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By: J.D. Finch (Guest IP 75.68.73.44) on 09-06-2007 03:22

For various reasons, I haven\'t made it to the Roundtable yet, but why not post my thoughts here, the place I consider my home on the Internet?    Outsider writers. Some have to exist outside, no matter how good or popular they become. When Jack Kerouac was welcomed into the insiders club was when he started dying. A perfect example of "Success will kill you".    I am reading a bio called Fisher's Face by Jan Morris. She's a British tranny and respected travel writer whose stuff is published by the mainstream press. But she's an outsider because of her point of view, which is fairly unique I think: she had a crush on her subject, a British Naval Admiral, when she was a man and has written his bio (interjecting her own feelings and opinions) as a woman.    There's a Playboy Playmate from decades back named Alice Denham, who wrote about screwing famous writers (a number of Beats, as well as Mailer, Roth, Gaddis, etc.) and though she considered herself one of the group of literatis made up of those she fucked, they did not think of her as "in the club" at all. After she wrote a novel she tried to get them to write cover blurbs and none would have anything to do with her. Back in the fifties, if the likes of a Mailer slammed the door in your face, you were the ne plus ultra of outsiders.    Class often creates outsiders, though at one time a poor (financially, not artistically) writer could be nearly assured of outsider status. But now, I don't see that a poor writer is an outsider, as there are so many poor in the nation that if poor, you are already part of a large group and thereby not truly "outside".    I think it was pretty dramatic when Jonathan Franzen blew off membership in Oprah's book club a few years ago. If you ever read any of his essays you'll find an outsider mind at work. I know he's a big player in the whole New Yorker/ establishmentpressandpublicati on scene, but I think he has the soul of an outsider.    So my point is, there are all sorts of outsiders and sometimes it is hard to recognize one past all the surface glitz that really has nothing to do with the writer's outsider soul. I try to look past the glitz because the payoff in authentic writing is well worth the effort of cutting through the bs.

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