I confess to being addicted to such catalogues of Where It’s At: catalogues with which the American Book Review particularly abounds. Here is another from the same lively source, by one Martin Sheter, in an essay called “Writing As Incorrectness”:
And then there’s what I call the “third rail”: the remarkable. . resurgence of all sorts of creativity going on in the nineties, right under the nose of all these [American academics] — people ranging the spectrum from Hakim Bey, Fact-Sheet 5, R U Sirius, ACT-UP graphicists, feminist collaborators, black and Native American oralists, and shock performance theoreticians, all the way to. . MTV’s “Liquid Television,” the San Francisco “transgressive” school, Brown-University-sponsored “unspeakable practices,” various cyberpunk and slipstream fictionalists. . (no doubt I’ve left out quite a bit here).
Perhaps he has; but the aforecited essay by Mr. Mark Amerika goes far to fill in any gaps in Mr. Sheter’s checklist of the contemporary Action. I quote again from Mr. Amerika:
all kinds of viral shit festering there, not the least of which would include dissident comix, wigged out zines, electronic journals, quick-time hypermedia CD-ROMs, a voluminous melange of hardcore industrial grunge post-everything music, the Internet, surfpunk technical journals, interactive cable TV, . hypertext novels, . single-user films, gen-derfuck performance art spectacles. . teenage mutant ninja gangsters, C-Span. . feminist deconstruction. . the list goes on.
And on and on and on: avant-pop, splatterpunk, cybersex — you name it, if you can, or make it up if you can’t. Indeed, it’s tempting to imagine that the pugnacious contributors to the ABR invent these wonderful catalogues as they go along; but I am assured by my more with-it informants — if scarcely reassured — that the items, however ephemeral, are for real.
If among the intentions of such in-your-face lists is to make us dinosaurs from “the late age of print” feel our dinosaurity, then they quite succeed. I confess to being out of the loop of contemporary American letters in their most aggressively avant-pop aspect. I cannot sing along with the “voluminous melange of hardcore industrial grunge post-everythings”; I cannot line-dance with the cybersexual splatterpunk avant-poppers. And while I do not revel in my end-of-the-century troglodytehood, I’m inclined to shrug my shoulders at it. I scan the American Book Review with considerable interest and amusement, likewise some of those “wigged-out zines” when my former students publish in them and kindly send me copies; I maintain a benevolent curiosity about hypertext (of which more presently) out of my long-standing interest in the nonlinear aspects of life and of literature. But the American perodicals that I actually subscribe to and thoroughly read are the New York Review of Books, Harper’s, the Sciences (the journal2 of the New York Academy of Sciences, which my wife and I enjoy as much for its art as for its articles), and Scientific American—the latter two partly as a source of fictive metaphors. Also Sail magazine, but never mind that, and Modern Maturity, the journal of the American Association of Retired Persons, which subscribes to me more than I to it; I look through it, but I don’t inhale. The current American fiction that I most relished while preparing these remarks happens to have been John Updike’s latest collection of short stories, The Afterlife, and William H. Gass’s monumental novel The Tunnel—two comparably masterful though radically different works of literary art from “the late age of print.” They make me pleased to have lived before the transition from “the book as we know it” to the “writing [of] the mind in lightforms” is complete.
Let me say at once, however, that I do not doubt the reality of that transition. Granted that a few writers still compose on the typewriter, even on manual typewriters: Saul Bellow says that he uses two, one for fiction and the other for nonfiction; my Johns Hopkins colleague Stephen Dixon worries that his prolific fiction-writing career will crash when he can no longer find anybody to service his brace of Hermes manual portables, or to supply ribbons for them. A very few of us, believe it or not, still prefer to draw out our first-draft sentences the even older-fashioned way, with fountain pen on paper.3 Despite these exceptions, however, most of my comrades in arms and all of my recent students compose their fiction on word processors, and of the few of us who don’t, most (myself included) depend absolutely on our computers for editing and revision, whether we do that on hard-copy print-outs or directly onscreen.4 Our publishers now routinely expect the finished product on disk or e-mail attachment as well as on paper, and the hottest, thorniest issue these days in the Authors Guild Bulletin (another “zine” that subscribes to me) is the protection of its members’ electronic rights in our book and magazine contracts, as more and more of our originally printed publication goes online one way or another down the road, and our control of copyright tends to evaporate in cyberspace. Although I might disagree with Mr. Michael Joyce about the implications of his proposition, I quite concur with the proposition itself: that we are indeed in “the late age of print,” not only as a means of producing and publishing literature, but, importantly, as a means of reading it. One New York playwright recently described all of us authors-for-print as “roadkill on the information superhighway.” He may be right.
To afford some perspective on this “transitional time,” I want to back up a bit now: first just a few years back, then a few decades back, if not farther yet, always keeping a navigator’s eye on where we are and where we seem to be going, literature-wise, as we briefly retrace where we’ve been (this is the Sail magazine approach to navigating the State of the Art).
A MERE 15 years ago, in 1981, we received at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars our very first word-processored manuscript in an application to our graduate program in fiction-writing. Although the piece itself was unremarkable, I was impressed by its virtually published look; it was, in fact, an early specimen of “desktop publishing.” Remembering how instructively chastened I myself had been in the early 1950s to see my own apprentice efforts first set in official, impersonal print in a student magazine — which seemed to me to make strikingly manifest both their small strengths and their large shortcomings — I imagined that this newfangled mode of manuscript-production might afford our apprentice writers some measure of the critical detachment that print confers. The farther their words were removed from longhand, I reasoned, and even from homely old-fashioned typescript, the more objectively the apprentice authors would be able to assess them.