Yesterday, I was part of an event, run by PM Press (the publishers of Sensation) on "radical fiction" last night. The idea was, that as the Anarchist Book Fair is tomorrow, people would be in town, and come.
Shockingly, people did not come:
![BjN0xnzCAAA_-es]( "BjN0xnzCAAA_-es")
Ultimately, there were five panelists and nine audience members, and that is if I include the spouse of a panelist. I guess the highlight is that my friends Sean and Sean came, as did some guy who reads this blog and his companion. So four out of nine came for me! Sold two, count 'em, two books as well.
My radical reading was to read this pan of my book from Publishers Weekly, followed by the first sentence of Love is the Law ("I am a fucking genius.") and the last sentence of Sensation ("We are.") inviting the audience to write their own mental novel to fill the hypothetical sixty-thousand word gap/opportunity space between those sentences. Radical!
Then there was a semi-interesting Q/A. Perhaps the Qs were more interesting than the As. I suppose I'm actually writing this blogpost to distance myself from some of the answers! There was an attempt to make a distinction between radical fiction (I brought up the idea of radical form vs. radical content) and socially conscious fiction*, which is what most of the other panelists were writing. And there was this idea presented that people are dumb/uneducated and/or simply don't respond to data or rational arguments, so the emotional appeals of fiction are more suitable for propagandizing. One panelist pretty wisely brought up the idea that small anarchist presses (or HUGE anarchist presses, like PM) aren't going to reach a mass audience—and that's why he also turned his book into a forty-minute one-man theater piece. Well, he was on the right track for a little while...
Anyway, I don't believe that people are dumb or uneducated or are immune to rational argument. I would say that people's experiences, rather than either emotional appeals or rational arguments, are what lead them to adopt various political positions. Few people become conservative or radical or whatever based only on some encounter with theory or ideas.
Happily, the conversation soon turned to sex, as there was a comment from the audience that successful radical fiction (Burroughs, Delany, etc.) often have a lot of sex in them. Correct! Though the radical examples were also mostly published prior to 1970. There's plenty of sex in regurgitated fanfiction such as Fifty Shades of Grey, after all. Sex may finally be exhausted as a taboo, or at least as a taboo that can become popular because of its radicalism. Housewives are reading about anal beads now; relatively few people are reading Delany's current sexualized novels about eating snot and dog semen. FOR SOME REASON.
Virtually everyone was writing genre fiction, or at least fiction with genre elements (e.g., a "love story"). So that question came up. I've always felt that the genres of speculative fiction have a high potential energy for radicalism, even if it manifests as extreme reaction. SF is by definition about something other than the status quo; even fantasies of hierarchy and divine rights and chosen ones almost always have a taste of fin de siècle about them—after the chosen one, the deluge. In Tolkien's terms, we're up to the Sixth Age of Man or something by now. And horror is all about the return of the repressed, which is necessarily a critique of repression. We never quite return to the status quo ante in these books, even if we wish to. Most of the others were interested in the underdog, for which noir is helpful genre, or were looking for a story arc in order to present politicized stories. Crime fiction is always good for this, as the plots are already set for the most part.
My own reason for writing radical fiction, whatever that is, is simply because it's what I find interesting. The potential audience is still fairly large—say, ten percent of the 2,882,955 people who voted for Ralph Nader for President in 2000 would be as good an estimate as anything. The problem, if there is one, is that the publishers interested in this material are not ones that can actually reach even ten percent of that ten percent: how do you find that 28,830 people who would really into a particular radical fiction title—and that hasn't already purchased their two books a year? Big publishers are often happy to sell thirty thousand copies of a trade paperback, but they do it by smearing eighty thousand copies across bookstores and hoping for the best. Small radical presses can't manage that, so if we end up with ten percent of that ten percent of that ten percent, we're doing pretty well.
So, haha, I'm doing pretty well. No wonder almost half the people at the event came out to see meeeee! Radical!
*Militant liberalism? Nostalgia for radicalisms past? Who even knows, man.
Shockingly, people did not come:
Ultimately, there were five panelists and nine audience members, and that is if I include the spouse of a panelist. I guess the highlight is that my friends Sean and Sean came, as did some guy who reads this blog and his companion. So four out of nine came for me! Sold two, count 'em, two books as well.
My radical reading was to read this pan of my book from Publishers Weekly, followed by the first sentence of Love is the Law ("I am a fucking genius.") and the last sentence of Sensation ("We are.") inviting the audience to write their own mental novel to fill the hypothetical sixty-thousand word gap/opportunity space between those sentences. Radical!
Then there was a semi-interesting Q/A. Perhaps the Qs were more interesting than the As. I suppose I'm actually writing this blogpost to distance myself from some of the answers! There was an attempt to make a distinction between radical fiction (I brought up the idea of radical form vs. radical content) and socially conscious fiction*, which is what most of the other panelists were writing. And there was this idea presented that people are dumb/uneducated and/or simply don't respond to data or rational arguments, so the emotional appeals of fiction are more suitable for propagandizing. One panelist pretty wisely brought up the idea that small anarchist presses (or HUGE anarchist presses, like PM) aren't going to reach a mass audience—and that's why he also turned his book into a forty-minute one-man theater piece. Well, he was on the right track for a little while...
Anyway, I don't believe that people are dumb or uneducated or are immune to rational argument. I would say that people's experiences, rather than either emotional appeals or rational arguments, are what lead them to adopt various political positions. Few people become conservative or radical or whatever based only on some encounter with theory or ideas.
Happily, the conversation soon turned to sex, as there was a comment from the audience that successful radical fiction (Burroughs, Delany, etc.) often have a lot of sex in them. Correct! Though the radical examples were also mostly published prior to 1970. There's plenty of sex in regurgitated fanfiction such as Fifty Shades of Grey, after all. Sex may finally be exhausted as a taboo, or at least as a taboo that can become popular because of its radicalism. Housewives are reading about anal beads now; relatively few people are reading Delany's current sexualized novels about eating snot and dog semen. FOR SOME REASON.
Virtually everyone was writing genre fiction, or at least fiction with genre elements (e.g., a "love story"). So that question came up. I've always felt that the genres of speculative fiction have a high potential energy for radicalism, even if it manifests as extreme reaction. SF is by definition about something other than the status quo; even fantasies of hierarchy and divine rights and chosen ones almost always have a taste of fin de siècle about them—after the chosen one, the deluge. In Tolkien's terms, we're up to the Sixth Age of Man or something by now. And horror is all about the return of the repressed, which is necessarily a critique of repression. We never quite return to the status quo ante in these books, even if we wish to. Most of the others were interested in the underdog, for which noir is helpful genre, or were looking for a story arc in order to present politicized stories. Crime fiction is always good for this, as the plots are already set for the most part.
My own reason for writing radical fiction, whatever that is, is simply because it's what I find interesting. The potential audience is still fairly large—say, ten percent of the 2,882,955 people who voted for Ralph Nader for President in 2000 would be as good an estimate as anything. The problem, if there is one, is that the publishers interested in this material are not ones that can actually reach even ten percent of that ten percent: how do you find that 28,830 people who would really into a particular radical fiction title—and that hasn't already purchased their two books a year? Big publishers are often happy to sell thirty thousand copies of a trade paperback, but they do it by smearing eighty thousand copies across bookstores and hoping for the best. Small radical presses can't manage that, so if we end up with ten percent of that ten percent of that ten percent, we're doing pretty well.
So, haha, I'm doing pretty well. No wonder almost half the people at the event came out to see meeeee! Radical!
*Militant liberalism? Nostalgia for radicalisms past? Who even knows, man.