A TELEPATHICIST MANIFESTO Lee Sharks & John Johnson 1. Telepathicism is about having thoughts, telepathically. 2. Telepathicism is NOT a method or style or school or writing. Telepaths HATE writing: It’s boorish and stupid and boring. Writing is like plowing a field with an old- fashioned cow. Telepaths are like advanced super computers plowing a field with eBay. 3. The telepath is stranded in time. Writing is a cow-plow, but it’s what the telepath has to work with. 4. Telepathic writers do not train as writers, diddle sentences, or work with words. Language is a dusty string in the telepath’s brain, causing an aneurism. 5. The telepath has a craft, and that craft is mind control powers. 6. Telepaths give birth to luminous tumors made of light. Inside their minds. 7. A telepathic tumor is the hope of the human race. 8. A telepathic tumor’s gestation takes 18 sentient lifetimes. All of them are spent in furious thought, giving birth with a grimace of work and fluid. Ash and dirt. Dust and spit. 9. Tiny metropolises of unpaid cyborg researches study literary history for ten thousand years inside a telepath’s 114 · · · page 143 · · · brain. 10. A telepath also does not have a brain, in the same way that a telepath does not write. 11. A telepath does not NEED to write, in the same way that a telepath does not need a brain. 12. A telepath has a mind, but just says no to tele-pathways of neurons and sensory dendrites. 13. A telepath exists in a cloud, generally. 14. A telepath exists in THE cloud, specifically. 15. Telepaths practice their craft of mind control powers via controlling minds, not brains or writing. 16. Telepaths also generally and specifically have control of writing and brains, but hate it. 17. Tumors that are the hope of the human race, and cyborgs that are unpaid or woefully underpaid for their level of qualification, make up cogs outside the machine of Telepathicism. They are cogs, and they are not cogs, but neurons, and they are not neurons, but sensory dendrites, and they are not sensory dendrites, they are whole brains, and they are not whole brains, they are writing, except, they are not writing, they are created telepathically and they are tumors and cyborgs and they are the omniscient hope of humanity. 18. Because Telepathicism is about having thoughts, telepathically. 115 · · · page 144 · · · EMOTICONS OF MIDNITE Lee Sharks I saw the most educated person on the poetry website banned from the poetry website, indignant confused and hurt, trolling the boards at dinnertime deleting his poems and comments, eloquent-fingered typist burning for a historically relevant poetry community in the emoticons of midnite who loneliness and jitters and sullen-faced and sad sat up reading in the quotidian emptiness of condominiums skittering across the tops of chat rooms contemplating literary criticism who was unable to find employment in the academies imagining steady work and purpose among the scholars of tenure— ah, Sigil—while you are not real, I am not real, and now we’re really in the total vegetable soup of time— 116 · · · page 145 · · · BACKLASH: ‘THE NEW HUMAN ILLITERATI’ CORNELL HERWITZ, professor and literary historian, published “The New Human Illiterati” in Partisan Review, vol. CXIV, No. 4 (Spring 2007). More than twenty years later, in his autobiography Bad Disciples, he continued to criticize Lee Sharks, whose “innovations,” Herwitz explained, “consisted not in a principled stand in the realms of aesthetics or ethics, but rather in the many years he had envied me, his inability to carve out a niche within the academy, and childish foot-stomping.” Herwitz was part of the informal community of New York literary critics and writers associated with Language Writing who passed from radicalism to trite political correctness in their careers after September 11th. In his attack on the hyper-authorialism, self- centeredness, and verbosity of the New Human writers in his 2007 article, Herwitz appointed himself “spokesman of the arrière-garde,” as his biographer, Hyde Morten, knew. 117 · · · page 146 · · · The result of Herwitz’ article was an influx of letters to the Partisan Review defending the New Humans, including one by Rebekah Crane. In the “Correspondence” section of the following issue of the journal, Crane wrote that the New Human writing was “less a reaction than a movement. It is a movement forward, away from, to start with, twenty years of the false binary between the tepid, sterile, unremarkable workshop writing” by writers like “Rita Dove, Billy Collins, and others who were so characteristic of the trends in mainstream ‘professional’ writing for the past few decades; and ‘avant-garde’ writers like [Charles] Bernstein, [Ron] Silliman, [Lyn] Hejinian, [Kenneth] Goldsmith” and others who typify “the equally canned, kneejerk post-humanism now three decades past its prime. Put both camps together, and you would be hard-pressed to find ten noteworthy poems.” Herwitz and other academics and commentators continued to cast aspersions on the New Human writers in the pages of Partisan Review. For example, in the Fall 2008 issue, Herwitz wrote in “The New Naivety and the Non-Novel” that the “public acclaim afforded Lee Sharks and Jack Feist, whose work combines a warmed-over avant-gardism with a posturing sentimentalism, underscores the fever that has developed on both poles of the cultural divide for anything totalizing, intense, fervid, and new; ten, or even five, years ago the New Human movement would have gone unremarked.” In the same issue, French critic Alain Boudreau, reviewing Rebekah Crane’s small-press anthology of literary translations, Day and Night: Conversations with Sapphic Desire, started by noting, “Rebekah Crane is regarded as the brightest of New York’s New Human poets. Since the other possibilities are Lee Sharks, Jack Feist, and Johannes Sigil, no one will contest her preeminence.” Boudreau, who had grown close with novelist Tao Lin, 118 · · · page 147 · · · wanted Crane to stop “copying Anne Carson and find her own voice. Maybe the New York scene is part of the explanation for her reserve; the startling aspect of the New Human writers is the degree to which they ape tradition. I suppose they think they must be ‘postmodern,’ and ‘postmodern’ just means going through the ritual rejection of one’s predecessors that has been dated for at least a century. Maybe a concerned friend should discretely explain to Lee Sharks that neither Walt Whitman nor Ezra Pound are so very avant-garde.” *** 119 · · · page 148 · · ·