Good deed

A writer whose work I admire has written a memoir. Apparently she's not happy with the small press that was going to publish it and so looked into her self-publishing options. I volunteered to do her production work for a print-on-demand book at Lulu and CreateSpace -- I can do it all practically in my sleep, including cover design. I feel good helping out a talented colleague. This is definitely a way digital technology has liberated writers, though of course all the marketing work now belongs to the writer. But for those of us who don't write best sellers and never will, it's often a very sensible option.

In my case, for example, I have no sense of "an audience" any more but rather a sense of adding material to my archive so that -- and this is either hope or delusion -- the work is available after I pass. I like to think the same thing will happen with my archive that happened with my essay "English Composition As A Happening," a young student/critic will find it on a dark dusty library shelf and go ape over it.

"What happened to the bold, kicky promise of writing instruction in the 1960s? The current conservative trend in composition is analyzed allegorically by Geoffrey Sirc in this book-length homage to Charles Deemer’s 1967 article, in which the theories and practices of Happenings artists (multi-disciplinary performance pioneers) were used to invigorate college writing. Sirc takes up Deemer’s inquiry, moving through the material and theoretical concerns of such pre- and post-Happenings influences as Duchamp and Pollock, situationists and punks, as well as many of the Happenings artists proper. With this book, sure to become a cult classic, begins a neo-avant-garde for composition studies."

Sirc on Deemer

As long as the work is accessible, there's a chance someone will find it and dig it. And that's all it's about, finding the passionate audience (as opposed to the commercial audience). I have enough fans to keep me sane (barely, ha ha). I'm glad I had my taste of "fame" in the 80s so I know now I haven't missed much. What I miss most is the money. That's it. "How much?" is the first thing Yeats asked when learning he'd won the Nobel, and he was exactly on target about the place of artists in our culture.