[Newspoetry] Open Letter to Pages for all Ages from The Unknown

[William Gillespie]

Dear Stephen Bentz of Pages for All Ages (tm),

In response to your request of (Wed, 15 Jan 2003 14:10:31 -0600) "Please
remove this page (http://www.unknownhypertext.com/pages.htm) from the web.
You are using our trademarked brand name without our consent," we the
Unknown have collectively composed this response in the form of an open
letter, relevant, we feel, to anyone who has a stake in free speech,
contemporary literature, the internet, satire, Illinois, net art, or
building community among those for whom the language still speaks louder
than money. A more colorful version of this letter is available online at
http://www.unknownhypertext.com/censored.htm

Here's some background.

The Unknown is:

-A hypertext novel by William Gillespie, MS, founder of Spineless Books,
which stands alongside Inky Press and Non Sequitur as part of a
tradition of local publishing; Scott Rettberg, PhD, professor
of literature at Stockton college and the founder of the Electronic
Literature Organization); and Dirk Stratton, PhD ABD, who teaches
creative writing full time at the excellent School for the Creative and
Performing Arts in Cincinnati.

-Winner of the 1998 trAce/Alt-X International Hypertext Competition, as
judged by Robert Coover (http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/hypertext/)

-Taught at numerous universities, including the University of Chicago,
Georgia Tech, and Brown (http://www.unknownhypertext.com/presskit/)

-Written about by scholars, critics, and students in France, Italy,
Australia, Barcelona, and Singapore, among others
(http://www.unknownhypertext.com/presskit/)

-Recovering from a tour of over 30 performance venues from sea to shining
sea (http://www.unknownhypertext.com/greenline.htm)

-As Beckett would say, "getting known." Canonical. Notorious even. In
fact, we have carbon copied and blind carbon copied several influential
literary critics, real and fictional, on this very email message.

We believe that there are no legal grounds for your request. We are not
using your logo, which may in fact be trademarked. We are neither
slandering nor libeling your store. We are not attempting to use your name
or URL as our own corporate name or URL to draw competing business away
from your store. We have not attempted to make any money off our
hypertext.

We are, in fact, a work of fiction. There are no bookstore laundromats
with wet bars. There is no Bookstore in the Woods. We have never been to
Alaska nor played pool with William Gaddis.

One does not wantonly edit an established work of literary fiction, such
as the Unknown, Ulysses, or the Odyssey. At this point, editing the
Unknown would interfere with the work of those people who are writing
dissertations about our multisequential fiction. (see "Drugs, Machines,
and Friendships." Cybertext Yearbook (forthcoming)) In literary
scholarship, proper citations are important. Suppose we removed the page
you requested, and a Norwegian hypertext scholar were to confront her
thesis committee and discover that the texts she cited in her paper,
comprising months of scholarship, are no longer there. What business, we
might ask, does Pages for all Ages have jeapordizing the academic careers
of Norwegian hypertext scholars?

If you are upset that The Unknown comes up second on a search for "Pages
for All Ages" on the Google search engine, we would encourage you to take
up your issue with Google. In fact, The Unknown comes up on many searches
for many things, by virtue of the fact that it is a critically acclaimed
work of literature, is encyclopedic, and has a massive vocabulary. One
important aspect of a web page that affects its Google ranking is how many
pages link to it, and the Unknown is widely linked to. We are not in a
position to affect Google search results.

And as a practical matter, one cannot simply remove a page from the web.
The page has been cached by Google and will continue to come up second and
be readable even if we remove it from our server. And will you send a
cease-and-desist to the people who maintain archive.org, in which the page
you have asked us to remove has been archived many times over? And if you
would consider that, don't you think that others have also considered
that? And what about the approximately 1,250 other uses of your trademark
on the Web a Google search calls up? Whatever damage you are afraid of has
been done.

But in all likelihood, the fact that your store is mentioned in one comic
scene of our novel has enhanced your credibility as a seller of serious
literature and possibly even brought you some business, as readers of our
work may have sought out the actual store referred to in the virtual space
of the comic hypertext novel. This has happened before
(http://www.unknownhypertext.com/coverletter.htm).

Now that we've covered the basics, let's proceed to the graduate level. Up
here, works of literature are read and discussed, not merely sold or
censored. Your request has deeper overtones and in fact touches on issues
of first amendment rights, but even more disturbingly, betrays an
extremely short-sighted attitude with regard to literature on the part of
your bookstore. In essence, your request is highly ironic without being at
all funny.

One of the many themes of the Unknown is the triumph of the independent
bookseller, publisher, and writer (and collaboration between them) over
the overbearing corporate publishing giants that rule trade publishing,
which organizations are profit driven and ultimately do not have the
readers' best interests in mind. Pages for All Ages is one of the "feisty
little independents" who are quite literally thanked
(http://www.unknownhypertext.com/bookstores.htm) in the pages of the
Unknown. Indeed, until now we were your loyal customers. Other such
booksellers (such as Urbana's exemplary Priceless Books!) have been
grateful to us for mentioning them, and have even hosted Unknown readings
in their stores. We are firmly on your side, and if you take this
conversation a step beyond your trademark, you will understand that.

To remove proper names from the text of the work would be to eviscerate
its intent. Were we to remove "Pages for All Ages," we would be allowing a
dangerous precedent-that we, as writers, are willing to compromise our
novel in order to appease corporate entities. Should Barnes & Noble or
Microsoft, which are in fact the targets of our critique, demand that we
remove their corporate names from the text of the novel, the intent of our
novel would be all but obfuscated.

Let us explain fiction to you: http://www.unknownhypertext.com/pages.htm
is not a scene about Pages for All Ages any more than Robert Coover's The
Public Burning (not available in your store) is a biography of Richard
Nixon. Again: Pages for All Ages has no bowling alley. The subtext of this
scene is that the large chains, by trying to consolidate too many services
into the sites of their superstores, are undermining the very real value
of literature and its place in society. In the fictional scene you think
we will take off the web, the "feisty independent" "Pages for All Ages" is
trying to compete with the superstores, and the result is a corruption of
what a bookstore is meant to be. Please reread the scene and notice how
the customer in the bookstore spends no more than one dollar on books, and
even then as an afterthought. Imagine trying to browse poetry while a rock
band is performing ten feet away. We think this page is not only funny but
meaningful. Haunting even.

The Unknown is a cry for help from scholars of English Studies who
find that America no longer has a literary culture that can accommodate
them, given that the interface between literature and readers is
controlled by a very small number of consolidated private interests. The
exceptions are libraries, independent publishing houses, writers who are
intrepid and obnoxious enough to create their own venues when the
mainstream venues are not open to them, like the Unknown, and the feisty
independent booksellers, like Pages for all Ages.

Browse some of the books in your store. What would Michael Moore do, for
instance, were he to receive a similar request from Nike (Downsize This
is in humor, Stupid White Men is with your bestsellers)? Did Eric
Schlosser get explicit permission from McDonald's to mention their
trademarked name in Fast Food Nation (betsellers)? Did David Foster
Wallace ask for permission to use Depend Adult Undergarments in Infinite
Jest (fiction)? We suspect, and hope, not, because if that isn't fair use,
then ignorance is strength and war is peace.

Of the scores of individuals and corporate entities mentioned in the
Unknown, you are the first to object to the use of your name within the
novel. Given the fact that The Unknown has been freely distributed on the
Internet since 1998, that you would raise objection in 2003 is even more
remarkable. It shows that not only do you object to free expression and
lack a sense of humor, but that you just don't read the web.

That's the graduate level, now let's get personal. Aside from the
respectable Illini Union bookstore, Pages for All Ages is the closest
thing to a local independent retail trade bookseller the University of
Illinois at Urbana has. (I do not consider Folletts to be a bookstore) As
such, you have a responsibility to foster literary culture in our
community. Attempting to censor award-winning works by local writers
certainly goes counter to building a literary community. We are indeed
quite shocked that, as a bookseller, you are not fighting for the rights
of novelists to freely express themselves, rather than against that right.
Yep, it sucks being you. Not only do you have to survive the competition
of Barnes & Noble and Borders, who have no-less-convenient locations and
better selections than you, but you also have to be the one with
integrity. Literature is no cake walk, take it from us.

We would encourage you to reconsider your request. Though, as a freely
distributed hypertext novel, we have no assets to speak of (indeed it
costs us money to keep the novel available to its global audience), there
are attorneys among our fan base, and we are quite prepared to engage in
whatever well-publicized struggle might be necessary to protect novelists'
right to free speech. Until now, we feel, we have brought you only
positive publicity. This is still our preference, but this could change.
Should you press this matter, we could get you famous. And we will also
ask that you never again use the word "Unknown" anywhere in your store.

But we hope to avoid a conflict, as we have bigger fish to fry. And,
frankly, as your once and hopefully future customer (and vendor), we would
suggest that your energy might be better spent embellishing your poetry
and fiction sections with more small press titles, such as, for starters,
Dalkey Archive Press (The Human Country, by Harry Mathews), Green Integer
(The Twofold Vibration, by Raymond Federman), Sun and Moon (My Life, by
Lyn Hejinian), Couch House (Eunoia, by Christian Bok, winner of the
Griffin Prize for Poetic Excellence), and Soft Skull (Hideous Dream, by
Stan Goff), for starters.

All Best,
The Unknown

PS. Attached is an article from today's Publisher's Weekly Newsline. This
week, Random Trade Publisher Ann Godoff was fired, because the division,
considered to be one of the finest literary imprints in big publishing,
was deemed not sufficiently profitable by its parent corporation. In other
news, the attached article concerns an independent bookseller in Austin,
Texas, a community that is comparable to Champaign-Urbana(-Savoy) in many
respects, except that it has a thriving literary culture thanks in no
small part to the independent booksellers who struggle to make it so.
Enjoy:

.....

Keep Austin Weird: BookPeople Helps Organize Protest Against Chains

BookPeople of Austin, Tex., is working with Liveable City, a local
non-profit community organization dedicated to improving Austin's "quality
of life," to protest Borders Books & Music's plans to open a superstore on
the same block as the 32-year-old independent. In addition to encouraging
local residents to speak out at public forums, the store is printing
bumper stickers and T-shirts with the slogan "Keep Austin Weird" to help
rally people around the cause.

The new Borders is part of a large retail development that will also
include an 88,000-sq.-ft. Whole Foods grocery store and a seven-story
office building. The city government has granted the project $2.1 million
in various development incentives. The development has reportedly used
$710,000 of the funds and is now seeking additional assistance. The same
developer has another large development one block away that includes an
OfficeMax store and a Starbucks.

Liveable City contends that the new Borders store is likely to harm the
local economy by taking away business from both BookPeople and Waterloo
Records, an independent music store. Robin Rather, research director for
Liveable City, explained, "Local merchants keep much more of their labor,
profits and spending here instead of out of town. Shopping at local
businesses instead of national chains with equivalent products and prices
injects three times as much money back into Austin's economy."

A study conducted by the Austin economic analysis firm Civic Economics
concurred, saying that BookPeople contributes $2.8 million annually to
Austin, and Waterloo Records contributes $4.1 million each year. Civic
Economics maintains that Borders is likely to account for just $800,000 of
local contributions annually, and that most profits will go elsewhere.

In an open letter on the store's Web site (http://www.bookpeople.com),
BookPeople CEO Steve Bercu calls national chain stores "eyesores" and says
that they are "inappropriate to this already congested area" and "are
exactly the sort of stores that belong in suburban settings."

Sparing no invective, Bercu added, "Much like a virus replicates itself to
destroy healthy cells, these chain stores spread and multiply, attempting
to drive existing, local, independent businesses out of business--and they
use our tax dollars as subsidies to give themselves a competitive chance."

He did add: "We're fine with competing, but we don't believe that the city
should be tipping the scales in favor of our competitors by subsidizing
the national chains."

Commenting on the fray, Rich Oppel, editor of the Austin-American
Statesman, wrote in an editorial that the city should not subsidize chains
but "neither should the city shield locally owned businesses from chain
competition." He added, "I buy books at Book People. It's on the way home,
I like the store's shaggy feel and I like to engage the tattooed clerks
who debate at length the virtues of any book I consider. Jeffrey
Eugenides' wonderful new novel Middlesex sells for $16.20 at Borders at
the Arboretum, and for $27 at BookPeople. Although prices are closer on
most books, $10 is a high weirdness premium... The real predator is not
Borders, but the city."

A town hall meeting has been scheduled for January 21 to discuss the
issue.--Edward Nawotka

PPS Please address future correspondence to our manager at
marla at unknownhypertext.com

On Wed, 15 Jan 2003, Steven Bentz wrote:

> Please remove this page (http://www.unknownhypertext.com/pages.htm) from the web. You are using our trademarked brand name without our consent.
>
> Steven Bentz
> Pages For All Ages
> 217.351.8018
>