TriQuarterly Blog

At Stake: Writing and Law

Good writers borrow, great writers steal -- so goes the old saw. But the writer toils arduously to mask his thievery in his own invention until the stolen material appears fresh and original. Unless, of course, you’re Davy Rothbart, who had the revelation that if you steal from reality, all you need is the eye for the right material. From right here in Chicago, Davy launched FOUND Magazine, which collects the funniest and most tragic notes, receipts, journals, photographs, and anything else that can be photocopied you can imagine. People all over the world comb the streets and recycling bins for humorous or poignant peeks into the lives of strangers, and Davy and his colleagues sift through the chaff so we can enjoy the wheat.  

This Friday, November 11, 2011, Rothbart will be at the Music Box on Southport to read some of his favorite finds, both new and old. His brother Peter will perform his excellent interpretations of found songs.  If you have never seen a live FOUND show, it is worth the trip. The show is in partnership with the Found Footage Festival, which screens humorous clips from VHS videotapes found in thrift stores, garage sales, and dumpsters.  

And if it seems voyeuristic, just remember, the United States Supreme Court long ago, in the search and seizure context, put Americans on notice that they don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in anything they expose to the public, including their trash.  

Writing off the Page: Fiction and the Internet

In a participatory digital domain it is hard to tell what will provide and confer literary value. Yes. The old guard is going digital. Fine. You can get published with the old guard online. But how else have things changed? What is new and literary?

John August delineates some of the challenges writers face in the digital age. Two of the four challenges he presents have to do with the timeliness of the work: immediacy and permanence. It is quite strange to adapt our assumptions and expectations of literary fiction to a chat room mentality. Yet online, even if a story disappears from the homepage of a given publication fairly quickly, it may reappear in an Internet search for much longer than anyone would ever expect a print journal to last.

Some worry that the digital age will put an end to good literature. But even if we’re culling for quality in a search for what is literary in the overwhelming morass of digital content, we do not want to re-introduce elitist sensibilities. We want to get away from the tiers and hierarchies wherever possible. We don't want to get trapped in a mentality that ranks books above literary journal publications above other online publications above blog posts above comment threads above chats above Tweets above text messages. Yet it is exhausting to put equal artistic effort into every single use of language exchanged online. Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa said, "My hope is that the new technology won't mean a banalization of the contents of the book.”

I found his quote on what was itself a fairly banal webpage. It was right beneath a directive to “Download Audiobooks - Start your 14-Day Free Trial today. Listen on your iPod or Mp3 Player!” And on this same page, if one takes the time to truly consider Mr. Llosa’s further comment that "…good literature, by awakening the critical spirit, creates citizens who are more difficult to manipulate....” one will also find herself wondering about the veracity of, “Local mom reveals $5 trick to erase wrinkles. Shocking results exposed!” and whether or not to click on the picture of the friendly old man with the white mustache to discover which, “4 things happen right before a heart attack.”

Yet I do not believe that literature can possibly lose its way. Nor do I agree with TIME’s assertion that literature is out of control. It’s changing quickly, yes. The current world of digital publishing can easily be likened to a red algae bloom or a gold rush boom town—two analogies that do little to offer the painstaking writer much solace. And yes. Fine. The simple fact is that if we’re going to make any headway at all about the worthiness of even a fraction of what’s out there, we really do need a website called The Review Review.  But even when faced with an incomprehensible marketplace, Mr. Llosa reminds us that, “No matter how ephemeral it is, a novel is something, while despair is nothing.”

With a Small p: Reflections on Poetry

John Donne – A poem can be holy. As a severely lapsed Catholic, I usually find poetic references to God trite. Then I read this, the power of which made me long for such longing.

Charles Bukowski – A poem does not need to be holy. 21 year old males have an annoying tendency to laud Bukowski’s  genius while literature professors dismiss him as a drunken hack. But both groups miss the mark. Hank was a genius and a drunk. He wrote clear, uncluttered poems that spoke directly to the heart. Scoff at his grimy subject matter and lack of craft, but he wrote diligently and without concern for trends, a practice a lot of would-be poets should consider emulating. To Bukowski, a poem did not need to be holy or beautiful; it just needed to be honest.

Antonin Artaud – A poem can be both lyrical and obscene. Never before have I encountered poetry simultaneously so ugly and beautiful. Artaud was stubborn, to be sure, but his resistance to the rules of surrealism allowed him to break from the confines of a movement that really should not have had any to begin with.  The results are often stunning, immoral, ugly, and compelling.

Nick Laird – Poetry requires slowing down. I’ll paraphrase form a very interesting piece Laird wrote for the Guardian: In the age of Twitter, poetry is more important than ever. Information is now delivered at lightning speed, and while this is not a bad thing, there’s no denying it has altered (ruined?) our collective attention span. We are becoming trained to think that immediacy equals quality. The antidote? Poetry. What other art form requires one to slow down in order to digest it fully?

Joseph Brodsky – The rejection of poetry condemns one to linguistic mediocrity. Again, this is a paraphrase, but Brodsky advocated for poetry throughout his life in order to rescue his age from empty rhetoric, political hucksterism, and other forms of banality.  

Aharon Shabtai – Poetry should be provocative. I mean, just read this.

Nicanor Parra –  Everything is fodder for poetry.  Well into his 90s (pushing 100!), Parra is still producing poems.  Some are arresting in their ambition; others are simply hilarious. The way to approach writing might be to do as this antipoet has always done: to shake off elevated diction and just write. The lesson: there is nothing that can’t find its way into poetry. 

Ciaran Carson – Clarity and precision are everything. Carson’s best work is clear, focused, and devastating. Look no further than his landmark collection Belfast Confetti, a book of long lines and prose poems that crackles rather than rambles. No small feat.

Vladmir Mayakovsky – Clarity and Precision are nothing. The futurists were concerned with movement, not tradition. Mayakovsky evinced these concerns in his strange, expansive poems. Sure, the images are obscure and the poems are ripe for editing, but MFA tendencies would rob this work of its unique quality.  

Walt Whitman – A poem is never finished (but maybe it should be). Ever read Leaves of Grass? Okay, which edition? If you’ve decided the so-called deathbed edition is best, as it is most complete, you’re missing the exuberance of the 1855 draft of “Song of Myself”—perhaps the finest poem written by a North American. Later editions of the expanding Leaves of Grass altered the tone and bogged down the early poems with some lesser works. It’s a mixed bag, though still pretty untouchable. The lesson: no poem is ever finished in the eyes of the poet, but in the eyes of the reader the poem has an end. Constant tinkering can ruin a perfectly good poem. Ultimately, you need to learn to step back and move on. 

Literarlily: Print and Digital Lit MagsAs the Chicago Reader reported in June, the long-form cultural criticism journal The Baffler is re-launching. However, there have been few updates about how and when until this week’s blog post, which prompted Baffler fans and lefties everywhere to celebrate the mag’s 15-year publishing deal with MIT Press. 

Founded in 1988 by Thomas Frank - author of What’s the Matter with Kansas - The Baffler was Chicago-based and notorious for its goal to "blunt the cutting edge.” This included skewering everyone from bankers to politicians (both sides of the aisle), and stories like Steve Albini’s “The Problem with Music” about indie rock bands and major record labels.

Political and social goals aside,The Baffler has a rocky publication history; it was last published in the spring of 2007; prior to that, it had been on hiatus since 2003. This was partially due to a 2001 fire at their offices and partly to the Baffler’s gleefully anti-establishment bent; for instance, Summers told the Chronicle of Higher Education that the Baffler used to have a “negative subscriber list…It had people they didn’t like so they wouldn’t let them subscribe.”

The new Baffler is more business-savvy. The MIT deal guarantees $500,000 over five years, with three annual issues guaranteed for those years and the first scheduled for March 2012. In addition to journalism and criticism, poetry, short fiction, cartoons, and photographs will be published in print and online. Even better, unlike many contemporary publications, The Baffler will be able to pay their staff and writers. Chicago-based no longer, it will run out of Cambridge, MA, where the new publisher and chief editor (and author of Every Fury on Earth)  John Summers lives. Other editors include Frank as founding editor; Chris Lehmann as senior editor, Edwin Frank as poetry editor, and Anna Summers (Summers’s wife) as fiction editor. There’s also a Chicago tie: The managing editor is Eugenia Williamson @eugenia_will, a Chicago native and current Boston Phoenix staff writer (in the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Williamson and I co-founded the literary blog Literago).

The Baffler’s reputation precedes it. In Chicago, it has been a cultural and artistic touchstone. As Julie Shapiro, Artistic Director of the Chicago’s Third Coast International Audio Festival, remembers, “It was the first ‘smartypants with humor’ publication I really took to...I always considered The Baffler among the "triumvirate" of cultural forces that drew me to Chicago: This American Life, The Baffler, Drag City record label.”

For me personally, a good litmus test of meeting someone has been if the magazine was on their radar or not. The people I wanted to hang out with were usually Baffler readers.

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