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Date Posted: 15:47:48 03/20/00 Mon
Author: Laird Hunt
Subject: Re: Dan Machlin's Response to "The Avenue"

Dear Dan,

Where I work one of the things it is impossible to circumvent is this question of imbalance you bring up -- and while what makes .com headlines is the technology imbalance -- what we are still really talking about is reliable access to food, shelter and water, and some kind of immediate protection/relief from war, natural disaster and AIDS. I love the idea of a current of information running under/over/alongside the established trickster channels (cataracts a la aol/timewarner), and the narrative element of all these fresh tributaries, but fear that frankness will be a long, long while in reaching those perhaps most in need of it. For while the customer sounds his/her clarion call for straight talk out across a network that is growing denser much more quickly than it is growing wider, the big tv networks still run the stories that work for them and their advertisers, and in the meantime run viagra ads next to stories on the conditions in Andean salt mines.

Of course, to change tack, if we want to discuss stunted networks we can take up the topic of non-mainstream, challenging, slightly difficult to categorize, prose fiction -- I'd love to hear some thoughts on where the hell all the publishers have gone. It's a curious circumstance, and testament to a lot of hard work, that beautiful, beleaguered poetry seems to be thriving (with terrific outlets galore), while it is often an extraordinary battle to get a non-mainstream prose work into book form (e.g., and this is reaching back a little, David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress, which I mention in "The Avenue" and which is an extraordinary work, got 50 plus smacks in the face before being picked up by Dalkey -- to whose efforts we owe the availability of so many great works). There are paradigm breakers out there -- Ben Marcus is probably one, as is Pamela Lu and certainly W.G. Sebald -- but I suspect that a fair number of 'narrativity' minded prose fiction practicioners have run over and over again into any variety of walls. N.D. has trimmed way back and turned its prose eyes Europe-ward. Sun & Moon seems to be accesible only through their contest. Dalkey does mainly (or only) reprints these days. Coffee House does great things but can only extend so far. Likewise Burning Deck. Etc.

But, in the meantime (and I'm out of time), what I really wanted to say was thanks for 'taking on' what I wrote -- so often these things just 'vanish', much like Penelope's errant threads, and those emails I sometimes lose, into the mysterious air -- Laird

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