Check out “The Resurrection of Guy Debord” published today on the Guardian‘s website: “Guy-Ernest Debord would be spinning in his grave — had he not been cremated following his suicide in 1994. The arch-rebel who prided himself on fully deserving society’s ‘universal hatred’ has now officially been recognised as a ‘national treasure’ in his homeland.” For more, go here.
Many thanks to Alejandrino Delfos for translating my 3:AM Magazine interview with Simon Reynolds into Spanish.
This appeared on the Guardian Books Blog on 2 April 2008:
Andy Warhol, Serious Writer
Best-known as a photographer, filmmaker, designer and illustrator, pope of pop Andy Warhol was also an influential novelist
Andy Warhol was a painter, illustrator, designer, photographer, filmmaker, producer, journalist, editor, anchorman, and model. In her book Warhol Spirit Cécile Guilbert argues, more contentiously, that he was also a serious writer.
She makes much of his influence on Bret Easton Ellis, himself one of the most influential authors of recent years. In one instance, an extract from American Psycho and a social column penned by Warhol in 1973 are printed side by side. The similarities are striking: same tonal blankness, compulsive name-dropping and seemingly endless lists of designer goods. (Fittingly, the film adaptation of American Psycho was directed by Mary Harron, whose previous movie had been I Shot Andy Warhol.)
Warhol’s name has frequently cropped up in reviews of Ellis’s work, but the connection has been most clearly established by Ellis himself. One of the characters in Glamorama is mocked because she only owns two books: the Bible plus the Andy Warhol Diaries (“and the Bible was a gift”). The inference here is that the Diaries appeal to superficial hipsters, but the juxtaposition with scripture is just as significant. The Pope of Pop presides over the celebrity culture and branded environment Glamorama is steeped in, but his presence runs the paradoxical risk of being overlooked — it is part of the novel’s wallpaper. When Victor, the protagonist, quotes one of Warhol’s epigrams (“Baby, Andy once said that beauty is a sign of intelligence”), it is immediately disproved by his girlfriend’s admission that she has no idea who he is (“Andy who?”). The fact that she could have walked straight out of the Factory or the Chelsea Hotel adds a nice touch of dramatic irony.
Apparently, the two men met at a launch party for Less Than Zero in 1985. Warhol had not read Ellis’s debut, but was much taken with its title (a nod to Elvis Costello) that resonated with his own rhetoric. Cécile Guilbert zeroes in on the quasi-Zen minimalism of his interview performances. She sees Warhol as a Candide-like figure rather than the usual sub-Wildean ironist: a mystical idiot savant whose very passivity turns him into a mirror or a tape recorder. In his memoir, POPism, Warhol claimed that the words he uttered during interviews always seemed to be “coming from someplace else, someplace behind [him]”. This oracular ventriloquism raises issues of authorship, as does his approach to the novel.
a: A Novel — Warhol’s answer to Ulysses, published in 1968 — is the verbatim transcription of a series of taped conversations between the author and actor Ondine. The typescripts (courtesy of four typists including Velvet Underground drummer Mo Tucker who excised all swear words) were themselves faithfully reproduced down to the last typo and abbreviation. The outcome is largely unreadable, in the same way that Warhol’s films are largely unwatchable.
Perhaps I am missing the point here. After all, Warhol deliberately set out to produce a “bad” novel as an experiment and his hands-off approach provided a nice variation on Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author” (an almost literal one given the Valerie Solanas incident which had just occured). He can also be credited with taking the objectivity of the nouveau roman to its logical conclusion and fulfilling B. S. Johnson‘s dream of capturing the “enormity of life” between the covers of a book.
Warhol was a prescient writer, if not a great one. He anticipated that the truth of fiction would be ditched in favour of the fictionalization of truth and invented reality TV in the process. In a way, he was not a writer at all. All his books were either dictated or transcribed from recordings, and in this respect he was part of a curiously old-fashioned tradition that predates the Gutenberg Galaxy.
This appeared on the Guardian Books Blog on 26 February 2008:
A Reader’s Guide to the Unwritten
Modernism’s strong, silent types not only redefined the purpose of literature – they saved on paper, too
“Neither am I,” quipped Peter Cook, when a fellow partygoer boasted that he was working on a novel. There is far more to this bon mot than meets the eye, as George Steiner‘s My Unwritten Books illustrates. In fact, the “non genre” lies at the very heart of literary modernity. Blaise Cendrars, for instance, toyed with the idea of a bibliography of unwritten works. Marcel Bénabou went one step further by publishing a provocative volume entitled Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books. In this manifesto of sorts, the anti-author argues that the books he has failed to write are not “pure nothingness”: they actually exist, virtually, in some Borgesian library of phantom fictions. This is precisely what Steiner means when he states that “A book unwritten is more than a void.” But what prompts writers to withhold themselves at the conception?
Some say that everything has already been said (La Bruyère et al); others have spoken of the futility of writing in the shadow of Joyce (Sollers) or in the wake of the Holocaust (Adorno) and 9/11 (McInerney). At a more fundamental level, as Tom McCarthy recently reasserted, literature is “always premised on its own impossibility”. Kafka even went as far as to state that the “essential impossibility of writing” is the “only thing one can write about”. Or not. Taking their cue from Rousseau (“There is nothing beautiful except that which does not exist”) the proponents of the “literature of the No” (or “workless artists” as Jean-Yves Jouannais calls them) prefer to abstain rather than run the risk of compromising their perfect vision. Written books are sweet, but those unwritten are sweeter.
This sense of creative impotence stems in part from a dual historical process which deified authors while defying the very authority of their authorship. In Europe, writers and artists were called upon to fill the spiritual vacuum left by the growing secularisation of society. For a while, the alter deus stood above his handiwork, paring his fingernails, but then “I” — the “onlie begetter” — became another, the signifier dumped the signified, and it all went pear-shaped. To compound matters, the gradual relaxation of censorship laws proved that the unsayable remained as elusive as ever when everything could be said.
The realisation that, at best, writers could only hope to dress old words new and recreate what was already there led to a spate of literary eclipses. Hofmannstahl’s Lord Chandos, who renounces literature because language cannot “penetrate the innermost core of things”, epitomises this mute mutiny instigated (in real life) by Rimbaud. Wittgenstein would later insist that the most important part of his work was the one he had not written, presumably because it lay beyond his coda to the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Keeping stum and tuning in to the roar on the other side of silence was a soft option. Dostoevsky’s Kirilov — who attempts to defeat God by desiring his own humanity and therefore his own mortality and death — heralded a wave of phantom scribes. Forced to recognise that divine ex nihilo creation was beyond their grasp, writers such as Marcel Schwob came to the conclusion that the urge to destroy was also a creative urge — and perhaps the only truly human one.
Authors, of course, have always been tempted to destroy works which failed to meet their impossibly high standards (vide Virgil), but never before had auto-da-fé been so closely related to felo-de-se. The Baron of Teive (one of Pessoa‘s numerous heteronyms) destroys himself after destroying most of his manuscripts because of the impossibility of producing “superior art”. In Dadaist circles, suicide even came to be seen as a form of inverted transcendence, a rejection of the reality principle, an antidote to literary mystification as well as a fashion. “You’re just a bunch of poets and I’m on the side of death,” was Jacques Rigaut‘s parting shot to the Surrealists. Like him, Arthur Cravan, Jacques Vaché, Danilo Kupus, Boris Poplavsky, Julien Torma and René Crevel all chose to make the ultimate artistic statement. The rest, of course, is silence.
This appeared in the Guardian Books Blog on 25 September 2007:
Living Poetry
If you thought writing was a prerequisite for being a literary hero, think again.
Flaubert famously decreed that the successful author should “live like a bourgeois and think like a demi-god”. The enduring appeal of the Beats lies, to a great extent, in the possibility they seemed to offer of living, as well as thinking, like demi-gods. On those grounds one could argue that Neal Cassady — who embodied the mad-to-live “essence of Beat” — was actually the most important creative force in the group, although he never published a single book during his lifetime. Along with Jacques Vaché and Arthur Cravan, he belongs to an unholy trinity of self-destructive, protean pranksters who burned like fabulous yellow roman candles as they turned their existence into poetry.
Vaché (1895-1919) was not simply a dandified anglophile who enjoyed walking the streets dressed as a loose woman or a Napoleonic soldier. His actual military career, serving with the French army in the first world war, was rather less outwardly distinguished. Choosing to be an actor rather than a puppet, he subverted army life by (as he put it) deserting within himself. There, in that Switzerland of the mind, he would pretend that his superiors were under his orders, or that he was fighting for the other side.
It was gun in hand, sporting an English pilot’s uniform and threatening to shoot at random that Vaché interrupted the premiere of Guillaume Apollinaire‘s Les Mamelles de Tirésias on account of its arty-farty production. A couple of years later, he died of an opium overdose which may have been an accident, but is commonly interpreted as a defiant parting shot to everyone and everything — the ultimate artistic statement. For André Breton — who befriended him during the war and always claimed that he was the originator of Surrealism — Vaché was poetry incarnate. His stroke of genius, he maintained, was “to have produced nothing”.
Fabian Lloyd aka Arthur Cravan (1887-1918) put all his genius into his short life; he put only his talent (and a limited one at that) into his works. As David Lalé writes in the recently-published Last Stop Salina Cruz: “His was a life dedicated to wanton destruction, to the extent that he elevated scandal and humiliation into an art form”. Almost too bad to be true, he inspired Gide‘s Lafcadio — the infamous character who kills a man for no other reason but to exercise his free will — and kick-started the Dada insurrection when he crossed paths with Picabia in Spain.
After being expelled from an English military academy for spanking a teacher, Lloyd relocated to bohemian Paris where he adopted his pseudonym, partied hard with the likes of Blaise Cendrars and managed to become France’s heavyweight champion without fighting a single match. Never one to shy away from self-promotion, Cravan ruthlessly exploited his reputation as a pugilist poet (although his boxing was on a par with his writing skills) and got a lot of mileage out of being Oscar Wilde‘s nephew. His antics — including giving lectures during which he insulted, mooned and fired gunshots at the audience — led to rough justice at the hands of an angry mob of avant-garde painters as well as a duel challenge courtesy of poor old Apollinaire. Significantly enough, he printed his literary journal on wrapping paper from a butcher’s shop.
The onset of the war marked the beginning of a convoluted vanishing act that led him — in various guises — from Paris to Mexico where he disappeared at sea on a drunken boat of his own making. His body was never found. Cravan, the eponymous colossus of Mina Loy‘s novel, had always been larger than life; now, he had taken elusiveness to the point of illusiveness. For decades, he would continue to be spotted in different parts of the world. He is still at large.
This was published in Guardian Books on 3 July 2007:
Slow-Cooked Books: The Virtues of Writing Slowly
In an age of unreflecting haste, there are many good reasons for authors to take their own sweet time.
Responding to an article in these very pages, back in February, I expressed concern at the accelerating pace of publishing and called (half-jokingly) for the creation of a Slow Writing Movement (SWM), modelled on the Slow Food phenomenon. Word processing probably enables people to write faster than ever, and the internet provides the sometimes dubious means of instant publication.
As a result, what often passes for fiction today would have been considered no more than an early draft only a few years ago. In truth, however, the digital age has simply compounded a problem caused by the increasing hegemony of one school of writing (the Ionic) over another (the Platonic).
Platonic writers tend to see their works as imperfect reflections of an unattainable literary ideal. They do not celebrate the birth of a new opus so much as mourn the abortion of all the other versions that could have been. In short (a keyword here), written books are sweet, but those unwritten are sweeter. Authors (and characters) belonging to this lineage have been known to give up writing altogether or contemplate destroying their own works, although they usually settle for spending an awful lot of time producing precious little.
Platonic writers are the antithesis of Grub Street hacks: for them, less is resolutely more. Since publication is, of necessity, an abject compromise with base reality, they agonize over endless revisions (like William H Gass whose novel, The Tunnel, was 30 years in the making) or grace the world with a slim volume of acerbic aphorisms whenever they can be arsed (à la Cioran).
In Plato’s famous dialogue, Socrates argues that the eponymous Ion and his fellow rhapsodes (the slam artists of Ancient Greece) are possessed by the gods whenever they tread the boards. According to this tradition, the artist, in the throes of creation, is under the influence — be it of the Muses, drugs, alcohol, a dream vision or some other variant of divine inspiration. Ionic Man does not speak: he is spoken through (or played upon like Coleridge’s Aeolian harp), hence the cult of “spontaneous prose” in its various guises. The work of art comes as easily as leaves to a tree, appearing fully-formed in a blinding flash of inspiration or in an accretive, free-associative manner as if under dictation. In both cases, logorrhoea beckons.
The Surrealists‘ experiments with automatic writing belong to this school. So do the numerous penis-extension tall tales of binge typing. A driven Kerouac composed On the Road in a three-week, benzedrine-fuelled session after fashioning a scroll manuscript which allowed the all-important free flow of words to go unimpeded. Capote‘s famous quip — “That isn’t writing; it’s typing” — unwittingly captured the histrionic quality of Kerouac’s feat. This is action writing that transforms a sedate, sedentary, haemorrhoid-inducing activity into a heroic performance.
Another prime instance of Ionic braggadocio is the legend according to which Georges Simenon once locked himself in a glass cage to toss off a novel in three days and three nights while spectators gawked. This planned publicity stunt never actually occurred, but it may well have inspired Will Self who, back in 2000, wrote a novella in a London art gallery during a two-week residency: the words were projected live on to a plasma screen behind the desk where he sat. These experiments, and others like National Novel Writing Month, are all interesting enough, but perhaps the time has come to ditch literary hothousing in favour of the Platonics’ “precious little” aesthetics.
Yes, of course, there is a social angle to all this. The Platonics belong to an aristocratic lineage which is at odds with our egalitarian times (how many authors can afford to be so unproductive?), but that should not blind us to what they have to offer. They write as if their lives depended on it. Whereas the Ionics try to merge life and literature into a seamless continuum, the Platonics, spurred on by what Paul Eluard called the “difficult desire to endure”, often sacrifice the present on the altar of posterity. How many works of fiction produced today have any staying power?
Everything comes to those who can wait, so join the Slow Writing Movement — if not now, then when you get round to it.
“Rebel With a Literary Cause” was published in the Guardian Books Blog on 2 May 2007:
Rebel With a Literary Cause
From Goethe to Rimbaud, a new book from Jon Savage reminds us of teenagehood’s bookish origins.
Through some felicitous coincidence, a stage adaptation of Absolute Beginners recently premiered in London just as Teenage was hitting the bookshelves. Colin MacInnes‘s late 50s cult masterpiece — often described as Britain’s answer to Catcher in the Rye — takes up the teenploitation motif almost exactly where Jon Savage teasingly leaves off. Mirroring the transitional nature of its subject, Savage’s Teenage chronicles the “creation of youth” from the mid-nineteenth century to the end of the second world war. Like Peter Pan, this “prehistory” is frozen “in a state of suspension, of permanent becoming.” In its end — the birth of the modern teenager circa 1944 — is its beginning.
Savage has produced a work of cultural history, not literary criticism, but he clearly shows that the proto-teenager was essentially a literary construct. Chatterton and Goethe provided the live-fast-die young blueprint which — via Rimbaud’s disappearing act and Rupert Brooke‘s shattered beauty — would lead to the James Deans and Kurt Cobains of later years.
Premature death is one way of burning always with the hard, gem-like flame of youth and avoiding the dreaded pipe and slippers. The other is fiction. Apropos of Alain-Fournier (who, incidentally, is not mentioned in Teenage although Raymond Radiguet gets a look-in), Adam Gopnik makes a distinction between the “novel of arrival,” that charts the young protagonist’s journey to maturity, and the “novel of adolescence” where adulthood is rejected in favour of extended adolescence. Le Grand Meaulnes, that supposedly archetypal coming-of-age novel is, in fact, a “refusal-to-age story” — a Bildungsroman that builds nothing.
It is precisely this literature of arrested development that holds the key to the dark secret lurking at the heart of Savage’s Teenage. Shifting skilfully from biography to fiction and back again, he makes much of the obvious parallels between Dorian Gray and Peter Pan: the “Faustian nature” of the “contra naturem” contracts and the death instinct that derives from the cult of eternal youth. We learn, for instance, that Rupert Brooke — a devotee of Wilde who was obsessed with J M Barrie‘s “tragic boy” — believed that the world’s great fault was that “its inhabitants grow old.” Talk about dramatic irony.
“It’s funny,” says Nicky in Noël Coward‘s The Vortex, “how mother’s generation always longed to be old when they were young, and we strain every nerve to keep young.” This transformation was brilliantly analysed by Witold Gombrowicz, the great Polish writer Savage fails to mention and who remains steadfastly ignored in Britain (although Updike, Kundera and Sontag rank among his most fervent admirers).
In the most famous passage of his debut novel, Ferdydurke (1937), Joey Kowalski — an amorphous thirty-year-old — is visited by an eminent old professor who treats him like a kid before marching him off to school where he fits in as naturally as a pupil half his age. If Kowalski embodies the notion (later popularised by Sartre) that identity is in the eye of the beholder, his own sense of immaturity reflects Poland’s cultural inferiority complex which, in turn, comes to symbolise the growing infantilism of society.
Ferdydurke dramatises the emergence of the “new Hedonism” Lord Henry had called for in Dorian Gray as well as the shifting human relations Virginia Woolf observed in the early years of the twentieth century. Gombrowicz was the first to sense how curiously one-sided the age-old battle between old age and young bucks was becoming. Outwardly, he says, we strive for completion, perfection and maturity; inwardly, we crave incompletion, imperfection and immaturity. The natural progression from immaturity to maturity (and death) is paralleled by a corresponding covert regression from maturity to immaturity. Mankind is suspended between divinity and puerility, torn between transcendence and pubescence. Through Kowalski, but also the characters of the schoolgirl and the farmhand, Gombrowicz diagnosed this tantalising tryst with trivia which defines the modern world.
Am mentioned in Sam Jordison’s “Surfing the New Literary Wave”, Guardian Books Blog, 12 February 2007
There may not be many new movements in books, but that’s probably because all the action’s online
Although it’s never entirely enjoyable to be proved wrong, I was still very pleased with the response to a blog I wrote at the end of last year about the lack of literary movements in contemporary literature. My contention might have received a firm rebuff, but following the suggestions in the comments has been most rewarding. They may not signal a new movement exactly, but if our times lack a Generation to rival the Beats, there’s no shortage of energetic underground activity – in cyberspace.
Admittedly there are as many yawning chasms of dull writing as high peaks of excellent prose, but for the past few weeks I’ve thoroughly enjoyed exploring this new landscape. So, with the zeal of the newly returned traveller, I thought I’d compose a rough guide to the highlights.
One of the first stopping points has to be the excellent 3:AM Magazine. 3:AM (with apologies for straining my geographical metaphor yet further) more than delivers on its promise to provide a “dip in edgier waters”. If you scroll down the huge home page, you’ll find a healthy selection of interviews and a large array of short stories. I’d recommend Nathan Wilkinson’s Probability Anxiety for one. Elsewhere, 3:AM editor Andrew Gallix’s own work is well worth reading too.
Closely associated with 3:AM is the Offbeat Generation, a loose confederation of writers, who all – at the very least – show considerable promise. Worth investigation are: HP Tinker, Ben Myers, Paul Ewen, Heidi James, Matthew Coleman, and, especially, Tony O’Neill. The latter seems to be the figurehead for this burgeoning scene. He’s a man who has taken the phrase rock’n’roll poet to its furthest edges, as a former member of the infamous Brian Jonestown Massacre sacked for behaviour too wild even for that notorious band. Having finally cleaned up his act he’s written a memoir due out in April and (already touted as the next underground classic) and some quite brilliant, not to mention shocking, short stories.
The even more sweary cousins of the Offbeat Generation are The Brutalists, following whose trail led me into fascinatingly unexpected territory. Sure a lot of the writing was of the “I’m young! I’m in London! I’m drunk! Look at me!” genre, but there was no denying its energy. Clicking through the links on these various myspace pages was also an amusement in itself. I kept seeing a bare-chested man with a gas mask on his face called “T”, for instance.
I’m reliably informed that this is the author Travis Jeppesen, but all I got from visiting his site was horrific black metal from a band called Krieg and the information that T would like to meet “denizens of the next level” and is interested in combat boots and dwarves. Unsettling as that was, it was Mr Trippy (apparently a pseudonym of the always interesting Stewart Home); who finally convinced me I’d journeyed far enough down that particular link chain, thanks to his offer of “avant-garde porn” and “better living through chemistry”
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic resides the daddy of all online magazines, McSweeney’s. It now has as many detractors as loyal readers, but still seems to have the edge on young pretenders, the particularly user-hostile Underground Literary Alliance and the smart n+1 magazine.
The best US site that I visited came thanks to a tip-off from the editor of the (also excellent) Internet Board Poetry Community blog. It’s MiPoesias, a site distinguished by the realisation that the internet offers unparalleled opportunities to let visitorshear as well as read poetry. Their online audio show isn’t exactly a laugh a minute, but it does offer some fantastic readings from authors, as well as some fine interviews. (The best I’ve heard so far is a retrospective interview with the grand old man of American poetry, Donald Hall.)
Finally, in case anyone is feeling overwhelmed by all this enthusiasm, here’s a healthy dose of cynicism about the whole myspace phenomenon from the excellent Scarlett Thomas. For this link – and several others – I have to acknowledge a debt of gratitude to Brunner, a poster on my movements blog. Thanks! I do consider myself enlightened – and, as you suggested, chastened. If anyone else would like to point out significant sites that I’ve missed, please go ahead.
Am mentioned in Sam Jordison’s “Literature For the MySpace Generation,” The Guardian, Wednesday 7 February 2007
Sam Jordison discovers how a new wave of publishers and writers are harnessing the power of MySpace and print on demand to bypass their bricks-and-mortar competitors to find new audiences
Journalists have an appalling track record when it comes to predicting revolution in the publishing industry, particularly when related to new technology. It was only at the turn of the millennium, for instance, that we were confidently forecasting that the rising “e-tide” would wash away the old publishing houses. Electronic books were going to make the traditional ink and paper product seem as ludicrously old-fashioned as Moses’s stone tablets. Meanwhile, the free transfer of data on the internet was going to make publishers’ distribution networks entirely redundant and loosen their grasp on copyright so completely that most of their revenue streams would dry up.
Of course, since then, almost the exact opposite has happened. Numerous mergers and acquisitions have ensured that the big houses have a tighter grip on the market than ever before, while the internet has actually generated new millions and new markets as blogs and popular websites have been bought up and turned into successful product. And has anyone ever seen an e-book?
Bearing all this in mind — and remembering that it takes a special kind of fool to augur change in the book world anyway — it’s with considerable nervousness that I’m now going to make my own assertion. A shake-up may well be coming — and it’s thanks to the opportunities opened up by new technology and the internet.
Leading the charge is Heidi James, the 33-year-old owner and sole employee of Social Disease, a new kind of publishing company. It does most of its marketing and talent scouting on the internet and relies on new print on demand technology to keep its costs sufficiently low to ensure that, even if it can’t compete with the publishing behemoths, it won’t be crushed by them anytime soon either.
James sums up Social Disease’s raison d’être as: “Zadie Smith is not fucking interesting”, and neither are Monica Ali and the dozens of other writers of similar social comedies that emerged in the wake of White Teeth’s huge success. “All this postmodern irony is just so dull,” James explains. “And I realised that I really hate the homogeneity of the publishing world where it’s next to impossible to get genuinely interesting work published. The big publishing houses would have you believe that there isn’t a market for new and exciting work that takes a few risks and makes a demand on its readers, but that’s bollocks. Absolute bollocks.”
To prove this point she set up her own company, taking its name from the Andy Warhol quote — “I have Social Disease. I have to go out every night. If I stay home one night I start spreading rumours to my dogs” — and promising to bring back the element of risk that James claims has all but disappeared from conventional publishers’ lists.
“I don’t believe that people are stupid,” she declares. “I do believe that readers are out there. I know that people are interested and like to be challenged, it’s just that no one is prepared to challenge them at the moment. And if the product’s not there, how can they buy it?”
The plan of how to do this is beguilingly simple: there isn’t one. James is the only person in the company, so there are no shareholders to answer to. Social Disease’s costs are negligible: a small amount for cover designs and the time investment necessary to edit the books; and because it’s print on demand, there are no setup costs associated with each print run, the writers receive a healthy royalty for each book sold and profits can be ploughed back into design and marketing.
James claims there has been a significant takeup from independent booksellers, including such major players as Foyles. Meanwhile, the books are easily obtainable through Amazon and a growing community on the social networking site MySpace is already clamouring for the kind of writing that Social Disease promotes.
The implications of all this are intoxicating. Next time a John Kennedy Toole — whose suicide has been directly attributed to the fact that no one would print his masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces — comes along, their work can not only be published online, but stand a significant chance of finding a home with publishers like Social Disease who would risk nothing by promoting them.
However, if the advantages of this kind of small-scale, DIY publishing are clear, so too are the drawbacks. Print on demand is not yet able to provide the economies of scale of traditional print runs (the unit cost of a print run of one book is the same as for 10,000) and Social Disease is never going to make the kind of profits or pack the same marketing and distribution punch as the big publishing houses.
It’s also worth noting that James’s first novel, Carbon, is to be published by more conventional methods (via Wrecking Ball Press), although she does point out that one of her writers, Paul Ewen, recently declined the overtures of a bigger publisher to sign with Social Disease. More importantly, she says, her aim isn’t to make money and sell a product. It’s to nurture new talent, promote new writing, give writers a platform and at the same time offer the public choices that big publishers can’t or won’t.
Alongside James there now stand a growing number of like-minded readers and writers, exploiting MySpace’s networking and self-promotion opportunities as confidently as their counterparts in the music industry. Away from the prying eyes of the marketing departments and bean counters, the kind of community that publishers would love to create for themselves has been spontaneously growing up.
Most attempts have been doomed to failure because the website just doesn’t offer the same advantages to the printed word as it does to music (after all, it’s far easier to listen to a three-minute song than to read a novel, or even a short story, on the site’s notoriously badly designed blog interface). Nevertheless, these literary MySpace pages, complete with links to samples of their work, attract a large network of online “friends” who share similar tastes and interests.
Chief among these are the Brutalists and the Offbeat Generation, who between them boast hundreds of MySpace contacts (including countercultural figures like punk renaissance man Billy Childish, as well as the usual handful of bizarre tribute pages to dead heroes such as Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs), and whose message boards contain adverts for a bewildering array of literary events and websites offering samples of all manner of new and obscure writers’ work.
The Offbeat Generation is not, as its spokesman Andrew Gallix (the editor-in-chief of the long-running online literary magazine 3:AM) points out, strictly speaking “a generation” (since its writers range in age from 18-40), rather it is a bunch of people “united” because they “feel alienated by a publishing world dominated by marketing”.
The Brutalists, meanwhile, is a cheerfully sweary conglomerate of writers who also claim to be “united by our disgust with mainstream publishing world that consistently rejects us.” As they explain in their online manifesto, Brutalism “means writing that shows no quarter. Writing that rages and burns across the page — writing that doesn’t worry about causing offence, breaking taboos, cutting to the heart of it. Writing that may shock and shake the reader into submission rather than gently caress them. We’re not anti-intellectual or anti-literary but we are anti-apathy and we exist in a highly agitated state.” Pleasingly, they also note: “When they call Pete Doherty a poet — arguably a near contemporary in terms of age/background/interests/location — we can’t help but laugh.”
Both groups have a growing MySpace presence, are widely read on the net and — crucially — both are using that impetus to publish their own anthologies and launch their writers through independent publishers (including, naturally, Social Disease).
At the moment, much of the material you’ll find if you trawl through the links on their MySpace pages are reminiscent of the kind of mini-zine literature that used to be sold in places like the ICA and Tate Modern shop, demonstrating an overpowering influence of Huysmans and Bukowski and labouring under the belief that getting drunk is some kind of artistic statement.
However, as Heidi James points out, web publishing has the distinct advantage in that it’s free. And, whereas in the old days you had to spend your £5 before discovering that you didn’t like the writing in the mini-zines, with the net the worst that can happen is that you’ll hurt your eyes. “There’s also every chance that you’ll be find something you like, you can put it in your favourites to watch how the writer develops and follow the links he or she provides to more like-minded authors. That’s the beauty of it.”
What’s more, while there is a lot of chaff, there’s definitely also some wheat to be found, particularly around both the Brutalists and Offbeat Generation. Even the best writing could arguably benefit from the nurturing attention of a stern editor, but there’s no denying the abundant energy, passion and pleasingly warped imagination of writers such as Matthew Coleman, Ben Myers, HP Tinker, Tony O’Neill and Andrew Gallix — not to mention Heidi James herself. There’s every hope that soon one of them might produce something rather special — and that, if they continue to expand their influence as rapidly as they have been doing in recent months, mainstream publishers will have to sit up and take serious notice.
ANDREW GALLIX 
