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From Marxmail, November 1999:
At 11:58 AM 11/17/99 -0500, Michael Yates wrote:
>The issue of ironic writing and discussion has come up on various
>lists. We had an interesting discussion of this and related topics last
>night in my prison class. The subject was the drug trade, a subject
>about which my students knew a great deal. The assigned article for
>discussion was "The Political Economy of Junk," written by novelist Sol
>Yurick and published many years ago (1970, Dec. issue) in Monthly
>Review.
I haven't seen hide nor hair of Sol since the early '80s when I took a
class on "Great Literature" with him at the Brecht Forum. This was one
of the most outstanding classes I've ever taken on or off campus,
including my days in the SWP when I had a chance to study labor history
with the guy who trained Jimmy Hoffa how to organize over-the-road truckers.
Sol's survey basically looked at the canon from the point of view of how
ruling class attitudes are projected, from the Old Testament to
Shakespeare. While much of the specifics are dimmed by the passage of
time, I remember the general sense of glee I felt at seeing all the
"great books" exposed as propaganda. I suspect that Sol was being
deliberately overstated and provocative, but he certainly had a way of
making you look at things critically.
He wrote the classic 60s novel "Bag", which dealt with his experiences
as a welfare worker. I too had put in some time with the Welfare
Department, which led to my radicalization in 1967. In more recent
years, he had turned his attention to the sort of cyber-espionage
thrillers that people like William Gibson turned out, but with a lot
more intelligence. I particularly recommend "Richard", which deals with
a plot to take over the world using artificial intelligence.
Here is an item from a conference sponsored by Brown University's
"Unspeakable Practices":
===
The death of avant-garde? Vanguard writers debate
"New styles, new content, but also the ability to make straight society
tremble is gone," Sol Yurick tells "Unspeakable Practices" session
By Richard P. Morin
Novelist Sol Yurick leaned into the microphone and made a simple, yet
powerful, statement: The avant-garde is dead. It was a peculiar judgment
given the fact that it was spoken during a vanguard narrative festival.
Yurick made his seemingly prophetic remark at last week's "Unspeakable
Practices III," a literary conference constructed by Robert Coover,
adjunct professor of English, which called together more than 40 writers
from around the world for five days of readings, performances and symposia.
Events included hypertext, cyberfiction and transoceanic readings, and
conversations among American and British writers via a teleconference
with London. There were readings from major American, Spanish,
Philippine, British and Latin American authors whose prose often pushed
the bounds of style and imagination. There was even an all-night finale
filled with readings, performances and music.
It seemed as if the avant-garde was alive and well.
"What we used to call the avant-garde is dead," said Yurick at the
symposium titled "Dumping the Century," a fin de siècle judgment of this
century's literary achievements and prospects for the next. "New styles,
new content, but also the ability to make straight society tremble is gone."
At the Oct. 3 session, Yurick asserted that there isn't the possibility
for anything truly new in modern literature. "Everything is theme and
variation," he said. "Are we in some way limited by biology?"
The conference was co-sponsored by the Program in Creative Writing, the
Department of Hispanic Studies and the John Hawkes Fund.
--Louis Proyect
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