was about 16 days ago. Procrastination and other distractions have gotten in the way of this post.
I am also including some thought I had on the way home that were divorced from the festival.
Let me sum up my thoughts: the whole was well executed; the conflicts in the scheduling were self-imposed; the staff (volunteers) were polite, helpful, casting an enthusiasm for what they were doing; the crowd was not huge, but I think we were all dedicated to the festival's purpose; I am looking forward to next year's edition.
The mixer was the usual horror for me. I never learned how to just make a cold introduction. The people I saw were all younger than me. I had no idea of their interests. Other than one fellow coming up to speak to me, no spoke with me, and I spoke with no one. (I would alter see that same person, gave him my email, and have not heard from him.) I won a book of poetry, but I cannot find it now. I gave it to CC to read when she was here last; I did not think she left with it.
The book sale was small. I noticed
Sarabande Books had a booth. My debit card failed me - it works well only if tapped - and I had promised to buy any more books. That was the highest cost of moving - toting, then organizing, all my books.
I did stop and look at Tipton Poetry Journal. They had a book of Indiana poets, but could not take plastic. They are on Facebook. Check them out.
I saw Larry Sweazy. He was on a panel of crime writers. I am pretty sure that he saw me. We both did a good job of ignoring the other. I left before it was over; this was one of those times when there was another program competing for my attention.
Probably should have taken that program first instead of last. It was on Midwest literary history. Which is a pretty lame description. This was more along the lines where I want to work. However, I did get a line on the book which was the subject of the program:
Lingering Inland: A Literary Tour of the Midwest (University of Illinois Press). (And which I purchased today.)
I got into a conversation with one of the panelists, a professor from Wisconsin, about the ambitions of F. Scott Fitzgerald and other Midwestern writers. He reappeared during the following session on Booth Tarkington. Poor fellow probably felt trapped by me chewing on his ear. However, I did get a sense that I was not wrong that Fitzgerald felt himself competing with Tarkington.
The Tarkington session gave me the idea I need to read another of his novels before I start on “Chasing Ashes”. In the conversation with the professor, I suggested that Tarkington is suffering from the same problem as someone like Gore Vidal, their popularity has done them in.
The last session attended was part disappointment and part surprise. It was about building communities. The disappointment was it had nothing to do with building literary communities and all to do with slam poetry. What I got from it was the members of the panel had much to promote poetry slams in Indianapolis, and that they were healthy. That made me feel good for Indy.
Being about 4 pm, I decided to go home. Age has its privileges and its costs. I skipped a discussion on getting one's works on stage.
Now, let me add some thoughts that came to me after I left the festival; not that they bear on the festival itself.
I made a stop at Meijers in Anderson. It has changed in 16 years. That was not the surprise. After all, I have made a trip to Muncie's Meijer's in the past month and found myself unimpressed. It used to be that I would do most of our grocery shopping at Meijers. They had better seafood offerings - including mussels - and things like leg of lamb (halal) and beef kidneys. Now, the seafood selection may be worse than Payless or Walmart. No leg of lamb, either. The place felt like a worn-out Walmart.
And that is what brought a long-boiling annoyance: too much seems more tawdry, more inefficient, cheaper than what I recall from before my incarceration.
It is as if upon getting market share, pushing out smaller competitors with better (or just as good) offering, what get is less variety and more shabbiness.
Ted Gioia has written about this in regard to Google and the culture generally, but Meijer's was evidence of our shabby culture on a different level.
If anything, the Proof festival made the contrast unavoidable - there was something brought off with style and concern for its attendees. Not the take-it-or-leave-it attitude I get from the huge commercial operations sitting astride this country.
Today, when I was preparing this post, the following came though in my email. They seem relevant to my thoughts, so I add them here for you to follow up on.
Dear Tech Evangelists: Have You Tried “Move Slow and Make Things”? (Literary Hub)
None of this is new. None of the panic, none of the prophetism. Okay, so our cigarettes tell the time and more and more people in a porno are computer-generated. The kids can’t spell and the world leaders are senile. It’s always been falling apart, even when it looked like it wasn’t. Take a long enough view of things and see how little has changed, even as everything has changed. What does Generative AI threaten that wasn’t already under siege?
The lie I hear spoken by every image-generation or video-generation or text-generating Gen AI app is the lie of instantaneity. That the most important thing is having produced. Not the living that precedes the act of art-making, not the living that occurs during the art-making itself. The app will tell you that the most important thing is how fast you made this song that you can get Spotify to pay you for.
You, singular. Without a keyboardist or a drummer or a singer or a mixing engineer, nobody else on payroll, no bandmates. No friends. The most important thing is how fast you did it all, because the second most important thing is that now you can sell the thing you made. Self-published gibberish on the Amazon marketplace, a Surrealist cat video YouTube short, bland country twang for a music streaming service.
You in your bedroom—yes, you—leaning forward hungrily in your gaming chair, can get rich quick and fool yourself into thinking you’ve lived a meaningful life for the cost of a monthly subscription.
Scheming and lazy, you don’t create the Velvet Sundown to win a Grammy or the adulation of your peers or any sense of satisfaction at having done a difficult thing well. You do it to make a quick buck. You don’t do it because the music is compelling or even good. You do it because it’s easy. Because it took no time at all.
We all feel it: Our once-happy digital spaces have become increasingly less user-friendly and more toxic, cluttered with extras nobody asked for and hardly anybody wants. There’s even a word for it: “enshittification,” named 2023 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society. The term was coined by tech journalist/science fiction author Cory Doctorow, a longtime advocate of digital rights. Doctorow has spun his analysis of what’s been ailing the tech industry into an eminently readable new book, Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What To Do About It.
***
It starts with the creation of a new two-sided online product of high quality, initially offered at a loss to attract users—say, Facebook, to pick an obvious example. Once the users are hooked on the product, the vendor moves to the second stage: degrading the product in some way for the benefit of their business customers. This might include selling advertisements, scraping and/or selling user data, or tweaking algorithms to prioritize content the vendor wishes users to see rather than what those users actually want.
Writing, the arts generally, should be in defiance of making our lives shabby. I hope more of you show up for the next Proof, pens in hand and minds ready to create a better defense against the technocrats.
sch
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