Dressed to impress

Writing as a Dissident Vocation

[Disclaimer] – Do not read this post. It is long, ugly and full of more vitriol than you know what to do with.

Chills scamper down my spine every time I see a video of Allen Ginsberg chanting (rather terribly) to calm a large crowd of restless protesters and policemen at the (frequently violent) 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. I feel the same awe when I read about Liu Xiabobo challenging Confucianism in China long before he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010.  The same gratitude for Wole Soyinka’s perseverance in the fight for a better Nigeria, for Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s exposure of Soviet labor camps, Ninotchka Rosca’s attacks on gender exploitation and the oppression of women, the nine Vietnamese writers jailed for their pro-democracy efforts.

A Dissident Vocation

I have always believed in the ability of Dissent to keep us from the ecstatic doom of popular thought and emotion, in its power to bludgeon us closer to perfection. And if I have believed in Dissent, I have believed even more fiercely in Dissent as the natural state and responsibility of writers.

If a people succumb to lusts unbalanced by love: the romance of war, obsessive accumulation of wealth, celebration of stupidity, excessive love of self, corruption,  ceaseless consumption and so on, it is because the writers among that people are silent, unmoving and polite. It is as Mario Vargas Llosa said in his Noble Prize acceptance speech:

“”We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist. Like writing, reading is a protest against the insufficiencies of life.”

It is our responsibility as writers to be non-conformist, restless, suspicious of common knowledge, distrustful of authority, paranoid and perennially dis-satisfied. To be writers is to reject the cliches in every facet of society and our lives,  to search, fight, feel and listen our way to the truth we make known in our fiction. This is how we make things better, by refusing to accept the way they are now.

“A certain kind of intelligence may be nothing more or less than a superior capacity for dissatisfaction”   –  Alaine de Botton

Dissent is necessary. We are all failures

Good Little Writers

Quick! To the nearest Top Ten list of best books of 2010. Find ye any dissent?  Gorgeous prose? Yes! Innovative structures? Yes! Explorations of the middle class psyche? Yes!  Postmortems of lifeless marriages? Yes! Gloriously charming child narrators? Windows into immigrant life? Yes! Dissent? Dissent? Dissent?

We-this new generation of writers are a quivering, saluting sea of limp penises.  In a time of two wars, of  heated and frequently violent ideological debate, ubiquitous corporate power, terrorism, crazed shootings, obscene materialism, increasing income inequality, constant surveillance and exponential stupidity,is there nothing we can fight for?

This is not another lament over the great decline of literature (okay, maybe a little). It is a lament at the great decline of dissident writers, writers who live unashamed in and unafraid of the public eye and against public tides.  This is a protest against our abdication of our dissident roles in public discourse, a rejection of our Charles Barkley “I am not a Role Model” attitude.

We do not Howl for anything, we do not fight for anything, we march in no picket lines, we refuse no handouts, we make no demands, we avoid all arguments (don’t you dare mention Franzenfreude), we embrace all corporations, take what we are given and yessuh along with it, race en mass to the hottest new product, buy, buy, buy,  be polite, inoffensive and normal.

This is a protest of the culture that leads a young writer to ask Ron Hogan on Publishing QT if authors should have negative opinions. The question (and the response) boggles the mind. To that writer I say:

“Yes dammit! You’re a writer, have any opinion you want, have sex in times square, call the Pope a moron, call for thrice weekly church services, vote Palin for Prez, chant “publishing sucks” before bedtime, marry Markus Dohle, protest the wars, buy flak jackets for the troops, call out fellow literary writers for being boring blowhards, piss of the genre army. Have a bloody opinion, and not just because it’s cool or profitable, but because you’re alive.”

The spirit of dissent is more alive in a brace of street artists than in our whole lot. More distrust in cypher of conscious rappers than at entire literary festivals. Money invades even these spheres in the end, but writers are so far gone, so attached to the rich, gentlemanly tit of our establishment that it’ll take a miracle to set us free again. We have no underground, no other ground to grow writers and books free of conformist influences.

Where is our Beat generation, our Nouveaux Philosophes, our Bloc 8406? And maybe we’re not as far out as these forebears, I would have been a stuffed shirt amidst the free love and delinquency of the beats and a dumbass among the New Philosphers…but their spirit of dissent was and remains necessary.

Within the Hive

We are not so bad at Dissent in our little corner of the blogosphere. Look at all those top ten lists and anti lists eh? The silly Franzenfreude, whitewashing outrage, propriety rage at the pedophilia book, to Nanowrimo or not to Nanowrimo, plagiarism kerfuffles and the like. The clang and clamor of sparring opinions ring loudly and clearly on Twitter, blogs and the book review sections of the big papers. But this is all within our hive, hidden and irrelevant to the tens of millions of readers who don’t read book blogs, literary mags or follow publishing related tweeps with the obsession of Bieber fans.

And we wonder (in anecdotal fashion) why people aren’t reading anymore.

Outside these walls, in the real America (oh Sarah!), we are cardboard characters, flatter than a EEG graph measuring Mrs. Palin’s brain activity. Literary and genre superstars write their books on cue, publish them on cue, market them on cue, start over again in a remarkable mimicry of a production line.  All of the creativity and mischief we possess and show in our little world mean nothing if the much much larger world out there doesn’t see or isn’t affected by it. This little light of ours, we’ve got to let it shine…like a mutha.

Self Publishers: The Shackled Free

Can you hear the bells? The harmonious singing of literary angels? A voice in the wilderness crying  ”Freedom is coming?” The writers have been set free, they can self publish now, escape the tyranny (and excellent distribution) of traditional publishing.

Yet when writers today decide to free themselves of whatever constraints (like entry) traditional publishing may put on us, do we write what cannot be written in the traditional world, do we speak hushed truths? Do we embrace fully the freedom we now posses? Nosiree! It’s the same fecal subject matter over and over again. Books as conformist and mindless as toilet paper.  The same obsession with production, copies sold, amazon rankings, twitter followers, apps, making money.

More than ever, we are free to write the truth, to say what others will not. But we don’t, we like the feel of these shackles dammit, yes we do.

Dissent is Bad for Business and Pleasure

You will not share this post.

No one likes to be the bearer of bad news, least of all you.  I’m not just saying that, it’s science. You’re friendly and you don’t talk if you don’t have anything nice to say, just like your momma told you. You couldn’t possibly take any of this to heart, you might offend someone, piss of an editor or a crucial bloc of readers. The country is in a recession, people want good news, happy news, entertainment! This no time to make a fuss.

How is your agent supposed to sell your book to publishers if you’re bashing them all the time. Shit, how are you even supposed to land an agent if you’re a dissenter? They don’t like negative writers. No, you have to be quiet, you have to be trusting, you have to maintain the proper business climate…or else.

You will not share this post.  Or maybe you will.

But you’ll comment on the paranoia and suspicion you note lurking beneath my words (we both get cookies for job well done!). Maybe I’m bitter, you know that stuff eats writers inside. Maybe you’ll write a response and give me the Lee Siegel and B.R Meyers treatment, an evisceration for daring to question the glowing success and state of the literati. For the record, while this post may resemble a Lee Siegel or B.R Meyers piece on crack, I am different from those guys in that I am able and willing to kick you in the nuts.

In your response you will display how much better read and informed you are (all true to be honest, I am but a humble philistine). You will be far more rational than I am here because you are a better person than I am (which you are). You will call for optimism and unity because those are always nicer and better than dissent. The Lauren Conrad novel? “Tis a scratch” you’ll say. Snooki’s work of art? “It’s just a flesh wound.” Indeed.  However, if you’re feeling somewhat ballsy and mean, you’ll connect this mound of steaming rhetoric to the tragedy in Tucson somehow (everyone’s doing it).

Maybe you actually like this post.

But its so taxing to make a fuss now isn’t it? Life is hard enough, writing well is hard enough. Why kill yourself trying to be more than what you are? Bills to be paid, health issues, terrible bosses, love lives as barren as the Sahara; who has time for this guerrilla literature? You are not Banksy, Nas or Immortal Technique. You are a writer and writers are quiet people.

Dissent Begins at Home

Dissent – like charity- begins at home and fewer areas are more in need of dissent than writers’ relationships to their work and to the business of publishing. It is in this sphere that the pressure to be a good, little writer first emerges.  It is here that a writers less optimistic about publishing first get called “Negative Nancies” or “Debbie Downers” (with accompanying blog posts), phrases meant to bludgeon them into silence and shame.

Now, my personal reaction to these phrases is to tell the wielder  to stuff a rolled up galley up their you know whats, but that’s just me being an asshole. Let’s try for a more civil response eh?

The publishing supply and value chains are made of many parties including writers, agents, publishers, distributors, retailers,  device makers and so on. Each of these parties has varying amounts of power at different times. At all times, weaker parties clamor for a change in terms and complain about the balance of power. This dissident din helps to shape public perception and debate and can lead to real change.

This phenomenon is present at all steps of the publishing chains, publishers regularly badmouth and complain about Amazon, independent bookstores about large retailers and Amazon, small publishers about dominant distributors and the too close relationship between establishment media and the big publishers. It goes on and on depending on who’s got who by the balls.

Writers have every right to participate in this shaping of public perception. We have a right to argue for changes to terms or policies we do not find acceptable. We have the right to count every hour spent hard at work on our novels as business costs and weigh them against the compensation and treatment. Any attempts to deny this right, or to cast writers as pessimists is horseshit at best.

A quick note on literary agents who use the insulting phrases above.

“Writers might be served better looking elsewhere for representation, signing up with agents who tell their writers to shut up is very much like taking a pen knife to gunfight in Kandahar City”

Always get the facts before dissenting. Other than that…dissent away.

Moving Forward

Assuming you stuck around to the end of this self flagellation, and you’re not heavy with accumulated disgust, what are we going to do eh?

We already know we shouldn’t have any expectations of serious financial gain from our writing. We already know that the majority of us will languish in obscurity. And yet we persevere, we find new ways to survive in an increasingly tough climate. We write because we must.

If we could just fight that fight in the pursuit of something more. Something beyond sales, beyond cheap thrills, beyond living as naively as the audiences we are supposed to whisper truth to. If we could get to a place where we our value to society is not only as a haven from the increasingly vapidity and speed of our culture, but as an active source of truth they can find no where else.

We must inject ourselves into the people’s consciousness for good. We must see clearly everything that would destroy the good in our culture and we must fight those things in both our work and our lives. We must be unafraid in the face of the consequences that come with dissidnt. We must live fully in the true nature of our vocation.

Happy MLK day.

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[Update]: Ron pointed out the unfairness of me calling him out for his response without detailing that response. He’s right and I apologize. A little more on his response below.

Ron basically warned the writer of some of the consequences of having negative opinions that I wrote about in the post (offending fellow writers or readers etc.) That in itself is not a bad thing, it would be foolish to speak one’s mind without knowledge of the consequences (as opposed to despite the consequences). That particular exchange just seemed to typify the kind of encouragement or pressure writers get to be safe.

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