fast pop lit

Humans Versus Robots!

COMMENTARY

(Pictured: Self-portrait by human artist Vincent van Gogh; a shot from the 1927 film Metropolis.)

DO PEOPLE KNOW exactly what kind of world tech moguls and tech hustlers are planning for us?

Here’s the crackpot vision of one of them, David Holz, CEO of Midjourney, who is fully captured by the More Technology religion:

The assumptions made in the paper are many– that everything goes smoothly with no setbacks; a science fiction fantasy disconnected from the earth, bureaucracies, reality. One can find statements of writings from other plutocrats as fantastical and dangerous, including Elon Musk’s plans to merge humans and computers so that we become in effect, ourselves, robots.

Keep in mind it’s all being done in the name of money. More money! The reason banks and Venture Capitalists are throwing billions of dollars at these madmen. More outlandish plans, more gimmicks, more ways to get suckers inside the circus tent to enable and enrich the tech guys. “Look at me! I can be an artist! A writer! Golly gee!! Just by saying a few words into this here device.” But you’re not an artist or writer, merely an enabler generating imitative mock-artistic garbage while simultaneously allowing the scamsters to ask for ever more funding, more expansion, more unnecessary electronic gadgets: more madness.

The name of the game for the tech guys is accelerationism, a kind of economic blitzkrieg. In their credo, “Move fast and break things.” Moving ahead as quickly as possible in a narrow path to reach a far out objective. The idea of simply achieving the distant objective, worrying about damages, destruction and repercussions later. Therefore, the all-out media blitz for AI and various AI gadgets– to make, in the minds of the public, their anti-human technology accepted fact.

“It’s clear that AI is a permanent part of our digital lives–” -Scott Lamb, VP of Content at Medium.

A 100% push to put the tech over, requiring from the other direction in order to limit or stop it an equal amount of pushback. Otherwise, the many ills that afflict society– including alienation, homelessness, and an out-of-control wealth gap– will only get worse.

Are we up for the fight?

-Karl Wenclas

(If you haven’t yet signed the “Save the Writer!” petition, please do so.)

Why 2024 Is Not 1968

COUNTERCULTURE

1968 WAS A KEY YEAR for the Sixties counterculture, highlighted by anti-Vietnam War protests on college campuses and the protest-to-end-all-protests at the Chicago convention:

1967-68-69 marked the peak of the American Cultural Revolution (yes, the U.S.A. also had one) which lasted from 1955 to 1973. A subject for a much longer essay.

THE POINT is that the college protests of 1968 were political, but also part of an entire cultural movement, which gave the demonstrations much of their strength. Music, styles, and mores had changed drastically. Culture was in upheaval– cultural revolution that’d been kicked off thirteen years prior by the roots musical explosion of rock n’ roll and by two Hollywood movies celebrating youth rebellion.

(“Rebel Without a Cause” 1955; Kent State 1970.)

An authentic counterculture was fully underway– rejection of handed-down homogenized standards combined with an embrace of new ways of living and thinking. Back-to-the-land artisanal small-scale attempts to escape the top-down corporate rat race, in search of independence and personal freedom.

They thought their world had become too conformist, too big, too intrusive– too unequal and stratified. Yet in its totalitarian get-in-your-head aspects that world carried a small fraction of the omnipresent technological intrusiveness of now.

If they had reasons to get out of their world– what about us?

Did the Sixties counterculture live up to its ideals and its promise? Of course not. But for a few years it sent shock waves through the technocratic system and the hierarchy-based U.S. establishment. Culture gave the campus protestors and convention demonstrators of 1968 a cachet– a glamor– they would not otherwise have had. Protest songs from Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and those who followed them served as soundtrack to the seizure of university buildings and shouts of “Peace Now!” and “The Whole World Is Watching!”

For all the energy put into current political protests, among a host of mistakes they lack the force of a full-scale cultural assault.

It’s what’s also missing from pushback against the top-down megabillionaire-backed assault of AI-generated work and art– though artists of all kinds are among the most affected.

NEEDED: A brand-new counterculture disconnected from the bought-and-paid-for hierarchical institutions of today. More human ways of thought, creativity, and expression; of experiencing the world: the real, analog world. A return to what makes us human, to serve as a model for those completely trapped within, and owned by, the electronic hive.

An escape door. A way out.

-Karl Wenclas

An Excerpt from “The Unhoused Gift” by Peter R. West

FICTION!

He had no compassion for homeless people—to him, they were an ugly boil on the face of the city, parasites that threatened the very fabric of the community. He reflected on his meteoric rise to the top of the legal world, clawing his way from a humble, working-class family, through a modest Cal State LA Law School, to building his own office by initially taking on less-than- prestigious cases that top lawyers had shunned, to finally developing a ferocious knack for scandalous murder trials that put him on the evening news. If he could make it, there was no reason for anyone else to sleep on the sidewalk or comb through trash cans.

As he approached the city, the drivers around him tried to maneuver their cars ahead of one another, as if a big prize was awaiting the one arriving first. Stanley could hear their incessant honking as they zigzagged in and out of lanes. But his silver Bentley was like a Roman galley warship rising through rough water, smashing all obstacles in its wake. His hand gripped the fine leather on the steering-wheel. His body pressed against the soft skin of the seats. His reflection in the mirror was of an attractive man with a kind face imprisoned by a tight ostentatious tie. He took a slight turn toward the homeless camp, which in the general direction of his office. The dismal sight of the people he maligned in court held a sordid appeal for him.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

Scoping Out the Future

AN ANALYSIS

c/o snarkybites.com

NOBODY KNOWS for certain what the artistic future will look like, including in the literary realm, given the approaching flood of AI-generated “art”. But we can make an accurate guess.

A.) The most massive part of the book market will be imitative tomes generated by chatbots. They’ll come from all directions, as they’re already coming from all directions. From hapless writer-wannabes who want the accomplishment of creating a novel or collection of poems or stories without doing any of the work. From content mills in faraway places creating thousands upon thousands of ebooks, as well as the print version, to generate income based on sheer volume. From new tech publishing outfits eager to get in on the AI game, presenting at least the pretense of quality but for whom the goal remains the same: generating income based on volume. Increasingly, much volume will come from the Big Five established conglomerate publishers themselves, who’ve begun recruiting tech people to work in the AI field.

B.) A small number of actual writers with some talent will try to push the envelope of what an AI chatbot can produce– hoping to thereby create innovative new literature (it’s no more than a hope). They’ll find themselves also swamped by the AI deluge, and more, perhaps carrying the same AI brand of aesthetic inferiority and artistic theft.

C.) The current self-publishing/fan fic/genre crowd, whose massive numbers have already congested the book market. Many will turn to AI (many already have) to produce more books faster, which will be self-defeating.

D.) The small press litmag community. For most of them (like ourselves, in part) their steadfast efforts are a labor of love. Survival, though, will become more difficult– unless they find ways to stand out. Which means going beyond either the literary or subliterary templates which permeate their underground realms.

E.) Holding up the tottery fort of the literary present-morphing-swiftly-into-past– especially in New York– will be the literary status quo. While storms rage outside, they’ll cling to their canonical high modern postmodern writings, as if perpetuating an ancient dead language. Like Essenes, they’ll continue to write inscrutable papers about unreadable texts, and hold events– in halls of cloistered academia, or high-brow venues in upscale gentrified neighborhoods– going through the motions of an archaic cult. Shuffling monks in robes, reciting properly approved words, affirming in gesture and invocation their artistic belief system. If asked why, they’ll stare blankly. No one will know.

F.) THEN there will be an alternative. The rebellion. A counterculture positively fighting the inhuman deluge of botbooks and other fake AI-generated crap. Those embracing human creativity and making it new, by returning to our cultural roots– to our forebears; our ancestors– and there finding inspiration. Drawing upon our most human abilities. Not just our underused natural brains– ours, not a machine’s– but especially upon our hearts and our souls. Emotion. Compassion. PASSION. New writing which screams, vibrates, and lives. It won’t be easy: to rediscover ourselves and find artistic purpose and humanity while existing in a soulless artificial world. But we’ll do it.

-Karl Wenclas

“Sketch Rex” by Perry Genovesi

NEW FICTION

c/o Andy Warhol

Dinner’s been tomato soup for so long and the red-ringed bowls are piling up in the sink. Santana sits with a green and white checkered quilt on their lap and winds their finger around a tassel. The Victrola is turned off and the light is a dim flypaper-yellow.

It’s Sunday night and they were considering a walk or a drive, something special before the week starts. They want to don their blue newsboy cap, visit the Boulevard to watch the young people sitting on the benches downtown, smoking by the statue of the giant granite head. A cold thought like wet paper towel presses itself against their face and snakes out their eyes.

There are no more creative thoughts inside the dome of their scalp. Before, ideas broadcasted in an arc. Some were neon. On those nights, the inside of their head resembled the Boulevard; there were so many thoughts. Now there are few and they’re all wet paper towel. These weak thoughts slurp around the perimeter of their skull. One shambles to the top of their head’s underside and then collapses like a broken roller coaster. Santana thinks of Rex, who used to rest atop the checkered quilt and chase his tail, clean himself, and curl up.


A red-cold thought crawls inside Santana’s bulbous nose. They search for the neon ones, but those all ran away with Rex. Rex would move from the quilt to the couch and finally to the rocking chair with its mothholey teal cushions, and sleep. And Santana would lie on the carpet to draw him. Sketchpad pointed to the chair, shirt riding up so their bare stomach brushes the rug, one hand on the marker. Sometimes they’d turn on the Victrola to listen to popular vocal music. Santana would draw the lines in Rex’s face. And for the rest of the night, a network of neon thoughts would brood around Rex. What color for his nose? Should it be as red as tomato soup? Santana rises to turn on the Victrola but pauses when they hear, by the door, a faint scratching.

Perry Genovesi lives in West Philadelphia, works as a public librarian, and serves his fellow workers in AFSCME District Council 47. He’s a ’24 Best Microfiction nominee, and his published fiction is forthcoming or has been featured in Eclectica, BULL, Vol.1 Brooklyn, and collected on tiny.cc/PerryGenovesi. Unfortunately for his admirers, he needs to be validated every 5 minutes & told he’s doing a great job or he shuts down. Twitter: @unionlibrarian 

An Excerpt from “The Spector Wept” by James Lee

And now we hang the jestors wreath

When peace doth dwell throughout the land

And beast will eat from mortals hand

All oceans will merge into the sands

And death and life will merge as one

All black will darken the brightest sun

Blood in veins no longer run

The Spectors work is finally done

XXX

“The Spector Wept” and another poem by James Lee are COMING SOON— to New Pop Lit!




Caitlin Clark and the Elements of a Game

(AP photo Hans Pennink)

BY SHOOTING BASKETS from farther out than any other player today is doing– farther than few have ever shot them– Caitlin Clark has changed the elements of the game she plays. In so doing, she’s raised the profile of women’s college basketball dramatically– and her own.

Seeing clips of her sharpshooting, I’m reminded of the Wild West’s Annie Oakley, who could defeat any man at target shooting. I’m reminded that women are better at threading needles. It’s possible that women are slightly better at some aspects of manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination.

“Nonsense!” you exclaim. “Plenty of men shoot the basketball as well as Caitlin Clark!”

To which I could reply, “Where are they?”

The reason we don’t see such long-range sharpshooting from men– with rare exceptions like Steph Curry– is because the elements of the mens game militate against it. Meaning, the priority given to unusual size and strength. There may indeed be 100 or more six-feet tall men who can shoot the basketball as well as Caitlin. Maybe more than 100. But few if any make it to the big time.

ELEMENTS

Change the rules or elements of any game and you change the importance of any one element, and thereby increase or decrease the game’s level of excitement. This was seen in baseball with the advent of “Moneyball,” with priority given to batters who either hit a home run or strike out, above players who hit for high average, get on base a lot, and steal bases. So what we see now when watching baseball games is not the hit-and-run drama of old, but occasional home runs punctuating an endless series of high pitch-count walks and strikeouts. A few seconds of action amid a whole lot of boredom.

Similar has happened in other sports, for good or ill. The National Football League changed its rules some years ago to favor the quarterback, which led to more passing, more scoring, more aerial excitement. They changed the elements of the game. Not a surprise that NFL football surpassed baseball as America’s most watched sport, and never looked back.

A DIFFERENT GAME

What does this have to do with literature, ostensibly the subject of this site?

At New Pop Lit we believe the short story (and then the novel) can be changed by changing its elements, and how much emphasis is put on any one element. Well-known is that in writing programs, emphasis is placed on “the well-written sentence,” as if that’s all that’s involved in writing a story. Much else is involved– which is why we believe the form can be radically changed. Improved. Made faster, deeper, and more exciting.

My co-editor Kathleen M. Crane is back writing short fiction again, after a substantial break. She’s a Hemingway acolyte, in that she writes with extreme clarity, “like seeing pebbles in a brook,” in Hemingway’s phrase. Except KMC writes with perhaps more compassion for the subjects of her tales.

As for myself, I’ve identified ten elements of short stories which I’m out to include or emphasize– or experiment with– in my own short fiction projects. I’ve mentioned two of them previously: multiple viewpoints, and non-linearity. With eight other elements to work on, I should be able to produce writing which looks wholly new– a kind of new literary work never before seen.

At least, that’s the thinking.

-Karl Wenclas

An Excerpt from “The Big Time” by Robert Bozic

EXCERPT FROM A CHAPTER IN A MEMOIR

It was all incredible to me. Just five years earlier, I was homeless, sleeping on the streets of Toronto, and now I was gearing up to fight at Madison Square Garden. Word had spread among my old high school friends, who, despite being in college and tied up with summer jobs, managed to wrangle a couple of days off to witness the fight. A few of them, thrilled at the idea of attending a match in New York, hastily organized a road trip.

Three days before the main event, Chuvalo, his entourage, and mine (which, at this point, comprised only Bev, my trainer, and myself, as Bertie and a couple of Lansdowne guys were coming in for just one night) arrived in New York. We all checked into the New Yorker Hotel, a venerable establishment nestled on Seventh Avenue between 33rd and 34th Street. It stood just south of what was arguably the seediest area in New York City, quite possibly in the entire United States. This neighborhood was infamous for its porn shops, strip joints, and a mix of greasy eateries like the original Tad’s Steakhouse, sprawling northward up to 43rd Street, where the Broadway Theatres began. On the southern border lay Eighth Avenue, home to the main bus terminal, Port Authority. Within a block or two of the Port Authority, a series of the most desolate-looking hotels offered rooms by the hour.

COMING SOON to New Pop Lit!

Interview: David Wayne Stewart

1.)  Which country is more divided right now, Canada or the United States?

Political discourse is coarsening everywhere these days, but polarization seems dangerously pronounced here in the U.S. Our current moment reminds me of the Quebec separatist era of my childhood, which was also marked by the hyper-politicization of issues that had previously been uncontroversial, set against an urban-rural divide. In the end, Canada sleepwalked its way to a constitutional crisis that almost tore the country apart. Perhaps Americans can look to that Canadian story as a cautionary tale.

2.)  What’s Canada’s best asset?

Despite its fraught history as a colonial nation, Canada has shown a more recent capacity to acknowledge and reckon with its past wrongs. The Spicer Commission’s town halls during the Quebec Constitutional crisis of the 1990s, and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission on residential schools of the early 2000s, are examples of the Canadian government listening to people’s concerns, and creating a historical record of injustice in pursuit of collective healing and social change. These experiences are cultural assets that will serve Canada in the decades to come as it continues to welcome immigrants and transition to a more knowledge-based economy.

3.)  Who’s your favorite hockey team?

As a kid in small-town Quebec, I used to walk home from school through cold and snow and immediately change into my favorite red, white, and blue hockey sweater with a number 10 on the back — the jersey of my childhood idol, Guy Lafleur. To this day, I remain a dyed-in-the-wool Montreal Canadiens fan.

NOW read David’s essay at New Pop Lit: “New to Class”

Are Arts Critics Pretentious?

photo of Dwight Macdonald c/o Bettmann-Corbis

THAT WAS THE QUESTION making the rounds on social media this past weekend as a video parody of snobby film critics circulated on Tik Tok and Twitter.

BUT: Is pretentiousness a fair criticism? Seeing that synonyms of “pretentious” include “affected” and “ostentatious,” I’d guess yes— based on quick looks at a couple essays by literary critics at New Left Review, of all places.

First is this one, by Hermione Hoby:

Here’s another fast glimpse of another essay from the same venue, this one by Leo Robson:

Clear-thinking criticism or pseudo-intellectual blather?

The reason I pulled the excerpts from New Left Review, is because at a “leftist” journal, certainly, is where you’d expect to find writing accessible to ordinary workers– to millions of curious readers from all areas of society eager to find writing they can agree, or disagree, with, and sometimes be moved by. Passion! Polemics! Opinions!! WHY NOT?

Instead they get exercises in intellectualism, from former university students who never left the classroom– or the classroom never left them. They’re still writing for professors or dissertation committees, or for other inside-the-box, don’t-make-waves thinkers just like them.

Pretentious? You bet!

-Karl Wenclas