The Collabo

Flatmancrooked’s First Winter featured a new translation (by yours truly) of a little-known story written collaboratively by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. The value of this Borges’ piece to Flatmancrooked and to its many other relatively unknown contributors is obvious. Borges, however, is dead and obtaining the rights to publish this translation was an onerous process. Thus, it’s not exactly a model I would recommend to other literary journals and publications.

What I would recommend is taking a cue from the hip-hop collaboration. One version of the ‘collabo’ is strictly monetary: Upcoming Rapper pays Famous Rapper fifty grand, say, to provide a guest verse. The other is benevolent (but also monetary): the ‘doing for your crew’ collabo; a sort of “I eat, you eat” kind of thing where Famous Rapper directs the spotlight on his crew of disciples.

Applying this to the literary world is easy: find a lesser known story by a famous author (e.g. Cheever’s “A Woman Without Her Country”), acquire the rights to anthologize it, and publish it alongside new stories. It doesn’t have to be a translation, or even a little-known story. Fuck it, get the rights to anthologize “The Swimmer” in your new collection. This is, of course, a method that requires a little capital.

If you’re just starting out, then hopefully, though you have no money, you have some connections. Thus you ask Ha Jin for a new story, say. This practice is already in place in the literary world, to a lesser degree, in the form of book-jacket blurbs and introductions. I’m suggesting that we take it a step further, that famous and respected authors contribute stories, poems, essays, whathaveyou to the journals and books of their friends and students. This practice will, of course, take an entire generation to develop, and so it will be difficult for us young writers to benefit from it on a wide-spread basis. We can, however, as future accomplished poets and story-writers, write a poem for a friend’s book or give a short-short to a student’s new collection.

It sounds odd, but think about trying to collect every song on which Lil Wayne has a verse. You’d be spread over hundreds of artists and albums; the oeuvre is not located in any one place (nor is the internet, which is where much of this will probably be published). It’s time to drop the pretensions that a book of stories or poems (and especially a journal of new writing by various authors) is a cohesive work of art that will be destroyed by the inclusion of foreign material. Jay-Z’s Reasonable Doubt features B.I.G. and it’s still a cohesive masterpiece. My copy of Sappho has fragments of doubtful attribution that are some of my favorites. I like Pynchon’s introduction to 1984 more than the book itself. In fact, the model of the forward or introduction would allow the artist to produce a “cohesive work.” In this case, the forward is simply replaced with an original work by the established author (i.e. your new book of short stories is prefaced by a new short story by George Saunders rather than with an introduction by George Saunders). I ask you, does the animated short at the beginning of a Pixar film ruin the integrity of the feature presentation?

Some people will probably say that journals already serve this function. That may be true to some extent, but it’s certainly a miniscule one. I’m not going to buy a copy of the Three Penny Review simply because Louise Glück has a poem in there. I will buy her new book. Which brings me to the obverse form of this idea: Upcoming Rapper is granted the privilege of a guest verse on Famous Rapper’s new album. In other words, a contest is structured so that the winner gets their short story published in Ha Jin’s new collection (as an afterward, say) or maybe Mark Strand has a new chapbook length sequence of poems that will be published alongside three contest winners to make a full length book—I’m not buying the PSA chapbook prize winners even if Mark Strand has written the introduction. It’s time to take the idea of the crossover to the next level.

I’m guessing this practice of literary guest appearances will anger many people (“Who the fuck does James Kaelan think he is publishing a Hemingway Story in his new collection!”) If so, good. It builds hype. It sells records and it can sell books.

Next Time: Making people angry: the East Coast-West Coast War of the nineties, Ulyssess, Eminem, Mary Karr’s first book—Catullus on obscenity, Big Pun’s Bluff, and Fade.

By Christopher Robinson