Workshop #6

Hello friends,

Workshop #6 transpired on a blustery evening of pouring rain. Congratulations to the hardy half who made it to class, and thanks to the absent ones who sent in their regrets. The next time that we number fewer than 8, we will conduct class in the cozy chairs by the fireplace...so don't miss it!

We began our discussion considering the life of Gertrude Stein. As background, I described her upbringing in boom-era San Francisco (1874 - 1899) among middle class Jews, orphaned as a young teenager, and her lively, intense friendship with older brother Leo. The two moved together to Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, initiating an artistic and literary milieu that has been exhaustively described and documented. Anyone interested should read Stein's own The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I also recommend Sylvia Salinger's book of letters, Just a Pretty Girl from the Country. This collection of letters home from a 20-something-year old black sheep of wealthy San Francisco Jews (who had been sent to stay with the Steins in Paris to keep her from associating with an undesirable suitor back home — "the coffeeboy") is a hilarious corrective to the grandiose mythologizing usually imposed on this interesting set of lives in belle epoque Paris. Salinger lived with Michael and Sarah Stein (older brother and sister-in-law of Gertrude and Leo) in the years just before WW I. Her letters confess bewilderment in the company of Matisse and Picasso and chronicle a life of obsessive shopping and gossip.

Stein's biography set the stage for our consideration of her approach to publishing. We recognized in her an almost contemporary figure, clear about her work and yet stymied in her efforts to find support and an audience. Her use of self-publishing, subsidized publishing, agents, and established publishers gave us a full palette of some of the same options (and challenges) we face today. Especially notable was her yearning for the support and validation of an established publisher and her grave disappointment when she finally got it. With Harcourt's wildly successful publication of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Stein herself became a valuable commodity who would be defined (and limited) by Harcourt's sense of what of her was saleable to "the public." Stein's hope that success would bring wide publication of her "real" work was dashed on the commercial judgment of Harcourt. He would only publish her "more open" books, like The Autobiography, and her "confessions and lectures."

The stewards of Stein's "real" books turned out to be those very small communities of like-minded writers and artists who both published and read her work, then kept it alive through their own work and teaching. It was noted how small these networks were — and are — and that they are built through person-to-person relationships attended to over time. In our own time, we considered the career of Lisa Robertson (a Canadian poet and essayist) as an example of smart engagement with a similar system. Robertson's insistence on working with people who interest her and her general indifference to working with those who don't was suggested as a good strategy for building a lasting career. This also implies an indifference to the hierarchy of forms (that is, an indifference to such hierarchical practices as scrambling to get a bigger publisher, focusing on "a book" at the expense of other writing, slighting zines or blogs, or changing the writing itself to suit the needs of a market) and the primacy of maintaining long lasting peer relationships.

With Robertson's career as our model, we asked what are good manners and etiquette for initiating such relationships. In approaching editors or agents, it was suggested that we be straightforward and confident. Situate ourselves as peers, not as supplicants. Presume the editor or agent feels the same. Where there is no common interest do not pretend there is. Respond to interest and support in kind. Mutuality and symmetricality, again, are our ideals. All experience suggests that editors, agents, and writers are in fact the very same people — a group involved in both writing and reading, all of them at once producers and consumers of literature. (Every editor of my books has also been a published writer.)

This curious fact — that there is, effectively, no permanent audience separate from the producers of culture, no group who just consumes — became the node for an interesting insight. Perhaps the emerging logic in this time of mixed proprietary and "open source" cultural work is a consumerless society: All are involved in the mutual production of culture, functioning as audience or consumer only as one mode in our collaborative work of production. This is certainly true of shared forms such as role-playing games, machinima, or remix culture, and increasingly true of literary production, visual art, and music, where the audience for work is also the producer of work (one band finishes its set and swaps places with the audience, who is the other band). In such a condition of radical mutuality the importance of creating and maintaining truly symmetrical peer relationships of respect and exchange is very clear.

With that thought we looked at two beautiful objects brought in by Chris Stamm and Sarah Boss: a kiddush cup and a plastic bottle of holy water. It was noted that both objects charmed their possessors by being unconsumable: they generated meaning and value in dialogue with the possessor, whose adoration and imagination are necessary ingredients in the mix of the object's aura. We spoke briefly about such non-book objects, but little came of our discussion.

The evening closed with a brief consideration of Mizuko Ito's study of amateur cultural production networks on the Annenberg Centers DIY studies weblog, Here were robust examples of the peer-to-peer swarm of cultural producers that are increasingly common, especially for kids growing up with digital technologies. The weblog itself was also admired and I announced that, driven by such admiration, the using global media workshop would initiate its weblog at Urban Honking so that we too can take advantage of this startling new technology. You can see its prototype version at www.urbanhonking.com/usingglobalmedia

Next week, Chris Stamm and Marcus Estes will introduce us to a chapter of Theodore Adorno's and Max Horkheimer's The Dialectic of Enlightenment, "The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception." This, by now, canonical text is a well written, stirring critique of mid-20th century mass culture. Two questions for us: Is such a critique relevant today? Have the networks of amateur cultural production brought the beast to its knees? Also, be ready to propose and/or discuss possible public gatherings/events we might undertake, and be ready to discuss the workshop's weblog, its ideal capacities and uses.

Thank you.

Matthew