Fugue 13 - Spring/Summer 1996 (No. 13)

============ FUGUE # 13, Spring/Summer 1996 a sort of Chomskian manufactured consent exists here, a subtle manipulation of will, mind, and information. We're all, everywhere, constructed through and by the media. We speak -at least in certain ways- what the media wants us to speak. At the same time, there are various levels and intricacies to this notion. To suggest, for instance, that the lack of free speech in America is somehow equivalent to the lack of free speech in, say, Iraq or Iran, seems just plain preposterous to me. Just try writing a book attacking Saddam in Iraq, or one satirizing the Moslem faith in Iran, and see how far it gets you. Salman Rushdie knows all about these subtleties and differences, poor guy.

AL: This, I think, draws us into the realm of the so-called "avant-pop." Since I see that my connection timer's ticking on the modem, one last request. How do you see the "avant-pop" shaping Amerikan consciousness? Can it? How will authors like Kathy Acker, Mark Leyner; and Harold Jaffe, critics like yourself and Larry McCaffery, be ultimately remembered ten, twenty years from now?

LO: I still worry about the label "avant-pop," even though I'm often referred to as part of that gang. In the introduction to In Memoriam to Postmodernism: Essays on the Avant-Pop, which I edited with Mark Amerika, I make the point that if we define avant-pop as a frame of mind that evinces the avant-garde's impulse toward pushing the envelope of art fused and confused with a rabidly-if ambivalently-pop cultural sensibility, well, then, all we're doing is redefining postmodernism, trying to dust it off and make it look new, trying to remarket it. Leyner, when everything's said and done, looks back to Warhol, Acker to Burroughs, Wallace to Pynchon, and so forth. I'm not sure any of the former are producing anything so drastically different that it can't fall under the rubric of the postmodern, even with the telltale televisual consciousnesses, whose trademark Pynchon holds. That isn't, though, in any way to demean their (our?) projects. Leyner, Acker, Wallace, Wright, Jaffe-many of the people associated with the so-called avant-pop- are among my favorite writers 91