THE POSITIVE MESSAGE OF NEW AMERICAN ART AND LITERATURE

Wednesday, November 19, 2008

Where Goes the Underground?

THE SALIENT POINT
to be made about the literary underground ("Resistance"; "Rebellion"; et.al.) as it's currently being managed at entities like the ULA and OW is that it does everything ass-backwards. In this respect it mimics the literary world as a whole. It makes me wonder if writers by nature are congenitally incapable of having a contemporary understanding about business, instead wanting to operate as if this were still 1820.

The problem is and has always been a MARKETING problem. The Underground Literary Alliance was founded to address this-- not to engage in the same-old same-old. Undergrounders, instead of using new tactics which I proved work, operate with the same baby-step way toward guaranteed failure; producing modest quantities of product; spending enormous amounts of energy in distributing it, without understanding the context within which it's placed, which demands ways to move it. Underground writers themselves are well-satisfied to have their books published, or poems placed on-line, without understanding it means nothing if new ways aren't found to attract readers TO that product.

Creating more supply isn't how the literary rebellion was intended to operate. The plan was always to first create DEMAND for that supply, to a great extent, into which the product could be fed. 90% of activity, if not 99%, was intended to go toward creating demand. Instead, 99% of effort is now spent on the other end. In this loud, media-saturated society, this is senseless.

No comments: