ALT WRITE: A PODCAST OF REFORMATION?
There are many podcasts in the world; of that number, a vast subset cover the broad landscape of literature; of that number, a certain group discuss outsider lit. These podcasts themselves exist in a haze only marginally cut through by the search bar on Apple Podcasts, are hard to quantify and categorize, as many of them seem to be done by the seat of the pants. Some apparently donât want to be known, are unclear on the surface. A chthonic quality pervades these podcasts, an inwardness that betrays what seems to be the ubiquitous directive to make themselves public, to be clear, to be user-friendly and chipper.
Alt-Write, one of the more mysterious of these podcasts, has a forbidding title, evoking the tortured and frightening politics of the era, the âalt-rightâ which was deemed to be partially responsible for the victory of Donald Trump in 2016. Its logo on Apple Podcasts shows two cartoonish assault rifles crossed perhaps in an emulation of the symbolism used by militias or terrorist organizations. All this has the effect of scaring some people off and ushering others further inside an alien world.
The internal qualities of the show are no more soft and cuddly than the external armor suggests. The podcast, which currently has 31 episodes, began as a kind of interview show with guests from the swarm of personalities surrounding counter cultural publishers ExPat Press, Misery Tourism, and the environs. The interviews were conducted by the mystery man known pseudonymously as bibles, who had released several books including The Better Face of Fascism from ExPat Press (see my review of this book below).
bibles, as his nom de plume is stylized, is a spectral figure; if he were to appear in a cartoon he would be a kind of dotted outline in the shape of a man. Little is known about him, probably by design: he seems to live in Salt Lake City as a forklift operator at a steelyard. In fact, many podcast episodes are conducted while bibles is working behind the wheel of the forklift and traversing the workplace. He is a literary working man in an era of people working from home. You can hear the beeping sounds of the forklift and the crash of steel plates being moved, as well as the workplace banter between people, interrupting the podcast discussions. A sense of movement and restlessness pervades the podcast, especially biblesâ input. A major feature of the show, that I have detected, is the sound design which at its base is raw and subject to the vagaries and limitations of cellular networks and wifi zones of various strengths. People on the podcast are victims of technology and often drop out of range.
The podcast Alt-Write I compare to surrealists, not by content but by form. Imagine Breton and Eluard and Aragon wielding cellphones with poor coverage plans having group phone calls while riding buses around Paris in the inter-war years, going in and out of signal. Just when someone is about to deliver some concise insight they go out of range, like the anticipated climax of a dream that tantalizingly never comes. Also, on top of this raw footage, is the famous sound design and editing which takes over the sonic space as the episodes pile up. The sound design of the podcast is like an obstacle course of sound, forcing listeners to make within themselves sculptures of concentration. The theater of the mind wine is flowing strong. Itâs the effort of figuring out whoâs talking, what did they say, through a sometimes dense cage of noise collage. The Hour of Slack but with currentivism as the religion of sorts. Some whole episodes are just bibles working at the steelyard while Durban Mofferâs voice talks and taunts like a hallucinated voice in a schizophrenicâs head, a voice you donât answer but endure. A mass of echoes, reverb, crash editing, laugh tracks, immaturity, obscenity, a rustle of atoms gives way to profound lessons from bibles on the art of writing and editing and publishing (listen to the episode âNegative God,â from 17:00 to the end).
bibles strikes me as a combination of wise-cracking kid in my high school who was not afraid to mock, a motivational speaker for struggling writers, and David Koresh of the Branch Davidians of old. bibles is complicated. He is an evangelist of a movement, apparently original to him, called âcurrentivism.â Currentivism, as far as I have been able to deduce, which is not far, has something to do with an art and a literature which is happening ânow,â currently. Publishing writing on the Internet instantaneously, whether it be on Twitter, alternate platforms of communication such as Telegram (bibles especially favors this), or in the quasi-writing âdocumentationâ of publishing podcasts, is currentivist. I could be wrong, and in the absence of more clarifying explanations from the originator, all attempts to explicate it are at best valiant guesses. Currentivism is apparently contrasted with the type of traditional writing that must be composed, submitted, accepted, published, over an interval of time which is not current. bibles speaks of âbetrayalsâ of currentivism.
Notes on Form vs Content, some of which pertain, some donât
R Crumb the underground cartoonist being an excellent artist of âformâ but sucking at original content (just some guy standing on a corner yelling âhey kids! Wanna learn about wiping your ass?!?â). Crumb was best when illustrating other peopleâs content (the Kafka book, Book of Genesis, American Splendor). Mr Natural was an exception.
Frank Zappa and Mothers of Invention: their record Fillmore East - June 1971, musically great (form) but the lyrics are really shitty, misogynistic and juvenile sexual anecdotes (content). Adolescent showmanship. Somehow when itâs in Zappaâs voice you can contextualize it but not in the try-hard voices of Mark Volman and Howard Kaylan. Zappa has been criticized for being a musical genius but an obnoxious wiseass in his persona.
Looking for âfacialâ expression in genitalia, finding none. Plumbing shots in porn, the gullyworks. A demonic face composed of genitalia, laughing. Body parts with no meaning, even as they change, redden, become erect, glistenânot the meaning of the face, which some would say even that has no meaning either. Psychosomatic signaling, the âformâ of the body vs the content. Body language.
Content, whatever that means, seeks out platforms in our digital age like spores seeking Petri dishes to grow inâor electrons seeking the best shell-patterns to fall into. Content self-inhabiting through podcasts, online publications, subscriber lists. I wrote years ago chapters of a sci-fi novella called Niobe, on Facebook for a while and on my blog. It had readers, like a serial. A small crowd of people were clamoring in the moment of composition for the next episode and it helped me get through it. Cliffhangers at the end of every chapter, linkages, no money changing hands. I was in the flow of time in a way I havenât been in other instances of writing. I knew there was an audience of six or seven people who were drooling for the next chapter. It helped me finish the novella, it propelled me. Was this currentivist?
Immediate public platforms vs the âdelayâ of publication through books that take years to come into public view, lit mags that take months, etc. Acceleration and directness between creator and reader that could in some distant tenuous way mimic the urge for directness, cutting out the middle man, in the Protestant Reformation which cut out the established order of the Catholic Church and said that the relationship between God and man was direct and could be partially ascertained through publishing, books. Gutenberg was a currentivist. No, thatâs laughable. But the reformation may come again, spiritâs relation to flesh (in biblesâ parlance: see podcast episode _______) changing in result of new technologies, new modulations of communication and publishing. Form, platform, reformation.
Of biblesâ politics, and the politics of âAlt Writeâ as a podcast, I lack the surgical instruments to reveal. He wrote a novel called âThe Better Face of Fascism,â which I have reviewed on goodreads, and there I similarly avoided tackling the evident flirtation or subtle fascination with the right wing. I donât know why I have done this glossing over. Iâm not sure what to say. I feel as though that sophistication may come later, if at all. Another area I have avoided is biblesâ religion: he directly makes mention of his Mormonism, and the ways this has apparently influenced his aesthetic and artistic and ideological ideas is fascinating and again, beyond my abilities.
I confess an apprehension if not fear in writing about bibles and Alt Write. I respect him. I really liked the novel of his I read and I detect an original mind at work, an influencer, to use a word ride with connotations. bibles has a formidable (albeit hidden to the novice) celebrity and connection with alt-lit 2.0, outsider lit, whatever you want to call itâthis lack of accuracy in description is becoming a mantra. bibles is like a godfather. He has apparently receded from the podcast, people have left the show, it has become atomized, has transformed into a new phenomenon. Things donât stay static. The movement of the movement, as it were, stays as constant as the times: the current, whether it be fluid or electrical, must go from point A to point Z, and it doesnât wait for people to catch up.