2nd
writers and the underground
Once in a while—I mean, pretty often actually, if you follow this stuff, and once in a while if you’re just watching it casually—you see a writer blow his top at the underground.
Here is Dave Eggers in an interview with the Harvard Advocate from the year 2000, just a few months after Heartbreaking Work came out.
There is a point in one’s life when one cares about selling out and not selling out. One worries whether or not wearing a certain shirt means that they are behind the curve or ahead of it, or that having certain music in one’s collection means that they are impressive, or unimpressive.
Thankfully, for some, this all passes. … Because, in the end, no one will ever give a shit who has kept shit ‘real’ except the two or three people, sitting in their apartments, bitter and self-devouring, who take it upon themselves to wonder about such things.
Part of this interview was re-printed in Harper’s.
In very much the same vein, a couple of years ago Vladimir Sorokin—author of the 1980s underground classics Norma and Ochered’ before becoming famous in the post-Soviet era—told an interviewer that “there are a lot of people in the Russian underground who just want to sit around and eat their own shit.” Which is an interesting image, for Sorokin, because in Norma it was respectable Soviet citizens—not the underground—who were forced to eat their own shit.
And on and on it goes. Jonathan Franzen’s now-infamous essay on William Gaddis in the New Yorker can and should be read as a response to the underground. And in music the examples are too numerous to mention.
The question that always comes to mind is: Who are they talking to? When Eggers blew his top at the Advocate, he was responding to specific questions, but clearly this stuff had been eating at him for a while. Where was he hearing it from? I have no idea. They didn’t even have the internet back then. (I mean, not the way they have it now.) The other question that comes to mind is: Why does he care? He’s broken through to the mainstream. Why does he want to beat up on little people “sitting in their apartments”? Why does Franzen care to address the people who (presumably) think he betrayed Gaddis? Why does Sorokin want to say such a thing about his old friends who haven’t gone on to become famous cult authors but are still reading their poems to the students at RGGU? It’s a mystery.
I think part of the answer is that all of these people come from the underground. Let me explain what I mean by that. There are a couple of writers in every generation who go straight from being hot-shots at their college literary magazine to a staff job at the New Yorker or a book deal with Random House. Updike did this. Jonathan Safran Foer, in my generation, did it. Everyone else—and I really mean everyone else—has to go out into a world that doesn’t give a shit. That is to say they enter bohemia—the underground. I’ll give a definition: The underground includes all young people, because they are powerless, and a few older people who’ve decided to stay in it and keep the flame alive. But the key point is that—again, with some exceptions—all writers pass through it, and it’s vital in keeping their spirits up while they struggle for more mainstream recognition.
This is a broad and possibly self-serving definition, but I believe in a way it’s the only operative one. To take n+1 as my example, we began four years ago by sharing an office in Dumbo with my friends at Ugly Duckling Presse. UDP is a genuinely underground poetry press by just about any definition you can think of. They put out difficult poetry as well as poetry in translation (also difficult)—for example they put out the poems of Sorokin’s old friend Prigov. They published Rubinshtein. And Bernshtein! They print chap-books. They will never address a very large audience, and in fact have no interest in doing so.
We were different from UDP even before we’d published a single issue. Our magazine was self-financed and had a bone to pick with contemporary culture, but it was written in as clear and accessible a language as we could find. It’s always been meant to address a large audience. We have lots of problems with Barnes and Noble, but we continue to make sure we’re stocked in B&N because there are a lot of places in America—and I’ve lived in some of them—where B&N is the only bookstore for miles and miles. Anyway: So even though in our resources and our geographical situation we were indistinguishable from our friends at UDP, we had different goals. And that was cool. They were an invaluable help to us in the early going and an inspiration. We simply would not have got out a first issue without them.
One of the toxic things about the internet, if you let it be—and I’ve clearly let it be, let’s face it—is that the underground now speaks in so many voices, and it’s hard to know which ones to take seriously—which ones are coming from a place like UDP (for example), and which ones are coming from fakes. Because I do think writers need to take the real underground seriously, because in the end the underground broadly conceived is the most committed, most intense, most important segment of the reading public. When everyone else has abandoned literature, they’ll still be there. And real writers know this: the ones I cited above made the mistake of attacking the underground, but the fact that they took the time to do so—mostly in forums that had nothing to do with the underground—indicates that they knew how important it was.
One of the interesting/dangerous things about Gawker is that it tries and often succeeds in taking an outsider position on things. One of the arguments in Carla Blumenkranz’s piece on the history of Gawker was that over time it became more powerful and more of an insider than the people it was attacking for being powerful insiders. This is true. And you can also point out that it’s a gossip site read primarily by New York media insiders—the polar opposite of the underground. But the thing is, it’s not written by New York media insiders. To the contrary: Its writers are outsiders by definition. An insider would refuse that job as it would jeopardize his standing with other insiders.
What’s more, those outsiders are not in essence reporters or analysts: in keeping with the current ethos of the web, they are aggregators. They take a sense of things that’s floating in the atmosphere—and into their email tip boxes—and formulate it into posts. But is it correct to say that this sense of things they’re sensing is coming from the underground, in even my very broad definition? I don’t know. Mostly not. But a little bit.
One figure to look at would be Jim Behrle, who does the Kreepie Kats cartoons at the end of each week for Gawker. Jim is a genuine underground poet, whose poetry I like. (In a sense all poets are outsider poets, maybe, but Jim more so.) He’s fashioned his status as an outsider poet into a kind of persona, which is also the persona of the Kreepie Kats cartoons, which (I think) he first started on his website: http://americanpoetry.biz/. It’s an interesting site. But what happens when Jim agrees to take his shtick and get paid for it by a corporation like Gawker? I’m not sure. The cartoons are so vulgar and funny that they’re almost beyond the scale of these values—but then again, no, they’re not. (Here’s the one he did about me.) So, I’m not sure if Jim is speaking there for the underground or for Gawker. A combination of the two, I guess, but Gawker’s the one paying for it.
There are a few other spots where the language of the underground is employed by people who actually have no commitment to the underground at all. (At least not at that moment.) You don’t need a super detective detection kit to see this, though I’m always a little slow to catch on.
Then there are people who will consistently and genuinely criticize you from an underground perspective: And that is something that as a writer I really think you just need to take. In my case, I’ve been hit a few times by some guys in Bed-Stuy who call themselves the Fiction Circus: Here and here. I think they’re wrong, but I respect the position. And of course the man who by now has been at it as long as anyone: King Wenclas of the Underground Literary Alliance. The King fights dirty sometimes, and knows exactly where to hit you so it hurts (he recently said that the last issue of n+1 “was even worse than McSweeney’s”—ooph), and he is indiscriminate in his opposition to all published writers, no matter the content of their books, but at least he is consistent and he never budges. He thinks all book reviews should be titled “Rich Guy Writes Book.” And his epic battle (because he will not lay down his arms) against the establishment, which manifests itself to him in his comments box, is often riveting. I’ve never been able to get very far into any of the artistic work produced by the ULA, but I do think the King’s blog is a genuine document by a writer who over the years has developed a distinct and powerful style.
What’s the point of all this? Just that if you sometimes wonder what’s going on when a writer or artist starts yelling at people whom you can’t even see, at phantoms—he’s probably working his shit out with the underground. And also that writers should never tell the underground to fuck off—because even while it often abuses them unfairly (or let’s say not altogether fairly), it’s where they come from, where they may have to retreat if things don’t work out in the big terrible world—and also in the end it’ll be the next generation of the underground that will read their works, mainstream or not.
