The Role of JAMES ADLER in my fiction

It was ten years ago, so the writing prodigy James Adler, an Austrailian, must have been but thirteen years old when he wrote me, having read and loved my Driftless trilogy. He asked what I was writing and I told him about the little novels and he asked to see them and I sent him Kramberger with Monkey and Voices After Evelyn and Skulls of Istria and Adriatica Deserta, all in word format. He replied about a month later and said they were all good enough, but when was I going to write something big? That got my hackles up–I recall we had an exchange about hackles, what they were, when they had been imported to Australia and the fact that they caused more havoc on that big island than cane toads–when to establish his credentials–he was now 14, he sent me a novel he had crafted himself, a drawing of a middle aged woman on a telephone on a cover of a novel, typed, called It’s Danny. It was about a phone call a family received from the troubled and disruptive Danny, and was a masterpiece of dark comedy. I was utterly amazed. I asked if he had sent it out and he told me had absolutely no interest in writing for anyone but his friends and would never sully himself by publishing. Since then I have read at least five of his novels, all of them masterpieces, particularly Your Ape, a novel of 600 or more pages of a complexity that I cannot begin to describe but rivals Pynchon at the very least in its jubilance, sinister atmosphere, and extraordinary wordplay, not to mention many extended comic scenes that remain imprinted on my brain as if I had lived through them. So during the course of our correspondence an idea was born, I can’t say specifically how, that I write something big, and thus The Manifold Destiny of Eddie Vegas was born, and with some ideas from the young Adler sprinkled in, executed to the point where it has become my best work of fiction.

James Adler will not send me a photo, nor do I have his permission to write this, but I think deep down he will appreciate this. I owe the resurrection of my writing career to this young man.

Why I’m glad Marlon James is through Talking about Diversity

Why I’m glad Marlon James is through Talking about Diversity

When Marlon James talks about diversity he talks in the liberal language of the audience he rightly feels can’t properly grasp diversity or its meaning and necessity. But nor can this audience do anything about it. Nor does it want to. So Marlon James cannot with his editorial words to do anything for the non-white, sexually heterodox people he champions. The best thing Marlon James can do is write fiction.

If Marlon James writes, diversity thrives. James is black, and from a post-colonial island. He speaks from two non-orthodox groups. White US Americans will always write and under the current socioeconomic system they will always thrive, will always be privileged. With the rise in recent decades of an abundance of woman writers, and more recently Indian, Korean, Chinese, African, African-American, gay, trans, and various other non-orthodox writers, diversity has proven it exists. What James laments essentially is the existence of socioeconomic disparities inherent to an oligarchic sociopolitical system with a racist and nationalist underpinning. Liberals are an essential pillar of that system. He should stop writing to them in their language. He is not one of them, and no sane anti-oligarch would want him to be one.

I read whatever the non-orthodox, Japanese-American, culturally somewhat Mexican Sesshu Foster of Los Angeles writes. Why? Because he is not writing to liberals. He’s writing on behalf of the victims of the oligarchic system in the United States. Who is he writing to? I would say he’s writing from. And if you want to read Sesshu Foster, you have to go to where he has established his world. It is not a world made for white liberals.

I’m white, so the best I can do is write against the oligarchic system. Non-white writers do best to write powerfully from a place alien to the orthodox, the liberal, the white. Marlon James’ discouragement is essential to the very process he is discouraged by, as it is hosted by the oligarchic, white patriarchal orthodox system; it is an attempt to alter that system from inside the mighty jaws of easy cooptation.

Stay diverse, Marlon James: that’s the most powerful thing you can do. And when your publisher wants to lay on you a cover with colors and design that scream your blackness, tell them to fuck off.

 

Rick Harsch

Why I’m glad Marlon James is through Talking about Diversity

Why I’m glad Marlon James is through Talking about Diversity

 

When Marlon James talks about diversity he talks in the liberal language of the audience he feels rightly can’t properly grasp diversity or its meaning and necessity. But nor can this audience do anything about it. Nor does it want to. So Marlon James cannot with his words to do anything for the non-white, sexually heterodox people he champions. The best thing Marlon James can do is write.

If Marlon James writes, diversity thrives. James is black, and from a post-colonial island. He speaks from two non-orthodox groups. White US Americans will always write and under the current socioeconomic system they will always thrive, will always be privileged. With the rise in recent decades of an abundance of woman writers, and more recently India, Korean, Chinese, African, African-American, gay, trans, and various other non-orthodox writers, diversity has proven it exists. What James laments essentially is the existence of socioeconomic disparities inherent to an oligarchic sociopolitical system. Liberals are an essential pillar of that system. He should stop writing to them in their language. He is not one of them, and no sane anti-oligarch would want him to be one.

I read whatever the non-orthodox, Japanese-American, culturally somewhat Mexican Sesshu Foster of Los Angeles writes. Why? Because he is not writing to liberals. He’s writing on behalf of the victims of the oligarchic system in the United States. Who is he writing to? I would say he isn’t. He’s writing from. And if you want to read Sesshu Foster, you have to go to where he has established his world. It is not a world made for white liberals.

I’m white, so the best I can do is write against the oligarchic system. Non-white writers do best to write powerfully from a place alien to the orthodox, the liberal, the white. Marlon James’ discouragement is essential to the very process he is discouraged by, as it is hosted by the oligarchic, white patriarchal orthodox system; it is an attempt to alter that system from inside the mighty jaws of easy cooptation.

Stay diverse, Marlon: that’s the most powerful thing you can do. And when your publisher wants to lay on you a cover with colors and design that scream your blackness, tell them to fuck off.

 

Rick Harsch