literature

How Ernest Hemingway Reinvented the Literary Game

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AN ANALYSIS

When “Shock of the New” artistic change happens, which resets everything involved with an art form, later generations look back at the change as a given. The cultural earthquake becomes an accepted part of the environment. Only if you go back in history to grasp the pre-moment– the world, the art, as it existed before the change– can you understand the full impact.

Such is the case with Ernest Hemingway.

You could say Hemingway was the Beatles of literature. He became the face of a stylistic reinvention of the art– a reinvention now largely discarded by literati– and a role model for that always-endangered animal: male writers. The list of American authors inspired by his success is a long one: J.D. Salinger; James Jones; Irwin Shaw; Norman Mailer, James Baldwin; Gore Vidal; Richard Yates; Herman Wouk, to name several, each of them in pursuit of that elusive prey, the Great American Novel.

ASPECTS OF CHANGE

STYLE: Ernest Hemingway’s compressed, less-is-more writing style was based in part on the innovations of Gertrude Stein and Sherwood Anderson, but also on his observation of Impressionist painters like Cezanne, who could create an image and capture a moment in time with a few brush strokes. Give the right detail and the observer’s brain fills in the rest.

Hemingway applied the same principle to writing. (As would under-appreciated French detective writer Georges Simenon.) The goal: more sense of immediacy; increased intensity.

Ernest Hemingway made writing look easy– when his technique was anything but. The minimalists of the 1980’s were, for the most part, a caricature of the Hemingway style. Not to mention most pop detective fiction! See Mickey Spillane. Simenon without the humanity.

The trick when assessing Hemingway’s work is treating it as a starting point, not an end point. He opened a door that other writers– including today’s writers– need to jump through.

DESIGN: Ernest Hemingway was, like his friend F. Scott Fitzgerald, a student of overall narrative design, most evident in his two famous short stories of the 1930’s, “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber” and “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

The former artfully switches viewpoints throughout, from Margaret Macomber to Wilson the big game hunter, to Francis Macomber. At one point the story enters the viewpoint of a lion! Masterful.

PERSONA: The 1920’s, care of the Lost Generation of expat writers in France and Spain, is looked back at as the most glamorous period of American writing. F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway– public figures both– were as celebrated as rock stars. A large part of this was the swaggering Hemingway persona. The two, in different ways, made writers cool again, as they hadn’t been since Byron. The literary scene became exciting.

Ernest Hemingway ended up as big, or bigger, a cultural figure as pop singers, athletes, and movie stars.

(image c/o Everett)

Can Ernest Hemingway be a model for writers now?

You won’t find a better one!

-Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit NEWS

Achieving Artistic Breakthrough

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EVERYONE involved with today’s literary scene knows the art is in trouble. Complaints pour in from every direction. “Not enough male readers!” “The New Yorker story is overwritten!!” “Genre fiction is all the same!!!”

Proposed solutions to the problem are tepid at best. Needed: drastic change in the art itself to better connect literature to the general public. To wake people up. To shock the world like a sudden surge of electrical current leading to artistic and cultural–

BREAKTHROUGH!

To get to that point, all received wisdom– every stale assumption about what is-or-isn’t allowable– needs to be set aside. Prevailing prescriptions for the health of the literary art don’t work.

THE STATUS QUO

The problem with approved literary intellectuals is they know only one direction. They pursue it relentlessly, under the influence of their literary gods and icons. The Approved Canonical Works: texts written as if existing within a narrow corridor, the narratives trapped, unable to escape. The reader follows the verbiage as it travels along, constricted, words following words, then more words. Where is it headed? What does it mean?

Professors are employed full-time at universities to explain what it means, along with esteemed critics– stuffed and mounted on metaphorical walls– at highly touted stuffy publications, and you can only say in response to their explanations, “Makes sense, I guess?” Bullied to accept every part of it, because, after all, these are the experts. Authorities. A circle of approval perpetuating itself like a clock, existing without independent thought.

But those approved tomes haven’t connected to your life or the ongoing life of the society around you. They haven’t moved or enlightened you and they certainly haven’t entertained you.

When it comes to saving literature, the only credible solution is to turn pop into art– or art into pop.

BUT HOW?

Our primary idea has been pop-lit: the fusion of popular writing with the “literary” to create an all-new hybrid reflecting the best of both styles. Going a step beyond that, more recently we’ve been working on “hyper-pop” multiple viewpoint stories in order to achieve a quicker, quirkier, more 3-D effect. (See, for one example, the novella The Loud Boys.) Impetus for this is our belief that anyone who can radically change the art of fiction, improving the reading experience, will own the future of the art.

We see the New Pop Lit project as an Innovation Island, but without the crutch– the necessity– of new electronic technology. THAT innovation wave has peaked, and is showing signs (AI) of increasing desperation to keep the investment bubble backing it inflated.

Better: A new wave of creativity based on long dormant human-centered innovation.

WAVE THEORY

Most people in this mad technocratic world are indoctrinated from birth into a linear mindset. One step followed by another. This includes a progressive, linear view of history. They’re unaware of the concept of waves, articulated by Nikolai Kondratieff, Ralph Nelson Elliott and others. The question always is where a cultural form is, in its particular wave or cycle. In the early stages? Ascending? Peaking? At a plateau? In decline?

BOTTOMING OUT? Which is where I place American literature at the present moment.

THE LAST GREAT CULTURAL WAVE

That would have to be rock-pop music, which coalesced around various strains of roots music– blues, folk, gospel, country– in the mid-20th century, before igniting and taking off like a rocket ship on February 9th, 1964, when The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show.

INSTANTANEITY

To better understand exactly what happened then– the quick cultural breakthrough– I’ve been reading several books on the period. Among them, Revolution In the Head by Ian MacDonald, which analyzes Beatles records and their impact. One term MacDonald uses caught my attention: instantaneity. He described it as “an elusive maelstrom of fragmentary impressions, perceptions, and jokes reflecting the collage spirit of an instantaneous, simultaneous, chance-embracing new age.”

But, he adds: “Not that The Beatles were fans of formlessness; quite the opposite.”

Structured chaos? A controlled cultural nuclear explosion? The term, anyway, gives us much to think about as we attempt to leap ahead of the literary pack with new artistic ideas.

-Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit NEWS

Has Literature Failed the American People?

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WHY THE LITERARY GAME NEEDS TO CHANGE

ONE OF THE MOST consequential elections in American history took place on November 5th, 2024 and literature absented itself. The newly elected President is already making threats against Canada, Mexico, Great Britain and Greenland, and literature has absented itself. Unprecedented wealth in the hands of a few individuals; the rise of super-plutocrats like Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. Perhaps the dawn of the end of the American republic as we know it. Plans to deport twenty million people; threats to cut benefits to veterans and the poor; Elon Musk prepared to grab control of the executive branch and its agencies while making Congress and the Supreme Court puppets or redundant– but established literature, its authors and commentators are nowhere to be found. They’re writing interior monologues, or descriptions of trips to Tuscany, or giving prim readings in New York City at KGB. The country’s about to collapse, the world’s in turmoil, but our privileged literati in their isolated bubble are safe. Or mindlessly complacent.

WHERE ARE GREAT POPULIST NOVELS?

Meaning: novels which can stir the masses and the mandarins as novels once did– as Jack London (The Iron Heel) and Frank Norris (The Octopus) did in reaction to money-grabbing robber barons and monopolists in their day, the early 20th Century– causing President Theodore Roosevelt to act. To move against greedy plutocrats, John D. Rockefeller and his like, who in comparison to today’s ruthless mega-billionaire robber barons were mere shopkeepers.

WHERE ARE THE CRITICS?

Where are the art’s navigators assigned to plot course and steer the ship of literature?

Are they penning unreadable conglomerations of words discussing an art viewed through layers of other people’s musings? Or reviewing irrelevant solipsistic books pushed out by the “literary” arm of the Big Five? While tragedies of the world take place around them, and the floor of their own society begins to sink under their feet?

They seem to think they’re still in the higher reaches of the academy, writing to impress faculty advisors.

The literary art? Does it live, reaching an engaged public? Or is it buried beneath an avalanche of blather?

It’ll have to be dug out with shovels, or by giant mechanical earthmovers.

Time to rescue it.

-Karl Wenclas

All About “The Loud Boys”

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NOW AVAILABLE at both Amazon’s Kindle Store and at Kobo—

–the new hyper-pop multidimensional novella, The Loud Boys.

Cast of Characters:

VAN HECKLER

Dark web podcaster and volatile leader of the most notorious gang of right-wing extremists ever seen.

DARA DEFIANT

Beautiful-but-inscrutable news reporter and Substack writer carrying a dark secret.

ABIGAIL SHRUB

In-your-face woke attack dog.

FAKE FACE

The city’s richest and most renowned business speculator doubling as a mobster.

JEREMY SMITH

Flamboyant #2 Loud Boy.

RASHEEN HOLLERAN

Manager of a homeless shelter in The Forgotten Zone.

TERRY THE HOOD

Ambitious hired killer.

HOWELL

New publisher of a failing newspaper.

THE THREE HERMITS

A rap group.

MUGGS

The most dangerous Loud Boy.

***

HOW will these personalities clash and conflict in the most beaten-down American city of them all?

FIND OUT!

The Loud Boys. Dystopia now. This isn’t fantasy– it’s today’s reality.

The Inside Game of AI

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WHILE BOTH the literary establishment and the broader lit-mag world dawdle, tech bros are investing large sums of money toward the goal of taking over the publishing world– as outlined in THIS hair-raising article about a company called Inkitt. The article doesn’t give the entire story: that the chief Venture Capitalist backing the project, billionaire Vinod Khosla, co-founded Sun Microsystems decades ago and went on to invest in, and make a fortune from, several enormous tech projects since. Now he’s looking for new territory to conquer. His current target: the literary world.

WHAT’S HAPPENING

What’s happening is an ongoing accelerationist blitzkrieg, fueled by billions in VC money. The goal: to take over industry after industry, using the tool of AI. “Move fast and break things” has long been the tech mantra– to spread the use of new technology as quickly as possible, allowing momentum itself to bypass slow-moving regulations and protests. To make adoption of the technology an accomplished fact.

MEDIA INFRASTRUCTURE

A large advantage tech companies have over traditional publishers– not to mention over low-rent literary outfits like New Pop Lit— is a tech media infrastructure in place ready to make PR noise about everything done by technology companies, large and small. This particular story about Inkitt, for instance, was covered not just by Tech Crunch, but also by dozens of other tech media outlets– coverage a standard small press outlet would never receive. In addition, business media flagships like Fortune Magazine are now devoting a huge amount of time and space to everything AI related, and are in business arrangements with AI companies, pumping onto social media outlets, like X, ads disguised as news articles.

How do poorly-funded literary outfits compete? We need to find ways to compete.

PRODUCER-DRIVEN ART

The goal, as outlined with the Inkitt strategy, is to model the literary business on what happened to the music industry, where creators aren’t artists themselves, but producers, who use computer technology to create the superstructure of a song, with an artist’s voice one of several tools layered into the recording. (With AI, a real human voice will no longer be required.) This process is well described by John Seabrook in his book, The Song Machine: Inside the Hit Factory. The key figures in Seabrook’s narrative are two producers who created the careers of pop stars Britney Spears, Katy Perry, Rihanna, and many others: Dr. Luke and Swedish-born Max Martin. They set a pattern that was followed by other entrepreneurs– and taken to extremes by South Korean Lee Soo-man’s SM Entertainment Company, creator of enormously successful K-Pop music. According to the Wall Street Journal, SM spends $3 million on meticulously training and molding each manufactured pop idol. The singers play their parts, but the music and presentation are the carefully-choreographed products of a billion-dollar entertainment company which calls all the shots.

This is a far cry from a Bob Dylan writing his own songs, then performing them himself with only an acoustic guitar and a harmonica.

Is this the future of the writer? To provide a name, face and semblance of a novel– then the tech corporation does everything else? A world of difference from the DIY ethos of print zines, and of the Underground Literary Alliance, which in the early 2000’s constructed the foundations of a cooperative literary movement in which writers themselves would make all decisions and be in total control of their own art; of every aspect of the publishing and promotional process.

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

IF outfits like Inkitt are successful, one can expect that Big Five publishing will either mimic the strategy of new AI publishers, or buy them out. Then there are “self-publishing” (vanity press) outfits like Mindstir Media. Mindstir, whose packages for would-be authors with money to burn range from $3299 to $30,000, already uses AI voices for their customers’ audio books. Will they also begin using AI for the editing/creation of the books themselves, in order to inexpensively grab more customers?

In any case, the market will be swamped by more and more AI-generated books, with plots and characters following the dictates of algorithms. Computer-programmed literature for a computer-programmed world, human beings used as both tools and consumers, a handful of giant corporations run by mega-billionaires making all profits.

Alternatives need to be found for this nightmare scenario. We believe the only viable alternative for human creators to follow will be human-centered– drawing on our human souls and natural abilities to create literary works more relevant and meaningful than anything produced by inhuman bots and soulless conglomerates.

-Karl Wenclas

Shakespeare and Creativity

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Shakespeare and friends at the Mermaid Tavern by John Faed

ONE THING to be noticed about the use of A.I. programs for writing, copyediting, and education is the way the programs enforce conformity and stifle creativity by forcing written language into an ever-narrower template of rules. Type something “wrong” in a document or email and the “correction” instantly appears. I’m sure most writers, especially new ones, immediately comply.

(The latest step in conformity is ChatGPT, which will do all your writing for you, by recycling lines and ideas from past writing– with not a shred of originality. We have a petition ongoing about that matter, which we suggest everyone read.)

Yet these processes, spawned by top-down systems, work contrary to the mode of operating of the greatest writer of them all, one William Shakespeare.

Stratford Will grew up in a time and place that was still largely an oral culture. Written communication was used first for legal documents, while the printing of books was strictly controlled and limited. Language was a verbal phenomenon, and that’s how people used it. Dictionaries had yet to be invented, while grammar was in a state of flux. Spelling was creative, to put it mildly– often used to give cues for how sentences were spoken— which words or syllables to emphasize, depending on context. Spoken language was the main thing– especially for Will and his colleagues in their acting company, as their art was a verbal, not written, art. Literature, for them, was a very different creature for them from what it is for us today.

In other words, it was a milieu designed for creativity. Everything about William Shakespeare’s life enhanced that freedom of creativity. Rules? What rules?! Shakespeare invented hundreds of words, often by turning nouns into verbs. (Today he’d be told, by a teacher or professor or bot, “You can’t do that!”) He was the son of a glovemaker, perhaps learned some of the trade himself, receiving the mental stimulation which comes from skilled manual labor. Also of course, he wasn’t just a writer, or just an actor, but more. Like his fellows, Will was a businessman, stagehand, salesman, and part everything else that went into the acting company’s productions. A jack-of-all-trades, or a “Johannes Factotum” as he was once scornfully described.

FINDING THE REAL SHAKESPEARE

Ironically, it’s the Stratfordian establishment itself which has perpetuated misconceptions of the man, his friends, and his times, in their effort to canonize him.

(Something similar happened with the Beats here in the USA. Free-wheeling fun-loving bohemians taking joy in words and art, they’ve been co-opted in total by a rigidly elitist literary establishment– canonized; or rather fossilized, preserved in amber and placed behind glass– though no one should dare write or behave, in this constipated world, too much like them. As evidenced by a protest at Columbia University back in 2006 by a performance troupe of which I happened to be part.)

The mistake academies make about Shakespeare’s poems and plays is treating them as artworks to be read– when they were created to be seen and heard. To be performed. Without that performance one can’t fully understand the plays or the men who created them.

To find the real William Shakespeare one has to read up on his friends and partners in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men acting company, started by working class carpenter, actor, and entrepreneur James Burbage and his two sons. The company was a collection of characters. My favorite might be Robert Armin, a goldsmith apprentice who was sent one day to collect a debt owed his master. Unable to collect it, he scrawled witty verses of complaint on the walls of the inn with chalk. Queen Elizabeth’s personal jester, Tarlton, noticed them and recruited young Armin into a different form of apprenticeship– one of acting, comedy, and playwrighting. (Note the suffix of “wright”: one who builds, repairs, or creates, such as a shipwright. The connection between skilled manual labor– dextrous work done with the hands– and literary creation.)

KEYS TO CREATIVITY AND ART


Vincent van Gogh’s artistic wonders were based on his ability to escape the systems of his day– to seek grounding in earthy reality. Here’s a quote from one of his letters to his brother Theo:

I wish those who mean well by me would understand that my actions proceed from a deep feeling and need for love, that recklessness and pride and indifference are not the springs that move the machine, and this step is a proof of my taking root at a low level on life’s way. I do not think I should do well in aiming at a higher station or in trying to change my character. I must have much more experience, I must learn still more, before I shall be ripe, but that is a question of time and perseverence.

(Interesting that Van Gogh’s emphasis on experience undoubtedly opened new neuropathways in his brain and gave him a stronger foundation of empathy and knowledge. On the path to genius.)

–———————————–

We have more systems today than ever, enforcing conformity by regulating and controlling every aspect of our lives. The artist’s job is to throw off those shackles and escape those controls.

XXXX

Coming soon: The Burbage Spoken Word Prize

XXXX

-Karl Wenclas for New Pop Lit News

Prototypes

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MAKING CREATIVE CHANGE PART V

ONE OF the first steps in creating the New is development of a prototype. That which can hint at innovations to come. As Henry Ford did with his first prototype, an automobile constructed largely from bicycle parts.

A prototype is a demonstration model intended to serve two purposes:

1.) To show potentials of the design or concept.

2.) To reveal flaws when ideas become reality.

By definition a prototype is not a finished product, or the ultimate expression of the intended product. But it should point a direction– a new path for creators to follow.

Prototype of first Tesla Roadster c/o Tesla Motors.

We’ve developed prototypes of new kinds of literary journals (see them here). But we’re also working on what we call the multidimensional or “3-D” short story.

One of the simpler ones we’ve released to date is “The Perfect Candidate.” Note how the opening is intentionally disorienting– the idea to disorient readers then quickly reorient them. (“Where am I? Who’s speaking?”) The narrative in this one is linear– but the changing viewpoints allows the writer to hint at what he wants, obscure what he wants, and reveal what he wants.

The story is designed-– as designed as a modernist skyscraper or the layout of a glossy New York magazine. The goal: a more rounded version of reality. The idea behind this story, this prototype, is to point to the endless possibilities of the well-designed story.

THE NEXT STEP is looking upon the short story– or the nonfiction essay– as part of an entire aesthetic.

THE CHALLENGE

The objective is to put the literary world into a state of flux, where change becomes constant– the only way to diminish the built-in advantages of an institutionalized, monopolistic status quo. Then– to stand out among the innovators.

Timing is key, as it was for Henry Ford. No one remembers the other tinkerers and pioneer automobile innovators, the other hundred-or-so fledgling car companies in the first couple decades of the Twentieth Century.

No one will remember this project unless we achieve artistic breakthrough.

Three Kinds of Revolution

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MAKING CREATIVE CHANGE PART III

1.

TRADITIONAL REVOLUTION. Thorough and swift destruction and replacement designed to demolish existing institutions and the System itself and replace them with all-new everything. See Robespierre and Lenin.

2.

GRADUAL REVOLUTION. Change within existing institutions and hierarchies, designed to capture them. Theodore Adorno and the Frankfurt School might exemplify this mode of thinking. Or were precursors of it, along with Antonio Gramsci.

3.

COMPETITIVE REVOLUTION. Competing with existing institutions using smaller, faster, more mobile and vastly more creative new organizations. Elon Musk’s various projects, as well as many popular DIY podcasts, fit this category.

CHANGE AGENTS

Currently we live in a world where Revolution Style #3 has pushed its way to the forefront. Upstarts everyplace. New ways of thinking pushed by what could be called change agents. The active molecules mentioned in Part I of this series.

Musk due to his penchant for publicity is at the forefront of such energized entities. Elon Musk has always been a huckster, combined with an arrogance unleavened by humility. (He’s yet to be knocked down hard by life.) His real strength lies in his ability to see weakness in established institutions, whether they be Boeing in aerospace, or General Motors and other legacy giants in the auto industry. The ability to observe “the best” and realize they can be taken down.

Elon Musk carries the ethos of the upstart– eager to topple complacent established kings and set himself up as new one.

In this quest, he relies on the doctrine of First Principles, which we’ll look at in the next installment of this series on change and how to make it.

-K.W.

Making Creative Change

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PART I: WHAT WE’RE NOT TAUGHT

Few people see the world as it really is, because we’re not taught to see it that way: As conflict between the dynamic and the static. The active agent, and the acted upon.

Count Leo Tolstoy discussed this in his massive masterpiece novel War and Peace. Is history the product of great men– or of the movement of massive unseen forces? Or a combination of both?

In his discussion of Napoleon and the invasion of Russia, Tolstoy saw the great man as merely along for the ride, accompanying a wave of economic and social forces. Yet change as often as not, even in the instance cited, is a matter of the willful individual pushing and driving the merely passive: the static. The inertia of movement pushing the inertia of the unmoving. Force upon molecules. One dynamic individual disturbing all around itself, like a cue ball upsetting a rack of balls in a pool hall.

XXXX

CHANGE should be especially true in the arts, which are intended to be dynamic. In constant flux.

The question for writers is: Which side of the equation are you on?

If you’re not published by one of the Big Four Manhattan publishers, or a professor at a university, it makes little sense to be on the side of the static. Of the aesthetic status quo. (Unless you write and publish as a hobby, to impress relatives and friends. But if you want more– ?)

NEXT: “Teaching Gatsby.”

State of the Site 2022

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NEW POP LIT ENTERS A NEW YEAR

THE BIG NEWS for the New Pop Lit project is our receiving a “Creators of Culture” grant from a wonderful Detroit-based arts organization named Culture Source. As near as we can determine, we qualified based on several criterion:

-Our EIC’s long history of promoting overlooked writers, notably in the 2000s with the Underground Literary Alliance.

-New Pop Lit’s focus on artistic innovation and design, including with our one-of-a-kind publications. “Craft publishing”: the idea to make our publications as creative and non-generic as possible.

-Our continued experimentation with literary form. This includes our behind-the-scenes effort to completely reinvent the short story, ongoing.

The starting point for everything we do is that the literary status quo isn’t good enough.

THE FUTURE

We’ll use the graciously-awarded funds not solely to keep this project operating (it’s been touch-and-go at times), but chiefly to discover and spotlight new writing and artistic talent, with more focus on talent in metro Detroit and environs.

Toward those ends, we’ll hold a contest or three, with monetary prizes.

The grant will also enable us to create more print publications. A portion of the award will be spent on necessary equipment and supplies. (Notably, paper and ink!)

The intelligent universe has conspired to keep us ongoing a while longer. As long as New Pop Lit lasts, we’ll aspire to achieve amazing arts breakthroughs– or at least one!

Stay informed via our Coming Soon page. Thanks.

XXX