books

Christmas Reading!

LAST-MINUTE CHRISTMAS GIFT IDEAS

CREATIVITY IS EVERYWHERE!

Including in small communities downriver from Detroit. A resident of one of them, Martin Bertera, has penned an atmospheric Christmas tale– Mistletoe — set in the mid-19th Century, in the tradition of Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky. We don’t want to give away too much of the plot, but it’s about a general store, an urchin child, the homeless, train-and-boat journeys from New York City to the Great Lakes, a farm, Christmas Eve, and– well, you have to read it. Most of all, it’s a story with heart, antithesis to today’s AI-generated robotic age. It’d make a perfect little Christmas gift for brothers and sisters, cousins, grandparents, friends or acquaintances, co-workers or the boss, nieces and nephews, uncles and aunts: all those for whom you’d like to buy something but aren’t sure exactly what.

Or purchase it for yourself to read on Christmas Eve– a perfect read for a perfect Santa-filled night.

You can buy it NOW right here.

About Graphic Novels

–and their potential influence on literature.

Graphic novels and comic books aren’t taken seriously by literary people, even though they’re an offshoot of the novel (19th century melodrama; early 20th century pulp fiction), and are a gateway for many readers to the novel.

The basic building block for the narrative comic book is the panel. Mini-paintings or portraits, usually with words added. When they’re not, the stand-alone illustration is meant to make a point– to emphasize a key plot moment, even depict the story’s climax. The result: interconnected micro-chapters. Dialogue is used sparingly but well. The graphic novel embodies the principle of “less is more.” A single sentence or lone illustration carries meaning beyond itself. The technique works on not spelling everything out. On not having to spell everything out, a principle used first by impressionist painters, impressionist music composers like Debussy, and by 20th century modernist writers Georges Simenon and Ernest Hemingway.

“It wasn’t by accident that the Gettysburg Address was so short. The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.” -Ernest Hemingway

Ernest Hemingway was heavily influenced by Impressionist painter Paul Cezanne. Like Stephen Crane, Hemingway saw literature as a visual art.

USING THE TECHNIQUE

JUST AS the comic book/graphic novel was an outgrowth of popular novels, there’s no reason why serious fiction writers can’t in turn be influenced by the graphic novel. “The graphic novel without graphics.”

Ways to do this:

1.) More striking, over-the-top characters.

2.) More dramatic plots.

3.) Short mini-or-micro chapters, to emphasize each plot moment– and to keep the narrative moving at a faster pace than traditional literature. All part of what I call multidimensional writing.

ADVANTAGES OVER GRAPHICS

What graphic novels can’t do is get inside the heads of their characters. This can be used in multidimensional writing, as in traditional fiction, without going full Henry James-Virginia Woolf “stream of consciousness.” One of the failings of contemporary writing is the trend toward alt-lit/autofiction-style solipsism, which often as not cuts out the actual world: the tragedies and happenings of now. Which is a shame, given today’s contentious chaotic happenings begging to be intelligently addressed with understanding, compassion and outrage.

One of the strengths of multidimensional fiction is the ability to present a variety of viewpoints, quickly switching between them for a rounded, three-dimensional effect.

As we’ve begun doing with some (not all) of our writing. Including the just-released novella, The Loud Boys— now available in ebook form at Amazon. Print version coming soon.

-Karl Wenclas

Open Territory

AN ANALYSIS

THE PART of the literary game up for grabs should be obvious, but it’s not: non-readers. Many millions of people who can read, could be reading, should be reading, but aren’t. The outfit which figures out first how to reach that crowd, that demographic, will own the future of the literary business.

A model to follow exists: the rock n’ roll music explosion which began in 1955 with the success of the 45 rpm single “Rock Around the Clock” by Bill Haley and the Comets– which dropped like a thunderbolt into an era of bland pop music sung by the likes of Patti Page and Perry Como.

At the forefront of the early rock movement were a handful of low-rent hustlers: Alan Freed in Cleveland; the Chess brothers and Chess Records in Chicago; Sam Phillips and Sun Records in Memphis; and soon enough, Berry Gordy Jr. and Motown Records in Detroit. Within a few years, they and other indie labels took half the record industry’s market share away from the monopolistic “Big Four”– and sent the cultural world into shock.

Over the next fifteen years the record industry multiplied several times over– due largely to new listeners. Popular music became the indispensable art, a part of most people’s everyday life– even part of their being, instead of existing as a distant icon on a pedestal, to be observed from afar and admired.

A key stat: in the mid-1950’s the jazz and classical music genres, sustained by the “close-listening” crowd, each held about 20% of the record market. By the time the musical revolution was over, their shares hovered closer to 1% each. They held their fan bases– but played no role in grabbing new audiences. The difference between a static and dynamic art.

THE LESSON?

The lesson is that cultural opportunity is always out there, but you need to be willing to grab it. To open the door to the new and exciting– or bust open a door if one isn’t there. Opportunity is greater with an art that’s long remained static, as in the literary field.

At New Pop Lit we’ve worked intensively at developing new models which potentially can wake up the non-reading public. That enormous untapped market. Our latest experiment is a novella which combines pop, noir, adventure, satire, topical politics and a comic book vibe: The Loud Boys. Ebook soon available at Amazon, with a print version to follow.

TWO QUESTIONS

1.) Are our literary experiments worth the attempt?

Absolutely. The upside is enormous.

2.) Am I pandering to the audience by writing “pop” style fiction?

I’m not pandering. I am that audience. I was an enthusiastic reader long before I thought about being a writer.

-Karl Wenclas

Nobel Irrelevance

A RANT

(photo c/o worldmagzine)

ANOTHER YEAR almost gone, another Nobel literature prize winner nobody’s heard of, who by all accounts writes “poetic prose,” a phrase which seems a nod by commentators toward the literary, to affirm among themselves (they speak for no one else) “she’s one of us.” She’s previously won the Booker Prize and probably other awards within today’s tiny literary world.

Yes, it’s a laudable event, plucking a dedicated writer from general obscurity and giving that person attention– good for the person; the writer– but for what after all is a glorified PR campaign it’s a failure. Part of consistent failure. PR without purpose. Is Han Kang a more compelling winner than last year’s winner? No doubt. That’s not enough.

Literature’s footprint in the culture is not increased a centimeter. Instead it continues to shrink. Relative to all else it shrinks, because the rest of the world’s noise– from politics, podcasts and polemics to Twitter and Tik-Tok, music and sports– speeds ahead like an expanding universe while the literary art stands still. Stuck. Trapped. An art of the imagination, allegedly, yet no one in credentialed levels of the literary realm has imagined a new idea– aesthetically or commercially– in decades. The same-old obsolete layers of overstaffed institutions and hierarchies. Ivy League academies and Big Five-sustained publicists and agents, akin to 19th century Central European bureaucrats receiving chests full of medals for moving stacks of jargon-filled paper around. Awards as tokens of appreciation for existing, while accomplishing nothing.

I’m not sure what the solution is, but it’s not this.

-Karl Wenclas

“the critics” by Ken Kakareka

HEMINGWAY FESTIVAL 2024

(photo c/o National Book Critics Circle)

they say
that writers
don’t play,
that’s why
they make
such great
observers.
like the
impotent
jake barnes
in the sun
also rises.
well
let me
tell you
something.
writers play.
i’ve stuck
my beak
in depths of
squishy kiwi
and tasted
the sweet,
the sour,
the ripened
and
the bitter.
i’ve snorted,
drank,
and fucked
everything
west of
the sun
and
sat with
the lamest
of ducks
at dead
wine bars
listening to
drowning
conversations,
and i’ve
walked
the walk
at old joints
in new orleans
where what
barflies say
jumps off
the walls
like frogs
off lilies.
so i can
tell you
that writers
play more
than anyone.
don’t believe
the critics –
they’re
the ones
who don’t
play.

See also Ken Kakareka’s other feature in this year’s Hemingway Festival, “Old Bull.”

What’s Wrong with American Literature Part III

WHAT HAPPENED?

(Those who most need to read this, won’t.)

LITERARY INTELLECTUALS became too caught up in their own intellects. They lost sight of what matters most: That authentic art is of, by, and for the people. IS a part of a society’s every day life. HAS meaning within that context.

The same phenomenon stagnated classical music. It became burdened by the art’s own intellectuals: music critics and academic pontificators who added to the form a heavy legacy of profound and-or pretentious thought, when all that mattered was the emotional connection between music and listener. Those notes or chords, or voices– those moments which went deep into a person’s soul and were beyond thought.

New fiction in this culture today especially should be playing chords deep within us, not merely impressing us with some Gaddis Foster-Wallace Knausgaard exhibition of disconnected intelligence.

Dickens and Dumas in the 19th century were wildly popular for reasons. Jack London’s tales have been translated into every language in every culture on the planet and loved by readers for over 100 years for reasons. Literature as an art form needs to get back to those reasons if it expects to be central to this society’s culture once again.

-KW