What's Coming Next.

Our last print ad campaign featured the cover image from issue 132 (by photographer Doug Macomber) of a bend in a California highway and bore the slogan “What’s coming next.” We opted for a period rather than a question mark to foreground the eclectic and unpredictable quality of TriQuarterly issues. Between now and the publication of the last print issue of TriQuarterly in April of 2010, we are going to be looking back at some of the memorable issues, articles, and contributors of the last forty-five years. We reached out to our authors, both foreign and domestic, past staff, local figures, old and new friends to add their reflections and commentary.

Bookmark this page and check back regularly to see what’s coming next.

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Bonnie Jo Campbell - Finalist for National Book Award

“The musician had invited her to sleep in his tent again, but Susanna decided to stay home for a change. Just before going to bed, she ate the last two pawpaws the musician had given her. Pawpaw fruits were ripening, and those people who had pawpaw trees and who pitched tents behind their houses in order to watch over them, people who were willing to use pellet rifles to protect those trees from squirrels were privileged to eat some of that flesh the color of pumpkin meat. The mellow flavor resembled mango but with no tropical fibers to stick in your teeth, and the several seeds within each fruit were dark and smooth as magic beans. Susanna wouldn’t wear a crystal like Lisa’s, but she might string shiny lobed pawpaw seeds into a necklace. According to the musician, who had fifty pawpaw trees, this part of Michigan was the top of the tree’s range, and so when they grew here at all, they did so under cover of larger trees which could protect their branches from harsh cold and heavy snows.”


This is an excerpt from “September News from Susanna’s Farm” a story featured in TriQuarterly #133, written by Bonnie Jo Campbell, who is a finalist for a National Book Award for her book American Salvage, a collection of short stories published by Wayne State University Press, 2009.

Charles Newman on...

The University

Proof of pluralism is that we can now talk of the university in the same breath with art and society. Higher education has come in for a good share of attention lately. It has been criticized both for a willful aloofness from society and its needs, and for a fatally perfect adaptation to society and its impositions. One thing is clear – its scope has been immeasurably increased – not only does everyone end up at college, but as institutions, universities have been made responsible for everything from driver training to the preservation of grand opera. Given modern military and technological goals, some have acquired a power, prestige, and concommitant awe, once reserved for nation-states. The competition between them is purer than between our oligopolies; the politics within them as proselytizing as in any of our parties. They insist upon tangible credentials from a society whose motive force has always been a pragmatic test of talent. They talk among themselves in specialized languages provocative as any underground, yet justify themselves to society in common counter-revolutionary rhetoric. They are becoming a sub-culture unto themselves.

Most importantly, perhaps, is the number of artists who are not only educated in universities, but make their subsequent living off them. What this relocation of dissent will cost us is not yet clear. It has gone far enough, however, that the old Bohemian/ Bourgeois debate bas been set along new lines; the “academic” and the “beat”, or in Robert Lowell’s words, between the “cooked” and the “uncooked”. We want to elaborate that debate – make the dialectic something more than the rejection of some foul unity. We are not interested in making anybody’s career, although we hope our experience may dignify many. We hope to search out new talent, and encourage the established to venture beyond their reputations.

One recalls, however, that universities, like all institutions dependent upon the good will of the community, have not always been receptive to the kind of questions good artists ask. One can then tell artists to avoid such institutions, or demand that the institutions become more accountable. It may be that in the expanding university, we are witnessing an affluent democracy’s oblique answer to the patronage system of the old world – although we could not afford to call it that yet. Still, leisure does strange things to people. And the university’s function, most magnificently conceived, has after all been roughly akin to the artist’s, in that it is pledged to the damnation of spurious order, and devoted to questions that society will not, alone, ask itself. This does not negate synthesis; it simply enhances its value. The university serves art by witnessing the pluralism of society.


All this implies the concept of limited revolution; revolution in the American tradition by chance, in that it makes use of the Establishment. We believe that to be more in accord with both the ideal and the real. This is not the time to profess loyalty to institutions, but to the discipline which keeps institutions alive.

Our task is to assemble. Literary reviews provide no more viable standards than I.Q. tests or annual income. They are simply another alternative; an attempt to bind temperament and action through language. Without resorting to epilogues or manifestoes, we want to embellish those proper nouns and common verbs which have made our culture too often a vehicle for minor aspirations and mock debate. It will be a modern enterprise, perhaps embarrassingly so, in that we are justified by little save our own potential. We’re getting dressed up to celebrate the fact we’re still looking.

-From the introduction by Charles Newman to TriQuarterly 1, 1964

Charles Newman on...

Art

Modern art is the creative personality’s confrontation with pluralism – the sharing of the spectrum. There is an old and engaging ideal that art, literature particularly, might structure reality in such a way as to develop human sensitivity, and if not create values, at least indicate alternatives. A figure as recent as James Joyce is said to have thought that the worst thing about World War II is that it kept people from reading Ulysses. The Sturm und Drang literary reviews at the time of “two nations” believed that after that blasting, what floated back to earth would find new roots, grow new patterns. It is no secret that all the pieces did not fit together. The tradition that Art might affect Life, even uplift it, is now carried on, not so much by artists, but be considered a rear guard action in terms of art.

A most compelling fact of modern life is that much of modern art seems to repudiate it. It is the old debate between Jefferson and De Tocqueville again; whether you choose to celebrate the dynamism or vulgarity of a pluralistic world. The cultural elite used to allow that people get along pretty well without art. It has taken them the last half-century to say that art gets along pretty well without people – since the people confuse their capacity to react with the artist’s ability to explore.

It is not for us to gauge the proper relationship between art and society, or even to bring the mind and marketplace together. They are already too close for comfort. The idea that art should serve society is impractical, not because some societies, like ours, have failed at it, or others like Russia, have succeeded all too well – but simply because it is impossible to harness the creative personality to a phenomenon which is more or less than himself. It takes too much out of everybody concerned.

But what if society should serve art? The artist’s task, we have often been told, is to question without regard to the consequences. Society’s task is less newsworthy, but no less compelling – for they must have the courage to confront questions which not only don’t occur to them, but which they could not answer if they did. In that sense, appreciation is a selfless act. It is the audience, themselves, who must reject the synthetic order of those who serve their needs or presume to create them. In the supermarket, the consumer must provide his own synthesis.

The necessity for the artist’s personal vision, the value of his partiality is clear. The creative individual has his place, such as it is. Art, and what passes for it, is surely taken seriously enough. Perhaps it is the audience in which we no longer believe.


-From the introduction by Charles Newman to TriQuarterly 1, 1964

Charles Newman on...

Pluralism

When Dos Passos said, “All right! Now we are two nations.”, he was right save in one particular – the number. Dualism for his generation dramatized a final disgust with the oneness, the phony unities of the modern world. We have since learned that even something elemental as disgust is not easy to come by. In a society where poets use the marketing techniques of advertising, where businessman hire poets to sensitize their images, where radicals captivate the very audience they are pledged to destroy, where the bourgeois find anarchism fashionable, where the ethics of corporations and universities appear interchangeable, it is difficult to draw that old dialectic taut again. Heaven and Hell are no longer popular concepts in an affluent democracy. The social scientists have given us another, less pejorative vocabulary to explain ourselves. What De Tocqueville noted as the tyranny of equality, Jefferson envisioned as the chance for each talent to find its own authority, we call now Pluralism – which is both the fear and promise of unlimited possibility. Now we are x nations.

It is possible, of course, that we simply cannot calculate fast enough, that a machine will come up with that number and set us straight again. But that is to assume that mere naming will again suffice. It is who makes use of that pure mathematics, and how, which concerns us. Pluralism means that the number in Dos Passos’ retort is an unknown integer. It does not mean that any single reply is inadmissible – but that answers are viable, dangerously so, precisely because they are mutable. Pluralism means that the stuff of each choice is a genuine confusion, and that order may be various as the unique personalities which lay claim to it.

Order is perverse then, when a personality is absent or synthetic. Modern journalism is awesomely adept in avoiding the price of order. In collective editorializing, the personality is subsumed by committee for the sake of consistency. The voice must never catch or waver; that would complicate things. There are the ‘Objectivists’, on the other hand, who would let the “images speak for themselves”. Thus, we are treated, in successive exposures, to a president, a quadruple amputee, tomato soup, a debutante, and earthquake – bound together simply because they are all “news”. In one case, the perspective is synthetic; in the other it is non-existent. Both lack the unity of personal vision, and the courage implicit. Commercialism is only one kind of cowardice, however. Who knows what to make of that president, that cripple, that girlie, that soup, that disaster?


-From the introduction by Charles Newman to TriQuarterly 1, 1964