ANTHOLOGY MOTIVATION
ABRIDGED
No Record's red anthologies are collections of previously unpublished, hitherto unknown, and wholly unprofessional writers, ferreted out of the transom by a small group of folks, and funded from the chump change in our own pockets. To coin these authors "raw" would be one way to do it. To coin them "new" might be another. To coin them "red" means something else entirely, though allusions between "red anthology," "white album" and "blue period" would be, we feel, fallacious. This is, after all, not British music or Spanish painting, but (mostly) American literature-and the idea of doing something for the sake of the idea seems a little too, um, idealistic. The writers you'll find in our compilations represent a series of folks with day jobs and rolled-up sleeves, who may not have read H.L. Mencken but who might identify with one of his finest quotes: "whatever happens, there is always a pen. There is always a way out."
We are interested in new voices. We are interested in unlikely voices. We are interested in your voice, be it new, unlikely, or unabridged. Should your voice be accompanied by the initials "M" "F" and "A" we confess a disinclination of interest. Mind you, it’s not because we think these initials can't result in something great. Rather, it’s because with them you have inherited a virtual birthright into the current publishing landscape. Alright, fine, "inherited" is the wrong word. You have worked hard. You have paid a great deal of money for the opportunity to work hard. You have worked hard on stories devised solely to impress professors, professors who will help you acquire publication credentials, publication credentials which will help you acquire plaudits and grants and academic positions. If anyone deserves to profit from the hard work you have done, it is you. And profit from this work you will. Elsewhere.
UNABRIDGED FROM THE 2007 COLLECTION
WHEN WE ORIGINALLY got together to hash out this introductory statement, we divided a single keyboard’s keys by the number of staff fingers present, and went at it. After several hours of ponderous labor (and many impromptu thumb-duels) we had come up with something that looked like this:
fouJ;rg-4ms;e… sdfuoi-94tnlsde;pq ¥ongf in ewnf gu nls13n g 20 ng juot6 ☺sdflj ds2 ☺☺ jane☺ g___ d__ ☺ ☺ ln1`2 Asd ]t \]d ]mar h rc’53y ¥
Hmm. Unless you’ve read Finnegan’s Wake one too many times, you might agree that Democracy is a dubious alternative in book publishing. So we elected a benevolent dictator and proceeded, not by small steps or great leaps forward, but hopefully not into outer space either.
This anthology is a collection of previously unpublished, hitherto unknown, and wholly unprofessional writers, ferreted out of the transom by a small group of folks, and funded from the chump change in our own pockets. To coin what we’ve come up with as “raw” would be one way to do it. To coin it “new” might be another. To coin it “red” means something else entirely, though analogies between “red anthology,” “white album,” and “blue period” would be, we feel, fallacious. This is, after all, not British music or Spanish painting, but (mostly) American literature—and the idea of doing something for the sake of the idea seems a little too, well, idealistic. The writers you’ll find here are folks pretty much like us: they have day jobs and rolled-up sleeves, and while they may not have read H.L. Mencken they still might identify with one of his finest quotes: “whatever happens, there is always a pen. There is always a way out.”
A nice phrase, sure. Question is, as it always is with Mencken: a “way out” from what?Why, when we might preserve acres of virgin rainforest, distribute milk to unloved kittens, or grant a needy teenager sufficient gold bricks to ship him to a Midwestern college whose domes rise from the center of an endlessly-oscillating cornfield, are we instead pooling our resources to bequeath to you, the public, another literary anthology? We know what you mean. Believe you us, the stomach butterflies began fluttering when we first floated the idea. Because isn’t it the case that too much literature is already being scribbled and inscribed without being imbibed? That the cream of our story-writing crop has already been plucked from the slush-pile, packed into University grain silos, stylistically freeze-dried in aesthetic degree-granting ant colonies and held ready for mass consumption during times of public duress? That, in an era of surveillance cameras, weblogs and desktop publishing, the arms of Adam Smith have stretched, Christlike and balanced, to the right and left sides of the scorched field and gathered all our remaining public ears into the vast chirographic thresher of the internet—the global village of itinerant idiots—making definitions like “unpublished,” “unknown,” and “unschooled” far murkier than in days of yore? All legitimate concerns, agreed. So we floated the idea. Then we slept on it. And when we woke up, the butterflies lifted their crushed wings and beat the blood back in. So we slept some more, then got up again, then yawned, then stretched, then went our separate ways, and the moon chased the sun over the horizon many times. When we came back together we were slightly more mature, slightly better informed, and perhaps slightly tipsy. Here’s what we’d found:
¥There were, indeed, many literary anthologies out there.
¥Most of those anthologies featured the work of dead writers.
¥Of those anthologies showcasing the work of the living, most of those showcased names were long familiar.
¥Of those names that were unfamiliar, they were generally clustered under the conceptual umbrella: “New Caribbean Writing,” or “Mystery Stories,” or “Behind Prison Walls.” We even found one that called itself “New Voices”—but, on closer investigation found its editor’s idea of a “New Voice” had been branded with the subtitle “from the nation’s top MFA programs.”
Now, what’s the problem with all of this? If you believe that God has really sunk beneath the waves of our waking life, bureaucracy is inevitable—a set of codes applied systematically to social acts, which is pretty much a conception of God, minus the flaming chariots, fountains of youth, water-walking, wine-wobbling, random asshole behavior, et cetera. Whether or not anything is “worthy” in some fundamental sense becomes unimportant; there are streets in heaven, and those gold bricks were set down by somebody. Raising one’s head to praise something ineffable? Bah! Why shouldn’t we walk with eyes glued to shoes, pondering the preplanned cracks in the sidewalk? Why shouldn’t we organize our anthologies around a central idea? After all, it’s claimed, by many, that constriction is a sign of maturity; that many academic disciplines, like mathematics, concentrate on solving a finite number of potential equations not because others are necessarily invalid, but in order to avoid chaos. Maxwell’s Demon may be the inevitable isotope of this worthy ethical methodology, but we take comfort in the fact that he’s stuck in a thermodynamic hell (with only the slimmest of Pynchon’s novels to keep him company). Looking for a “way out” of the box becomes not only immature, but easy; the “worthy” challenge lies in finding another “way in.” Instructed by this ideal, we peer through a crack in H.L Mencken’s own grain silo and find that it isn’t full of corn; it’s full of shit.
Shit, not because Mencken didn’t believe in science (he did) or wasn’t a snob (he was), but because, when asked to explain some shrapnel of the world, he rolled up his sleeves and used any loose end lying on his office desk. If religion worked, he’d work it in. If science worked, he’d work it in. This was a man who once summed up the American South as a place where “a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician,” and Democracy as “the idea that the common man knows what he wants and deserves to get it, good and hard.” Hilarious, immediate, wrongheaded and—worst of all—old-fashioned. Because if you enjoy reading you enjoy the concept of time, because the concept of time hinges on the cultivation of a storyline. Which itself hinges on a selective use of elements. You are, in short, a caveman. When we lived in caves, linguistic subdivisions of space and time were still subservient to mnemonics. The power of suggestion necessarily ran deep, but its roots were anchored to a single mineral of the mind. The word “Democracy,” to cave-dwellers, wouldn’t be just one of many potential outgrowths stemming from the subtextual elements “the common man knows what he wants, and deserves to get it;” it would be the only possible flower these elements were capable of producing. The ideal realm of the epithet. Chirography, like genetic recombination, stuck the word in a single, arbitrary position, and simultaneously struck a blow for Democracy. It told us that the definition of a word was not fundamentally subservient to its surrounding environment; that, instead, a word could be fundamentally reassembled so as to reflect any environment. Without it, Mencken could never have written the first outgrowth of his definition on his tabula rasa, then pondered, then stretched across his desk, and worked in the disjunctive catch-phrase, “good and hard,” at its conclusion. Hooray for chirography! Hip, hip… oh cave-dweller, don’t start cheering yet. Because there’s still entropy to consider: at a certain point the exploration of chirographic independence will tend to be taken for granted, and the impact of the practice, in practice, dissipate into a shallow farce. That it will, out of linear frustration at its lack of audience, hurl its recombined beans into the dust and climb higher and higher up the towering beanstalk, until the smell of dust and the taste of corn has faded to a distant memory. Okay. This is a potent strain of thought. It’s gotten a lot of airtime recently. Since the onset of the atomic age all academic disciplines have been slowly drawn under the spell of Los Alamos, barricading themselves behind partitions, their languages growing increasingly Byzantine, not only to other specialists, but, especially, to the public. Literary language, which we might expect to serve as a goodwill ambassador between these boxed worlds and our own, is unfortunately no exception. Quite a lot has been said about the merits and demerits of the “workshop” story championed by MFA students and their attendant literary journals—some good, some bad. Certainly it’s a strain of writing which, if not cultivated directly by those emerald cities, has at least subsisted on them in times of famine. The justifying premise may be that writers need time, and space, to create great or challenging works; works whose worth is not be immediately apparent to the cave-dwelling public. Clearly, it’s an experiment which has succeeded in producing or incubating many of our best contemporary writers. But what’s maddening is that, compared to the flaming atomic chariots, bottomless black holes, fuel-efficient cars and hairy tomatoes flung from Los Alamos’s ivory towers over the past 60 years, literature is not a science. Literature is stodgy, colloquial, antique. Its cutting-edge technology is still the book, for God's sake! A collection of words swaddled in a glossy jacket! Okay, call it something different. Call literature a means of mapping interior space. A way to send quality control inspectors down your own streets to chart the new cracks after a blast knocks you flat. But even if one were to cite the myriad arrangements underneath each jacket--the gulf between the clean narrative lines of Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver, and the rampages of William T. Vollmann and Saul Bellow, appears a galaxy wide—this distance is more of an oscillation, whose peaks and troughs don’t signify breakthroughs, but rather a complex variation on a single arrangement. When folks talk of quality in literature, they talk in terms of cracks: unwasted sentences, images effectively evoked, words that are made to count. The storyline of grammatical neatness. The solving of equations. This cleanliness is next to godliness, maybe. Or maybe the concepts occupy adjoining faculty offices in the emerald city. But wherever godliness is, it isn’t anyplace literature can touch. Literature, quite simply, isn’t calibrated to send anyone to the moon. It’s supposed to send us back to Kansas.
And if Kansas, it’s a very particular breed of Kansas. Physics was about making the small enormous; literature is about making the enormous visible. Literature was, and is, one of the last formal defenses against the machinations of the world. If we were to go a bit deeper, we might call it the last formal defense of the agricultural intellect—the same way that painting is, perhaps, the last formal defense of the noble intellect. If you take a shallow New Critical stance on this, you might say this is so because, while both can be created spontaneously, a work of literature can be printed and endlessly reproduced—while a work of visual art must be viewed in one place for its full effect to be seen. The image on page 13 underscores the failure of visual art as a replicable form. Visual art achieves this universality only in the abstract: a square table, a triangular jungle gym, a pair of grain silo breasts on a red-eye HBO movie. Literature stalks us, fully formed beneath its jacket, in subway stations, from shelves, out of pockets, under armpits, peeping from garbage cans; it gives color to those moments when we realize that Maxwell’s Demon is us, and we’re in hell, and all we can do is watch the doomed rushing of matter back and forth. Maybe hunt around for that lever long enough to move the world. Then again, levers cost money to mold. Pulling slot machines is foolhardy. Apples and cherries don’t mix; neither do metaphors. Talk is cheap; money talks. Counting our resources for this project, we realized we had more words than dollars. Others will tell us that gambling does not pay because the house always wins. Others will watch us crawl back from this house and into a writing workshop. Confusion is okay. We’re not going anywhere. Can we? Maybe this is the value of literature: a way to stand still as those levers crank and crank and the world cracks open and swirls around you. No, it can’t be that.
We recognize the contradiction in our methodology. After all, we belittle Caribbeanwriting (not really, we’re big boosters of Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul) while setting up equally arbitrary conditions for this red anthology: no fiction MFA’s, no fiction publishing credentials. Aren’t we being a little fascist with our socialism? Aren’t we using our criterion as a lever by which to open the trapdoor on others? We admit, maybe, we are. But while the idea of a slush pile may be, in Howard Junker’s always-apt terminology, a “democratic enterprise,” we suspect that, at many publications, this huddled mass may get what it doesn’t deserve--good and hard. You may or may not know this, but many literary venues will jettison submissions that come without an MFA affiliation or an extensive prior publication history. And even if you knew that, you may not know that getting affiliated with an MFA program often has less to do with how you write than who you know. Whatever happened to using “anything that works?” Again, we’re left facing H.L. Mencken inside his empty grain silo. And he crosses his rolled-up sleeve arms, and grins, and asks us: if God is really dead, and the bureaucracy has seized political power, then, from a political perspective, this shit is obvious: looking out into a wide cornfield, wouldn't you fill your own book with those writers who'd provide you with the best possible nutrition? In other words: should the process of publication, bureaucratized, signify maturity, or is it just another sort of political land-grab? And before we can even approach that question, we’d have to ask a better one: why the hell should literature, as a last defense, be mixed up with politics at all?
Hmm. Scratch politics. Perhaps it’s the spirit of expedience. Even for this project—a little anthology, from an equally-little literary press—we looked at thousands of excerpts, and hundreds of submissions. Our eyes wearied; our stomach butterflies migrated, leaving us as jaded and cold as a bunk in a gulag in winter. Bereft of ideals, we elected a benevolent dictator and just dealt with it. We can only imagine the day-to-day chaos confronted by editors of more established houses, or the fascism that makes those precious editorial hours count.
We don’t claim to be breaking new ground. Far from it. Paul Auster and the folks at NPR got here long before we did, and assembled a marvelous collection, I Thought My Father was God. It’s an anthology of short-short stories, by unknown writers. The topics are broad, the styles many, the quality oscillates delightfully. The book’s cover shows a man standing on a chair, arms outstretched, holding a megaphone, facing a wind-tossed cornfield. We really do admire that book. There was only one problem: its stories were very, very short. Necessarily so; they were, after all, read on the radio, in a specific time slot. Boundaries are important, yes. Still, how much quality control can you do in a short-short? We felt, reading Auster’s collection, the touch of a very old hand: as if the public had been given a series of small plots, under the watchful gaze of a noted author who peered down from the grain silo. But the establishment of a literary fiefdom seems better suited to Europe; in America , we’re still apt to believe that every citizen deserves his forty acres and a jackass. And as our population thickens, as our public spaces get slowly zoned out, as we spend more and more time in cramped coffee shop cubicles hiding from increasingly unstable weather patterns, we need our imaginative horizons—now, we need them to be wider than ever. We need to feel compelled to walk outside and feel the hot air on our skin and feel the need to do something about it. Writing is a final formal defense because it can compel one to imagine a landscape other than the one one inhabits. And it is terrifying to think that this horizon line can be cropped by a workshop window frame, bent and hammered and sharpened into a single shape, and handed to writers to decapitate the dreams from the body of their work. You can see the casualties of these trials-by-jury lined up on the discount rack of your bookstore: literature cut, stacked, shrink-wrapped and ordered to breathe. Hairy tomatoes do not merely thrive in a polluted environment. They justify it.
The shadow of the scythe descends. Perhaps, inside those emerald city domes, cleanliness and godliness are actually tapping codes to each other through that adjoining faculty office wall. But even if you believe that the MFA programs have subdivided this literary thing down to a science, you might still believe that there’s an enormous amount of writing out there, and a lot of worthy writers who might never have the chance to swaddle their words between the covers of a book jacket. Chaotic? Certainly this explanation has been chaotic. But if you’ve managed to glean anything from this, or from the anthologized redness that follows, we hope that the next time those dome windows are flung open, you won’t be dazzled by mere radiation. Pick up your lever, bury it in the earth of Kansas, pull it behind you. The crack that follows your footsteps will bring good things.
ABRIDGED
No Record's red anthologies are collections of previously unpublished, hitherto unknown, and wholly unprofessional writers, ferreted out of the transom by a small group of folks, and funded from the chump change in our own pockets. To coin these authors "raw" would be one way to do it. To coin them "new" might be another. To coin them "red" means something else entirely, though allusions between "red anthology," "white album" and "blue period" would be, we feel, fallacious. This is, after all, not British music or Spanish painting, but (mostly) American literature-and the idea of doing something for the sake of the idea seems a little too, um, idealistic. The writers you'll find in our compilations represent a series of folks with day jobs and rolled-up sleeves, who may not have read H.L. Mencken but who might identify with one of his finest quotes: "whatever happens, there is always a pen. There is always a way out."
We are interested in new voices. We are interested in unlikely voices. We are interested in your voice, be it new, unlikely, or unabridged. Should your voice be accompanied by the initials "M" "F" and "A" we confess a disinclination of interest. Mind you, it’s not because we think these initials can't result in something great. Rather, it’s because with them you have inherited a virtual birthright into the current publishing landscape. Alright, fine, "inherited" is the wrong word. You have worked hard. You have paid a great deal of money for the opportunity to work hard. You have worked hard on stories devised solely to impress professors, professors who will help you acquire publication credentials, publication credentials which will help you acquire plaudits and grants and academic positions. If anyone deserves to profit from the hard work you have done, it is you. And profit from this work you will. Elsewhere.
UNABRIDGED FROM THE 2007 COLLECTION
WHEN WE ORIGINALLY got together to hash out this introductory statement, we divided a single keyboard’s keys by the number of staff fingers present, and went at it. After several hours of ponderous labor (and many impromptu thumb-duels) we had come up with something that looked like this:
fouJ;rg-4ms;e… sdfuoi-94tnlsde;pq ¥ongf in ewnf gu nls13n g 20 ng juot6 ☺sdflj ds2 ☺☺ jane☺ g___ d__ ☺ ☺ ln1`2 Asd ]t \]d ]mar h rc’53y ¥
Hmm. Unless you’ve read Finnegan’s Wake one too many times, you might agree that Democracy is a dubious alternative in book publishing. So we elected a benevolent dictator and proceeded, not by small steps or great leaps forward, but hopefully not into outer space either.
This anthology is a collection of previously unpublished, hitherto unknown, and wholly unprofessional writers, ferreted out of the transom by a small group of folks, and funded from the chump change in our own pockets. To coin what we’ve come up with as “raw” would be one way to do it. To coin it “new” might be another. To coin it “red” means something else entirely, though analogies between “red anthology,” “white album,” and “blue period” would be, we feel, fallacious. This is, after all, not British music or Spanish painting, but (mostly) American literature—and the idea of doing something for the sake of the idea seems a little too, well, idealistic. The writers you’ll find here are folks pretty much like us: they have day jobs and rolled-up sleeves, and while they may not have read H.L. Mencken they still might identify with one of his finest quotes: “whatever happens, there is always a pen. There is always a way out.”
A nice phrase, sure. Question is, as it always is with Mencken: a “way out” from what?Why, when we might preserve acres of virgin rainforest, distribute milk to unloved kittens, or grant a needy teenager sufficient gold bricks to ship him to a Midwestern college whose domes rise from the center of an endlessly-oscillating cornfield, are we instead pooling our resources to bequeath to you, the public, another literary anthology? We know what you mean. Believe you us, the stomach butterflies began fluttering when we first floated the idea. Because isn’t it the case that too much literature is already being scribbled and inscribed without being imbibed? That the cream of our story-writing crop has already been plucked from the slush-pile, packed into University grain silos, stylistically freeze-dried in aesthetic degree-granting ant colonies and held ready for mass consumption during times of public duress? That, in an era of surveillance cameras, weblogs and desktop publishing, the arms of Adam Smith have stretched, Christlike and balanced, to the right and left sides of the scorched field and gathered all our remaining public ears into the vast chirographic thresher of the internet—the global village of itinerant idiots—making definitions like “unpublished,” “unknown,” and “unschooled” far murkier than in days of yore? All legitimate concerns, agreed. So we floated the idea. Then we slept on it. And when we woke up, the butterflies lifted their crushed wings and beat the blood back in. So we slept some more, then got up again, then yawned, then stretched, then went our separate ways, and the moon chased the sun over the horizon many times. When we came back together we were slightly more mature, slightly better informed, and perhaps slightly tipsy. Here’s what we’d found:
¥There were, indeed, many literary anthologies out there.
¥Most of those anthologies featured the work of dead writers.
¥Of those anthologies showcasing the work of the living, most of those showcased names were long familiar.
¥Of those names that were unfamiliar, they were generally clustered under the conceptual umbrella: “New Caribbean Writing,” or “Mystery Stories,” or “Behind Prison Walls.” We even found one that called itself “New Voices”—but, on closer investigation found its editor’s idea of a “New Voice” had been branded with the subtitle “from the nation’s top MFA programs.”
Now, what’s the problem with all of this? If you believe that God has really sunk beneath the waves of our waking life, bureaucracy is inevitable—a set of codes applied systematically to social acts, which is pretty much a conception of God, minus the flaming chariots, fountains of youth, water-walking, wine-wobbling, random asshole behavior, et cetera. Whether or not anything is “worthy” in some fundamental sense becomes unimportant; there are streets in heaven, and those gold bricks were set down by somebody. Raising one’s head to praise something ineffable? Bah! Why shouldn’t we walk with eyes glued to shoes, pondering the preplanned cracks in the sidewalk? Why shouldn’t we organize our anthologies around a central idea? After all, it’s claimed, by many, that constriction is a sign of maturity; that many academic disciplines, like mathematics, concentrate on solving a finite number of potential equations not because others are necessarily invalid, but in order to avoid chaos. Maxwell’s Demon may be the inevitable isotope of this worthy ethical methodology, but we take comfort in the fact that he’s stuck in a thermodynamic hell (with only the slimmest of Pynchon’s novels to keep him company). Looking for a “way out” of the box becomes not only immature, but easy; the “worthy” challenge lies in finding another “way in.” Instructed by this ideal, we peer through a crack in H.L Mencken’s own grain silo and find that it isn’t full of corn; it’s full of shit.
Shit, not because Mencken didn’t believe in science (he did) or wasn’t a snob (he was), but because, when asked to explain some shrapnel of the world, he rolled up his sleeves and used any loose end lying on his office desk. If religion worked, he’d work it in. If science worked, he’d work it in. This was a man who once summed up the American South as a place where “a poet is now almost as rare as an oboe-player, a dry-point etcher or a metaphysician,” and Democracy as “the idea that the common man knows what he wants and deserves to get it, good and hard.” Hilarious, immediate, wrongheaded and—worst of all—old-fashioned. Because if you enjoy reading you enjoy the concept of time, because the concept of time hinges on the cultivation of a storyline. Which itself hinges on a selective use of elements. You are, in short, a caveman. When we lived in caves, linguistic subdivisions of space and time were still subservient to mnemonics. The power of suggestion necessarily ran deep, but its roots were anchored to a single mineral of the mind. The word “Democracy,” to cave-dwellers, wouldn’t be just one of many potential outgrowths stemming from the subtextual elements “the common man knows what he wants, and deserves to get it;” it would be the only possible flower these elements were capable of producing. The ideal realm of the epithet. Chirography, like genetic recombination, stuck the word in a single, arbitrary position, and simultaneously struck a blow for Democracy. It told us that the definition of a word was not fundamentally subservient to its surrounding environment; that, instead, a word could be fundamentally reassembled so as to reflect any environment. Without it, Mencken could never have written the first outgrowth of his definition on his tabula rasa, then pondered, then stretched across his desk, and worked in the disjunctive catch-phrase, “good and hard,” at its conclusion. Hooray for chirography! Hip, hip… oh cave-dweller, don’t start cheering yet. Because there’s still entropy to consider: at a certain point the exploration of chirographic independence will tend to be taken for granted, and the impact of the practice, in practice, dissipate into a shallow farce. That it will, out of linear frustration at its lack of audience, hurl its recombined beans into the dust and climb higher and higher up the towering beanstalk, until the smell of dust and the taste of corn has faded to a distant memory. Okay. This is a potent strain of thought. It’s gotten a lot of airtime recently. Since the onset of the atomic age all academic disciplines have been slowly drawn under the spell of Los Alamos, barricading themselves behind partitions, their languages growing increasingly Byzantine, not only to other specialists, but, especially, to the public. Literary language, which we might expect to serve as a goodwill ambassador between these boxed worlds and our own, is unfortunately no exception. Quite a lot has been said about the merits and demerits of the “workshop” story championed by MFA students and their attendant literary journals—some good, some bad. Certainly it’s a strain of writing which, if not cultivated directly by those emerald cities, has at least subsisted on them in times of famine. The justifying premise may be that writers need time, and space, to create great or challenging works; works whose worth is not be immediately apparent to the cave-dwelling public. Clearly, it’s an experiment which has succeeded in producing or incubating many of our best contemporary writers. But what’s maddening is that, compared to the flaming atomic chariots, bottomless black holes, fuel-efficient cars and hairy tomatoes flung from Los Alamos’s ivory towers over the past 60 years, literature is not a science. Literature is stodgy, colloquial, antique. Its cutting-edge technology is still the book, for God's sake! A collection of words swaddled in a glossy jacket! Okay, call it something different. Call literature a means of mapping interior space. A way to send quality control inspectors down your own streets to chart the new cracks after a blast knocks you flat. But even if one were to cite the myriad arrangements underneath each jacket--the gulf between the clean narrative lines of Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver, and the rampages of William T. Vollmann and Saul Bellow, appears a galaxy wide—this distance is more of an oscillation, whose peaks and troughs don’t signify breakthroughs, but rather a complex variation on a single arrangement. When folks talk of quality in literature, they talk in terms of cracks: unwasted sentences, images effectively evoked, words that are made to count. The storyline of grammatical neatness. The solving of equations. This cleanliness is next to godliness, maybe. Or maybe the concepts occupy adjoining faculty offices in the emerald city. But wherever godliness is, it isn’t anyplace literature can touch. Literature, quite simply, isn’t calibrated to send anyone to the moon. It’s supposed to send us back to Kansas.
And if Kansas, it’s a very particular breed of Kansas. Physics was about making the small enormous; literature is about making the enormous visible. Literature was, and is, one of the last formal defenses against the machinations of the world. If we were to go a bit deeper, we might call it the last formal defense of the agricultural intellect—the same way that painting is, perhaps, the last formal defense of the noble intellect. If you take a shallow New Critical stance on this, you might say this is so because, while both can be created spontaneously, a work of literature can be printed and endlessly reproduced—while a work of visual art must be viewed in one place for its full effect to be seen. The image on page 13 underscores the failure of visual art as a replicable form. Visual art achieves this universality only in the abstract: a square table, a triangular jungle gym, a pair of grain silo breasts on a red-eye HBO movie. Literature stalks us, fully formed beneath its jacket, in subway stations, from shelves, out of pockets, under armpits, peeping from garbage cans; it gives color to those moments when we realize that Maxwell’s Demon is us, and we’re in hell, and all we can do is watch the doomed rushing of matter back and forth. Maybe hunt around for that lever long enough to move the world. Then again, levers cost money to mold. Pulling slot machines is foolhardy. Apples and cherries don’t mix; neither do metaphors. Talk is cheap; money talks. Counting our resources for this project, we realized we had more words than dollars. Others will tell us that gambling does not pay because the house always wins. Others will watch us crawl back from this house and into a writing workshop. Confusion is okay. We’re not going anywhere. Can we? Maybe this is the value of literature: a way to stand still as those levers crank and crank and the world cracks open and swirls around you. No, it can’t be that.
We recognize the contradiction in our methodology. After all, we belittle Caribbeanwriting (not really, we’re big boosters of Derek Walcott and V.S. Naipaul) while setting up equally arbitrary conditions for this red anthology: no fiction MFA’s, no fiction publishing credentials. Aren’t we being a little fascist with our socialism? Aren’t we using our criterion as a lever by which to open the trapdoor on others? We admit, maybe, we are. But while the idea of a slush pile may be, in Howard Junker’s always-apt terminology, a “democratic enterprise,” we suspect that, at many publications, this huddled mass may get what it doesn’t deserve--good and hard. You may or may not know this, but many literary venues will jettison submissions that come without an MFA affiliation or an extensive prior publication history. And even if you knew that, you may not know that getting affiliated with an MFA program often has less to do with how you write than who you know. Whatever happened to using “anything that works?” Again, we’re left facing H.L. Mencken inside his empty grain silo. And he crosses his rolled-up sleeve arms, and grins, and asks us: if God is really dead, and the bureaucracy has seized political power, then, from a political perspective, this shit is obvious: looking out into a wide cornfield, wouldn't you fill your own book with those writers who'd provide you with the best possible nutrition? In other words: should the process of publication, bureaucratized, signify maturity, or is it just another sort of political land-grab? And before we can even approach that question, we’d have to ask a better one: why the hell should literature, as a last defense, be mixed up with politics at all?
Hmm. Scratch politics. Perhaps it’s the spirit of expedience. Even for this project—a little anthology, from an equally-little literary press—we looked at thousands of excerpts, and hundreds of submissions. Our eyes wearied; our stomach butterflies migrated, leaving us as jaded and cold as a bunk in a gulag in winter. Bereft of ideals, we elected a benevolent dictator and just dealt with it. We can only imagine the day-to-day chaos confronted by editors of more established houses, or the fascism that makes those precious editorial hours count.
We don’t claim to be breaking new ground. Far from it. Paul Auster and the folks at NPR got here long before we did, and assembled a marvelous collection, I Thought My Father was God. It’s an anthology of short-short stories, by unknown writers. The topics are broad, the styles many, the quality oscillates delightfully. The book’s cover shows a man standing on a chair, arms outstretched, holding a megaphone, facing a wind-tossed cornfield. We really do admire that book. There was only one problem: its stories were very, very short. Necessarily so; they were, after all, read on the radio, in a specific time slot. Boundaries are important, yes. Still, how much quality control can you do in a short-short? We felt, reading Auster’s collection, the touch of a very old hand: as if the public had been given a series of small plots, under the watchful gaze of a noted author who peered down from the grain silo. But the establishment of a literary fiefdom seems better suited to Europe; in America , we’re still apt to believe that every citizen deserves his forty acres and a jackass. And as our population thickens, as our public spaces get slowly zoned out, as we spend more and more time in cramped coffee shop cubicles hiding from increasingly unstable weather patterns, we need our imaginative horizons—now, we need them to be wider than ever. We need to feel compelled to walk outside and feel the hot air on our skin and feel the need to do something about it. Writing is a final formal defense because it can compel one to imagine a landscape other than the one one inhabits. And it is terrifying to think that this horizon line can be cropped by a workshop window frame, bent and hammered and sharpened into a single shape, and handed to writers to decapitate the dreams from the body of their work. You can see the casualties of these trials-by-jury lined up on the discount rack of your bookstore: literature cut, stacked, shrink-wrapped and ordered to breathe. Hairy tomatoes do not merely thrive in a polluted environment. They justify it.
The shadow of the scythe descends. Perhaps, inside those emerald city domes, cleanliness and godliness are actually tapping codes to each other through that adjoining faculty office wall. But even if you believe that the MFA programs have subdivided this literary thing down to a science, you might still believe that there’s an enormous amount of writing out there, and a lot of worthy writers who might never have the chance to swaddle their words between the covers of a book jacket. Chaotic? Certainly this explanation has been chaotic. But if you’ve managed to glean anything from this, or from the anthologized redness that follows, we hope that the next time those dome windows are flung open, you won’t be dazzled by mere radiation. Pick up your lever, bury it in the earth of Kansas, pull it behind you. The crack that follows your footsteps will bring good things.