#paul town

Havingvisited the left yesterday, let’s check in on the right today. It’s not doing too well either. Town is reacting against the $400 right-wing Passage Prize anthology, particularly these two racist poems (don’t click that link unless you’re prepared to read racist poems). The poems are shit, which is to say willfully excremental and lamentably unflushed. What a society makes taboo will be violated. The maintenance of the taboo as taboo even requires its regular violation to fortify the boundary between what may and may not be said, just in case we forget. But bad artists mistake taboo-violation for good art, since violating the taboo is a cheap and easy way to generate a bit of energy in a text. You see this in 20th-century sex writing, all that flaunting of the genitalia in the stern (if imagined) face of the gray-bearded Victorian patriarch and his purse-lipped domestic angel; this was my impression, for instance, of what little I ever managed to read of Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. And so just as Lawrence got a charge out of writing cock and cunt in Lady Chatterley, so today’s fascoid poetasters giggle as they scribble the N-word. (You can tell where the taboo falls: which words am I willing to type out and which not.) Personally, I find it contemptible; I join Mark Alastor’s double anathema “Against the Sowers of Discord.”

Now on to to Town’s main point. As far as books go, he’s right. Individual self-publishing is probably better than small presses as long as you are willing and able to generate your own publicity. (Small presses go out of business and take your books with them, or cancel your books at the behest of Twitter mobs, or refuse to use Amazon, or any number of other annoying things—so, the technological affordances for self-publishing being what they are, why bother with them?) But it’s naive to think there’s not going to be some re-bundling of writers into schools and journals. Books are one thing, because they’re always purchased individually whether they were self-published or not, but how many paid newsletters can you really subscribe to a month? This is why the minute I heard about the Mars Review of Books I knew something was happening, for good or ill. And the writing is good; it’s just that I still don’t know what to think about Urbit. And Urbit et al. is the only reason “Dimes Square”matters,if it does, and it’s too soon to tell. These people who think they’re in Slaves of New York might be in “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” instead, which is worth a couple of articles.

As for right/left: art, in a functioning modern civilization, is apolitical, a terrain of inquiry, not exhortation, and so solidly considered in this light that even art meant as hortatory comes out inquisitive. As I think I’ve said before—but nobody ever listens, so I’ll say it again—the answer to bad left-wing art is not bad right-wing art, but art tout court and without qualification.