Dan Schneider on Good Faith, Stupidity, & The Internet: Part 6: Cults Of Personality (Part 2)

As has been the case with all the rest of these prior essays in the GFSI series, this one will deal with much of the accumulated stupidity since the last essay, almost two years ago. In that essay I promised that this next installment would deal with mainly the cult of personality known as the cult of the self, and, indeed, the vast majority of the folks exposed in this essay will be shown to be guilty of the narcissism at the center of a cult of the self that dominates online culture in 2012, and since the rise of the internet in the mid-1990s. Of course, not much has changed over the two years, save that there are even more and more idiots online and their delusions and stupidity get more and more blatant. I write and record these essays for one sole purpose: so that in the future, cyber-historians wanting access to information on why the early Internet days were so filled with idiocy and sciolism will have, at least, a basic bit of understanding, generally, and specifically they will be able to reconcile why it was so difficult for writers and artists of quality, as myself, and some others, to break through when, in earlier times, such was not nearly so difficult.

Going through, in no particular order. Let me review a typical case of online stupidity.

In 2009, I received a solicitation from a website called Arts And Faith, http://artsandfaith.com/t100/, which was moderated by a man named Greg Wolfe. It was an innocuous enough email, and, after sitting unread for a week or two (due to the 15-1600+ emails a week I receive over the last 4-5 years), I read it, and asked if I could submit capsule reviews for some of the films linked, as they were blank. I figured I could spread the word on some quality films, and get some new readers. Thus, I submitted a number of reviews for unreviewed films (the site was differently set up and had many unreviewed films then). After waiting several months, and being told that my reviews would make it online, I queried Greg Wolfe- after his solicitation, and this exchange took place:

From: Dan Schneider [mailto:cinemension@gmail.com]
Sent: Wednesday, February 17, 2010 3:12 AM
To: Arts and Faith; Wolfe, Greg
Subject: Re: Vote in the 2010 Arts and Faith Top 100 Films Poll

Voted in the poll.
When will it be up and when can I submit some capsules?
BTW- surprised to see Vanya listed and not My Dinner W Andre- 2 st. hours of nothing BUT talk on Arts & Faith.
DAN

Dear cinemension,
YOUR VOTE COUNTS! LESS THAN 1 WEEK TO GO!
Voting for our 2010 Arts & Faith Top 100 Films List is now underway.
Arts & Faith has produced Top 100 film lists before, but we are really going to town this year! We've had a number of great new nominations and a survey system that works really well (though it does take a while to fill out!).
The final list will be sent off into the public square to draw attention to this lively online community and to some deserving films and directors.
We’re emailing you because we want to make sure that every member of Arts and Faith knows about this, not just those who post often.
Help us make the best list we can – be a part of this exciting process.
The poll is open until midnight Sunday February 21st.
You can vote here
To be a part of the discussion click here
VOTE TODAY!
Yours,
The IMAGE staff

Acknowledged. I did not see a nomination form, only a poll; unless there was separate email with a nomination form that my filters somehow gobbled. Oh well.
Let me know when the capsules are due, and what the limits are.
Thanks,
DAN

Now, compare the calm rational demeanor of my email with the growing hyperbolic nature of Wolfe’s response. It’s as if he expects people to serve his site’s need. Soon, this will explode into a bizare accusation.

See how calmly I explained how an email alert may have gotten lost, due to my overwhelm of correspondence, yet Wolfe believes I should be following his site every day.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cinemension@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Feb 17, 2010 at 6:22 PM
Subject: Re: Vote in the 2010 Arts and Faith Top 100 Films Poll
To: gwolfe@spu.edu

Aside from working a 40+ hour a week real world job, and some other jobs on the side (online and off), I run a website that has recently just passed the 170 million mark in visitors. My 1300+ pages have garnered over 7 billion hits total in under a decade online. I average about 15-1600 emails a week from poets seeking criticism to submissions of bad poems and ridiculous essays to people writing about their opinion of this or that review to assholes with nothing better to do but rag on something to people wanting me to submit a piece here or there to folks who just want me to explain the meaning of life to them. From that I try to help and reply to those people w the most talent and most serious inquiries.
That does not include emails from assorted websites like Amazon or Criterion or the rest that want to sell me books or films, much less spam for penis enlargement nor Nigerian banks seeking my help.
I am one person, with those 15-1600 people making requests a week. I can only answer maybe 5-10% in any depth, yet ALL want attention, and if they do not get it they assume- despite their being the most important people in their universes, they get pissed.
In my free time I look at many websites, and try to correspond w a few that garner my interest, as well as help some out with a contribution here or there; such as with your site. I don't always have time to know every little thing that goes on at every website that I am interested in nor that solicits me. The best I can do is occasionally follow up.
How many people run your website, and how many emails do you, personally, get that can be replied to in depth?
In short, I doubt there is an individual more invested in the arts (and their betterment), in general, online or off, that draws breath.

DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cinemension@gmail.com>

Date: Thu, Feb 18, 2010 at 5:36 AM
Subject: Re: Vote in the 2010 Arts and Faith Top 100 Films Poll
To: "Wolfe, Greg" <gwolfe@spu.edu>

That's true. I did offer to write capsules, but that was after several years of getting solicitations/spam via emails from your website; which is how I found out about it. If you don't want the interest of regular non-regular members, don't spam. Period.
If all you want is insularity, so be it; but that's not good for arts nor faith. One of the biggest problems online is websites that want cults, not a cosmopolitan readership. It leads to self-delusion and the sort of arrogance your prior emails displayed.

And I'll assume neither you nor your staff is as busy as me; and I forgot trying to squeeze in some films and reading, as well, in my weekly calendar.

DAN

Then, after having received spams from his site, and having had a few other folks confirm for me that they, too, had received spams from Wolfe’s site, I received this bullshit reply I forwarded on to my site’s e-list:

From: Dan Schneider <cinemension@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 10:52 AM
Subject: Fwd: Vote in the 2010 Arts and Faith Top 100 Films Poll
To:

Note the passive aggression, both in not answering my query, below, and in the 'bait' comment and the 'nice in life,' comment.
These are the types of assholes I detest. In my next Internet survey I'm gonna rip this lying fucker a new one. What gets me is how smarmy he is- if you Google his name, he's one of these finger up the ass New Agey religious nuts.
Yet, he LIES thru his teeth re: the spamming. Why? Because, of course, everyone knows who he and his magazine are- these artsy wannabe types never cease to amaze me. Hell, Cosmoetica is 20-50x more popular, and I don't delude myself that more than 1-2% of the online public has ever visited it.
DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cinemension@gmail.com>

Date: Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 10:34 AM
Subject: Re: Vote in the 2010 Arts and Faith Top 100 Films Poll
To: "Wolfe, Greg" <gwolfe@spu.edu>

Greg:
I received spams from Image to my cosmoetica@gmail.com email from 2007 on, until I registered, and then it switched to this email.
Here is bait:
Do you follow A&F? We've discussed nominations for weeks. Do you post there? I'm curious about how invested in this community you are.
The list is meant to represent the community.

As if every person registered should know every last thing that occurs every last day. Delusional bait, but bait nonetheless.

DAN

Note how he kinda, sorta admits his website spams, then denies it, then sidesteps by accusing me of baiting him, even though I was spammed, I volunteered to help them, I was shat upon, then lied to and falsely accused. This is typical of individuals who lack a conscience.

If not interested in improving their website (and my capsules were far better than they have now), he should have simply said no, and not jerked me around for months. And it’s not being spammed that pissed me, but his bald-faced lying about it.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: cosmoeticalist <cosmoeticalist@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 12:11 PM
Subject: Re: Deluded Assfucker

Got a reply where he kind of sort of admits that he had been spamming me, but that is over now, and he apologized. Of course, this is only to 'his current knowledge.' And, there's a hint that this may be because I am registering under other names. Sheesh!
DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cinemension@gmail.com>

Date: Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 12:08 PM
Subject: Re: Vote in the 2010 Arts and Faith Top 100 Films Poll
To: "Wolfe, Greg" <gwolfe@spu.edu>

Thanks, I guess when you're so busy you kind of forget all the solicitations.
DAN

On Sun, Feb 21, 2010 at 11:15 AM, Wolfe, Greg <gwolfe@spu.edu> wrote:

I’ve removed you from the board – at least the registration based on your cinemension gmail address. (Let me know if you’ve registered under any other names.)

If you ever receive an e-mail from A&F, please forward it to me immediately because to my knowledge our current policy is that we do not send out e-mails to anyone other than registered users.

So, Gregory Wolfe lies about spamming, gets caught, and like so many other online losers, weasels his way out of it. Then there’s his claims about being above it all, even as he notes it. Fortunately, I’ve not heard from the jackass since. And this is Mr. Religion?

I wrote of these fools earlier, in Part 1of this two part essay, and in the years since, they still kept on at the idiotic thread on the Empire Magazine website. The delusions go on for pages, and one of the idiots, calling himself Pigeon Army (aka Ding Chavez), from New Zealand, actually emailed me personally, after the post Roger Ebert did on me and my website. He seems to have gotten paranoid that, after he emailed me, I got his IP# and other information. The asses were also paranoid over the fact that one of them also was emailing me with information on them and their posts, included deluded little Steven Edmondson.

Here in the email, interpolated with comments. The whole thing is so funny because it’s so obiously a bluff from a kid, which reminds me of the time, within Cosmoetica’s first month online, when I got a life threatening email from a guy, sent it to the local police and FBI, and then had the boy’s mother emailing and calling me, begging me not to press charges. Read this bedwetting email::

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Adam Goodall <goldfishinabowl@hotmail.com>
Date: Wed, Dec 16, 2009 at 6:07 PM
Subject: A Formal Letter to Mr. Daniel Schneider
To: cosmoetica@gmail.com

[Gotta love the idiot’s FORMAL letter, as opposed to his masturbatory emails and blog posts?]

One, I don’t want you libelling me by plastering my full name all over your essays, using me as a scapegoat for every piece of criticism you receive, and then proceeding to call into question my sexuality, mental capacity, age, gender, maturity, intelligence and reputation with a gleeful disregard for the law or for human decency.

[Either Ding does not realize that his last name, Goodall, came though in his email, or he does not care. Whether that’s real or not is beside the point- his idiocy in making that statement is not. And note, after using pseudonyms and attacking me, he calls me out for attacking his pseudonymous bullshit.]

Two, I don’t want my friends and family to feel ashamed if and when they find about my getting into contact with you.

You may know me better as Pigeon Army, one of the participants in the Top 10 Worst Dan Schneider Reviews thread over at the Empire Online forum (http://www.empireonline.com/forum/tm.asp?m=2462295, if you’ve forgotten the link). When one forum member started that thread in July of this year, I don’t think any of us at Empire anticipated your response. It had not been started as baiting, nor had it been started as vicious character assassination. Like one watches Manos: The Hands of Fate because of how bad it is, or one listens to the music of Wing ironically, the thread was started so that we as a forum, bound in a kind of light-hearted internet camaraderie, could revel in the awfulness of your writing. Much like the people who watch Manos don’t wish death upon the people who made it, we don’t wish death upon you. Your work is ridiculous, badly-written, infinitely smug and altogether unworthy of a tag of ‘First Year Film Studies paper’, let alone actual critical analysis of film. That doesn’t mean that we hate you, or that we wish you to die, because of your reviews. That means we don’t like your work – and while we may have said some unacceptably insulting things that you took offense to, you can be assured that we did not mean you any direct or indirect harm. If we did insult you, I apologise fully.

[Note how he cannot even stand behind his puerility. Note how the email tries to put up a pretense of maturity all the while passive aggression is breaking out like the zits on his back.]

That was the 30^th of October 2009. Three months, nearly four, after the thread had been posted, and three months exact after all activity had died in it.

I want you to take careful note of this date, Mr. Schneider. It’s more important than you think.

The essay that I linked to above is one you should be familiar with. I know I am – it is the one in which you refer to me as an “ass”, and then say that myself and my compatriots are “vicarious vermin, so socially maladapted that they can only spend their time at a computer to feel joy.” While I was going to write you a stern letter after the publication of this, I eventually decided against it, as I had no time, being preoccupied in several things that kept me away from a computer – I had the end of year party for my debating society coming up; I had scripts to write for a Film course application; I had a job to acquire for my summer break (I live in New Zealand); I had friends to have dinner with, talk to, and party with; I had plenty of films to watch; and I had two Law exams to study for and sit. My life was too full with things to do for me to refute your claims in an e-mail.

However, three days ago, my time, you posted an addendum to your essay. You state in this addendum that someone named Joey Pottr emailed you, excoriated you for your attack on our thread, and demanded apologies from you for your libellous statements, attributing things Steven and the man known has Weepingsam hadn’t done to them.

In this addendum, as I’m sure you well know, you used homophobic slurs to describe ‘Joey Pottr’ and ‘Steven’ repeatedly in the form of “fudgepacker” while displaying a hitherto unprecedented love for calling things Pavlovian.

Most importantly, though, Mr. Schneider, you made numerous libellous statements against Steven and the members of the Empire Forum.

[Of course, this idiot does not even recognize that libel require three com[ponents: 1) falseness, 2) intent to defame, with the falseness acknowledged, and 3) provable damage to a peputation. In short, all three of the points required for libel to not be applicabl;e were easily attained by me, but more importasntly, they only apply to REAL NAMES, not pseudonyms!]

TheManWithNoShame is not, never has been, and never will be Weepingsam. In fact, he has stated categorically on that same thread, “The best part is I don't have a fucking clue who weepingsam is. He's just some name he's plucked out of thin air.” In fact, you acknowledge yourself in your addendum that “Little Steven’s and Weepy’s are distinct, and from different parts of the world, with different ISPs,” and while TheManWithNoShame is not Steven, he does live in the same country as him, and so it immediately follows that The ManWithNoShame cannot possibly be Weepingsam, as they live in different parts of the world, with different ISPs.

“ Again, a nice try at covering his ass, but even the folks at Empire can see the IP numbers of those who post.”

As a moderator on this forum, Mr. Schneider, I shall state right now that this is not the case, and that what we have here is a lie. Only moderators can see the IP addresses of their fellow posters in any fashion that doesn’t require outside technology. And, furthermore, I can tell you that TheManWithNoShame, Steven, Weepingsam, jamesbondguy, Troilus, rawlinson, Rhubarb, Epiphany Demon and myself are all different people. I have seen all of the IPs of those listed who post on the Empire Forums. Weepingsam never has. Steven has, in fact, already been banned from the forum, and while it may be regrettable to give you this as ammunition, it is imperative that I point out just how fallacious these statements you make are. We are all different people, living our own separate lives, and it seems that you have made the same mistake that you accuse Steven of making (and I paraphrase your comments here) – “This sort of thing is known as the projection of self…No, I have to be as obsessed as they are; even though time and agin [sic] they have seen that dozens, if not hundreds, of separate entities, have tried to combat the vandalism that Little Steven and his kind do.” The only difference is that this time, this isn’t Wikipedia vandalism. This is a blatant and gleeful destruction of the reputation of a group of people for no other reason in that they do not like your writing.

Again – Steven has already been banned from the website for matters not related to trolling or disagreeing with you. Or being a “fudgepacker”. We may be his “pals”, but that does not make us his puppets.

[Note, how in his panic, he gives away even more information than I had from the person in that thread who contacted me. This deluded little cybernerd is a total idiot. Yet, onward e reveals his cowardice and idiocy.]

Furthermore, I have been explicitly told by the forum member TheManWithNoShame that he was, in fact, the writer of the ‘Joey Pottr’ letter. The ‘slip of the tongue’ at the end was little more than a joke, and Steven had nothing to do with that letter.

I do not know of the Wikipedia ‘vandalism’ you post at length about. Frankly, I don’t care what happens at Wikipedia, as I only tend to use it for what my university lecturers have recommended I use it for – as a good starting point for essays (though it should never be used for academic writing, something I agree with). I will note, however, that the staff at Wikipedia might be interested to know your opinion of it in regards to its coverage of the arts – “the vast majority of edits there add zero in terms of knowledge- [sic] contrasted to what the links to my reviews did.” I am told Steven had very little to do with this ‘vandalism’ you purport to have occurred, but nevertheless, that is tangential to the real issue here today.

In his essay Libel on the Internet: An International Problem, which can be found here - http://www.law.buffalo.edu/Academics/courses/629/computer_law_policy_articles/CompLawPapers/holland.htm - Adjunct Professor Howard Meyers defines libel in American law as “Libel occurs when a false statement is written which injures an individual by disgracing him. The statement must be about an individual and the readers must be aware that the individual is the subject of the false statement. Furthermore, the defamatory statement must not be an opinion, but rather one of fact.”

In the ‘essay’ that you published, you wrote that TheManWithNoShame was Weepingsam, that the members of the Empire Forum were all aliases of Steven Edmondson, and that Steven Edmondson was a “fudgepacker” (while accusations that someone is gay may not necessarily constitute libel in and of themselves, it can be argued as an allegation of “unchastity”, and thus defamation per se, which does hold up in many American states).

[In his email, the dummy even admits to hearsay, ‘I am told….’, and then quotes bullshit on libel that far more describes the statements made about me, by him and his forum, since I use my real name and do not use aliases.]

Furthermore, you have repeatedly asserted that all of us involved in the thread were “cyberstalkers”, which is a pretty severe allegation of criminal activity given the nature of the law and its approach to the internet. 47 USC s223 states, in subsection a, paragraph 1, subparagraph C, “Whoever in interstate or foreign communications makes a telephone call or utilizes a telecommunications device, whether or not conversation or communication ensues, without disclosing his identity and with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass any person at the called number or who receives the communications; shall be fined under Title 18, or imprisoned not more than two years, or both.” This, the most relevant part of US cyberstalking laws, clearly doesn’t encompass posting reviews published by the aggrieved party on a forum, and then mockingly discussing them with other people. There was never an intent to “annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass” you, Mr. Schneider. I would be hard-pressed to say anyone you’ve claimed to be a cyberstalker has possessed that intent, otherwise one could feasibly say that anything anyone says that is critical of another’s work is cyberstalking, and that all critical discourse should henceforth be banned.

[Of course, as I’ve stated, and a quick Gogle search will show, it is not libel, and even if it met all three points of libel, it would fail because there are nothing but pseudonyms used by the Empire asses.]

Your childish name-calling, written without an ounce of humour or self-reflexiveness, does not concern me.

As much as I take issue with it, that name-calling is not so much insulting as it is juvenile, pathetic and unbearably smug.

Your assertions of superiority over us members of the Empire Forum do concern me, as you seem to operate within a force-field of hypocrisy and a lack of self-awareness. Pointing out how people who mock your work have high post counts on an internet community that bonds over a love of film and an innate sense of very human camaraderie and friendship does not show how much better you are than us, particularly when you mention elsewhere how much you’ve written in your time as a contributor to the internet and how many people come to your website. Numbers do not prove how much better you are than us - fan sites for George W. Bush may get more hits than the Empire Forum, but that does not mean he is a better person than us, much like it does not mean he is a better person than you. Furthermore, asserting your superiority over people who are passing light-hearted comment over your reviews on a forum not in the public eye by dedicating several paragraphs of bile and unpleasantness to them in an essay that is in the public eye is incredibly counter-productive, and makes you look insecure and childish instead of superior.

Furthermore, your assertions that people can only read your work because they like them or are in awe of you – or, as you put it, “Yet, if I am so unsuccessful, why do folk like Little Steven and Weepy simply not click to another website? Because they know what I am saying is correct, and wish like hell that they had said it.” – concerns me, as it shows a remarkable lack of understanding of human nature. Perhaps this analogy will help – I was at dinner with several old high school friends last Friday, when one realised there was a car accident at the intersection outside our restaurant. For the next fifteen minutes, we would regularly update ourselves on what was happening on that intersection, up until the tow truck drove away the totalled car. Why did we do this? Because we loved what we were seeing? Absolutely not – my friends and myself do not possess misanthropic mindsets, and are outgoing people who love working with others. In fact, those friends are studying to be doctors, scientists, architects. I’m studying to be a lawyer. All of us are studying for these careers because we want to help people. So why did we watch the car crash? Because it fascinated us. It was powerful, but not in a good way. We weren’t hoping another would occur – we were hoping the driver was alright; we were marvelling at how totalled the car was; we were surprised by how many emergency services people had turned up. Likewise, why do us members of the Empire Forum read your work? Because it fascinates us. We aren’t hoping more writing will be produced – we are hoping if the writer is alright; we are marvelling at how ‘totalled’ the critical analysis and prose is; we are surprised by how many things have been written to date. Your writing is like a car crash to us. Writing that reduces the lovely and intelligent Oja Kodar to nothing more than a filthy wet dream, that doesn’t want to appreciate all of Juliette Binoche’s performance in Three Colours: Blue because she speaks French, that maligns Carol Reed’s greatest cinematic achievement with a zany conspiracy theory because he cast Orson Welles in it – writing like that can only be like a car crash to us.

However, these are not my biggest problems with your writing. If they were, I would be no less justified in writing this, but I would not get through to you. Evidence has shown that you seem unable to change, unable to realise just how self-aggrandising and ridiculous you come across as. My biggest problem with you, right now, is that you are defaming the members of the Empire Forum, you are defaming Steven Edmondson, and you are defaming Weepingsam.

You are tarnishing our reputations, as you have tarnished the reputations of others – a certain Peter Svensland, who wrote into Roger Ebert on his opinions of yourself, was described by you in a mean-spirited and downright virulent blog post as someone who “seems to have spent the better part of his life in and out of 'happy farms’”; you have gone on record as calling Roger Ebert “notoriously dense”, “often stolid” and “outrageously dumb”, calling his intelligence into question regularly (which makes the hypocrisy of you flying the flag of his gentlemanly and generous praise of your work all the more distasteful). Perhaps the defamation of us Empire Forum members and Mr. Svensland is even worse (I know not if Mr. Svensland has actually spent time in mental hospitals, though your wording seems to suggest that is not the case) than your defamation of Ebert, as you are asserting patently wrong statements about us to be ‘facts’, and then bitterly making unpleasant, vicious ad hominem attacks on us in conjunction with those assertions of falsities as truth.

Mr. Schneider, I call upon you to apologise for your libellous statements. The best thing to do right now is recant for your offensive, defamatory comments; to swallow your pride and accept, for once, that you were wrong. It is, one may say, the only thing an honourable man would do.

P.S. – Generals aren’t the only people who have ‘yes men’. They exist everywhere, in all walks of life.

P.P.S - Despite all this, you are still more than welcome at any time to visit the Empire Forums and join us in our discussion. Us members of the Empire Forum are tolerant and friendly folk, willing to give anyone a fair shake.

Yes, Adam ‘Pigeon Army/Dingo Chavez/dozens of other online aliases’ Goodall, if that’s even his real name, which I doubt, and care little of- he, a man of honor. Never let it be said, dear reader, that I proffer no entertainment on this website. This Pavlovian response is typical of the many I’ve gotten over the years, but, as noted above, getting 80,000 or more emails a year means most get no looks at all. I never even replied to this fool, and let him go back to his place in the Empire daisy chain so he could pack fudge and munch starfish in peace, and shoot of fhis pathetic grovelings to others. Be well, Pigeon Army!

On a related point, it was fun how the Empire asses misread Ebert’s cringe in the post, as it was directed at them, not me!

Other than passive aggressive asses like Adam Goodall, there are bait and switch emails from people who start off friendly, but realy have an agenda. Here is one exchange between me and ‘Generic Josh,’ as I dubbed him:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joshua Englehart <josh@articulateresearch.com>
Date: Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 11:51 PM
Subject: question for Dan
To: cosmoetica@gmail.com

I've been browsing through your site, and have to say that I agree with most of the specific criticism you have for individual poems.

First, the curious: Although I agree with almost everything you have to say about any particular poem, I sometimes find myself thinking about other poems by the author under discussion that I do like, and I wonder whether you find things of value in these poets and are simply choosing works that are better as examples of what not to do, or something. The truly unfortunate thing about poetry is there is just so little of it that is not crap. Even among my favorite poets I can usually only find a very small handful of poems that I think are really somthing special, no matter how many volumes they've published over how many years. Bukowski, for instance -- 99% of his poetry was worthless. But I have found a few that I do like, such as Don't come round, but if you do... or The Genius of the Crowd, which while clearly juvenile and more than a little self-important still has a kind of lilt to it that I like.

I absolutely love some of WCWs poems -- I'm in awe of him. And yet again, there are less than 10 that I care much for (although that does include Asphodel, which is pretty freaking long). From his earlier work, the shorter ones are clearly better; but in my opinion the stuff he did at the end of his life, such as The Ivy Crown, To Daphne and Virginia, and The Descent, all found in Pictures from Brueghel, were absolutely mind-shattering. There's a subtlety about the movement of his thoughts, it's not what you anticipate and yet somehow seems very right.

Incidentally, while I agree with you about repetition being pointless and formulaic in most cases, I wondered what you thought of the repeating phrases and conceptual imagry in The Descent. I have an exceptional memory for poetry that I like; after a few reads I can usually recite it word for word (the trade-off being that I have almost no appreciable visual cognition -- it's really difficult for me to 'picture ' things in my head), and get pleasure from doing so (even to myself... I just like the way the language flows). The Descent I discovered to be oddly difficult to remember properly -- which seems appropriate considering that memory is the theme that runs strongly through the entire poem. I'm not sure if that was done deliberately or not, I know it seems a bit far-fetched. But it's true that for some reason that poem was much more difficult than is the norm for me -- it has something to do with the way that some phrases partially repeat but then angle off in a different but similar direction than their first appearances, I think. *shrug* Anyway, on to the actual question I wanted to ask you, which is about WCW's line breaks.

I can't say at what point it might be considered to have been fully developed / implemented, and so maybe in the poems of his you cite the breaks are more arbitrary than in, say, Asphodel -- I'd have to read them over more carefully and think about it -- but I noticed that you didn't mention at all what Williams was trying to do with what he called the 'variable foot'; your criticism of his line breaks treats them as if they were used in their traditional (well, traditional in modern poetry) function of accentuating certain words or ideas in the poem. I would respectfully disagree with this view, as I believe strongly that what Williams, in his attempt to 'capture the rhythms of American speech' was doing with his breaks was defining lines that were meant to be equal in length (length meaning in this context how long it takes to actually say the line aloud). Shakespeare being one of the two largest influences on the English language (along with the Bible) it's not surprising that much of Williams' work winds up sounding roughly iambic. But while traditional notions of meter in verse hinge on syllable count, which is arbitrary and tends to sound far more stilted and awkward than common speech -- not to mention the peculiarities of ellipsis and atypical phrasing to which poets must often resort in order to satisfy the strict formality of traditional meter -- Williams' lines recognise that spoken language is constantly adjusting its tempo based on the conceptual and situational context. The emphasis placed on a phrase, and the speed at which it is delivered, often vary widely based on such things as the difficulty of the concept being expressed, originality of the phrase (a cliche or well-known combination of words will usually be spoken more quickly, since both the speaker and the listener will tend to regard it almost as a single word) and the position of the phrase within a larger argument (one's locution is undeniably different when nearing the peak of an argument or the crux of a problem, in ways much too subtle to be indicated by italicization or the blunt instrument of upper case). Within a single sentence it is natural to constantly alter the pace of delivery, and yet we still recognize in the whole an underlying rhythm that ties the speech togeher in a way that seems wholly natural. Williams wanted to impart to his verse this same sort of natural, organic tempo, and in large part I feel that he managed to succeed in that to an extent that no one had previously done.

I think it's worth considering the obsessive amount of thought Williams spent specifically on line breaks in particular, and the enormous significance he assigned to them. To Williams the line break was the most misused and least understood element of poetic structure -- or at least, one whose full potential no one had ever managed to approach even distantly, including even the most innovative and experimentally inclined among his peers (of Cummings: '... a poet whom I love but with whom I differ touching the modern poetic technique [...] as yet he does not concede the point -- nor indeed is he aware of it'). He would have been appalled at your suggestion that his line breaks were in any case arbitrary, as that was one of his most common complaints about the work of others (of T.S. Eliot, famously, '...bad prose chopped arbitrarily into lines'). In light of all of which I conclude that Williams' lines should be parsed with neither abacus nor semiotic map, but with a metronome.

Thanks for spending the time and funds in support of the online community (I'm not at all certain that the definite article is at all appropriate in that phrase, but I'm trying to keep the stick out of my ass to the extent that's possible without risking the broad road and strait gate leading to Friends reruns and maudlin bathos) and with respect to the several freely accessible resources you provide and maintain. Every sandbag helps.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Feb 27, 2010 at 11:52 AM
Subject: Re: question for Dan
To: Joshua Englehart <josh@articulateresearch.com>

It's a bit presumptuous of you to inform me about what the bases of my assumptions are, in my opinion. I've read very little about what Williams said about his own poetry, actually; in general I don't really care about what artists say about their art, any more than I care about the lifestyles of the musicians who create music I like or the sexual picadillos of sport figures whose talent I acknowledge. I'd seen a reference to what he called the 'variable foot' and was curious about the concept. Most of my opinions about what I think he was actually trying to do, and what I think to some extent he did do, evolved through my reading of his poetry, particularly that written in the last few years before his death.
Josh: You wrote 1) Williams was trying to do, 2) I believe strongly that what Williams, in his attempt, 3) it's not surprising that much of Williams' work, and 4) Williams' lines recognise that spoken language is constantly adjusting its tempo based on the conceptual and situational context. All of that in ONE paragraph. I was not presumptuous, I was commenting on the bases of presumptions you made. Take, for instance, #4, and how you anthropomorphize Williams' very lines of poetry. People do this sort of thing subconsciously when they love something and seek to defend it, regardless of its quality. It's an emotional response that simply has no place in criticism. Period.

Your arguments against my claims about Williams' poetry are riddled with straw men. I am of course not suggesting that one should be able to reconstruct an idiolect from the written work (the closest I've seen to that, other than linguistics transcriptions using literally hundreds of distinct diacritical marks for just a couple of sentences, is probably Cummings' "oil tel duh woil doi sez". It's difficult to read that in any way that makes any sort of sense at all without reproducing a pretty distinct Jersey or Bostonian accent). Your attack on that hyperbolic claim, which I was never trying to make, is facile and suffers from a reactive over-extension in the opposite direction.
I never made that claim. I debunked your claim about what you think you know of what Williams knew of his poetry and artistic aims. I wrote that 1) artists lie, and 2) there is no plain speech poetry- and gave a concrete example from WCW. As for accents, that is separate and apart from tempo in speech. So, you have switched your argument. Despite sterotypes, not all New Yorkers speak rapid fire, and not all Southerners slowly drawl.

Obviously there is some sort of middle ground here, as we do employ some locutionary tags in the form of punctuation, paragraph separation, italicization, boldfacing, capitalization, etc. These 'rules' of written language would have been discarded long ago if they didn't serve some function. Having abandoned most poetic forms that employ a fixed line length, modern poetry is left with an extra punctuation mark, so to speak, in the line break—but there has been no real consensus on what to do with it. Its use is often wholly arbitrary, or employed according to some vague feeling by the poet as to what surprisingly unconventional pattern (or lack of same) of breaking up the lines seems more 'poetic' or best manages to imply that something otherwise mundane has been imparted a powerful and sexy depth by virtue of scattering deliberately meaningless signifiers throughout, such that the resultant confusion as to the meaning of the text might be mistaken for a clever trope of some kind.
Poetry exists in lines for the enjambment to add duplicity of meaning. Even if one buys into the fallacy of meter, there is no logic for the break into lines, save for the pause at a line break. But, as I wrote, if you buy into WCW's claim of plain speech, the very rationale for enjambment is moot.

Also, I never said anything about 'the purity of the spoken word'. I said that Williams claimed to be trying to 'capture the rhythms of American speech' and that in so doing he recognized something about spoken language that hasn't been examined or explored much in writing by anyone else, namely, the changes in pace that take place constantly in speech. He was interested in how to address this particular component of spoken language in a written form. This does not mean that he was attempting to dictate exactly how one of his poems would be read; rather, it is an attempt to exploit in written language some of the extra shadings of meaning that are available when speaking aloud.
My phrasing was a better distillation of what you attempted to say in more words. Now, reread the litttle section between my last two interjections. What it says makes no sense, and frankly is buying WAY too much into claims about WCW that are not sustainable by the poems he actually wrote. As I showed earlier, HE did NOT write in PLAIN speech. In his best lines and poems he affects that, but it is NOT plain speech. Average folk do not speak like WCW poems, anymore than they do like Hart Crane poems. His is a style, but not anything remotely resembling plain speech. If it were, then it would be larded with interjections, fillers of ums and ers, etc. And, the fact that he did break his poems into lines, is EXPLICIT admission that he was trying to control how a poem is spoken. That is the purpose of enjambment, on a phonic and audio level. If not, he would have written block paragraphs.

We do use various means in writing to describe how something is meant to sound, including accent marks, alternative spellings, contractions etc. (often used to indicate regional dialect), punctuation, and descriptive phrases in prose such as 'he said slowly'. If you read a poem aloud, the way you read the poem will be affected by these things. Although no two people will interpret them in exactly the same way, nevertheless they have an effect. "oil tel duh woil doi sez" is not the same as "'I'll tell the world', I said". The former clearly is written so as to influence the way the poem sounds when read aloud, or how a reader imagines it might sound aloud even if he is reading it silently to himself.
But it makes no attempt to impose speed of reading, which was what you had brought up. I debunked that.

That is of course an extreme example, but nonetheless it is true that writers use such techniques to varying degrees in just about any written work. Generally they are not meant so much to dictate how it should sound as they are intended to reference and evoke some of the nuance that is available in spoken language. Just as when one writes, '...he said in a very dry voice, heavy with sarcasm,' it is left up to the reader to supply whatever he imagines dry sarcasm should sound like, so we use various other indicators in written language that on one level designate various specific oral effects, but on another attempt to access a sort of commonality of meaning that lies behind the specifics. The line break is one of these possible indicators, as are the comma and the full stop. Different people, when reading something aloud, might grant differing amounts of pause when reading past a comma or full stop, but no one pretends that those marks have no meaning whatsoever, or that whatever significance they do have is confined entirely to the written form and should have no impact at all on the way it sounds when read aloud or recited.

***Actually, e.e. cummings was even better. This is akin to the fallacy of stream of consciousness writing, when consciousness is clearly not stream-like; it's an affectation. And, assuming by your spelling that you are British, I can tell you that in the US, there are vastly more complex rules re: the emphasis of sounds, from assorted dialects like Gullah thru Noo Yawkese. All of this argues AGAINST the claims you and others make for Williams.

I'm not British; I was born & live in California. I have noticed that I do tend to favor (heh but apparently not in the case of 'favour') British spelling in some instances, without thinking; it's not an affectation, I just don't notice myself doing it. I think it probably goes back to my mother's love of Dickens' novels; before I started elementary school, and then on weekends and during the summer, she would have me read to her for hours from Great Expectations or The Pickwick Papers while she did her sewing (my father was opposed to television on principle, and we rarely had one in the house). As a result, I think that my introduction to many words was in their British form, and it stuck with me.

In any case, I hardly find the idea supportable that there somehow exists a much more complex set of pronunciation rules in America than among the English; there are many localized dialects in Great Britain, some of which are barely comprehensible to one another. Apart from regionalizations, there is a well-established class distinction which extends even to diction (as was famously lampooned in John Betjeman's 1958 poem How to Get On in Society). When you consider the distinct accents of English-speaking residents of Scotland, Wales, etc., it's clear that there's plenty of variety there.
The USA has 4 times the amount of people than Britain has, and many many more ethnic groups. Our brew is many times more complex- verbally, genetically, racially, politically, etc. It's simple dint of numbers.

Far more vital is th efact of what a poet is actually writing about, and WCW was rather pedestrian. Cummings, at least, wrote deeper, more violent and emotional poems which had WCW-like affects, but also had a lyricism Williams lacked.

I love Cummings -- the man was brilliant, funny, and had a strong humanism about him that shone through in all of his work. But I certainly wouldn't consider WCW 'pedestrian' even though the things he wrote about tended to have more to do with interpersonal relationships than with general observations, political or social opinion, etc. One thing that I would note is that you don't really see much development over time in Cummings' poetry; although he did have minor 'periods' of experimentation of one type or another, poems of his from the 20s are not radically different in style from those he wrote in the 50s. Williams' technique, on the other hand, seems to me to have been his entire life in the development, culminating in the style he used in Asphodel and other late works.
Both were ultimately dead end gimmick poets, and neither could sustain a poem for more than a page, which is why both's best and most known works are considerably less than a page in length.

It's ridiculous to argue that poetry is primarily about content, and not about how it's written. How it's written is exactly what differentiates it from prose. Ideally, of course, the various structural and other elements such as controlled rule-breaking ('poetic license') and content density work together to lead the reader to approach the subject from an unexpected or unfamiliar direction, allowing an appreciation of the content that differs both experientially and in substance.
I wrote it is vital, not about. Read the poems of Walter de la Mare. He is a formalist nonpareil, but he says absolutely NOTHING. His work is intellectually inert. In short, no amount of technical skill can compensate for intellectual lack, and greatness depends upon both in good helpings. My point was that WCW has little to say of any depth- he is, as I state, a gimmick poet, just like cummings, or bill bissett, Wilfred Watson, or reams of other gimmick poets of minor note. He is not in a league with Whitman, Crane, Rilke, Stevens, Jeffers, or many other poets who veined their work with philosophic depths.

I've noticed (from the 30 or so of your essays that I've read) that you're fond of stating that this or that person's work possesses or lacks 'lyricism'. It strikes me as nothing more than an attempt to add authority and a sense of technical merit to your personal opinion of a particular author or work through the use of a term whose definition is entirely subjective and without any established meaning beyond "it sounds good [to me]". Tricks like this that lend an artificial weight to your opinion are no different than those for which you excoriate others when they wax effusive about how someone's writing is a 'metaphor for our age' or the like. Meaningless tripe meant to convince the reader that you're more educated and a better authority on the subject than they are.
Except I often detail the things that show clunky music or not. What I do not do, as example, is go on to lengthily prove a blatant cliche is such, because any person reading a poem that cannot diuscern a cliche that is obvious needs to read more. Just as in a film review I will not dwell on why a certain camera swoop by a director that then pans in to a person's face is the director's way of saying 'this is important.' It's obvious. In short, I assume a reader has a certain level of knowledge and intellect and I do not have to engage in Dick and Jane level hermeneusis. That said, I do rip apart many technical points in many essays. It's no trick, it's called respecting your readers, something that the PC world abhors. And, I do not aim to convince anyone in an essay, merely to evince things that they may lack the skills to see, but which are plain to someone with the requisite level of skill and wisdom.
That is why i am REPLYING to you, and did not seek your opinion.

This is patently false, an overly simplified and imbalanced reaction to some basic changes in understanding of the idea of 'the text' that came about toward the beginning of the Modern era in art and literature. Yes, it is true that, as Derrida put it (and before you say anything, yes, I have my own problems with that weaselly bastard) writing is 'orphaned and ... cut off at birth from its father', and in one sense it makes no difference what was in the author's head when they were writing something, only whatever it was that actually got written.
Fuck Derrida or any of the other semioticians and theorists. Art is its own best explanation, when good or great. I can tell you what a film or poem means, but if that is or is not what was intended I cannot. And even if the artist claims it so, artists are known to lie. Art is a lie, not a truth. The intentional fallacy is just that, and a deceptive way to make wannabe artists think that they can understand something aside and apart from the art itself.

But on the other hand, the very act of reading a text is the act of attempting to understand the author's intent, even though the 'author' in this context is somewhat abstracted and idealized, and we know that we will never 'know' in some absolute sense what the author meant. It starts most basically at the coarse level of interpretation, where we recognize that the author is writing in English (or whatever) and proceeds from there. When we are puzzled by a particular sentence and examine it more closely, although in one sense what we are asking ourselves is "is there a way for this sentence to be interpreted such that it makes sense in context?" the process by which we do that operates much more like "What is the author trying to say here?" We can recognize typos or poor choices in diction because we assume that the author was trying to say something that makes some sort of sense, and so we can say, 'Oh, I see, he means it like this, as in this.' Do you wish to claim, for example, that an understanding of the cultural, social, historical, etc. context within which something was written can have no positive impact on our understanding or appreciation of an author's work?
No, but all work can and must stand by itself, Context is turkey trimmings, not the turkey. If the art cannot stand of its own accord, it will fail. For example, I may not know who the person in a great historical poem is, or what the feats attributed to said hero is; BUT a great poem does not require that. I will be rapt by it whether or not that her is named Ulysses, Sir Gawain or Izzy Metzenbaum. By finding out who Ulysses or Gawain were I might add to the poem's depth, slightly, but if I NEED that info for the poem to work, the artist has failed to strike the right chord.
Read my poem, on Cosmo, called The Al Capone Canzone. It works, whether or not you know Capone was a psycho gangster, because that's the feel you get from his grandiosity. Learning that he was responsible for the murders of hundreds and was Public Enemy #1, only adds to the poem, but it has no bearing on its greatness.

Do you think that there is no value when reading, for instance, a historical work of satire, in knowing something about the political or social circumstances or particulars upon which the author was commenting? This may be information that the author could safely assume would be universally possessed by his contemporaries, but which mean nothing to the modern reader. Do you feel that there is no value in understanding, when viewing a painting by anyone from the Realist period onward, what movements or entrenched ideas in art were being rebelled against or commented upon by the artist? The artist often uses his work as a form of expression within a dialogue he is carrying on with his peers, who share certain understandings, who already have a history of 'conversation' on the subject that is referenced in the current work, who are swept up in common events in the world, who have all just seen the new work by so-and-so that has in some way revolutionized the field and opened up new possibilities, etc. Knowing something about that background or ongoing 'conversation' can vastly deepen one's appreciation of the specific work—the specific 'statement'—in question.
See my last response; and note that you wrote can vastly deepen one's appreciation CAN is not an imperative. In short, your own words betray the fact that it is NOT needed. It's an additive; not a necessity. In short, you are unwittingly agreeing with me.

Yes, in the end the work stands apart from the creator and must survive on its own. But it does not do so in a vacuum. From the first glance at the text, when you determine that the author was intending to address an audience who could read English, you have assumptions and make determinations about the author's intent. In the case under discussion, it is absolutely justifiable to mention what the author was attempting to do, because the reader is being asked to consider the adoption of what is essentially a new punctuation mark, the line break -- or I should say, the adoption of a definition for the line break, an element of punctuation which does not have any well-established meaning or usage convention in modern poetry, and the significance of which in any particular instance is for most readers (and writers, for that matter) vague at best, and confusing or annoying at worst. Without some sort of explanation of the author's intent in using this particular mark, the reader will completely miss an entire layer of signification present in the text. Williams contends that there is an undeveloped area of our written language, and that since rules governing usage of the line break do not exist and the various attempts to use the mark are clumsy and do not take full advantage of the opportunities it presents; since, in short, it is not being used productively for anything else, it should be used in this new way, to indicate something that is used extensively in oral linguistic practice but has never been recognized or developed at all in the written form.
Look at how you again are so free in assuming what WCW intended or not. It simply does not matter what he intended, real or imbued by you. Why? Because it does not matter to me, and I can get many, many others who would agree that it means nothing to them, apart from any knowledge of my or your opinions. It only takes one dissent to falsify your claim.

Just as one is expected to have learned (separately from the poem being read) the rules of grammar and traditions of usage that impart signification to the comma, the full stop, italicization, boldfacing, etc, so one is expected to come to one of Williams' later poems with an understanding of the line break as used in his work. It is no different from using your knowledge of the fact that the author is European to guide your understanding of what is meant by commas and periods within numbers (which tend to have the opposite usage here in the States). The only difference here is that what Williams proposes is an innovation, and so the reader's knowledge of how to read him properly must be partially gained from the author himself. There is the implicit assumption that if this particular grammatical theory (that is, his definition of the line break) gains wide-spread acceptance, beating out competing definitions & rules to become the established usage, then eventually the reader would not need to be specifically informed of the author's intent; it would be a given. Other authors would use it the same way or else be implying something specific by the fact that they weren't using it in that way, the default way. As it is, if you haven't encountered the break being used as an indicator of this particular thing before, you will be unlikely to pick up the idea just from reading poems that do so; not knowing how to translate the line break, or even that it was something that might require translation or understanding, no particular instance of its use would mean anything, and no patterns or implications could arise from its employment within a particular work. In which case, you will be entirely oblivious to an aspect of the text, completely unable to judge for yourself whether you feel that defining the line break in this way has merit, or even how well you feel the author has managed to use the technique within the poem to add depth or some other informational payload.
I simply do not have the time to repeat myself. But, you are giving WCW WAY too much credit, and shortshrifting contemporaries and predecessors from Whitman and Stephen Crane and Dickinson to Mallarme, and even Russian and Chinese poets. You are arguing from emotion, not history nor the actual work.

No two people have exactly the same feelings evoked when they see various colors. But conventions develop: the stop light is red, the stop sign is red, fire trucks are red, portions of posted signs that are meant as a warning or important restriction are often printed in red text. One could be completely colorblind and still use these things; the traffic light indicates 'stop' when the light in the top position of the three is lit, the stop sign is a particular shape and says 'stop', one can still read the warning signs and recognize a fire truck by shape and by the sound it makes. But there is a whole layer of relationships between these things that is signified by color, that would be missed by someone who didn't see the color. This is also true of one who sees the color but who has been trained to assign a different significance to it -- it certainly makes a difference in one's understanding of a Chinese work if when one sees someone dressed in white, or encounters extensive use of white on a Chinese movie set in a particular scene, one understands that, unlike the Western norm, white is for the Chinese a color traditionally associated with death and bad luck.

And appalled or not, I have read hundreds of thousands of poems. I know arbitrariness and I know the rationales used to support them- from the political to the personal. And, to use your metronome analogy, you'd have to constantly reset it with every reader, and only 1 in 100,000 might be on the same beat.

I can't say for certain that I've read 'hundreds of thousands' of poems, but I've certainly read many thousands of them It is a testament to the incredible potential of poetry that the handful of genuine treasures we manage to dig up for ourselves over the years seem justification enough for the hugely disproportionate amount of time spent wading through dross and slag in the course of the search.

My comment about the metronome was somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but in any case I think you misunderstood what I was saying by mentioning it. What is important is not so much the speed at which the piece is read, but the length of time spent on each line relative to the others. Each line should take the same amount of time to read as all of the other lines. What the line breaks are designed to indicate here is not the exact tempo of any particular line, but the changes in pace within the work. In practice, this means that a shorter line is being 'said' with more deliberation, while a longer line becomes a more 'excited' bit. This is a major component of spoken language that we routinely employ in speech, and as such is a significant potential content vector for poetry that has heretofore been largely ignored.
Your claim of each line needing to be read in the same amount of time as the next- be it in WCW or any poem, is purely your subjective take. If that's how you enjoy certain poems, I CANNOT argue with that. I CANNOT argue with someone who thinks Steven Spielberg is a filmic genius. But I can argue against the objective merits of such claims. I have against yours, and also against Spielberg's, in film essays.

Amiably,

Josh

Dread is rare due to fallenness.

-- M. Heidegger

You know, entirely apart from whatever opinions we each may have on any particular subject, I have to say that your approach to dialogue is... well... loud, for want of a better term. You charge in, tossing about your instantaneous judgements as if you are simply providing facts to the sadly uninformed rather than advancing your subjective opinions. Your criticisms of particular poems often make good points, but your little schtick with the 'improvement' of them is formulaic, presumes an objective standard that does not exist, is smug and condescending, shows no respect for the idea that your failure to appreciate a work or an author may be due partly to a lack of insight or comprehension on your part, hands out a 'grade' at the end as though that proves anything, and just generally comes off as arrogant and prickish. Likewise, repeating your opinions in this email to me using phrases in all capitals and saying things like Period! does not add any weight or convincing power to the opinions themselves; it just implies that I should be so accepting of your authority and superior understanding of the subject that in order to alter one of my opinions you need do no more than tell me firmly what that opinion should be, instruct me not to give any more consideration to the matter, and then move on. I would respectfully disagree.
Josh. YOU supplicated me. I did not pluck you out of the cosmos, DID I! You have repeated logical fallacies and factual errors that I have debunked. Don't wanna hear them? Then do NOT write to people. I have graciously taken time to share with you my obviously superior experience and knowledge, AT YOUR REQUEST. I get 100s of emails a WEEK! I get many more submissions of bad poems and essays. Technology has likely made me the most widely read poet of all time ESPECIALLY of unpublished poetry. I read so much imitative dreck and get so little intellectual compensation for it, for the love of the art.
When you ask a favor of someone, and they respond with aid and grace, you should be appreciative. 999 other emails I ignore, but because of a glimmer of something more, I took time to help YOU. Next time, I'll just delete it when I see your name. As for TOP, they are meant to be fast food essays, and are laced with humor; for a sadly ADD world. And there is not a poem I rewrote that is NOT better. The poems are not laced with depth beyond my ken. They are, despite their NAME value, no better than the tripe I get mailed 30k times in a year from nameless wannabe poets.
I do NOT care whether you accept my authority or not. You are the person who clearly cared enough to solicit my opinion, and did so lacking the grace to accept that I went out of my way to help you, and not one of the 999 other folks who supplicate me asking me to magically transform their crap into Dickinson or Pasternak. I am not loud. I know myself. I know what I know because of 26 years of practice writing, reading, and reading, reading, reading. I KNOW when I hear BS, and the stuff you say about WCW is said, in similar veins, by fans of every other poet- from Bukowski to Eliot, and back. There is nothing NEW in such emotion-based defenses. I once had a similar argument with a fellow who claimed a poem of my wife's was not good because it was an affected black dialect. Yet the same moron defended tripe written by Wanda Coleman, and did not know the most basic rules of black dialectic himself.

*shrug* I mean no offense by the preceding; I do find value in your opinions and have been entertained by reading some of your essays. It's just my personal feeling that having had some success or having gained some notoriety via expression of your opinions does not automatically confer upon them some elevated status or make them any more likely to be correct than anyone else's. I mean, Jesus, look at how many people nod their heads in time to the crap-filled diatribes of this or that talk radio host.

Anyway, this has been an extraordinarily lengthy reply, for no particular reason other than that I'm something of an insomniac and that giving my opinion to someone else helps me to clarify it in my own head. If you actually made it this far, I salute you.

Josh

p.s. Links to your site are one thing, but sticking flattering quotes and self-aggrandizing promotional blurbs in your email's default signature block is in astonishingly poor taste. Really.
We live in a lowest common denominator world. I don't give a damn what anyone thinks of the website. If it's not obvious in its excellence and utility to someone, it is their lack. But many people ejaculate over such blurbery, and who am I to deny a boner?
Back of the head?

DAN

My final remark concerns the photo of the back of a girl’s head that folowed. It was Generic Josh trying to be back of the palm cool. But look at the passive aggression, similar yo Goodall’s, and look at the sidestepping, similat to Wolfe’s. This is what I call the manifestation of the hive mind. Generic Josh may be obtuse, but this actually aligns him with others, it does not separate him.

I then, predictably, got more BS from him with two visual aids at the bottom, one saying ‘How about a nice big cup of shut the fuck up’ and ‘run along and die now,’ showing the passive aggression of Generic Josh in losing the argument in words, then turning to childish remarks in pictures. Yet, look how calm and on point I remain::

Hadn't really looked at other people's opinions of the 'variable foot' in Williams' poetry much, but a cursory search reveals that there are others who think exactly the same as I do about it.

http://books.google.com/books?id=Bv_Aga6AyDwC&lpg=PA141&ots=61M2Osm_FG&dq=williams%20variable%20foot&pg=PA143#v=onepage&q=williams%20variable%20foot&f=false

You can state your opinions as though they were facts all day. I don't know where you got the idea that I was asking you for 'help'; I read some of your stuff, and was curious about your opinions on a couple of things. I was inviting a discussion, not asking for your mentorship.
You: I actually have two questions... one technical, one curious.
When one queries another, as you did, in your opening email, it's fair to assume that one is seeking answers one lacks. If you did not think I could provide them you would not have asked them, no? Again, I actually read what others write. As for others opinions, this is called the appeal to authority fallacy. There are millions who will swear that grey aliens abduct and sexually abuse millions of humans per year. There are many millions more deluded souls that think a sky wizard exists who created the cosmos. Neither camp can provide an ounce of proof. Unlike these folks, my prior emails debunked your claims. Get over it.

I also don't know why you assume that I'm an aspiring poet who needs your guidance. I wrote some poetry in my 20s, but these days am focussing on longer work. I appreciate poetry, though, and enjoy it.

Williams' work has a depth and subtlety that I'm not surprised you don't recognize or understand.
I recognize its manifest limitations. You are the one, as I've shown, who resorts to emotional biases and fallacies and outburts, such as this:

Don't lecture me about how you're correcting my 'fallacies' with your jumping on out-of-context sentences and grasping at anything that can be potentially misconstrued in order to make you appear to have a valid point.
I'm not lecturing. You queried (see above). I replied. Mature people, when they are granted the favor of a reply, say thank you, especially when their initial query and subsequent responses show them to be in the inferior position knowledge-wise. When I encounter someone expert in Romanian politics, who wants to dazzle me, I say thank you, if I haven't already said I'm not interested.

For example, the bit about anthropomorphizing WCW's poetry because I said that his 'lines recognize' something. Obviously, what was meant by that was 'The way Williams chose to construct his lines demonstrates his recognition of varying tempo as seen in spoken language.' The way I chose to say it was perfectly acceptable idiom, just as when you say that Cummings wrote 'more violent' poems, the use of violent in this context to refer to a textual work is perfectly acceptable idiom, and perfectly understandable to anyone not attempting to nitpick individual lines rather than address the broader issues.
It also is a subtle indicator of your emotionalizing, apparent throughout this thread. It's also something which veins most bad criticism and the opinions of those who believe art is truth or all art is political or other naive biases with no fundamental reality. I did not question its acceptability, did I? I questioned your specific choice of anthropomorphizing when, as you have shown, you could just as easily not have.

I don't think that my opinion on that or anything else are automatically better than everyone else's. But since you insist on constantly resorting to some 'appeal to authority' when defending your opinions, I guess I can say that my Master's in language philosophy with a minor symbolic logic and predicate calculus at least should indicate that I don't need a lecture on high school level 'Critical Thinking'.
No, but it obviously has not served you well in this exchange, has it? It's not how long your penis is, but what you do with it.

Unfortunately, you're simply too arrogant to carry a productive conversation.
I've tolerated your puerility thus far, haven't I? And done so when all I have done is given you good advice, at YOUR request. Yours is the arrogant position.

You talk about emotionally based arguments, but most of what you write seems based solidly in emotion -- that is, insecurity. Almost every line of your writing is designed to prove to yourself and everyone else that your opinions are important, that you understand something that they don't, that you're the authority on something. You are unable to calm down enough to actually listen and think, giving respect to the other person at least as far as to consider honestly what they have to say. You're too concerned with your shrill protests and "See! You even agree with me!" 'gotcha' style discourse. It's sophomoric and tiresome. The fact that you have a bunch of people who read what you have to say means nothing, there are plenty of immensely popular idiots.
But, given the fact of your supplicatory status, a few emails ago, and my reluctance to indulge your puerility and naive-te, your attitude now is indicative of a child who has not been told by a parent that he did well, just to quell his feelings of failure. I am not the emotional one. You are, and the only time emotion is let into my criticism is for deserved ridicule. But, given your already bruised feelings, I have not even done that to you yet. An even cursory glance at my initial and subsequent replies shows that I read, understood, and disagreed with what you said, then debunked your assertions thoroughly.

It's so typical of you to assume that asking your opinion is equivalent to asking for your help or guidance. Probably because you have no clue about the nature of adult discourse.

So screw you, you pompous windbag.
Says the boy with the attention span of a three year old, the dozens ability of a five year old, and the 'naughty' Photoshop ability of a nine year old with his first Playboy wrapped about his wiener.

DAN

Then followed the Photoshop bullshit. There is an old saying that people will forgive you if you are wrong, but never if you are right. This is as true a statement as I’ve ever encountered.

Yet, Josh persisted, and I refernced Gregory Wolfe, although not by name. This email had a photo of singer Tom waits at its bottom:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 1:46 PM
Subject: Re: question for Dan
To: Joshua Englehart <josh@articulateresearch.com>

It's interesting to watch the development of your replies. They are totally generic. I got into another email exchange with the owner of a website that spent two years spamming me to buy their magazine. Late last year I replied and offered to help them with their film site. They said yes, but like many sites, they were in a process of fucking their website up, so delayed for mos. Then, they sent me a poll on how to help with their site. I replied, and asked when I could actually help them. The owner started raging about how I did not keep up with the site, or else I wd know what they were up to. His site gets about 2% of the traffic mine does and he has a volunteer staff of folk to help him.
With the the ridiculousness of his demand that I keep up with a site that had spammed me, yet which I graciously offered to help, anyway, I asked him how busy he was, with his staff and all, because in an average week, and not including 10x as many spams for penis enlargement and Nigerian bank scams, I get 15-1600 emails a week. Many are solicitations to join some poetry or film chatroom, to review someone's book of poems or a new DVD, but most are idiotic rants from people who are looking to defend bad writers or films and trying to argue, I ignore most of them. I also get many emails from people who have not read any of my poems nor essays, yet who feel that it is my duty to help them with their 3rd grade level doggerel, and make it Whitmanian. I ignore them. The most pathetic I forward around to my e-list, for a laugh, as I do with emails like this, when, as with the aforementioned idiot, I, despite being spammed, graciously offered to help him with his website.
Naturally, he never followed up with a reply on how many emails he personally gets, and reads, if not answers. His best attempt was to inform me that he was too big to be bothered by such emails as mine, which took umbrage at his delusive ideal that I should somehow follow every little fart his site whiffs. This is what your email has descended to. You query. I answer. You don'r like answer. You get in snit. I tolerate. You play with Photoshop and your penis. I wonder if I would get shown as many young male penises if I were gay? Probably not. Such is life. Although I know a few queer guys who would not mind seeing your penis, if you really need to exhibit it.
Fortunately, every so often I do surveys of Internet stupidity. My next foray will be on Cults of Personality, which often devolve down to the self, like the site owner who felt his relatively unknown site was the epicenter of all things online, and all its doings should be known. Thanks for adding to my next essay.
As to your overly florid and solipsistic reply, Excelsior:

Once again: I did not ask for your 'advice'. I was curious about your opinion. I approached you in hopes that an invitation for you to express your opinion might lead to an exchange of ideas, not as a petitioner or supplicant.
Rinse, wash, repeat. When one queries another with specific queries, that is the de facto relationship. And clearly, given your rather generic defense of a poet you have an emotional attachment to- thus dipping into the well of worn critical cliches over, this status is reinforced. The biggest downer with emails as yours is that there will likely be some young budding poet/writer/film critic whose mind will fail to be ignited because he or she did not get the benefit of my even glancing at their query/work because of the tiresome nonsense that someone like you feels a desperate need to bellow.

I did not wring my hands in abject thanks, awed by the superiority of your destruction of my arguments with your flawless logic, because I do not agree with your arguments. This is an essential difference between myself and you. Despite being convinced that you do not understand my arguments and that your own logic is flawed and misdirected, I still treat our discussion as if it were a difference of opinions. I consider that my opinion is correct, of course, or else it would not be my opinion. Nevertheless, I am not so arrogant and convinced of (or desperate to believe in) my own superiority as to characterize my opinions as indisputable fact, the truth of which should be patently obvious to anyone not hopelessly mired in 'emotionalism'.
Says the man who spent more time Photoshopping puerile insults than on the 'logic' of his easily denuded arguments.

Your response to my pointing out that there are other well-respected, well-educated critics whose opinion sides with mine rather than with yours boggles the mind. I have repeatedly mentioned your habit of resorting to the 'appeal to authority' fallacy in your attempts to increase the significance of your own opinion by referencing how many people view your website and by such things as quoting other critics' opinion of your work on your website and in your email signature, several times using the phrase 'appeal to authority', and then you say "this is a fallacy known as 'appeal to authority'" as if you're introducing the concept to someone who has probably never heard of it -- another indication that you do not really absorb much of anything that I say to you.
It was I who simply and logically popped your arguments. It was YOU who provided the links that appealed to authority. I appealed to logic, a voluminous knowledge of the subject matter, and the flaws in your argument. You appealed to authority figures and petty insults. It's hilarious when, despite the evidence in black and white, people think they can still distort things.

Of course the critics who agree with me could be wrong, as could I be. But your wish to characterize our difference of opinion as one between education and ignorance, between logic and emotionalism, between hero-worship and clear-headed understanding, suffers when the very same opinion that I hold is generated by someone whose expertise and experience in the field is widely recognized by the entire academic and critical world.
No, I showed clearly that it was wrong. You are free to disagree, but the burden of proof is yours. You made the claims for WCW, and they were not original to begin with. Generic, stale, and utterly reliant on the flawed claims of others. That's something that cannot be ascribed to me.

Similarly, your 'alien abduction' example is grasping and facile. There is an obvious difference between the ravings of fringe theorists whose ideas are given absolutely no weight by the relevant academic community and the reasoned, peer-reviewed opinions of well-regarded leaders in their field. Again, this is no guarantee of the accuracy of the claims. But your argument is equivalent to the claim that one should give equal weight to writings about grey aliens as to papers published in Journal of the American Chemical Society. Either could be right or wrong, but to argue that one is no more easily dismissed than the other is disingenuous, and typical of your style of attempting to 'score points' in an 'argument' rather than engage in honest dialogue.
I have been calm and honest. It is you who have been dishonest and childish, with your emotionalism, that I've pointed out in writing and visuals. The point of my analogy was that MOST of the crap people write of any art/artist, based in emotion, has as much heft as your claims. I have not attempted to argue with your liking WCW, have I? No. I only pointed out obvious fallacies. And not all opinions are equal. If Steven Pinker and I were to opine on the speech centers of the brain, he'd be the more reliable expert. A quick look at even just the posted poems of mine online and at Cosmoetica shows that there is no poet with as many great poems, and as diverse in form, content and structure, in their careers, as I have merely online, 3-4% of my total oeuvre. In short, there is no BETTER expert on poetry than me. Period. You're free to disagree. But given the generic mindset you've displayed, who will care?

You seem incapable of acknowledging that someone could disagree with you without being in some way mentally unstable, emotionally blinded, or otherwise impaired. You believe that your arguments have been so cogent and so obviously superior to mine that for me not to have humbled myself before your patently superior understanding demonstrates the height of ingratitude. This is hubris on a vast scale. It is so beyond the pale that I am at a loss as to how to respond. When someone is so convinced of their own superiority that they cannot even conceive of anyone honestly disagreeing with them or failing to recognize the rightness of their position despite having understood their arguments, there is really little chance that there will ever be a meaningful exchange. You are too wrapped up in self-worship to allow any viewpoint but your own to penetrate. You believe without question that you understand my motivations and that you know upon what I base my opinions. It is inconceivable to you that you might be completely missing the point.
I am very capable of recognizing honest dissent. But you are the one who has been petty, dishonest, and resorted to name-calling and visual insults. Do not try to sound high-minded when you've acted like a gutter politician.

Because of this, I should accept the fact that this email, like the ones gone before, is pointless; nothing will have any impact on your unshakable image of yourself as both elevated and long-suffering, the self-less Christ-like martyr who despite having done nothing but give of yourself for the good of the world, sharing your gifts with the poor masses because you pity us in our ignorance, wounded by our resentment of you but nonetheless continuing to offer up your kindly and beneficient wisdom to our deaf and ungrateful ears. 'Forgive them Father, for they know not what they do ...they are like sheep without a shepherd.'

But despite realizing that, blinded by your halo, there is nearly zero likelihood of your ever understanding what I'm saying, I'll tell you anyway, because I think that you actually believe the crap you're telling me. I think you are legitimately saddened and confused by what you perceive as a malicious spurning of your freely offered, open hand. And so maybe there is some chance that what I'm saying will get through to you. Not much of a chance, but something, anyway.

Let me explain it to you slowly: I did not misunderstand your arguments, I simply disagree with them. I am not blinded to their logic by emotionalism, I simply find your logic to be flawed and misapplied.
And it is therefore my disagreement with you that drove you to puerile penis-waving? It could not be that you are petty and insecure that I so easily dismissed your claims. You see, Generic Josh, I have had this argument hundreds if not 1000s of times with your doppelgangers. Switch a name/art/ artist, slightly alter a claim or two, and this could be on Charles Bukowski, Salo, Jean Cocteau, Tom Cruise, atheism, Christianity, George W. Bush, Vietnam death camps, etc. I knew that you would be driven to a screed, wherein you do not even acknowledge your petty juvenilia and seek to shift blame, after you've long forgotten why you even were moved to write; because you wanted to learn something.

I do not believe that Williams was a gifted writer and major contributor to the advancement of poetics out of hero worship, sentimentalism, or some romanticized view of poetry or writing in general, but as a result of careful consideration of his work so as to understand what he was doing, or attempting to do, with his poetry, and, once I felt that I was clear about his ideas and methodolgy, comparison of the result and implication of those theories to the alternatives.
And all that has made you tender a claim that is writ thru and thru with the same generic banalities dozens of Bukowski claimants make for their boy, replete with appeal to authority fallacies galore. Spend less time BORING strangers and more time on personal growth, both emotionally and intellectually. This is me doing you a FAVOR! Take my advice this time.

Having done so, I am convinced that -- completely aside from whatever I may think about his poems themselves -- his 'variable foot' concept is a powerful one that makes available to writers and readers a new content vector. This does not, of course, mean that it will be used well, or that what is produced by its use will automatically be good poetry. It is simply a way of using the existing signifiers of written language in such a manner as to allow for greater informational density than does the prevailing method. I am not saying that Williams was the greatest poet that ever lived, nor do I 'base my life on his teachings'. As I said before, I don't really care for the vast majority of his work. What I do believe, however, is that Williams had a couple of particular ideas about poetry that he worked on his entire life, trying to articulate, refine, and apply them. His other main concept (as typified by his famous "no ideas but in things" statement) I find to be overly subjective, a bit mystical, and not particularly useful (except perhaps to himself). His idea about line breaks and what he called the variable foot, however, I find not only highly innovative (and therefore interesting) but also very effective and potentially useful, a legitimate contribution to the field of poetry with implications that reach, on a smaller scale, to all of written language. That is my opinion, as someone who has spent his life studying language and whose intense interest is in the way we encode information so as to communicate it, in both its written and oral forms.
And when you get around to reading more, what might be called WORLD poetry (to use the PC cliche) you will find that WCW's ideas on the variable foot were not unique nor original to him, and by, oh, an eon or so. Really, read more. I'll let you discover that on your own. Try Arabic and Chinese poetry for a start. See, I am generous to a fault.

You may disagree with this view, as is your right. However, I don't believe that you really comprehend my perspective. Firstly, you don't believe that Williams was trying to do any such thing (despite there being much evidence available in support of the idea that he was concerned with this issue throughout his entire writing career) but instead assume that I'm ascribing to him far more credit than is due out of (variously) either a grandiose sense of what poetry is and how it works, a misguided belief that the author's intent has any impact on how one should interpret his work, or a naive adulation of Williams that emotionally skews my ideas about his writing. Your assumptions in this regard (along with your basic hubris) cause you to dismiss my opinions out of hand, leaping to the conclusion that you understand them without ever giving them more than cursory consideration.
I disagree because it's historically wrong. Just as I disagreed that Newton issued the Emancipation Proclamation.

Secondly, you persist in attempting to inform me about what line breaks 'are' or 'are for' as though what they are were anything other than what we, as users of English, decide they should be. It is my contention that, particularly since the advent of poetic forms that have little or no formal metrical structure ('free verse') the line break is not being used consistently, powerfully, or importantly.
Here's where you should read my poetry. No one in English poetry history uses enjambment better.

Absent a regular metric, enjambment as a poetic device is vastly weakened. Neither writers nor readers of modern poetry have much sense of what the break is intended to communicate or what best to do with it. The strongest idea of the lot is a sort of vague conviction that words on either end of a line are strengthened or highlighted, mixed with the tentative idea that maybe there should be some sort of pause at each line break. But in practice this does not really work out. Writers end up breaking their lines more or less arbitrarily in ways that they think are innovative or more 'poetic' somehow, which ends up communicating little or nothing to the reader. The reader is not sure how whatever rule of signification is supposed to be applied to the line break actually confers this extra 'poetization' to what is written; it seems contrived, and the significance that is supposedly to be attached to the words seems unearned somehow, artificially inflated.
Bad poets do this, not great ones. You are broadbrushing (surprise, surprise).

Every other signifier that is used in written English is tied strongly at its base to a corresponding event in spoken English. When one sees a comma in written English, there is a corresponding pause when one reads the sentence aloud, as well as changes that occur in the 'shape' of the vocal stream (we tend to 'round' the final syllable(s) before a comma downward or upward, depending on context). When one sees a full stop, there is another corresponding set of actions that takes place when the sentence is read aloud. The start of a new paragraph also implies certain things about how the text should sound when read aloud. It is from their oral counterparts that the written signifiers derive their power. Although it is possible to describe what meaning is conferred by a comma within a particular context, it is not through some abstracted application of rules that the meaning is conveyed. Rather, as we are following internally the sense of what is written, when we encounter a comma it evokes in us the experience of a particular sort of change in the flow of a spoken sentence, and our internal sense of the flow of the text is altered in a corresponding fashion. Our comprehension is based in the way we originally learned to think and use language, which is verbally. This is why elements of written language that have no strong verbal equivalent, such as choice of typeface, are relegated far down the hierarchy of signification; most people would agree that something originally written in Helvetica can be read in Arial with little or no change in meaning, despite the significant alteration in the visual experience of the text.
But all language flows from thought; punctuation is less a function of the spoken word than it is the thought idea. We THINK punctually. Ask any reporter who has taped a conversation. I, as example, have transcribed, with my wife, sevral of my interviews. Punctuation reflects thought, NOT speech. They are proximate markers.

You persistantly argue against written poetry being similar to 'plain' or 'common' speech, which is something that I never claimed. I referred to 'verbal language' or 'speech', with no reference to 'plain' or 'common'. The ideas are not equivalent. Of course a written poem is not identical to demotic speech; one does not expect it to be, if for no other reason than that the writer has much more time to consider what is being said. However, there are many instances where spoken language differs from 'common' speech, such as in prepared speeches or the dialogue in a movie or play. In movies an attempt is often made to make the dialogue sound more 'natural', but we are aware that there is a difference between that and the way it happens in everyday life. The effect is more pronounced in prepared speeches. The fact that they do not reflect the way speech occurs when constructed 'on the fly' does not invalidate them as examples of the use of verbal language. And, of course, there is much overlap between the way 'common' speech is written and the way we write anything else; a transcript of a spoken conversation will use commas, periods, and question marks, just as will sentences in a novel.

Poetry is similar. I won't go so far as to say that all written poetry is best viewed as a sort of guide or map that points to a verbal instantiation; there are obvious exceptions such as concrete poetry, and there are the more common examples of 'free verse' that rely on artificial signification and the muddled conviction that many hold that convinces them that the way the lines are broken up on the page confers to the content some sort of vague, added depth that they cannot define but that they believe is somehow more 'poetic'. For the most part, however, it is my firm belief that most strong poetry derives is at its most powerful in its verbal form. It is often the case that when one attempts to find a way to read a poem aloud such that it retains its strength, one realizes that one did not understand the poem quite as well as was thought -- or one realizes that the poem was not in fact as strong as was believed. It is not a question of whether or not what the poem says corresponds to how someone would speak in the normal course of the day, chatting to friends; it is more a question of, 'How would this poem have to sound in order to conceive of it as having been said by someone?' Of course we don't speak that way in 'plain' speech. But something of deep gravity, for instance, or that is especially important to the speaker and upon which he has spent much thought, is reasonably different in form from ad hoc conversation. There is nothing revolutionary in this.

I fail to see how your arguments against the line break being used to convey something specific that is normally found in spoken language (i.e., constantly varying changes in tempo) justify treating this particular signifier any differently from others which clearly do convey specific elements of spoken language such as commas, periods, boldface, etc. The use of a comma to indicate a pause in the verbal form of a sentence is not invalidated by the argument that written language is far more fixed than spoken, and that it does not take into account the vast differences in the way different people speak. Despite the fact that no two people will read a written sentence in the same way, we still accept the use of control marks that indicate something about how the sentence should sound when spoken aloud. What I am saying about a possible way of using the line break to indicate changes in tempo is no different, and you have never addressed this contention. Saying that the comma does not indicate tempo is arbitrary; it is designed to indicate a particular event within a reading of the sentence, as are all other signifiers. You have said nothing to explain why written indicators of changes in tempo should be any less valid than written indicators designating pauses (such as a comma), emphasis (such as italicization), or changes in the slope and pitch of a sentence (such as happens when we slope the pitch of a sentence upward at the end of a sentence that ends with a question mark).
The problem with your tempo argument is that even WCW did not even follow his own dictates. And THIS is how one can tell that an artist is lying. He gets tossed a query or plaint from someone looking to him as a Buddha. He feels good, then assents to the assertion, not even realizing the implications of it. Even more apparent is all the nonsense attached to Ab Ex visual art. These guys did not know WHAT they were doing, and merely assented to the shit the sycophants foisted, because it made them feel special. This is why so much art sucks. That and the fact that most people are not good at most things, I am not a good javelin thrower.

Well, as I said, I do not expect this to have any effect on you whatsoever, because I honestly believe that your ego is the defining factor in how you access the sense of whatever is said to you. I don't believe that you have the ability to consider what I'm saying with an open mind such that there is any possibility of change in the way you view anything. Of course, it's always possible that you could understand completely and still disagree, just as I'm saying to you that I've done with what you've written. But that's not what I believe is happening in this case. In any event, even assuming I'm 100% correct both in what I'm saying and in my evaluation of your responses and the reasons for them, it does not excuse my being rude to you in my last email, and so I apologize for that. It came from my frustration at what appears to be unwarranted and condescending assumptions made about myself, my motivations, and my ability to make rational evaluations, which I feel you are in no position to make. But it is important to maintain one's own standards of behaviour even when provoked, and so I regret having failed to remain civil.

Openly,

Josh
Thanks for the acknowledgment of your incivility. Now, listen to me. Spend all this time and energy wasted here, and do something positive. Poetry, art, whatever. Better, more experienced, and more knowledgeable folks than you have lost arguments to me. Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, and William F. Buckley, in tag team, could not beat me when I am on my home turf. Do not waste your life online. Read, read, read. Even if you do not understand, it'll at least keep you out of trouble.

DAN

There was one final exchange- the monkey ass referring to yet another of Josh’s photoshopped masterpieces:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, Mar 2, 2010 at 6:27 AM
Subject: Fwd: question for Dan
To: Joshua Englehart <josh@articulateresearch.com>

"But given the generic mindset you've displayed, who will care?"

Yes. It sums up your ignorance and arrogance to a T. I pour the feed, you gorge on cue. Be careful of the tsetses, they love monkey ass.

DAN

"Read, read, read. Even if you do not understand, it'll at least keep you out of trouble."

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joshua Englehart <josh@articulateresearch.com>
Date: Mon, Mar 1, 2010 at 4:37 PM
Subject: Re: question for Dan
To: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>

A quick look at even just the posted poems of mine online and at Cosmoetica shows that there is no poet with as many great poems, and as diverse in form, content and structure, in their careers, as I have merely online, 3-4% of my total oeuvre. In short, there is no BETTER expert on poetry than me. Period.

I rarely respond to any emails any longer, unless the submission has good creative writing in it. I simply lack the time, effort, and will to play teacher to people like Josh, or Adam, or Gregory Wolfe, who are dishonest and unwilling to learn.

I’ve denuded these asses before, but I just had to go back to the circle-jerking well they bend each other over. A couple of years ago, my wife Jessica, came to me with suspicious IP activity on her own blog, on the day of or after the post below. This usually sets her off, whereas I don’t care who reads Cosmoetica. Nonetheless, she tracked these asses back to their latest circle-jerk on me:

Let me preface this post with two apologies: 1.) I apologize for the sardonic-irreverent tone I'll be taking in the following (as already evidenced by the title), which I honestly hope doesn't detract from the general earnestness with which I approach reading and analyzing literature on this blog (although I acknowledge my posts have frequent tongue-in-check moments just in general, so whatever).

And 2.) I'm sorry for even bringing up the subject of Cosmoetica.com creator and visionary, Dan Schneider, all 6'1" 195 lbs. of him, whom I think debases the discourse merely with his being cited -- and I understand that in so doing I likewise give his "criticism" some level of validity, for which I also want to apologize profusely. So I guess all told that's really three apologies.

I co-founded and used to write for an exceedingly unpopular website called The Weekly Johnson. If we specialized in anything it was humor, I suppose. And for a variety of good reasons we discontinued work on the site in 2008 or so. But ya know, shucks, I still remember it fondly -- and recently I let my curiosity get the better of me and searched to see if anyone out there on the Internet-scape was curious about what had become of it. Mostly, predictably, no one had wondered -- pro, con, or neutrally.

[Yes, the Weekly Johnson was so popular that it died on the vine. It’s quite humorous to read all of these ghost sites that died because they were ‘highly popular.’]

That is, with the notable exception of Dan Schneider, who was at some point the subject of an article by my friend and site co-founder, Jamie Ferguson, entitled: "Dan Schneider: Douche Bag".

The WJ now belongs to the internet's Way Back Machines, left to be dissected by future anthropologists or whatsoever might subsume and displace that particular scientific discipline, perhaps something involving cybernetics?

Dan Schneider, meanwhile, remains very much active and screed-ey. And long story made short: Dan apparently found Jamie's article and decided to respond in a way only he would. Good for him, I say.

And but anyway, here in the Rowanverse the fourth law of poetastering is: the Schneiderverse is a, as the delightful Homer Simpson might say, groin-grabbingly awful milieux of the abounding excruciating minutiae that is his oeuvre. But that's not my opinion; that's the law.

And Thus We Respond to Dan with: A High-Minded Gchat Discussion of All Things Schneiderian Whence The Rowanverse:

Matt: hey
found out some stuff
you might be interested - Dan Schneider apparently responded

Jamie: ha, my goodness
methinks the bard must have googled himself
Matt: methinks he certainly did.

um, I happen to have 150 million viewers a year
I'm perpetually on the nation's lips.
I think people know who I am
Jamie: aaaaah. idiocy is like a fine wine.
Matt: the only case he has, really, is that the article is glib
but that was the point to begin with
Jamie: I barely remember writing this.
he's right, though-
i envied him terribly.
still do.
Matt: good god, I know. he doesn't do the best job of refuting

you wish you had a Wikipedia article
Jamie: ha! "a liar or an obsessive!" i read one hour's worth of

something boring like "ensconced"?!?
Matt: its possible he leaves typos in his articles all the time
Jamie: did he really save this up in the hate box under his

bed for years? he's so delightfully sad
Matt: that's the thing I took away from it
Jamie: he was like our only reader, apparently
Matt: i literally can't think of anyone else who read it.
anyone we can VERIFY read it, anyway
the fact that he decided to respond says more than

Matt: intelligent people use neologisms all the time!
Jamie: naturally. i know that, too. i utilianate

that's been defunct for 3 years
Jon ‎(1:57 PM):
whooooooooa - readership of 150 million...

every sentence just piles it on
oh, he's not really fat? how wrong you were! what a

fool you've been!
Matt: hahahaaha
i can't believe he wants to prove he's not fat!
Jamie: i know
um, I've got news for you, dan! I actually DON'T

there's another little "fact" you got wrong!
Matt: he proves our every point with wicked efficiency.

it's like he said
oh, a taste of my own medicine, eh?
well how do you like a taste of MY own medicine!
Jamie: you think you can reveal me as the asshole

attacks? how about some ad hominem attacks, typist?!?
Matt: an American hero.
Jamie:

Jon ‎(2:21 PM): oh wait, even better, here's his take on HIS WIFE:
"Jessica is a great poet, but not nearly as vast nor sweeping as I

I simply was not challenged by it any longer)."
Matt: this is about the stupidest stuff I've ever read
Jamie: really? "just about"?

puking guts out...
Jamie: really, here's what I should say-
today, I am destroyed. a few years ago, i sarcastically

Dan Schneider- a man I envy more than anything in the world.
i called him a douchebag, a moron,

amongst other things."
how is it possible that people couldn't tell I was joking?
how could ANYONE say such terrible things about him?
"A moron," really? have you SEEN how many

neologisms the man uses?
Matt: "Shakespeare has no more than a dozen great sonnets.

2 comments:

I cannot wait for Dan to respond to this.......in 2014. PS who would marry this guy?!?!?!

I am imagining a woman who is very eager to please, very much harried to the point of being cowed. Then again, Dan will probably yell at me for even suggesting that notion. "Um . . . no, sorry troglodyte, once again you demonstrate how very little you know. My wife happens to be among the most assertive, liberated people on the planet. Second, certainly, only to me. Return to tonguing the glans of the incestual lit scene at once, little troll!" Something like that. Or perhaps I'll be hearing from Dan's lawyer(s). Too soon to tell.

So, now with that bit of possible future children dribbling down the duo’s cheeks, all I need do is repeat, I knew of their silliness right away, but only had time to respond now because….well, they are just not that important, and by the time I get another chance to reply to their inevitable co-ejaculatory reply, their current blog will likely be pushing up cyber-daisies, as well- just like this blog is.

A quick look at this young wannabe phallic symbol’s blog finds a load of links to his generic MFA mill type short stories, loaded with overdescription and poor modifier use, as well as this summary of himself:

Matt Rowan

About Me

All right so "who I am" is this: I live outside of (and spend much of my free time in) Chicago; I like reading, writing and not the other "R" so much. I've been at reading and writing pretty steadily these last couple years or so, and I aspire to something significant, being-a-writer-wise (e.g. I plan to attend a creative writing MFA in the near future). Also, I'm in graduate school right now studying for what stuff will grant me the opportunity to teach English / Language Arts to school children, a profession in which I find a great appeal and look forward to starting. I'm also really very nice. Not "George Saunders nice" but geesus, the man's a saint. Trust me, I've emailed him. I respond to email, as well. Usually nicely, depending. Want to exchange links? Want to award me prestigious (at least sounding) awards? Send any and all inquiries to: matt.rowan84@gmail.com

In the dream where you show up to school naked, why do you never go swimming?

About me

What’s interesting is that, after the failure of The Weekly Johnson, due to its lack of humor, Matty would think he still had any insight into humorous fiction. Nonetheless, he’s just as generic as Josh or the others.

Speaking of generic, there was my encounter, last year, with an American idol blogger named Idolhead Ed, eponymous owner of this website. Due to changed working hours and a general lack of enthusiasm over the way that show has gone the last few years, I did not watch the 2012 version of the show, so this exchange is about the season that concluded with country singer Scotty McCreary winning the show, in 2011.

The Basics is that I posted some comments on this and other blogs, about how one of the losers on that season’s show- Haley Reinhart- was not a good singer. The girl had clearly butchered many songs, on her way to an appalling third place finish, becoming one of the three or four most infamous bad singers to have done well in the show’s dubious voting procedures. In this thread, one will notice how I stick on point with an artistic critique, only to have the site owner and a few other trolls merely rave about their liking of Reinhart, despite an offkey operformance where she three times blew the song lyrics. Had original judge, Simon Cowell, been on that season he would have pointed this out.

Yet, despite this, the next time I went to post, guess what? I was banned. So, I emailed the site owner, via his comment form:

Ed: It's quite childish to remove a post when I pointed out that your argument was not based on art and singing ability and then ban me from commenting.

If you don't want feedback then don't have any comments, but such actions are only an admission of your being wrong, as well as immature.

Here are the comments that I tried to post before I was banned, and after Idolhead Ed removed a comment of mine where I pointed out that he said nothing of the art:

Paul: Like Ed, you state nothing based on the actual singing save liking Haley. Her voice drags and sputters in the lower ranges, and when she belts it breaks up in her rasp. She also flubbed 3 sings' lyrics. That is THE worst single performance night in Idol history because she butchered 3 songs! THREE! That's not an opinion but fact- look up the lyrics and watch the videos. As I stated, but you did not read. I DO NOT like country, but Scotty has not missed a note and Lauren, while immature as a singer, clearly has a better voice than Haley. It carries a tune and is not nearly as weak. Haley will, like many other wannabes, fade away, and next year few will recall her. She'll end up playing the local circuit in the Midwest, at best. Granted, given a good producer she could have a career- look at that horrid Nicole Scherzinger! But that's not talent. That's marketing and sex appeal to the lowest common denominator.

Dunwurry: Look at Stefano- in his range, he may have had the best voice outside of Scotty, for the boys. But he had no clue as to artistry. He was raw. Your claim of Haley hiding her flaws with the growl is spot-on. Seriously- the best female vocalists were Diana D, LaToya, Melinda, Alison I., Crystal, Siobhan, Pia: does anyone seriously wanna argue that Haley was as good as they were? AS for marketability, Kelly and Carrie have been the most successful, but does anyone seriously think Kelly was better than Alison or Carrie better than Siobhan? Kelly was the first one and the show put all its power behind her to start the franchise. As for Carrie- she's a beautiful, sexy blond- a young Faith Hill, with decent singing talent. You think sex doesn't sell? Aside from perhaps LaToya, were any of the females I listed 'sexy'?

Rusty: No. But I've been to concerts as diverse as Barry Manilow and Motorhead and 99% of concert music is worse than studio stuff. Did you see Il Volo last night? Horrible lip-synching. Why do they do that? Simple. The guys are really not that good- Lip synching is the giveaway that the performer is flawed. That Scherzinger was even more blatant.

But don't kid yourself. Haley lost on a roll of the dice, not because others suddenly realized she wasn't that good. That's the way of things when art is removed from the picture, and why Ed mentioned none of it in his reply to me.

Note I never flame nor do anythign but point out obvious flaws, a thing most people simply are not mature enough to handle. Interestingly, only I use my real name to post. Everyone else uses handles and pseudonyms to hide their immature rants and behavior behind. But this was not the only site to ban me. I also got banned from this thread, yet you will see I said nothing that attacked anyone, and the folks that all attacked me did not get banned. It’s really amazing how shallow people are. The Internet, however, has forever exposed that trait of mankind for the ages. Yet, these site owners don’t realize the damage they do when they remove comments from threads and distort them, leaving replies to nonexisistent comments, etc.

The Idol Guy claimed I made trouble, and one joker even thought I was fatso Dan Schneider, the cable chidlren’s television idiot- a claim that will recur, later in this essay. Nonetheless, after removing a reply of mine, and banning me, I emailed this second site’s owner, and, as with the first, the coward did not respond:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
Date: Tue, May 24, 2011 at 4:38 PM
Subject: Banned
To: theidolguy@theidolguy.com

Why did you ban me?
I did not use profanity, did not attack anyone, and answered all queries thrust at me.
Are you that immature that you cannot handle having your opinion challenged?

DAN

Show me any aggression on either of the 2 threads. I have pointed out reasons why Haley's voice is bad and that she flubbed lyrics. her perf was bad. I have not made excuses for them, not attacked Haley the way others have, and do not LIKE country. I have been objective.

Look at what you just did. Joe uses all sorts of profanity and yo act as if my calling him on that is an aggression on par w that profanity. That does not strike you as odd? If not, then you need to step back and look at how you view things.

I don't need attention; I am answering your and others' comments, which is civil and shows respect. If I did not you'd claim I did not back up my words or was dissing you, so you set up a no win situation that your opponent is in. I simply avoid that by calling your machinations and note that no one has shown a single reason why Haley's singing is good.

Clearly, Scotty McCreary was the best singer on that season of American Idol, and, as

I have mentioned many of the stalkers, trolls, and hackers who have wasted my time in the past, but here is one of the silliest to date. A reader of Cosmoetica once sent me a link to a website called Oh Internet. It’s sort of a 12^th rate, lazy man’s Wikipedia, and given Wikipedia’s increasingly deserved shoddy reputation for lies and distortion, that’s saying something. In fact, even this website has a page ripping Wikipedia, despite trying to imitate it. Anyway, here is the link to the Oh Internet reference on Cosmoetica: http://ohinternet.com/Cosmoetica. Now, you’ll note that, on this page, there are three ‘contributions’ to the page- sure to increase once this essay goes online. One is from someone using a ‘Cosmoetica’ moniker, to try and impugn me, with these edits, one of which is a doctored document titled, ironically, fake key words, meaning that I supposedly try to boost Cosmoetica’s ratings by using terms as ‘katie couric fake nude’ or other silly things. Of course, I do no such things, and, in fact, I rarely ever use key words, as bots will always scan text and prioritize whatever is determined as the crux of a post. Keywords are, in other words, not that important. But, to the cybergeek who claims this, he clearly thinks they are, and, note how there is no attribution to these supposed fake key words, such as the pages on Cosmoetica they were taken from. If Oh Internet was NOT trying to be like Wikipedia they would never allow such crap like this to be sourced and unchallenged.

But, there is another ‘contributor’ to the page. Whether or not this is one single person or not is irrelevant since their hive mind obviates such a query, and that is the page’s creator, Popeyesquirm. This is a longtime Cosmoetica stalker, who also goes by the moniker Johnny Lurg, blessed with all the talent of a Weekly Johnson contributor. The page is an unintendedly funny take on Cosmoetica, since its humor is generated not by its content but by its content’s poor presentation and distortion of reality, all the while trying to seem ‘objective.’ Herein the hilarious first sentence: The primitively designed yet strenuously compiled Cosmoetica is a popular literary website administrated by Dan Schneider, an Ebert-approved film critic and semi-published poet with provocative opinions on the past, present, and future history of poetry.

Look at all the David Foster Wallace level modifiers- primitively, strenuously- and, how is one semi-published? Popeye squirm and Johnny Lurg are just two of the aliases of the unibrowed fellow who owns http://johnnylurg.blogspot.com/. Note the shit-eating grin, the curly hair, the out of style eyeglasses- you just knew he would look this nerdy and dorky, didn’t you? This is also someone known as Ben Simon, a wannabe comediam (fail) and poet (double fail), whose poetry is a sub-Beatnik doggerel, and whose main motivation seems to be envy. Oh, and yes, he is also a Wikipedia troll: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:JohnnyLurg who tried to speedy delete the page on me, and has been banned after using and admitting to using many sockpuppets. Would that the idiots at Wikipedia be as harsh on all the sockpuppets that have harassed and deleted and banned mention of my site, but, ah well, the failed attempts at vandalizing my page is why the Oh Internet page was created, as well as the likely sockpuppet called Cosmoetica.

Of course, not all the online idiots are stalkers or hacks, some are even editors for magazines, newspapers, and presses. Last year, my wife Jessica received a book to review from the Philadelphia Inquirer, called About to Die: How News Images Move the Public by Barbie Zelizer. It is reviewed here. Yet, when she submitted the review to the newspaper, the books editor, John Timpane, refused to run it because the review was critical of the book. It was fair, and far less harsh than many of the essays I’ve written, but the editor eventually paid a ‘kill fee’ to my wife because he lacked the guts to actually run ‘real criticism’ that is fair. I post this exchange to counter the claims that there is no active attempt (with full intent) to dumb down the discourse in the arts). That gurgle you hear is the flushed throes of what was once journalism:

Note how Timpane does not want to deal with the structural flaws of the book, but its ‘Content’ which is utterly meaningless to criticize. It’s a book on elephant mating habits, say, and how can you say that is good or bad? But how the mating habits are described and evaluated, that IS open for criticism, and Jessica was right on point. This focus on ‘the content’ over how the content is presented utterly removes the discussion of skill and art, which is the important part of the book, and only thing worth critiquing. Timpane falls back on such weasel wording to hide his cowardice.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From:
Date: Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 12:46 PM
Subject: Fwd: Philly guy doesn't want me tun my negative review

More cowardice from the mainstream media.
You actually do address these points and he's as bad and cowardly as that punk kid who published Wong's book.
Send me the review and I'll post it on Cosmo later this week, and write my own comments in an annotated version of the book contrasted against his claims.

To get down to specifics, I first sensed the problem as of your third graf, which begins, “Unfortunately.” The problem is, it’s far too early to start ripping her prose.

A great review can START with an Unfortunately. Formula and cowardice.
Damn, can newspapers die any more swiftly? All he wants is a generic and formulaic review. The meat is not her content but its presentation. And from what you state her ideas are worthless and banal.
I'll put this in the Featured Attractions, too.

DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: J S
Date: Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 12:16 PM

Subject: Philly guy doesn't want me tun my negative review

I won't be reviewing for them anymore!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: J S
Date: Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 12:16 PM
Subject: Re: Your book review
To: "Timpane, John" <jtimpane@phillynews.com>

Hi John:
I have to disagree about the review. 1st of all, the points she mentions are not even compelling in the least. They're common sense and likely she's just expanding on some thesis she wrote during her academic career. In 700-800 words it's impossible to go into all the details as far as what is wrong with the book, which is a lot. If she can't communicate her ideas well, how can you or anyone expect to take her ideas seriously? The book itself is tedious, dry and to use the phrase "guild the lily" --that's what she does to the extreme. To not mention her poor style is dishonest.
I use words like "unfortunately" because it is unfortunate for the reader to have to deal with this. Frankly, this book shouldn't have even been published. I could have gone into details as far as the poorness that exists in academic writing, and how this book exemplifies this. Basically you want me to cushion it, which I won't do. It's a bad book.
you should assess whether its treatment of them is adequate or thought-provoking or what. But you don’t.

I do address this--I state why it doesn't work--that's common sense and rather "duh!" It certainly is not thought provoking. Here I do argue against it:

Zelizer argues that about-to-die images play to the emotions and imagination because they depict human suffering, anguish and also the fear of death. Yet anyone can view images of the dead bodies piled up in Dachau or Auschwitz and not only conjure up similar emotions to when one is witnessing near death images, but who is to say what image makes one person imagine or feel something more than another? Emotions are subjective, and people have different means for imagining. Perhaps seeing a child left for dead offers up an image of this child’s mother, which in turn, causes one to imagine the mother’s story. Other than mere exploitation or fascination, seeing victims jumping out of the Twin Towers is no better or worse emotionally on an American than if one sees them upon impact.

I also mention how she doesn't address how images have impacted the dumbing down of the media. You'd think she would, given the topic? Another weakness in the book. I think my review is too kind, actually.

Basically, if someone is not capable of communicating ideas well, (and given she's the Chair of the communications dept is rather ironic) taking those points seriously is moot. To use what my husband Dan would say, "It's like marveling over the perfect symmetry of a freshly pinched loaf of shit."

Sorry you don't want to run it. I appreciate the kill fee. But part of the reason writing is so bad is that no one wants to actually state why the book IS bad or that the writing itself is bad.

Note how all his arguments are bullshit, as Jessica does all he claims he wants, leaving his only reason for not publishing it because he does not want to offend the publisher, as newspapers, such as his, have become de facto advertisements for books, not objective critical voices.

Note how, in this last exchange with this coward, he tries to claim Jess did not think of the reader when that’s ALL she did, and it was Timpane who did not give a damn about objectivity and fairness:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: J S
Date: Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 12:56 PM
Subject: Re: Your book review
To: "Timpane, John" <jtimpane@phillynews.com>

I don't hold any brief with the writer or book. I had no idea who she was till you sent it, but given the poorness of its quality, readers would appreciate my warning them against it. I'd say that's the greatest form of consideration.
Thanks for the check.

Jessica

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: J S
Date: Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 9:24 PM
Subject: Re: Another thing about the Philly guy
To:

And all 3 reviews that have been pubbed (1 by Wilson and 2 by this guy) were all positive. The lone negative and he doesn't want it.

Of course, editors are not the only idiot, agents are just as stupid, and deceitful, such as this one, who, after totally not getting Jess’s greatest novel, sent a snide comment to her, and claimed it was an invite to re-submit. It was not, and Jess called her on it:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: J S
Date: Wed, Feb 16, 2011 at 11:53 AM
Subject: Re: Ashley Grayson Literary Agency
To: Ashley Grayson <graysonagent@earthlink.net>

If you think what you previously typed bespoke any invitation, implicit or explicit, to re-query, then you have let me and any others who receive such condescension know not to bother with someone who understands so little of the proper usage of words.
Thanks anyway. Goodbye.

This level of stupidity and deceit is all too common in the publishing industry, and why that industry is failing fininacially, as well as creating a whole generation of people who do not read literature, as it is not given to them.

Of course, Jess is not the only one who deals with such stolidity. Here is an exchange I had with Blogcritics editor Barbara Barnett, a deliterate who barely understands the basic rules of grammar. Witness:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider
Date: Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 4:52 PM
Subject: Fwd: Your Shock Corridor review
To: Barbara Barnett <barbara.barnett@blogcritics.org>

In some ways it resembles David And Lisa, a film that came out a year earlier, but was a blatantly socially progressive film, not a B film ‘shocker.’ And in other ways, it’s barely a step above an Ed Wood or exploitation film.

The point is a) you made a claim that was simply not so re: run-ons, and b) you were thrown by a rather simple pair of complex sentences with a none too difficult set of comparisons. Both Albert Einstein and Mo the bum at the diner who picks his nose could understand them. Why couldn't you?
In short, given all the pointless and ill written reviews on all sorts of nebulous and totally worthless entertainment and political minutia, when confronted with a well written and in depth look at an interesting, if not great, film by an important American filmmaker, you hemmed and hawed, and ultimately lost it because of your editorial limits.
That's not good editorial nor business practice.
DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Barbara Barnett <barbara.barnett@blogcritics.org>
Date: Sat, Jan 8, 2011 at 2:57 PM
Subject: Re: Your Shock Corridor review

To: Dan Schneider

There is a difference, of course, and complex sentences don't necessarily mean better sentences--or even more intelligently written sentences. Paragraphs are good things, and simple writing allows a non-scholarly audience to appreciate your words better.

Look at the sentence in question, and ask what sort of an editor would have ANY problem with that relatively simple complex sentence? Of course, over the years, this was merely one of a handful of problems I had with Barnett, a nororiously stolid editor who has screwed up a number of other BC contributors’ works. Her errors include a lack of knowledge in grammar and even basic spelling. How, again, is she an editor? Oh yes, it’s the Internet.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Scott Esposito <scott_esposito@yahoo.com>
Date: Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 9:06 AM
Subject: Re: Book Review Submission- Conversational Reading
To: cosmoeticalist

Thanks for letting us see this review, Dan, but it's not quite what we're looking for.

Best,
Scott

From: cosmoetica
Subject: Re: Book Review Submission- Conversational Reading
To: scott_esposito@yahoo.com
Date: Wednesday, August 5, 2009, 6:07 AM

Hmmm, they are not looking for great essays on books. Now, go and compare my review with anything penned by Esposito, or anythign that appears on the website in question, and the qualitative gulf is obvious. I deal with what is on the page alone.

Perhaps the worst website online, in terms of the arts, is The Huffington Post. A couple of years ago I suggested to the site, and its editors, that they start an arts and or literature page, and that I’d like to contribute. I never got a reply, then, less than three months later they appeared with both a Books and Arts page, giving me no credit, and refusing to even let me post there, despite having one of the top five arts websites online, in terms of readership, and the top one, in terms of being non-commercial. HuffPo is infamous for screwing contributors without payment, and for stealing barely rewritten content, and being nothing but a link farm, so stealing my idea and then blacklisting me is not a stretch. Then they did not even accept a few submissions I sent, instead looking to feature hacks like Anis Shivani, who criticizes New York Time shack, David Orr, who once blurbed cynically for Cosmoetica, and literary necrophile Thomas Steinbeck, who I’ve previously destroyed.

But, to end this digression on my encounters with institutionalized stupidity, let me end where I began, with Blogcritics, and another infamous editor there, Christopher Rose. It began when my Revolutionary Road review (BC must hate my posts on Richard Yates) was first infested with some trolls. Basically, I intellectually destroyed the trolls, but got posts of mine altered and deleted, not unlike The American Idol posts (above) while the trolls were protected by editor Rose. Herein my email exchanges:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider
Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 7:09 AM
Subject: Revolutionary Road thread
To: BC Editors <editorbclist@yahoogroups.com>, Gordon Hauptfleisch <ghaupt@gmail.com>, Barbara Barnett <barbara.barnett@blogcritics.org>

http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-revolutionary-road-by-richard1/#comments
I have put up with some haphazard editing of my posts in the past, but now that full censorship is going on I must address this. In the aforementioned thread, as of this writing, a full 13 comments have been deleted by a comments editor.
For a few years this thread got no replies, then an initial commenter started in. We exchanged a few times, and then the trolls arrived. Ok, so what? They are easily enough dealt with. If you wanted to delete obvious troll comments you should have done so from the start. All of my replies have been direct and included no profanity nor attacks. I have replied directly, and often humorously to obvious personal attacks.
Then, all of a sudden, today, days after the thread, some comments editor deletes a section of a comment wherein I respond to a troll who openly calls me a dick. In my response I basically stated who's the dick now? Or thereabouts.
Now, I was only wanting my comment restored, since it was not an attack, but a recognition that I WAS attacked. It meant nothing and I did not want the initial attack deleted.
But, the initial attack now stands while unrelated posts have been removed. Why? The thread now has replies to replies that no longer exist.
I have been around since Eric Olson started this site, and since he left and Technorati took over, the site has lost all sense of professionalism.
Do you want to be just another pop site?
If so, you are well on your way. If not, I suggest you restore all the deleted material so that the thread actually coheres. Yes, there are trolls, but unless you nip them in the bud, going back and gutting good comments is counterproductive.
DAN

Rose did not reply, but old Barb Barnett did, apparently unable to actually READ text, much less edit it:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Barbara Barnett <sasmom1@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 7:50 AM
Subject: Re: Revolutionary Road thread
To: Dan Schneider
Cc: editorbclist <editorbclist@yahoogroups.com>, Gordon Hauptfleisch <ghaupt@gmail.com>

We do not allow personal attacks in our comments threads. It has always been policy at BC. Although I do not know the wording of the original comments, I believe, that was what was edited out.

Sent from my iPad

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider
Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 8:11 AM
Subject: Re: Revolutionary Road thread
To: Barbara Barnett <sasmom1@gmail.com>
Cc: editorbclist <editorbclist@yahoogroups.com>, Gordon Hauptfleisch <ghaupt@gmail.com>

Then why is where a troll calls me a dick, which prompted my response, still in the thread?
Currently comment #22:

· 22 - zingzing

i've read the review (and the book) and i agree with will that the melodrama has its own point. as much as anything else, it's a book about how dramatic representations in art affect our responses to personal drama. is it any wonder that it all starts with a play? i don't think yates is the greatest writer ever, or this is the greatest novel ever, but you seemed to have missed a great deal of the novel's strengths. which would explain why you don't like it.
but my major fault with this article came in the comments field, where you came across as arrogant (you aren't the greatest [long list of things you claim to be the greatest ever at] ever, sir), hypocritical (you can dish it out, but can't take it without getting personal), homophobic (check comment #26), and belligerent towards anyone that would dare disagree with you.
in short, you come off like a dick in the comments. will lobbed a ball into your court and you pissed on it. that he still played was good on him. you did nothing to deserve his reply. i'd hope someone who doles out criticism for a living could take a little. but your word is god, according to you. and that's sickening.
My response was, 'Now who looks like a dick?'
That is not an attack, but a rebuttal to an attack. Then there were comments removed not written by me nor the nameless troll, zing.
Why were they removed?
Just look at the deleted comments, Barbara. Or ask the comments editor who deleted them.
And none of the other 12 responses had attacks by me or the other commenters. So, there is a blatant attack and use of a vulgarity in comment 22 that started this censorship, yet it still stands, and now multiple persons' comments have been removed willy-nilly.
Does that make sense? I'll presume the reason my comment was initially censored was for 'dick', yet that was in clear response to the trolls comments. None of the other comments deleted had any such word. Not that I'm justifying that merely the word dick shd be censored, but if this is what started it, then be CONSISTENT. Delete all the comments or restore all of them. Start from scratch then, otherwise your bias is showing.

DAN

It should be noted that the ‘will’ in the thread is now, currently, on the Cosmoetica e-list, so the rationale foer this trioll was pure bunkum, as was the rationale for why my polite responses to the trolls were altered and deleted while the trolls’ replies were untouched (an all too familiar tack on blogs and web boards across the Internet.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christopher Rose <christopher.rose@blogcritics.org>
Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 8:30 AM
Subject: Re: [editorbclist] Revolutionary Road thread
To: cosmoetica@gmail.com
Cc: editorbclist@yahoogroups.com

This comments thread got out of hand and has been pacified, that's all...

Christopher Rose
Comments Editor
Blogcritics

Of course, it was not my comments that got out of hand, and note the unwitting usage of the infamous ‘pacified’ euphemism- General Westmoreland is smiling in hell!

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider
Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 9:08 AM
Subject: Re: [editorbclist] Revolutionary Road thread
To: Christopher Rose <christopher.rose@blogcritics.org>
Cc: editorbclist@yahoogroups.com, Barbara Barnett <barbara.barnett@blogcritics.org>, Gordon Hauptfleisch <ghaupt@gmail.com>

Christopher: below is current comment #22. This use of the word dick is what started your deletions. I responded by stating 'Who's a dick now?'
In what universe is calling someone a dick NOT an attack while merely responding as I did considered an attack? And how does any of this have anything to do with the over dozen prior comments by people not me nor this troll, getting deleted?
Your actions suggest, at minimum, a bias (are you, perhaps zingzing, using a suckpuppet name?) or, at worst, outright disregard for the integrity of the comments section.
Again, how is the comment that started your deletions still standing while wholly unrelated comments not?

DAN

· 22 - zingzing

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider
Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 9:10 AM
Subject: Re: [editorbclist] Revolutionary Road thread
To: Christopher Rose <christopher.rose@blogcritics.org>
Cc: editorbclist@yahoogroups.com, Barbara Barnett <barbara.barnett@blogcritics.org>, Gordon Hauptfleisch <ghaupt@gmail.com>

From comment 26: (and if you want to get around the editors, you have to qualify your insults. you can't be fucking dumb about it.)

Sounds like zing has some inside information on how NOT to get deleted even when attacking.

DAN

One can almost envision the sputtering drool runnign down Rose’s chin as he is now caught in a lie. Look at our exchange and how he is totally nailed:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christopher Rose <christopher.rose@blogcritics.org>
Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 9:15 AM
Subject: Re: [editorbclist] Revolutionary Road thread
To: Dan Schneider, blogcritics editors <editorbclist@yahoogroups.com>

Dan,
We try to be as tolerant as possible in the comments pace but as I told you previously, this thread got out of control so I decided to take a stricter line, that's all.
He didn't call you a dick, he said that you were being arrogant and coming off like a dick.
And, no, zingzing doesn't have any inside information as you assert in your follow on email; there isn't any inside information.

Christopher Rose
Comments Editor
Blogcritics

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider
Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 9:19 AM
Subject: Re: [editorbclist] Revolutionary Road thread
To: Christopher Rose <christopher.rose@blogcritics.org>
Cc: blogcritics editors <editorbclist@yahoogroups.com>, Barbara Barnett <barbara.barnett@blogcritics.org>, Gordon Hauptfleisch <ghaupt@gmail.com>

And I did not call him a dick in the comment that directly followed. I stated Who's a dick now? How is my comment an attack, when it is in DIRECT reply to his, and again, how does this relate to earlier comments that were not posted by me nor zing, yet which were now removed?
All I am asking for is a rationale for why Who's a dick now? is an attack and the comment that prompted my reply NOT? It's trite, but this is the slippery slope you create for yourself when you DO delete comments. I was perfectly able and willing to beat the trolls into submission, w/o profanity, and w humor, but now you have gutted the whole thread, and little of it makes sense.
DAN

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christopher Rose <christopher.rose@blogcritics.org>
Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 9:24 AM
Subject: Re: [editorbclist] Revolutionary Road thread
To: Dan Schneider
Cc: blogcritics editors <editorbclist@yahoogroups.com>

Dan,
When threads get out of hand, a line has to be drawn somewhere, that's all that happened.
The removal of earlier comments was done because they clearly contributed to the failure of commenters to stay within the loose confines of the comments policy.
It is not your role to either decide who is trolling or to "beat the trolls into submission", so please just limit your efforts to making sure you stay within the comments policy.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider
Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 1:08 PM
Subject: Re: [editorbclist] Revolutionary Road thread
To: Christopher Rose <christopher.rose@blogcritics.org>
Cc: blogcritics editors <editorbclist@yahoogroups.com>, Barbara Barnett <barbara.barnett@blogcritics.org>, Gordon Hauptfleisch <ghaupt@gmail.com>

I did, and you utterly have avoided answering specific direct questions as to why you arbitrarily edited as you did. By virtue of the manner you edited, and did not edit, you clearly have a pro-bias toward the troll named zingzing. That you have avoided even mentioning the comments or the name speaks volumes as to your intent, and likely relation to this troll.
And, for the record, I have always stayed within the policies. "you come off like a dick in the comments" is a direct provocation; hence an attack. Who's a dick now?, coming after the sentence, 'On the positive side, I did get one- one- glimmer in this last reply, that you are not totally hopeless' is in no sane measure, an attack.
However, it's clear from your illogical little jig that you are not willing to be fair nor reasonable, so I won't pursue this any further.
However, in the future, you may want to not cause such a ruckus online with your wanton, biased, and illogical deletions. For your edification, I received an email from another BC writer and contributor who states that there is an interesting dynamic that goes on in many of the threads that you censor, Chris. That is that there is always one commenter/troll, whose clear provocations and violations are never edited nor removed even though many others, like me, point to their clearly being the source. This suggests a pattern of bias predating this thread, and also possible sockpuppeting on your part, or that of a partner in crime. If true, it would suggest you really need to get a life.
And I did get contacted by a couple of otherwise oddball characters who run a website called Save Blogcritics. Apparently they have extensively documented similar biases and whatnot by you and a number of other editors.
Not that I really needed such confirmation of what is plain to see, but just giving you a heads up that at least once a year I do an Internet roundup of the assorted asshattery that goes on online, and when, in a few weeks, I get around to it, your, and the other trolls', behaviors, will make for interesting fodder. Look for it.
I guess I should be thanking you for the future good reading of my audience.

Thanks,
DAN

I did get contacted by a couple of nuts from a now defunct website called SaveBlogcritics- as well as another BC editor, who were similarly screwed over by BC. The site is now removed, but they had a few articles on both Barnett and Rose, and the arbitrary nature of their editing. Rose retorted:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Christopher Rose <christopher.rose@blogcritics.org>
Date: Sat, Sep 10, 2011 at 1:35 PM
Subject: Re: [editorbclist] Revolutionary Road thread
To: Dan Schneider
Cc: blogcritics editors <editorbclist@yahoogroups.com>

Dan,
I think your high levels of self confidence are leading you into a profound misinterpretation of events; the only ruckus going on is in your head, not online.
As your heated emails confirm, it is never possible to please all the people all the time when managing the comments space, but I am confident that a reasonable balance that does not favour any party has been taken here.
Feel free to write whatever you like on your own site, it is still a relatively free internet after all, and I am sure both Blogcritics and myself are robust enough to survive your interpretation of events, which I note now also considers me a troll, despite not even having participated in the "debate" in the comments space at all.

Note the utter unwillingness to take responsibility. What does my self-confidence or not have anything to do with his deletions in favor of an obvious troll? And, go reread my emails- they are measured and specific. In what universe are they heated? This is classic strawmanning, as Rose refuses to deal with his own nefarious deeds, and tries to shift blame to the victim in this circumstance. And, yes, it took over 9 months, not a few weeks, to do this piece, but I was actually creating great art in the interim.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider
Date: Sun, Sep 11, 2011 at 10:37 AM
Subject: Re: [editorbclist] Revolutionary Road thread
To: Christopher Rose <christopher.rose@blogcritics.org>
Cc: blogcritics editors <editorbclist@yahoogroups.com>, Barbara Barnett <barbara.barnett@blogcritics.org>, Gordon Hauptfleisch <ghaupt@gmail.com>

What misinterpretation? I asked specific questions. I gave a specific example of what you deleted from my comment and asked how it was an attack while the poinys responded to were not? You have not answered because you CANNOT. I.e.- you either routinely delete so often you cannot recall why you initially deleted my response, and even if you regret it, you're caught by the shorthairs, and likely the comments are flushed and irretrievable, and your eminent bias pro-an obvious troll- zingzing, are inexplicable.
And I have only replied to you and on the thread. That three other individuals have come forward with evidence of this biased editing of yours being a pattern is evidence of just that: i.e.- you are notorious. Perhaps the Yahoo email I copied to goes to a server of other BC editors? I don't know, but my getting contacted from the ether on this matter, from other BC folk, is a testament to a ruckus YOU have caused. No one contacted me while I was battering the troll, only AFTER you started deleting comments by others and LEFT the initial attack, which clearly violates BC's own stated standards:

We will edit/delete spam comments, duplicate comments, unsupported accusations, personal attacks of any kind, and terms offensive to groups when used in a pejorative manner.

In addition, we reserve the right to edit/delete comments that are some combination of pointlessly vulgar, vile, cruel, without redeeming qualities, and an embarrassment to the site. Read more: http://blogcritics.org/comments-policy/#ixzz1XeqNBXpG

Again: YOU amplified this rather generic thread where I was letting a troll slowly cinch a noose about his neck into something where other editors and websites have taken notice. Did zingzing whine to you that he felt threatened, and you had to SAVE your buddy from a witty logician? I don't know, and don't really care, but it simply shows you up as a hypocrite; only the degree is at issue.
Zing's dick comment clearly is unsupported, a personal attack, and contains a term offensive to many groups, as well as being pointlessly vulgar. That you deleted my humorous reply to his attack and not his attack shows bias- whether you are him or know him I cannot prove, but given the bias, it's a strong possibility in either case, esp. in light that this habit of selective troll protection seems to be a modus operandi for you
Chris, you are so clearly nailed. At minimum for hypocrisy and bias, and possibly, if the other editors are correct, for continuing a pattern of either sockpuppeting or supporting pals who troll, and deleting those who oppose them.
This is why you scrupulously avoid any direct answers about why you clearly are violating your own site's policies. You have no defense. The sad thing is that the Internet is filled with folks like you, who have no lives, and get off on the meager little 'power' you think you possess in such matters. Again, get a real life, and maybe a real job wouldn't hurt, either.

DAN

Of course, I get contacted by many asses online, who NEED to show me their stupidity, so, for brevity’s sake, let me mention just a few here, and it’s a wonder why so many publishers don’t want to publish someone, regardless of the obvious quality of my writing, who has such a built in fanbase of redaers and folks who would love to read my stuff just to give their lives meaning.

Anyway, onward to the trolls. A whole web board was devoted to me by these asses who thought I was the IMDB imposter called The Intellectual Everyman, who has so little a life he even claimed:

The best thing about this video is that it got the "real" Everyman to claim I'm him on his website. I can think of no higher complement- AllenbysEyes

Of course, the dummy could not even logically state the facts- that he claimed to be me, not vice-versa. Of course, all his IMDB posts were deleted. Similarly, some asses decide to attack my wife, in this thread titled OT: Is Jessica Schnieder the worst person of all time? And, yes, the idiots could not even spell our surname correctly, so the contents of the thread should not surprise by being declaimed as silly and childish, at best. The starter of that thread was this troll that, like the Weekly Johnson asses, jess tracked by visits to her blog. And just like the idiots that believed I was The Intellectual Everyman, despite obvious non-syntactical replies pasted from essays, people took this shit seriously. The webboard asses fell for it all because they had no ability to discern writing. The creator of the video on The Intellectual Everyman is Groggy Dundee, another longtime Cosmoetica troll, and associate of another old time Cosmo troll, Tor Svensland, who, coincidentally, was the person who actually started Roger Ebert's thread on me.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: W G <wagifford2007@yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 7:58 AM
Subject: Re: dan schneider is a total fraud really bad cute poetry... LOL, hahahaha, tripe

lots more computer virus' on the way!!!!!! hehehe luv ya! god i miss ya both

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: W G <wagifford2007@yahoo.com>
Date: Sat, Dec 4, 2010 at 7:55 AM
Subject: dan schneider is a total fraud really bad cute poetry... LOL, hahahaha, tripe
To: cosmoeticaessays@gmail.com

and hopefully has hung himself LOL, total tripe and has no credence, nor even
knows what these words mean.. more virus' on the way! A total info whore LOL
by3 bye, luv,
me(hope u post on google .. u will need it!) i post the same in Europe, wikileaks can't stand him,
nor his wife, LOLOLOLOL more virus' coming! google keep o n truckin!!! lol
he and his wife need have hopefully hung themselves.. and their friends(not) who feel sorry keep their lives alive..

Of course, sometimes the people that go apeshit are those that initially start off sane. A woman named Joanne Marinelli, who calsl herself The Spastic Dowager, was someone I found on another Ebert thread on loneliness, and invited to the Cosmoetica e-list. I actually invited 3-4 dozen people, and about 20 took me up on the offer. Only two remain, as the rest did not, despite claims to the contrary, care about art. This woman, however, was totally nuts, and got into many arguments with other e-listers, in her few weks on the e-list, including mocking a woman who claimed to have been raped. Eventually, she lost all touch with reality, and thought I was fatso Dan Schneider, the cable TV children’s crap maven, then thought I offered her a job when I asked her to submit essays to Cosmo. This is typical of her delusions.

Here is an essay I wrote defending a bad book by an author I knew, and who told me that he knew his book was bad, then wanted me to excise that reality from a statement in the essay. Comment 4 was, again, butchered by a BC editor:

- Dan Schneider

John, you clearly don't spend much time online.
Ms. Gibson made 3 demonstrably false statements, which I showed.
There was no nastiness, nor personal invective by me, although both Gibson and the reviewer Holloway demonstrated both.
"For what it's worth, anyone in the publishing industry will tell you that an excerpt is far longer than a quote. It's a passage."
Not so.
quote: something that is quoted; especially : a passage referred to, repeated, or adduced
excerpt: a passage (as from a book or musical composition) selected, performed, or copied : extract
At the risk of your wrath, you are 100% wrong, definitionally. Neither term refers to any length. Never has. They are de facto synonyms. Care to admit your error?
[Edited by Comments Editor]

Why? Did I curse or rant? No, I merely stated the obvious, that the prior commenter, one ‘John Newman’ was merely a sockpuppet for the New York Journal Of Books. Yet, calling my review childish and nasty is NOT edited, even as the BC editors would not have actually allowed a nasty review, much less comment, as evidenced above.

Here is a page on Tumblr, from a nasty young queer with weight and acne problems, named Andrew Ketcham, who was on my e-list for awhile, before he attacked my wife, another young female, and several others in exchanges.

There’s this asshole poet who runs a writing appreciation site along with an e-mail list wherein he and his (awful) poetess wife run down any and every form of poetry that doesn’t conform to their ideals on Style.

Actual quote from one of his essays regarding Ted Hughes: “Fortunately, for the world- in general, & literature specifically- TH died of cancer on October 28th, 1998.”

Dan Schneider, fuck off. Your poems have “okay” readability and the style has absolutely no identity to it. I have no “Ketchamality?” Your poems are just “Douchebaggery.”

Naturally, Ketcham- who is a doggerelist and MFA hack in training, is lying when he claims I’ve trashed all those poets. And, given his assorted posts about his weight and facial issues, it’s kind of funny to have him declare anyone, much less my good looking wife, ugly. On this now defunct blog, with a bad title, Ketcham zealously guarded his doggerel with this ominous warning:

All works (hereby poems, shorts and miscellaneous writings) posted by user ReccyV/Andrew Ketcham are copyrighted. Any attempt to plagiarize these pieces will result in punishment to the furthest extent of the law. Think before you steal.

There was another Cosmo e-lister, who in 2011, had a mental breakdown, and who I had to remove from the list, who had a breakdown over his obesity, lack of skill, and lack of sexual companionship. After some nonsense over the death of journalist Christopher Hitchens, this person (whose name I won’t use, due to the length of time he was on the e-list, and the severity of his midlife crisis) could not let go of his hostility, and took his initial rants against me, on Facebook- in an open account, visible to all, and started then harassing me on the e-list, after I declined embarrassing him on his own page. I do have screenshots of both his Facebook nonsense and of his insane and decitful emails- which prove his lies and delusions, but won’t, at this time, post them. Out of kindness and past affection, I will just say it’s disturbing to see someone so self-destruct. He was not the first, but I’ve only had to ban a handful of people from the list, over the years, and the Hitchens thread led to some absurd and bigoted remarks about Moslems (and later about another e-lister he used a different racist term on) and Islamofascism where I proved him 100% metaphysically, logically, definitionally, politically, and historically wrong. His delusions held fast, and he was the sort to claim personal relationships with celebrities he had met- as example, he was a ‘friend’ of Hitchens because he claimed twice to have driven the man to LAX as part of his job, and claimed to be ‘close’ friends with filmmaker David Gordon Green because he went to the same school with him, even though he had no personal contact information for his ‘friend’- the type of friend who would likely have uttered a ‘Who?’ at this e-lister’s name’s mention. All in all, he should have known better, after having seen me destroy liars for years on the e-list and in essays as this, but ignorance, petulance, hubris, and solipsism got the better of him. Thus, I went, and am still going, kid gloves on him.

Over the years, I’ve written of numerous generic idiots, such as Carlo Parcelli, the doggerelist who submitted to me, at the behest of Black Jack Foley, was rejected, then wrote the inane piece, linked above, wherein he hangs himself with stu[pidity and lies. Then there was The Vermont Poet, who had difficulty even reading almanacs and dictionaries for definitions. There was Weeping Sam, in his assorted incarnations, such as this, wherein he argues with another version of himself, or this or this or this (see the comments). Then there was this PopMatters thread, wherein the editor again deleted comments by myself and an ass named Paul Maher, who had- surprise, surprise- started in with personal attacks. Then there was Naftali, a follower of Dean Esmay’s, whom I destroyed in the linked thread. And, speaking of Esmay, here is the link wherein I schooled Esmay regarding the Vietnam War, and the fact that it was the U.S.-sponsored South that installed the first death camps in Indochina. It was not long after this that Esmay (or someone who suspiciously lived in the same town in Michigan that he did that year) sent me a virus that wiped out an old PC of mine. Other assorted Esmay links include this, this umpteenth post on AIDS Denialism, and this. Of course, Bob, The Grumbler’ Grumman is always good for a laugh.

Of course, there are some folk that never learn, like this writer Dawn Marie Kresan, who takes on my aborted interview with Phillip Lopate, and gives ten idiotic points that she claims are bad interviewing techniques, even though the very things she quotes MAKE the interview not the typical fluff and advertisement sort that abound online. It’s funny when stuff like this is posted, because, basically she’s stating how to be a brainless, thoughtless, drone and promote all that is bad.
The two most ridiculous are:

6. Make generalizations about critics and the literary community and then expect the author to respond to this diatribe.
Quote: “Why do almost all critics and wannabe artists today find it impossible to distance themselves from emotion-based subjectivity and towards intellectual objectivity? Is it merely self-interest because of the fellatric way the publication world is set up?”
7. Be nonsensical.
Quote: “another noxious claim is that ‘all art is political.’ Aside from its logical absurdity, one can substitute the words ‘about poodles’ for ‘political,’ and the statement is just as true, or absurd. If one does not deal with politics in one’s story, poem or painting, then one is actually making a statement about the condition of poodles in the cosmos by ignoring their plight. No?”

As for point 6, just look above, at the Phliadelphia Inquirer’s editor’s refusal to publish Jessica’s review. What I state is no generalization, but the product of hundreds of such encounters over the years. Why do you think it is that you find great essays on art, film, and literature at Cosmoetica, and the crap that Kresan writes on a Blogspot account? As for point 7- that Kresan does not understand what I wrote shows just why she is so poor a writer and thinker. It is logically and syntactically very understandable, but then Kresan could not pontificate in a PC fashion. Of course, Kresan did her own insipid and pointless, PC interviews, but, as of this writing, they have been removed. Wonder why?

Interestingly, when I was sent this link to Kresan’s post, I decided, for the hell of it, to Google it under Cosmoetica, and it came up on page 25, with my Goodle setting set to 50 links per page, and was the next to last link on said page, meaning it was link number 1249. In brief, I get millions of readers precisely because of the great contributions to art and discourse I put out, while this tripe is relegated to the Internet’s dung heaps- proof that, depite the LCD media saying that good writing and art are doomed to fail online, it’s the reverse, on rare occasions, and Dawn Marie Kresan is its proof.

I have a friend who said something like, “what is the point of doing something if you don’t want to be the best?” It never occurred to me that as a publisher or writer, that THAT should be my goal. Sure it would be nice to win an award or get a little validation, and as a publisher I have an obligation to submit my authors’ books to award competitions, but in the end, is that what it is about? I’ve always done what I find rewarding and not worry about the rest. The book will find its audience. And to me at least, as a writer, the process is more foundational to artistic merit. Creating art is what matters — not selling it, labeling it, critiquing it, admonishing or praising it. Ego needs to be disassociated from the final work.

Note how Kresan never viewed art as something one should make the best of, and then, after that, she compounds her isiocy with conflating being the best at something with winning an award- utterly antithetical to the impulse to great art.

Of course, Kresan isn’t the only moron with no idea of what constitutes a good interview. Some British blogger named Tom Morris, who in true geek fashion is chubby and obsessive, according to his blog, wrote Sanger meets Schneider; I hit the bottle. What’s really funny is the footnotes for this post (my comments bolded within):

It’s sort of entertaining in a way. I mean, I downed the equivalent of four cups of coffee in energy drinks before setting off by train on a very slow sojourn through the south of England last night, and by the time I ploughed through all 40,000 words of Schneider v. Sanger, I desperately wanted to glug a whisky and ibuprofen cocktail to take the pain away.

***Note how he cannot even read an interview without terming it a vs. The Lowest Common Denominator/Internet mode already takes ahold.

If you go to public lectures, you know there’s always that one person who asks a question at the end. Only it’s not a question: it’s a rambling, meandering monologue. Eventually it hits five minutes and they have seemingly asked just about everything under the sun about pretty much nothing at all. The only reason they’ve sat down is they’ve run out of breath. If they had a pull-string on them, you could give it a tug and they’d spew shit for another five minutes. Now you get to enjoy that uncomfortable pause as the rest of the audience and the speakers try desperately hard to work out and salvage something from that pointless intervention. Bottle that train-wreck aesthetic and put it online and you’ve got Schneider’s literary interview series.

***Right, because asking pointed questions that are not asked in the typical online advertisements cum interviews is so like the clueless person who has one question with 5 popints. Morris is a sciolist supreme here.

On Citizendium, for instance, he bangs on about the “fascism” of “credentialism”, which ignores the fundamental policies of the site and is apparently relayed at second hand from an anonymous source.¹ The problem with the expertise policy on Citizendium is that it has been misapplied or badly implemented. The problems with Citizendium come down to boring things like management and bureaucracy and a whole load of other very down-to-earth things, rather than the vision itself.

***Except, if you read the interview, or even do a quick Google search, this is patently false, and why Citizendium, to this day, is not even on the radar as far as online resources go.

The other problem is that Wikipedia has grown through most of it’s painful episodes, and Citizendium has been cursed with quite a number of unproductive editors who have been banned from Wikipedia (I won’t name names, but anyone who follows these things will know who I am talking about).

***Note how Morris first accuses me of an anonymous source, as if that is something bad, yet then parenthetically declaims gossip without even a claimed source, but a ‘we all know what I mean’ asides. It’s simply hilarious to read these bad thinkers and writers who transgres far worse than those they claim to want to school.

Their bans from Wikipedia may not have been for the best of reasons and may indeed be examples of ‘the right result for the wrong reason’. And because the accumulated policy cruft isn’t there on Citizendium, said people turn up and the tools aren’t there to really do anything about them. So they push their own personal points of view and fail to be neutral and so on. The policies on Wikipedia have been tested by repeated application, while Citizendium’s haven’t. And because of the way Citizendium works, those policies aren’t going to be tested in the real world because of the lack of critical mass.

In other words, Wikipedia is run by common law with admins as magistrates, while Citizendium as it currently stands is run by an elaborate bureaucracy, the political battles of which now seem to occupy almost all of the attention of the community as opposed to actually writing content. The fundamental problem with Citizendium is too much bureaucracy too soon, and that the Benevolent Dictator has gone too quickly. With Wikipedia, the Benevolent Dictator (Jimbo) may perhaps have outstayed his welcome; with Citizendium, he perhaps disappeared far too quickly.

***And it’s a viw utterly at odds with reality, for the very nature of Wikipedia means it is bureaucratic- ever notice hoew the talk and mediation pages make up over 75% of Wikipedia’s bandwdth, by even a conservative estimate. Wikipedia, because of this pandering to the lowest common denominator is the most stastus quo website online. People and institutions of power are always portraye dwell- just look, as example, how ebsites like IMDB or AMC are constantly linked for film reviews, even though they add no new material that Wikipedia’s articles do not, and IMDB, like Wikipedia, is an info site built by anonymous editors, whose information is quite often wrong. Yet, individual critics cannot get reviews linked, even if they contain far more in depth and unique information.

I don’t have any animosity though, and I’m completely disinterested in the personal and political side of it, which is most of the reason I left the CZ EC: because interpersonal political bickering is just completely uninteresting to me. As MeatballWiki puts it: Fighting Is Boring. I just want more and better information online delivered under free licenses because, well, Wikipedia is a lot less dysfunctional than the existing institutions of newspapers and the entertainment industry.

***This is another example of unintended humor. Wikipedia, as I said, is more stasis bound than any other website online.

I’m ultimately a pragmatist (on Internet encyclopedias anyway), so whatever works. Wikipedia vs. Citizendium is like Linux vs. GNU Hurd. In open content communities, like open source, competition ultimately is just another word for cooperation. If you want to see people argue the toss over Citizendium, try RationalWiki.

Anyway, so you are reading the Sanger interview and you think it might get interesting and the interview might veer into some constructive discussion of exactly what could be fixed about the varying models of running, say, Wikipedia vs. Citizendium vs. some other online Wikipedia-like encyclopedia, and Schneider wanders off into discussing his own theories and ideas like he seems to do in every other bloody interview he does.

So rather than getting some in-depth specifics about what Larry Sanger is best known for: namely, helping start Wikipedia and running it in the first year, and then going off and starting Citizendium, you get Schneider still being butthurt about how Dan Dennett basically didn’t give a shit about his question about why Time Magazine didn’t put Genghis Khan on their list of the top people of the millennium or whatever. It’s pretty good car-crash-TV to see Larry very gently noting that it may not be Dennett who is at fault in this relationship.

***No it’s not. Sanger and I lay out the founding of Wikipedia and Citizendium from start to end. Anyone with zero knowledge of either enterprise will know much after this interview, but here is the key point: one must actually READ the thing, not just look to gather bullet points, as Morris does. But, as far as the gossipy behind the scenes crap that most wanna hear of- say, Sanger vs. Jimmy Wales, I don’t delve into that because a) it’s dull, and b) it’s been done to death. What Morris wants is for me to rehash the same things every other website dealing witgh Sanger and wales does. Why would I do that? I want to interview him, which means eye to eye, not in some faux bow to the great man that a lumpenmenschen like Morris seems to want.

Whether you agree with Larry or not, he’s obviously an interesting guy, and it’d be interesting to hear his views about Wikipedia and so on at some length. A 40,000 word interview would be a good place to do it, if only it was done by someone who could put his own ego on hold. A few interesting tidbits do appear in amongst a seemingly endless cycle of confirming the truth of the Dunning-Krueger effect over and over again.

***Yes, Morris, let’s bow down to the great Sanger. Sanger’s words, in fact, constitute the bulk of the interview, and I actually had to wait over two years to splice the interview together because Sanger was so neurotic that I had to break up the interview into five parts. And, on a side note, it’s bizarre to see how Morris actually thinks Dennett comes off well in his interview, as, in the earlier above link, he writes:

Aspiring journos, take heed. Here is how not to conduct an interview. If the aggregate length of your questions are longer than the answers, it’s not really an interview - more of an monologue with occasional punctuation by the guest, interjecting subtle hints that you don’t really get the whole interviewing thing. I guess if you loudly proclaim that you have “achieved greatness” in the middle of an interview, the idea that it’s a ‘conversation’ suddenly becomes nothing but a farce. Even with the absolute buffoon of an interviewer, Dennett still shines through.

First, the questions were in depth, and when one answers with nothing but a two or thre word attempt at humor, it’s the interviewee at fault. Re: the Khan question, the very point was Dennett was tasked with being on a panel he was patently unqualified to be on- an examination of the last eon’s most influential people, and, instead of acknowledging that fact, he tried to pass off his ignorance as humor. Yet, Morris, in a classic case of buying anythign an authority figure (someone with name brand imprimatur) states, swallows whole. The interesting thing is how folks like Morris and Kresan see failures in an interview, and blame the interviewer for the interviewee’s failures, when most of the interviews I’ve conducted have had great, lengthy, and in depth replies. Granted, one might state, well, of course Steven Pinker, James Emanuel, and Lem Dobbs, take these queries and run with them, as they CARE about imparting knowledge. Dennett did not, and it shows, and the vast majority of people with no knowledge of someone like Dennett see this plainly. It’s only the folks invested in Dennett’s fame or views that do not. The whole Khan question, and Dennett’s whiff on it, actually is a GREAT moment in the interview because it shows how intellectually timid Dennett really is. He is incapable of thinking outside the box, which is why his once promising career in exploring the workings of the human brain has devolved into being a hack ‘professional atheist’- witness his poor answer to the question about the puerile term ‘brights.’

But, in Schneider’s defence, surely he manages to get Larry Sanger to explain his views on philosophy? He is being interviewed as an epistemologist rather than for his role in Nupedia, Wikipedia and Citizendium. Well, Schneider fails on that front too. He does elicit a few interesting nuggets, but he fails to actually ask about Sanger’s specific research interests or elicit his views on any of the stuff that is of interest to contemporary epistemologists, despite us being in the fortunate position of living in a time after Gettier sent everyone back to the epistemological drawing board. Far be it from me to suggest that the reason Schneider failed to ask much in the way of good questions about Sanger’s philosophical views despite 40,000 words of space to do so is probably because Schneider doesn’t really understand philosophy very well.

***Again, did Morris actually READ the interview, or just cherrypick for bullet points for a deluded screed?

If you don’t want to spend hours reading this dreck, let me pull out a few choice samples.

I believe that artists are fundamentally different, intellectually, than non-artists, and that the truly great artists are even more greatly different from the average artists than the average artist is from the non-artist. […] What are your thoughts on this? Are their current philosophers who might be considered visionaries in a hundred or more years? Who are they? Is there one discipline of philosophy that lends itself more to creative or visionary thought? And, if you are copacetic with such a system, where on the scale would you place yourself?

***Is Morris serious? This is pomp? These are in depth and fundamental questions. Yes, to a blogger concerned with day to day political and cultural nonsense this may be over the head, but not to intelligent readers; the bulk of Cosmoetica’s audience. Maybe I should have asked, what was it like sitting on a panel with Steven Pinker. Does he really have bedroom eyes?

Is why? the ultimate query? If so, what is the ultimate answer? Is it why not? Is it because!? Or is that just super-simplistic philosophic bullshit that someone is better off simply saying so? to? And is so? the best and/or safest reply to any philosophic query?

***Note how Morris ballockses the actual question, and when Sanger, like Dennett, shows his limits as a philosopher and thinker, Morris actuallytakes this as a rebuke, rather than Sanger’s own limits. It should be noted, that in the interview, and in the corrspondence for it, Sanger constantly rebuked HIMSELF for his limits. Of course, one would have to actually READ the interview to see this.

If you are familiar with UFO lore, you know that many people who claim to be abductees of extraterrestrial sexual experimenters only recall their traumas long after the fact. This is akin to the now verified False Memory Syndrome that has exculpated false claims of sexual abuse rings, Satanic torture, and a myriad of other bizarre claims. You must know of the work of the late psychiatrist John Mack, and his work with claimed alien abductees. He grew to believe in the mythos. So, if memories can change, is the past in any way mutable? And, is the past safer than the present or the future because we know how it turned out?

Where to start? That’s like a poster child for fractal wrongness. The more you think about it, the more wrong it is. And then you zoom in on a particular and it’s even more wrong. And then you ponder the mind of whoever thought this was a good theory and bloody hell, you pile so much wrongness up and it topples over causing a veritable earthquake of wrong.

Firstly, what the fuck kind of question is that? If you ask anyone with a modicum of sense, the answers are “No” and “I haven’t got a fucking clue what you are talking about” respectively. I mean, seriously, Schneider thinks that memories not being stable and accurate over time means the past is potentially ‘mutable’. That’s like all those people who think “if a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it really make a sound?” is some kind of important philosophical problem, when it has a clear and simple empirical answer: namely, yes.

If a newspaper says that Brussels is in France, does it in some sense make it in France? No. If the evil psychologist of so many philosophical thought experiments wired me up to a computer and made me start having, oh, some thing very much like the mental state I would have if I were to believe that Winston Churchill was still alive, it wouldn’t suddenly make him alive, or make the “past mutable”. It would mean in the first instance that the newspaper got something wrong and in the second instance that my mental states do not always accurately reflect the outside world. In other words, the world doesn’t give a shit what you think.

***This is so ridiculous that one wonders if Morris, and his blog, are examples of Poe’s Law, wherein a satire is almost indistinguishable from real life stupidity. The questions are good and pointed, and on a subject Sanger claimed to have an interest in, memeory. I am giving him a chance to expound his beliefs when I ask ‘if memories can change, is the past in any way mutable?’ I am not stating it as my belief, or as Morris claims: I mean, seriously, Schneider thinks that memories not being stable and accurate over time means the past is potentially ‘mutable’. Now, seriously, a first grader could see that the two italicized sentences are not equivalent. Just how old is Morris? Of course, the likelier reality is that this article is just a clasic case of strawmanning, for almost everything Morris claims I ask or state I am not asking, and is not stated I the context he presents it. This is not only strawmanning, but bulletpointing. But then he goes on, on a point HE makes, not me nor Sanger. And he does this all the while accusing ME of bloviating:

If you take the possibility seriously that someone having memories that do not accurately reflect facts about the past means that the past is “mutable”, you need to be smacked around the head a few times with an undergraduate epistemology textbook. This sort of thinking almost borders on what Dan Dennett calls a deepity. It has a meaning that is very obviously true but unimportant and it has a significant meaning which is total bullshit.²

As Sanger points out, it is especially amusing to hear this kind of utter nonsense from someone who rails so vehemently against ‘subjectivism’ (and postmodernism and political correctness et al.)! Apparently, subjectivism is the source of all evil in art and aesthetics, but subjectivism about the external world is perfectly fine because how else would we be able to explain the mental states of people who think they’ve been abducted by aliens?! Enquiring minds want to know!

***Again, he totally misrepresents my claims on subjectivity. Show me, on all of Cosmoetica, where I deny subjectivity. What I deny are subjectivists’ claims against objectivity. These are not the same. Of course, to Morris’s limited mind, they may appear to be, but whose fault is that?

So that’s all fun and games if, like me, you have something of a tolerance for watching people fail badly at philosophy (Schneider that is). But why on earth are you asking the co-founder of Wikipedia whether or not he’s familiar with “UFO lore”? Besides the aforementioned car crash value, what is the reader supposed to glean from this? Am I supposed to be impressed by how wide ranging an intellect Schneider has or something? (I’m really not.)

***No, you should see the commonality of memory, philosophy, and their connections to Sanger’s claims of epistemology and his own work, if you READ the interview. Again, all Morris and Kresan want is regurges of the same answered questions in dozens of other interviews. Well, go read them, and pat your backs for it, but then accept the responsibility for the ignorance in not being able to even read a simple and coherent sentence, as shown in my replies.

I hear a lot of interviews on the radio and in the best interviews the interviewer is asking exactly the sort of questions I would want to ask and otherwise keeping out of the way. The skilled interviewer isn’t there to talk about themselves. People don’t tune into Desert Island Discs to hear Sue Lawley or Kirsty Young, they tune into hear something interesting about the guest, with music as a proxy for their personality.

***Wrong. People want to see interviewers who push people out of their comfort zones: Tom Snyder, Dick cavett, Bill Buckley, Phil Donahue, and others come to mind. There is no one doing this today EXCEPT me. Maybe that’s why almost 450 million hits have been registered on all the interview pages!

Interviewing is fundamentally a very modest matter: as Kierkegaard said of Socrates, one is serving as a midwife, bringing things out of the student (or interviewee). Sometimes an interviewer needs to be a bit strong-armed and do the Jeremy Paxman routine, but the point is to let the interviewee do the talking. An interviewer who spends his whole time puffing himself up is like a teacher whose only role is to show how much cleverer he is than his students. It may make him feel better, but what value is there in that to anybody else? Go beyond that Socratic (or an emotional variant thereof of the Socratic) role and, to use the Kierkegaard analogy, you end up having to play the role of Jesus. And while a good interviewer can occasionally pull off Socrates, he or she will always fail at being Jesus by dint of, oh, not being the son of God.

***Need I do more than point out the Appeal To Authority fallacy here. Simply put, Kierkegaard was wrong. Donahue and Buckley are right. An interviewer knows when to let an interviewee open up and when to push, but if the interviewer is narcissistic and in over his head (Dennett) or neurotic and lacking in confidence (Sanger) or psychotic (Edward Hoagland) there is little the intyerviewer can do, Groveling does not make for compelling reading. That stated, Sanger’s interview is actually very good, if not great. And Dennett’s is solid, although, to use a sports analogy, I carried him.

Here’s a hint for wannabe interviewers: if multiple interviewees (including smart folk like Dennett) tell you repeatedly and at length that they are having a really hard time working out what the bloody hell you are actually trying to say, you should seriously consider rethinking your technique.

***Except that almost all the interviewees but a handful have stated they appreciated the in depth questions, and not being talked down to. That Dennett wanted to be the great man is, again, his issue, not mine. That Moris wants such fawning is his issue, as well. So, hint to would be critics, if one is going to critique something, be honest, don’t strawman, don’t take out of context, make false assertions, and don’t impose your own limited ideas into something successful.

On his website, Schneider modestly describes his interview with Steven Pinker as “One of the greatest interviews ever recorded”. This is an interview where a huge chunk of it is Schneider quoting different chunks of his own reviews of Pinker’s books back at him and asking him for responses, and the rest of it asking the exact same questions he asked to Dennett and Sanger about his half-baked theories and philosophies. In an interview, Schneider himself is asked who he thinks the greatest living “visionary poets” are. The phrase “Excluding myself” appears in the answer. I kid you not. As for why you you’ve never heard of him, the greatest living visionary poet? That’s all a conspiracy by the publishing industry and stupid idiotic “deliterates” who spend all their time watching American Idol rather than reading his ingenious works of poetry, as he explains repeatedly and at length in interviews with anyone who’ll listen.

***Over 70% of Pinker’s interview is Pinker’s words, and, of course, I’ll be quoting from my reviews, as I am asking him points about his book that I have made. Who should I be quoting, Michiko Kakutani, as if shje would even read a book by Pinker? And is Morris seriously arguing that the publishing industry does NOT publish hacks? Yet another blogger who claims to be an outsider, and not like the status quo, yet, at every opportunity, sides with it.

Interestingly, the interview with Pinker contains a number of questions which are the same word-for-word as the interview with Sanger. As if the interviewee is simply a disciple or a sounding board, someone to sit at the feet of the Great Artist and quietly nod in approval. For a writer of such obvious Greatness, it is interesting how easily you could produce a computer programme to churn out these interviews. Basically, you just take an existing template and just throw in a few phrases from the Amazon.com descriptions of the published works of the author being interviewed and hit send.

***That’s because they are an interview series, so, of course, I will ask the same questions on an interviewee’s biography, views on certain subjects and the like. Why? Because I don’t presume that even a Pinker is known by more than a small fraction of the world’s audience. I am actually opening these folks’ works up to a larger audience. That is the VERY point. That Morris cannot reason this out states just how entwined he is in the thin veneer of pop and online culture he is.

I wish I could have said this interview “tl;dr” (too long; didn’t read) but sadly it was “too long; did read”. And now I need to find where I stashed that whisky to make the memory of it go away as quickly as possible. To restate a question that the Man of Considerable Greatness asks, if I numb the pain with enough alcohol and painkillers to sedate a pony, does that make the interview in some sense less awful? Sadly not.

***Then, after ripping me in this post for Hubris, Morris hilariously goes all David Foster Wallace; as if this glorified masturbation needed further explanation. I mean, it’s stuuff like this that is the reason for essays like this. Witness:

1. That’s an awesome interview technique by the way: when you have a public website you can go and look at with your own eyes, you instead rely on the testimony of one anonymous individual. Also, really? Really? It’s “fascistic” to run a wiki where experts are asked to sign off on articles? The worst you can say about is that it doesn’t work or that the selection of experts is problematic. But to suggest that any issue in the debate over the relative merits of wiki-based encyclopedia projects approaches the level of “fascism” is really a bit OTT…

2. Okay, let me give it a shot. If events that happened in the past have as some mereological component mental states that are happening now or in the future, there is a way in which this view can be true. Imagine we have some abstract object that represents a past event, such that it is contingent on abstract objects of the same broad type. And we say that such an event has a mereological relationship with present brain states that are related to the event, and those brain states have a causal chain of history between them as they change or degrade over time. So, you’ve got the event (E1) and it has some unspecified relationship R1 with one or more mental state sets (MSS1), which themselves have a different relationship with a chain of mental states (MS1…MSn). We can pick any mental state from MSS1, and it has a relationship to E1. In as much as the set of mental states attached to a particular event change, it is possible to say that the event E1 changes. In as much as one believes that the event has as a direct property or mereological component of itself a set of mental states that have a relationship with that event, then the mutability of events based on mental states about them in the future is obviously true. But I don’t see any good reason to accept this sort of account because it doesn’t get you anywhere useful, and it throws up oddities. I mean, the idea that, say, the Battle of the Somme would have been different if I had not been born seventy-odd years later is far too ontologically queer for me.

Of course, he takes point 1 out of context, again, but would you expect anything else, by this point? Part 2 is even funnier, as his discombobulations are just the sort of bullshit a sciolist like him would find compelling: vapid, bigwordthrowingarounding, with no intellectual merit. And, more cogently, unlike my pointed queries, they have nothing to do with what my interview was stating; a classic case of Morris not only strawmanning, but manifesting that the reason he didn’t like the Sanger interview was simply because I didn’t ask the masturbatory sorts of questions a geek like him NEEDS to know, for I do not toss softballs, not engage in pointless advertising- I speak and interview eye to eye. I do not fawn, nor expect the same. Ach du Lieber Gott in Himmel!

Fortunately, Tom ‘Call me Fluff’ Morris gets a few readers who actually see HIS obtuseness, and set him straight in the comments, save for one tool who claims I need to be humble- why? Why is humility, if based on an untruth, better than reality and veracity? Of course, while Morris is singular, iterations of his type abound, like this, another not too interesting ass was this post on Weldon Kees, from a repressed Canadian, which criticized my laudatory post on the writer, but in a very dumb way that is now lost to the Internet’s afterlife.

Of course, if the Internet fails, there’s always emails, such as this ass, whom I destroyed:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Amy Smart <iamamysmart@yahoo.com>
Date: Tue, Sep 6, 2011 at 12:54 PM
Subject: My reaction to your words

Hello,
This morning I came across your article about Quincy Troupe:
"Even more troubling was the way that both students & teachers rationalized the whole incident- claiming that it was QT’s writing, not academic cv that got him his sinecure. The fallacy of that assertion lies in the fact that I have yet to be offered a professorship even though my poetry’s quality dwarfs QT’s. ... "
Your criticism and jealousy is unpleasant to read and it comes as no surprise that you were once a gang member. Perhaps that is the reason you were not selected for the position such as the one Quincy Troupe held. Troupe does pay a price for falsifying his credentials on his CV. He didn't murder anyone! He was found out by the world at large and that does not go away.
His "white lie" was an act of survival, in

Natural Law

QT was not a lawless being in an ordered universe. He was a desperate black man in a racist society, trying to survive. There was no violence or threat of such involved. There was poetry, superb teaching skills and love. You try being a black man, Dan.
I hope you find a way to be kind and use your writing for beauty and inspiration. Yes, it is important to speak out against injustice, however you go for the jugular for unimportant issues while there is so much cruelty and serious corruption to deal with.
Your words make this world a colder place.
I don't understand why people are so hell bent on forming their opinions and writing them, without careful consideration, for the whole world to see. To me it is a form of intellectual masturbation in front of an open window.
I'm not sure which photo on your site is yours, but there is such ugliness in your words, it would not matter how physically appealing you may be. Your poetry is wonderful and you spoil it by your rantings and self adulation.
Wish you can learn modesty, act kindly and behave generously.

AmyHello,

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider
Date: Wed, Sep 7, 2011 at 9:45 AM
Subject: Fwd: My reaction to your words
To: Amy Smart <iamamysmart@yahoo.com>

So, given the delusion of your words, were you a sexual abuse victim or are you an addictive personality?
Now, before you get outraged, think of what I have said. You write to a total stranger with these bizarre accusations about a years old piece about a writer who is clearly fraudulent, and you TOTALLY dodge the very import and point of the piece. QT had some talent, but has done nothing with it. He has milked the system and coasted for years- black or not. He is intellectually and creatively lazy.
Yes, I'm sure QT was called nigger here and there and has suffered the clicks of cab doors and looks from fearing whites and others. But he's sure cleaned up in his latter years. I'll place my life story and circumstances against his any day, and I'd guarantee you that over 95% of black people would sooner have chosen his path in life than mine.
So, the point is, what has made you so insecure as to read the words of a total stranger, that are accurate, yet totally having NADA to do with you, yet set you off to write such an inane and churlish email? Statistically speaking, and given you are apparently a female with artistic pretensions, the above two posits are the most likely reason. Personally, I don't give a damn, but be warned that there are people in this life that will take that attitude of yours and backhand you clear across a room.
There, I've warned you. My good deed for the day is done. And given your initial email, I have been very kind and generous.

DAN

Then there were the Harlan Ellison asslickers, who rose up after I posted this review, which drove them apeshit on the Ellison blog, now only saved in cache. As I stypical, not a single of the persons arguing with me, or over the post, actually dealt with any of the specific points rised, instead just letting their wrath and ire get the better of them. Yet, even when one praises someone all you get is ignorance. I have read a blog called Stupid Evil Bastard for the better part of a decade- and even got the epigraph for my book, The Vincetti Brothers, by reading it, and the linked thread, and posted this response after the blogger oddly self-deprecated himself in favor of a philospher type of far less ability. I got no thanks nor even acknowledgement. It just goes to show that even people capable of more than the average person are utterly incapable of seeing their own abilities, however limited, and often deferring to the most banal people or ideas, merely out of deference. Yet, I, who have done more for the arts, and thousands of wannabe artists, over the years, than any human being in history- from personal actions to advice on submitted writings, never get anything approaching the puzzling fascination the blogger has with this rather off the rack wannabe philosopher.

However, another of the Empire type boards is this one, wherein more trolls circle-jerk each other. The oddest thing is that for every one of these accessible via the Internet there are dozens or hundreds of these on hidden or closed blogs or chatrooms from services like Yahoo. The post starts out with a seeming admirer of my This Old Poem essays:

I must be cruel to be kind
December 4, 2010 10:00 PM Subscribe

This Old Poem Those familiar with the long-running PBS TV series This Old House may be able to discern where I am going with this series of essays. Basically, I seek to rehabilitate (by rewriting) well-known poems....
Dan Schneider cuts Amiri Baraka in half, performs battlefield surgery on Hughes, takes away Raymond Carver's carriage return, and runs carefully amok in your classics. Whether or not you like the results, Schneider makes an exhaustive case that even the oldest standards can and must offer surprise at every turn.

Philosophically, the concept of "rewriting" poems written written by someone else seems, just, wrong....
posted by HuronBob at 10:06 PM on December 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

Philosophically, the concept of "rewriting" poems written by someone else seems, just, like what people do all the time...
posted by b1tr0t at 10:23 PM on December 4, 2010

Gotta love how comment 3 rips #1 with the obviousness of reality. Then we get the wannabe critics who reveal they know nada of poetry:

(I would be so tempted to present my edit as the original and the original as my rewrite, then only reveal the truth after everyone commented on how my rewrite is totally pedestrian and misses the author's point completely and is obviously the work of an inferior writer...)
posted by Ian A.T. at 10:26 PM on December 4, 2010 [4 favorites]

Christ, what a thoughtful person.
posted by shii at 10:39 PM on December 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

I hated all of the rewrites that I read. They varied from "not quite as good" to "what the hell, this no longer even makes any sense or has any soul, kind of like it was computer-generated."
This could actually be funny, if it was being done in an overly-pedantic English teacher sort of way and meant to be humorous, but this was just painful.
posted by wending my way at 10:41 PM on December 4, 2010 [3 favorites]

Philosophically, the concept of "rewriting" poems written written by someone else
is just fine if the goal is to understand the poems and poetry better, and not to actually publish new versions of the poems, Sonnets by Shakespeare & Smith, and even that could be interesting if Smith were amusing.
In these linked essays, the writer spends time considering, for example, whether a certain word should come before or after the line break. That is how poetry should be approached: syllable by syllable. I'm not claiming his analyses are brilliant, but the approach is sound. Take it apart, look at each part, and see how it all fits back together. Are there any parts we don't need? Are there any parts that could have been fitted together better? Anything missing? What would happen if we moved this part over here and cut that part?
posted by pracowity at 10:48 PM on December 4, 2010

My God, they're all so much worse! It's impressive, that combination of consistent inability to improve good poets' worst poems with all the bluster and denigration and conviction that he has done so. Suggests how easily territory-marking can overtake the ability to read.
posted by RogerB at 10:51 PM on December 4, 2010 [3 favorites]

TH never wrote a poem over 10 lines long that was any good.
Well, this was an extremely unpromising start to the first link I read. And it went downhill from there.
posted by Abiezer at 11:12 PM on December 4, 2010

I once considered doing this with screenplays I've liked the premise of but hated the execution (most recently Inception), but then I feared it would be linked to on MeFi and people would react like MeFites.
posted by dobbs at 11:17 PM on December 4, 2010

One does see the similarity with This Old House. At least the later series.
posted by maxwelton at 11:18 PM on December 4, 2010

Actually, as wending my way suggests, some of these are kind of unintentionally hilarious. My favorite so far is when his constant refrain of "Let's tighten things up" turns Blake into a Hallmark card. But it's hard to find enough humor amid the bile drenching these pieces to keep reading.
The most potentially interesting moments here are the ones where Schneider's sensibility, his personal convictions about the One Right Way to write poems, is in the starkest conflict with the material, as when he confesses his wish to "de-Whitmanize" Whitman. But the right way to process that wish was Pound's, not this bitchy feigned surprise at finding "Victorian pomp" in an 1865 poem memorializing a head of state.
posted by RogerB at 11:30 PM on December 4, 2010

Heroic levels of ineptitude and hubris in that Blake re-write. I am now happy to concur with Saxon Kane's pithy summing up above.
posted by Abiezer at 11:39 PM on December 4, 2010 [1 favorite]

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us—if at all—not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
The hand that wrote this should be given the benefit of the doubt when it comes to his other work. It's alright to question, but to rewrite?
posted by Trochanter at 11:50 PM on December 4, 2010

You just knew the Appeal to Authority fallacy had to come in. And, how about the tool that links to the Whitman essay, claiming I have a wish to de-Whitmanize Whitman when, in fact, the essay ends: I would tinker a bit more, myself, but that would too de-Whitmanize the poem. My version is better, but I doubt it’ll nudge the original from anthologies- 140 years is too big a head start, even for a poem begging to be bettered!

Wait, you say, you mean an anonymous online troll would lie and state something 180 degrees from the stated truth? What is this world coming to?

Ugh, Shakespeare is so, like, blah blah blah. So imma gonna take his Henry VIII and turn it into a TV show.
posted by munchingzombie at 12:11 AM on December 5, 2010

Heroic levels of ineptitude and hubris in that Blake re-write.

Yes. This is an interesting idea and there's even a need for it because poets get away with far too much and all anybody ever does is chuckle and move on. But that Blake re-write was so awful that I feel this person should be put up against a wall. He's done a very bad thing and that's all there is to it.
posted by nixerman at 12:24 AM on December 5, 2010

who's woods these are?
i think i know!
his house is in the village.
though he will not see me stopping here to watch his woods fill up with snow,
my little horse must think it.
of easy, wind, and downy. flake the woods are!
lovely! dark! and deep!
to go before:
i sleep and miles.
to go before.
i sleep.
posted by brenton at 12:31 AM on December 5, 2010

Consensus in this thread seems to be drifting towards "what an asshole" territory generally, and the City Pages article sure paints him that way. On the other hand, I just wound up reading his take on Weldon Kees, and it seems like he's got a side as an informed and thoughtful reader with an interesting taste in things (albeit too concerned with pointing out the originality of his interpretations).
posted by brennen at 12:43 AM on December 5, 2010

Hive mind time? I mean, are there this may stupid people? Or are they sockpuppets? Does it really matter if they have separate bodies, con sidering their minds are so unitary?

It's alright to question, but to rewrite?
The rewriting of poetry is a valuable way to learn the writing of poetry, though more polite poets will keep their practice sessions confined to the notebook. Recasting free verse in pentameters, tearing lines out of a stanza until it stops working, translating a poem from an unknown language with nothing but a rough gloss and a dictionary - all of these are edifying, productive, and fun. If there's any offense here, it's in the manner rather than the nature of this guy's work.
posted by Iridic at 1:03 AM on December 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

Yeah, this concept is fine but the execution would be more palatable if it had the tone "let's experiment and see if we can come up with an interesting alternative" rather than "Step aside, Eliot and Keats, Dan Schneider is here to show you how to write poetry." I suppose that raging ego helps the creative process as much in poetry as anywhere else, but it all but forces the reader to react with nitpicky glee when he gets a technical point wrong like "I cut air from bubbles because it’s an unnecessary adjective."
posted by No-sword at 1:23 AM on December 5, 2010

His comments about Sandra Cisneros are kind of disgusting.
posted by wayland at 1:35 AM on December 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

This was more fun when it was rewriting poems as limericks. The challenge of capturing the original while also saying something about the original at the same time and making it funny is more interesting than "This is how I would have done it" because there is no "How I would have done it" You didn't do it. Do your own thing.. It also reminds me of the recent post about "Good artists copy, great artists steal." You're supposed to take something and make it your own. Not take something, mess it up and give it back.
posted by amethysts at 1:42 AM on December 5, 2010

Ugh. Fuck this guy. I'm embarrassed for him.
posted by the bricabrac man at 2:19 AM on December 5, 2010

Love the utterance of clichés like Good artists copy, great artists steal to make a point that is wholly wrong, and shouldn’t that last poster save the redface for his life?

The woods, pretty
Not near city
Pause a bitty
Must sleep, pity
posted by maxwelton at 2:20 AM on December 5, 2010 [4 favorites]

Maybe I can tighten that up:

Woods cute
Horse mute
Snow beaut
Sleep, shoot
posted by maxwelton at 2:25 AM on December 5, 2010 [6 favorites]

a fork in the road
snow slips down from heavy branch
many ri till sleep
posted by zompist at 5:29 AM on December 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

I am having a massive rage overreaction to this. I suddenly hate this man more than I hate Communists.
posted by prefpara at 6:41 AM on December 5, 2010 [3 favorites]

It only matters because the stakes are so small. Since the City piece was written in 1999, I think he's branched to interviews and not terible film criticism. But ripping apart the Twin Cities' poetry world can't have taken too long.
posted by Ideefixe at 7:29 AM on December 5, 2010

I have rewriten
the poem
By William
Carlos Williams

and which
you were probably
looking
forwards to

Forgive me
it was delapidated
so long
and so old
posted by Artw at 7:45 AM on December 5, 2010 [4 favorites]

It's interesting that people get so worked up about this in a way they don't about, say, a cover version of a song. I find I don't care for much contemporary poetry, so I don't care for this either, but I think the idea of "cover versions" of poetry is totally worthwhile.
posted by Failure31 at 8:41 AM on December 5, 2010

The rare good point, and the answer to it is that pop music, in the long run, does not matter. Poetry does.

Dan Schneider, I know Byron. I've read Byron. I've studied Byron.
Byron's poems are old friends of mine.
You, Sir, are no Lord Byron.
posted by misha at 8:41 AM on December 5, 2010

I wouldn't say I'm bothered to the point of worked up but to return to the execrable Blake 'tightening up':
Joy and woe: the soul divine
Runs a joy with silken twine
makes nonsense of the grammar (the soul runs a joy?) by cutting Blake's original:
Joy and woe are woven fine,
A clothing for the soul divine.
Under every grief and pine
Runs a joy with silken twine.
to the point that you can't help but think Schneider's either not reading properly or an utter moron.
And the cloth-eared fucknut called Milton a bad poet! /wipes spittle flecks
posted by Abiezer at 8:50 AM on December 5, 2010

He said Frank O'Hara was "a very lazy poet." My hands are shaking. He insults him repeatedly. I had to stop reading. This post should be titled "some dude named Dan shits on greatness."
There is a way to analyze poetry, and there is a way to discuss how poems are constructed, and there is a way to describe the choices made by the poet and the impact those choices have on the poem, and this is not that. This is just atrocious. This guy's tone is among the most off-putting I have ever encountered. "By now I hope you will be able to recognize bad line breaks without the need for me to hand hold & explain the obvious."
Not only is this guy doing something he should not be doing, but he is also revealing that he totally lacks insight and good taste. Dylan Thomas "is doubtlessly 1 of the most overrated poets of all time."
I am ashamed for him. Simultaneously I am totally appalled.
posted by prefpara at 8:51 AM on December 5, 2010

This is probably the most hilarious run of stupidity in the thread. The first guy thinks reusing a cliched from the 1988 Presidential election is somehow cool and hip. The second guy shows a preferbce for cliché. Ahum, to have the souls actively manipulating its joy is far more interesting than having the soul being bound by joy and woe. Wanna bet Abiezer took MFA classes? I mean, literally, an example of great and trite writing, and he prefers the trite, even calling the great non-grammatical. Unreal, but it actually was online, dear readers! Then the masturbatory tool whose hands are shaking. Well, remove them from your pants, please. No need to wank in public. You should be appalled!

prefpara:
"I am having a massive rage overreaction to this."
Which I think would be fine by Schneider. It appears he styles himself a provocateur, someone who will stand up in a crowd and say the emperor has no clothes. Which in a theoretical sense is perfectly fine, but in the real world means that one often comes across as the sort of person for whom the only role of a punchbowl is to be the place one deposits one's turds. Schneider appears not to mind this, which might be why it appears at this point he does not get very many party invitations.
Failure31:
I don't think what Schneider's doing is comparable to a cover version, though. The closest description would be "parody by editing," although I clearly Schneider would argue that he's improving via his editing rather than parodying.
posted by jscalzi at 8:55 AM on December 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

I think the idea of "cover versions" of poetry is totally worthwhile.
Here's an example of a brilliant, intelligent riff:
Original
Riff
Another example. I've always been fond of a fairly juvenile poem by Dylan Thomas in which he pokes fun at the popular poetry of his day. Here's an excerpt:
Do not forget that 'limpet' rhymes
With 'strumpet' in these troubled times,
And commas are the worst of crimes;
Few understand the works of Cummings,
And few James Joyce's mental slummings,
And few young Auden's coded chatter;
But then it is the few that matter.
...it's possible to have a conversation about poetry without being an intolerable asshole.
posted by prefpara at 8:57 AM on December 5, 2010 [2 favorites]

It appears he styles himself a provocateur, someone who will stand up in a crowd and say the emperor has no clothes
Not just one emperor, though, but all the emperors of history (is there any 1 who isn't "1 of the most overrated"?); and while standing up to bravely inform you of this, Schneider repeatedly declares himself the greatest tailor of all time, reminding you that he has produced hundreds of fine suits of clothes, far better than the emperors', which he'd be happy to sell you if you weren't such an idiot.
posted by RogerB at 9:04 AM on December 5, 2010 [1 favorite]

For those of you who have read Pushkin's Malenkie Tragedii, this guy is like Salieri if Salieri had no talent and, instead of killing Mozart, waited for him to die and then started rewriting his music ("this 1 needs more cowbell").
posted by prefpara at 9:10 AM on December 5, 2010 [8 favorites]

Look, this might be extremely interesting as a personal exercise in understanding poetic process; it might be somewhat useful to share that exercise.
The part where he brags about how much he "improved" these poems makes him seem like a dick. (And/or like Nahum Tate or Colley Cibber, both famed for "improving" Shakespeare by making it boring and like saccharine ass--in Tate's King Lear, Cordelia lives at the end!)
The part where he publicly posts unauthorized edited versions of living poets' copyrighted works makes him seem like an idiot. An idiot and a tortfeasor.
Postcard from my mind: I always sing the word "Tortfeasor" to the tune of "Goldfinger" so now you know. And I do an awesome Shirley Bassey.
posted by Sidhedevil at 11:27 AM on December 5, 2010

I worked in the same office as Schneider as few years back. The CP article came out during this time and many of us had the same reaction: "The article makes him seem less like the weirdo-about-to-snap that we thought he was."
His personality was very much what many people here have described. He certainly has intelligence and wit but it is hard to access behind the ego and need to appear provocative. A close friend of mine worked closely with him and would likely have a more charitable impression. 6-12 months after he left the company, I was forwarded a scathing email he wrote to most of the management, copying union officials and local media. My name was on the long list of people he had problems with for supposedly passing along privileged information to others on the list. Most of the missive was from the same attitude these reinterpretations came from, namely his assumption that he knows better and you should listen to him because he is willing to say that he knows better.
posted by soelo at 4:10 PM on December 5, 2010

The second poster, the same ass from the last run, totally mixes up rewrites with a tangent take on something, and ahow about the guy who checked his Word of the day email and found tortfeasor? Then, you just knew there had to be the anonymous, I once knew him bullshitter. Of course, the so-called letter is total fiction, as I never sent an email with a long list of people I had problems with. I did send an email with specific proofs of dates and times that my own company computer had been hacked without my knowledge or consent, but the rest is all fiction. But, nice to have lies told from behind the veneer of anonymity, right?

On first skim: What on earth is this guy's aversion to writing out numbers and the word 'and'? His ampersand key must be worn out.
posted by Gordafarin at 3:01 AM on December 6, 2010

And, on reading through a few articles: Christ, what an arrogant asshole.
posted by Gordafarin at 5:38 AM on December 6, 2010

Ironically, the page ends with an ad for a film version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. That can mean no good.

So, what exactly was the point of this thread? So that anonymous douches can basically compare each others’ ignorance- for what purpose? It seems Metafilter is a 1990s era designed website where people just randomly post whatever, and it’s funny, considering how sometimes I get trolls talking about Cosmoetica’s highly redaable design.

Of course, not all people you encounter are nasty. Some are just deluded idiots. Peter Damian Bellis is one of them. He spent two decades penning a mediocre novel called The Conjure Man, which I shall shortly review, and, like many a wannabe writer out there, decided to advertise to me and/or get my imprimatur on the book.

His first contact to me was the submission of two brief pieces on the art of writing. Neither were very good nor cogent, and I wrote back:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 3:43 AM
Subject: Re: two very short pieces
To: conjureman27@comcast.net

If you merge these together and flesh it out some more this would be a fine essay I'd post. As is they are too brief, mere bullet points. I Googled and see you have a website and doc film.
I'll peruse more in the next week.
Thanks for sending. Have you any longer articles?

DAN

In cas eit has gone unnoticed, in this or earlier, similar essays, I am always frank, thankful, and courteous when responding to people and queries, unless they start off with an attitude, which usually causes me to hit the delete or spam button. After all, I get 1600+ emails a week and simply have no time, as one person, to get into drawn out arguments. But, every so often I do, when someone poses as reasonable, but hides an agenda.

My perfunctory thanks was greeted with a de facto advertisement- note the length of this response, and the hints of desperation. Bad-mediocre poems, and reprinted material from elswhere online, plus an absurd defense of Magical Realism. Granted, after all that time trying to push his book, Bellis is entitled to some getting of things off his chest, and with that sympathy, I let him vent. Still, this long? To a stranger?:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <conjureman27@comcast.net>
Date: Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 10:36 AM
Subject: Re: two very short pieces
To: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>

I’d be happy to merge these two shorter pieces and send it to you; I will give it some thought in a week or so; I am finishing my second novel, it’s called gods among gazelles, I have about 30 or so pages to go (total about 380 pages). I sent you those two short pieces to strike up a conversation with you after reading your review of Infinite Jest. I could only manage a few pages of the book and felt about it the same way I feel about Franzen and all the rest of the derivative post-modern realists (if writers are on the fringe anyway because they seek to uncover beauty or truth, then I am on the fringe of the fringe, at least in America, because I am a magical realist – even that is not accurate, I consider myself a mythical realist). Anyway, when I read your piece I realized I had come across a kindred spirit both in terms of your view of literature and the artistic process.

If you have a chance to peruse my website further next week, please click the big blue Alligator link and you can download a free pdf of my first novel, The Conjure Man. The novel came out in 2010, and I like to tell people that it did not receive one of the 5 nominations for the National Book Award. Then I like to tell people that one of the judges for that year, Andrei Codrescu, wrote me after the competition had concluded. This is what he said (which he has given me permission to share):

“The Conjure Man moved me because of the beauty of language, and the world of characters you created. It’s been a year since I read your book, but it stayed in my mind long after many other works of fiction I was reading at the time dissolved instantly. I also remember thinking that your magical-realist perspective was going deliberately against the social-psychological trend of the new American fiction that, frankly, bores the shit out of me. Your book didn't bore me, that's for sure. I signed an agreement not to talk about the deliberations of the jury for the national prize your book was submitted to, but I wasn't the only one who found "Conjure Man" fascinating and worthy of a nomination. Cheers, Andrei"

In a second letter he wrote that he thought it may indeed become part of the literary canon, for what that statement is worth.

I do have an account of the process of getting the book published that you may find of interest; I also have some longer pieces that I posted on my blog when I had a blog, and I will also include some of those. Finally, I see that you also post poetry, and since all novelists really wanted to be poets, I thought to send you a few (I do not write much poetry). You are welcome to any and all of it.

First, if will indulge me, here is the back story regarding the publication of the Conjure Man. I finished the novel in 1993 and immediately sent seven query letters to seven big-time publishing houses, including Scribners, FSG, Little Brown, William Morrow, and Doubleday. Within a month, I received a letter from each house, from a Senior editor at each house, requesting sample chapters. From sample chapters they all requested the book. And then I got a few calls suggesting I get an agent. So I did. In fact, I had my pick of agents. I chose Kip Kotzen of the Ned leavitt Agency. They were getting great feedback from the editors (John Glusman at FSG, Deb Futter at Doubleday, a bunch others I forget). So great was the reaction, in fact, that Kip decided to call an auction. One editor, and I will not mention his name, wrote that the book might be the best thing written since Huck Finn. Another wrote that the novel was absolutely, obviously brilliant. I thought I was on my way. But the auction was a mistake. The guy at Scribners told Kip later that he would've plunked down $15,000 for the book, but he wasn't interested in an auction. I guess you couldn't blame them. New author; first book, a narrator who speaks in Gulluh, thematic structure. One by one all of the houses dropped, all but Doubleday. Their Executive Editor, Deborah Futter, wrote me a letter extolling the book, the descriptive power, the characters, and the language, especially the power of the dialect. She felt The Conjure Man would best fit with their Anchor Books division, so I went to New York to meet with the Senior Editor of Anchor Books, Charlie Conrad. But when I walked into Charlie's office, his jaw literally dropped. You see Anchor Books published ficiton of ethnic interest, I didn't know that, I was 32, and Charlie had expected that I was going to be black. because of Kilby and the dialect. The good news was that I had done my job as a writer extremely well; I had created a convincing, cohesive world off the coast of South Carolina. The bad news was that I was not black, and therefore not nearly so marketable (irony of ironies), as Charlie Conrad had thought. Charlie told me he had thought I was going to be the next Ellison, which was an impossibility my being white. For thirty minutes we actually talked about why I wasn't black (Charlie had said they had already sketched out a marketing campaign). Then he said that he saw the book at a place like FSG, but we had already ruined that with the failed auction.

My agent at that time thought it was simply because it was my first book-if it had been my second book they would have jumped at it, so he suggested I write another book to create at least the perception of an audience. I started writing short stories and send them out. I figured short stories were, well, short, and I could write enough of them quickly enough to create the "perception of an audience," which I seemed to be lacking. Just how this would come about I wasn't sure. It was a half-baked plan. But I wrote some pretty good stories and started sending them to various journals, but after a few short months, I realized that creating an audience by publishing short stories in journals was not a short-term kind of endeavor. Some journals accepted the stories, but their publishing back log was so great that it might be years before a story would see print. Other journals were unresponsive. And even when I finally saw a couple of stories in print, it was hard to gauge how many readers had read them. It was by chance that I sent three of my best stories to The Ontario Review, and they landed on the desk of Joyce Carol Oates, who was also the associate editor of the journal. She liked the stories. And we began a brief exchange of notes. But the review was backlogged for three years so they couldn't publish them. So I got pissed and decided to do it all myself. I founded River boat Books and published the short stories (One Last dance with Lawrence Welk & Other Stories); Joyce carol Oates gave me the blurb; the collection was named a 1997 Minnesota Book Award Finalist, and I even got to read on Fresh Air (a studio in the Twin Cities). Then I published Eternity, My Beloved, trans. from the French (Jean Sulivan). Then I published a collection of poetry by a poet I met in central PA (Somewhere Between Earth and Heaven - it's decent poetry, and he did impress Robert Creely). I was putting together one more book, an anthology of women writers in 2004 but couldn't get funding, so I put it aside. And I had sent out Conjure Man two more times. Once to a press in Texas, the Publisher had heard me read on Fresh Air and had called me about the novel, so I sent it to her. I got a letter and the ms back in 4 weeks from some assistant editor at the house and he didn't like it at all. But one year later, the Publisher called me again to ask what had happened to the novel; it had never arrived on her desk and she was certain it would be placed somewhere. I told her about the assistant editor and she got a bit upset. She said that guy was a volunteer reader and they had to get a restraining order to keep him out of their building. She apologized for what had happened, and then she said she was really sorry because they were no longer publishing fiction, only non-fiction. The acquisitions editor at the other press, it was in Montgomery AL, loved the book and wanted it and put it on the desk of their publisher, but two weeks later the manuscript was in limbo because the publisher was in a legal battle with his board over who owned what and then they got an injunction against him so he wasn't allowed to publish anything for five years

This shit was crazy. But everything has its time, and in 2009 I knew 2010 was supposed to be the year for The Conjure Man (this part is sort of mystical, supernatural, so I will save it for another time), and so I said fuck it (a less than mystical idiom), I'll just do it myself again, and here it is.

naked across the sky --
a wingless song of root and
stone and branch fills
the cold dark air and crack jacking
against the blackcapped
hood of night
falls in jagged pieces to the ground.

of the swallowdeadsong
headlong
to the tombtorn earth
and feel the pluck of stem and petal
root deep my wormworn heart.

I have been far too long surrounded by
the vacuum of the world's indifference,
except in moments when I can peel back
the layers of the sky and see behind,
but not the sky of unhealed lacerations
which swell like boils on my brain, or maybe,
yes, it is the same, the rusty purple
streaks give way to eyeless night, my memories
seed-scattered on the ground below like fresh
cut hay, the heavy, heaving wagons rolling
slowly towards the black black woods, the black black
sky, the smell of dead and dying grass a
too hot smell and wet and punctured by the
weaving blur of years. Yes, it is the same.

Today I am spread thin across God's anvil,
my soul withering in the bellows of his breath,
my body melting, merging, the dust of
my purpose mixing with the desert of
my hope until I am one of the many
obsidian-like shards half-buried, hiltless,
in the blood-dry carcass of this once fertile,
crescent earth, mirror to the shimmering,
sweltering winds of my beliefs, yet also the dark-
heaving ripple of the camels as they settle
into the sand, indifferent, unimpatient,
unwashed, impervious; and the stench of their
dung-heavy breath washes clean this mirror,
leaving now a cloudless, distant, sheltering sky.

When Gabriel Garcia Marquez published One Hundred Years of Solitude in 1967, the world began to take notice of a special kind of literature that has since been given the name of "magical realism." Today, the list of writers embracing the magical perspective and the qualities evoked by Marquez includes Carlos Fuentes (Mexico), Ben Okri (Nigeria), Isabelle Allende (Chile), Derek Walcott (Trinidad), Alvaro Mutis (Spain), and Bernardo Atxaga (Portugal), and so, for many, "magical realism" is defined by an international contingent. American writers are notably absent from the list. Of course there are many American writers that can indeed be classed as magical realists. Toni Morrison with Beloved and Song of Solomon certainly creates a world where the boundary between the real and the surreal or magical is blurred. Other American magical realists (or at least American writers who have written magical realist pieces) include Alice Walker, Lawrence Thornton, Gloria Naylor (Mama's Day), Alice Hoffman (Turtle Moon,), Robert Olen Butler (A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain), Barbara Kingsolver, and also Canadian-born writer Margaret Atwood (check out the The Robber Bride), to name a few. Now what does all this have to do with the title of this essay? It is my assertion that the best fiction of the last thirty years reflects a magical realist approach, and to understand why I feel this way, I need to define what magical realism is and how the magical realist approach allows a writer to uncover the Truth, whatever that Truth may be, with greater immediacy.

To say magical realism is about supernatural experiences or that it must focus on ghosts or strange, unexplainable events is an oversimplification that ignores the depth of much of the literature being produced using this method. All great writing is in one way or another an attempt to reveal the soul of human experience, that which makes living an experience that is at once profound, joyous, agonizing, exulting, fulfilling, and all in spite of the mundane monotony of everyday existence. For most of us, the day-to-day affair of living is not magical, but the spark that keeps us moving forward reflects a faith or hope or commitment or connection that is magical. All great writing must grapple with this paradox. For the realist, the answer is psychological. For the determinist (which is not to say religious), the answer is ontological. And for the magical realist the answer is somewhere in between.

Magical realism is fiction which makes the magical or extraordinary seem normal by viewing the same through a prism of the everyday, the familiar. When Jose Arcadio is shot in his room (One Hundred Years of Solitude, an excerpt), "a trickle of blood came out under the door, crossed the living room, went out into the street, continued on in a straight line across the uneven terraces, went down steps and climbed over curbs, passed along the Street of the Turks, turned a corner to the right and another to the left, made a right angle at the Buendia house, went in under the closed door, crossed through the parlor, hugging the walls so as not to stain the rugs, went on to the other living room, made a wide curve to avoid the dining-room table, went along the porch with the begonias, and passed without being seen under Amaranta's chair as she gave an arithmetic lesson to Aureliano Jose, and went though the pantry and came out in the kitchen, where Ursula was getting ready to crack thirty-six eggs to make bread." Ursula follows the trail back to her Jose and we get the feeling that she knew whose blood it was all along. But we accept both the exaggerated trail of the blood and Ursula's tacit awareness because we believe in her strong feeling for Jose, the strong personal, emotional, human connection between the two. In fact, it is because of the magical approach that we understand this connection, so the technique both creates and supports the meaning that is revealed.

Another way of looking at magical realism is to say that it is fiction that explores our very human search (even need) for the miraculous, the ecstatic. Moreover, the world of the magical realist is one where such a search is possible in practical terms (as opposed to, say, the world of contemporary urban/suburban America where such a search takes on pseudo-psychological overtones). The world of the magical realist seems at once more primitive and more passionate, and in truth, most magical realist fiction comes from cultures thought of as primitive or grounded in superstition when compared with the progressive, technological marvel that is the American urban landscape. It should be noted here that the American magical realists focus for the most part on ethnic or rural cultures or the cultures of other countries. Robert Olen Butler writes about Vietnam. Toni Morrison and Alice Walker write about African-Americans. Lawrence Thornton goes to South America. Mainstream modern urban/suburban America, which is what too much of our nation's literature reflects, is left curiously out of the mix.

The irony, of course, is that American literature was grounded in the very beginning in a cultural ethos that embraced the supernatural, the mythic, the legendary. We did not separate that aspect of our lives from the everyday routine. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Rip Van Winkle, the Brer Rabbit stories, Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill (and other tall tales) -- all of this was part of our oral storytelling tradition. Our great writers pulled from this tradition. Hawthorne was simply the first to weave the magic of this folk culture into a complex social, political, and moral tale, The Scarlet Letter. (Later he penned The Marble Faun, which is a bit darker, but comes from the same wellspring.)

Mark Twain was next; his Huckleberry Finn reflects the superstitious, the magical in numerous stories/tales via Jim, but also in the very texture and movement of the piece from the miraculous escape from drowning by river boat to a very real belief in the power of ghosts to the overall miracle of the journey downstream. If "magical realism" is a fiction that posits the mythic, the supernatural in a familiar, everyday text, then Huckleberry Finn must be classed as a precursor to it because of its texture.

Other early "magical realists" include, from the American side, Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville (the symbolic, mythic fury of the white whale), and from the British side, Mary Shelley (Frankenstein) and Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray). You could, of course, move from these into a subcategory of magical realism, sci-fi (H. G. Wells, Huxley, etc.); but aside from those writers we could truly call "magical realists," like Bernard Malamud (The Natural), the thread of magical realism runs through a wide range of literature in the twentieth century as well. Mark Twain was only the beginning.

It is only in the last forty years that we have begun to distinguish mainstream literature from "magical realism." All of our great writers made use of the superstitious, cultural folk ethos that made our literature unique. Even in Hemingway, the quintessential realist, there is a lengthy passage in For Whom The Bell Tolls (in chapter ten)when Pilar tells the story of the executions in her town that captures the texture, the feel, even the rhythm of life that is later captured by García Márquez in sections of One Hundred Years of Solitude. While not magical in an overt sense, this passage of Hemingway does reflect the cultural folk ethos of Pilar's people and their trials and tribulations. Faulkner does the same in a short story entitled "A Rose for Emily."

The list goes on and on, and in some cases, there are whole books that seem as if they had been penned in this modern era of magical realism. One such book is Thorton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey. Set in Peru, it reads with the detached, bemused fatalism and appreciation for the magic of life that we see in Chronicle of a Death Foretold. (I am sure García Márquez read Wilder. There are passages by García Márquez that seem lifted, at least stylistically, right out of Wilder's Peruvian fable.)

I would have to say that the difference between the magical realism of today and that found in the literature of decades past is simply a matter of classification. We now separate our world with greater scientific precision -- magical, folksy, supernatural stuff on one side, the real world on the other side. We as a culture did not do this in America forty years ago, and I suspect that the peoples of the South American and African countries where magical realism is the strongest today do not divide their world, and hence their fiction, into the superstitious and the real; I believe they embrace it all, which is why we believe magical realism is a purely "south of the border" phenomenon.

For me, magical realists do a better job of capturing the essence of what it means to be human than do psychological realists more concerned with what it means to be contemporary. Too many of our "literary" American writers seem to have forgotten that the role of the writer is to reinterpret the myths of our culture and breath into them new life, and hence new meaning. The writer is the shaman, the bard, the mystic who uncovers for us the truth about our relationship to God and the world and each other. If this role is neglected or forgotten, then we are robbed of an understanding of our very soul, and that is what I think has happened in America. To quote Wordsworth, who saw the same thing happening in the England of 1807, "I'd rather be/A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;/So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,/Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;/Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;/Or hear old Triton blow his wreathed horn."

One week ago, after the rush and thrill of sending The Conjure Man out into the world, I finally had a sense that I could now finish some of the other books I’ve started. It was a sense of coming full circle, not to the end of something, but rather the beginning again. Each new piece is almost starting over from scratch, finding the rhythm of the story, the texture, the sense of place – it is almost like I have to learn how to write all over again. Or this is how it feels until I open myself up to the words, get inside them, and start writing.

The very next thing I did was go hunting, through the attic, old drawers, boxes of papers, digging out everything I had ever started, and because I save everything, it was a lot of digging. I have probably eight or nine novels in various stages of completion, as well as half a dozen outlines of other books, one screenplay, three one acts, two completed novellas and one half completed , and maybe 3 dozen poems (mostly sonnets), and a few essays scattered about. (I also found all of the old drafts of The Conjure Man, and the old outlines, which means at some point I will write about the process of writing that novel, but not today.)

I have been working through the material, identifying which must be completed next, and which one after that, and so on, and I feel it is important work because for me, each story is a gift from God (or from Jung’s Over Soul, our collective unconscious, if you prefer). As writers we need to be aware that every story is a gift, every story has come into our hands and no one else’s, and the only thing we are supposed to do is to sit with each story long enough to bring it to the world, sit with it, listen to it, feel the echoes of the story reverberating against each other, each part of the story speaking to every other part. And if we sit long enough, we will capture most of it, never all of it, but most of it, enough of it – and then we birth it and move on to the next gift.

It seems to me that too many writers forget this. Each and every story is a gift to be nurtured in this way. But I hear writers talk about stories they wrote when they were younger or started to write and then abandoned and now they are older and have moved past those stories. This is especially true once writers get published, for now they move into a treadmill of expectations; they must churn out the next book, and then the next book, even before they have allowed the first ones to properly breathe.

Too many writers do not sit long enough with their books and so miss the opportunity to capture the echoes, anchor the emotional impact, make their book what they see in their mind and feel in their soul, but rarely capture on the page. Then again how easy for me to say sit with your book a little while longer; I sat with The Conjure Man for 23 years, and for a variety of reasons, not just because I was sitting with the book (more about that in a later post). But even when I was not sitting with The Conjure Man, I was sitting with it.

I’ll tell you one thing, I certainly cannot afford to sit with the nine plus remaining books for 23 years each, but then I suspect part of me has been sitting with each of them all along as well. But The Conjure Man needed to come first.

So if you will indulge me, I would like to share with you the beginning of one of those nine plus books. The working title is Rebecca Woods, for that is the name of the character. And it is not the next book I will be working on (it is not even in the next four), for I will need to sit with Rebecca for quite some time to even know where it is going. And please forgive any editorial lapses, for what I am sharing with you is first draft, as it comes out.

A small cream-colored Toyota inched its way across the shimmery, sun-burnt, asphalt glaze of an empty parking lot, across the parking lot and into the shade of an elevated highway and then back into the sunlight, and it only stopped inching its way three feet from a rust-streaked warehouse, a flat tin roof, a row of wooden doors and green paint flaking away, a cement loading dock, and beyond all that the St. John’s river. The driver of the car was one Rebecca Woods, thirtyish, unmarried, a pair of Vandemere sunglasses to mask a host of inbred paranoias. She was also a bank vice-president, though she often needed to look at her own business card to remind herself of this fact.

At first Rebecca could only stare at the warehouse. She sat in the car and it was still running and the air conditioning felt cool against her face. For a moment she forgot why she had come. She looked out at a world comfortably dulled by the purplish tint of her Vandemeres. Then she shifted in her seat. What an odd place, she thought. She could see dozens of empty, brown beer bottles scattered across the pavement, pieces of brown glass up along the loading dock wall. Clumps of yellowing, weedy grass grew where the asphalt had disintegrated. What was the reason for meeting in a place like this, Rebecca thought. She slipped off her sunglasses, letting them dangle by a cord around her neck. Then she clicked open a shoe-polish-black briefcase and rifled through its innards, but in her haste she sent most of the papers and a box of paper clips spilling out across the front seat and onto the floor. Suddenly her face was flush with panic. She had not expected a warehouse. She was sure this was the wrong address. But then she found the memo and there it was, 97 West Forsythe. She had not got it wrong after all. It was still a pretty peculiar place to meet someone, but she had not got it wrong. Laughing at herself, though perhaps it was an uncomfortable kind of laughter, laughing at the panic of a moment before, she Vandemered her eyes once again and turned off the car and stepped out onto the asphalt.

The warehouse was once part of the Maxwell House Coffee Company. But that had been many years ago. Of course Maxwell House was still around. Several blocks away a blue Maxwell House coffee can some seventy feet high pressed down upon the tree line. Perhaps the can went higher than that, for it seemed at times to cast its shadow on the cars traveling the elevated highway. To the people of the neighborhood, mostly poor blacks whose grandparents had come to Jacksonville during the Depression, the coffee can was a symbol of permanence, oblivious to the passing of time, oblivious to the world rotting away beneath it. And of course the warehouse was a part of the rot. There was no longer a company sign hanging from the edge of the roof. There was no company logo on the doors. There were no sacks of coffee beans stacked by the hundreds and workers milling about the loading dock in overalls and worn brogans covered in a fine coffee dust. A few broken windows and a row of padlocked doors were the only indication that anyone had ever set foot there. Even the smell of coffee had been purged. There was now only the fishy, oily, motor smell of the river.

Rebecca Woods walked up the steps to the loading dock and stopped. Again she looked at the memo, which seemed now almost a part of her hand. She had left her briefcase in the car, and also her purse. Green door after green door she tried, the dull thud of the padlocks banging against the soggy, soft wood and a few more paint flecks breaking loose, but none of the doors would open. She retreated down the loading dock steps and made her way around to the street-side of the warehouse. She headed for the back down a narrow path, beating aside the dense, unrelenting, vegetation which is a hallmark of abandoned property. Gigantic sun flowers and patches of elephant ears and vines and briars and all of it a tangled mat. She trembled with a tiny, bird-like rage, as much because of the padlocked green doors as because of the idiocy of her being at an abandoned warehouse at all. What a God-awful place to meet on a Friday afternoon.

Trembling still, she came to the back staircase, a fire-escape really, the railings covered with a fine, powdery rust. She pulled herself up the stairs, the rust mixing with the sweat of her hands and adhering to the skin, but she did not notice this. At the top of the stairs there was a small iron-grate platform, a single row of factory-style windows, and a narrow, lusterless door with glass panels running its length, like the ribbed armor of some prehistoric creature. One of the windows was open slightly, or perhaps it was broken the way the push lever was dangling there. Rebecca could hear the half-garbled sound of an old radio leaking out through the opening. Jazz, she thought, someone is listening to jazz, which may or may not have been true. Rebecca was not big on music in general. Then the volume was turned up. Rebecca stopped on the platform, listening, transfixed, a motionless, sun-bleached figure standing on the back stairs of an abandoned warehouse. For the second time she seemed to forget why she was there. Her tiny, trembling, bird-like rage ceased. Her breathing became shallow, invisible. Then the radio was snapped off. Rebecca blinked, an absent, untroubled look on her face. She opened the door and went inside.

“Hello?” Rebecca tried to remember the name of her appointment, but her mind was filled only with the memory of the jazz. She thought to glance at the memo, for surely she had written down the name, but there was no memo either, as if it, too, had been suddenly, irretrievably, obliterated by the sound of those unknown beatniks from the radio.

“Look,” she said, “it seems there’s been a mistake here. I thought I was calling on a customer, or at least a potential customer. I’ll be going now. I’m sorry I bothered you.”

But Rebecca did not even look at the door. She was waiting, it seemed, for some kind of answer, a mumbled apology, a curse, the mocking laughter of a practical jokester. Rebecca needed some confirmation that she had not imagined the phone call that morning and the raspy voice on the other end urging her to drive out to 97 West Forsythe. It was the chance of a lifetime. She wouldn’t want to miss it. And so Rebecca waited. But there was no answer. She looked around the room, a narrow hall of an office that had doubled as the night watchman’s private casino some twenty years earlier, and she wondered who had been listening to the jazz. Where had they gone? But she could see no one. The afternoon sunlight barely penetrated the factory-style windows. What glow came through was a faint, dusty brownish-gold color. All Rebecca could see was a thick, metal desk near the open window and the radio set squarely in the middle and a chair pulled out.

Again, I sympathized, but, now, even in rereading his excerpt from his latest book, it seems that Bellis’s flaws of over-modifying, with lapses into cliché- see the last line above, have acrried over from The Conjure Man. Natheless, I replied:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 11:02 AM
Subject: Re: two very short pieces
To: conjureman27@comcast.net

I'll read these in a day or two. I did read the two excerpts that were online, from the novels. I thought the first more engaging. The second seemed modifier heavy, but, given the excerption, that may be consonant with the character.
I get tons of crap sent to me, from raging insane emails because something I wrote dissed a boo or actor or writer or philosophy their bosom held dear. It's simply not that hard to click away from my site and on to the next, yet the deluded ardor and hate my words inspire can only mean that most of these wights actually know that my crits are spot on
Pro or con, blurbs are just that. I met Codrescu a few times- first in NYC and then in Mpls in the mid-90s when he ran Exquisite Corpse. Don't think much of his prose nor poetry. I saw the JCO blurb. FRankly, she's a hack. Perhaps if she spent more than 5 mins on any page she wrote she'd produce something of quality, but I've never seen anythign that'll stand the test of time, save for some sports reporting she did in the 1970s on boxing.
Nonetheless, my wife and I have been looking to perhaps publish e-books of our works. Have you had any success, fiscally or in getting your name out there? I see you have a doc on your love of music. I've interviewed some doc makers and have thought maybe getting one interested in my site or writings or my life might help me circumvent the MFA Mafia that has killed art in our time.
Anyway, gimme thru the weekend, and I'll comment more next week.
Thanks for the contact. I always appreciate the one sane and intelligent contact I get from the 999 other worthless ones.

DAN

As will become apparent, my last sentence was premature. I was hit with more advertising. Again, I get Belklis’s frustration, I really do. But, cannot one tone it down, just a bit? Above he invited me to review The Conjure Man, which I have, and will post shortly after this essay goes online. He then replied:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <conjureman27@comcast.net>
Date: Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 11:30 AM
Subject: Re: two very short pieces
To: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>

I am glad to know you found Kilby's voice engaging - Thaddeus's voice is indeed on the modifier-heavy side, perhaps a vestige of my immersion into Faulkner in my youth, but also certainly a reflection of the fact that Thaddeus is an old-timey failed southern prophet, so the language is my attempt to create both the cadence of the place adn time as well as a sense of something more biblical - I am, however, more interested in the interplay of the various voices and cadences as people move through the novel and the impressions this interplay leaves - and certainly in one of Thaddeu's later sections the language turns on itself, becoming more ironic at times, and then delving into something more surreal. The real test for anyone coming to the book is the degree to which the blend of voices keeps pushing them deeper and deeper into the novel. I hope each reader will find some scenes that leave a lasting, if not to say haunting impression. Above all, I hope the end of the novel has this impact.

As I point out in my review, the book’s ending is not a standout, and, in retrospect, The Conjure Man reminds me of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which many would take as a compliment. I don’t, for despite its Pulitzer Prize and spur to Morrison’s Nobel Prize, it is a mediocre book which eschews its psychological depth, and best character- a survivor of the Andersonville prison camp, for a weepy and trite ghost story. I once argued with a friend, who believed the titular character was a real ghost, not a psychological manifestation , that I could prove my POV, but to do so would mean I’d have to subject myself to rereading the book, which I was not prepeared to do, so left the argument unresolved. The Conjure Man is much like that in that it never follows up on its best arcs and plots, and just fizzles, in the end.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <conjureman27@comcast.net>
Date: Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 12:12 PM
Subject: Re: two very short pieces
To: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>

As for how to circumvent the MFA Mafia that is indeed killing art in our time, nothing I have done to date has made any dent. My first collection picked up a MN Book Award Finalist designation in 1997 and I toured coffee shops, mostly in St. Paul. Bookstores were a waste of time. That book sold 2,000 copies, everything that had been printed. It is now out of print. The Conjure Man has sold 1,000 copies (coming to the end of the first print run on that). What connections I have made, however, have not been altogether useful in persuading people to part with their dollars for literature. We are so overwhelmed with mediocrity that people will only stumble upon something really good, even great, by accident, and even then, they will rarely recognize it. Very little coming out of NY is worth the paper its printed on; the proliferation of MFA programs has created a world where we have medicore writers writing mediocre books, edited by mediocre editors, and reviewed by mediocre reviewers, all connected to the big time money making machine that turns out what I call potato chip fiction. You eat potato chips because you like the salty taste, and as long as it seems like a potato chip you eat the whole bag, and then you go on to the next bag. Of course we saw this coming 20 years ago. I remember reading an article by Sam Delaney and he noted that in 1987 there were 30 MFA programs in the country and 87 publishers of literay fiction in NYC alone. Now there are over 500 MFA programs and only 3 literary publishers in NYC, and they, like FS & G, now promote Franzen and others of a 6th grade reading level and imagination as literary. By and large the writers and judges of the contests for literary prizes also come from this rather large pool of mediocre writers. I am reminded of the secretary pools of the 1950s.

I think trying to publish and sell e-books is somewhat like shouting into the wind. People have too many choices and not enough time to digest them so the easiset thing to do is ignore everything except what they discover through the media outlests they trust, but since most of the reading public is unaware that these media outlests are themselves corrupted by mediocrity, the best of what is being written today is languishing undiscovered and undiscoverable.

Hard to say what will stand the test of time. I will say that The Conjure Man reads as well today as it did when I finished it in 1992. But I was striving to create something that would be read in 100 years.

The challenge, I think, is to reinvent how people approach literature. My own view is that great literature always was about experience, as opposed to understanding, but then somehow the academics got in between these books and the reading public and superimposed upon literature teh idea that it was about understanding. Our schools have been teachign this kind of crap for fifty years. Up until 5th grade reading is story time and it is solely about the experience. Then in middle school teachers give kids books and say read the first three chapters and we will discuss the themes, or the symbols, etc. This is when most kids give up on books. I like to ask teachers if they try to interpret their own experiences as they experience them, or if instead they look back on an experience after it is over and try to figure out what happened and why and even twenty years later they have no idea. I tell them that the only people who try to interpret experience as it is happening are austitic, and as a result they are thoroughly confused by the world. This is what we have done to our reading public. We have turned them into autistic readers who need help now just to experience a book. (They would prefer to go to movies where the experience is unmediated). But what is worse is that many of our writers can be lumped into this same group - in other words, our writers have become autistic in their ability to express profound complex beautiful experiences. No wonder most of these writers must turn out formulaic garbage (one editor at Doubleday I know, when speaking of complex literature, held up Pat Conroy's Prince of Tides as an example). So how can you possibly even pitch to these people; they do not understand you, they speak another watered-down language altogether. how can you possibly pitch to these people when they continue to sell potato chips day in and day out.

I see no way out of this except to hand sell your books to everyone who will listen. Or find some major internet company who will send the pdf of your book to everyone in their address book free of charge (if you sent out a million copies, may 10,000 people would read it and 1,000 would recognize the quality).

The only other way I can see to ensure that your books are read in 100 years is to create special editions, leatherbound books with the highest quality materials, say no more than 500 copies (which at $150 per book is a bit much to produce); but at least that way they would indeed survie for one hundred years or more, at least physically, and because they would have been thus turned into sacred objects, which is how books were once treated, there is at least the possiblity they would be rediscovered in the year 2121.

I think pretty much any other means of getting books of great merit out into the hands of the general reading public is an accident at best. Perhaps just by chance an editor at a big commercial house will publish a great book (and I do not mean the ones they promote, for those are mostly off the mark). Or perhaps by chance your book wins some prize. (In another letter, whic is off the record, Andrei indicated that the Conjure Man made the top ten list on everyone on the committee, but not the final five. I suspect that he and Sam Delaney voted for the book, and the three women on the committe, all mediocre writers, did not. If by chance, by the luck of the draw, the make-up of the committee had been different, then perhaps The Conjure Man would have earned a nomination; at which point it would have been granted commcercial literary status - but this would have been by accident. Given that the make-up of these committees, as noted earlier, probbaly contains a majority of mediocrity, such accidents are unlikely.)

So there is no choice but to keep at it, focus on each book, try to outwrite everyone else (it always has seemed to me some sort of surreal competition) and push my books into the hands of as many readers as I can find.

P.S. The documentary is stilla t this point in tehplanning stages. My cousin, Michael Clancy is a director; we just haven't ahd the time to take the next step. Also, while many musicians have read the book and expressed interest in composing original music to reflect their experience with teh book, none have actually done so. They are,after all musicians and as a group seem a bit distracted when it comes to cooalbroative projects.

It’s worth noting that Bellis writes: ‘The only other way I can see to ensure that your books are read in 100 years is to create special editions, leatherbound books with the highest quality materials, say no more than 500 copies,’ which clued me in to the fact that he does not really understand what I write of when I speak of art that is great and endures. In fact, the only insurance for trasmittal of work across time, is greatness. Period. Bellis simply mistakes art and its ideations for a physical, material object, revealing where his true desires lie- not to ameliorate others but to aggrandize himself. These emails, obviously, bolster that view.

Let me also state, since in this email, Bellis writes of some off the record comments that some hack writers made on assorted subjects. Let me note that nowhere do I agree to confidentiality, and Bellis’s emails, as well as all others sent to me are subject to posting online at any time, for, as I have researched email privacy (which mirrors that of physical correspondence), what I state here is applicable:

If you want to contact Dan Schneider, Jessica Schneider, or any of the other Cosmoetica contributors about the site, drop a line to cosmoetica - at- gmail- dot- com. All emails with attachments will be deleted unread, and any threats- personal or legal- will immediately be reported to the authorities. All contacts, emails, and submissions- electronic, print, or postal, become the intellectual property of Cosmoetica, which is free to do with them as it sees fit, for all contacts, emails, and submissions to Cosmoetica grant a non-exclusive license to forward or post online any contact, emails or submissions in perpetuity; subject to editing for clarity, satire, readability, logic, or any other reason Cosmoetica deems necessary for posting and/or publication on the website. So do all harassments, pointless rants, and curses, which may become the subject of mockery and/or satire via Cosmoetica's email list, and can be posted online at any time. Harassment will be reported to the authorities if of a threatening nature. By contacting, emailing, or submitting material(s) to Cosmoetica, and any or all persons and/or email addresses associated with the website, the contacter/submitter'respondent waives all rights to claims of damages (personal or financial) against Cosmoetica for any embarrassment or regrets suffered because of the rights the website exercises in posting contacts, emails, and/or submissions. Emails, by their nature, carry no expectation of privacy, may be reprinted in full or part- at the discretion of the website, and Cosmoetica will not allow people to hide their stupidity, nastiness, nor bigotry behind such. In short, if you are not willing to stand behind a statement that may be forever online, don't email it here. Cosmoetica reserves the right to use any email sent as an example of the asininity of most people.

As will become evident, shortly Bellis’s emails become harassing in nature, so even had I agreed to confidentiality, such would have been sundered by his violation of standards of email decorum. Also, since these emails serve an educational value, re: the publishing industry, they are fair game for a critical essay, much like the deluded ravings of editor Peter Brookesmith are.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 4:31 PM
Subject: Re: two very short pieces
To: conjureman27@comcast.net

Re: the doc- make sure it's not a vanity doc- which is the film equiv of a vanity press. Make sure it's something beyond a home movie, whether its focus is music, you, or whatever.
Re: books, quality is the only thing that lasts. When we lived in Mpls area we'd go to Magers & Quinn, or some of the Dinkytown bookshops that had books from the 1880s-1920s, and I forget the names, but these books survived cuz they were produced en masse. They were the Franzens of their day- or the Rowlings. The only reason the physical books survive is cuz they were once popular. Now they're not even worthy as collector's editions. But Twain, Conrad, Dreiser, etc. are. Why? Quality.
I tell Jess that, short term, this sea of bad- not even mediocre- but bad, writing is a bane, but in the long run, people 100, 10k or 500k years from now will laugh at the David Foster Wallaces of the world. And they'll know him only as a factoid, not as a readable writer. Folks like him, James Frey or Eggers, cannot even construct a compelling paragraph. Overrated Faulkner could have a good paragraph. Even JCO or TC Boyle, at least can structure stories well. The tales they tell, and the cardboard characters, and the plunge into cliche kills them, but they are a notch above DFW and ilk. Mary Gaitskill is another bad JCO-TCB level writer.
Things are cyclical, and I think it'll take one great book- really great, to get big time coverage, and the MFA mills will slowly wither. I think the e-books will help end the publishing scams- what are agents, really? There were virtually none until the 1950s. But it'll take a really good self-pub e-book to get noticed, sell alot, or be made into a film, and then the movies and public will make dinosaurs of the big houses.
They abandoned art and literature by the 1980s, and now the technology is on the verge of eliminating them, just like newspapers are dying.
I'm copying Jess.

More later.
DAN

Of course, the next email’s close, with a blurb by Bellis’s father, was a further sign that all Bellis wanted was me to be bowled over by his and his book’s awesomeness, rather than actually corresponding. I mean, c’mon, can we actually write without a phallic display? And from one’s daddy?

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <conjureman27@comcast.net>
Date: Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 5:39 PM
Subject: Re: two very short pieces
To: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>

As far as the documentary - my cousin, Michael Clancy would direct (his only film so far was Eulogy) - we would basically be stealing the use of one of the camera guys he works with on a routine basis to shoot the film - and the general drift of this mockumentary is this; Me, a middle-aged white guy promoting his novel at blues festivals becasue the book resonates with the atmosphere of the blues (among other things) - I recite in kilby's voice (a sort of standardized Gulluh). This is how I promoted the book in 2010 - I went to ten blues festivals and sold 500 books; pretty much half the people who listened to me recite bought a book.

As far as books and quality - this has been the cornertone of my life - my dad was an anti-establishment college English professor who always maintained the that it was the literal primacy of the text by which you judged quality - so he went agaisnt the grain of all or post-modern critical thought - so many of his articles were not published, etc. His dissertation was on Moby Dick, which he gave me to read when I was ten. He gave me all of Conrad to read at age twelve. I came to Twain on my own.

With respect to your next email - I do think the South Americans, Marquez and Mario Vargas Llosa in particular, provide for a full experience, at least this was true for me (such as I found in stories like A Very Great Man with Enormous Wings from Marquez and The Story Teller from Llosa). I suspect you and I are seeking different kinds of experiences as we approach these books. But is the ability to produce genuine expereinces in readers that is the only measure of quality, and as experiences vary from reader to reader, so does the appreciation of what constitutes great literature. It is because of this that, from writer to writer, critical opinions are more about one writer saying I didn't like this in that writer's book because this is how I would have done it.

So I do not agree that this is a period of bad writing; I think this is a period like all periods, where there is alway bad writing, and enough of it that it overwhelms the good and the great in teh short-term. A great book depends upon garnering sufficient readers over however long it takes, which is why it can take years.

is Faulkner overrated? Hard to say, especially since fewer and fewer people read him. His experience speakes to fewer and fewer people. But his Sound and the Fury approaches the mythic. gatsby approaches the mythic. Grapes of Wrath approaches the mythic. So does Moby Dick, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. But I have been these discussions with my dad all of my life.

So let me make one final comment about The Conjure Man. I wil lbegin by saying that he was my severest critic. Everything I gave him was covered in red ink; until I was 27 and began sending him the chapters of The Conjure Man. It was then the tenor of his comments changed. In teh margin there would be a single comment - this is pretty good, or perhaps, wehre is this going/ or maybe a suimple this is nicely done.

Since for me the book is about a total immersionkind of experiences, I will relate to a couple of perspectives about it. I have received 100 lertters to date from people who have said that the book does not read like a book; they fell like they are inside a movie; they expereinces all five senses, etc.

Onewoman said the experience for her was so strong and compelling, so visceral, that when she got to themiddle of the book she could not stop until she came to the end and then she had a physical reaction that felt like her heaart had stopped, she couldn't breathe, she was sweating, and that she felt like she had just escaped from drowning. One non-academci academic in North Carolina (Gregg Morris) wrote me that he thinks it is the best novel he has ever read;he and his colleagues focus on story telling and the art of the narrative experience[ they read 3 novels a week and write articles etc; he said The Conjure Man is ony the second book he has read twice in 40 years.

Of course this random sampling of responses, of reader experiences, is no proof of the book's enduring quailty, but I am fairly confident that the book possesses that quality. (That said, the book I am finishing now, gods among gazelles, is even better).

Let me close with a few remarks by my father, who put it in the context of American literature.

This novel follows two mainstreams in American fiction. It is realistic and humorous in the manner of Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye; it is brooding, symbolic, and spiritual in the manner of Hawthorne, Melville, and Faulkner. In addition, it takes black and white in American beyond racism, beyond integration, into a realm where one thinks only of humanity. And it is written in rhythms, cadences, and images that are more poetry than prose.
The teenager, Kilby, is a most engaging character. Not shrewd like Huck Finn or tormented like Holden Caufield, Kilby is a true innocent. He gets into scrapes because he does what people tell him. But Kilby is not a cliché. He also keeps his eyes open, and as his experiences multiply, he learns from them, learns to make his own assessments of people. The climax is most moving. Kilby realizes the Old Man's worth, understands their special relationship, defends the dying Old Man against the town, and inherits the Old Mans' spiritual vision.
You don't warm up to the Old Man in the same way. Thaddeus is a different kind of character. But he is powerfully drawn. Foreboding most of the time, only in his growing relationship to Kilby does his essential humanity come through. Totally fair himself, but disillusioned by the hypocrisy of religion, and rendered helpless and brooding by the unfairness of life and the mystery of death, his own life has been as nothing. But he is redeemed by Kilby as the prophet who takes his place to continue to speak the vision. What the vision entails will certainly be the subject of much critical discussion, for the author presents it without editorial.
Kilby and the Old Man have a number of magical/mythical experiences which bring to the novel a mythic element. (The author's brand of magical realism is less whimsical than that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez', but just as surprising.) Like Moby Dick, this novel is full of numerous side stories that are satiric and humorous. At least one is absolutely hilarious, the story of a "conjure man" who is bewildered and frightened by a successful experience in conjuring. The secondary characters are absolute gems. I'll mention two. Ty is a concession to Hemingway. He is a character like Jake Barnes who has lost his genitals to the war and is solving his problem the same way, through drinking and an incomplete love affair. Willie is the novel's antagonist. Lost in superstition, he continually tries to convince the townspeople that the Old Man is the Devil. He almost succeeds at the end. But it is too late. The Old Man dies, goes up in flames, and Kilby emerges as his successor. At the end, Willy reminds us of Roger Chillingworth. His whole life having gone in persecuting the old Man, life suddenly becomes for him bewildering and meaningless.
The story is extraordinary. But more importantly, the author has a way of writing that gets the reader involved if the reader wants to follow the narrative.
George Bellis, Ph.D., Professor of English (ret.), St. John's University (Author of numerous essays on 19th and 20th century American Fiction as well as a critical book examining Moby Dick.)

Again, while sympathetic to Bellis’s plight, why is it that, no matter who writes me, I usually end up putting up with so much, and get people pissed at the slightest comment? In a word: maturity. I possess it. Most others do not.

This is shown in the brevity, pointedness, and depth of my replies, whereas Bellis rambles and waves his kudos. This next email will send Bellis over the edge, for some reason. Read my email, and then see how Bellis distorts it in his response:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 3:26 AM
Subject: Re: two very short pieces
To: conjureman27@comcast.net

I seek one thing, excellence. And excellence- be it art, poetry, prose, memoir, criticism, is an objective thing. Words have definitive meanings. Therefore a term like 'taste' is not meaningful for real taste- in the tongue, IS on a per person basis as no two people's tongues are built the same way. But red, peach, bridge, dog, and eyeball all have specific meanings to English fluent folks.
The diff is recognizing objective excellence from subjective likes. I like bad art- I grew up watching pro wrestling, Godzilla and 50s sci fi films and soap opera. I like the poems of Richard Brautigan. But these are all examples of bad art. I do not like most Bergman films, nor certain films or documentaries, even if I acknowledge their excellence.
In reviews, I cannot convey my emotional reactions cuz they are irrelevant to another who cannot experience them, but I can objectively show cliches, bad acting, sentimentalist tripe. But, this means people cannot be passive in art. Entertainment is passive, art is not.
Also, emotions do not come from the heart but the head, If one stimulates the mind an emotional reaction is virtually guaranteed, but an emotion first art almost always fails to stimulate the brain. 2001: A Space Odyssey had me weeping when I first saw HAL's death. Terms of Endearment had me nodding off.
All art is going to be 99.99% bad, in all times. Or 99% with .99 good and .01% great. Published books or juried art in galleries is almost always bad. Why? The LCD factor. The more idiots involved the less intellect, and groups cannot have a vision- only individuals can.
Art is not about truth. It CANNOT be. But it communicates something, and usually it is a slice of reality. If you hold an apple up to me, that is a reality. My stating you are holding an apple up to me is a truth, or not. It's amazing how few people, esp. artists get this key and IMPORTANT difference.
I finished, in Dec, a 600k word novel on life in poor NYC in a Mob-infested time. It follows 3 bros. and I went for 'TOTAL IMMERSION' by using dialogue as a way to impart narrative and character development. Character IS plot. W/o the former, the latter means nothing. It is just marionettes in a show.
I'll have to look up your dad. Is he still alive?

DAN

Bellis had a side email conversation with Jessica and I, but it bears little consequence on the main thread. To the email above, Bellis started a new thread, with an ominous Subject heading:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <conjureman27@comcast.net>
Date: Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 8:44 AM
Subject: a final email
To: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>

I see now we will disagree on virtually everything when it comes to discussing literature, art, the human experience, etc. So quite probably this will be our last exchange of thoughts.

What is important when it comes to art, literature, music, all of these things humans try to create, is emotion.

Emotion arises from that part of the brain called the subcortex. We have no active, intellectual control in and of ourselves over the process that produces them. They are activated by visual or auditory stimuli. They are not activated by intellectual ideas. (As I said above, intellectual ideas only create opinions, which are often mistaken for emotions, but they are not emotions.)

Music produces emotions immediately. So does film, by its visual nature. Books can produce emotion in people to the degree which they can stimulate the subcortex through visual and sensory imagery. (Written dialogue cannot do this, unless the dialogue makes use of oral story telling techniques and provides the listener/reader with plenty of visual cues.) When we find a book that allows us to enter the dream state of the subcortex, the place that produces emotions, we will generally consider that book to be a great book. Ironically, the subculture of academia has constructed an artificial barrier between most readers and the ability of a book to produce this dream state. This barrier was constructed in the belief that only the intellect could properly appreciate a great book. What a load of crap. But because we have two generations of readers who read books for understanding, we have two generations of readers who by and large miss the experience of reading great books. They rely instead on what others have told them about the book as the foundation for some judgement about the book, or they base their reading of the book on a psudeo-academic, intellectual criteria which is mostly a matter of taste (subjective, always). (See notes on taste above and below.)

I need to point out here that what you would term a slice of reality is not simply a slice, though perhaps an artist or writer will only focus on a narrow dimension. In your example you hold up an apple and you say that is a reality, your stating that I am holding up an apple is a truth, or not. But it does not end there. There are an infinite number of dimensions to this act of me holding up the apple. Your perspective and my perspective of the event are only two of those dimensions.

One final thought: truly great critics are generous critics, because they allow their love of literature (art) to shine through whatever they are critiquing. Hacks are filled with the venom of bitter opinions and bruised egos.

P.S. My father is very much alive; he and I have been reading and discussing Saramago.

Need I say, despite Bellis’s claim, he could not end things with his ‘Final Email?’ It’s so ridiculous how so many people balk at actually exposing themselves to new and better ideas and artists. And it’s amazing that bellis tries to lump me in with ‘academic; thought, even as I am as antithetical to that as anyone. In fact, it is bellis who is cloaked in all the garb and language of academia. It’s just that they have not embraced his work. As evidence by earlier emails, had his book become published and part of the canon that includes dreck like David Foster Wallace and Joyce Carol Oates, he would not be railing about the nature and state of publishing. His is, at its core, a selfish and personalized view. Mine is not merely concerned with getting my nor Jessica’s work out there for our egos, but because it is great, and will affect others in helping them to interpret the cosmos. All great art does that. Artists are interpreters of reality. For Bellis, it’s merely a vehicle for Peter Damian Bellis’s ascent.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Apr 20, 2012 at 11:53 AM
Subject: Re: a final email
To: conjureman27@comcast.net

Interpolated:

Dan,

I see now we will disagree on virtually everything when it comes to discussing literature, art, the human experience, etc. So quite probably this will be our last exchange of thoughts.

To begin with, excellence is not an objective thing. Excellence is not something you can quantify, no matter how much you hope this to be true. Also, words themselves possess no specific meaning either; they are simply approximations of experience. Indeed, the meaning of words is constantly shifting beneath our feet, it is like standing near the ocean when the tide is pulling out. This is why Keats could write “heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” Taste is irrelevant (see below.). Finally, all the words you cite, red, peach, bridge, dog, eyeball, depend upon context for their meaning; they possess no universally specific meaning without context. By red do you mean, a communist, a color on the light spectrum continuum, businesses losing money, people embarrassed with emotion, which is it? You can play the same kind of game with every word in the dictionary. Once you realize that all words possess meaning only by context, once you realize that all words are thus merely an approximation of experience, then you realize that the only constant that allows us to use words to convey experience lies in the very emotion said experience creates.
****Nonsense- your limits are your own, not mine nor anyone else's. When you say something is not objective your are describing YOUR limits. This is a common logical fallacy called the fallacy of self-limits. In the arts it is prevalent. This is why so many bad artists resent great ones, because they feel that the great one has someone TAKEN something that should be theirs, for they do not see the daemon within themselves. Words possess multiple meanings, but each is specific to the context. You are broadbrushing, and not being specific. Nothing else you have said is in disagreement with what I stated, so the problem is in your understanding of the words I wrote, not in what was stated. Hence, the failure is on the reader, not the writer.

What is important when it comes to art, literature, music, all of these things humans try to create, is emotion.
***Art is COMMUNICATION. Period. At its highest level. What is communicated is not as important as how. Art is relevant as a veb. As a noun it just is. If Dr. Mengele wrote great sonnets about making lampshades of Jews, and they were skillfully done and evoked depth and meaning, that their subject matter was grim would be irrelevant. If all you seek to invoke is emotion, make bumper stickers. Art is a higher thing.

You are mistaken if you think that by stimulating the mind one guarantees an emotional response. (How ironic that your view of how art creates emotion is the same view as all of the academic humanists in the post-modern era beginning with Kandinsky.) All one guarantees by stimulating the mind, which I define here as that portion of the mind we ascribe to the intellect, is opinion. There are many people who confuse opinions, highly inflamed or otherwise, with emotions, but they are not the same thing.
***Again, nonsense, I have seen this over and again at countless readings. The people who read doggerel saying rape is wrong, or nuclear war is bad inevitably get rolled eyes. Those with a play of words, first and foremost, regardless of what their subject matter, get dilated pupils, fixed gazes, smiles unforced, and people asking them queries on what they meant by this or that. Right is right. Wherever a correct opinion comes from- be it Mao or Stalin or Bush, matters not. So, there is no irony, only right or wrong. Deep, layered, intellectual art ALWAYS stays with those who have minds that are attuned to what art is: communication. THose that do not read vampire books or watch Spielberg films.

When we find a book that allows us to enter the dream state of the subcortex, the place that produces emotions, we will generally consider that book to be a great book. Ironically, the subculture of academia has constructed an artificial barrier between most readers and the ability of a book to produce this dream state. This barrier was constructed in the belief that only the intellect could properly appreciate a great book. What a load of crap. But because we have two generations of readers who read books for understanding, we have two generations of readers who by and large miss the experience of reading great books. They rely instead on what others have told them about the book as the foundation for some judgement about the book, or they base their reading of the book on a psudeo-academic, intellectual criteria which is mostly a matter of taste (subjective, always). (See notes on taste above and below.)
***Look at all you've written thus far- it's pseudo-scientific nonsense that's simply in disagreement with academia. It's like arguing capitalism vs. communism w/o realizing that the underlying problem w both is that they value material things over accomplishment and achievement. A currency of pelf, not excellence, undoes both. In a similar way, you are taking a lietrary alchemical approach to things that simply are not this needlessly complex.

Judging from the way you approach reading and critiquing literature, I would be tempted to put you in this category. There isn’t any point in critiquing sloppy language, clichés, over writing, heavy use of modifiers, pick your stylistic tic. (This is why taste is irrelevant – see above.) As my father likes to say, the whole of a book is more than its parts, so if by the end of the book you experience some kind of emotion (not to be confused with an opinion), then you have read a great book, at least for yourself. If many people also experience some kind of emotion after finishing said book, then the society will consider it a great book. Conrad’s writing, for example, is filled with examples of clumsy constructions and clichéd language used as stand-ins for emotional reactions on the part of his characters, but his books are great books because of the impact produced as a whole.
***The only point in crit is to show how and why something works or does not. Subjectivism is bound to fail, not only in science, but also art. Again, you are free to like Joyce Carol Oates' crap writing, just like I can like Bruno Sammartino bearhugging Ivan Putski, but neither JCO's words nor the wrestler's hold are anything of real lasting value. Conrad's best books overcome their flaws. Great is not synonymous w perfect. This is another misconception many have. One might achieve greatness by getting only 2 or 3 elements of a poem or painting great, but they can be so ineffably great that the rest does not matter. Kurosawa's Rashomon has what many consider to be the worst ending to a great film ever. But, if great (I think the ending kyboshes that) the ending does not matter. It would be GREATER w a great ending, but it can still be argued as great. Great things can have bad elements. Many a great poem has a cliche or two.

This is why the only thing worth reading in a critical piece of a work of art, literature, music, film, is the experience of the critic. And it does not matter that everyone will experience the piece of art, the music, the story in a slightly different, or even totally different manner (Lord Jim comes to mind here). All that is important is that the work stimulates an experience, which is an expression of emotion.
***It's only worth reading if you want to know why a critic farts a certain way, too. I don't care what you or another person FELT about a great film or not. I want to know those elements that support your opinion. I can't feel what you do for that ugly girl you had a boner for in 7th grade, not can I know what it was like eating a certain food in a foreign country, but I can sense it if written or filmed well.

The artist’s only responsibility, then, is to prick the subcortex and thus induce an emotion in the reader, viewer, listener. If the artist has mastered his or her craft, they will know precisely which emotions they are targeting, which effect they are striving for. That said, since the act of creation is itself an act that requires entering the dream state, many of the emotions that emerge are unknown even to the creator. That is the profound beauty of all art.
***More nonsense. The artist's only respoinsibilty is to be a good or great as he can be in whatever he does. All else is irrelevant. If in 10k years some beast on an intergalactic vessel reads a poem of mine and understands a line to the poiint where he goes, 'Ah, that ancient human, he KNEW!' then that is what all art strives for. That his heart, or what not flutters, is nice, but not the goal. I don;t care what Homer or Tu Fu felt about a certain governor or flower. I want to BE THERE, and the only way to be there with them is through how their minds can manipulate ideas, words, which are an intellectual thing. Emotions CAN be invoked, provoked, evoked, but that is not the goal. Nor is, btw, beauty and endpoint of art.

Art, then, in all its forms, is only about experience, moreover, it is about experience in the broadest possible terms. If it were limited to the “slice of life” kind of reality you suggest, then it would resonate with very few beyond the author of the work.
***Experience is meaningless w/o a mind to contextualize it. Amoebas can experience. We are more than action and reaction. To reduce art to this base level is not only wrong, but downright silly. It's this puerilization, in fact, that is WHY we have the art we do! PC and PoMo are all about emotion, despite claims to the contrary.

P.S. My father is very much alive; he and I have been reading and discussing Saramago.
***Great critics, like any other vocation, are what they are because of how well they do their task, or not. Generosity has nothing to do with it. But, by any measure, I am a generous critic. Given the overwhelm of garbage out there, if you were to base divide my reviews into pro and con, you would find my pro reviews FAR exceed the .01% of art that is actually good. If I were to wade thru all the bad films, bad books, bad philosophies, religions, poems, paintings, and ideas out there, I would never experience the good.
A final point: you stated that you left many books undone because you spent so many years trying to push a single book. That seems a futile waste. Think about it, would you not be better off working as much as you can on as many works of quality as you can? Most artists have a peak period of a decade to 15 years. Why waste it networking when you can make art. When you're old and out of steam, then you can push those works you made. As is, there may be works and ideas that are irrecoverable.
Good luck, but if bailing on a conversation you started, simply because you have not convinced, is a usual tack, that does not augur well, personally nor artistically. Don't seek acolytes, seek excellence. All else follows suit. History is overwhelmingly clear on this point.

Be well,
DAN

It really is amazing to reread these exchanges, for Bellis is so lacking in anything of depth and quality to say, whereas everything I counter with is pointed, intelligent, and, almost as importantly, from my own experience and intelelct. There is no grafting of others’ claims nor quotes to use in an Appeal To Authority logical fallacy.

Nonetheles, here is where I ended things. What follows is Bellis’s incursion into my time, on an unwanted basis. Yet, he re[plied, and I sarcastically ribbed him over trying my patience- and let no one ever say I am not a patient man:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
Date: Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 11:00 AM
Subject: Re: a final email
To: conjureman27@comcast.net

I take it this is the real, final, with a cherry on top email?
Again, interpolated:

***You contacted me. You gave me a whole bevy of promotional material for your work. You complained bitterly of today's sad state of writing and the arts. Yet, you also claim to be a subjectivist. The two are not logically coherent. If you really believed all is subjective then you'd logically have no reason for a plaint. That you do belies your real motive. You are pissed that more people do not LIKE your work. Ok, then admit it, because by your own claims you have no objective way of stating you are better than DFW or James Frey or TC Boyle or whatever MFA hack of the moment is called 'hot.'
Your statement of objective excellence is just that, your statement. Again, I grant you your limit, that you cannot go there. I can. I have. I continue to do so. Since becoming a great poet in 1993 I've written well over 1000 great poems, a hundred or more great short stories, 5 great memoir books, A similar amount of great novels, and all this prose, btw, since 2004- 29 completed mss. Add in over 1000 essays on Cosmo on art, film, politics, life, philosophy, and I can state, I am not seeking excellence. I produce it.
The construction of a sentence, or a stanza, or the projection of a portrait or a catchy song beat is not something that is exceptional to all human endeavors. Just as one can determine a good and well built home or boat or a well made sonnet. Again, I grant you that YOU cannot. Don't try to impose your limits and fallibilities on others. Because I cannot bench press 300 lbs does not give me the right to deny those who can, or those who claim to.
And I am not attacking you. I am simply demonstrating your failed logic. Again, you sought me out, you paraded your PR my way, and then when preening, I simply showed your glisten was not that shiny. Don't offload your insecurities on me, esp, when I have demonstrated that, given your own statements, you have no logical right to bitch about the poor state of anything since you deny objectivity. Hence, you are reacting emotionally, and like a child that does not shine the apple of mama's eye.
When I point out the bad writing foisted on culture, I do so by ripping cliches, bad dialogue, poor character development, the substituion of political or religious axes for depth etc. All of these are demonstrable. Cliches- which are familiar phrases or ideas in familiar situations- are the most obviously objective manifestation of bad writing or art around.
But, this means nothing to you because you want to claim to be a subjectivist, then whine cuz the assholes don't LIKE your toys. I don't give a shit about what Samuel Delany thinks. I've read his shit. What would it matter what he, or Oates or any other hack thinks? Ok, they like this or that. So what? They could not explain why they like it, much less why it's good.
Greater than transcendence is its recognition. It's the ending to a sonnet I wrote, and basically it means that understanding the mechanics of a thing is greater than producing the thing because, ala the parable of Jesus and the fish, it's better to teach a man to fish than give him a fish.

***Here's another point, and another fallacy you bring up- the intentional fallacy. What Homer or I or you or Joe Blow intends in their art is meaningless; esp. to a critic. Only the result matters. If I write a treatise on the Weimar Republic and you take it as a salute to poodles, something's wrong. My intent is meaningless. I don't care what Homer intended. The thing is, Peter, that your dialectic is stuff that I've seen before countless times. I could predict the tropes and the arguments, and they are utterly generic. They suggest a vacuum, not a being, is uttering them. There is no cogitation needed, and none need apply. Perhaps you enjoy lolling thru life in a dream state, but most artists of exception I know prefer to engage life fully, deeply, and getting to the reality of existence, not some narcosis, is what the best art does. And it does it thru the mind. The intellect is the apex of humanity. It separates us from all other terrestrial beats: animals love (as any pet owner), and animals have rudimentary feelings. Humans TRANSCEND directly because we can UNDERSTAND that transcendence. At least the best of us can. Most folks, of course, are philosophical zombies. But, since you are a subjectivist, none of this matters.
Ideas are the meat of art. Philosophy is ideas, but art is ideas in motion. That's why it is greater than philosophy, and arguably the highest human pursuit. And art is the product of, and the thing stored in the mind. It is greater than mere emotion: love is a good thing, but without the ken to understand it, it is meaningless. In fact, all of the cosmos is meaningless sans a mind to comprehend it. A human is just a sack of meat without principles, ideas, ideals. These are what ennoble and enable us, not feelings, lest a bird that wails over its dead mate be deemed on par with a great artist.

***What do you think contextualizes anything? The MIND, not emotion. Meaning is an intellectual thing, not an emotional one. Peter, seriously, I just need allow you to type and my points are made. REALLY, look at what you have typed here. You have just ceded the argument.

Peter: experience is communicated. To go back to Mengele. Suppose he wants to write a sonnet sequence about the joys of torturing the mongrel Jew race. It's a silly and even noxious idea, but if he brilliantly uses words and ideas to get one to say, wow, these are damned good poems, he has won, because his communication has been effective. That you or I do not like the thing communicated is utterly beside the point, because the 'art' of the communication has triumphed. Read some of the lesser TS Eliot poems. Not great, but solid poems, even with their Anti-Semitism. So what? Eliot can still be a great poet, arguably, and a rotten person. As McLuhan said, the medium is the message, and this is esp. true re: art. Now, combine a great idea with great skill and that trumps all, but don't deny something its greatness because it's written by a Republican, a Jihadist, a Klansman, or a Commie.
Peter: I ooze art and thought even when I'm shitting. As an artist, my goal is always to help others come to understanding whatever it is mty essay, poem, or story is proposing.But I realize even the greatest art will not penetrate the 99+% of all philosophical zombies out there. By contrast, there seems to be no Peter in your ideas. They are off the rack and generic. As people on my site's e-list could attest, they have seen dozens of these sorts of arguments out of the 100s I've charitably conducted.
Any antagonism you feel is your own creation. Again, you sought me out, you slathered me in PR, you made this and that claim. I dissented. I demonstrated. And, logically, I succeeded. If you are unhappy with art today, and are a subjectivist, you are illogical, and pouting because you are not IN.
I don't really care about being IN, just that I am affecting future generations. I translate the cosmos for those less capable. To read a poem or story or essay of mine means you've gotten a shot to learn. You are free to shoot or pass. It really doesn't matter to me. I stated this 13 years ago in a published interview: because I give no quarter, people are forced to deal with what they give off into the world. If a person does not like themselves or is lacking in confidence, I will not reassure them nor open my ever loving bosom to suckle the world.
I have a life. I have vision. I have purpose. I have created them both. I have been charitable in sharing with you what I have told many people over the years. Do with it what you will. Those with vision do their best with it.
So, unless you have a 'final email with whipped cream and a sprinkle of salt,' I'll assume we're done. I get too many emails- 15-1600 a week to reiterate the same obvious points. And that's what they are, not only correct, but obviously so. If you cannot understand how your subjectivist leanings wholly undercut your plaints, there's nothing I can do to right that wrong within.

DAN

Naturally, the sprinkle of salt came, bolded, And note the further deterioration into childishness, by Bellis. I really am too kind:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: <conjureman27@comcast.net>
Date: Sat, Apr 21, 2012 at 12:28 PM
Subject: Re: a final email
To: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>

From: "Dan Schneider" <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
To: conjureman27@comcast.net
Sent: Saturday, April 21, 2012 12:00:06 PM
Subject: Re: a final email

I take it this is the real, final, with a cherry on top email?
Again, interpolated:

The statement that there exists an objective excellence is like stating that there is a God. it is a matter of belief, not logic. Since most of your 'logical" thinking seems to stem from that singular point, most if not all of your thinking is flawed. If you really beleive yoru work reflects the excellence you claim, get it out there. To hide it via online postings and ebook possibilties is a cowardly way to share yoru work. Personally, I do believe in an objective reality; but more probably an impersonal conecpt of God. I believe every story is already written (more in line with Jung, whom I presume you dismiss given your sophomoric rantings) and the artist will be able to access those stories which come to him or her as gifts. Depending upon the artist's capacity and patient, he or she will be able to capture most of these stories. No one can caputre all of it. I can capture about 90%.
The construction of a sentence, or a stanza, or the projection of a portrait or a catchy song beat is not something that is exceptional to all human endeavors. Just as one can determine a good and well built home or boat or a well made sonnet. Again, I grant you that YOU cannot. Don't try to impose your limits and fallibilities on others. Because I cannot bench press 300 lbs does not give me the right to deny those who can, or those who claim to.

I am not trying to impose anything on anyone. Things are what they are.
And I am not attacking you. I am simply demonstrating your failed logic.

Again, you sought me out, you paraded your PR my way, and then when preening, I simply showed your glisten was not that shiny.

How did you show anything of the kind? you made no comments about my work, other than a "heavy-modifer" aside. I was only trying to poke through your shield of self-indulgent, presumptive, arrogant, pseudo-intellectualism.

Don't offload your insecurities on me, esp, when I have demonstrated that, given your own statements, you have no logical right to bitch about the poor state of anything since you deny objectivity. Hence, you are reacting emotionally, and like a child that does not shine the apple of mama's eye.

I shed my insecurities years ago. There is no emotion in any of my statements. Again, you keep brandishing about the same tired responses to positions you think are being staked.
When I point out the bad writing foisted on culture, I do so by ripping cliches, bad dialogue, poor character development, the substituion of political or religious axes for depth etc. All of these are demonstrable. Cliches- which are familiar phrases or ideas in familiar situations- are the most obviously objective manifestation of bad writing or art around.
But, this means nothing to you because you want to claim to be a subjectivist, then whine cuz the assholes don't LIKE your toys.

Quite the actually, actually. everyone who has taken the time to read my work has responded quite favorably. My comments were directed at teh lacc of access. I think everyone should be invited to the table. Tie will sort out the rest. Again, you have neither read clearly or thought deeply enough about anything I said. You respond with a litany of cliched thinking.

I don't give a shit about what Samuel Delany thinks. I've read his shit. What would it matter what he, or Oates or any other hack thinks? Ok, they like this or that. So what? They could not explain why they like it, much less why it's good.
Greater than transcendence is its recognition. It's the ending to a sonnet I wrote, and basically it means that understanding the mechanics of a thing is greater than producing the thing because, ala the parable of Jesus and the fish, it's better to teach a man to fish than give him a fish.

The absolute reality of existence is accessible only thru the dream-state; it is of a spiritual nature. It has nothing to do with the "objective" reality you seem to prefer, the kind of vision you find in Richard Ford. But then I suppose that is your critque of Garcia Marquez and the rest of the magical realists from South America. Both your position and mine, however, are at bottom, merely statements of belief.
Ideas are the meat of art. Philosophy is ideas, but art is ideas in motion. That's why it is greater than philosophy, and arguably the highest human pursuit. And art is the product of, and the thing stored in the mind. It is greater than mere emotion: love is a good thing, but without the ken to understand it, it is meaningless. In fact, all of the cosmos is meaningless sans a mind to comprehend it. A human is just a sack of meat without principles, ideas, ideals. These are what ennoble and enable us, nit feelings, lest a bird that wails over its dead mate be deemed on par with a great artist.

***What do you think contextualizes anything? The MIND, not emotion? Meaning is an intellectual thing, not an emotional one. Peter, seriously, I just need allow you to type and my points are made. REALLY, look at what you have typed here. You have just ceded the argument.

All of what you are saying happens after the fact of the experience. It does not happen during the experience. But you are jumblign together two separate things. The act of creating a work of art is not the same thing as someone experienceing that work of art. The highest form of art is music, by the way, not poetry; music creates an unmediated, transcendant experience (later we can peahsp itnerpret and contextualize, but this never happens during). Poetry is a descendant of music (in the West, the early Greeks, poetry arose from the prasie-songs of rituals.) All poetry, and in fact all writing, is striving to acheive the same effect as music.

I am not denying any of that; you rponts here are misapplied.
Peter: I ooze art and thought even when I'm shitting. As an artists, my goal is always to help others come to understanding whatever it is mty essay, poem, or story is proposing.But I realize even the greatest art will not penetrate the 99+% of all philosophical zombies out there. By contrast, there seems to be no Peter in your ideas. They are off the rack and generic. As people on my site's e-list could attest, they have seen dozens of these sorts of arguments out of the 100s I've charitably conducted.
Any antagonism you feel is your own creation. Again, you sought me out, you slathered me in PR, you made this and that claim. I dissented. I demonstrated. And, logically, I succeeded. If you are unhappy with art today, and are a subjectivist, you are illogical, and pouting because you are not IN.
I don't really care about being IN, just that I am affecting future generations.

I translate the cosmos for those less capable. To read a poem or story or essay of mine means you've gotten a shot to learn. Uou are free to shoot or pass. It really doesn't matter to me. I stated this 13 years ago in a published interview: because I give no quarter, people are forced to deal with what they give off into the world. If a person does not like themselves or is lacking in confidence, I will not reassure them nor open my ever loving bosom to suckle the world.

It appears from what you have just said that you have no clue about the cosmos or anything in it.
I have a life. I have vision. I have purpose. I have created them both. I have been charitable in sharing with you what I have told many people over the years. Do with it what you will. Those with vision do their best with it.
So, unless you have a 'final email with whipped cream and a sprinkle of salt,' I'll assume we're done. I get too many emails- 15-1600 a week to reiterate the same obvious points. And that's what they are, not only correct, but obviously so. If you cannot understand how your subjectivist leanings wholly undercut your plaints, there's nothing I can do to right that wrong within.

DAN

By this point, I figured I’d never get rid of Bellis, and ended my side of this pointless email thread, with no apparent reply from Bellis, as I, again, asked he keep his word and stop with the puerility:

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dan Schneider <cosmoetica@gmail.com>
Date: Sun, Apr 22, 2012 at 11:06 AM
Subject: Re: a final email
To: conjureman27@comcast.net

I've not had a good day, dealing with childish co-workers who gossip and a clueless boss who's a refugee from Village of the Damned.
So, I take it you are one of these people that will state something, then never follow thru, lest why I am last email +2, at this point. And the childishness is rearing within you.
To address the bolded point by point:
1) More nonsense, and utterly unfounded and unsupported. Excellence and God are not cognates nor in the same intellectual realm. That you cannot see that means I am talking with someone yet to maturely deal w reality. I can't help you there. And your passive aggression (the sophomoric comment, the comments on stories, the constant phallic waving) is evidence of this immaturity immanent with all your claims. To claim all stories are written is de facto claiming the Divine Inspiration Fallacy, which abnegates the self. I am solely responsible for me and mine. I have agency. So does everyone. And denying it may make for a good schnoolie, but that's all. As for capturing, your own stated and illogical views suggest you're missing the bulk of reality. But, that's your problem.
2) The statement that you are incapable of grasping objective reality, such as excellence, and then claiming it for all, is your attempt to impose by fiat. Again, that you don't understand this is on you.
3) Black meet blacker.
4) Poor reading comprehension: I was referring to your flawed logic, but it's interesting that you assume I was referring to your writing, since you have laden these exchanges with your blurbery. Freud smiles, and not cus he got some.
5) From the man who has told me that writer A, B, and C thinks X, Y and Z. Again, you sought me out, and laid your laurels at my feet, not the other way around.
6) You totally missed my point, yet patted yourself on the back again. A sure sign of security.
7) The absolute reality of existence is accessible only thru the dream-state; it is of a spiritual nature. It has nothing to do with the "objective" reality you seem to prefer, the kind of vision you find in Richard Ford. But then I suppose that is your critque of Garcia Marquez and the rest of the magical realists from South America. Both your position and mine, however, are at bottom, merely statements of belief.
This is as funny as in the prior email where you made my point for me. Reality is only accessible thru dream. And you've yet to address the fact that your claims to subjectivism utterly annihilate your claims to excellence. If all is dependent upon subjective emotion you CANNOT lay claim to any excellence, 'cause that's an objective thing. All of your dialectic then, is both hypocritical and superfluous, since it is all subjective. So, clearly your actions belie your claims, and you are caught in your own illogical trap.
If this were a juried and scored debate you would have been hauled out of the building two emails ago.
8) Experience is perceived through the brain, and the brain intellectualizes all, even unconsciously. Emotion is a residue of that. And poetry is the highest of the arts, by a long shot. Poetry, specifically, and writing, generally, are the closest thing humans have, short of telepathy, to total abstraction. These figures on white represent things. Music simply is. The ears and eyes have been around for 600 million or more years. Literature for about 6k, written. A great poem can put you into a near whole world with just squiggles that a reader needs to co-create. Music just is. Many musicians resent this because they know music can be appreciated while multitasking- Muzak is the great proof of this. You need an intellect to make great music but not to get it. Writing requires both. Mere sound never puts one on the Pequod as it goes down, it does not fill the nostrils like the start of a Tree Grows In Brooklyn, it does not ring the mind's bell like Ozymandias. Writing, and poetry (cuz it can even do away with most narrative, at its best) do more with less. 600 mill years is a HUGE head start and writing blows music out of the water in its effect. It's why the adjective 'poetic' is used for all other human pursuits. People have poetic moments and not melodic ones. Poetry is descended from music, and so are humans from australopithecenes. We're better.
9) Ding! De bell dun be struck!
10) A wholly supported claim, because if you believe all art is subjective, then you cannot logically claim yours is better than the shit of some artist who uses their shit in performance art. Me tooing is not a response.
11) The game.
So, what is the purpose of all this- to show me the breadth of your convolutions? Why would I care? You dumped all this at me, I was kind enough to listen, then your id got the worst of you, you freaked, and went all passive-aggressive. Have things in MN gotten even worse since I left? Go plug your book, write, do as best you can, and so on. And, btw, http://www.cosmoetica.com/Statistics.htm this is hardly indicative of someone not putting their work out in the public. I've gotten 1000s of emails from college kids who've used or plagiarized my essays to pass classes. On any level, that's a bit more the essence of communication that getting bad writers like Samuel Delany or Joyce Carol Oates to write a blurb.
But none of that matters. Only the work. 2 novels in 20 years suggests you'd be better off working in that area than showing off your artistic and intellectual lack to a total stranger, no?
No more silly and puerile emails (with any toppings), stick to your word this time- as in FINAL, and do what you claim to love, unless that was a claim as valid as your subjectivity.

DAN

And, with that, my Peter Damian Bellis Experience was at an end (aside from a snide email where Bellis tried to, again, dickwave his opinion on some of my short stories), although, as mentioned, I did later read and write a review of his book, which I will shortly post.

Yes, the cults of personality I have delineated in this, and the first part of this two part series, mostly devolve into the cults of the self- and, no, I am not guilty of it, for exposing these cults is not equivalent to embracing them, in classic strawman tactics. As many of these web postings, emails, blog comments, and so on, have been around for a few months to years before I have gotten a chance to see them again, in this essay, it’s worth noting not only the vast gulf of intellectual and personal integrity and intelligence between me and the rest of thes folks (in my favor), but how almost unbelievably dense all these people are. And this is the sine qua non of why I occasionally write these lengthy esays: because, at a future date there will be people who will claim that such selfishness, obtuseness, otiosity, and so on, did not exist, that it was merely a contrivance by later generations to slander earlier ones.

Well, it was not. It is so. The early Internet was a place of unending sciolism, hyper-emotionalism, ignorance of the arts and in the propagation of great art, and nasty, personal crap, that not only actively worked to deny the contemporaneous audience of the works of great writers like Dan and Jessica Schneider, but also a limited number of other artists of auality, while protecting and suckling a corrupt system intent on choking off potential readersd and arts enthusiasts of substance.

It did not work, of course, but it was attempted. These essays are a small part of the proof. The rest can be amply dug up by the cyber-archaeologists. Spade up, boys!

Gender	Male
Location	Chicago, Illinois, United States
Introduction	All right so "who I am" is this: I like reading, writing and not the other "R" so much. I've been at reading and writing pretty steadily these last couple years or so, and I aspire to something significant, being-a-writer-wise (e.g. I've started an online literary magazine, Untoward (untowardmag.com)). I'm in graduate school right now studying for what stuff will grant me the opportunity to teach English / Language Arts to school children, a profession in which I find a great appeal and look forward to beginning. I'm also really very nice. Not "George Saunders nice" but geesus, the man's a saint. Trust me, I've emailed him. I respond to email, as well. Usually nicely, depending. Send any and all inquiries to: matt.rowan84@gmail.com
Favorite Music	Ted Leo, WHY?, The Dodos, The Kinks
Favorite Books	Catch-22, Sometimes a Great Notion, CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, Cat's Cradle, A Confederacy of Dunces, Moby-Dick, The New York Trilogy, Cloud Atlas, Infinite Jest, Crime and Punishment, Lolita, and really too many to list

2 comments:

Matt Rowan

About Me

In the dream where you show up to school naked, why do you never go swimming?

About me

· 22 - zingzing

· 22 - zingzing

- Dan Schneider

Natural Law

I must be cruel to be kind December 4, 2010 10:00 PM Subscribe

I must be cruel to be kind
December 4, 2010 10:00 PM Subscribe