I belong to the tradition of outsider, like Whitman and Thoreau, Henry Miller and Jack Kerouac. As William Carlos Williams remarked, being against the grain is solidly in the American grain, in the mainstream, and at some point the mainstream writer fades into irrelevance and triviality and the rogue, or underground writer is adopted into the canon.
Also, the underground is often transgressive. Think of William S. Burroughs, John Rechy, and Hubert Selby, Jr., or, more recently, Charles Bukowski, the Poet Laureate of Skid Row.
This is not an easy job to fill. Many are called but few are chosen. Most fall by the wayside, or fall among thorns, or fall on barren soil. It’s rare for someone to create a body of work and invent a genre to present it in. Without any help. Over the course of a writing life.
Whenever such a
writer sneaks past the gatekeeper it creates a succès fou, or runaway success.
The writer may die before this happens.
These things run in cycles. Whenever the literary arteries get clogged with glitz and hackwork, a strong dose of medicine comes along to clean things out, like pouring lye down a sink. It foams.
In Ike’s farewell
address he warned about a military-industrial-academic complex, where scholars and researchers have been co-opted
by the power of federal money. This has
happened to writing in
Deal with it. Double-Sawbuck (XX): Twenty Months of Daily Typewriting makes recent books look tame, partisan, and narrow.
It’s not just about the political and economic realm it’s about literature, and culture. What are our choices, and how do we recognize them, amid the fray.
Values, how do we know what our values are?
What is good and what is not good, Phaedrus? Need we anyone to tell us?
Yes. We need the artist. The outsider. Unbought and unbossed. Ichor in his veins, or vitriol.
Andrew Keen says the Internet is killing today’s culture, in The Cult of the Amateur.
I say corporate publishing and the professionalization of writing, as a career, are killing literature, and the worldwide web, and self-published pamphlets, are keeping it alive.
My book is a yeasty ferment.
It just bubbles up.