WHAT IS THAT. . . THING?

I am Tim Barrus’ co-writer. Sometimes. I don’t do vids. The Daily Beast (an online magazine) on January 19th “printed” a short essay criticizing memoirs that were episodic, unexplained and otherwise expect the reader to do a little work to “get it.” The article writer also wanted proof of reality, fact-checking. Tim commented, since he’s so often the brunt of such criticism. He was focusing on publishing’s resentment and resistance to the new media of the “vook,” an ebook with videos embedded. He’s stunned by the “meanness” of the responses to his queries. In fact, since publishing has gone the way of the stock market (mostly by thinking it could be run like a stock market investment company) everyone is pretty daggone cranky.

But let’s stick to the issue of defining memoir. As a former English teacher, I’d say most publishers and critics take the categories learned in high school way too seriously. It was a page in the lit book, right, and explained autobiography, biography, and maybe memoir or collected correspondence. NOT from the point of view of the writer, but from the critic who needs to sort what he or she is explaining. The gist of the division between autobiography and memoir was that the first was factual (born on x/x/xx in dadada) and the second was impressionistic. What they don’t tell you is that in a bookstore a memoir is worth about ten times as much as an autobiography. Publishers will push everything they can towards being a memoir. The critics moan and grumble that they are TIRED of memoir, but the public buys them. Many theories why. By now there are so many that subcategories are developing.

Out here on the prairie where I am, we are a little more elastic, at least away from the universities, so our spectrum of stories runs from campfire bullshit on one end, through several kinds of history and literature to 3-D large-screen personal vision sci-fi on the other. All may be relatively true and all may be intensely personal. (We do not pass judgment as much as bicoastals.) Here on the edge of the rez we are sharply aware that recent history such as massacres have at least two versions: tribal and governmental. We also know how to make a pitch for money and we know that sometimes it’s a good idea to blurt, “Hey, only kidding.” That is, we don’t live in literature categories: we live in real lives packed with stories.

Tim, who never saw a category he didn’t like to escape, is doing more than working with a mixed media: he is “writing” IN the subject IN the moment with the participants contributing. It will be clearer if I describe our creation -- or maybe “generation” is more accurate -- of the conventionally print manuscript called “Orpheus Pressed Up Against the Windows of the Catacombs.” It began in 2007 as daily email correspondence between Tim and I. Pretty soon his Cinematheque boys (art students “at risk”) began to butt in and out. It was like a daily journal.

I condensed it, organized it (mostly chronologically or maybe geographically), added a little explanation for those who weren’t there, and now it’s a story ready to be a book. But what category? Especially since Tim and the guys were all over the planet while I was sitting here in a Montana village. No one did any fact-checking. For all Tim knows (since we’ve never met), the cat typed my part. For all I know, Tim was actually in a library carrel with a lot of reference books. (Jealous anti-fans suggest that.) There were videos flying back and forth, plenty of still photos, sometimes paintings, but none was woven into the text, which was actually an electronic correspondence. If Tim made all this up, I will -- as he would say -- eat my sneakers.

Is this reality fiction? Is it related to the New Journalism? Is it a published diary? Don’t new media create new categories? I would say yes to all questions. It is immediate, episodic, sometimes almost unbearably emotional (there were deaths), surprising, morality-busting, and often very very funny. Tim writes in passionate vernacular. I respond in (ahem) measured prose, pushing everything into myth and archetype, trying to explain, find patterns. So some critics would barf right there. They can’t handle two styles in one manuscript.

Then along come the guyz with their own extravagant ideas. Some don’t speak (or keyboard) English so there’s just a blurted phrase. In any language. They have to be masked to keep their pimps, tricks, and parents from finding them. But they LIVE attached to their iPods and Internet connections, spinning out relationships like silkworms with no accountability to anyone or focus on anything except survival.

The old English textbook is now obsolete. (It should be on something like iPad anyway, so it can keep up.) The new English textbook must be in many languages. Texts, critics and dictionaries are always running along behind, desperately trying to keep up with what is happening. If one creates a trail of words while traveling, written in the moment, illustrated, edited and arranged later -- what is that? The Journals of Lewis & Clark? So did your English teacher tell you whether that was autobiography or memoir? Did she note that “travelogue” is one of the major metaphors of life-stories?

New ways of using words must be allowed their uniqueness until there are enough of them to put a concept around. Consider graphic novels. There WAS no such thing. Consider novels. Once there WAS no such thing. But a lot of the early ones purported to be correspondence: they just weren’t electronic. (Imagine Lewis & Clark on an iPad! Or -- Yow! -- “Fanny Hill.”)

I was on a panel back a few years that tried to inquire into these matters -- at least the audience wanted to do that -- but it was immediately strangled by the panel moderator because what the panel was really about was marketing. The whole thing of marketing is saying you’ve got to buy this and not that. Autobiography, good. Memoir, dubious. Un-factual memoir, ohmigod -- shoot it! So UGLY. But books, as the best English teachers know, cannot be suppressed anymore than boys can, and every new invention from papyrus to Espresso machines means new kinds of writing.