can be bought or sold, everything falling outside of this narrow
paradigm becomes a simple non-discourse, the channels of communication
get interrupted by publishers, the very people who take upon themselves
the task of enabling dialogue between an author and an audience.[2] It
makes no difference whether you like it or not, the function and the
main, if not the only reason for existence of publishers is to
facilitate communication between the author and the public. It is a
regrettable and historical inconvenience that the publishers have been
allowed to inhabit such a important position but once they had claimed
it for their own they had become if not force then certainly a factor to
be reckoned with. It seems or had seemed to be a type of symbiosis one
could find an explanation for regardless of how preposterous the notion
of tying together art and commerce might appear, and it had remained
acceptable exactly because of the belief that publishers indeed
facilitated communication. But what had happened in the late 20th
century and had established itself as the modus operandi for the
21st century was that the publishing houses assumed the
function of their owners’ mouthpieces or, in other words, that the
capital began to speak openly using the words of, more or less,
unsuspecting authors. It
presents no strain to prove this fact. By being counted among numerous
acquisitions of big media conglomerates, which in turn are counted among
equally numerous acquisitions of big industrial conglomerates,
publishers became involved in the business of providing what the public
wants to hear rather than what the authors want to express.[3] But
what does the public want to be communicated to it? What is it that the honest,
buck-earning folk want to hear? The answer is not even well hidden
within the very question, because what the good, simple, honest,
hardworking, salt-of-the-earth, everyday, small people want to
hear is – exactly what they are. And the problem would not exist were
it not for the fact that good does not equal right, or moral, or
logical. Simple does not imply the shortest possible way to the source
of the matter. Honest does not provide any clues to whether the truth is
being spoken. Hardworking means almost everything except loving what one
does. Salt-of-the-earth leaves aside the pepper. Everyday is a cheap
knock-off of eternity. Small is nothing but that which cannot ever grow. In
other words, the author has been hindered in what his or her main
function is. Only,
what is the function of the author[4]? Imagine
a society that thinks of itself as good and yet everybody who takes part
in that particular society would freely agree it, the society, is not
perfect, is far from perfect, is not trying to become perfect, has
abandoned all attempts to become even better. Nevertheless, in such a
society exists a group of people who call themselves the authors, but
won’t contradict if they are addressed as the artists, or the
innovators, or the free spirits. What the name of a free spirit actually
means is that the person bearing it does not see eye to eye with the
rest of the society it belongs to. What the title of an innovator means
is that it’s applied to the person inventing other ways of doing
things people usually do, and even inventing altogether new things to be
done. What the label of the artist means is that the particular person
being stuck with it is directly dealing with what most, if not every
other person usually does. What people usually do is called living,
although living in itself does not imply an active approach to life. So
the author wants to tell people, the public, how they should live their
lives, take charge, take responsibility and the opportunity to improve
the society they belong to. In the days of television, the Internet,
public relations, and politics incorporated, who needs a bunch of
literate busybodies determining trifling things such as the contents of
truth, the moral law, or the essence of humanity? Not I, says the average
member of the public and pounces his soft thigh with a loosely closed
fist. And here we come to the question of class. Set
aside for a moment that what you think you know and consider this. In
the society of a Western type there is but one class of people – those
who have money, any amount of money, who are because if it to be treated
as they rightfully deserve – as consumers[5].
Of course, this one class has a memory
of other classes that had historically preceded it and is most of the
time, when not working (although it shudders at the thought of being
called a “working class”), when not earning money, engaged in
spending money (so, yes, it would like to be called a “spending
class”) for the sake of being comfortable. In order to be completely
comfortable, a member of the spending class needs to become someone else
for even a shortest span of time. Among other activities, enjoying the
products of literary design seems to be a popular way of substituting
one’s identity for a ready-made character. The main concern of the
publishing industry is to cater to the urge to abandon oneself, to be
someone else without engaging in the actual realities of being, to
experience the suspension of one’s existence by playing a risk-free
daydream role. To feed this particular need of the market, the
publishing industry harvests different realities and transforms them
into assembly-line fictions, by extracting truths and adding popular
supplement dogmas[6].
Similar as they may be to it, the products of this industry have nothing
in common with the works of literature.
Once
we’re clear on that we realize that there is but one fraction of the
entrepreneurial activity involved in presenting and promoting actual
literature. They call themselves small presses, more out of mimicry than
out of modesty. Low expectations are easy to meet and easier not to miss
if not met. They hold the one and only channel of communication between
the author and his/her public, which, if you once again consider they
call themselves small, is not a particularly big deal. They are also independent,
meaning they are open to any serious offer of a takeover; they are alternative
too, meaning they copy that which they want to become, and as small as
they are they all want to get bigger. Guilty they are too of a number of
great feats, but mostly innocent of anything that wouldn’t resemble
imitation.[7]
And successful imitation is the foundation of any surviving business, is
it not? Of
course, truth is also that small presses are the only real innovators[8]
in the book business. At least they used to be. Now they mostly keep an
eye out for any crumb that might fall off the big guys’ table. They
are ever vigilant. They see everything, they miss nothing… well,
almost. There
are limits to what kind of a new thing the small presses are willing to
present, and these limits are not set by the small presses, or that part
of the public that manages to discover their books, but by what the
media conglomerates have labeled acceptable. The secret of successful
small publishing is not to stray too far from the norm, but just far
enough to provoke the refined tastes of the readership.[9] This
is seemingly a strategy beyond reproach, from the perspective of good
business, but under closer observation it becomes clear that a small
press will have no public unless it carves it out for itself and its
authors from the corpus (or the corpse!) of the general public. In other
words Mohammad will have to stretch his legs in order to reach the
mountain and find a few rocks that are willing to listen to him. It is
in the nature of a rock to enjoy silence almost as much as it enjoys
what it wants to be told, and an average reader is precisely such
a rock. In this the publishing industry and the small presses have
seemingly divided the market, the former providing what is desired to be
heard, the latter providing a lack of sound. Only
a rock cannot escape a sound, pleasant or not, it has to endure it, grow
accustomed to it, accept it, in time – in more or less time. From a
market point of view, it was always true that everything can be sold,
but among things that can be sold there are those that are easier to
sell than others. Understandably, if one is catering to the existing
needs of the public, one will deal with commodities that are easier to
move. But since the media conglomerates are already doing it, there is
no point in competing for that type of a market, thus a truly innovative
small press should look to the needs that are not even experienced yet,
move away from the immediate necessity and anticipate the needs of the
future. Still,
even the most idealistic argument cannot look over the fact that in
order to print books you need to have money, because reforming the
publishing business will take some considerable time even without
attempting to reform the printing business. Some small presses have
ingenious solutions to the problem: Natalija
& Ognjen, Have
you noticed the part where the editor of a small press inquires whether
the young LITERARY authors “do their own paintings”? You have? Good.
Then please, read on. admit
2 ! By
now you are surely intrigued. This is something else, you say to
yourself. And it is. It’s something completely else. n&o, Thus
in just three emails two novelists are reduced to play badly the roles
of collagists, which is bad in itself, but not half as bad as, for
example, paying for your work to be read by an editor, or enter a
contest where the combined fees paid by all the contestants conveniently
cover the first prize = the editor’s honorarium (no, there’s no
honor in that, our friends)[12]. In
a consumerist society an author with a book that has not been published
is a helpless, hapless drone. If the book doesn’t reach any audience,
the work is fruitless, the work, in a manner of speaking, does not even
exist. Everything that is usually suggested to an author in order for
the work to be presented to an audience is wrong, both morally and
artistically, regardless of the fact how sane it might be in terms of
good business. Because the author is not a sane businessman, if one
displays a sane businessman’s behavior one does not even attempt to
write literature. One might engage in the enterprises of literary
design, but not in literature as art. So there is no use in telling an
author to have a specific audience in mind, because what that really
means is to have an audience of publishers (and occasionally agents) who
presume that they recognize and understand the tastes, needs, and
dispositions of the greater public. In spite of what is proclaimed by
business owners, no truly great book was written with a specific
audience in mind, the only need that an author should be expected to
cater to is one’s own need to communicate. Yet in order to communicate
the author requires mediators, middlemen, otherwise one is free to hang
one’s words on the thin air. What,
on the other hand, a small publisher needs to do is not to go under, but
to stay afloat financially speaking, jeopardizing, in the process, less
of one’s own business postulates and more of the author’s artistic
vision. The problem thus is not in running a good or bad business, or
printing good or bad literature. The problem arises when the diversity
of venues and ideas gets reduced for the sake of the sale, when
publishers become so market-minded that they all come to think alike,
when the flow of ideas and innovations gets so reduced by the
funnel-shaped frame of mind of the small presses that the time comes
when there are books which no publisher is interested in supporting and
books which any of them would gladly accept. The publishers themselves
then cease to be an audience, the public ceases to be an audience, and
the only audience for an author to address is the market, which exists
without anyone seemingly taking responsibility for it, a veritable deus
ex machina, a thing of its own oppressing any free discourse. This,
however, is only the business side of the argument. There are books that
fail to get produced because the market says they oughtn’t be
produced. But
of the small portion of books defying the market, most of them are
produced by small presses, more often than not a single person
impersonating a press. Here, if the market is left out of the picture,
the criteria that a book needs to satisfy are personal preferences of
the publisher. What this usually means is that the one-person-press will
support a book he or she feels strongly for, which in turn means he or
she will support a book that speaks to him or her alone on a very deep,
personal, dare we say, intimate level.[13]
This might be the book that one would write oneself providing one would
know how to do it. In other words, a book that would receive support of
such a publisher would be the one in which he/she could recognize
oneself as an author. What the actual author becomes here is a sort of a
surrogate mother (publishers might view it differently, but then again
this argument is not written by publishers), an author released from
authorship, since the final decision, whether a book reaches an audience
or not, is taken out of the author’s hands and placed in the hands of
the publisher. Observed from this angle (all) small presses are
vanity presses, all are involved in self-publishing more than in the
publishing of the other, and all small publishers abuse their role of
the middleperson, competing for the foreground with the author. The
solution to this problem seems a very obvious one – instead of a publisher assuming the role of the author, the author
should take matters into one’s own hands and become a publisher. But
whatever you might have heard, there is a deep, indeed abysmal
difference between the reception of a self-published work and that
brought forth by a “legitimate” press, and this difference has been
in huge part worked upon and deepened by the presses attempting to deal
with the disloyal competition. For the system of literary production is
such, that any benefit from self-publishing is removed from it, for the
longest possible period of time. A self-published author will usually
not be granted an audience, criticism, or any academic scrutiny (not in
his/her lifetime, to be sure), simply because to offer one’s work is
not enough, one needs to be in the position to reciprocate favors prior
to receiving any. Help, understanding, support, and acclaim come to
those who don’t depend on them, in order for the kind, benevolent
energy not to get lost or diluted. Just think how terrible it would be
if the university professors would start teaching from books by
self-published authors. Who would in turn publish those professors? A
horrible, horrible image indeed. That
is why a work of art, that art that finally reaches the audience, has to
pass through at least a double if not a threefold circle of utter
selfishness. Since it is an essentially selfish urge to put words to
paper and expect anyone to read and/or admire them. It is an essentially
selfish urge to publish such words, to insert oneself in the role of the
go-between, to earn merit on the basis of transporting it, to indulge
oneself in the abandonment of the illusion that noble deeds are equally
pleasant and comfortable. It is equally selfish to recommend a work of
words, because what the one making a recommendation hopes to communicate
is some of one’s own identity, that in the process of critique some of
that divine authorial dust will rub off of him. Because, isn’t it so:
every time you clap your hands a new critic is born. Admittedly,
this would be a poor argument without there being some solution to the
problem offered. What we suggest is basically a departure form the
prevailing perspectives on authorship, publishing and the audience, in
terms of literary art. Firstly,
the author must be clear what are his/her choices if determined to
create art. No audience should exist in the author’s mind, except the
entire mankind. This is somewhat a shotgun approach, by shooting high
one might hit nothing at all, but only by shooting high can one hit
high, unless one is a very bad marksman indeed, in which case it’s
best to stay out of his/her range. Next, the author must come to terms
what represents the new in the world of art. New exists, it is
attainable, it might not be recognized until it gets a bit older, but it
is there nevertheless, and no concession should be given to those who
try to have the new fit the old. Furthermore, there is no art that
sells. What is usually sold under art is the impression of art, the glow
that emanates from it, the smell of the roast, the radioactivity of
plutonium, not the story itself but the story about the story, not the
ideas but the socks that the ideas wore, the secondary effect, the
aftershock, the tsunami, the mould of the cheese. Art cannot be sold. It
can be produced, promoted, offered, appreciated, debated upon but it
cannot be sold. It can be packaged, but when sold in a package it is the
package that’s been sold, not the art. The
readers need to be roused from their slumber. They need to be pulled by the
small of their hair for being tricked into believing that what they have
been offered, that what is freely there for the taking (providing one
pays for it) is in any shape or form art. Sure they like to flatter
themselves and like even more to be flattered to that they are
connoisseurs, that they recognize and treasure art and all those high
and lofty sentiments that are nothing but the cellophane on the product.
They need to stop allowing themselves to be fooled, they need to accept
that the new that’s been sold to them is the old they accept and are
comfortable with. Art is not pleasant, it’s not cozy, or comfy, it is
hard, as hard as life is, it demands involvement, does not cater to
complacency, is not offered on a silver platter but sought after,
tracked, traced, actively looked for. As
for the publisher, a small publisher, he/she must come to terms with the
fact that he is not an author, she is not an author, but rather that
original reader who must transcend the laws of the market, must
transcend one’s own pettiness, must look for the real innovation,
fight against instincts of survival, because for art to be appreciated
everybody involved must die, the author, the press, even the initial
audience. In other words a publisher must not be an artist of letters,
but an artist of dying, must be able to die a convincing death, yet stay
alive, must be a Lazarus for the Christ of the author, must publish what
one hates, and fears, and doesn’t understand, because if literature
would be comprised of only what we love, are comfortable with, and
understand, we would end up only with a rosy image of ourselves, us
aging Dorian Grays, staring at the face we would like to possess, lying
to ourselves for the mere pleasure of hearing our voices articulate the
deceit. But
the main answer to the issue of narrowing down the audiences’
perspective on literature lies in authors cooperating on a more
efficient level. What we suggest it this: it is deemed inappropriate,
and proven ineffectual to publish one’s own work, by self-publishing
the author communicates only with his/her most immediate surrounding.
So, instead of self-publishing an author needs to publish – other
authors. This way a network of mutually published authors will develop,
each author rather selflessly offering his/her own audience to the
other, and receiving the other’s audience in return. The principle is
more or less similar to self-publishing because it calls for the
proliferation of one-person-presses, but the main difference is that a
communication channels are established, that there is an exchange of
experiences and ideas. In order for the author to attract attention to
oneself, he/she must step aside and help the other, because the other is
in the exact same situation even if his/her ideas are not identical to
ours. This is what needs to become the basis of literary discourse, or
literary communication and collaboration. To be sure, there will still
exist those individuals interested solely in presenting other people’s
work and creating none of their own, same as there will still exist
large media conglomerates dealing with commercial literature or literary
design. There will also exist authors who do not wish to cooperate, who
find their work is superior to the works of others, who will expect to
be discovered, stuffed, and served with an apple between their teeth to
the expecting public.[14]
The point of cooperation in literary production, or publishing, to be
more precise, wouldn’t be to do way with any of them, finally they are
their own biggest problem. But what could be achieved by authors
collaborating is the diversification of the literary discourse,
expanding of the definition of what is literature, of what is deemed
publishable, readable, acceptable. The public does not know what it is
ready to consider or accept unless it is confronted with it. Publishers,
small or large, should not be in the position of determining what is and
what isn’t literature. Literature is whatever authors produce, not
what gets printed, not even what gets read, and the public needs to be
under constant pressure of the new, the real new, the kind of new that
is raw, bleeding, alive, not wrapped in plastic, the public needs to be
constantly tested, because authors around the world are constantly
testing themselves; limits to what literature is and can be
need to be ever expanded, pressed upon, and that is exactly what the
obligation of small presses needs to be – to press, to persist, to
push, expand, dilate – and not to placate or patronize. Admit it, we
are all in the business of what we don’t yet know, and because of this
it is preposterous to set limits and boundaries, to set rules and
etiquettes, the space of literature demands to be liberated over and
over, again, once more, in your lifetime. Thus
what could be hoped for by organizing a new front in the struggle for
the minds of the readers is that by stealing some portion of the market
from media conglomerates and other publishers uninterested in constant
change they will be forced to broaden their definitions and set aside
their antiquated patterns. Change is what every market fears, change
beyond its control, and change is what the authors must produce in order
to shift the balance of power to their own advantage. This is what the
essence of literary terrorism is about. The innocent will suffer,
exactly because they are innocent of any action. The adversary is by far
superior in what he deems is most important, namely, the money. The
authors need to organize, they need to test the power of the powerful,
and need to fight for what belongs to them, for what they have a right
to – their audience – because there is no art in which the artist
can be denied his/her audience to such a degree as in the art of
letters. … And? … Is
this it, you ask. The brilliant new solution to every writer’s
predicament? Well,
if it sounds a trifle too familiar it is because it already exists in
some small extent, and no, we don’t claim to have invented it. But
what we suggest is that it needs to become a wide-spread practice, that
the authors need to work to give this particular type of publishing more
credibility, in fact to refuse to provide any further credibility to
other, orthodox types of publishing. You’ve been told, and they’ll
be happy to tell you again, one cannot live of writing, and so the
authors perish and presses survive, the former seemingly in the business
of dying and the latter in the business of living. Well, that is exactly
what needs to be changed. If there is no living to be made in writing
there certainly shouldn’t be any living to be made in publishing.
Because what is an author? A human being. And what is a press? An
enterprise. So if any logic and order is to be restored in the literary
production the presses will have to be sacrificed for the sake of the
authors, and not the other way around, a business will have to get into
the business of dying, into business of bad business, a business will
need to live long enough to distribute a work of art and then die in
order for the art to live.
[1]
The term terrorism is here for a number of reasons, the most
important of which is that today it refers to the last possible
means of fighting a superior adversary. In time when no other means
of resistance and struggle is possible, when all channels are
controlled and owned by whomever you’re fighting against,
terrorism is the only possible venue for your frustrations. What it
postulates is that the innocent should suffer because of their
inactivity, the honest, the righteous, the god and law-abiding will
be hurt because they are not innocent at all, because they are made
comfortable by what ever is oppressing those who resort to
terrorism. When it comes to literary terrorism it does not however
involve violence. Raids on Narnes & Bobles, Handom Rouses,
Doarbers would only create corporate martyrs. In fact, even
mentioning their names would further promote them. In its nature the
Internet is perfectly ignorant, it has a soul of a machine, it shows
a type of mathematical sympathy for the financially unprivileged. To
include correct names of the oppressors in a text condemning them
would result in a number of misdirected visits. The Internet knows
no irony, or criticism, it is powered by the atom of the search
word, a contextless term, it turns a sequence of letters into a logo
before they are given an opportunity to form or relay a thought.
This is also why the term terrorism is used, when a number of
synonyms could have been utilized. In a literary discourse those are
all just words, but when posted on a web page they become magnets of
human interest, both positive and negative. Because of all this
reckless games with words are to be encouraged, evil does not exist
in the word prior to the act that the word describes, any call to
bring down the oppressor is just, people have a right to
self-determination. No one has the right to speak on behalf of the
other. Of
course, terms such as “impotence”, or “bomb”, or “kinky
sex with animals” will result in numerous other misdirections, but
people who don’t know what they are looking for should be
misdirected from time to time. To any other less benevolent Internet
roamer, member of a law enforcement or intelligence agency, all we
have to say is – this is literature, what are you doing here, get
out!
[2]
Here we do not even wish to consider literary agents, whose
existence is equally miraculous as that of a dry sponge at the
bottom of a sea. As far as agents are concerned they can die and
decompose since they in no way contribute to the advancement of
literature as art. Never had, never will. What’s more, we take
this opportunity to ask them nicely to abandon the use of the
adjective “literary” in stating and promoting their profession.
It does not belong to them and they should kindly return it. We
won’t ask twice! [3]
In order to serve that purpose, to tell the people what the people
want to hear, there is a type of industry that is known as big, or
corporate publishing. This industry deals in printing, promoting,
distributing and selling the labor of craftsmen who engage in
literature-like production. Not only by creating artifices that
imitate life, but that also imitate the art of literature, these
laborers engage in what could roughly be named as literary or word
design. But don’t be confused, although in appearance very similar
to actual literature this activity is in fact a branch of the
entertainment industry the purpose of which is to put you to sleep,
make you comfortable, docile, and keep you at the level of complete
imbecility. Throughout our text we will not refer to this
literary-like activity as literature. In the sense we discuss it
literature is above all art, meaning that it is and should be free,
all connotations of the word free included. [4] One suggestion can certainly be found in Jean-Paul Sartre’s “What is Literature?”, and can be paraphrased, in a nutshell, as a need to address and expand the freedom of the reader. For Sartre, literary text becomes a sort of a blueprint which a reader can use to exercise his/her own freedom. This function, according to Sartre, had been most in tune with the necessity of the moment in times preceding and immediately following bourgeois revolutions, when the author as a member of the bourgeoisie sought to promote the freedom of the class he/she belonged to. This is certainly confirmed by the position of Friedrich Schiller, expressed in his letters “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”. “If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom,” says Schiller. [5] Indeed, the author belongs to this class wholeheartedly. “The writer consumes and does not produce, even if he has decided to serve community’s interests with his pen,” says Sartre arguing that there is no correlation between a literary work and the award the author receives for it. But along with the fact that there exists only one class (consumers), we must consider that among that small number of people able to envisage existence beyond the class of consumers literary authors stand shoulder to shoulder with other artist. Yes, we are all consumers, but some of us are able to imagine how it would be if that class was to be transcended. There are other modes of existence, the fact that they are not being exercised by anyone doesn’t mean that they are not there. So if in the time of the Enlightenment the role of the author was to promote the class he/she belonged to, today this role is diametrically opposite. The writer of today needs to see what are the problems of a one-class society. Socialism had collapsed because it had insisted on one (uniformed) class. Same will happen to the capitalist system. Alternatives need to be looked for and found. The paradigms of the past will not help us in that search, except as a way not to follow. But an endnote is hardly a place to offer a solution. We will develop this subject further in future. [6] A work of literary design, a product of the publishing industry could in a sense be compared to low-fat milk which is first reduced to an opaque liquid only to be “enriched” by added vitamins A and D. The fat that gets extracted is the truth, any truth a work of literature might contain, meaning any link that particular language-based construction might have with reality, and vitamins A and D are stereotypes, marketable beliefs and dogmas, ingredients whose purpose is to control and direct minds and actions of the readership. [7]
We intend to give not a paragraph to the print-on-demand phenomenon
(an endnote will do). Those publishers are even not in the
bookselling business. Their ingenuity is responsible for solving a
bad publisher’s ancient predicament – how to take the public out
of the equation? Simple, by turning the author into his/her own
book-buying public. Instead of 12.000 readers all you have to have
is 12.000 authors, e voila! One of them actually brags with
that exact number on its web-site. And why not? Doesn’t each man,
woman, child, pet dog has his or her own story? Life writes novels,
our darlings, and people who pen them (or keyboard them) also buy
them. Perfect! [8] Apparent contradiction stems from the fact that the term small press refers to the size of the undertaking, and that a new term has to be coined for those presses which are still concerned with innovation. We suggest that they are to be called authors’ presses, for reasons that we discuss in the remainder of this text. [9]
What else is an author to think when ideas such as this one follow
the rejected manuscript: “If
you don't mind me throwing out an idea, I would suggest that you
take the format of two writers in a more creative direction: the
relationship of kidnapper, kidnappee; CEO, janitor; refugee, UN
soldier; etc.” This goes but a trifle beyond the antiquated demand
that art should imitate nature, don’t you think. Only what would
this be, art imitates… Hollywood? And to disperse any illusions,
this is a part of a reply by a small, very small press, which
allegedly prides itself with self-proclaimed alternativeness
opposing the commercial control of corporate publishers. Here
is also where we’d like to offer you a recipe for a bestseller. We
decided it was best to hide it in the endnotes to force whoever
might stumble upon this text to actually read. Anyway, are you
ready? Here it goes – in order to write a bestseller you need to
become someone else, the best choice would be to join the armed
forces, for example air force, which would provide you with an
opportunity to bomb some civilians, feel distraught about it, shed a
secret tear or two, write about your experiences, making sure you
mention you’d do it all again if, for example, democracy would be
threatened by peoples with beards. And remember, whatever you do,
act sincere, you’re sure to make it. It’s a cinch. Oh, yes, and
find God while you’re up there unloading the bomb bay, it helps
boost the sales. [10]
It goes without saying that these email messages are presented in
their original form, the splendor of their charm and typos included.
The only things that are cleverly disguised are the names of the
perpetrators. [11]
Not to confuse the gentle reader, here is our original “collage
idea” with, as you’ll notice, slightly more emphasis on the
actual novel than the collages we don’t and are not able to do: “We
thought about the limited edition and:
a) it will include the integral text of the novel
b) one idea is to put actual polaroids of LA, loose
change, movie theatre tickets, supermarket bills, receipts, fliers
(all of which we have in large quantities), but the question is what
would be the best way to do it, make original collages (how many
100? 200? 500?), just insert them in the text (divide all objects in
let's say five groups, find five places in the book where they'd fit
the context, leave space for them in the layout, superglue them
in the actual books? can this be done? in what time?)
c) do original illustrations (how many? 5? 7? 12?) send you
jpeg files for you to print them out (would this be
original/handmade enough?)
d) we teach and are students at an art college, so how about organize
art kids to donate their scrap art, bits and pieces, sketches,
something they cannot use and would throw away, make them cut
their submissions to the size of the page of the book, print
their names, links, wise words on the back of each
illustration, could these things be bound together with
the text as illustrations? no matter what paper/material they come
on as long as they're the right size? would it be legal? (if
you're interested in this we could check at our college for
permission, maybe even organize a contest online, on our respective
sites (we have 2))??? that way we could animate the largest possible
group of people and who knows, maybe some of them would even buy the
book (or at least their parents), and it would be a genuine
collaborative effort???
e) try all of the above and see what we come up with (our guess is
we'd need at least 5 illustrations between parts of the novel
[“Mr. & Mrs. Hide”] 1-2, 2-3, 3-4, 4-5, 5-epilogue (did
we mention, the novel is now divided into 6 parts, 5 + epilogue,
since it had to be organized in some way) - because the
theme is reality vs. fiction, or reality in collaboration with
fiction, so anything we can throw in works, even if it's just a
piece of asphalt or a fistful of beach sand
f) how much would it cost to throw the whole thing in a really plain
cardboard box, include the illustrations and college kid's scrap
art, bind those with the text, but also fill the box with loose
change, sand, leaves, cigarette butts, candy wrappers trash,
because this is what our book is about - EVERYTHING!!!
g) how far can we go, we need some guidance, and we need to do as
little manual labor as possible especially because this'll be a
bicoastal operation
h) so we'd like you to think about it and reduce for us the list of
options, the illustrations used need to be real, not only real in
material sense, but they need to be reality, they need to be banal
and dirty, and make no sense until the book is read, they need to
confuse and possibly shock, but not to the extent of shit in tin
cans or used condoms...” [12] All common and despicable enough practices indeed, from which the authors of this text had managed to steer clear of, and wholeheartedly advise the same to any author or reader. [13]
Consider the following segment of a rejection notice: “We are a
very small publishing house operating out of our own pockets. We can
only do two books a year, so we must be absolutely passionate about
something to publish it.” Now, this would all be very well and
fine if this publishing house would be clear on what they consider
near and dear to them, but when it comes to promoting their books
they paint the picture in the widest possible stokes in order to
appeal to the widest possible audience. The picture appears less
perfect when you consider that this same press held a manuscript of
an author who committed suicide in the process of waiting for their
answer. Should we even inquire if you had ever heard of a publisher
committing suicide while waiting for an author to get back to
him/her/them. Of course, once the death of the author became public,
the publisher did the only (financially) proper thing and published
the book authored by the poor corpse. But
the problem that needs to be stressed is this – no publisher is open to
all authors, but simultaneously it is open to all readers, which is
why there is more room than little to question the noble principles
of publishers. [14]
Whoever thinks of literature as a profitable career will always
encounter his/her counterpart. But the fact is if literature was to
be thought of as financially sane, it would be a very sad human
activity indeed. In the time when technological advancements,
material advancements are so great the only course for actual, real
progress is to be found in the realm of ideas. Don’t believe what
you’ve heard, that the ideals of the past are the highest
achievements of human spirit. In any other sphere of human activity
such a contention would be absurd. To say that the ideas of the past
are not to be surpassed is to say that the oxcart is the most
advanced means of transportation. To be sure, closing the chapter on
the intellectual evolution of human beings benefits those who are in
the business of controlling the masses. Isn’t it perfectly easy
and convenient to declare stupidity and ignorance a virtue? Every
other branch of human endeavor has the in-built stipulation of
progress, every one of them except politics, religion, philosophy
and art. Why is that so? Could anyone explain, please. Why is that
so? |
