Publication: In the Age of Negation - by john tottenham

BY JOHN TOTTENHAM

Perhaps you remember me…

No, that wasn’t right. It was senseless to open a letter of entreaty by suggesting that I was forgettable, especially when I knew only too well that the party in question would remember me.

Hello Charlie, it’s your old friend here…

No, that was too presumptuous: only his friends addressed him by that diminutive. I had met Charles a few times at social gatherings; our brief exchanges had been awkward, and I always got the impression that he was itching to get away from me so that he could talk to somebody more successful.

Hello Charles...

I didn’t like the sound of that either. There was something both wheedling and slightly invasive about that “Hello.” It bespoke an over-awareness of the rejection I was inevitably courting by penning this missive of reintroduction. But maybe I was reading too much into it, and he probably wouldn’t be reading anything into it.

Hello…

But I never opened a communication with “Hello” or “Hi.” Anachronistic as it was—a throwback to epistolary days—I usually opened my emails with “Dear.”

Dear Charles…

Charles Wersing certainly wasn’t dear to me; in fact, I regarded him as the enemy. He was a “gatekeeper” of the literary establishment, and he stood firmly in the way of the likes of me. But let it ride for the moment, I needed to get this thing started.

I hope that you haven’t been temporarily blinded by the delight of seeing my name in your mailbox…

No, that wouldn’t do at all: a facetious allusion to any awkwardness that might exist between us wasn’t going to do me any

favors. Despite the fact that he’d never shown any interest in me or my work, and had walked away from me at parties, Charles Wersing had always snubbed me suavely. He was a man of polished manners, who used his politeness as a weapon, as might be expected of a highly successful New York literary agent; and we did have a mutual friend whom Charles respected enough that a courteous reply, at least, would be guaranteed, even if it was a courteous rejection. So tone it down a bit, be friendly…

Since we haven’t corresponded in five years, the time has come to bug you again…

Enough of the disingenuous groveling, for fuck’s sake; he should feel honored to receive a solicitation from me. Get straight to the point…

I’ll get straight to the point. I finally acknowledged that I had no grasp of plot, character or dialogue, and decided to write a novel, and that’s mostly what I’ve been working on for the last four years. While writing the novel one of my greatest concerns was that once it was finished I wouldn’t do anything about getting it published, and much as I feared, that is turning out to be the case. If I put one percent of the amount of time and care into putting it out there as I put into the work itself, then I might get somewhere. But I find it hard to do even that much.

That wasn’t getting straight to the point, and I was laying on the self-deprecation too thickly. I could hear Charles sighing with impatience as he waded through this irrelevant preamble. He didn’t need to know about all that; he’d heard it all before.

It would probably be fairly easy to get it published by a local small press but the nature of the work dictates that it requires the validation of a reputable imprint, or at least a good independent press. If you read it, you’d see what I meant—but don’t worry, I’m not going to subject you to that.

He didn’t need to hear about that either, and the suggestion that it was within my power to subject him to anything had to be removed.

I’m not even going to attempt to subject you to that…

But it was true that the nature of the work demanded that it should be published by a reputable press. If it was published by a small press, it would look petty; if it was published by a major press, it would look less petty. And that “fairly easy” made me uneasy: Perhaps it wouldn’t be “fairly easy” to get it published by

a small press; perhaps I was deceiving myself about that.

Since my hopes haven’t yet been crushed, I thought why not start at the top—which is why I’m writing to you—and work my way down.

This arbiter of taste had already had so much smoke blown up his ass that a fire alarm went off every time he broke wind. The flattery sounded weak and insincere, and it was.

I realize that you must be exhausted from the polite pesterings of needy scribblers and that the sight of a fresh solicitation in your mailbox might induce at the very least a sinking feeling.

I know you get pestered a lot owing to your benevolent nature and I don’t want to add to your burden…

What’s this crap about his benevolent nature? From what I’ve witnessed, there’s nothing remotely benevolent about him. He’s one of the top literary agents in New York, which virtually guarantees that he’s not a nice guy. He’s not in the business out of a devotion to fine literature. If he, or one of his assistants, senses sales potential in a book, he’ll get behind it. And I do want to add to his burden, although I almost certainly won’t be granted that opportunity: my book lacks the sort of mainstream appeal he’s looking for. Maybe I was going into this with the wrong attitude, but this wasn’t my first go-round with upscale literary agents—and they were all upscale, it came with the territory. I knew the nature of the beast: I knew their habits and their habitats; I knew what they wanted, and I knew that I didn’t have what they wanted, but I did want to be published by a reputable press owing to the work in question, in which I’d revealed (and exaggerated) too much of my lower nature. There was no point agonizing over crafting a letter that was destined for rejection, just dash something off…

I’ll probably end up settling for less but at present—having not yet been completely demoralized by rejection, and having put very little effort into the quest—I’m still harboring the perhaps unrealistic hopes of being published by a maj…

Why should I settle for “less” and why should my hopes be “unrealistic?” I’ve seen what’s out there. My work doesn’t compare unfavorably with any of it. Why place myself in a subordinate position?

To be honest, in my humble opinion the book could become a contemporary classic if it receives the right kind of handling and exposure…

Now I was laying the self-confidence on too heavily, and overdoing the inadequacy/grandiosity contrast. Of course, I’m going to be confident about my own work, but that confidence isn’t likely to rub off on a veteran literary agent who’s heard it all before. And why say “to be honest?” That made it sound as if I hadn’t been honest up until that point.

I don’t want to take up too much of your time, that increasingly precious substance…

Oh, fuck this. As if his time was so precious. He was probably out on the town, being wined and dined by one of his successful clients. Did Pen Shawn have to abase himself like this in order to get his execrable novel published? The same doors that were thrown wide open to an actor with literary pretensions are firmly closed to somebody who has spent a lifetime honing his craft and finally has a work of definite quality to offer. Charles had recently secured a publishing deal for Pen Shawn with a major house, a feat that would have been impossible were it not for the author’s renown in another field of the arts—as Shawn’s first novel, from the little I had been able to read of it, was unreadable, and would never be considered salable were it not for the name attached to it: that of a famous actor who desperately wanted to be taken seriously as a writer.

Since Charles had arranged to get Shawn’s novel published, it was reasonable to assume that he had read it. But perhaps that formality had been dispensed with in this special case and he had automatically given it the green light owing to the author’s impeccable thespian credentials. This scenario seemed highly plausible.

What was the point of spending hours on end crafting a letter that, if responded to at all, would be groaned over for a few seconds before a practiced perfunctory reply was whipped off, accompanied by a profound wish to never be heard from again?

I knew the answer to that question: There was no point.

I had spent four years working on something with no promise of remuneration or manifestation, which in itself would strike most people as an act of madness. If it was a hobby that I had been engaged in, like gardening, the reward would lie in the personal pleasure that one derived from the task, but I liked to think it was more than that.

Just get it over with; he probably won’t even read it all the way through…

I understand that my novel may not be the sort of thing you normally handle, and if this is so I was wondering if you might know of any agents or publishers that might be receptive to the first novel by a blossoming middle-aged talent.

Throw in some fluff about how delightful it would be to see him again, insert the synopsis, and that would do nicely…

BY ZAK SMITH

Months back, when the pandemic was still running strong, I wrote about how much I wanted to go to a museum—even a mediocre one. Well, now I can and I did and I remembered that most things are bad. We can do whatever we want again, including wonder why we choose to do it.

Though sometimes art is good, it usually isn’t. This has been true throughout history but, also throughout history, the edge has traditionally been taken off this state of affairs by art exhibitions having some kind of social purpose. “It may just be another bull running from a guy shooting arrows,” the paleolithic critics used to say between sips of stale yak milk “but at least it gives us all an opportunity to get out to the cave.” For a long time this social purpose was frankly religious or statist—there was a statue of a great man or an archangel. Even if it sucked, it was still George Washington and you were supposed to know what he looked like and that he could be impressive—and on a horse. Eventually a further purpose developed—social and commercial business was increasingly going down in larger and larger rooms and art was needed to decorate them. Parlors, salons and chambers of all kinds were expected to have pictures of sailing ships, dogs or the people who owned them—paintings filled the walls, statues gathered in the corners, and these announced that the spaces they occupied were both safe and spoken for. In this way, art was a force for civilization in the most crass and middle-class terms: it announced these spaces were attempting to be civil. You didn’t have to look at the art, just being around it was enough to establish your status as a non-ruffian. While modernity brought with it forces that would bring these assumptions into doubt, the forces themselves settled, often unconsciously, on a new answer to the question of the purpose of exhibiting art. The self-consciously bohemian classes realized that they couldn’t talk about revolution at work, that they shouldn’t talk at all during Godard movies, that they couldn’t hear each other at Pink Floyd concerts, and that when they were home watching TV there was no one listening, so they needed to find entertainments that were neither loud, nor immersive, nor convenient. Art shows filled the bill. For approximately 100 years they became an extension of cafe society, a place to broadly advance the project of being well-educated with a funny haircut while hating (or at least hating-on) capitalism, and the art increasingly reflected that stance in form and content. Often the art was much more fun to talk about than look at, but the people who liked it were okay with that. Insofar as art sat like a mute centerpiece at the table of the chattering classes’ social and intellectual ambitions, it was doing a job they needed done.

Nowadays, however, when you can not only talk to all your friends and thousands of strangers about defunding the police, organizing your mutual aid society and planning your performance/rave/happening while watching TV but you can see every piece in every art show in full color without leaving your couch, it seems like the social role of shows is due for another revision. One of the many questions NFTs raise is, really, what counts as “looking” at a piece of art and how much do you really have to do it to receive what it has to give?

When I’m out at a show I am definitely looking at the thing and I am—if the people around me are ones I trust very much with absolutely no social connection to the artists—going to tell them what I think about it but …we could be doing that at my place. About not just what we saw that day but about anything ever made. “Do you know Chavelet? Well let me google him.” I am not saying there’s no reason to go to a show—I am simply saying there are fewer and fewer unique ones.

Maybe art shows won’t have a social role anymore—maybe they should cultivate an anti-social role. Maybe we need art to lean into its ability to disconnect us from what everyone else wants us to care about: No longer the twice-life-size marble Virgin at the far end of the block-long museum queue, but unknown shrines off unmarked dirt roads, dedicated to gods unknown.