Out of Work Shamans vs. the Mall

Should Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer have blown up a Waldenbooks?

Lately I’ve been reading All This Thinking: The Correspondence of Clark Coolidge and Bernadette Mayer (U of New Mexico Press, 2022). I won’t pretend to offer a review, and Cam Scott has already written a good one here. Instead, I want to expand upon a passage that made me laugh and also seemed to touch on one of the ongoing concerns of this blog: how much publishing has changed in the last 40 years. In particular, both Coolidge and Mayer were very conscious of the effects of conglomeration in the late 70/early 80s—major media corporations buying up smaller publishing firms and consolidating media empires—that was then changing the publishing world in a drastic way (in fact, I have already written about some of Mayer’s own thoughts on the issue here).

In the exchange between Coolidge and Mayer that follows, the central image expressing these changes is one near and dear to me: the shopping mall. And I want to say a few things about malls here before digging into the letters. As you may know, I run a small press called Dead Mall, and I’ve written on the press’s website about the name’s significance for me¹. In sum, my early experiences of literature occurred in malls, or in relation to malls. And in recent years, I’ve come to see the emergence of the mall as a crucial historical fact. Further, its present state of decay and “death” is a sign not of its demise, but of its having moved into cyberspace and been enhanced by technologies of surveillance and control.

The mall is now everywhere. And yet there is something path-etic and dreamlike about the physical fact of the abandoned mall. As Walter Benjamin saw in his Arcades Project, the material reality of a dead mall—the decaying nineteenth century Arcades of Paris are seen as “proto-malls”—is also a psychic space: a physical expression of social dream life that becomes more vivid as its layers fall apart and the glow fades. Yes, it was a place of rampant commerce, but it was also a place of of collective, social experience, with fountains, greenery, fascinating shades of light, an unimaginable wealth of materials and objects—a place of desire, even of fantasy. Take money out of the equation, as well as the consumerist mentality, and you have a utopian space. And Benjamin, thinking as a Freudian, saw this trace of a utopia as “latent content” in the mall’s dream: it is the secret, repressed desire of capital to become just such communal space—to seek its own abolition.

If Benjamin was right, it seems that desire has been smothered or else it up and fled. In 2024, the mall has left physical space altogether to enter cyberspace, diffusing itself into a permanent ambience, watching us and shaping our desires from our phones and every fluctuation of attention and even touch. The consumer in the perma-mall is now also a commodity, yielding data to be sold and utilized in pursuit of further sales. The shopper doesn’t enter the mall any longer; the mall lives in them, inside their most intimate spaces, alongside texts, memories, fantasy images, work, every app you have. The next step, then, is liquidating imagination itself and rendering it transparent to these same technologies.

But I was talking about the letters…

I got started on this line of thoughts today after reading the following passage in a letter Coolidge wrote to Mayer, dated October 1980. In it, he addresses publishing, conglomeration, and—that’s right—the newly emerging corporate bookstores, usually found in malls. He begins with reference to an article in the New Yorker:

I've been following through that three-parter on present state of the Book Biz in New Yorker and its stuff we somehow already know even if not exactly but still horribly depressing stark down in fact and future fact. Conglomerate ownership, print media divisions, going for the big commerciality, loss of the friendly neighborhood bookseller, etc. blahblahblah. The kind of piece that Larry is going to later insist we all must read (like that Pauline Kael Hoooywood Biz piece he was assigning to his class at Naropa!) even though we all have read it and don't even want to discuss it anymore.

While I didn’t take the time to try and track down the three-part article he refers to, it’s interesting that his initial reaction is one of exhaustion: “blahblahblah” and “we...don’t even want to discuss it anymore.” As though it’s enough trying to keep one’s writing alive while living through all this stuff and watching the changes reshape your world, and to then be expected to gather around the New Yorker to “understand” it all? It’s a must read! Yeah, sure. But then Coolidge goes on to address what does interest him in the article:

One thing that got me how these huge suburban shoppingcenter bookchains like Waldenbooks (which are taking over everything and even determining by computerized sales "projections" just which manuscripts will be accepted by the publishers) are being purposely designed to look like supermarkets so that nobody will feel intimidated or embarrassed to walk in. Shit, not only am I intimidated to walk into a supermarket but I honestly can't ever remember feeling intimidated by walking into a book store. Amazing. Theyd claim that makes me an elite snob I spose. Maybe we will end up members of terrorist cells planning to place plastique behind the racks. Either that or a state of out-of-work shamanism, right.

For those who may not remember, or who weren’t alive then, Waldenbooks came before Borders and Barnes & Noble, and if you’ve been in either one of those, then you know what he means. Coolidge is watching in real time as the logic of conglomeration transforms the actual space in which literature is encountered. And yes, this is something that happened to physical space and to the textures and lighting and moods in which books lived². It was tangible, tactile, and it got worse and worse, and then it simply transformed itself: it moved onto the internet and became Amazon. “Computerized sales projections” sounds quaint in today’s world of algorithmic manipulation and monopoly tactics. In Amazon’s self-publishing platform, CreateSpace³, the entire circuit of literary production and reception is now largely internalized by the logic first apparent in 1980 in the corporate/conglomerate mall bookstore.

And what is Coolidge’s affective response to this situation and what it promises for the future? One option is to become a terrorist: bomb the bookstores! He’s obviously being facetious here, but contained in this is a still-meaningful idea: that rejection and even attack are at least implied by the position he and Mayer held on the margins. And I continue to ask how that vitally marginal position fares today, in a culture of poetry in the US that has sought adaptations to, well, The Mall⁴. (I’ll refer you elsewhere on the blog if you’d like to read those thoughts.)

Perhaps more interesting, though, is the other face of the poet-terrorist in Coolidge’s joke: the shaman—here signified as “out of work,” offering something nobody can employ. Now, I realize I am probably putting too much emphasis on Coolidge’s offhanded joke here, but I can’t help but find this complex of ideas fascinating: poet, terrorist, shaman, bookstore, mall. And it raises a few questions: first, what exactly is a shaman⁵ —or, how can we rescue this figure from Jim Morrison cliches and Qanon rioters? To put it concisely, the shaman is a figure who moves through imagination, transgressing the boundaries of their own identity, to handle the toxins and sicknesses of their community. The shaman is the one who turns everything inside out, where the external goes inward, and internal goes out: they operate at a nexus of reality and imagination and freely move between the valences of each. For a poet, this is something they do in language—or it is a capacity of their linguistic operations. And in the historical scene that Coolidge surveyed, a world moving through conglomeration and malls, the poet was fated to be a marginal figure—an out of work shaman in a land of sickened dreams.

Before I share Bernadette’s reply to this letter, I want to share a passage from Midwinter Day in which she actually describes a mall. It was written in 1978, a couple years before the letters were exchanged, and she describes the physical manifestation of a mall on the landscape in Massachusetts. You see very clearly what “a land of sickened dreams” looked like to her: 

“And something called malls are the big thing now.” I mean, this is really an astonishing instance of history in verse. Dodging union labor. Fraudulent corporations. Hideous deals. Families seeking pleasure from places that ruin their lives. Encroaching isolation and privatization. The desire to imitate royalty through the pursuit of entertainment. Endless assimilation beyond one’s capacity. And in the middle of all of this degradation, the secret/latent face of the mall is that of a spaceship: an emblem of the Future, of Discovery, even of the possibility of civilization itself—half buried in the ground and surrounded by a parking lot. She gives a topography and specificity to all this. It’s all right there.

So two years after writing this, she had moved to NYC and was working for the Poetry Project. And at some point during her busy days, she sat down and read Coolidge’s latest letter, in which he muses on Waldenbooks, terrorism, and shamans. Then, about six weeks later, on November 22, 1980, she wrote a letter back that contained the following:

[S]upermarkets, subways, publishing conglomerates, banks, who in his or her right mind would want to walk in to those? Well it's more than obvious I know but I've always been a dimwit in the sense that I really do not understand why, for instance, there is such a thing as MacDonalds or something. Nor do I have any greater understanding how anyone can be a poet and write poetry without apprehending the almost absolutist conditions or givens of it. So here we are, two purists, just swinging our arms around in each others’ vicinities.

There is little to say in response besides, YES and I LOVE YOU. “I really do not understand why, for instance, there is such a thing as MacDonalds or something.” And truly, how do you write poetry “without apprehending the almost absolute conditions or givens of it”—when IT is also now the corporate, privatized, surveillant control of space itself, inner and outer, by the demands of an increasingly ubiquitous and amorphous Market. Living “in a state like this,” one flirts with the identities of Purist, Terrorist, Shaman—each a figure of exclusion, exception, and refusal. One says the world as given is not the world that poetry knows, but that poetry knows the given world too. And one says that capital breeds sickness by lying about our dreams.

So where does all this leave us? In 2024, the mall is everywhere, an almost permanent ambience. Shopping itself is a necessary way of life and has trained our other behaviors as well. After all, isn’t that all that scrolling is—shopping? We’re in the mall right now, or somewhere outside its doors, hanging out in the parking lot. At best we’re the “out of work shamans,” waving our arms in the vicinity of one another, and endeavoring to “apprehend the almost absolutist conditions or givens” that we’re alive within, and to keep breathing what life there is into language, into books, into our personal and collective imaginations.

---

Thanks for reading <3

If you liked this, please consider sharing it somewhere. Maybe others will like it too.                                       

1. From the FAQ page:

First, dead malls are real, so it's not just a poetical phrase. In the most obvious sense, the image of failing commerce especially apt for anyone involved in the small press world.  

Second, the name is an homage to Walter Benjamin, whose great, unfinished Arcades Project is about the dead proto-malls of 19th century Paris. He saw something potentially revolutionary in the ruins of these temples to capital. Hidden in their architecture, unknown even to their builders, were dream-traces of a communal existence where imagination and reality intermingled, and these became exposed as the buildings were abandoned.  ​

More personally, in the mid-1990s, my own first encounters with literature happened at malls. I grew up in a very small town with a bad library and no bookstores nearby, and our household didn't have the internet (most didn't then). With no other real options, I would drive an hour to Dayton or Cincinnati (or be driven by one of my parents) and search bookstores at the mall. Sometimes I would spend hours there, treating the store like a library, knowing no one, buying nothing. And yet, there among perfume counters, mall cops, and bogus pop music, I found books that showed me another world was possible.

In sum, the name Dead Mall Press captures all this for me: Walter Benjamin's search for revolutionary imagination amid ruins and debris; my own young imagination living amid the traps of circumstance; the haunting overlaps between different historical moments and the materials that capture them; and the intensification of the book as commodity in the era of Amazon. All these come together for me in Dead Mall Press.

2. As Coolidge notes, these spaces were designed to appeal to the most bland consumerist sensibility. And we know, without question, that this has affected people’s expectations for how a book should look and feel: it’s supposed to seem at home in the mall. The perfect-bound, roughly 9 x 6 book is the standard in part because of the literal space books were corralled into. Pamphlets, oddly shaped pages, no spine, looks home-made, looks weird, looks ephemeral—no, take your business elsewhere. This is not where you belong.

3. Living the wildest dream a Waldenbooks executive could have ever had, Amazon actually functions simultaneously as publisher (via CreateSpace), promoter, medium of consumption (via Kindle), point of sale, and even reviews. The whole thing is internal to the mall.

4. And while the soon-to-emerge non-profit model of publishing for poetry and small presses suggested itself as a lifeline—a way to survive outside the market—it still found itself being shaped by having to integrate with the market and, more importantly, with donors, institutions, and the state. I have written on the blog about the effects of these entities (see: “The Plot to Destroy Poetry?” linked above).

5. I made another attempt to address the concept of the shaman in essay from 2020 on my older blog, which has now become Dead Mall Press’s website.