IS PETER GIORDANO A LITERARY FASCIST?

Wed May 14 08:53:01 CDT 1997

Before I was ready to send out the following satire (for which I gratefully
acknowledge the generous collaboration and inspiration of Mr. Peter
Giordano) I received via private e-mail a copy of his letter to Dale L.
Larson from, which I freely quote below, provoked by the following "threat"
in my humorous reply to John Mascaro:

>>Giordano I will pillory when I get around to it. I can just see him with
his head hanging out of the pillory while all the people with late book
notices throw snowballs with rocks in them at him. Massachusetts is perfect
for this, so historically correct and all. Neither Los Angeles nor
Philadelphia is quite right.

Mr. Giordano writes to Dale L. Larson that he's not concerned about being
criticized, but that "threats are another matter." He says that if I make
"any reference" to him "outside of the confines of pynchon-l" he "will take
action."

"Any such action on his part is harrassment," he asserts. By commenting on
him outside the list I would be violating his privacy, he charges, and it
will result in a lawsuit. "He may be sitting on a beach in Mexico but his
assests are not," Mr. Giordano observes. 

Mr. Giordano will not tolerate any more threats, he states, "and if your
client comes near me either in the real world or virtually I guarentee it -
I will own IAM (and believe me I don't want to)." 

"Think about what kind of witness your client would make in court," he
advises. "Think about the trail of threats he's already left behind." Mr.
Giordano concludes his case by writing, "Have all the fun you want on
Pynchon-l but beyond that leave me alone."

Assets? What assets? -- did he find something I don't know about it in his
research? Hey, Peter -- may I call you Peter, since we're now such great
friends? -- tell me where those assets are and I promise I'll never so much
as mention your name as long as I live. I have assets!

Peter, you've really outdone yourself here. My hat's off to you! I just had
one of the best laughs of the week. Please let me know if you'd like me to
help you work up the script for your next Komedy Klub appearance. With
talent like yours, you won't be a mere reference librarian for long! This
assets shtick is an absolute masterpiece of humorous hyperbole. Now just
polish up your command of spelling and punctuation and we'll have you
writing material for Jim Carrey.

Meanwhile, see if you can work the following into your routine.

Coming to your local screen:
---------------------------------

IS PETER GIORDANO A LITERARY FASCIST?

An on-line comedy.

At 12:36 PM 05/13/97 -0400, Peter.Giordano at williams.edu wrote:

>Did you know that they will sell just about any book with an ISBN 

Makes my challenge to 2b4 even easier for him to meet. You don't have to be
Gary Kasparov to lose this match. Aw c'mon, 2b4, do your book! I bet it will
get better reviews than mine and sell better too, but together we'll begin
to form a market. Much better for overall sales, you know.

>Also, did you know that the "author" interviews in Amazon are bogus? They
are not interviews at all - Instead they are the results of a form filled
out by the author.

Why is this bogus? The author doesn't write his or her own questions. The
questions are excellent and could be used as a model for real-life
interviewing. Someone did write them in the first place. Each interview is
reviewed by a person before being placed on line.

What I observe in Mr. Giordano's comments is a very marked bias in favor of
authority over independence. He seems to have some sort of internal rating
system against which he measures works of art according to the size and
respectability of the publisher. Much of his invective, if translated into
French of the style of late 19th and early 20th Century, would easily pass
as attacks on Impressionist and Modern works by academic critics.

According to Mr. Giordano's method, the early works of R. Crumb, for
example, would be rejected as having had any validity because he published
them himself. Some of his recent works would be rejected as well, because
they are published by very small presses.

Almost all of Henry Miller's first editions would be dismissed because they
were published by Maurice Girodias' Olympia Press, a publisher of
pornography. So was Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. Even when Miller's work
finally appeared in an American edition, it was published by Barney Rosset's
Grove Press, not much more than a one-man basement operation, as was
Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights, which published the first edition of
Howl by Allen Ginsberg. Paul Krassner and Abby Hoffman would be
disqualified, as would William Burroughs' first edition of Naked Lunch. So
would many of the self-published works of Mark Twain.

The list could go on through many of the greatest names in world literature.
Mr. Giordano, a distinguished reference librarian, could, if he wished,
demonstrate his vast command of publishing history by offering us many more
examples. According to his reasoning, however, none of this would count
because the works were later ratified by the Establishment publishing
system; and/or, what were originally one-man basement presses grew into
corporate giants.

This system does make it much easier to evaluate art and literature. Values
can be assigned according to the publisher's stock exchange listing, sales
volume, number of titles and so on. Then the book itself could be rated by
the number of editions, their sales and the reviews, with a weight assigned
according to the status of the reviewer and the reviewing publication. All
of this might be arranged in some sort of sophisticated sorting program.
Fill in the blanks and out pops an infallible rating.

I want to like this even though I do get a Z for zero, but it reminds me too
much of Russia under Stalin, Germany under Hitler and Italy under Mussolini.
Are "They" likely to be Dale L. Larson slaving on a mimeograph machine in
his basement churning out smeared copies of Lineland? Or are they more
likely to be Bertelsmann, AG?

A while back, Andrew Dinn commented on American marketing fascism. I agreed
with his comments fully. More than that, I'd say that Mr. Giordano is quite
fascistic in his thinking and his methods of expression, in worshipping
status as a measure of value, in his sneering, intemperate language, his
identification with the strong over the weak, his preference for the
baseless slur over the concrete fact.

Now he will perhaps throw us once again my bitter sarcasm about ripping off
his face as an example of my fascism. Obviously, I didn't mean that
physically. I meant it metaphorically, as in ripping off a mask. I've pried
it up around the edges a bit here, I think. Does anyone really want to see
the rest?

Why am I bothering with this, then? Because I'm writing a book, The Human
Robot: Essays on the Emotional Effects of Industrialism. I'm quite serious
about this. It helps me to write the book, which is almost finished and
needs some anecdotal material to liven it up a bit.

Mr. Giordano's method of rating the value of works of art is exactly the
kind of concrete example of human robot behavior that I need to illustrate
my theories. He's drawing his own self-portrait. The more he reveals
himself, the better it gets for me. In a real interview situation, the idea
is to provoke the subject into moments of self-revelation. This is quite
difficult, because everyone poses for the mirror. The pose itself is often
interesting because it reveals the subject's pretensions. When the subject
gets angry or a bit manic, however, the pose is obliterated in the rush of
words. Mr. Giordano is posing and preening for us here. He's so proud of his
thoughts and so in love with his own voice that he doesn't quite realize
that what he is saying about himself might provide negative interpretations

That's why Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., doesn't want to expose himself to
interviews and reveal any more about himself than we see in his writing. He
knows that he will automatically lose the bare margin of control that he has
when he publishes a book. I'd say he's merely prudent. I'm not. Neither is
Peter Giordano. That's why I like what he produces as grist for my mill.

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