The Brainwashed

One of the complaints from one of the reviewers I took to task is that the ULA portrayed its antagonists as blindly conformist sheep. Yet what else do you call it when writers like Tom Bissell and Maria Bustillos chain themselves to a dead art that nobody wants?

They cling to their affirmation that they “write well,” which distinguishes them from the DIY bottom feeders of the ULA, who do not in their estimation “write well.” “In the end, you have to write well,” Tom Bissell smugly tells us.

But what does that mean? Does it mean connecting with readers other than the indoctrinated? No! Of course not.

Tom Bissell has a certain touchy-feely glibness, and knows how to construct an artful takedown by being thoroughly dishonest, but the truth is that this appointed expert of letters, this “great” writer (per fellow apparatchik Hillary Frey) doesn’t write well. His writing, like all literary writing, has scant originality, little energy, and no pace. Most of Bissell’s essays in his recent book are unreadable. The ULA essay may indeed be the best of the lot. It’s a concoction of distortions from top to bottom.

Think I’m wrong? Listen to Tom Bissell interviewed by Ed Champion at “The Bat Segundo Show.” Dull speaking to dullest:

The interview is agonizingly slow—just like a “literary” prose tome. The conversation proceeds like the progress of a pet turtle across a tabletop, filled with significant pauses of weighty self-importance as the two struggle audibly to put together credible thoughts. Hear how difficult they have it. “What do I say now?”  they seem to be thinking. It’s terrible radio. A sports radio host like J.T. the Brick would’ve yelled “Time!” after a minute.

Listen to the two, Ed and Tom, with their dawdled pronouncements, and realize they’re intellectually stunted. The talk is confined within narrow lines—though it includes, against the Underground Literary Alliance, a profusion of falsehoods and slurs.

We see this in Bissell’s pre-election Yahoo News! articles also: Bissell’s indoctrinated stereotypes. The only way he’s capable of seeing the world: through the narrow restrictions of acceptable thought already laid down for him.

This includes Tom Bissell’s notions about writing, which he brought to his look at a writing scene he was congenitally unable to understand. Or unwilling to understand.

Bissell appears effective with his takedowns because there’s no opposition present. He’s like a boxer punching a padded bag, with no one hitting back. It’s been the way of the literary world; how it’s maintained itself. The only thing the literary establishment has going for it is its monopoly on print media access. Reviewers and critics are as indoctrinated as the writers. It’s all the same crowd. A rigged game. Maybe it’s always been a rigged game, so that a Dwight MacDonald could beat up a great novelist like James Gould Cozzens because Cozzens wasn’t able to fight back. One side only is retained and presented. The result is a warped truth, as warped as what Bissell did to the Underground Literary Alliance. But truth is the least of the established literary world’s concern.

If you make it that far in the Ed and Tom interview—if you can endure the dullness—note when the two slogs speculate about the fate of the ULA. What happened to those guys? They don’t have an idea.

Social context? The severe recession raging for half of America outside the doors of their studio? Reality? Nowhere to be found.

A more perfect example of bubble writers removed from their own place and time couldn’t be given. Their irrelevance is palpable. It hovers like a rancid smell over the stagnant interview.

Oh well. That’s the literary world now.