On the Trilogy
Three hefty volumes come to their conclusion soon. The author is duty-bound to resist the desire to explain the literary components and connections engineered in this trilogy, preferring to leave the still water of the surface text intact while allowing readers to determine if there are swifter currents below. The danger of discussing what the book means is not only in condescension of the reader, but it places the author in the position of taking on the pedantic airs of the mediocre English literature teacher. I will violate my own principle here just a little.
These books are embodied in the environment of the day, and so a variety of topical sociopolitical issues permeate the porous enclosure of the narrative. This is by no means a literary innovation, and many of the authors I admire (specifically Sinclair Lewis and John Barth) manifest this principle of cross-fertilizing current events with fiction. The desideratum of the trilogy may in fact be populated with issues of importance to myself, including the fate of libraries, the effects of digital technology, the triumph of the id, political gamesmanship, propaganda tactics, alienation, environmental degradation, overconsumption, precarious labor, the lasting effects of neoliberalism, and the lack of research into chemical sensitivities. In this way, the issues by themselves define my political persuasion. I can only hope that I have presented those viewpoints via the dialogue of characters in a non-dogmatic and non-doctrinaire way. These are issues that are of importance to me, and I fully respect that they are not shared by many others.
For me, setting the boundary of a trilogy proves challenging if only because it proves abrupt to bring a project to conclusion given that one is accustomed to a certain momentum that wishes to persist. However, I must now answer the call of other, long-neglected projects. It is an almost unreasonable demand in this age of high speed expectations and demands for brevity for readers to dedicate themselves to nearly a million words distributed over three rather large books. It is for this reason that I expect little to nothing...
It is the egotism of authors to delight in talking about their work. I was no stranger to this practice, and there are readers who equally delight in the process notes and tattle of the author. However, as I have grown older in my practice, I find that talking about my work is not enjoyable or even necessary. Any “wisdom” I may have about the practice of writing will have been said a thousand times before by thousands of others in a thousand different ways. I am not interested in the practice of fetishizing the author as celebrity personality or as some precious and special being imbued with “an important mission.” Such practices of author fetishization are indexed uncomfortably close to marketing, and such acts belong to the distant periphery of the author’s central goal: in attempting to write good books. It is the work that is important, not the author. Authors, on the whole, and if we strip away all self-aggrandizing behavior, are generally unglamorous in life, if not also mundane. The stage actor is interesting when acting; offstage, he or she is a regular person. Writing is a performative act, and ultimately the best words one can get out of an author ought to appear in the work itself – not in interviews. My best words appear in books that I have spent time crafting and developing, not necessarily in offhand remarks where I have not been afforded the time to craft. Unlike acting, writing does not (nor ought not) permit the appearance of the author as if on stage, so that the author is more the hidden force or text’s wire-puller. The name is on the spine, and in the front-matter, and that is the author’s trace. Writing is much closer to architecture than theatre, and so perhaps the author builds books, and the words are the performers within the edifice raised.
Very few people around me take much interest in what I write. Or, if they do, it is regarded as simply something I occupy my time with. There is no excessive adulation or praise, nor do I seek it. In fact, many are those around me who do not know that I have a recent book unless someone else informs them. I like it this way. My work as an author plays very little role in my social interactions. I do not ask friends or family to purchase my books or write favorable reviews. I keep quiet about my writing practice unless directly asked, which rarely happens. The world is a vast welter of other things to talk about, and within my various circles there are more pressing issues than to go on an extended session discussing the contents of my books.
There are plenty of authors in the world who are committed to the social apparatus of writing – joining writers’ forums online, going to writers’ conferences, submitting works with regularity and discipline, crafting their image as an author, making connections and alliances in the literary circles, chasing after awards and grants, attending highbrow literary soirees, and packing their schedules with appearances to read and sign books. It just so happens that this type of author is not me. Does this suggest that I am not in good faith with a literary community? Perhaps. And, perhaps I want to avoid a lot of the acrimonious politics that occur in that industry – I experience my fair share of politics in other aspects of life.
A frequent complaint among those who specialize in experimental literature is having such a small pool of readers. The more belligerent of the self-proclaimed experimentalists denounce the popular tastes of the masses that are indexed on frivolous and banal content, absolutely formulaic and catering to sex and violence without any substance. I largely share their view from a critical theory perspective, but this must be squared against managing one’s expectations. Firstly, if one writes niche fiction, one should not expect to attain coveted bestseller status. It would be as sensible as writing a for-specialists book on quantum physics and bemoaning the fact that only a handful of people will buy it. If one writes literature of more sophisticated integrity which demands a lot out of readers, one ought to be content in making a mark among that very particular readership. To demand fame and fortune – a rarity in writing – is unrealistic, and is largely powered by the vicissitudes of a strong marketing strategy that is selective in what it chooses to popularize. As well, berating readers as a whole for failing to engage with challenging works is terribly unhelpful; if one wants to persuade or entice people to broaden their reading horizons, telling them they are stupid will not achieve the desired outcome. We all have our axes to grind with respect to mass consumer culture and the corporate popularization / engineering of taste, but caustic critics of popular taste have been with us for centuries and there is little else new to add beyond remarks on how new technologies are employed to continue the cultural divide.
To that end of experimental literature, there is a precedent for crafting works that appeal to a wider audience which includes more general and more sophisticated readers. Shakespeare did it. He wrote plays that appealed to the more surface features that a less-literary crowd could enjoy, as well as planting themes and concepts that appealed to an audience that had a different approach to reading. I hope this trilogy has done precisely that. If not, then my aspiration will be to improve. Just because most of popular culture leaves me cold, or preemptively by its choices shuts me out, I only repeat their error by shutting out readers of the popular. However, integrity demands that I do not pander. In fact, that I might demand a great deal of a reader in terms of assuming they catch scholarly references or have a juggernaut of a vocabulary is, in my view, the highest form of flattery I can give a reader: I will simply assume that they are far more knowledgeable and literate than I am, and so not commit that most heinous of authorial sins: condescension.
My very brief take on experimental literature owes its definition to what experiment means in science: an experiment, by definition, is guided by hypotheses, and can succeed or fail. Technically, all books are experimental; that is, it is an attempt that has as much chance of succeeding as it does failing, and if it does fail, do what the scientist does: change some of the controls, try again.
The first book in this trilogy, The Infinite Library, received polarized reviews. Those who loved books as precious objects, libraries, and bookish subjects tended to appreciate my contribution, whereas those whose reading tastes more sided with popular fare, “chicklit”, and formula-based genre stories took a dimmer view of my attempt. This is not a judgement; as the library sciences thinker Ranganathan once said, to each book its readers, to each reader his or her books. I will not quote reviews of the work that are freely available elsewhere, but through those reviews - positive and negative - I learned a great deal about my own book; other readers found touchstones or thematic threads throughout that I may not have noticed, and so it is like I am among the readers, on the outside looking in, since I have ceded control of the book as it is an object floating freely, an object liberated from its author and in the hands of readers.
The second book in this trilogy, The Infinite Atrocity, did not receive much attention, and there is no point in speculating as to why this is the case, and no point in trying to artificially drum up an audience immediately for it. It is what it is, and like the first book, I have also ceded control over it to the readership who will act as its judges.
This brings me to book number three, The Infinite Grey, another big brute of a book that I am currently doing final line edits for to be ready to release it into the textstream.
The future university effectively becomes the hulking grey tombstone of knowledge. By focusing on the microcosm of the university as the setting for a future feudalism, I am admittedly being selective in following one effect of neoliberal ideology (tempered by neoconservative evangelical philosophy united with militarism and nationalism as the new social bond to replace more naturally human arrangements). I am inspired here by a medley of works which include those of Thorstein Veblen, Lewis Mumford, David Harvey, Christopher Lasch, Jean Baudrillard, and a host of other theoretical inputs. Literarily, the inspirational nexus would include John Barth’s Giles, Goat-Boy and Donald Barthelme’s Snow White. These two in particular function as parodies of the reformist notions of postsecondary education taken to maximalist extremes, but in such a way where the parody eerily resembles the current raft of trends in higher education.
There is more to education than the narrow financial arguments of being a potential “economic driver.” There is something to be said about intrinsic value of education – not as a product, but as a process, even if this is to stake an antiquated claim. But intrinsic value is lost when the mysticism of “economy” naturalizes all discourse according to its myopic evaluation of existence. In such gamified environments, deep learning is sacrificed for strategic, instrumental pursuit of grades, and that education becomes akin to the tedious level-grinding of the role playing game genre.
I don’t conceal my own political stance here. I make myself the easy target of right-wing pundits by my insistence that we deemphasize business interests and focus more on community-building. The books in this trilogy, which carry the baggage of ideological concern by arguably taking a speculative leap from an alarmist anti-neoliberal point of view by showing the possible consequences of current trends, are certainly my literary attempt at a warning. Given that socialist has become a dirty word, an epithet to denounce “radicals” and “extremists” (ironic given that neoliberalism is in itself built on uniting the radicalism of market deregulation and evangelicalism), the pundits can tell me to go pound salt. But I have never bought into the argument that freer global markets would magically produce affluence and prosperity for all; in fact, the trend has been in cultivating further disparities and inequalities. More exploited labor. More deregulation of environmental protections. In the game of global capital, there are winners and losers, and those on the losing side are not stuck there – contrary to what pundits say – because of some personal failing. These are systemic failures. The game may in fact be rigged, and like a perverted form of economic Calvinism, some people are just born damned.
Just as a staid, even dogmatic, book will drag the same stale message into view for a reader, there is sometimes something surprising that happens in the margins. It is there that the reader inscribes the different, a flight of interpretation, a disagreement, a lateral association. Just as it is in the marginalia of books, so it is in the margins of a society. Just now, as I type this, I continue to see a more robust push-back against anti-democratic procedures, against rampant and mindless consumerism, a turn towards community engagement, the growing of one’s own organic gardens, a demand for better environmental protections. Not everywhere, of course. And although movements like Occupy seemed to be a rhapsody of confusing or conflicting messages, the spirit of such things has not dampened. It may also be heartening that the very logic of neoliberalism is moving the deregulated and predatory market system steadily towards its own ruin. I can only hope that the signs I see indicate the twilight of such a ruinous system.
These books are embodied in the environment of the day, and so a variety of topical sociopolitical issues permeate the porous enclosure of the narrative. This is by no means a literary innovation, and many of the authors I admire (specifically Sinclair Lewis and John Barth) manifest this principle of cross-fertilizing current events with fiction. The desideratum of the trilogy may in fact be populated with issues of importance to myself, including the fate of libraries, the effects of digital technology, the triumph of the id, political gamesmanship, propaganda tactics, alienation, environmental degradation, overconsumption, precarious labor, the lasting effects of neoliberalism, and the lack of research into chemical sensitivities. In this way, the issues by themselves define my political persuasion. I can only hope that I have presented those viewpoints via the dialogue of characters in a non-dogmatic and non-doctrinaire way. These are issues that are of importance to me, and I fully respect that they are not shared by many others.
For me, setting the boundary of a trilogy proves challenging if only because it proves abrupt to bring a project to conclusion given that one is accustomed to a certain momentum that wishes to persist. However, I must now answer the call of other, long-neglected projects. It is an almost unreasonable demand in this age of high speed expectations and demands for brevity for readers to dedicate themselves to nearly a million words distributed over three rather large books. It is for this reason that I expect little to nothing...
It is the egotism of authors to delight in talking about their work. I was no stranger to this practice, and there are readers who equally delight in the process notes and tattle of the author. However, as I have grown older in my practice, I find that talking about my work is not enjoyable or even necessary. Any “wisdom” I may have about the practice of writing will have been said a thousand times before by thousands of others in a thousand different ways. I am not interested in the practice of fetishizing the author as celebrity personality or as some precious and special being imbued with “an important mission.” Such practices of author fetishization are indexed uncomfortably close to marketing, and such acts belong to the distant periphery of the author’s central goal: in attempting to write good books. It is the work that is important, not the author. Authors, on the whole, and if we strip away all self-aggrandizing behavior, are generally unglamorous in life, if not also mundane. The stage actor is interesting when acting; offstage, he or she is a regular person. Writing is a performative act, and ultimately the best words one can get out of an author ought to appear in the work itself – not in interviews. My best words appear in books that I have spent time crafting and developing, not necessarily in offhand remarks where I have not been afforded the time to craft. Unlike acting, writing does not (nor ought not) permit the appearance of the author as if on stage, so that the author is more the hidden force or text’s wire-puller. The name is on the spine, and in the front-matter, and that is the author’s trace. Writing is much closer to architecture than theatre, and so perhaps the author builds books, and the words are the performers within the edifice raised.
Very few people around me take much interest in what I write. Or, if they do, it is regarded as simply something I occupy my time with. There is no excessive adulation or praise, nor do I seek it. In fact, many are those around me who do not know that I have a recent book unless someone else informs them. I like it this way. My work as an author plays very little role in my social interactions. I do not ask friends or family to purchase my books or write favorable reviews. I keep quiet about my writing practice unless directly asked, which rarely happens. The world is a vast welter of other things to talk about, and within my various circles there are more pressing issues than to go on an extended session discussing the contents of my books.
There are plenty of authors in the world who are committed to the social apparatus of writing – joining writers’ forums online, going to writers’ conferences, submitting works with regularity and discipline, crafting their image as an author, making connections and alliances in the literary circles, chasing after awards and grants, attending highbrow literary soirees, and packing their schedules with appearances to read and sign books. It just so happens that this type of author is not me. Does this suggest that I am not in good faith with a literary community? Perhaps. And, perhaps I want to avoid a lot of the acrimonious politics that occur in that industry – I experience my fair share of politics in other aspects of life.
A frequent complaint among those who specialize in experimental literature is having such a small pool of readers. The more belligerent of the self-proclaimed experimentalists denounce the popular tastes of the masses that are indexed on frivolous and banal content, absolutely formulaic and catering to sex and violence without any substance. I largely share their view from a critical theory perspective, but this must be squared against managing one’s expectations. Firstly, if one writes niche fiction, one should not expect to attain coveted bestseller status. It would be as sensible as writing a for-specialists book on quantum physics and bemoaning the fact that only a handful of people will buy it. If one writes literature of more sophisticated integrity which demands a lot out of readers, one ought to be content in making a mark among that very particular readership. To demand fame and fortune – a rarity in writing – is unrealistic, and is largely powered by the vicissitudes of a strong marketing strategy that is selective in what it chooses to popularize. As well, berating readers as a whole for failing to engage with challenging works is terribly unhelpful; if one wants to persuade or entice people to broaden their reading horizons, telling them they are stupid will not achieve the desired outcome. We all have our axes to grind with respect to mass consumer culture and the corporate popularization / engineering of taste, but caustic critics of popular taste have been with us for centuries and there is little else new to add beyond remarks on how new technologies are employed to continue the cultural divide.
To that end of experimental literature, there is a precedent for crafting works that appeal to a wider audience which includes more general and more sophisticated readers. Shakespeare did it. He wrote plays that appealed to the more surface features that a less-literary crowd could enjoy, as well as planting themes and concepts that appealed to an audience that had a different approach to reading. I hope this trilogy has done precisely that. If not, then my aspiration will be to improve. Just because most of popular culture leaves me cold, or preemptively by its choices shuts me out, I only repeat their error by shutting out readers of the popular. However, integrity demands that I do not pander. In fact, that I might demand a great deal of a reader in terms of assuming they catch scholarly references or have a juggernaut of a vocabulary is, in my view, the highest form of flattery I can give a reader: I will simply assume that they are far more knowledgeable and literate than I am, and so not commit that most heinous of authorial sins: condescension.
My very brief take on experimental literature owes its definition to what experiment means in science: an experiment, by definition, is guided by hypotheses, and can succeed or fail. Technically, all books are experimental; that is, it is an attempt that has as much chance of succeeding as it does failing, and if it does fail, do what the scientist does: change some of the controls, try again.
The first book in this trilogy, The Infinite Library, received polarized reviews. Those who loved books as precious objects, libraries, and bookish subjects tended to appreciate my contribution, whereas those whose reading tastes more sided with popular fare, “chicklit”, and formula-based genre stories took a dimmer view of my attempt. This is not a judgement; as the library sciences thinker Ranganathan once said, to each book its readers, to each reader his or her books. I will not quote reviews of the work that are freely available elsewhere, but through those reviews - positive and negative - I learned a great deal about my own book; other readers found touchstones or thematic threads throughout that I may not have noticed, and so it is like I am among the readers, on the outside looking in, since I have ceded control of the book as it is an object floating freely, an object liberated from its author and in the hands of readers.
The second book in this trilogy, The Infinite Atrocity, did not receive much attention, and there is no point in speculating as to why this is the case, and no point in trying to artificially drum up an audience immediately for it. It is what it is, and like the first book, I have also ceded control over it to the readership who will act as its judges.
This brings me to book number three, The Infinite Grey, another big brute of a book that I am currently doing final line edits for to be ready to release it into the textstream.
The future university effectively becomes the hulking grey tombstone of knowledge. By focusing on the microcosm of the university as the setting for a future feudalism, I am admittedly being selective in following one effect of neoliberal ideology (tempered by neoconservative evangelical philosophy united with militarism and nationalism as the new social bond to replace more naturally human arrangements). I am inspired here by a medley of works which include those of Thorstein Veblen, Lewis Mumford, David Harvey, Christopher Lasch, Jean Baudrillard, and a host of other theoretical inputs. Literarily, the inspirational nexus would include John Barth’s Giles, Goat-Boy and Donald Barthelme’s Snow White. These two in particular function as parodies of the reformist notions of postsecondary education taken to maximalist extremes, but in such a way where the parody eerily resembles the current raft of trends in higher education.
There is more to education than the narrow financial arguments of being a potential “economic driver.” There is something to be said about intrinsic value of education – not as a product, but as a process, even if this is to stake an antiquated claim. But intrinsic value is lost when the mysticism of “economy” naturalizes all discourse according to its myopic evaluation of existence. In such gamified environments, deep learning is sacrificed for strategic, instrumental pursuit of grades, and that education becomes akin to the tedious level-grinding of the role playing game genre.
I don’t conceal my own political stance here. I make myself the easy target of right-wing pundits by my insistence that we deemphasize business interests and focus more on community-building. The books in this trilogy, which carry the baggage of ideological concern by arguably taking a speculative leap from an alarmist anti-neoliberal point of view by showing the possible consequences of current trends, are certainly my literary attempt at a warning. Given that socialist has become a dirty word, an epithet to denounce “radicals” and “extremists” (ironic given that neoliberalism is in itself built on uniting the radicalism of market deregulation and evangelicalism), the pundits can tell me to go pound salt. But I have never bought into the argument that freer global markets would magically produce affluence and prosperity for all; in fact, the trend has been in cultivating further disparities and inequalities. More exploited labor. More deregulation of environmental protections. In the game of global capital, there are winners and losers, and those on the losing side are not stuck there – contrary to what pundits say – because of some personal failing. These are systemic failures. The game may in fact be rigged, and like a perverted form of economic Calvinism, some people are just born damned.
Just as a staid, even dogmatic, book will drag the same stale message into view for a reader, there is sometimes something surprising that happens in the margins. It is there that the reader inscribes the different, a flight of interpretation, a disagreement, a lateral association. Just as it is in the marginalia of books, so it is in the margins of a society. Just now, as I type this, I continue to see a more robust push-back against anti-democratic procedures, against rampant and mindless consumerism, a turn towards community engagement, the growing of one’s own organic gardens, a demand for better environmental protections. Not everywhere, of course. And although movements like Occupy seemed to be a rhapsody of confusing or conflicting messages, the spirit of such things has not dampened. It may also be heartening that the very logic of neoliberalism is moving the deregulated and predatory market system steadily towards its own ruin. I can only hope that the signs I see indicate the twilight of such a ruinous system.
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