A piece of trivia known only to the most ardent Combat fans: Sarge had letters tattooed on the knuckles of his right hand, DAS, and tattooed on his left, EIN. Kraut talk. Hey, Sarge, why you got Kraut talk on your hands? When he put his fists together, knuckles out, as he often did in the very eyes of the enemy, like Joe Louis in a pre-fight press conference with Herr Schmelling, the tattoos spelled DASEIN.
A disturbing lesson, White writes, for "in order to win the war, the Americans had to become the moral equivalent (as Field Marshal Reagan would say) of the Nazis."
Andy Warhol once noted that it's not that art is becoming more commercial, it's that commerce is becoming more artistic. Similarly, much has been made out of the Hollywoodization of publishing - the attempt to save literature from extinction by making it more like Multiplex movies. Thus bookstore chains take on the skin without the viscera of independent bookstores, while small-press publishers have to contend with heavyweights like NPR and its mid-brow vision of art and literature, or a national magazine's censorship-by-omission of books published by small or academic presses, or the fact that when Oprah Winfrey, the most powerful person in literature, mentions a book on TV, its sales can go up as much as 3,000%. (Ophrah's PR people also report that her overweight viewers have, with her help, taken off a combined total of 534,336 pounds.) The implications for the idiosyncratic novel, or idiosyncratic anything, are not good (see for example Dreaming Out Loud where Bruce Feiler describes how the conglomeration of radio stations and the application of mass marketing techniques have driven music to a bland middle).
Rightly so, White points out that there are formally innovative writers being published by
the commercial presses: Richard Powers, William T. Vollmann, Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner, David
Foster Wallace, Stephen Wright and Paul Auster, to name a few. His complaint is with the
climate that makes an aberration of them and the authors with presses that lack the resources
to be noticed by Oprah or Time (a list is provided in his "Cultural Studies and the Poetic").
Indeed, one of the pleasures of Monstrous Possibilities are the mini summations of literature
and publishing embedded within the essays. See especially "The Late Word: Why I Didn't Renew
My Subscription to Nation" and "The Culture of Everyday Venality: or A Life in the Book
Industry" - a critique of the small presses, what they are, and how they got that way, and what
they are up against: a pervasive conception of literature that transforms novels into the
Hollywood video in the shape of a book. This mindset issues from common readers who keep
airport "book" stores humming, but also, those who should know better. Frederic Jameson, for
example, who accounts "for contemporary fiction with a twenty-year-old label ('fabulation')
and one novel from E.L. Doctorow." Or, it could be added, the thousands of "creative writers"
as they are called in the academy, who go on to become the grass roots outside the academy.
Take for example a recent issue of Poets and Writers, one of the best information sources for
authors who publish in non-commercial venues (i.e., the equivalent of an artist's alternative
space). Half of the literary magazines advertising for fiction and poetry submissions had
the following titles:
| Acorn Whistle | Cuddledown | Ancient Paths |
| Array | Crone's Nest | Lucid Stone |
| Papyrus | Natural Bridge | Messages from the Heart |
| Procreations | Raw Seed | Green Mountain Review |
| Shoofly | Small Potatoes | Snow Bound |
| Sundog | Thin Air | Tributaries |
| Under the Sun | Visions | Plow and Hearth |
| Wind | Chambers | Whispering Pines | Gardeners' Eden | Penzeys Spices | Water Stone |
| Lands' End | Somerset | Voice of the Mountains.... |
It doesn't take a semiotician to see the aesthetic at work here, for it is the bedrock of Americana itself: the cult of plain speak, of down-home honesty, the appeal to nature - as opposed to the corrupt culture of Europe, especially French theoreticians. "Field and Stream narrative doxology," to use White's phrase. It's also interesting to note the commonality of this imagery within the marketplace, as evidenced by the titles of some mail-order catalogs that arrived as I was writing this, and that I mixed in with the above titles (can you pick them out?)
