WHAT'S NOW ABOUT &NOW

&NOW—a festival of new writing—was based on simple premises: a belief that the world changes (e.g. we now live with cloning, cell phones, e-mail); that people think in contexts other than those of our forebears (feminism did happen; jihads come west; cognitive science eclipses the talking cure; we've lived through revolutions in biology as well as in the humanities); that some authors, like some artists or musicians, work in forms that seem in sync with these contemporary ways of thinking about a contemporary world. No one expects today's architecture to mimic Bauhaus architecture. No one expects contemporary painting to be synonymous with post-impressionism. No one expects contemporary music to sound like Bach. So why shouldn't our expectations for what counts as a novel, short story, or poem also reflect larger historical changes? Why is it, as William Gass wonders, that the dominant form of the 20th century novel is the 19th century novel? That is, why does a survey of contemporary museums and galleries reveal such variety in what counts as visual art—the sculpture made of blood as well as more traditional painting and video—while a survey of the literature section of most bookstores (or course syllabi) suggests that the "literary" novel is a genre with constraints as narrow as those of the most commercially-driven, glossy, New Yorker story?
   Unlike the 19th century novel, interactive CDs and Hip-Hop music come to mind as forms that embody our moment with their re-mix of competing viewpoints and styles, their juxtapositions of voices, bending of genres, boundary transgressions. In short, the Hip-Hop culture of ripping and burning seems to have many points of affinity with contemporary culture in general: a culture and an aesthetic made possible by the sampling and collage technology that allows DJs, or anyone with a laptop, to mix tracks, to incorporate all of musical history, TV shows, the whole theater of audio memory. But more important, it is an aesthetic born of a cultural mindset that thinks it's as natural to regard all culture as contingent and rearrange-able: as natural to us as Medievals once found looking for a Christian explanation for the order of the planets, or as Modernists would have thought it natural to articulate a Freudian unconscious. It's a mindset that makes many of the tenants Modernists took for granted, e.g., the Originality of a genius Artist soaring above History, seem passé.
   So we put out a call. Who were the authors working from a larger-than-traditional conception of what counts as literature? What does their work look like? What does it say? The samples of writing in this issue of the Notre Dame Review reflect some of what we learned.
   In the spirit of the festival, the authors and works gathered here do not mine those tired and false dichotomies often associated with new writing, the difference between High and low, for example, or Then and now: what so often is mis-characterized by the uninitiated as last-century's avant-garde agenda. Rather, like the festival itself, they are simply born out of a consideration of writing as a medium for art as practiced at our moment. If terms like "story" and "poem" are avoided, it's only because they don't seem to fit a work like Scott Helmes's "The Division of the Soul," a poem that is also an equation. If terms like "author" don't fit it's because the authorship of work like Implementation is as dispersed as its many on-line contributors. If terms like "literature" are avoided it is because they seem to imply institutions and canons and genre divisions and values that have more to do with the values of the publishing marketplace than those of artists. It is because thinking of writing as a medium as well as a material, in the way that all sound can be creative material to a soundscape composer, opens up possibilities for writing not normally considered literary: wire bent so its shadow casts words on the wall as in Alexandra Grant and Michael Joyce's collaborations. It is because they come out of a conception of literature as the Museum without Walls where a novel can be in the form of a videogame manual, as is Mark Marino's Labyrinth, or a travel guide like Michael Martone's Blue Guide to Indiana. Why not?
   That is, if the 19th century novel is the literary equivalent of a painting of a clipper ship on the high seas, works like Eduardo Kac's "Biopoetry" or George Quasha's Poetry Is or Davis Schneiderman and Tom Denlinger's Future Catastrophes can be thought of as the literary equivalent to conceptual art. A different emphasis. A different orientation: one that privileges the conceptual in literature instead of the mimetic. As such, the & of &NOW does not imply a break with the past so much as a continuation in the way that Mike Smith's Anagrams of America takes literary history as its raw materials to make poetry that says something in a manner we can also see living outside the book. If works as diverse as Debra Di Blasi's image-text "Czechoslovakian Rhapsody," Lance Olsen's 10:01 collage, Brian Everson's hermetic and epistemological "House Rules," or Kass Fliesher's "Speed of Zoom" share any common concerns, it seems to be a disregard for categories. And the demonstration they provide that there can be no Now without a Then, especially a Then which begets a Now, which begets a Then, which begets a Now. . . . Or as Joe Amato says in his "Treatise of Whole Numbers," "Because it's aesthetic, it's momentary./ Because it's momentary, we're confused." But it's the pleasurable confusion of not being sure of all that literature is in the moment. The confusion that comes from not closing the book on literature, not being dogmatic or certain what literature is and is not, the confusion that resists placing all writing in easily packaged categories, or forsakes claim to what the future might look back on and decide literature was when Now is Then.
   Textsounds, a gathering of sound poets and critics, convened at Notre Dame in the fall of 2004 and this issue also proudly presents work from some of those authors. A complete lineup of the authors who performed at Textsounds and &NOW can be found at www.nd.edu/~andnow. We'd also like to thank the &NOW Committee who dealt with a multitude of issues, with grace under pressure, and without whom the festival could not have been the success that it was: Shaun Dillon, Kevin Ducey, Lisa Gonzales, Angela Hur, Campbell Irving, Corey Madsen, Dani Rado, Kimberly Taylor, and especially Taranee Wangsatorntanakhun.

—Steve Tomasula