Ralph Waldo Emerson's comments on Jane Austen's work in the style of image macros, popularized by internet communities like Internet Poetry. Source image courtesy of the University of Texas Libraries, The University of Texas at Austin via Wikimedia Commons.

There has never been a historical period/art movement without its shit talkers.

We are cultured to understand ourselves based on exclusion: I am an American because I am  not British, German, French, Hungarian, etc. And within the initial cultural distinction, we fragment further into trades, political interests, hobbies, etc.

Before the age of the internet, the lay person was largely left out of cultural dialogue that was primarily controlled by academics, artists and politicians. Beat-appreciators could attend academic salons or poetry readings and make snide comments to their companions about the relative merit of any one artist, but there was no forum for those comments to reach the artists himself or larger literary community. As a result, literary insults were often exchanged between writers and entered our cultural memory (Ex: Truman Capote said of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, “That’s not writing, that’s typing.”). But in the age of the internet the idea of a “lay person” has become almost irrelevant in the zeitgeist. The identity of “literary critic” is no longer reserved for a person on staff at a newspaper/magazine/journal with a liberal arts education who is paid for her/his comments. A “literary critic” can be an Amazon reviewer, a blogger, whatever.^[1] The phrase “Everyone’s a critic” has become practically literal and writers/artists can now respond to their critics on an incredibly personal level.

Virginia Woolf on James Joyce. Photo by C. Ruf, Zurich, ca. 1918 via Wikimedia Commons. Love you Virgie, but I would argue that even this quip is unnecessarily reductive.

The para-social^[2]  experience in the culture of celebrity has, in some ways, transitioned seamlessly into the literary world. Contemporary readers want to know about author’s lives and feel free to comment on them. Some of the flaming remarks on Tao Lin’s Facebook profile after his divorce with Megan Boyle were made with the same fervor or inanity as entertainment magazine readers’ comments on the Kim Kardashian/Kris Humphries divorce, but unlike K&K, Tao freely offered to answer any questions from his fans/friends on the internet. Most people are guilty of subscribing to the para-social perspective at least some of the time. I have added at least a dozen writers whom I have never met IRL as friends on Facebook and I take great pleasure in reading their status updates about their writing, the funny things their kids say, drama on book tours, etc. I don’t delude myself into thinking we’re really friends, but I do feel as if I know them or know a part of their lives. Perhaps because we feel we know these people, we feel entitled to comment on their work, entitled to our sometimes malicious opinions.

In 2005, Anne Rice’s Blood Canticle received an impressive number of negative reader comments on Amazon and Rice responded with a 1,200 word rant: ”Your stupid, arrogant assumptions about me and what I am doing are slander…. You have used the site as if it were a public urinal to publish falsehood and lies…. Be assured of the utter contempt I feel for you.” This is kind of a reversal of the para-social experience. The writer thinks it is her responsibility to respond to her fans who have a personal relationship with her work.

Diversity in Discourse

The base assertion in any literary insult can be summed up as, “X has no value.” To say something has no value is to insult the audience, to attempt to divert an audience or prospective audience from a text and persuade them it lacks merit. This is a kind of pedestrian gate-keeping. We attempt to control the information the audience receives because it is in our own best interest that our audience agrees with our taste, but it can also stifle discourse.

I would argue that writers, even fiction writers, are documenters and do not create markets in the same way that corporations fabricate a need for products like the Forever Lazy or a cake pop maker through marketing. Writers attempt to respond to the cultural moment, so if a text has an audience, then it is highly likely that it is responding to some aspect of the human condition or a concern of its era. Ex: As much as I personally dislike the Twilight Saga because I find Bella to be an un-empowered and flat character, I cannot deny that the series responds to the human desire to be effortlessly exceptional and the hope that we will find something that will lift our lives out of mundanity. Even the tritest rhyming love poem that gets 400 notes on tumblr from teenage girl bloggers is responding to some need or curiosity in the audience, even if that is just a desire for saccharine puppy-love. I take no pleasure in reading either of these works, but that is because I exist outside of their target audience. The power of the internet is that audiences are free to be fragmented, and therefore more representational than ever before. Steve Roggenbuck, one of internet literature’s more recognizable figures and founder of Internet Poetry, has said as much: “[the internet creates] big opportunities for types of poetry that are maybe not respected in academic institutions but which actually have a big potential readership.”

Marie Calloway was recently in the middle of an internet literature values-based argument around a confessional non-fiction piece about her sexual encounter with an older male writer originally published on her blog and republished as fiction by MuuMuu House under the title “Adrien Brody.” Soon after, she was contacted by at least one literary agent, featured in The Observer, The Rumpus, Gawker, and shit-talked about online as a slut and attention-whore. Kate Zambreno pretty well covered a major shortcoming of the harshest critics’ comments: this kind of writing has been done by men for decades and their ethics/literary are not questioned, so what is wrong with women addressing the same curiosity? This is valid, but I think another major issue here is that perhaps these shit-talkers exist outside of Calloway’s target audience and therefore do not have the background to learn anything or find any entertainment in her work.

The Hype Machine

An image-macro featuring a stock-photo model posing as Hazel Cummings on the phone. In the background one of her image macros from "Worthless" is displayed on a computer screen made by British author Ben Brooks in response to Hazel Cumming's e-book "Worthless" and the facebook comment shitstorm that followed.

At the same time Marie Calloway was being at once lauded and flamed for “Adrien Brody,” a minor internet writer named Hazel Cummings posted a collection of image macros titled “Worthless,” a no-holds-barred series of photos laid over with satirical text lambasting a number of well-known internet writers. I will refrain from commenting on the content of Hazel’s ebook, and would instead like to discuss the rhetorical techniques used in her refutation that certain internet writers have value.

In a Facebook comment, she explained her concern that the writers pictured in the ebook took away attention from other, more worthwhile writers on the internet and proceeded to list several female writers including xTx, Frank Hinton, Chelsea Martin, some others and (seemingly randomly) me. For the following few days, Hazel received a lot of negative comments from fans of Internet Poetry. This kind of criticism addresses a decades old concern associated with new media that the shit will drown out work of “value” and threaten culture at large and any kind of assertion that certain texts have greater inherent value than others promotes a myopic worldview that romanticizes the Old Boy’s Club of literature, the perspective that only some people are in the privileged position of being able to determine whether a piece of art is good or bad and the plebeians must accept what is given to them from on high. Consider that Wordsworth was considered trash/totally weird by many in his time given that blank verse was such a departure from formal poetry; some publishers feared the popularization of the trade paperback would lead to the death of the industry; the internet is feared by old people and people who don’t understand successful filtering, or something. It is easy forget that new technology or new forms are tools with no inherent good or evil.

The internet is, in many ways, still in its infancy and we are still learning to use it as a tool. If readers miss texts that would be more valuable to the audience they belong to, then that is a problem of media literacy and of filtering rather than a problem with the internet itself. A tool only has value based on how any given user utilizes it. Another concern Hazel expressed about internet poets and Tao Lin is that they are blinding their audience to their surroundings through marketing, but this assumes a lack of agency in the audience and implies that the audience is not literate enough in its use of media to recognize when it is being marketed to. If the audience does indeed totally lack that ability there is a much larger cultural problem at hand than any that could be created by a dozen or so online writers and their friends.

This is not an argument for the merit of Steve Roggenbuck’s poetry as literature, but an argument that he and his imitators/compatriots have a valid artistic perspective. American culture is largely anti-intellectual. Given that and other factors, poetry has ceased to be viewed as “of the folke,” a means of historical preservation or entertainment; poetry is no longer commonly read or heard by the uneducated. It is common knowledge that poetry collections almost never turn a profit for publishers, no matter the press’ size or the poet’s relative acclaim. So, logic follows that for poetry (and, to a certain extent, literary fiction) to avoid sinking into obscurity and irrelevance, it must return to the streets. There will always be a place for  intellectual poetry as long as the humanities are preserved in institutions of higher education, but to restrict it to academia is much more threatening to poetry and literature as art than any one writer or micro-movement can be.

Defining ‘Criticism’ for a Generation that Grew Up ‘Flaming’

Defining something of value as anything that speaks to an audience^[3] might seem to eliminate a place for review or critical writing, but I think there is still room for this. We can argue for a poem/story/novel/film’s relative effectiveness in addressing elements of the human condition or in working within the form established by an artistic movement. This is what I would call instructive criticism, but it would seem that some critics in the emerging generation of writers have distorted constructive criticism. Some users go to HTML Giant just to read the comment section, which is often filled with post-ironic sarcasm or hateful remarks. The same could be said for the comment section of Thought Catalog and countless other literature and culture blogs. This discourse of internet comments learned is akin to flaming learned in early web forums and chat rooms. When flaming begins to be considered equal in effectiveness to rhetoric, review and criticism cease to be productive and instead focuses on silencing other speakers.

Constitutionally or legally speaking, the first amendment^[4] of the American constitution grants citizens the right to free speech, which comes with an implied right to be heard. But that implied right to be heard simply means that no other body, person or government, can restrict your right to speak. The right to be heard does not imply a requirement that any audience has to listen. If the audience doesn’t like what it is hearing, it should either turn its ear away or engage with the speaker through constructive discourse instead of insulting the dignity of the speaker through vitriol. If we’re going to be mean, let’s at least be intelligent about it.

Writers have had a reputation for their clever insults and spirited discourse, but unless flaming is once again separated from criticism, then it is highly likely literary analysis will descend into dumb rage instead of cultural expansion.

Return to text. ^1. Even further distended is the identity of “writer,” but I have already discussed that.

^2. The tendency of an audience to identify with celebrities or characters as if a personal relationship existed between them. Horton, Donald; R. Richard Wohl (1956). “Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance”. Psychiatry 19 (3): 215–229.PMID 13359569. republished in Particip@tions 3 (1) ISSN 1749-8716

^3.I would like to emphasize that I am purely speaking about art when I say anything must have some value if it has an audience, lest anyone think I would also defend hate speech, which also clearly has an audience in some communities.

^4. I am speaking from an American cultural perspective not to be particularly exclusive or nationalistic, but simply because American literature and American culture is what I am familiar with and its relationship to American law is the best analogy I can come up with given the limitations of my own educational background.

All the people/journals/poems/stories/books that were recognized last night deserve that recognition, but I wanted to give a shout out to some of my favorite pieces/entities/people from this year. Also, I will admit that my list blatantly favors the Pacific Northwest.

Alt Lit Writer of the Year (male) – Blake Butler for his continued contributions to the alt/young/internet lit community and for proving small press writers can successfully transition to large press.

Alt Lit Writer of the Year (female) – Molly Gaudry for all her support of the alt-lit community.

Best Alt Lit Novel- “The Weather Stations” by Ryan Callbecause there was no story collection category and this beautiful book of stories about human grief as told through extreme weather events has not had enough good things said about it.

Best Alt Lit Short Story – “Age Hung Us Out to Dry” by Ryan Call

Best Alt Lit Poem – “Why I Am A Tree” by Heather Christle

Best Alt Lit Online Mag – Housefire

Best Alt Lit Journal/Mag – Pank

Best Alt Lit Chapbook- “The Cows” by Lydia Davis. Don’t know if Lydia Davis can still be considered alt lit. Don’t care.

Best Alt Lit Moment- The launch of the Lit Pub

Breakout Alt Lit Writer (Male)- Ryan Call

Breakout Alt Lit Writer (Female) – Megan Boyle

Best New Litzine – Hoarse

And now, Ricky C. and I will take our dance as prom king and queen via Michael Inscoe’s video “We Are a Goldmine”

]]> http://fedinger.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/my-alt-lit-award-pics-post-award-ceremony-bonus-dance-of-the-alt-lit-prom-king-and-queen/feed/ 0 parisfrances http://fedinger.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/when-all-your-friends-are-writers/ http://fedinger.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/when-all-your-friends-are-writers/#comments Sun, 09 Oct 2011 07:18:39 +0000 Frances E. Dinger http://fedinger.wordpress.com/?p=351 ]]> I read a post on Trick With a Knife (it has since been removed by the author) awhile back that, among other things, made a disparaging comment about another writer’s remark about the number of writers she considers to be friends. The comment was something to the affect of, “I feel sorry for you because all your friends are writers,” as if it was a bad thing. This was the primary thing that stuck with me from the piece.

Mostly, it stuck with me because all* of my friends are writers and this has never seemed like a bad thing.

I spent a lot of time in Pilot Books in the summer of 2010 and befriended a couple writers that have since banded into a writers’ group that meets weekly (most of the time) to work and sometimes more often for social purposes. Earlier that summer, I had been spending most of my time with other students from my university in another writing group that has since disbanded but remain friends and see each other regularly. Some of my most meaningful relationships have been created through writing. I met my boyfriend after I started reading his blog in 2008. Many of my closest friends, even outside of my writing group, are writers in a variety of genres. This seems unavoidable in part because we are at a point in history when there is more writing available and being produced than ever.

The last time I rode the train from Seattle to Portland (to visit my cousin, who is also a writer, and to perform at a Smalldoggies Reading and hang out with other writers), the man in the seat next to me bought me coffee and told me about his failed attempts at writing. Though he did not consider himself to be working writer, he was indeed writing. In a sense, we are all writers. Consider how many emails you write each day. The diction and syntax of emailing is often different than speaking, and then emails can be divided by a sort of genre system (Ex: Work related, to friends, to family, business inquiry. Internet comments are in a genre totally their own). In some informal way, everyone is a kind of writer. It is more necessary than ever that a person can express herself clearly through writing.

In the past couple decades or so, the idea of being an “American writer” has lost a significant amount of its mystique and glamor. The reasons for this remain kind of vague to me but it makes sense considering the writer’s lifestyle is, in many ways, more accessible now than ever. Even before self publishing began, possibilities for working writers expanded with the invention of the mass-market paperback in the first half of the 20th century and the popularization of genre-fiction in the latter half. Not only was it cheaper to print books, but there was also consumer demand for a wider variety of them.

Nelson Algren said in a 1955 interview with the Paris Review that he had, “the feeling that other writers can’t help you with writing. I’ve gone to writers’ conferences and writers’ sessions and writers’ clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I’m sure it’s the wrong direction. It isn’t the place where you learn to write. I’ve always felt strongly that a writer shouldn’t be engaged with other writers, or with people who make books, or even with people who read them. I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn’t really live, he observes.”

I think this is absolutely incorrect. Or at least not correct for what I see in this emerging generation of writers. Previously, artists were the only cataloguers and creators of content. But with the advent of Facebook and digital cameras, most people are now observers or producers of content as well as consumers of other user-generated content. We all live at a certain distance from the world; this comes naturally from cataloguing experience as it is happening. Detachment is no longer exclusive to the experience of artists. It could be suggested that artists do “better” cataloguing, but this seems elitist. Artists perhaps are just more organized in their cataloguing.

The crux of the modern writer is to both live and catalogue, and, it seems, to offer commentary on the way “non-professional” writers catalogue.

But this doesn’t exactly address why I think it is acceptable for writers to be friends with each other, even to the point of being friends with each other almost exclusively. In saying, “I think the farther away you get from the literary traffic, the closer you are to sources. I mean, a writer doesn’t really live, he observes,” Algren is admitting to a kind of thievery of experience most writers seem privy to. By “closer to your sources,” this means closer to non-writers whose lives are interesting enough to put down on paper, people who will not be offended by any creative-borrowing. But the benefit of being friends with writers is that, if you’re polite, you won’t take their experience. Writers recognize what is “story worthy.” This means that, when I am sitting with a writer friend at dinner and he tells a story about running a porno magazine rental service as a child, I acknowledge that he might use this for a story at a later date and thus, I should not take it for my own work. I could view it as fair game and try to get to it first, but that would just be kind of a dick move. With this in mind, the writer is forced to either be more self-reflective or imaginative.

This also removes the gate-keeping element of story-telling. In this writing/publishing environment where writers respect the sanctity of the personal history of others, minority groups have more ability to tell their own stories instead of having them told by (mostly) well-educated white men.

*Well, not all. I would estimate 80 percent. But that is a significant majority.

]]> http://fedinger.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/when-all-your-friends-are-writers/feed/ 4 parisfrances http://fedinger.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/make-a-man-and-name-him-frank-a-review-of-i-dont-respect-female-expression/ http://fedinger.wordpress.com/2011/06/13/make-a-man-and-name-him-frank-a-review-of-i-dont-respect-female-expression/#comments Tue, 14 Jun 2011 05:21:29 +0000 Frances E. Dinger http://fedinger.wordpress.com/?p=348 ]]>

When they first hear of Frank Hinton, many people immediately assume she is a man. My mother, who recently joined Facebook and apparently occasionally views the profiles of my friends, said to me over the phone, “I had no idea Frank Hinton was a girl.” I once read Frank’s piece “How to be Me, an Instructional Video narrated by Frank Hinton,” at Pilot Books’ Other People’s Prose or Poetry night and was met with somewhat confused stares when I introduced Frank as a “woman living in Nova Scotia.”

This element of presumption is one of the reasons why I think Frank’s debut chapbook I Don’t Respect Female Expression works so well. The title likely sounds entirely offensive to anyone unfamiliar with Frank’s work. The chapbook doesn’t actively disprove its title, but instead almost seems to be championing a kind of genderless experience. Often, the gender of narrators is not specified, and when the gender of characters is specific, Frank is fair to both men and women, avoiding cliches of misogyny or whiney and disillusioned women. This is all achieved without being didactic.

Beyond gender, Frank explores human grief, the idiosyncrasies of romantic relationships, and desire, while also playing with the idea of Frank as a writer and Frank as a character. This is really where the collection shines.

“Make a Man,” one of the shortest pieces in the chapbook, is about a girl named Lili making a man for herself. That man is Frank Hinton.

Make a man and name him Frank.

Make him young and frail…. Give him access to the internet. Put him on the peripheries of what you admire…. Give him a psychic anchor. Give him yourself. Your name is Lili. Fuck him.

This is almost an artist’s statement, an explanation of work. Frank Hinton is both a writer and character. The work is both authored and, in a way, unauthored. This is why I love Frank’s work. Frank’s online persona is a, presumably female, writer-editor powerhouse, but Frank is also a male character in many of Frank the author’s stories. This prevents the reader from being too presumptuous about what in the work is autobiographical. Frank is simultaneously creating distance from the author and the work, while also inspiring curiosity in the reader, because no one likes to be denied information, especially in the digital age.

I want to believe in Frank as a cute young woman living in Canada, but another part of me hopes Frank Hinton is an ugly witch, a six-armed bear, a eunuch monk living in a small Italian villa, or something else entirely unlike an attractive hipster. That would be the purest execution of exercise. Frank’s work is important because, in an age when anyone can create a false identity online, pen-names seem pointless and almost redundant. It is no longer enough to simply be anonymous. Frank enhances her work through her persona, presenting an obviously constructed persona while still remaining sincere.

I Don’t Respect Female Expression leaves me wanting more, but it is not unsatisfying. It’s just too short. Frank is doing some powerful things with her work and I can’t wait to read more. The print edition of Frank’s chapbook has sold out but you can buy the e-book here. It will be the best $3 you’ve spent all day.

Richard recorded his reading of one of my new short stories, making some edits of his own as he went along. The text of this is forthcoming in Smalldoggies Magazine.

Richard and Ana C. released their ebook OH NO, EVERYTHING IS WET NOW this week on Magic Helicopter Press. Read it here!

Other cool things that happened in April:

-I met Riley Michael Parker of Metazen and Housefire in person for the first time.
-I read Weather Stations by Ryan Call, which was published March 1 on Caketrain. Buy it and read it. I will be posting a review soon.
-There is No Year by Blake Butler came out on Harper Perennial. It is surreal, disjointed (though, less so than Scorch Atlas) and much similar to House of Leaves but less showy. Highly recommended.
- Small Press Festival 2011 hosted a Small Press Expo in partnership with the Hugo House and Rogue Scholar.
-Tara Atkinson, Willie Fitzgerald, Summer Robinson and crew brought SPF2011 to a close with a sweet closing party, “Dancing with Pomeranians,” which was filmed by Rogue Scholar.

Photos of both the Smalldoggies and Portland Review reading as well as a video of my performance (awkward stage banter included!) taken by my lovely cousin Kerri Anne are below.

I unfortunately do not speak Spanish and I’m sure some of you are in that boat as well. The original English text can be found after the jump.

WILEY COYOTE

The winter is almost over when the coyotes come
close to the house. Each night, feet from the porch
until dad comes up from the basement with the gun.

First shot skyward.
(The clouds and animal are indifferent.)
Second shot bites furred flesh shoulder.

The animal flees wounded, blood blooming
from its shoulder. Dad lights to the woods,
into the trees and more trees and spaces between trees.

But he loses the coyote in the snow,
blood trailing into brush, thorny bushes
too thick to trail through. The snow will last

until April. and by then the body
will be gone. Nature knows
we’re April’s only fools.

Dad comes home hungry.
The coyotes will come again, hungry.
They’ve got no pantry out there,

no condensed soup,
no ramen with vegetables,
russet potatoes sprouting in bags.

How do you feed a family on doubt.
Does an animal feel responsible
for the well being of its children.

Coyote to his family:
Let’s go into the woods.
Let’s have a Donner party.*

(I love you. I will eat you)

*To avoid problems with translation (IE: The Donner party incident perhaps not being familiar to Spanish readers), the second to last line in the translated text translates to, “We will have a dinner party where we will eat each other.“

The event was organized by new-to-Seattle writer Tara Atkinson and included Ben Blum, myself, Tom De Beauchamp, Brandon Scott Gorrell, Pilot Books owner/founder Summer Robinson and others.

Last Sunday’s track list and photos after the jump!

Side A

Track 1: THE BODY, THE BURNING, THE BREATH AND THE STARS- Ben Blum
Track 2: STRANGER DANGER- Frances Dinger
Track 3: TENDER MORSELS- Jamey Braden
Track 4: THE PARTY- Summer Robinson
Track 5: TO A FAMOUS ANIMAL- William “Willie” Fitzgerald

Side B

Track 6: DIFFERENT TYPES OF JOBS YOU CAN HAVE- Brandon Scott Gorrell
Track 7: BEDTIME STORY FOR THE GREAT GRANDSON OF JOHNNY APPLESEED/BEDTIME STORY FOR ALARM CLOCKS- Tara Atkinson
Track 8: THIS IS NOT A STORY- Matt Nelson
Track 9: GOAT STORY- Tom De Beauchamp

This was just the first of a series. More mix tape readings and zines to come.

Richard visited for six days.

March was a lamb or something. In March:

-I interviewed the talented and kind Mike Young during his spring break, which was during my finals.

-I was visited by Richard Chiem for six full days.

-There was much rejoicing and also a Ustream. In parts of the video I look like a boy. We tried to record our reading of James Yeh’s story ‘I Am, I Admit, at Times, a Lazy Lover,’ but there was an error and it did not record. Sorry, James.

-I guess I got some Twitter followers?

Things read in March:
Light Boxes by Shane Jones
Blankets by Craig Thompson
most of Orange Eats Creeps by Grace Krilanovich
Common Carnage by Stephen Dobyns

Other interviews in this series include conversations with xTx, DJ Berndt, Frank Hinton and Stephen Tully Dierks.