One year I went to the meetings of the grants panels
for the Division of Cultural Affairs. They allotted time for
public comments. The first day was arts organizations and
the second day was individual artists. I prepared a few modest
comments as a small press publisher and as a literary writer.
I stood up and delivered them in a quavering voice. I was nervous.
Nobody seemed to know what I was getting at, much less agree with me.
Not the state, not the artists. I said that I could not apply for a grant
as a small press because I was not a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit institution,
with a board of directors and a mission statement. I said I was a seat of
the pants operation who had never made a profit and never would, publishing what
I published, and that the 501(c)(3) not-for-profit institutions, with a board of
directors and a mission statement, would never publish literature. Ever.
The second day I said the requirement to submit work in one category,
fiction, poetry, or creative nonfiction, would not let me enter work that
combined all three and the requirement that I not include work that
identified me by name, to ensure blind judging, did not let me
submit work in which I was a named character, engaging in
a dialogue with a fictional character I had created, an alter ego,
or doppelgänger. By now a threadbare device of post-modernism.
The nouveau roman. Where you been, Fig? (From moldy fig.)
I was serious. I might as well have been barking mad.
A tale told by an idiot. Nouveau roman. Is that French?
It was the antinovel and I was the antichrist.