Wozniacki Comeback

 

For a long time I’ve meant to write about Caroline Wozniacki, the Danish player (of Polish parents) who surprised me by retiring in 2020, at the age of 29. For as much as any player, she helped inspire Famepunk.

Specifically, I credit watching Wozniacki with a major plot point. In the first volume, US Open 1987, the heroine’s progress through the tournament is causing her to miss freshman orientation activities at the college of her dreams; in the end, she doesn’t go. College or career is a choice that tennis players aren’t alone in facing. For me, college was the only option, ever; most people I knew were the same, partly because we were none of us blessed with astonishing athletic talent. Caroline Wozniacki, who was, caught my notice early in her career when she started winning a US Open women’s warm-up tournament that used to be held every August in New Haven. I watched her play on cable TV, listened to her interviews; I was watching the night she put her ponytail into what became her trademark braid, which I never liked quite as well.

It might have been during a championship match when it occurred to me that Yale, seeing as how she was 18 and in town, ought to make Caroline Wozniacki an immediate offer of admission. It was clear to me that she could more than handle the work entailed to graduate at the top of her class. Maybe (definitely, I thought) tennis doesn’t need another young blonde goddess—not as much as the whole planet, really, needs intelligent, articulate, strong, healthy, charismatic young women who speak multiple languages fluently as teens, to study and train for leadership roles in the society to come.

2017; By Christian Mesiano – Caroline Wozniacki, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia

Yale would have been the starting point for that ascension I was picturing, and later played around with in Famepunk. I was sorry that Wozniacki didn't enroll at the time. Back then (2008 or 2009), the first objection to the idea would have been that compared to the pursuit of an undergraduate degree, even in New Haven, a full-fledged professional tennis career must offer immeasurably more key preparation for a successful life in the rooms of power—rooms already crowded with Ivy Leaguers whom her fame and wealth, self-earned, would start her on a step above. By this argument, naturally unanswerable then, once she played out her time in the WTA and retired a multiple champion, Caroline Wozniacki would pause, maybe marry and have children (as she has done), and then go out and take her place as an important decision-maker somewhere. Danish politics, diplomacy, major philanthropy or big relief projects, head of a green technology company—anything.

Instead, here we are, with the recent announcement that she’ll be competing next month in Canada preparatory to another crack at the US Open title. What happened? In the past year she’s already returned to tennis as a match commentator; she’s got a sleepy, Kim Novak-style voice which I don’t mind but no one would argue that we need more match commentators in the universe. This week she’s playing at Wimbledon in the Legends event, which brings retired players, many great names, back to the courts for the public to enjoy. But with players like Navratilova, Hingis, Sabatini there, no one is really clamoring to see Caroline Wozniacki, too, not when she’s only been gone a few years.

2019

What’s behind the comeback phenomenon? Is it really, as cynics suggest, that top players just can’t stand to give up the perks of a champion’s lifestyle? Or is it being the center of attention that they come to miss too much to stay away? It must feel like free money, after a point, if people keep letting you earn when you’re long past your prime; a nest egg, a comfortable cushion, or a grateful way out of some financial or family dilemma—comebacks must come in handy, for sure.

But the productive lifetimes of which we were cheated, somehow—they don’t come back. They never were. Admirable womanhoods of power, impact, and long duration, exchanged for short primes and six-decade twilights: someone with Caroline Wozniacki’s overall potential and abilities shouldn’t have become irrelevant to the rest of us so young. And she senses this, knows this; it’s why she’s coming back. Is she moving in the right direction, though? Now might be a better time to consider getting an advanced degree.

Surprise Obsolescence

It was billed as a safety measure in 1996 when professional tennis began replacing net cord judges and their fingertips (and their proneness to getting beaned by errant shots) with digital sensors. The electronic line call system used during every match at this year's US Open had a solid trial run as an anti-COVID technology. At first, since a pre-recorded human cry of “Out!” is triggered when a ball goes wide or long, it’s possible to overlook what’s missing: an entire profession. Line judging sparks a decisive turn in the final match climax of FAMEPUNK: US Open 1987 which could never happen now, twenty-five years after those fictional events.

The men and women who crouched and hunkered down and peered and saw, with notable accuracy, where the close balls fell were intriguing characters on the tennis courts in Queens. That they drew pay was a known fact. Not all were local, many flew in. Some had been unsuccessful players. From finding chances to preside at the smallest events they’d climbed a ranking board to reach the pinnacle, working these two weeks of August, outdoors, on their feet. The great hard courts look bare without them: factory floors emptied, mopped and made hygienic for the robot replacements’ sake. Touted as “cleaner”for players, viewers and sponsors, one upshot sees dozens of still-indispensable ball boys and balls girls thrown into higher relief. The line judges—their absence makes clear—had interposed a layer of responsible and adult presence between a sexually omnivorous world viewership and the ball kids’ flashing knees; oversized uniforms and all, child labor stays, adults go redundant, and the pedo class delights.

Chair umpires are still out there as well. As if to compensate for the loss of opportunities to overrule a line judge call, this current showboating generation finds ways to keep the cameras on itself, and in its meager celebrity might be allowed to age in place. Its successors are bound to be artificial: for chair umpires are only line judges who rose to the top and now sit up high, after years and years of being bent at the waist at the back of the court, crouching, peering, barking calls, enduring abusive tantrums. With the US Open off the table, who would persevere? A dry pipeline awaits.

Electronic line-calling also means the end of disputed calls--and with them an entire discourse, no less a part of a pro player’s “tennis vocabulary” than a slice or a grip. When every call is correct, there’s no space for expressing disagreement, disbelief, outrage; there's no one there to bitch at; there's no more buying time with a strategic sure-to-fail challenge. Countless acres of on-court drama and human engagement have been eradicated before they could happen.

Prophetess Motives

 

The women’s game had a bad reputation, in truth, because every few years since the First World War some teenaged girl would come along out of nowhere to beat all the established players back into historical footnotes—as if they hadn’t been playing the game properly, not for a while; as if they’d been subjecting the public to a charade with their cough-cough married lady patty-caking back and forth at one another; when some of these girls were so exceedingly young and they just beat everybody. It was difficult for women such as Cookie Toms who desperately wanted respect with a capital R to gain any traction in its pursuit because women’s tennis just didn’t look good to a great many people.

But Cookie and her band of like-minded players had persevered and prevailed.

 

This is from Middlemarch, Part 2 of Famepunk--a story which is looking very forward-looking, to say the least, today, when an virtually unknown qualifier still in her teens has just won the women's singles final at the US Open. In fact, the women's draw in the other half was wiped out by a hungry teen, too.

Congratulations to Emma Raducanu (above, right), and to her worthy opponent, 19 year-old Leyla Fernandez, who won many hearts with her valiant play this tournament.

In Emma Jasohn, the heroine of Famepunk, I'm proud to have created a champion who paved the way in fiction for a player to go from qualifier to trophy-holder in three weeks at Queens; in real life, it had never been done until now. 

What will come true next? Read the books and find out before it happens. 

But back to Cookie Toms and her band of like-minded players: this follows history pretty closely, and is modeled on "The Nine" who rebelled against women's second-class citizenship in professional tennis by starting their own association and tour, which Virginia Slims cigarettes sponsored. Fifty years later, what's now the WTA swims in money. Billie Jean King, model for Cookie Toms and like her the greatest of all champions, continues to deserve all accolades; and the sponsorships are still looking very suspect. A video tribute to The Nine, shown between Thursday's two women's semifinals, looked like this to those watching in the stadium and at home:

To be fair, in Dubai and (most of) the UAE, though their skirts had better reach the knee and spaghetti straps will not be tolerated, women are not required to cover their heads or faces in public. 

So Fly There Today!

 

The Tennis Fan Today (Part 1)

Professional tennis, and the watching of professional tennis, are two completely different matters. A person can love professional tennis as I do and yet never watch it, and not miss it, and not even mind when it isn’t being played. This empty Wimbledon pandemic fortnight, after the blank where Roland Garros should have been, leaves me shrugging with equal indifference. Of course, if Maria Sharapova hadn’t retired my guess is I’d feel differently, bothered at least if not somewhat heartsick on her behalf. I’d have loved to see her win more titles. But as it is, I don’t care.

Blame the impedimenta. To attending in professional tennis events in person in a normal year, a long list: inconvenience, jacked-up prices, extreme overcrowding, intrusive security, feral bands of child autograph hunters, terrible pop music playing on the changeovers (put this at the top of the list) and all over the grounds, the air thick with beeriness and meat smoke, the fatigue-slackened faces silvered by Jumbotron light pollution: a horrible time and this is with comp tickets, forget about having to pay for them.

But to follow from afar is not much easier nor any more pleasant. What started out, for one thing, as too many commercials has become too much to pay monthly for a premium cable subscription: an annoyance has grown into a major barrier. Beyond which is “the product” itself—always a product, professional tennis have never been more of one—how it looks and what it contains. When I’ve been able to watch on occasion these past several years, I’ve seen the commercials haven’t gone anywhere, they’ve multiplied inside the broadcasts and overrun the tournaments, the courts, the players’ persons. Information-wise, it’s a wasteland of pointless statistics, canned themes, obfuscation and hacky hagiography. The commentators chatter without ceasing. I especially dread the national embarrassment that settles in as the Americans mispronounce every single “foreign” player’s name. It’s deliberate, I’ve even heard them refer to the “Americanized version.” The embarrassment and sorrow at how our media hold us back, we the people who could use better training from childhood onward, these deep feelings get in there and spoil my enjoyment, over time they’ve helped to erode my wish to watch at all.

Slash a way through all these unpalatable trappings and there is professional tennis, the game itself and the act of watching it being played. Without question, we see our human civilization at a peak here—more than one, really. As sports go, like baseball, it’s full of perfections. Unusually, both sexes reach the highest levels of play, of reward, and of fame. The best men are like demigods. And where else have women, rising in white skirts out of immemorial subjections, made such a sustained display of active liberated female bodies, unrestrained and self-directed, excelling in competition? Simply to sit and reflect on the last century in professional women’s tennis is to be in touch with the highest ideals, while memory fills with heroics and proud moments. Tennis in thought is very beautiful.

In finding ways to make the pleasure of watching professional tennis outweigh the depressing nastiness of actually doing so, the modern fan leans hard on personalities. Attachments and infatuations bind us to the sight of certain players so that we’ll put up with the most aggravating coverage in return.  Also, great players, like Maria Sharapova, make it worthwhile to watch them. Though too many beautiful quiet tensions have gone from today’s noisy game (which despite what people say won’t be appreciably quieter in her absence when play resumes this year), a mute control brings goodness back, like a magic wand whose wave leaves us alone in the hush with our love idols.

I’d stopped muting Maria years ago, however, when I began to love the way she vocalized. Her whole game just captured me. Here is a tinyloop from a final she played at Stanford in August 2010. Victoria Azarenka’s voice is first, Sharapova’s second.

2nd Roland Garros title

About Tennis

The real one

US Open 1987 has been out and available for several years now, in its CreateSpace edition. As I began preparing the first Nostalgistudio edition for publication later this summer, I remembered that several people who read the book had told me they'd been a little lost at points because they don't know anything about tennis. For a tennis fan like me to hear this is shocking and sad, of course. I don't like to think of people being deprived of such an enjoyment--watching and being able to follow a good competitive tennis match is one of the higher pleasures in life, I think. As for the novel, the first chapter concerns a single fateful tennis match described in some detail. Those kind readers felt lost right away, this was the problem.

So I wrote some more text, a few pages to insert quite near the opening. If you've read the book and didn't get the tennis part, please accept this new material with my sincere and apologetic thanks. For newcomers, maybe people with some know-how about the game, I offer it for discussion. Did I miss too much again?

(The new excerpt is here.)

What a Wimbledon

Here I am spending hours and hours this fleeting summer in the preparation of new editions for Nostalgistudio of all three FAMEPUNK novels so far, immersed once again in women's tennis as a subject while simultaneously scanning its current state for promotional opportunities, ways to ride some surge in fandom into wider view. And what I see is so very far from promising anything of the sort, it might as well be a cloud of antitheses, when all but the seventh of the top ten ladies' singles seeds goes out in the first week. It's disgraceful and won't win fans--quite the contrary. Overpraised princesses wilting under a single round of pressure: no one wants to applaud that. To my personal horror, women's tennis has become the New York Mets. One loss, then two, then two others; they achieve something lemming-like, these super athletes in mostly identical dresses swatting forehands long.

via Gfycat

LAMENT out now!

Another new clay season

A little scare just now when I sat down to write a fresh entry and found myself signed out of my Blogger account after two years away. I could see my two little old sites still reading "me" but couldn't enter to refresh them, this one and Reading Les Miserables at Work out of my control only drifted there, like junked space stations, relics. I sat bewildered. Then I thought, Would it matter? What if What is Famepunk? ended randomly, years out of date, out of carelessness? Couldn't it go on that way, an old attachment, always linked? Old and dead, yes--but would it matter? With a lynch-pin of my creative life (even if it hasn't looked like one lately) not just threatened but gone, snatched away, rationalizing like crazy, I kept calm. My mind formed ideas for going on without it, unencumbered by women's tennis blogging. But I was self-disgusted. I felt the loss I'd brought on myself through inattention. In the end I tried another sign-in, the right one. I'm grateful to be back.

Аутсайдеры

Ostapenko versus Kasatkina. These are the outsidery finalists in this year's Charleston green clay tournament. Neither player seeded, none of the top ten seeds made it to the semifinals. Women's tennis continues down the path it's set itself.

Paying too much for not playing, paying too much attention to "storylines" over substance. And pampering, primping, pimping, party-dressing its "stars" for consumption--by whom? Who is even watching the WTA now? They haven't got a broadcast contract, they'd rather pay their executives than shell out for coverage. Who would want to watch? The outfits are all alike and all equally horrible. Meanwhile a virtually all-male coaching galaxy hovers over the enterprise sucking up cash and leaving blasted confidence.

As an outsider myself, I salute the young players (and the older over-the-hill but not players) who are looking at this situation as the opportunity it is. Good for Ostapenko! Good for Kasatkina! Good for Mirjana Lucic and Jo Konta and Elena Vesnina, good for the underdogs, all the "ovas" the others might mistake for nonentities. I'm not watching them either, but that don't mean a damn thing.

Sales update: All Famepunk books are now $2.99 each across all digital platforms. Writing update: I'm in year four of a book that takes place in the Soviet Union around the time of World War II; it isn't a tennis novel. But it will be good! Stay tuned for more about it.

Extended Quadruple Doubles Sale

In celebration of the world's greatest player, her doubles partners and the rest, the sale continues at Smashwords.

 

 

On Super Grand Slam Sale

For the duration of the 2015 US Open ALL THREE volumes of Famepunk are ON SALE FOR HALF PRICE at Smashwords. Will there be another calendar year Grand Slam winner in women's tennis--the first in 27 years? While you wait to find out, you can relive the last time with a strong dose of fiction in Part 2: Middlemarch. It takes place on The Tour in 1988.

 

Congratulations to the winners I watched on-line tonight--Nicole Gibbs (USA! USA), Kurumi Nara and the divine Petra Kvitova in her first night match in New York.

 

 

 

Lesbian Bar Scene / New Excerpt

Since last November, so for a year now, I've been working on a novel that takes place in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era. It's not Famepunk, in other words. I'd hoped to have finished it by now so that I could return to writing "the tennis novels" but it will take a while longer. And it will be good, I think!

 

Meanwhile, to celebrate the relaunch of my main website under its new name--liz-mackie.com--I'm posting an excerpt from the upcoming (someday not too long from now) Part 4 of Famepunk, which will be called Against Theodosia. This is the COMPLETE chapter excerpted in the "coming soon" scene that's included at the very end of Part 2: Middlemarch. It takes place around Thanksgiving in New York City (so, seasonal) in 1990, and it's called "In the Cubbyhole."

 

 

The picture here is from New York City in 1990 (except, summer) to set the tone. I had those shorts! The Cubbyhole is a lesbian bar in Greenwich Village which MAY OR MAY NOT have existed as I've depicted it in 1990; I thought it had but lately heard otherwise.

 

Picture source is Ann Bannon's site; here is a link, she is a hero of mine. Another interesting site I've found lately, also on Blogger, is devoted to Lost Womyn's Space and it's worth a long visit.

 

Happy Holidays dear readers--for me it's back to Odessa, 1941...

On Sale in July at Smashwords

Until the end of July, customers at Smashwords can get all three volumes of Famepunk for one low price of $7.50. The first two books are 50% off and the last one is FREE! Use code SSW50 at checkout.

After Wimbledon | Ladies

The scary Canadian tennis player Eugenie Bouchard hasn't managed to inspire any warm feelings in me in the couple of years since her star began to rise. She is aggressive and antique portrait bust pretty, very Gilded Age; other fans of Edith Wharton might have noted her exact-in-many-points resemblance to Undine Spragg. Yesterday at Wimbledon she played and was flattened 6-3 6-0 in the Ladies Single final. Even though I am a major Petra Kvitova fan, here was my chance to loosen the heartstrings and sympathize with the kid a little; I didn't, I enjoyed watching North American princess type Eugenie Bouchard get thumped and sent packing in less than an hour by "my" player. Very much!

 

Petra Wins Again

But ever since, when I think about what she was up against, thinking back on that match, I've felt more and more sorry for Genie Bouchard. In my mind's eye I can picture her, a pretty blonde girl with visor, braid, racquet, white multi-million dollar Nike contract tennis dress, the works--she's on one side of the net. And on the other side, I know, is Petra Kvitova, I've watched the match twice (on-line, via ESPN embedded on the Wimbledon site all the way through the finals, all courts, with replay, very civilized and great despite buffering problems). And I see Petra Kvitova; she just hit a crosscourt forehand. At the same time a spirit photography-style double exposure occurs in my memory and hovering all around her I see white brick walls and parts of industrial structures--concrete loading docks, power plant smokestacks, thick steel beams with rivets for their alien double spines. As I recall, I see poor Genie Bouchard with no weapons but a strong chin versus some kind of dark Satanic Mill, a human female mega-factory for the production of another Wimbledon title.

 

 

Hard, Fast and Beautiful

At a time (now, 2014) when women’s professional tennis is so rife with incompetence, gutlessness, malingering and fakery as to be practically unwatchable, I’ve turned to The Vaults. It’s possible to find quite a few interesting old matches on-line; the Australian Open posted some great ones on its web site that I watched during this last tournament, for instance.

And then there’s fiction.

Hard, Fast and Beautiful is a 1951 film directed by Ida Lupino (who was also an actress, of course) for RKO Pictures. It traces the meteoric career of a young tennis player who wins the women’s singles title at the US Open, only to find her hopes and dreams jeopardized and almost crushed by the machinations of her horrible mother. I will spoil the ending now by saying that in the end the young player quits and goes off in the arms of her fiancée, who promises to be a good earner.

 

The mother, played by Claire Trevor, is the star of the story. She is a cold bitch with a rotten character and an addiction to status, smoking, cocktails, fur coats, fancy hotels and basic cash money. Which is a problem for her because in the “pre-professional era” of international tennis, which didn’t actually end until 1968, tournament play was reserved for amateur athletes. The four “majors”—Wimbledon, Roland Garros, the United States Open, the Australian Championships—and other title events around the US and the world, did not offer prize money. If you won, you got a cup. If you wanted to make money playing tennis, you went “pro” and played against other pros on one of the exhibition circuits. (In 1952’s “Pat and Mike,” Katherine Hepburn’s character plays pro tennis, appearing at one point against Alice Marble who won many Grand Slam titles as an amateur; she also spied against the Nazis until she got shot in the back and had to go home.) Pro matches could be quite competitive but professional tennis wasn’t considered or expected to offer true competition in the sense that amateur tennis did.

So poor Millie Farley (the mother) does what she can to leverage her champion daughter’s world-class but non-paying titles into a living. She joins forces with a suave scumbag talent scout-manager-promoter and in no time at all her daughter’s getting free racquets, free clothes, and big checks made out to “Cash” from major hotel chains who want her as a guest. There’s a big mother-daughter confrontation when young Florence Farley wins Wimbledon and comes back drunk from the post-finals ball to their huge suite at the Piccadilly Hotel, where she reveals that none of the other girls get to stay in huge suites and that she’s being ostracized because of her ill-gotten gains. Millie doesn’t want Florence to turn pro—she just wants her to keep winning so that they can keep traveling around the world in luxury. But eventually (see above) this becomes too much to ask and Florence quits. Millie has a downfall.

This movie, its fine acting and dramatic qualities aside, offers a wonderful look back at a vanished world. The US Open scenes were filmed on location at Forest Hills, right in the grass court stadium, and also at the Forest Hills Inn (which still exists, though not as a hotel now, it’s co-ops). All the play is with wooden racquets and it’s extremely good play, complete with lots of strategy and “American Twist” serves. In one montage all the old East Coast tournaments show up—Philadelphia, East Hampton, a couple in New Jersey, there was even one in Essex, Massachusetts. Upper-class white East Coast Yankees (redundant, redundant) coming out to watch white women play tennis, with no money casting its sullying shadow over the enterprise, pure competition—this was the picture of a dream world.

 

Forest Hills, Queens

 

Of course people always took money. Perks. There must have been a lot of gambling. Match-fixing. The pure amateur was a figure of myth long before the sport was professionalized. Poor Millie, all alone at the end, the bad mother. She has a bad greed problem and that made her a bad person by the stated standards of her day. But looking at the ending of Hard, Fast and Beautiful from the perspective of 2014, when Dominika Cibulkova (a nice girl, no question) got $1,350,000 for winning six games in the Australian Open final, it’s harder to judge, hard not to sympathize.

Maybe the greedy people were simply ahead of their time.

Partly Free Until Epiphany

Happy Boxing Day! In honor of the season, until January 6, 2014 I will be giving away FREE print copies of Famepunk Part 3: The Lutheran. Just send your mailing address of choice to liz@famepunk.com and give it a week or so.

At your request, I'll send you a BONUS digital copy. . .and if you've already bought a copy of The Lutheran, please let me know. I'll send you a copy of something else.

A Modern Holiday Classic (Updated)

I spent all summer into October working on a long chapter from Against Theodosia, the next volume of Famepunk. I called it The Lutheran. When it was done, I put it aside for a month. My plan was to publish the chapter as a Christmas-themed Kindle Single and use it to "draw people into" the rest of the series at the buying time of year.

So I spent part of the fall slacking off from being a financially unsuccessful writer. I read a lot and watched movies, it was wonderful. Then I got involved in another writing project, unrelated to Famepunk but still, coincidentally, with Russian and Jewish characters. I was really getting into it but then ran into Thanksgiving. At which point the first Sunday in Advent, my deadline, loomed.

With the help of kind readers (Claudia, Rags & James) I was able to make pretty quick work of the final revisions. The cover design went very smoothly; in PhotoShop I was able to copy over the basics of the previous cover designs, having learned how to do this while making them. Then, on the last morning of the last minute before publishing, I decided that it wasn't a chapter from Part 3--it was a part itself. Which makes it Part 3: The Lutheran.

Like a flash, I finish the cover, prepare all the text files, fiddle fiddle fiddle upload and quickly publish digital versions for Kindle & Smashwords. A week later, Amazon lists the elegant-122 page print paperback version, a nice little slim little self-contained story that skips ahead in the Famepunk chronology to the very end of 1991 when the heroine, Emma Jasohn, is about to have a baby. To some degree, the whole thing really is a Christmas story.

It's also a comedy about the Protestant Church. The lead character (The Lutheran) is a stranger to the Famepunk story who gets hired as Emma's emergency German tutor. He's German and so is his (also pregnant) wife, they both attend Union Theological Seminary where they're honing their skills and qualifications for the Lutheran priesthood. So this is the part of my subversive lesbian global-historial romance that's told from the point of view of a heterosexual male.

Technically, I felt it was the best choice, in large part because it absolved me of having to write so intimate an account of "the process" as I might have attempted otherwise. It wouldn't have been very good. Third trimester pregnancy, amniotic fluids, contractions, labor pains, crowning, placenta--what do I know? I think undergoing this experience sounds horrible.

The thing is, I have never had a baby. I've never wanted to have a baby, care for a baby, raise a baby, at all. Neither does Emma Jasohn, she is unwillingly pregnant, carrying a baby she doesn't want to full term because the people who control her life plan to profit from this baby--which, in her case, will be a celebrity baby, since she's famous and the baby's father is, too. But while I was writing this part of the story I thought a lot about how many girls and woman have babies they don't want, every day the unwanted are born to miserable mothers imprisoned by their own circumstances.

And still those mothers and children turn out okay all the time. So, Merry Christmas...buy a book!

Avatars!

Difficult to Categorize | 7 | Have I Transgressed?

Practically at the very moment of release from my strangulating 6-month Kindle Select exclusive, I finally published the Smashwords edition of Middlemarch. Which means that in a few more days it will be available for iPads and Nooks and phones and everything—digital saturation. I’ve been all over the Kindle Direct Publishing site and the Smashwords dashboard among the files at my accounts doing this. I’ve checked the sales data. I haven’t made any sales at all.

But I persevere! After two weeks of tinkering I’m finally happy again with the front page of my web site. I’m content to stop, despite the dead javascript in Her Attractive Pain and Cloak which I just don’t know how to fix (and it’s still alive in Explorer). My work so far is there, the best I could do at the time. Of course it’s not everything. I’ve got cartons of writing on paper. Lots of the old stuff is on typing paper—typed!—and a great deal else (including a novel) printed from files stored inaccessibly throughout a deep wooden desk drawer full of different-sized disks; I’ve got hardware to match piled in corners and closets, busted and unsupported. To put more old work on-line, I’ll have to re-type it.


Throw rice!

In early 2001, when I could still open some of those old files, I converted two of them into web projects to build out RIP-TV beyond the diaryland site. An episodic autobiographical piece about my luck (bad) with women, One and Others was written and pieced together over the course of many years. The web version is the first complete one; it’s organized around several views of a painting of my sister’s that I keep above my desk. The title is stolen from a small-scale wooden sculpture by Louise Bourgeois that I first saw with my after-college girlfriend (who’s in the story) at MoMA in the 1982 one-woman retrospective, an unforgettable show. Not long ago I saw One and Others again, it’s on Madison Avenue in the Whitney’s permanent collection, near the bathrooms; I recognized it right away coming out. In tribute to its undimmed allure, I’ve replaced the Soviet work propaganda that I’ve been using as the linking “tile” at RIP-TV with a photo of the thing itself.


The site’s other pre-digital story, Girls School, I wrote start to finish in the fall of 1995 as my contribution to a lesbian writing workshop I was taking with nice lesbian friends in Central Square, Cambridge. It was composed under the influence of a cover-to-cover Columbus Day weekend reading of Harold Bloom’s The Western Canon that I did on my own. Which (the Western canon, especially Macbeth) remains to me what Girls School is about, although it is a lesbian porno climaxing in a sex ritual. I did a serial on-line publication, each installment illustrated with a collage made from an image in the Taschen paperback 1000 Nudes. For years I’ve had the finished version linked to a lesbian pair study from the same source with a Constructivist graphic cut into one of the bodies, an image I consider ample warning; I’ve kept and cropped it for the latest front page design.

May 2013 and I’ve had those two stories on my web page which I’ve shared widely for over a decade; I always put my web page address on my business resume, too. But somehow until recently I thought So what? about that. I wasn't unaware of how I was outing myself, but I was indifferent. The lesbian thing wasn’t really my focus; I was interested in writing in different voices and crafting hypertexts and creating on-screen beauty. In my work the lesbianism was content, it was just one type of subject matter among many contributing to the flow of words: this is how I saw it. Maybe writing Middlemarch changed me—anyhow my point of view has changed. The lesbianism looks extremely significant to me at the present time. Of course I’ve always realized that vast numbers of people can’t tolerate lesbians at all, not even the marrying child-rearing kind and certainly not the sex ritual enacting kind. I don’t care at all about these people’s feelings, but being more aware of them makes me care more about lesbians. I want to support and encourage lesbians in their lesbianism through an offering of literature. I hope it helps.


So at last I’m posting Middlemarch on Smashwords, and here comes the category choice. In support of lesbianism I go with Fiction—Gay & Lesbian—Lesbian for the primary listing and Fiction—Historical—USA for the back-up. Literary Fiction I passed by, as planned; Women’s Fiction tempted me, Women’s Fiction—Feminist tempted me. The category that sounded most fitting, I didn’t choose either: Fiction—Literature—Transgressional. But the first time I saw that category, it seemed to flash.

It felt almost too fitting. What doesn't Famepunk Part 2: Middlemarch transgress? Look what it does to the historical record, for starters! Crossing lines everywhere, crossing all the lines, violating all the boundaries, walking into lines of nightsticks on every hand: my book does this with its tits out. It’s ridiculously transgressive. I mused. Transgressional: maybe these are my people.


Me

Then I thought, Hey, wait a minute. What’s with Transgressional? What happened to Subversive? So I looked and there’s no category line for Fiction—Literature—Subversive or for anything Subversive. That category—a genuine category, one of long standing and high repute in many circles, historically important circles—is gone, it’s missing; Subversive is history. To say, I have set out to undermine a faulty structure and help to bring it down isn’t the choice now. Instead, I transgress: the focus of agency shifts from the structure to the property lines, from cores to boundaries, from danger to nuisance, naughtiness. Why should this be? Subversive is maybe passé, too blunt and opinionated, too butch, too innocent, maybe; Transgressional offers the almost to subversive’s too much for the sensitive 21st-century ear. Maybe this is the thinking, that Subversive has evolved, that it’s gained self-awareness and done some re-branding and now it’s Transgressional. Its politics informed by psychology, recognizing protest as neurotic symptom, it prods the reasonable walls until they bite.

I’d have loved to label Fampunk as subversive literature (which it might be) and fight it out with the competitive anarchists and would-be Kaczynskis for a readership.

Difficult to Categorize | 6 | Is it Literary Fiction?

To be truthful, to be honest with myself, I fear that Famepunk belongs in the worst category of all. In my secret opinion it couldn't be worse.

To me, Literary Fiction sounds awful. The words conjoined, they look okay at first and then, no, they also look awful. This is the category with the gold leaf encrusted, the greedy of glittering prizes one. Literary Fiction: boom, there it is, dropped down and stuck on alphabetical lists smack between dozens of choices where its pretentious “as-opposed-to” tone insults most writers of fiction, actually; I think the majority of us hope to be read by the ages. Here is a box I’d much rather not click—except that I’d still like to qualify as a serious fiction-writer whose work is worth reading.

It’s a quandary. 

Because however putrid Literary Fiction sounds and is as a category, Famepunk is literary fiction. That is, it’s written specifically in relation and response to many other works of fiction, old & new, high & low, but especially in reaction to great literature; it’s a book about literature and about itself as literature. See, for instance, the title of Part 2. Or that in writing the many sex scenes in Middlemarch  I was directly influenced by D.H. Lawrence and especially The Rainbow (banned in Britain 1915-26), and maybe too much by Joseph Conrad whom I was reading devotedly last year. Sometimes I let influences like this guide conscious choices; mostly I was being as descriptive as possible, without any particular regard to influence, of the vivid scenes in my imagination which I was taking down as best I could. But I’m a reader (movie buff, play-goer, art lover, opera-to-rock music fan) of very long standing and somehow, I believe, everything in there is emerging and recombining into Famepunk. Experience is influence, too—everything is influence. All the material is autobiographical.

Maybe for that reason, I think of Famepunk as my personal contribution to literature. Is that pretentious? I don’t know. Pathetic? I don’t think so—not in my opinion. I think I’m doing well and that my writing is clear and straightforward and not pretentious at all. I know it’s different but then I mean it to be different. I intend it to be art. Am I ambitious to be classed among the great, inspired and visionary writers? Yes. Obviously I want this. Why not? What a scandal it would be otherwise—how could I want less than this when both heroines in my novel, among their few redeeming features, are great achievers and visionaries? Should I, their creator, aspire to be less? Never.

So am I untrue to my quest, my gestalt, if I choose something “less than” Literary Fiction to define not just the book but its reason springing from within myself for being? Or can I just say, honestly, you know, I still don’t like the way it sounds, namely snooty—as in entitled—and awful. Not to mention how the label has become practically a by-word for fakery and corruption and that it’s completely impossible not to picture a world encircled by writers sitting at desks in their faculty offices, slathering one another’s review copies with rapturous blurbs. They always mention genius. I can’t embrace the category because I feel so alienated from everyone who’d feel fitted to a T, who wouldn’t even think twice. Writers who wouldn’t accept anything less than a shot at a place in the pantheon—that rogues' gallery.