here was only one thing we agreed on: we were rabid socialists to a man. Red lions, given to rallying and stein-clashing. We lived by slogans. We would baffle Republicans with our ironfisted proclamations that the United States of America was a socialist state to the core, and always had been. Question was: at whose expense? Free land to white men, immigrant labor. But if someone triggered Dirk’s sentiments over Southern Comfort, he might rail from a barstool, waving a copy of Herland. Public transportation, national parks and libraries. We knew that experimental literature owed a lot to public funding: public universities and their presses, the NEA, the IAC, and, and we cannot stress this enough, public libraries. State-funded repositories of state-funded lit. Curt White had a job and could afford to write, and we couldn’t be happier. A few authors manage to stay out of academe: DeLillo, Auster, Gaddis, McCarthy, but they are increasingly the exception. Not that being deep-fried in theory has a positive effect on everyone’s writing. When we founded the Unknown, Rettberg was working for Amoco, and I had been proofreading speeches of football coaches (an impossible job, given that even the name of the publishing company I worked for had a typo in it, and no proofreader who wants to keep working would dare point out a fact like that [Coaches Choice—no apostrophe]). We were raving, man. Our project depended on the state and that was as it should be. We were fucking writing the literature to usher America into the Second Millennium. America had a hypertext that was being browsed worldwide. There were rumors that Scholes had a paper in the works about us. Because we were the shit. We were good old Yankee know-how applied to the electronic medium of the next thousand years. We were American, we were making the most of it, because America was the wealthiest, mightiest, and most wretched and disliked and humiliated and self-loathing nation on earth.

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