Amateur Vigour | Ribbonfarm [revised]
On the surge in outbreeding enhancement in literature
First version published @ Ribbonfarm on August 4, 2020.
Though news of the death of the novel―or for that matter, the book or the author―may seem no better than clickbait following countless false reports, it is hardly too early to ask what comes next. In its Western variant, the novel built momentum over hundreds of years to become the dominant literary form of the twentieth century; its popularity and penetration dependent on―if ever responsive to―sometimes vertiginous phase shifts in means, media, markets. In this sense, its history reads like a (living) fossil of the modern era, from mechanisation to globalisation, from the expansion of literacy to the invention of intimacy.
Given the scope, speed and scale of transformations and disruptions we are currently faced with―many of which the pandemic will consolidate or heighten―it would be remiss of us, however, to not imagine other literary forms emerging well within our lifetimes.
[And if the precondition for new forms is, indeed, in new platforms and new media…]
For starters: following the concentration in both publishing and distribution of past decades; a handful of small, aggressively independent presses are now scouting for talent not in the koi-pond of MFAs or residency programs but on social media, where it can be found at its most adventurous and unembellished. Business models vary but are central in the push towards autonomy these presses share. These are not manifesto factories, either, but agile enterprises that are [re]s[e]izing the means of production by taking everything, from their submission software to their bookmaking, into their hands; the way others microbrew beer or cure ham. Nor are these the zines of the nineties: the DIY book has at last hit its stride as a fine art, with objects as impressive as those issued by almost any major house―and better copy. The writers championed by these presses are, furthermore, early explorers in relative peerlessness, encouraged to pursue marginal practices that might be otherwise untenable by one-man editorial orchestras who do not conduct themselves as king or tastemakers―roles still [p]reserved for the establishment reviewer—but rather, as craftsmen and colleagues.
While, naturally, precedents exist in presses like Adelphi or magazines like Sur, there is a significant and telling difference in how the elective affinities at work today may be more exclusively literary than ever before. These are not groups of friends with similar backgrounds who meet periodically at a café or who attended the same colleges. We’re not in Bloomsbury anymore. By and large, these are cadres of strangers from all walks of life―Twitter mutuals―more eclectic in their outputs than entire university departments.
It may be the first time the phonecall is coming from outside the house in this way. Defamiliarisation is no longer solely in the product, but essential to the social literary process. Here’s to the shape of outbreeding enhancement in literature.
Peter Brown. Shot by Ned. 2015. Oil on canvas, 137 x 107 cm.
I hope you don't mind the rant and is not too boring...
I find fascinating that we are still musing over the mitosis of writing and its media du jour. It is very..., ourobory? Reading this sent me looking into my own outstanding footprint in the Web, which, as you well know, isn't the beginning of the media. I wish I still had access to my early forays on dialup BBS, mailing lists, Compuserve, Prodigy, AOL... The latter account I still hold for sentimental reasons, even though I don't use it (although I have mine blocked to incoming messages, my wife still does use her AOL email address attached to my account). Funny, I was dipping my fingers into AOL so early that my username there is LEAR, hence the sentimentality. A couple of years later, when it skyrocketed, you couldn't get any meaningful username without using a string numbers attached to it or something akin to random generated passwords.
For outstanding I mean things you can find in the WayBackMachine of Archive.org, like this page I created in 1994, the same year Netscape was released, for a company I used to work (I point to 1994 because the WBM didn't start caching sites until 1996, which is the earliest date for the site there): https://web.archive.org/web/19961105105010/http://www.gnamaritime.com/
Then in 1999, Blogger popped up and long form writing online started at its earnest. I supported Blogger, the idea of it, until it was swallowed by Google in 2003. That pissed me off and sent to NetSol to register my first domain name and, armed with MovableType and climbing a cool learning curve, publishing my own blogs there in 2003, one in English, another in Spanish and the third a photoblog. They are, zombie-like, still there. I don't have any tattoos but I hear you can't stop at one... Same happens with domain names. I've a bunch of them because I like their names and ever hoping to monetize them, like Datitla, or Titilos, born out of poetry; or Sorocabana, born out of nostalgia for gone Montevidean places, for example.
I said you sent me looking for my early outstanding footprint because I felt I needed to go back to my own genesis in the media, my own semi-abandoned relics, to reach the point of the present of your note and then project my mind into the future you see there. Some of those old posts look foreign, even to me. Some are political in nature (Bush's war, etc.). Some are interesting, like this one: http://www.sorocabana.net/cambios/2005/03/22/la_vida_sin_may/ Thanks to that retrospective I found that the lady mentioned there, Rebecca Milans, another fellow Uruguayan, was still writing in her blog until last year! Talk about a blast from the past! I haven't read her musings for well over ten years! I thought that just finding that was worthy of sharing all this with you. If you read a bit of her blog, especially her very early posts, you'll see why.
Well, just a long rant to point at a grain of sand (hers) in a giant beach of online writing out there. Some literary fortunes were made in those early days, when agents started scouting blogs for hardcopy publishing. The media is still evolving, as you point out. Writing is still at the same level of angst as ever. Apologies for the long wind...