“I don’t think a manifesto is neccessary…”
–That’s my hope, that a manifesto is never necessary. My hope is, as you imply as well (“the few folk I have conversed with and the handful of communities joined has been more coincidence than a desire to get to know what’s happening in the underground”) that we come into these things searching for a shared expierence, and should a movement evolve, then great. But to START a movement seems too rife with ego.

But you are right, I think that artistic call-to-arms mentalities are driven by branding, without having to succomb to branding-as-a-dirty-word, as in “I’ve got a webpage, so fuck your ad in the Daily Star” – Guess what Mr. Underground…both methods serve the same purpose.

So, I say, embrace your natural direction. Sooner or later, you’ll find kindreds. No need to stand in front of tanks as a motivator, only as a response.

But even the Beats, I’d say they only existed in academia, and as Kerouac and Ginsberg’s name for thier friends, but mostly they were a clique who got popular. I’m sure there were other literary movements going on even then, they just weren’t picked up by the academics, by the papers.

Can anyone really say that Naked Lunch and On the Road bear any similarity? I couldn’t. They’re as different as literature comes; one is a calculated ode to society, a satire and paregoric phillipic. The other is a love letter!

But they were used to contextualise a youth movement which they referenced: a “rejection of mainstream American values, experimentation with drugs, alternate forms of sexuality, and an interest in Eastern spirituality”, and in an attempt to contextualise those movements the academics bestowed attributes to the novels that actually contextualised them – but it was the mythology surrounding the books that provided a context, not the books themselves. The Beat movement came after the fact.

I think it’s a mistake in approaching the underground as a collective – maybe I’m wrong, I’ve never much desired to be part of the social-web of zines and movements, the few folk I have conversed with and the handful of communities joined has been more coincidence than a desire to get to know what’s happening in the underground. To me, though, they seem like a series of cliques of writers without an overarching agenda or similarity, beyond a lack of book deals – I don’t mean clique in a bad way, either – simply looking for a few folk to share work with in the thankless pits of obscurity. I think that is as it should be. I don’t think we’re splintered. For every Bizarro site, every author of Brutaliterature, there are more folk at places like the OWC, who, for lack of mainstream publicity, simply link to their work and go about reading others. I don’t think a manifesto is neccessary – like yourself, I guess. Though you’ve managed not to sneer at the undergroundists, I do think its important to point out any artificial artistic call-to-arms is more an attempt at branding and marketing, and though hypocritical in its plea for academic obscurity just as distasteful in a plea for academic notoriety. Non-chalance is the way to go. No manifesto. Just write. These generational signifiers are methods of control, I reckon. I’m not sure what I’m talking about anymore. Where am I? I wanted to find your interview with that Shipp guy. Christ.