The Reading Experience

News of the Poetry World

    The Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog recently announced it is abandoning the "discussion model" to provide instead "a daily news feed with links and excerpts from other outlets around the world." This means that the site will no longer feature blog posts from a selected group of poets "discussing" poetry but will become like every other digest blog offering "news."

    The PF is making this move because "The blog as a form has begun to be overtaken by social media like Twitter and Facebook.  News of the poetry world now travels fastest and furthest through Twitter. . .with the information often picked up from news aggregator sites rather than discursive blogs." Further,

. . .anyone involved in the more dynamic discussions of poetry, poetics, or politics in the past year knows that more and more of the most vibrant interactions have been found on Facebook.  We saw this happening last month as our National Poetry Month posts traveled far and wide through various status updates, wall postings, and links.

    I always thought the "discussion model" used at Harriet was a little too chatty, too often short on extended analysis, but nevertheless I checked in on the blog several times a week and usually found some posts on the practice and reading of poetry that were well worth my time. I can with some certainty say I will never look at the site again, as it now gives in to the preoccupation with the "fastest and furthest" that characterizes too much of the blogosphere. "News of the poetry world" will replace the consideration of actual poetry.

    I don't know whether "the blog as a form has begun to be overtaken by social media like Twitter and Facebook," at least where serious commentary on poetry and fiction is concerned. That it has overtaken the blog as a source of quasi-public instant messaging is probably true, and to the extent this leaves the weblog as a space that might be put to use for more substantive discourse is a good thing. But why the PF would think that Twitter-type shout-outs would be better for poetry than the "discursive blog" is not something I can understand.

    Is more "information" what we really need? Does the rapid-fire posting of ephemera amount to "dynamic discussions" or does it just reduce the discussion of poetry to the same relentless focus on trivia that characterizes the coverage of movies, of celebrity culture in general? What seems to me to be motivating the Harriet change of approach--what seems to be motivating the Twitterization of online discourse in general--is precisely the desire to see what is posted disseminated "far and wide through various status updates, wall postings, and links," not a concern for the substance of the post. The mere accumulation of friends, followers, and hits, evidence of "interaction," is the end-in-itself.

    The digest form of weblog has existed from the beginnings of the blogosphere, is probably the original, most recognizable form of blog. Plenty of them still exist and provide useful "news." If Twitter now performs this function more efficiently, so be it, but that doesn't seem to be a good reason to transform all blogs into versions of Twitter. Both poetry and fiction need more "discursive blogs" examining the news that stays news, not fewer.

NOTE Andrew Wessels at A Compulsive Reader has some similar thoughts.

Rescuing Public Discourse

In a recent essay in Mother Jones, Ted Genoways blames the decline--both in numbers and in influence--of university-affiliated literary magazines not on the university administrators who are, as Genoways puts it, "off-loading" such magazines, nor or the editorial practices by which these magazines determine what they will publish, but on writers themselves. "For Christ's sake," he exclaims, "write something we might want to read."

The logic by which Genoways reaches this conclusion is quite confusing. As Mark Athitakis characterizes his line of thinking, Genoways argues that "Postmodernism is dead, but it persists, which means nobody wants to write fiction about Iraq, which means university-based literary journals are dying, but to solve that writers need to move away from academia." The essay does seem to be based on the assumption that academic literary magazines have been dominated by "postmodernism," although what this seems to mean to Genoways is that writers have stopped "giving two shits about the world," as if any fiction that doesn't concern itself with "big issues," which Genoways apparently equates with "giving two shits," is by default "postmodern."

I must say that when I look at any randomly chosen issue of any literary magazine, whether university-sponsored or not, I have a hard time finding fiction that could plausibly be called postmodern, if to be postmodern is to challenge the reigning narrative conventions promoted by the academic creative writing programs that often enough administer these very magazines. I actually agree with Genoways that there are too many litmags publishing too much perfunctory work, but that these magazines have proliferated because the demand for postmodernism is so insistent seems to me patently absurd. Furthermore, there is a rather glaring contradiction between the assertion there are too many publications chasing too few readers and the attempt to help them gather a bigger audience by suggesting they change their ways, which Genoways also makes. As he himself notes, most of the excess submissions made to a journal like Virginia Quarterly Review (of which Genoways is the editor), come from writers with the desire to write but not much talent for it, and if the number of literary magazines no longer expands in order to accomodate more such writers (as they inevitably do), the perceived problem that too many litmags go unread takes care of itself.

But this reduction of readership to those with a genuine interest in serious fiction obviously wouldn't satisfy Genoways, since presumably many writers would still avoid the "big issues." Ultimately his argument is not with the proprietors of literary magazines or even with academe and its supposed pernicious influence, but with the present cohort of American writers whom Genoways sees as insufficiently "engaged." He tries to cast this preference for "socially conscious writing" as a plea for writers to "reach out" to readers, but I'm not aware that large numbers of fiction readers have indicated that if only academic literary magazines would publish more such fiction they would start subscribing to them in droves. The connection Genoways sees between issues-focused fiction and larger audiences for literary magazines remains, to say the least, unexplored.

Unless he's suggesting that litmags convert themselves into outlets for journalism rather than fiction: "With so many newspapers and magazines closing, with so many commercial publishers looking to nonprofit models, a few bold university presidents could save American literature, reshape journalism, and maybe even rescue public discourse from the cable shout shows and the blogosphere." This concern for "public discourse" seems more immediate to Genoways than his ostensible concern for fiction or for literary magazines and their loss of audience. Perhaps contributing to "public discourse" is actually closer in spirit to the mission of the modern university than giving publishing space to the "merely literary." But if reshaping journalism is the new goal of "literary" magazines located on campus, I hope they just disappear instead.

The Didactic Embodiment of the Physical Book

Although I agree with Alan Kaufman that for longer works the paper-based book remains a perfectly adequate purveyor of text--I don't own a Kindle and still can see no reason why I should, given my habits as a reader--and that Google Books, so far at least, is more annoying than useful, his lament over the demise of "book culture" nevertheless seems excessively dolesome. The resistance to the electronification of writing is likely to continue into the foreseeable future, and probably will get even more rancorous as the process intensifies, but I can't see how Kaufman's sort of stamping of the rhetorical feet is going to convince many people to join it.

The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book. Hi-tech [sic] propagandists tell us that the book is a tree-mudering, space-devouring, inferior form of technology, that society simply would be better-off altogether if we euthanized it even as we begin to carry around, like good little Aryans, whole libraries in our pockets,downloaded on the Uber-Kindle.

This would be offensive if it weren't so silly. Perhaps Kaufman would find fellow-travellers in the teabaggers, who similarly seem drawn to inane Nazi analogies and also apparently regard any change as evidence of tyranny.

But even less convincing is the nature of Kaufman's defense of the physical book: 

To me, the book is one of life's most sacred objects, a torah, a testament, something not only worth living for but. . .something that is even worth dying for. . .The world is moving to embrace the electronic media as its principle mode of expression. The human has opted for the machine, and its ghosts, over the haptic companionship and the didactic embodiment of the physical book. . . .

Kaufman's reason for finding books "sacred" is that, well, they're books. Kaufman aspired to publish his words within the "appropriate temple" of the book, but why it is either especially appropriate or constitutes a temple is not explained. Kaufman seems to assume we all know a book is special, a bastion of culture, but for myself, when I look at a modern book I see some strips of paper, not always of the best quality, glued between two pieces of cardboard, not always that securely. Kaufman is offended by the notion that a book might be reduced to its "utility as a medium for language," but for those of us who value books primarly for the words contained therein, for the verbal compositions they make available, what else besides their utility brings them into existence in the first place? If books should be saved only because they are "cultural artifacts," then I, for one, feel no particular urgency to save them. I'm interested in books because they enable the reading experience, not because I want to contemplate them as artifacts.

I also agree with Kaufman that "publishers. . .are producers not of books but money, while books have become simply another vehicle, along with the Washing Machine and the iPod, for generating capital." But this hardly seems a state of affairs that lends itself to the preservation of the book as Alan Kaufman has known it. Publishers aren't going to become less philistine, and why we would want to entrust the survival of books to such people is manifestly unclear to me. If anything, the corporate capitalists are going to have less control of e-printing, so the rational response to the problem Kaufman identifies is to encourage respect for the written word online and in e-publishing, not to undermine the potential of these media by associating them with Hitler.

I suppose if you think that "Not since the advent of Christianity has the world witnessed so sweeping a change in the very fabric of human existence" as that ushered in by the "hi-tech revolution"--an outburst of hyperbole even the loudest cheerleaders of that revolution themselves would no doubt hesitate to venture--then the resort to the over-the-top analogies in which Kaufman indulges in this essay might seem justified. If you think that trading paper technology for that of cyberspace means human beings are turning over their lives to the "machine," a declaration that "I will fight it" might seem a heroic sentiment. But surely a change that substitutes pixels on a screen for print marks on a page isn't going to transform "the very fabric of human existence." At the most, we might ultimately witness some dimunition in length of some texts--which for many kinds of writing, for example academic criticism or history or narrative reporting, won't be such a loss at all. The idea that accessing a text by "electronic" means will turn us into compliant subjects of a fascist e-regime, however, just seems weird. Kaufman and his fellow resistance fighters both attribute a totemic status to the printed book and regard pixel-based display of text with a horror that is finally inexplicable to me.

Our Stories

If we take The Writer's Notebook: Craft Essays from Tin House (Tin House Books) to be a representative gathering of critical wisdom from current American writers, what does it ultimately tell us about these writers' understanding of the purpose of fiction, their widely-shared assumptions? 

Unfortunately, in my view it tells us that their understanding of fiction's purposes is very limited indeed, their assumptions about its possibilties, its potential to surprise and to creatively challenge established conventions, very narrow and constricted. Almost none of the essays included in the volume even suggest that fiction ought to be challenging in this way, and some even explicitly express impatience with adventurous, unconventional fiction. Most of the essays--all of them originally delivered at Tin House's Summer Writers Workshop--discuss works of fiction as if they were products to be assembled from blueprints exploiting familiar devices, the writing of fiction as adherence to certain fundamental truths universally acknowledged.

Perhaps this is to be expected in a book presenting "craft essays." A "writers workshop" is centrally focused on "craft" as an element of fiction writing that can be taught (or at least talked about), and as working writers those participating in the workshop presumably do have advice to dispense at the level of craft. Perhaps it is too much to expect that writers themselves would feel comfortable emphasizing "art " over craft, since arguably the best most of them can do is hope that careful attention to craft will ultimately give rise to art. Distinguishing what is successfully artistic, which is a function of the experience of reading fiction, from the mere application of craft is the critic's job, not the writer's.

Perhaps. But in publishing a book like The Writer's Notebook, Tin House is putting its imprimatur on the "craft" approach, and one might presume that those writers who heed the kind of advice dispensed in the book might ultimately be producing the kind of work that could find its way into print in this journal. That this work would be safe, formally "sound" and stylistically "fine," would only conform to the mission of journals like Tin House, which, as far as I can tell, is to a) reinforce the existing structure of academic writing programs and workshops, providing their graduates with a place to publish, and b) associate themselves as much as possible with "quality" writing, which can't be just anything and everything and thus needs to be narrowed down to its embodiment in "craft," the boundaries of which are laid down in The Writer's Notebook.

I wouldn't go so far as to say that Tin House or other high-profile literary magazines are actively hostile to adventurous or experimental fiction (sometimes an unconventional story or two can be squeezed into the mix), but the discussions of the nature of fiction and the writing of fiction in The Writer's Notebook assume a form that is relatively fixed, comprising such staple elements as "dialogue," "scene," and "character motivation," a practice that is subject to improvement through increased skill with these tools. Such a conception of fiction as a handy collection of pre-approved devices doesn't much encourage departures from standard practice or questioning of the place of these devices in composing works of fiction. (Why, for example, is "dialogue" to be expected in stories or novels? Shouldn't this be something that might be useful in some circumstances, when contributing to an overall aesthetic effect, rather than a convention all fiction must "get to" at some point?) It shouldn't be surprising that most issues of Tin House don't feature short stories that seem to be the result of such questioning of the short story as a stable, identifiable thing reproducible through the application of "craft."

Thus Tom Grimes informs us that "our stories are amorphous until we discover how time controls them. Every great story contains a 'clock,' an intrinsic timekeeper." "Determine whether or not your story has a 'clock,'" he concludes. "It can be a day, a week, a month, a season, etctera, but the story has to have it." If a story "has to have" a clock, then should one discover one's story doesn't really seem to depend much on timekeeping, on the sort of narrative "development" the passage of time provides, then apparently one doesn't really have a story at all. This seems a reductively literal insistence on "story" as the sine qua non of short fiction, when of course much modern/postmodern fiction has explicitly worked to undermine "story" as the essence of fiction. Not many of Donald Barthelme's stories, for example would be able to pass the "clock" test administered by Grimes. They're much too "amorphous."

Anna Keesey tells us that a "scene" is "fiction's fundamental unit." "Part of what makes fiction writing so difficult," she claims, is that "the writer must decide what's going to happen, to whom, and why, but is simultaneously loaded up with another set of decisons: who'll be telling the story, in what order, with what level of detail and at what speed of revelation." Here again is a recipe for conventionality in fiction, by which "story," ("what's going to happen") takes precedence and all of the other "decisions"--themselves highly conventional and formulaic--are made as ornamental on the primary illusion of narrative immediacy. "We see the action occur; we feel the time pass," as Keesey puts it later in the essay. Keesey acknowledges that writers like Woolf and Proust slow down the unfolding of scene--which Keesey calls "infolding"--but she can't see this as an implicit repudiation of "scene" except in its most perfunctory role as a framing device. She chooses instead to regard it as just an indication that scene "is superbly elastic." Why not just say that in some fiction "scene" is as irrelevant as "clock time"?

Even when otherwise acknoweldging the limitations of one or another conventional approach, as in Keesey's essay or Aimee Bender's essay on "character motivation," the writers can't seem to give up on the assumptions giving rise to the approach. Bender cautions against making "motivation" explicitly clear. Instead, she writes, it's acceptable "not really to know what's going on with your characters and to let the writing be a process of discovering that." This sort of "complexity" is truer to human psychology, after all. But what if "motivation" never becomes clear, or is not even necessary? What if "psychology" itself is irrelevant to a particular's writer's concerns? One gets the sense that this would not be acceptable, since it jettisons one of the underlying assumptions of mainstream literary fiction--it's all about "understanding" character--that supports all of the accompanying assumptions about "craft."

The only two essays in The Writer's Notebook that really do depart from conventional thinking, the only two essays that finally are about the art of fiction, are Lucy Corin's "Material" and D.A. Powell's "(Mis)Adventures in Poetry." Corin specifically abjures the impulse to "find the form to 'suit' your content, your material." Instead, she describes her own practice of regarding words as her "material," from which come other words that finally cohere into form. Her advice to writers: "you should look at the material you produce to find your material." This can include the visual arrangement of the words on the page, and Corin spends much of her essay comparing different kinds of arrangements of "material." The essay undermines much of the other "advice" to be found in The Writer's Notebook and is really the only essay in this book that makes it worth having. Powell posits that in poetry "often it's the inexact, the awful, the mistaken linguistic turn that manages to say the right thing because it unmoors us from our perceived relationship to the subject about which we're trying to write." "The subjects of poetry are always the same," he concludes, "so lend your ear to the language instead." "Dare to say the unsayable in a new way." If only as many fiction writers could find a way to heed this advice as, in my opinion, many poets already do.

Unfortunately, readers of The Writer's Notebook won't get exposed to much discussion of language as the fundamental "unit" of fiction. They'll mostly discover essays that invite the writer to say the same old things, the eminently sayable, in the same old ways, but to think of this as "craft."

OCD

I have to agree with Edmond Caldwell:

Austerlitz and 2666 are good books brought to us in a way that sucks the oxygen out of the type of atmosphere in which good books might be much more broadly produced, understood, and enjoyed. . .To come up with Best Books lists in this environment is little more than an exercise in pecking the least maggoty bits from carrion.

But the listing and ranking game goes on – and on and on – as if all sectors of society were afflicted with a kind of mass obsessive-compulsive disorder or species of autism. . . .

Andrew Seal objects:

I am not convinced that [Caldwell's] attempt to move the conversation to a question of who owns the means of literary production does anything more than nudge us toward a severe reification of outsiderness, an anti-brand mandarinism. His approach, in fact, greatly simplifies the whole question of distinction (which he gets to later): it just makes that-which-cannot-be-corporatized into a new fetish object.

This might be a valid objection if the alternative to the kind of list-making employed at The Millions was simply to make another list from which books published by the mainstream corporate publishers were excluded. This would only reproduce wittingly what Millions-type lists do unwittingly, which is to assume that anything remotely useful can be accomplished by making lists and choosing up sides. In the real literary world in which live, the only honest course of action is to refuse to join in on list-making in the first place, which would at the least be an acknowledgement that we can't make such simplified judgments about current or recent work given the pre-chosen samples which mainstream publishing makes available.

 

 

 

Last Book Business Post--Coda

Responding to my previous post, Ted Striphas clarifies his argument about the need to help people "fit reading better into their everyday lives" through breaking books into shorter pieces:

Option one is to imagine that people have been seduced by electronic media — lulled by television, the internet, Twitter, video games, and more into a state in which they are pathologically unable to focus and, by extension, incapable of following a book-length narrative from beginning to end.

Option two is to recognize the numerous “environmental” factors that make it extremely difficult for people to find sustained time for book reading in their everyday lives. Hence the examples from my earlier post, of leaf blowers, crying babies, etc.

Since the first option "places all of the responsibility for not reading squarely on people’s shoulders and opens them (us?) up to moral condemnation," Striphas goes for option two, which assumes that "people do indeed want to read but that specific aspects of their everyday lives simply get in the way."

I don't know that it requires we believe a mass audience has been "seduced" by media into a state of pathological inattention to text in order to explain why books seem less appealing to this audience . The visual and electronic alternatives Striphas names offer a choice to their "consumers," who duly consume them instead of books because, I have to conclude, they prefer them over books as a way of passing the time. Acknowledging this does not open up such people to "moral condemnation" but simply recognizes that a) for a majority of people, reading, especially of fiction, is merely a way of passing time and that b) for most of these people, tv, movies, and text-messaging are preferred over "book-length narratives" among the time-passing alternatives. It is the way of the world, and no amount of chapter shearing is going to bring this mass audience to books except, indeed, for the occasional puerile potboiler such as The Da Vinci Code.

The assumption behind arguments such as the one Striphas makes is that reading is per se preferable to these other choices, no matter what kind of book might be read, and I can't agree that it is. In fact, if I were to advise someone whether it would be more rewarding to watch, say, Monk, or to read The Da Vinci Code, or its current equivalent on the Best Seller list, I would unhesitantingly say the former. Books that provide a complex experience well beyond what can be offered up on tv surely are more worth the time expended on them, but such books can't be chopped up into more easily digestible portions without undermining their very purpose. Readers have to take them as they are or leave them alone. Manufacturing other "books" so that they more closely resemble every other entertainment device accomplishes nothing for real reading, and won't work, anyway. Who needs books as a simulacrum of a tv show when you've got the real thing available?

Of course, the whole effort to bring books into the "contexts within which people live" might not be about encouraging reading at all, or at least not primarily. It might be about the effort to save book publishing as "a bona fide capitalist enterprise."

My Very Last Post on the Book Business Ever

This guy thinks that publishers ought to encourage writers to write in "smaller chapters" because his sister found the chapters in The Da Vinci Code "cinematic." "Perhaps that’s true," he continues,

but having watched her read the book over the next couple of days, I couldn’t help but think that they were even more televisual in nature. She could sit down and read for five or ten minutes at a clip, non-commitally, and even manage to finish a chapter or two in the process. She could read distractedly, as the text didn’t demand that she sustain her attention for very long. What’s remarkable is that the book, despite being more than 400 pages, hardly behaves like a substantial (as in long) work of fiction.

Scott Esposito has already pointed out the contradictions between the author's assurances he doesn't contend "that people’s attention spans are waning" and his worry that these days we're too often distracted by "a loud truck rolling by" or "the incessant drone of leaf blowers," but unfortunately the author probably does believe the greatest threat to reading is the racket generated by lawn equipment and "publishing professionals" will probably take his defense of televisual prose quite seriously.

Indeed, since taking the advice to "attune their sensitivities better to the fine-grain of everyday life" and make books safe for reading "five or ten minutes at a clip, non-commitally" is the most idiotic and self-destructive thing publishers could do, they no doubt will do it, with great dispatch. Even though such an approach thoroughly undermines all the arguments made on behalf of the "book" as an intellectually superior mode of communication and places it exactly on par with every other form of "information technology" at our disposal, and even though it subverts the very purpose of reading by assuring "readers" books will no longer "demand that [we] sustain [our] attention for very long," the "brevity-is-better" method might still extend the death agonies of the book business long enough to squeeze out another mega-seller or two. It might keep books and reading in thrall to the imperatives of corporate capitalism a little longer, and this, of course, is everything.

Sometimes the short chapter or segment can be used to great aesthetic effect. Aharon Appelfeld, for example (I've just finished reading his All Whom I Have Loved), often breaks his generally short narratives into quite short chapters, but these chapters are not simply links in a glittery chain of events. They sink in and spread out rather than serve as simply the latest plot point in the rush to get from there to there. This is clearly not what Ted Striphas has in mind. He wants books in bite-size bits that readers can consume "non-commitally." Applefeld writes books that engage our attention, profoundly. Striphas would be content with books as superficial as any other entertainment option that helps us waste our time rather than redeem it.

Publishers have pursued the "dumbing-down strategy" to the point where they have now essentially ruined book publishing as an endeavor devoted more to the cultivation of good writers--writers whose audience might extend beyond the present and into succeeding generations--than the cultivation of cash. Even those involved in its ruination know that they're doing it, but acknowledge they can't stop themselves, as this recent article by an editor who "until recently worked for a large publisher in New York" attests:

A system that requires the trucking of vast quantities of paper to bookshops and then back to publishers’ warehouses for pulping is environmentally and commercially unsustainable. An industry that spends all its money on bookseller discounts and very little on finding an audience is getting things the wrong way round. Following the strictures of their accountants, the large houses will intensify their concentration on blockbusters. High street bookshops will abandon deep stockholding, becoming mere showrooms for bestsellers and prize-winners.

If shorter chapters can get a few more people into those bookshops and continue to prop up this moribund system, why not try it?

If we're lucky, the props will come crashing down sooner rather than later, and we'll be rid both of the buttoned-down stooges who have made it so unnecessarily difficult for serious readers to find the books they still want, as well as for serious writers to find any readers at all, and of enablers like Ted Striphas. If we're even luckier, the small and independent presses (see the list to the right) that to some extent are forced to mimic the actions of the corporate publishers in order to survive will feel less pressure to do so and their implicit mission of bringing worthwhile books to those of us who actually like to read--both short chapters and long ones--can be more profitably fulfilled. No doubt the cybersphere will also contribute to a book culture focused more on bringing particular books together with individual readers than on ginning up a mob response.

If corporate book publishing were to disappear entirely, leaving books--especially fiction--to their appropriate "niche" among those who read "commitally," I, for one, would be a happy man. In the meantime, I will confine my attentions to the good books that do still, miraculously, continue to appear.

Living On Earth

Kassia Krozser is

baffled and amazed by authors who do not see marketing as part of their jobs. First off, is there really a job description for authors? If so, please forward to me as I have a few holes in my resume and I’m too lazy to do the work myself. Second, what planet are you living on? Very, very few authors have the luxury of not engaging in marketing. And even they have to do talk show appearances or “Wait, Wait, Don’t Tell Me”.

Why should this be baffling? If writers wanted to be marketers, presumably they would have become. . .marketers. Instead they chose to be writers, presuming that marketing was the job of publishers. Admittedly, publishers now do a terrible job, not just of marketing, but of judging talent, editing, and nourishing careers. Indeed, they're terrible at all the jobs writers once thought defined the very word, "publisher." That writers ceded editorial control to the publishers was the devil's bargain they had to strike with modern capitalism, something they had to exchange in order to get matters of business taken care of. I suppose that, in the wake of the violation of this deal on the part of publishers, writers who still want the benefits accompanying the bargain--placement in bookstores, reviews in important newspapers, etc.--might be forced to do both the writing and the selling, but I don't see why they should have known this would be part of their job, and I certainly don't know why they would continue to regard mainstream publishers as the arbiters of "success." If these publishers are not publishing their books with any care, if they're dropping them after the first book flops (due mostly to the publisher's own incompetence), and if they're going to force writers to do all the grunt work, anyway, what earthly reason do writers have to endure the situation and submit themselves to such humiliations?

Now, I know that Kassia has the best interests of writers in mind. And I also know that if the publishing of fiction were to move farther toward self-publishing as a viable mode, the need for writers to become marketers and promoters would no doubt become even more acute. But it's the publishers themselves who have brought things to this pass, and it won't do to let them off the hook by claiming they're "book-focused" rather than "author-focused" and noting they're "juggling hundreds, maybe thousands of authors." If they've let their business practices spiral out of control, whose fault is that, exactly? Should we really compound this failure by now chastising those writers who haven't yet gotten with the new program and become their own publicists? The "marketing" crisis is a failure of capitalism, yet another example of its increasingly crude, bottom-line mentality, with the marketing of books now being outsourced to the writers themselves. Should we cheerfully give in to this?

Kassia concludes by urging us to accept the new paradigm in which "the author as a business" holds equal place with "the writer as a creative being." Given we live in a culture that post-Reagan capitalism has transformed into one that is "all-business, all-the-time," acceding to the new paradigm might be inevitable, resisting it futile. Acquiescing to the notion that "Marketing might be a distraction for a writer, but. . .essential if you’re an author" may well be necessary to "succeed" in the brave new world avaricious publishers have created, but one might still hope that some people will choose to be writers nevertheless, and let the authors be damned.

Publish or Perish

The emerging controversy over the fate of Vladimir Nabokov's final, unfinished manuscript raises issues similar to those discussed in the preceding post. In that post I suggested that the publication of the "original" versions of some of Raymond Carver's stories will serve only to diminish readers' estimation of Carver's fiction. I further argued that even if Carver's editor in effect co-wrote the stories, it would be better for those original efforts to remain unpublished. What ultimately matters is the quality of the work, and, since I believe the impure versions of the stories (those edited by Gordon Lish) are superior, they are the versions that should be available to future readers.

In the Nabokov case, a manuscript the author felt should not be available will either be destroyed or be published against the author's wishes. Whereas Carver agreed to the publication of the impure versions of his work (thus effectively claiming them as his own), here the author wanted the impure version of his work-in-progress (impure because not completed) to be withheld from publication. If we are finally able to read The Original of Laura, we would be reading something the author had not yet claimed as his own (worthy of being attributed to "Vladimir Nabokov" on the cover), something that, to Nabokov's way of thinking, did not yet constitute a text that could be read at all in any meaningful sense. It was the finished work that Nabokov would share with his audience; the work done on the way to that finished form should not concern them.

In discussing the issues involved in this controversy, Ron Rosenbaum asks, "Does the lust for aesthetic beauty always allow us to rationalize trampling on the artist's grave?" But the unfinished manuscript could not have "aesthetic beauty" as Nabokov would have defined the term. Aesthetic beauty emerges from the work as it is fully shaped, exhausting its creator's artistic resources. The completed work might fail to have aesthetic beauty, but only the completed work manifests the aesthetic beauty the artist/author attempted to bring about. Nabokov wanted The Original of Laura destroyed because it coud not provide the aesthetic satisfaction he wanted his fiction to provoke above all else. (The "tingle" in the spine he himself most valued when reading works of literature.)

There are of course notable challenges to the purity of effect Nabokov demanded. Kafka wanted his incomplete work (including The Trial) similarly dispatched to oblivion, and most of us are surely glad that Max Brod, his executor, did not follow his instructions. Few would deny that even in their truncated or unpolished form Kafka's novels provide a distinctive aesthetic experience. Perhaps The Original of Laura would also redeem itself in its fragmentary state, although from Rosenbaum's description of it (through Dmitri Nabokov), it doesn't seem that it will. Still, Nabokov is such a beguiling writer it is certainly possible that this 30-page manuscript has a sufficiently realized appeal that it would be a loss to literature--or at least to Nabokov's body of work--if it were to be destroyed.

Nabokov would never have gotten himself into a situation like that Raymond Carver faced when deciding which version of his stories to make public, since it is inconceivable that he would have allowed an editor to interfere with his work in the way Gordon Lish apparently did in editing Carver. But the two cases are related in the way they foreground important questions: Who has the authority to decide when or whether a text should be officially sanctioned under a deceased author's name--the author, through his or her explicit instructions or tacit acquiescence, or his/her "executors," those in possession of the text in question? How do we assess unpublished works in the larger context of an author's known work? Most importantly: At what point does a text have sufficient aesthetic integrity that we are justified reading it as a text, and not just a draft still on its way to its artistic consummation?

Restoration Drama

I'm afraid that Tess Gallagher, unwittingly and with all good intentions, has done Raymond Carver's reputation as a significant American writer permanent harm. It will not be possible for future readers and students of Carver's fiction to approach it without the question of its authenticity lingering somewhere in the background--in some cases, as in academic courses featuring Carver on the syllabus, without the question being addressed directly. "Is this one of those stories his editor rewrote for him?" will almost certainly be asked by those encountering his work for the first time and by critics assessing his place in late 20th century American literature. He might utimately be remembered more as a case study in the fraught relationship between some writers and their editors than as a great American short story writer (which I think he is, even after learning the extent to which Carver's signature understated style and de-dramatized plots were imposed on him by Gordon Lish.)

However much Gallagher believes that Carvers's initial, more expansive (and frankly more ordinary) drafts are the "true, original” versions of his stories, they are not the stories that those of who read his books as they were published encountered and that made his name as a post-postmodern writer of consequence. They are not what we think of when we think of a "Raymond Carver story," and whether Carver sacrificed his "artistic integrity" by giving in to Lish or willingly took advice that actually improved his stories is by this time mostly irrelevant. Carver never repudiated the Lish-edited stories, and republished them without changing them, so this is not really a situation analagous to that of the filmmaker who later re-releases a "director's cut" to restore what had initially been eliminated by commercially driven producers. In effect, a third party is making editorial decisions the author did not and cannot now agree to, and a different writer is being presented to us in place of the one we thought we knew.

Traver Kauffman (the Rake), who prefers the un-Lished stories, suggests that "re-publishing is fine insofar as the people behind it realize that what they're putting out is going to be mostly of scholarly interest and probably will not serve to change any minds." I'm not at all sure this is true. If enough people do prefer the "restored" stories, they will remain in print and available as "alternative" versions, and some scholars will do doubt use the restored versions when teaching Carver, or at least present them along with the "original" versions as an exercise in comparative analysis. Far from changing minds about Carver, the existence of the "true, original" stories will work to influence future readers in making up their minds about this writer in the first place. At some point examining the original drafts for their "scholarly interest" is fine, but having two different versions--in effect, two different texts--competing for approbation as the "real" work of Raymond Carver is not merely an academic matter. It may finally substitute the editorial controversy for the actual consideration of Carver's fiction as literary art.

The Rake further suggests that it would be useful for other contemporary writers to publish earlier drafts of their work, allowing the reader to pursue the pressing question "How Was It Done?". For those interested enough in a particular writer to want to read discarded drafts and other marginalia, it is probably true that such an offering would simply satisfy a curiosity and wouldn't really affect their estimation of the writer's published work. I myself have never been much interested in the "how" question. I'm more concerned with the "what": What kind of work is this? What's going on? If reading alternative versions of a work of fiction helps me to better answer these questions, I am willing to examine them. If what I find there somehow enhances my subsequent reading experiences, it will have been a worthwhile exercise. If it merely illustrates "the actual human effort behind the pages, the grinding, nuts and bolts stuff," as the Rake further puts it, it doesn't seem worth the time, since I'm pretty sure I already know that writing involves much grinding.

That two separate texts of some of Carver's stories are in circulation, however, isn't really equivalent to the scholarly edition offering glimpses into the writing process. At best, it requires that we consider each of them separately, that we in some ways take them as two different stories. We can prefer one of them over the other, but the very act of reading them in this way makes it impossible to identify either one of them as the "real" Carver story. Future anthologists will have to decide which text best represents Carver as a writer nevertheless, and the decision will unavoidably be subjective, if not completely arbitrary.

As an erstwhile scholar of postmodernism, I am perfectly comfortable with indeterminacy and dislocation. I understand that texts can be elusive, unstable, self-contradictory. But a literal instability between different versions of the "same" text is a bit too pomo even for me. My introduction to Carver came through the Lish-edited stories that to me signalled a break from the formal experiments and self-reflexivity of postmodern American fiction but did not merely return to old-fashioned storytelling. The severely pared-back minimalism of these stories seemed to accept the postmodern critique of representation if not its alternative strategies. Character and plot are stripped to the bone, the former presented to us entirely through mundane actions, with no attempt at "psychological realism" (thus we never really get to "know" Carver's characters, we just watch them wandering through their lives), the latter flattening out Freytag's triangle to an unemphatic succession of events. It's these stories that offered a Raymond Carver engaged in his own kind of experimentation (how bare and uninflected can realism become while still maintaing our interest?), which as far as I can tell is mostly absent in the more elaborated but conventional Lish-less originals. Even if Gordon Lish did essentially co-author the published stories, that's still the Raymond Carver I'd rather have.

Becoming Respectable

Jacob Russell wonders why so many writers are so eager to get their work published in "little magazines":

Each one of these periodicals receives hundreds, and many, thousands of submissions a month. Is it the hope of becoming "respectable," of making an honest buck, that drives writers to spend their time and money printing and copying and addressing and mailing and keeping records so you don't send the same story to the same place?

And answers his own question:

Aside from Harpers (which publishes no more than 12 stories a year) and The New Yorker (which may publish 100), what's left? Esquire. Playboy. Maybe a dozen open slots left in the Real World. What's left, the last remaining outlet for print publication: the Little Lits. So what drives this is the writers. When the readers disappear, what else is left?

The problem with this answer is that the readers didn't "disappear." They never existed. Little magazines have always subsisted on subscriptions from libraries and subsidies from universities or some other outside funding agency. Very few (perhaps none) have been able to keep themselves in print off of individual subscriptions and sales, and even those that do find themselves onto library shelves mostly go unread except by a few creative writing students who want to know what sort of thing a given journal is accepting these days.

The literary magazine as we know it was the product of two aspirations, one noble, one less so. Most of the early "little magazines" were created, at least in part, in a sincere effort to provide "serious writing" a place of initial publication in a world where the "book business" has little or no interest in literary short fiction or poetry. To some extent, such magazines continue to be founded on this idealistic ambition, although over the years it has become increasingly difficult to see how yet another literary magazine published from yet another small college or regional university is going to spark a revival of interest in poetry or the short story. The circulation numbers for most of these publications remain microscopically low.

The other function the little magazine came to fulfill was offering the opportunity for publishing credits to the scores of writers who began to emerge from the creative writing programs appearing in increasing numbers in the 1950s-1970s and that now exist in some form in almost all American colleges and universities. Since not all of these programs could insist that incoming faculty already have books to their credit, placement in one of these magazines could help insure job candidates appropriate credentials and could serve as measures of "production" for faculty members in mid-career. Take a look at the contributors page of most literary magazines, and you'll most likely discover that most of the contributors are either members of the faculty of a creative writing program or students at one of these programs, presumably in both cases seeking publication credit that will specifically advance their academic careers.

(I am a graduate of one of these programs, and I can certainly testify from my own experience that gathering such credits was something I was taught, both directly and indirectly, to vigorously pursue.)

I'm afraid that this more utilitarian goal has come to dominate most writer's thinking and largely accounts for what "drives" them to engage in the submissions game Jacob describes. Jacob further cautions against blaming "academics" for the dismal rules of this game. But it isn't the "MFA Mafia Cartel" that controls current little magazine publishing operations, even though graduates of the more prestigious MFA programs do seem to have pride of place in the more presigious literary magazines. (Just as scholars from more prestigious universities get pride of place in most scholarly publications of any kind.) It's the very attachment of little magazines to universities, from which most of today's little magazines still originate, and inevitably to the protocols of academic publication that most directly influences the dynamics of publishing in even the smallest, least recognizable of the literary magazines.

On the one hand, the existence of this system does help to keep poetry and short fiction alive as literary forms. This is not a negligible accomplishment, and for it the editors of little magazines, who endure a maximum amount of trouble and enjoy a minimum amount of compensation for their efforts, should be thanked. On the other hand, the bland uniformity of what is published in the little magazines as a whole begins to suggest that the publishing format created decades ago to serve the needs of "literature" as embodied in the institutional necessities of academe isn't aging well.

For a more extensive discussion of the role of literary magazines, see my essay here.

Saving the Short Story as a Whole

Responding to various recent articles on the state of the short story, and on literary magazines more generally, Ed Champion suggests that

if you want to save the short story as a whole and if you want it to be more than merely the niche markets it currently serves, you’re going to have to get the general population reading short fiction. And this means creating magazines, exclusively devoted to fiction that entertains as well as enlightens, that the public will buy.

I suppose it's true that if you want to take short fiction out of its "niche market," you would have to "get the general population reading short fiction," but regrettably this isn't going to happen. The "general population" a) doesn't read and b) wouldn't read short fiction even if it could be coaxed into reading a little bit more of something. Everyone hearkens back to the "golden age" of the short story published in magazines such as Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post, but those publications ultimately stopped publishing short stories (and most of what they published was tame, conventional fare) and eventually ceased publication altogether precisely because a) the general population doesn't read and b) wouldn't read short fiction even if. . . .

Since the 1950s, university-based literary magazines have taken over the role of publishing short stories, and, if anything, have flooded the market with short fiction. While no one magazine usually lasts for very long (only a handful of those prominent in the 60s and 70s are still publishing today), new ones spring up to take their place as every English department in every college and university in the United States decides it needs to sponsor one. Non-university-based publications start up all the time as well, and although many of their founders appear to believe they will be able to sustain themselves financially, very few of them ever do. Still, its hard to argue that with the proliferation of literary magazines, now abetted by the constant appearance of new literary journals online, that there isn't enough short fiction published in this country. Indeed, most of what is published in the existing journals goes largely unread.

Publishing magazines "exclusively devoted to fiction" that "the public will buy," as futile as this enterprise would surely turn out to be, could only mean to dumb down the current tenor of literary magazines, to publish more conventional, more "accessible" fiction. I can't see what purpose this would serve. Such fiction would not be "better" for its readers than Desperate Housewives. It would identify fiction as just another entertainment option, a way to pass some time while easing up on the electricity bill. You are not better off reading a bland and undemanding short story than you are watching a bland and undemanding tv show. If just weaning a few people away from visual entertainment back to print is the goal, forget it. Not enough people will convert to make the effort worthwhile.

What is needed is not more short story publications "exclusively devoted to fiction" that appeal more widely but fewer publications devoted exclusively to fiction (or poetry, for that matter) and more that appeal to the discerning audience for serious fiction that actually exists. What is needed is for editors of literary magazines, both established and up-and-coming, to not just publish fiction shorn of all context and mixed together in an otherwise indigestible stew but to indicate, both through editorial commentary and consistent editorial choices, what they think is important about the fiction they publish. Why have they selected it? What larger vision of the possibilities of short fiction does the selection illustrate? In my opinion, the "miscellany" approach practiced by most literary magazines--by which the "best fiction available" is printed, with little or no indication of what makes it the "best"--makes all too many of them useless; I can only make my way through a few of them, trying to find the "best" in a scattershot fashion, before I put them aside and conclude it just isn't worth my time (and sometimes money) to prospect for fiction in this way.

Most importantly, literary magazines need to abandon the "exclusively devoted to fiction" strategy altogether. More of them need to publish criticism and serious literary journalism, in part to make up for the sad state of newspaper reviewing, but also to provide the even larger and more crucial context that situates current fiction within literary history as well as present aesthetic and cultural debates. This would signal that we still take short fiction (all fiction) seriously, that it is part of a rich historical traditon to which new fiction continues to aspire and that more is at stake than providing a few more writers with vitae items or adding yet another "little magazine" to all the others sitting forlornly on library shelves. Letting thousands of fictional flowers bloom might seem a pretty idea, but without some critical tending, they will all just rot.

Discouraging to Writers

In one installment in his very useful series of reports on last weekend's flurry of NBCC-sponsored panels on book-reviewing, Richard Grayson cites these remarks (I assume they are a paraphrase) by Scribner's senior editor Colin Harrison:

. . .there's a very short period of time in which responses to a book come in and actually matter; most books are in the marketplace of ideas for only a brief moment. A lack of reviews can be very discouraging to writers.

This isn't quite right. There is no "marketplace of ideas" in American book review publications; there's only the actual marketplace, the one in which book reviews appear all in a rush over a week or two and by the commercial measures of which the immediate value of books is judged. The process of book publishing and book reviewing has become indistinguishable from that which rules the release and reviews of movies: build up interest over that opening weekend, whose box office receipts tell us what we need to know about the quality of the "product" in question.

The recent publication of the final Harry Potter book almost exactly followed the movie-release paradigm. All of the purported excitement over the book crested during that weekend in which it appeared, only to almost instantly wane in the days and weeks to follow. The long lines of ticket/book buyers must have contained all of the book's enthusiasts, since there's been very little discussion of the book over the longer haul and just this past Saturday, during my periodical visit to St. Louis area book stores, I noticed big stacks of unmoved books gathered discreetly here and there, with no more loud displays and silly promotional gimmicks accompanying them.

But if most books still don't get the full-on publicity treatment of a Harry Potter novel, the "very short period of time" in which they're allowed to be noticed is real enough. For "big" books, the newspaper book review sections quite obviously compete to get their reviews out first, with the predictable result that they all appear on the same Sunday and their mutual shout-outs to readers are lost in the din. Even the less-publicized novels and those from smaller presses tend to get their few notices all at once. Some books, of course, get no "coverage" at all, but it's a little hard to see how an isolated review here or there could cut through the noise enough to do such books any good, anyway.

(Why, for example, couldn't book review sections during the summer months, when the bigger publishers are in their off seasons, devote some space to those books that were victims of the deluge of books released in the fall and spring and didn't get reviewed then? (Or in December through February, a similarly slack season?) Instead, the same old approach seems to apply, as those few new books that are released at these times are still the focus of review attention.)

I'm sure that writers do find a lack of reviews "very discouraging." Since, as far as I can tell, publishers do little else to find readers for most of their books (other than send authors on the road to flack for themselves), no reviews sends a clear message: your book isn't worth much. But writers ought to be just as discouraged at the state of affairs that has led to the "crisis in book reviewing," as the NBCC has it: publishers who throw their books out at the public through an exceedingly narrow "window," and book reviews that abet this hidebound and increasingly loony strategy by catching them and tossing them in a pile.

Deeper Into a Piece

Gary Kamiya tells us that

The truth is, you have to learn how to be edited just as much as you have to learn how to edit. And learning how to be edited teaches you a lot about writing, about distance and objectivity and humility, and ultimately about yourself.

Translation: Editors are needed to make sure writers don't get too big for their britches. To "learn how to be edited" means learning what it is acceptable and unacceptable to say according to establishment protocols of discourse.

"Distance and objectivity and humility" means staying in your place and not offering any insights that aren't pre-approved by your editor according to his/her understanding of what conventional wisdom can sustain. (This might include "contrarian" opinions, as long as they are recognizably contrarian--good for a momentary frisson of perverse delight but not to be taken seriously as a threat to the cw--and not actually expressions of dissent.)

Learning to be edited teaches you that writing can be dangerous in the wrong hands and that editors need to be respected as the arbiters of what can safely be committed to print. What it teaches you about yourself is that you are the sort who will trade your integrity to be a duly sworn member of the club. Perhaps one day you can be the one doing the swearing-in.

Kamiya continues: "In an odd way, the exchange between writer and editor encapsulates the process of growing up." It isn't so odd. Editors view writers as children, and "learning how to be edited" is the crucial stage in learning to respect your elders. (Even when they help plunge your country into a brutal and immoral war, they're always right.)

And continues:

In the brave new world of self-publishing, editors are an endangered species. This isn't all bad. It's good that anyone who wants to publish and has access to a computer now faces no barriers. And some bloggers don't really need editors: Their prose is fluent and conversational, and readers have no expectation that the work is going to be elegant or beautifully shaped. Its main function is to communicate clearly. It isn't intended to last.

Articles in newspapers and magazines are intended to last? Until tomorrow, when they go out with the trash? Exactly what has Kamiya himself edited that will be included in some future version of the Norton Anthology of American Literature? Or that might even be studied in a journalism class at the local community college? When did newspaper and periodical editors convince themselves that what they print is superior to what can be found in blogs because it is "intended to last"? Are they this far gone in their delusions?

And speaking of delusions:

The art of editing is running against the cultural tide. We are in an age of volume; editing is about refinement. It's about getting deeper into a piece, its ideas, its structure, its language. It's a handmade art, a craft. You don't learn it overnight. Editing aims at making a piece more like a Stradivarius and less like a microchip. And as the media universe becomes larger and more filled with microchips, we need the violin makers.

The fear among editors and journalists that their comfortable positions within a "professional" elite are threatened could not be more palpable than in this inane analogy. The San Franciso Examiner (where Kamiya once worked as an editor) as Stradivarius!

Editors as skilled second-readers may survive the implosion of the American print media. Editors of the grandiose kind Kamiya describes are doomed, partly because of the goofily elevated image to which people like Gary Kamiya continue to cling.

A Good Title

Ellis Sharp points us to a British literary agency that informs us it looks for the following in the fiction it represents:

A good title; an engaging story with a beginning, middle and end; vivid, memorable characters whom one cares about; superb dialogue; a transporting sense of time and place; accuracy of detailing; psychological plausibility; an intriguing beginning and memorable ending.

In addition, what fills us with joy is the writer who has a palpable love of language, who always chooses precisely the right words, eschews clichés, handles pacing with the skill of a dancer and musician, conjures up moods and atmospheres with an apparently invisible wand, and whose spelling, punctuation and grammar are immaculate.

It may be that, as Ellis intimates, this is a way of warding off various kinds of genre manuscripts, letting prospective authors know that this agency is looking for only the "best" in serious fiction. However, it doesn't seem to me that these criteria really exclude the "best" in current genre fiction. Most SF and crime fiction attempt to provide "engaging" stories, "memorable" characters, "superb dialogue," blah, blah, blah. (A possible exception might be "psychological plausibility": SF novels, for example, probably aren't expected to provide this particular kind of "realism" very extensively, at least not at the expense of a clearly demarcated "beginning, middle, and end"; presumably only "literary fiction" is asked to carry off both of these tasks at the same time.)

The real problem with this editorial prescription is that it's just a grab-bag of conventional wisdom about what makes for a properly "literary" work of fiction, and as such it's probably shared by most agents and editors who consider themselves in the business of publishing "quality" books. Perhaps writers who perceive their job as first of all to be published attempt to scrupulously obey such directions and duly set about to provide the ingredients called for (and perhaps this explains why so many published literary novels seem so indistinguishable from one another), but writers interested in creating fresh and imaginative works of art can only find this list of imperatives confusing. Producing "literary fiction" apparently doesn't mean doing one's best to create a compelling reading experience out of the myriad ways language can be brought to bear on "character" or "story" or "place," but is a matter of combining these elements in an already-known manner: Mix one part "engaging story" (making sure to include "an intriguing beginning and memorable ending") with two parts "accuracy of detailing" with a healthy slice of "memorable character" and just a pinch of good dialogue.

Do these agents and editors really believe that writing fiction comes down to following this formula with just a little more skill than the next guy? Exactly what is a "palpable love of language" for them? Is it as simple as eschewing cliches? Surely it can't be something as vague as "pacing with the skill of a dancer and musician" or conjuring up "moods and atmospheres with an apparently invisible wand." Is this where the "art" comes in? Accepting that "pacing" is very important and then carrying it out with "the skill of a dancer"? That "moods and atmospheres" ought to be present and then applying one's wand? Furthermore, how to reconcile these more evanescent attributes with the need to choose "precisely the right words"? Isn't this "precisely" a little constricting, especially if you're trying to imitate dancers and musicians, whirling through the story and jamming out "moods and atmospheres" at your pleasure? Doesn't finding the "right word" imply that that word was known beforehand, that writing involves pinning down the thought to the word rather than letting words loose to see where they'll go?

In an interview at Condalmo with Sheila Heti, author of the underappreciated novel Ticknor, Heti says this about "character":

I think we read literature in a funny way. We try to make sense of it the way we make sense of life, and by this route, look at the characters as though they're our friends, by which I mean: we gossip about them and cheaply psychoanalyse them. I find this to be a very funny thing to do to a character! In a lot of interviews I'm asked to speculate on Ticknor in this way, as though he is something separate from myself, someone I know, that I can talk about objectively. But of course, he is only my words, my head, my understanding of things, my aesthetic – not a person at all. . . .

In my opinion, asking for a "vivid, memorable character" amounts to requesting that a work of fiction provide us with a friend, a "person" with whom we will have what is called "sympathy." Demanding "psychological plausibility" in fictional characters means the author should give us the opportunity to "gossip about them and cheaply psychoanalyse them." And in the same way Heti suggests that good writers don't think about what makes for "memorable characters " when they're creating them, it's likely they don't think much about what makes a story "engaging" or dialogue "superb" or a sense of time or place "transporting," either. (Although maybe they do think about good titles and grammatical correctness.) Telling writers they ought to produce such things means nothing.

You the Author

In an essay at Backspace, Richard Curtis enthuses over the possibilities of Amazon's BookSurge:

I pondered – why would amazon buy a print on demand press? I didn’t have to wait long for the answer. A few months ago, they launched a service aimed at helping publishers keep their books in print. When the stock of a book runs low, amazon takes the publisher’s file and reprints the book at amazon’s own plant and fulfills back-orders. How do publishers feel about outsourcing their printing and fulfillment? What’s not to be thrilled about? They’re making money at no cost to themselves whatsoever. It’s all done virtually, and everybody makes money, including you the author.

Curtis thinks the logic behind this service is unavoidable, and might ulitmately result in making Amazon itself obsolete:

. . .Right now, in order to satisfy those subscription orders on amazon, Random House has to print five thousand copies at its printing plant and, ship them to amazon’s warehouse. Well, that’s perfectly fine if you’re in the twentieth century. But this is the 21st, and publishing is becoming virtual. How about this alternative: amazon prints all five thousand copies at its BookSurge plant in Charleston, South Carolina. Booksurge then ships the books directly to the customers who pre-ordered them months ago.

Pretty sexy, yes? Neither Random House nor amazon are out of pocket for the printing cost, because it’s covered by the price of the book; nor is there any shipping cost to the publisher, because shipping is paid by the customer. Nor is there any warehouse cost, because there are no warehouses! I used the term “virtual;” we know that in a digital world, all middlemen become impediments. I say unto you categorically that direct bookselling to the consumer, with no middlmen, is the way of the future. And here’s something more to think about: as stupendous as amazon is, it is only a middleman for book publishers. Is there any reason why publishers have to outsource their fulfillment to amazon? None that I can think of. Once the Random Houses of the world see the profitability inherent in the subscription/print-on-demand model, if they’re smart -- a condition we cannot always take for granted – but if they’re smart, they’ll realize they can do it themselves.

According to Curtis, this do-it-yourself approach will come to dominate bookselling because cutting out the middlemen and "selling directly to customers is the only way that the book industry will find its way back to profitability."

I certainly agree that the middlemen are "impediments" in the process of getting books into the hands of readers, and that their tentacles have enwrapped the "book business" so thoroughly that debacles like this will only become increasingly common.

But I'm afraid the warehousers and the sales people and the "distribution groups" aren't the only middlemen. And it's not only Amazon that will become unnecessary for publishers to "outsource their fulfillment." Bookstores, while in some instances providing a relaxing enough way to spend a Saturday afternoon, aren't really necessary if my primary goal is to purchase the book I've been reading about on the litblogs, and the days when my choices are limited by the tastes of bookstore owners and the limited storage space they have available are of course long over. Even the Borders and Barnes and Noble megastores (maybe especially them, since their inventory is now almost completely determined by big sales and quick turnarounds) cannot supply the diversity of selection now possible online, except at their own online sites. Nostalgia for the old-time bohemian bookstores will linger for a while--and such nostalgia is not altogether misguided--but the bricks-and-mortar bookstore will eventually disappear, as, literally, few people will have much use for them.

Agents are of course the most conspicuous middlemen in today's book business. Like all other agents in our entertainment-industrial complex, they exist to keep the industrial cogs running smoothly and to siphon off as much profit for themselves as possible. But then agents are really the middlemen for the next level of middlemen, the editors. The problem with editors is not that they edit--some writers need editing--but that they mostly don't. (Reportedly, much of the hands-on editing is being sloughed off on the agents. That they must take on this burden in order to maintain their place in the pecking order has to be very frustrating to them.) Instead they indulge in their own delusions of grandeur, masquerading as "gatekeeping," or else they see the writing and reading of books as an opportunity to stamp the process with their own exquisite sensibilities:

With a book that is clearly well-constructed and interesting but leaves me with no inclination to acquire it, I can see on paper why it works -- and often even anticipate that it will be very successful -- but I just don't feel particularly enthusiastic about it. . .a really "me" book feels like an intense crush, illuminating and electric -- like it was written just for me. I become infatuated. I have butterflies in my stomach, and I want to tell all of my friends about it. I can hardly think straight until I have acquired it. (Or at least tried to!)

How darling. Books as boyfriends.

Apparently this is the philosophy behind book acquisition in our time (aside from chasing after the next blockbuster and wasting all the marketing money on it, before discovering the public thinks what you're promoting is just so last year.) All the editors gather together their "me" books, and everyone's ego is suitably gratified. Who needs "well-constructed and interesting" when you can pretend to have half-written this other swell book just by discovering it?

However, even the editors are just the stand-ins for the most imposingly intermediate of middlemen, the publishers themselves. Curtis proclaims that POD will "save the publishing industry" because it can peddle its wares directly to consumers. It doesn't occur to him that the efficiency made possible by print-on-demand will almost inevitably make publishing companies as we know them obsolete as well. Why entrust the downloading of your book to self-described publishers when you can send it straight to your readers yourself? Yes, some services will still be provided by ostensible middlemen in this new process (some of them perhaps still operating as "small" presses), but I can't imagine that, eventually, the technology involved won't be sufficiently streamlined as to make "self-publishing" effectively the only kind of publishing a writer would desire.

Ultimately, Curtis's shot across the publishing bow is no doubt just a warning to the "book business" that it needs to reconstitute itself to accomodate New Media. He comes to salvage third-party book publishing, not bury it. But if his mission were really to ensure that "books of lasting cultural value" continue to be written and read, he'd acknowledge that publishing as it has existed for the last 50 years is the biggest obstacle to that goal and he'd assist in digging its grave.

Flaws in Packaging

I don't want to seem churlish about this, but I have to say I find Levi Asher's position on "explanatory text" bewildering:

. . .I still feel strongly that back cover blurbs and review excerpts are essential to the "selection process" every reader goes through when looking at a new book. A publisher who presents a blank back cover on a novel by an unknown author, in my opinion, must not be thinking about how potential readers are going to look at this novel. The purist approach. . .sounds admirable, but I don't think it translates into reality. I am simply not going to devote my time to reading a book without some idea why I should read it. A novel needs a road map, and to fail to provide some explanatory text when publishing a new author is, in my opinion, a fatal mistake.

Does a serious reader really make a decision to read or not to read based on blurbs and "review excerpts"? Don't we all realize by now that blurbs are simply advertising tags that often bear no relation to the actual quality of the book being blurbed? In Michael Martone's Michael Martone, we are told that "Michael Martone" was once a student of John Barth's at Johns Hopkins: "During that first class John Barth also offered to give all of his students a reader's comment or 'blurb' that each could use as each made his or her way in the world. Martone's 'blurb' reads as follows: 'Among our wealth of excellent new American short-story writers, Michael Martone is one particularly worth reading.' Martone has used the quotation, with deep appreciation, on each of his books. . .and on all the acompanying promotional material. Perhaps because of the abiding affection and regard he holds for his teacher's gesture, Martone loves the genre of the 'blurb' and is very happy to write one for anyone who asks." Barth's blurb is dutifully included on the back cover of Michael Martone, an example of this book's playful charm but also clear enough warning that we should indeed take the blurb as a formulaic "genre" that ought not to be taken seriously as literary criticism.

And why settle for "review excerpts"? Ought we really accept carefully edited excerpts as substitutes for more fully articulated commentary? If knowing what other people are saying about a particular book is important (and it sometimes can be), why not seek out the full-text reviews, either print reviews or blog posts about the book? Surely this can't be that time-consuming, and it seems a much better use of (and justification for) book reviewing than as the source of "excerpts."

Frankly, I almost always ignore not only this back-cover material, but everything that's printed on a book jacket, including the flap copy. My curiosity about what I will find in a given book is going to be satisfied only by reading a few paragraphs, a few pages, enough to inform me about the book's thematic focus and aesthetic assumptions. Sometimes it won't be safisfied until I've read the whole thing. (Sometimes it will be satisfied quite quickly and I'll decide it's not a book for me. But the blurbs and the review excerpts will have had nothing to do with it.)

I understand there's a limited amount of time and a seemingly unlimited supply of books out there. But I am troubled by what seems to be Levi's entirely passive approach to book selection: Tell me "why I should read it." Entice me with baubles and come-ons. Don't readers have some role to play in determining what will be worth reading? Elsewhere in his post, Levi writes of the book that occasioned his displeasure in the first place: "I quickly concluded that nobody will read this book, since the author is not a known name and the book package presents no compelling reason to dive in, and that was the end of my review." Is this what book reviewing has become? An attempt to gauge how popular the book will be? Quick dismissal of all writers "not a known name"? An evaluation of the "book package" rather than the book? Since Levi had been sent the book for possible review, couldn't he have been one of those who gave the book a chance and then let his readers know why they should read it or not? Wouldn't some genuine literary criticism be a more suitable response than criticism of the flaws in "packaging"?

Perhaps I'm just a blinkered "purist," but I've always thought books were published to be read, not to be scrutinized for their marketing devices.

How Is It Going to Sell?

According to Justine Larbalestier:

. . .Accusations of being too self promotery make me a bit jittery. Promoting your books is part of a writer’s job. If no one knows the book exists how is it going to sell? A writer should be out there lining up bookshop appearances, sending out postcards/business cards/tshoshkas of some kind. You should be attending cons/trade shows/schools/libraries or whatever will help get the word out about your work. . . .

I continue to resist the idea that, at least in the context of "mainstream" publishing (small presses have a limited ability to promote what they publish, but all parties understand this from the beginning), "promoting your books is part of a writer's job." Is writing your book part of a publisher's job? If not, why let publishers off the hook and agree to do their actual work for them? There really was a time when the writer's job was to write and the publisher's job was to get it into readers' hands. Clearly that day has passed, and, like so many other businesses, publishers are "outsourcing" work they used to do themselves--in this case, to authors themselves.

Given the way current publishing seems to operate--books are published without any realistic plan to get them noticed, floating on a fragile bubble of hope one or two of them might, through some mysterious means, catch on and become blockbusters--it isn't surprising that this practice now predominates. Writers are indeed left to fend for themselves. But if the publisher's only real job is to print your book, why the continuing reluctance to turn to self-publishing? By Justine's own account, this seems to be what book publishing has come down to anyway. If the author is going to engage in the kind of labor she describes, of what practical utility is it to have the publisher's name on the spine? Just a residual sense that your book has been officially pronounced fit by people who know good writing when they see it? Does anyone any longer believe that they do?

Perhaps it is now true that writers must both write and promote. In which case, what good are publishers?

Business Decisions

Booksquare takes some exception to the notion that, according to The Sunday Times, "the [book] industry has become incapable of spotting genuine literary talent.":

While our first tendency is to draw comfort from having our worst suspicions confirmed, there is a stronger tendency to explore the idea that while Naipaul and Middleton are fine authors, they do not appeal to every reader. Thus, when it comes to make business decisions (and one must recall that representing or publishing books is indeed a business decision), different criteria are used to judge work. . . .

But this is, of course, the very point of Times article. It does not claim that "the book industry has become incapable of making business decisions" (although one could certainly question the wisdom of many it does make). Obviously, the implication of this experiment (submitting chapters from books by V. S. Naipaul and Stanley Middleton to various publishers, only to have them rejected) is that the overriding imperative in contemporary publishing is to indeed apply "different criteria" than literary merit. Perhaps Naipaul and Middleton "do not appeal to every reader," but that their work manifests "literary talent" seems to me undeniable. The "book industry" and its apologists need to make up their minds: Either "literary talent" no longer matters and publishing any piece of dreck that comes along on the suspicion it might make money is now acceptable practice, or it does matter and the publishing world is doing a dreadful job of serving that talent.

Entry Fee Enclosed

Alan Cordle has become "cynical about the whole enterprise" of contemporary poetry as a result of his efforts at "exposing fraudulent contests" and "tracking the sycophants" at his website Foetry. He thought poetry was about beauty, but the publishing of poetry has turned out to be about "cozy cronyism."

It's hard to believe that Cordle was really as naive as he claims he was when he discovered that judges of poetry contests sometimes select the manuscripts of "students, friends, and even their lovers." Poets are as fallibly human as anyone else, and surely Cordle did not assume that writing poetry afforded some kind of exemption from this truth. But perhaps Cordle should give himself a break--he thinks he's discovered that poets are unscrupulous and poetry contests financially corrupt, but he's really discovered that poets (and editors) prefer what they prefer and that getting published (in fiction as well as poetry) is not simply a matter of producing good work and having it recognized as a matter of course. In some ways it is only to be expected that poets would choose to extol the work of their own former students, since presumably those students exemplify in their work the qualities valued by the teacher to begin with, in some cases writing poetry directly influenced by the teacher's work.

To the extent that poetry/fiction prizes are explicitly "fixed"--the winner is known in advance, the other contestants deliberately bilked of their entry fees--Cordle's efforts to uncover the practice would be both welcome and justified. But I can't see that any of the examples described at the Foetry website reach this level. Few of them go beyond the "this poet knows that poet/this poet previously expressed admiration for that poet" variety of accusation. In my opinion, the fact of the matter is this: All poetry and fiction prizes, either those rewarding entire manuscripts or those that identify individual poems or stories as "winners" in literary journals, are inherently suspect, what might be called systemic scams. Print journals continue to proliferate, as does the cost of printing them, and since the readership of these journals is too small to support them through subscription, and the support provided by universities (where most of the journals reside) only weakens (as does support for university press poetry publication), these meaningless prizes and the entry fees they generate have arisen as a way of maintaining the supply of ink and paper.

I believe Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, when he says that most contests simply allow small presses to scrape by. Surely no one thinks large sums of money are at stake in the publishing of poetry and short fiction. Nevertheless, without the sums that are produced, such publishing would likely collapse from its own puffed-up weight. Contest money serves the system as a whole, at least for the moment, to forestall the day when small-scale print publishing as it has been conducted for the past forty years (a period that also coincides with the growth of creative writing programs) can no longer be sustained. In the meantime, aspiring and lesser-known writers will undoutedly continue to pay for the opportunity to be rejected by the literary journals or presses of their choice.

Why anyone would willingly participate in his/her own exploitation and disillusionment in this way is beyond me, but I guess the allure of being published in a literary magazine, even if most copies will sit unread on library shelves, or by a poetry press, whose books probably won't even make it to most libraries, is still strong for some writers. Moreover, such writers ought at least take to heart what Foetry has managed to make clear: Editors do indeed prefer what they prefer, and mostly what they prefer is the familiar and the compatible. And this is true both of those publishing conventional work and those who tend to publish more experimental fiction or poetry. (We are told in the L.A. Times Article that NEA chairman Dana Gioia has contacted Alan Cordle "to offer support for Foetry's goals." One suspects that Gioia, a poet in what Ron Silliman calls the "School of Quietude," would like to combat the influence of "post-avant" poetry--more highly esteemed in some quarters of the poetry world--and the venues that favor it.) The chances your work will meet the expectations of these editors is slight, even when you're seeking ordinary, non-contest-related publication.

Perhaps the greatest harm these literary contests do is to collectively perpetuate the idea there are commonly recognized standards by which all literary work is judged suitable for publication, that work submitted for publication to the most desirable venues will be assessed dispassionately and will get into print only if it is objectively the most meritorious. Where would these standards come from? Literary criticism of the kind that might help to establish such standards hardly exists any more, having been replaced by a species of academic criticism that finds value in literature only in its utility for advancing outside agendas and by newspaper-based book reviewing that rarely does more than provide crude consumer advice. At best, it seems to me, literary journals and many small presses proceed according to a kind of literary conventional wisdom whereby everybody publishes what everybody else is publishing. It isn't cynicism to think that literary publishing in the United States is far from a meritocracy (even if you don't think those involved are necessarily morally corrupt). It's common sense.