    
Chris Hayden
Rating: N/A
Votes: 0 | | Posted on Thursday, July 03, 2003 - 10:58 am: | |
Cocowriter, Yukio and Thumper:
For starts, after the Harry Potter Craporama it is obvious that it is all about the Benjamins--about sales. I was just reading a Black Film Director (I think it was Bill Duke but I have to recheck) give an interview where he shot the auteur theory of film all to hell. Making films is not about Art, it is all about getting butts in seats and getting out books is not about art it is about how many you can sell. In addition I have seen many poorly edited sloppy books that put this Years Granta Writer of the Future to Shame.
But suppose it is sloppily edited, poorly written, and a piece of sludge? We act as though we are personally affronted because someone put out a bad book--all we have to do is put it down--we don't have to read the whole thing or buy it.
Further, your arguement, while laudible, smacks of that trotted out by many established poets, snobs and pallid bloodless elitists, mostly, who insist that neophytes need to write and study for some years (at least seven, according to one) before they ever submit anything for publication or do a public reading--advice they never took themselves usually. Somebody out there might have a hell of a story to tell or something to say that the establishment does not want said, and he can't afford a professional editor. Should he wait until we sniff the air about him and say "Now is your time?' He or she, after all, is the one who is going to have to take the brickbats if he has made a fool of himself.
I'm thinking of the raw power of the poorly printed sometimes mimeographed broadsides of the Beat Poets, the sloppy smudged Black Panther Party papers, the first Underground Comics, full of mistakes and typoes but still pulsing with naked energy. Would you dismiss the slave narratives because the people were unlettered and illiterate? What about the early gut bucket blues, rock n roll, primitive, raw, imperfect, created by field hands and jailbirds, yet full of a spirit that influences young white musicians all over the world today?
Come out of your ivory towers! Smell the sweat, blood and funk of the folk writers! Share their typoes and bad grammar with them! |