Exposition

Shit English Majors Say (and shit they don't anymore)

2012-01-21T11:14:00.000-08:00

One thing I've come to see from talking with my students about reading is that arguments over platforms are of little or no interest to them. Most of them own Kindles or Nooks, which they use mostly for recreational reading. Most of their school texts are books, and they do most of their other reading online.

And I think it's fair to say that—aside from the opportunities for diversion they offer—most such innovations in computing and communication technology facilitate book publishing. What I have found striking is the change in classroom discourse about what's actually in the books. For example, not only was none my students familiar with the phrase "over the transom," none of them was familiar with a transom. And they had heard nothing whatsoever of Joseph Conrad. I'd brought the name up in relation to the sinking of the Italian cruise liner and how that captain's predicament was similar to that of Conrad's title character Lord Jim, who also abandons ship in a moment of panic and is tormented by the act for the rest of his life.

Not one of the students in the class knew the character or the author. I have always been impatient with instructors who express shock at what their students have not read; however, it was remarkable to me—as one who had encountered Heart of Darkness in two or three different classes, and on the screen in the DNA of Apocalypse Now—that a work that was to my generation a proto-critique of colonialism from the point of view of the colonialist in the waning years of colonialism would be unknown to this one.

Obviously, Conrad was a flashpoint author during the culture wars of the 80s and 90s (as expressed in Chinua Achebe's famous essay), who's been demoted in the canon as a result of those conversations and frequently replaced by more authentic voices from the former colonies in question, such as Achebe's. And now arguments that used to feel like intellectual life and death seem very distant from discussions of Twitter passwords and the navigation architecture of online style manuals.

The way we distribute now.

2012-01-15T17:21:00.000-08:00

From the Poetry Foundation, Janaka Stucky on the realities of poetry publishing expressed in units.

Publishing 2100

2012-01-14T11:20:00.000-08:00

If readers of literature are to be grateful to this clustered and chaotic age for anything, it may well be the innovation imposed upon publishers who find themselves simultaneously confined by harsh economic conditions and freed by technologies that allow them to do things for almost nothing that used to be very expensive. Here from the Guardian are four models in small press publishing, each of which are notable for how they confront the economic and technical realities of the current marketplace and each of which are notable for how they may affect what sorts of work get published.

The first, Unbound, uses a subscription method, by which readers can go to their website and pledge money toward the publishing of a book. Then in return for his or her stake the pledger receives a copy of the published book, a signed copy, an invite to the launch party, depending on the amount given. Subscription publishing is nothing new. It is, according to the article, how Samuel Johnson’s dictionary was published. And it can boast as its most attractive advantage full funding of a book before it comes to print. However, to succeed a title must generate enough buzz to meet its projected cost and thus far Unbound has mainly relied on well-known names, such as former Python Terry Jones to clear that bar. Nevertheless, at a time when survival has become the primary preoccupation of all sorts of businesses, there is something refreshing about a model that is by its very nature self-supporting.

Many American readers are already familiar with Melville House. Here the Guardian highlights the publisher's “hybrid book,” an intriguing publishing model in which readers purchase a bound book and then unleash “illuminations” by scanning a QR code. These enhancements are comprised of “an anthology of readings and illustrations that explain the cultural milieu and legacy of the particular novella.” The idea of a book coming packaged with the equivalent of DVD extras inspires a certain degree of ambivalence. While I was excited at the idea of an anthology of five classic novellas—including those by Chekov and Conrad—all titled “The Duel,” I can’t imagine wanting to read the book more knowing there will be pictures.

The third model is the British venture Boxfiction, billed as a “TV series you can read.” The less said the better. Similarly, the new Penguin Shorts go the ebook one better, not only are they digital but they’re short. “All we can do is respond to what the market wants,” says founder Venetia Butterfield. Which is certainly one way of looking at it.

Random Media Guy

2011-12-22T07:21:00.000-08:00

One advantage of being an editor at a literary magazine wasthat it ended any conversation initiated by the question “So, what do you do?”with a single sentence. “Interesting” was the most representational reaction to myanswer, if not the most common. “Bo-ring” was the most honest. (Yes, someonedid say this to me once and I wanted to kiss her for it.) The fact was thatthat was what I was, and there was little more I could have said about the jobthat anyone asked, or cared, to hear. I have since discovered that from an employmentstandpoint the title of lit-mag editor is not a door-opener either, and the fact I wasat it for so long only highlights my folly rather than marks me as adependable, dedicated worker. Therefore it was probably inevitable that—whileI waited for someone to glean general indispensability from my very particular resume—Iwould find myself cast into a variety of far flung endeavors over the yearand a half.

In addition to my (as yet unpaid) editorial and fundraising work on behalf of Fifth Star Press, I have published a couple ofshort stories; rewritten a novel; compiled an anthology; assisted a professorof psychology in transforming a half dozen academic papers into a sort ofprofessional memoir, which has since been accepted for publication by aprominent university press; enrolled in a training program called ChicagoCareer Tech, through which I have been placed in classes in social mediamarketing at the Tribeca Flashpoint Academy, as well as in an internship atChicago Public Media, (WBEZ); and, on top of all this, I will be teaching acourse in book publishing at LakeForest College in the spring.

The practical result of all this is that rather than being able to tell someone whatI do in a single sentence, I find my current situation impossible to summarize on a resume—much less to an acquaintance on the 147 bus. Indeed, looking over the preceding two paragraphs, I am reading how I spent my last eighteen months written down in the same place for the first time. That is primarily because I—as likely do most people—adapt each cover letter and resume to highlight oneaspect of my experience, after pouring over the job description in order to pinpoint areas of emphasis. All of which is to convey to whomever picks up my resume from a pile of hundreds: "Trust me—you want me," at a time when the needs of those in search of qualified workers and those in search of work are apparent, yet automated human resources systems confound that recognition of mutual advantage.

The Launch of a Concern and a Community

2011-12-20T17:48:00.000-08:00

After a more than a year of meetings and preparation, we are prepared to make public a new big idea in small press publishing: Fifth Star Press, a not-for-profit book publisher of trade nonfiction and fiction with a local focus on Chicago culture and history. There would seem to be, you might say, something audacious (if not flat out nuts) about starting a publishing company during the worst economy in 70 years, at a time when the one thing people think they know about books it that they are going away. However we are entering into this enterprise with the exact opposite mindset.

We conceived of Fifth Star as an antidote to the impersonality of the Kindle and other electronic readers. We have nothing against such gadgets; however, our research has indicated that while e-readers have become the indisputable favorites of mystery, romance, and science fiction readers, the print medium remains the destination of choice for readers of non-genre fiction and nonfiction. We believe that offering the majority of people who prefer books to electronic devices the sort of book they want to read is a good business model.

Our mission is twofold: we hope to bring popular and marketable books to a broad audience and we seek to prove that a lean, sales-oriented model of publishing can prevail at a time when so many publishers are closing or scaling back their operations.

Our first books will be out in the spring. I will be saying a lot more as the publication date nears and more about how this model fits into our view of the current state of publishing in the weeks and months to come.

The Book That Coined a Conundrum

2011-11-08T09:12:00.000-08:00

Catch-22 is 50 years old. I first read the novel when it was 17, and I haven't read a book I liked better since. If I'd known that would be the case then I might have been depressed, but the reality is that books that help to form our consciousnesses will mostly be read when are young, so it's natural rather than sad to be more attached to the adult books we read early in our teens than those we read later, regardless of merit.

Along the same lines, a critic once said of Heller, Catch-22, and his subsequent novels that any author who creates a idiom will never write a work of equal or greater importance. That always stuck to me as an odd sort of curse, since most writers, having coined the paradox of a generation, would be happy to call it a day.

From my inbox

2011-11-04T09:40:00.000-07:00

Woke up to this today. Sort of a weekly thing. I love the first two comments. I'm not sure if they're referring to the event itself or to the post-print apocalyptic landscape.

A Platform and a Conversation

2011-09-27T10:26:00.000-07:00

Not long ago, I attended a symposium at which Dominique Raccah, publisher of Sourcebooks, talked about some of the exciting technological advances e-readers had to forward to. (The other member of the panel was Dan Sinker, who suggested that computers are obsolete and that novels will henceforth be written on cell phones by teenage Japanese girls.) When asked which innovations she was most enthusiastic about, Raccah said that—with the new e-book technology—it would soon be possible to know at any given moment to know who was reading the same book you are. This would, she said, provide a “platform for a conversation.” As it happened, I was sitting next to a book critic. We exchanged looks of mutual horror.

It’s fair to say that words like platform and conversation have been applied figuratively these days in so many ways to virtual realms that they are completely removed their literal meanings. However, the question remains: is the opportunity for a contemporaneous conversation with other readers of the same book something that anyone has been clambering for? Or is connecting Kindle readers with each other merely the next logical technological step regardless of demand? Reading has historically been a solitary activity and, I always assumed, a self-selecting pursuit, insofar as every reader I know enjoys quiet and solitude as indispensible elements of the reading experience.

I was thinking about this the other day while reading Louis Menand in the New Yorker on the letters of T.S. Eliot. When Eliot published “Tradition and the Individual Talent”—the essay that Menand credits with creating the modern university English department—in the Egoist, the magazine boasted 185 subscribers. Despite the absence of what we now call connectivity, Eliot was somehow able to start a conversation that continues to influence the study of literature almost nine decades later. Of course, the key mechanism at work is genius, or at the very least, insight. Would a chat on Kindle among readers of The Help—the tagline for the film is “Join the conversation”—break comparable ground? It could, theoretically, but as anyone who as ever sat next to a stranger on an airplane knows conversation for conversation’s sake is not automatically a good thing.

Mistakes We Didn't Know We Were Making

2011-09-11T17:42:00.000-07:00

I started Exposition on the day after I left my position at TriQuarterly in the spring of 2010. My intent, as the subhead suggested, was to reveal the peculiar circumstances of a literary sensibility in a new and impermanent age. The idea of documenting the unexpected turns of a life in literary publishing after leaving my relatively comfortable existence at TriQuarterly seemed worthy as a personal activity and potentially interesting to anyone who wanted to check it out. However, early on I encountered unexpected difficulties that maybe should not have been so unexpected. The first was that I realized I was far more comfortable commenting on the words and works of others than I was offering regular opinions on the shifting state of publishing, as I saw it. A second was that I came to see in short order that the necessary rapid and steady pace of a blog was disharmonious the uneven movement of a personal/career crisis/opportunity. A significant aspect of redirecting a career after thirteen years in the same job is knocking on doors—real and metaphorical—trying to sell stories, books, and oneself. Yet it’s bad form at best to discuss specific job or creative opportunities while they are pending. And so I was left toiling in quiet desperation out in the world, while devoting Exposition to stories like this, commenting on the fault lines between print and technology, a tectonics that are as limiting as they are important.

Over the past few months, though, circumstances have changed. For one thing, what seemed at first to be an unwelcome job change at an inopportune time has turned into a walk-on role in one of the great labor crises of the last century and a half. Secondly, after a year of development, I am (with a few other souls of equally questionable judgment) on the verge of launching a publishing experiment inspired by the current circumstances in Chicago and in publishing. We will be announcing the project and a new website in the next month. In the meantime, I hope provide context and a rationale for such a step, with the understanding that rationales are not always rational.

Johnny Tremain and Today's Tea Party

2010-12-31T08:05:00.000-08:00

Jill Lepore had a nice piece in the New York Times last week about “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” a poem published 150 years ago on the date South Carolina’s secession from the Union. Like many leading New Englanders of his day, Longfellow was an abolitionist, and Lepore writes:

“Paul Revere’s Ride” is less a poem about the Revolutionary War than about the impending Civil War — and about the conflict over slavery that caused it. That meaning, though, has been almost entirely forgotten.

I showed the article to my eight-year old daughter Zelda because we are currently reading Johnny Tremain. As with Longfellow, Esther Forbes wrote her book about the American Revolution with a message about conflict of her day. Johnny must set aside his personal preoccupations to take up a weapon, as millions of young men were doing when Forbes was writing in 1943.

Reading the book for the first time since my mother read it to me when I was Zelda’s age (during the height of the Vietnam war), I am struck by the complexity of the work. On the one hand there is a dour New England Protestant ethic of industry and self-sacrifice driving the narrative; on the other, Forbes clearly recognizes the toll that such doctrinal demands took upon those on the fringes of colonial society. At eight I was obsessed with the military history of the American Revolutionary, a fact my mother, who was active in the antiwar movement in Madison, tolerated, and even abetted with her purchases of books and toy soldiers, but I’m sure did not entirely approve of. I am also struck at my sense of sorrow and waste—that I certainly didn’t feel when I was eight—as the two heroes, Johnny and Rab, are casting their own bullets and preparing cartridges, in the last days before the first shots are fired on Lexington Green, a sense that is particularly acute because I know this time how the book will end.

Of course, just as Longfellow and Forbes were using historical events as allegories the affairs of their times, Lepore chooses the anniversary of the Longfellow’s poem to write an argument against the revisionist Secessionmania that is gripping many in the South and against the know-nothing bigotry against Muslims that is current among many of those who claim to be acting in the spirit of the original Boston Tea Party.

Dr. Syntax Edges Prosody by a Nose

2010-12-08T18:37:00.000-08:00

I thought concordances and word counts were relatively time-tested scholarly techniques, new technologies notwithstanding, but the end of the story makes it worth reading.

Blogging Makes Joan Didion Uncomfortable

2010-11-22T19:07:00.000-08:00

This is the second in installment of posts in which iconic writer of the sixties reveals misgivings toward the brave new world of writing in a technological age. In an interview—or. more accurately, a passing encounter —with Ross Kenneth Urken of the blog Guest of a Guest, Joan Didion says:

Well, I don't really understand blogging. It seems like writing, except quicker. I mean, I'm not actually looking for that instant feedback.

Just as it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Phillip Roth should have no interest in curling up in bed with a Kindle, it should shock no one that Joan Didion, whose sentences flash like knife blades honed as a keen as razors blades that somehow never go dull, should have little interest in the casual immediacy of blogging.

“It makes me uncomfortable,” Didion said. “It’s an entirely different impulse, I guess. It's like talking.”

And, of course, writing as talking is not what Didion does. Consider the opening of her essay “Marrying Absurd” from Slouching toward Bethlehem (1967):

To be married in Las Vegas, Clark County’s Nevada, a bride must swear that she is eighteen or has parental permission and a bridegroom that he is twenty-one or has parental permission. Someone must put up five dollars for the license. (Sundays and holidays, fifteen dollars.) The Clark County Courthouse issues marriage licenses at any time of the day or night except between noon and one in the afternoon, between eight and nine in the evening, and between four and five in the morning. Nothing else is required. The State of Nevada, alone among the United States, demands neither a premarital blood test nor a waiting period before or after the issuance of a marriage license.

In her dry recounting of the provisions of Clark County’s marriage ordinances regarding the issuance of marriage licenses, culminating in the listing of each of the three hours during which the courthouse is closed, Didion contrasts deadpan Nevada’s forward-looking, laissez faire marriage policy of the 1960s with its consequences, which are, at the same time, lucrative, touching, and pathetic.

Most discussions of the contrasts between literary writing and blogging generally come around to questions of impermanence and revision, the implication being that bloggers are writers whose medium requires them to forego artistry for speed. However, such a view necessary devalues the range of complex decisions and techniques acquired in hours of solitary crafting that are lost in the interest of haste. To say nothing of what is lost when permanence is lost. For example, twenty years from now the 2010s will be remembered as the infancy of what will likely be by then near-universally legal gay marriage across the country. Are there essays being written today, in Iowa and Vermont, the gay “Marrying Absurd”s of today, that will still be read two decades from now?

Philip Roth Hates Change

2010-11-01T06:11:00.000-07:00

Reuters reporter Christine Kearney asks Philip Roth about e-readers, a device over which the author of the new novel Nemesis has likely lost little sleep. Of the larger question of technology in general, Roth says:

"The concentration, the focus, the solitude, the silence, all the things that are required for serious reading are not within people's reach anymore," he said.
Beginning with film in the 20th Century, then television, then computers, and more recently social media networks such as Facebook, the reader is now utterly distracted, he said.
"Now it is the multiple screens and there is no competing against it," Roth said. Roth does not plan to buy any kind of e-reading device such as Amazon's Kindle. "I don't see what the point is for me," he said. "I like to read in bed at night and I like to read with a book. I can't stand change anyway."

Kearney’s second topic struck me—if not Roth—as more interesting.

"Among the publishing chatter about a possible impending death of the popular, longer novel and the growth of novellas due to e-readers,” Kearney writes, "Nemesis—clocking in at about 56,000 words—is Roth's latest in a cycle of short novels."

While I’ve caught none of this chatter, Kearney suggests that Roth is on the cutting edge of the trend. “I am with the times,” Roth jokes.

Roth, author Goodbye, Columbus, says he asked Saul Bellow, author of The Adventures of Augie March and Herzog, how to write a short novel.

I talked to him and said "How do you do it?" And he didn't know any more than anybody else. So we just laughed.

Breaking: Book Publishers Believe People Need Book Publishers

2010-10-16T12:46:00.000-07:00

In a USA Today Op–Ed this week, the authors Harold McGraw III and Phillip Ruppel present five myths about the future of book publishing the digital age. Their top two are:

Myth No. 1. Publishers are merely printers. That would be news to companies like ours, which don't even operate their own printing presses. Publishers today are in the content business. We develop it; we design it; and we deliver it however our readers want it. And while a large part of our business remains in paper and print, we are seeing an unmistakable and irreversible shift toward bits and bytes with e-books and digital delivery platforms accounting for a growing share of the total market.

Myth No. 2. Authors don't need publishers in the digital age. Anyone who has ever written a book knows this to be false. Many great authors would never have found their audience without a great publisher willing to take a risk on their talents and market their works. At every stage of the editorial process, publishers partner with their authors as creative consultants, editors and designers. Ernest Hemingway had Maxwell Perkins from Charles Scribner's Sons, and Norman Mailer had E.L. Doctorow from Dial Press.

This week I attended a seminar designed to orient out of work print journalists on opportunities for web writers and web editors (as a job distinct from that of web designer). The moderator insisted there were plenty of good-paying jobs based on the same-value added argument. Firms will hire journalists to produce web content because they have skills and training that readers value, such as fact-checking and interviewing. As encouraged as I was at the thought, I found myself wondering at the same time if this were true. My sense is that people don’t miss what they don’t notice.

For example, I am more likely to read a film review by Anthony Lane of a film that I am not going to see than I am to read a review by David Denby of a film that I am because I prefer Lane’s writing (and I rarely go to see, or avoid, films based on reviews anyway). In other words, I tend to read reviews for the writing and the quality of argument, but I suspect that I am a small minority. Anyone seeking movie reviews on the Web can go to Rotten Tomatoes and not only get reviews but rankings of box office tallies (something that I doubt either Lane or Denby much cares about), links to buy tickets, watch clips, read celebrity gossip, and countless other features and adornments—all of which I’m guessing were proposed in design meetings in which the idea of improving the quality of writing of the reviews was never raised.

The key questions become for how much longer will publishers, regardless of the format in which they are publishing, feel it is worth the expense and effort to play Perkins to Fitzgerald (or, for that matter, Lish to Carver) and how much longer will readers continue to expect such a marriage of literary and editorial skill?

Who could have predicted?

2010-09-30T11:35:00.000-07:00

There’s an old joke about two writers talking publishing:

Writer 1: Any luck with your novel?
Writer 2: Naw, the publishing market sucks. I can’t believe how much it sucks.
Writer 1: It’s always sucked.
Writer 2: Yeah, but now it’s really bad.

For as long as I can remember people have been saying that conditions for getting a first novel published by a New York house were bad and getting worse by the second. These expressions of doom pre-dated the Kindle. Just the same, this story should surprise no one. Facing declining sales and under pressure from parent companies and shareholders, publishing houses seem to be taking fewer risks on new talent than ever before. And e-reader consumers thus far overwhelmingly favor non-fiction, genre fiction, bestsellers in general. In other words, they are inclined to buy that which is the opposite of the first literary novel of a recent graduate of a MFA program.

The trend in literary publishing, regardless of format, from at least as far back as Oprah’s first book club, has been away from the blue-chip competence of MFA grads toward writer-personalities who can tell a story of their lives on Oprah’s couch that tracks directly with the material in the book. The message being: you, too, can commodify your sucky life. With the result being an unexpected, disproportionate fame and, now, with the logical conclusion being—this.

Updated: Links fixed.

Where do they find these people?

2010-09-11T10:01:00.000-07:00

I have always wondered where lifestyle reporters find interview subjects who conveniently suffer from the exact angst du jour highlighted the article. In this case the story is that there are couples in America in which one prefers to read paper books and the other prefers to read e-books. (See the couple above captured spontaneously in their living room reading on differing devices.) She loves the way books smell; he thinks books are so Middle Ages and hates the whole “smell” thing.

The writer concedes that it’s not clear how widespread this quiet agony of marriages strained to the breaking point by divergent preferences of reading platforms is but insists that “the publishing industry is paying close attention, trying to figure out how to market books to households that read in different ways.”

Apparently, there is also some concern among digital evangelists about the resiliency of paper:

“There is much more emotional attachment to the paper book than there is to the CD or the DVD,” said Mike Shatzkin, founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, which advises book publishers on digital change. “It is not logical — it’s visceral.”

Right? Because there’s no logic to people preferring the device that you can pick up and read after you’ve dropped it off the Empire State Building.

What almost every article that sets out to reveal the tension between e-readers and paper readers is the notion that there necessarily must be a philosophical motivation behind the choice, deeply rooted in each individuals world view and sense of self, but my sense is that such motivations are often more prosaic. I’m not an early adopter of e-reading technology for several reasons. One is that I can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars on technology that will cost half as much a year from now and be obsolete in two. Another is that I know if I bought one, I’d never use it and then feel guilty. I reason I don’t use the iCal app on my computer isn’t that I like the smell of the half dozen to-do lists strewn about by desk. I don’t use it because I know that if I did, one item on my hand-scrawled to-do lists would be “Transfer to-do lists to iCal.”

The Souffle Also Rises

2010-09-01T18:24:00.000-07:00

With Gourmet first coming back digital and now in a newsstand print format, Conde Nast appears to be the first of the big magazine publishers to be following the trend I pointed out in Creative Nonfiction of online literary magazines who establish a print presence by publishing greatest hits collections semi-regularly. Jason Fell, the author of the article, suggests that this move is not an indication that Nast is bringing back Gourmet as a periodical but uses the opportunity scratch his head, as many have, over the closing Gourmet in the first place, a panic move ostensibly aimed at bottom line realities that caused disproportionate damage to the company’s public image.

I hope to be back on a more regular posting schedule after Labor Day. The languid steamy days of August have coincided with a period of intensified job hunting, which these days goes mostly Choose File/Attach Resume and “I believe my education and experience make me uniquely qualified for this position,” which means “I can’t tell from the language in your posting what your company actually publishes, but if it doesn’t advocate the killing of puppies, I’d be willing to consider it.”

Shivani on the Future of Literary Magazines

2010-08-19T17:43:00.000-07:00

Last week, Anis Shivani posted a list on the Huffington Post of “17 Literary Journals That Might Survive the Internet.” I found the list intriguingly random. While most literary magazines these days make their case for survivability on the grounds of how well they have adapted to the new technology (as Jeanne Leiby of the Southern Review does here effectively), the magazines Shivani has chosen fall in a broad range along the spectrum of new-media adoption—which of course may be the point he is implicitly making: that editors, not circumstances, determine a magazine’s future.

Shivani asked the editors of these publications “Can this venerable American literary institution survive—or even thrive—despite new technologies?” What struck me about the replies was that many of editors make the case for their futures by referencing the nature and position of little magazine in the past. Dan Latimer of the Southern Humanities Review says, “It is astonishing to learn that the journals that spread Modernism over the globe rarely had a circulation over 1,000. The Dial was an exception.” (The Dial was an exception, though the larger it grew, the more money it lost.) Which indicates that the reach and influence of literary magazines always extended beyond their circulation numbers. How many people have read “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the near century since Ezra Pound urged Harriet Monroe to accept the work of an unpublished T. S. Eliot?

Robert Boyers of Salamagundi points out that literary magazines “thrive because we are committed to publishing work that cannot appear in The Atlantic or The New Yorker, work that will often seem far too eccentric and rigorous for online publications.” Which, of course, has been the mission—as advanced in different ways— of little magazines over the last century. Poets and fiction writers from Robert Frost and Marianne Moore to Joyce Oates and Ernest Hemingway were published first in small-circulation literary magazines before their work was accepted as part of the canon of the twentieth century.

Though academic quarterlies followed close on their heels, the pioneering magazines of the nineteen-teens and twenties were characterized, for the most part, by the fact that they were independently financed and that their editors rarely spent much time thinking about what they could do to bring in more subscribers. However, gone—sadly—are the days when an editor can move her operation to Europe to take advantage of a low cost of living, liquor, and printing. And most institutionally-affiliated magazines must show some growth in circulation or risk being shut down or forced online.

Carolyn Kuebler of the New England Review speculates that “eventually print will be reserved only for things that are best suited to its particular charms—literary magazines among them—rather than the assumed medium of choice.” And perhaps that will be the salvation of the literary magazine in the end: not only that it attracts a certain type of audience, but that it repels that which seeks the commercial or the profitable.

Update: I chose the Raritan image from the post because it's a great magazine that more people should know about.

Give It up for Garden and Gun Magazine

2010-08-11T17:05:00.000-07:00

I, like most Americans, would never dream of setting foot in my garden without a sidearm. On the other hand, I have long viewed the National Rifle Association as a crackpot organization whose primary purpose, aside from lining their pockets, is to guarantee that the number of multiple-fatality workplace shootings in this country never falls below two a week.

Therefore, I applaud the editors of Garden and Gun magazine for sticking to their guns, as it were, and refusing to run an NRA ad. This does, I concede, leave their commitment to a fully armed society somewhat in question among those gun enthusiasts who are less—what would be the word?—hinged. However, that predicament is easily rectified by changing the magazine’s name to Gun and Garden.

Kevin Morrissey

2010-08-10T17:59:00.000-07:00

Kevin Morrissey, managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, died last week. I never met Kevin in person. I’d only dealt with him via email on a couple of small matters (though for those of us who were managing editors of literary magazines, small matters are the big stuff of most days), and therefore have no first-hand knowledge of the ensuing controversy. For me, he was one of my counterparts who fell into my category of “People Who I Bet Are Better Than Me at This Job.” As I was reading the tributes that have been coming in, this one from his sister struck me the most, maybe because as I write this, I am sitting in a public library branch, watching children in their flip-flops lug stacks of books to the check-out desk:

Morrissey came by books naturally, his sister Maria Morrissey said. “As children, Kevin and I were the ones in the family who went to the library every week and would drag home huge stacks of books," she said. "Kevin would read and read and read.”

The Profit Equation

2010-07-26T08:21:00.000-07:00

The final lecture of So You Want to Start a Magazine was devoted to the steps necessary to determine a magazine’s potential for profitability. As I have suggested, the utility of the class for me was diminished by the fact that my neo-socialist literary magazine—despite all its certain dash and drive—is unlikely to be supported by Lexus, Tag Heuer, and Ketel One ads. And when I told “Steve” the instructor (who had graciously agreed to take phone calls) that my four-year subscription goals were 2000 copies, I could tell from the descending lilt in his voice that he agreed. Though I should say that Steve is not only very successful in the field but also a truly supportive instructor. Ultimately, the class was valuable for the insight it provided into the practical realities and processes that must attend the impulse to start a magazine (profitable or otherwise) and for the business plan template that was essentially the superstructure of the lesson plan. And, on the upside, I have spared myself a fortune in market-testing and branding consulting fees.

The only downside to the experience was that it revivified my long-dormant school-related anxiety and its attendant dreams. I had one the second week of class that I had returned to my alma mater the University of Wisconsin to attend a reunion of the cast of the Rodney Dangerfield vehicle Back to School that was filmed in Madison while I was going there. The dream-event was held in a crowded lecture hall and had been going on for less than a minute before I remembered not only that I had hated the movie and been annoyed at having to walk around all the cameras and crowds as I went about my self-important way, but also that I was missing a math class I had registered for but hadn’t gone to since the first week. A school anxiety dream within a school anxiety dream, and all this while I was actually doing the online work for the class as it was assigned—unlike some virtual students I could name.

Colorado Review in the HuffPo

2010-07-21T17:23:00.000-07:00

Anis Shivani has a great interview with Stephanie G'Schwind on Huffington Post. The Colorado Review, along with other stateonymic literary magazines, like the Missouri Review and the Alaska Quarterly Review, are excellent examples of journals with regional-sounding names that are actually the equal of any of the top geographically-ambiguously-titled counterparts.

2010-07-14T18:35:00.001-07:00

Mumbai-based author Murzban F. Shroff , who’s story “A Matter of Misfortune” appeared in TriQuarterly 132, is facing obscenity charges in Indian for his outstanding collection Breathless in Bombay (St. Martin’s, 2008).

Read all about it here.

http://www.indiawest.com/readmore.aspx?id=1700&sid=1

In a recent email Shroff wrote to us: “Several writer-friends in the U.S., are taking this forward, at various levels. If you have any contacts with writers' guilds, networks, and organizations, please bring this to their attention. I would like to add that I am immensely grateful to International Pen who came in solidly and unconditionally to ensure that the literature of my city stays protected.”

One sure way to help would be to buy his book.

A Passage in India

2010-07-14T18:09:00.000-07:00

I received word from TriQuarterly 132 contributor Murzban F. Shroff yesterday regarding the disposition of his indecency case in the Indian courts.

Good news, though it is a little chilling to think of what would become of a judge in the U.S. court system who praised a work of fiction for upholding secularism.

I'm reprinting a post from the old TriQuarterly To-day blog that contains a link that Murzban sent that explains the story behind the trial.

You can take the editor out of the NFP

2010-07-12T18:41:00.000-07:00

The objective of the intro to magazine publishing class I’m taking is—unsurprisingly—to launch one’s own magazine. The online lectures are targeted toward creating a for-profit magazine, one supported not only by single-copy sales, subscriptions, and advertising, but also by product tie-ins and “advertorials,” in short, a magazine like most of the dwindling pool you see, and sometimes buy, at your newsstand. The introductory course lecture insists that while these are dark times for the magazine industry all is not gloom. Out of crisis comes opportunity—for that sighted entrepreneur with a brilliant and ruthless new business model.

So naturally I chose to start a Socialist magazine on the model of the Masses, or the Anvil, or the old Partisan Review. Worse, since I didn’t think such a venture could sustain itself in this day and age through sales and subs, I decided that Exposition magazine (I went meta) would be a not-for-profit, dependant upon institutional subventions and grants. One may be forgiven for concluding that I have learned absolutely nothing from personal experience (particularly given my guilty admiration for slick magazines that turn a profit). However, I worried the course would not be worth the tuition if I didn’t apply what I learned to something I might actually consider doing.

The instructor—whom we will call Steve (not his real name)—says that, thanks to the savage realities of the Great Recession, the editorial and business sides of magazines are closer than they ever have been, and I believe this is true. At TriQuarterly we didn’t necessarily think ourselves immune to economic reality, but rather believed that nurturing a literary culture that may not otherwise survive in a market subjugated to the bottom line was precisely the mission of a university-based literary magazine.

Cast to the barbarities of the market, one might conclude that magazines in this era cannot support themselves primarily on advertisement. Not necessarily true says Steve. Maxim once boasted a sell-through rate of 70%, thus inspiring a new maxim: it is not possible to support a magazine through advertising without feeling that one needs to take a shower at the end of the day.

When Margaret Anderson, the legendary editor of the Little Review, found—having embraced anarchism and published the likes of Emma Goldman and John Reed—that no one would advertize in her magazine, she began publishing brief inserts on pages where advertising would normally appear. Of this nature:

Carson, Pirie, Scott and Company ought to advertise something, though I don’t know just what. The man I interviewed made such a face when I told him we were radical that I haven’t had the courage to go back and pester him for the desired full-page. The Carson-Pirie attitude toward change of any sort is well-known—I think resent even having to keep pace with the change in fashions.

It may be worth a try. Steve also says publishers need to be open to profitable new models or perhaps not-for-profitable new models.

Re-education and Its Discontents

2010-07-08T07:53:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the gap between postings. I’ve been scrambling to meet several deadlines, the most intriguing of which is the course work for a course on starting online on magazine publishing.

A necessary and yet humiliating aspect of losing one’s job on the pretext of technological change is the sense that one needs to be retrained, reeducated to keep up with the changing job market. Of course, this notion is generally a byproduct of anxiety rather than reason because in the job market—insofar as such a thing can be identified—there is very little that can be accomplished in technical or vocational training for the vast majority of fields that couldn’t better be learned through the experience of an actual job. The fact is that in terms of sheer economic efficiency, shrimp fishermen are most productive when they are fishing for shrimp rather than sopping up oil and manufacturers are more productive when they are manufacturing rather than working as a hostess at Appleby’s. And, in my specific case, online editing is far less demanding and complex than print editing, so the idea that anyone with experience in the latter would be unable to do the former is absurd.

Just the same, having worked for only one magazine over the last thirteen years I have wondered, over the past few months, how universal and transferable my skills are. So, the email advertisement for this course that came through on a job site I subscribe to caught my eye. The instructor has a solid reputation in marketing and advertising for several glossy magazines in New York. I was reluctant, though, to pay the money for the tuition. The next day, however, I got an email telling me that I’d sold a short story for the exact same amount as the course cost, so I decided it was kismet of some sort and enrolled.

The course is designed with a conventional advertising/subscription for profit model, so not exactly my area of expertise, but, as I said, the idea was to see how magazine work is done for profit. Over the next few days, I will provide an account of what I have learned.

Books or Butter

2010-06-21T17:15:00.000-07:00

In a post titled “Print Culture and the Fate of the Literary Quarterly” Salon blogger Front Porch Republic (FPR) references TriQuarterly and Shenandoah going online and worries what these changes mean for print literature. FPR sites similar concerns from George Core, the editor of Sewanee Review, a journal to which he subscribes, and also quotes R.T. Smith, editor of Shenandoah, who, in part, blames Shenandoah’s predicament on “the disproportion between the number of people who would love to publish in Shenandoah and the number of who would love to read it.”

FPR goes on to say that he buys or subscribes to a select number of literary magazines “out of duty, I suppose, and out of loyalty too, and perhaps out of guilt, but also out of the belief that my money is better spent on, and is more needed in the service of, a Republic of Letters in print.” While I don’t know a magazine editor who would want anyone to subscribe out of a sense of duty or guilt, it is true that the profusion of graduate writing programs over the last 20 years has led to a profusion of writers and a profusion of new magazines but not a profusion of subscribers. And I would go so far to suggest that if you have an advanced degree in creative writing and can’t find any magazines that you would not only willingly subscribe to but also eagerly anticipate each number of, then you are likely in the wrong line of work.

Take, for example, FPR commenter JustJuli, who seems to view her time spent in a graduate writing program as like living in a North Korean gulag. Now, set loose with an MFA from her (apparently compulsory) course of study, and consequently unemployable, JustJuli says she must choose between subscribing to literary magazines and shoeing her children. Fortunately, having been deprogrammed from her harrowing brush with creativity, she finds the choice a no-brainer.

Commenter tomreedtoon too says piffle to FPRs concern for the future of print culture because, he states boldly (literally), “nobody reads any more (sic).” And he has proof that this is true—for tomreedtoon has said the exact same thing in comments to previous posts that were about people reading things and yet people still keep putting up posts about people reading things! How does tomreedtoon carry on in the face of such willful intransigence? One is inclined to wonder. Of course, the notion that no one reads anymore is common these days, largely, one imagines, among people who don’t read.

H/T Marya

Corporate Thought-Monitoring: It’s a Feature Not a Bug

2010-06-12T14:03:00.000-07:00

Buried in UC-Berkeley professor Pamela Samuelson’s thorough evaluation of the implications of the Google Book Search Settlement is this inadvertent Onion headline: “Google’s senior management has actively been trying to expand the firm’s revenue models.” Should the settlement be approved, Google will still be allowed to “track reader’s past and present online actions and locations through some unstated combination of cookies, IP addresses, referrer logs, and numerous distinguishing characteristics of a reader’s hardware and software.” These practices, according to Samuelson, “would allow Google to know ‘what books are searched for, which are browsed (even if not purchased), what pages are viewed . . . and how much time is spent on each page.'”

Michael Chabon, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Jonathan Lethem oppose the settlement, fearing fewer people might browse, say, Tropic of Cancer if they knew that somewhere in a bunker somewhere somebody is keeping track of how long they are lingering over the naughtiest bits. Of course, lest one become too paranoid, we can be reassured that all this monitoring will not be conducted in the name of decently or patriotism but commerce.

Rope, Part Deux

2010-06-03T12:13:00.000-07:00

According to Wired, via Reuters, a consensus arose at this year’s BookExpo America (the yearly orgy of commercialism for the book publishing industry) among publishers that an e-book alternative must arise to sidestep the Apple/Amazon battle for hegemony. Which suggests, remarkably, that unlike in previous platforms wars, such as Betamax v. VHS or HD-DVD v. Bluray, the winner won’t be one or the other but rather none of the above. As it stands you have Amazon, and their attempted i-Tunes-ification of the publishing industry versus latecomer Steve Nobody-Reads-Books-Anymore-but-We’re-More-Than–Happy-to-Sell-Them-to-You-Anyway-in-a-Format-Unreadable-by-Devices-Other-Than-Ours Jobs.

All of this digital maneuvering has drawn attention to what might be called an analog advantage to printed books. As Susan Peterson Kennedy, president of Penguin, points out, “The devices have not caught up with the content. Contrary to popular opinion, the book is actually so far more flexible.”

Thus it appears that the future of print literature may be more secure than early adopters of e-readers would have us believe. Unfortunately, the article suggests that much of the buzz at the convention surrounded Barbra Streisand’s forthcoming book on interior design, so the future of civilization remains in doubt.

Best. Book. Review.

2010-06-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

Ever.

h/t Mairead

Gatekeepers

2010-05-27T11:35:00.000-07:00

“First, would you trust a citizen surgeon to remove your son’s neuroblastoma?” asks Parisian media consultant Frédérick Filloux. This question, while intended as an argument for the necessity of professional writers and editors, actually points more directly at the dilemma facing writers and editors today. Most people—other than those who boast that they don’t read—believe that they could be writers themselves. In fact, during my tenure there, the Northwestern University Press published collections of poetry by four physicians, while during the same time period I know of exactly no poet who dabbled in surgery.

As for editors, the prognosis may be even more bleak. To the extent the editor is given any thought in the age of the Internet, it is as a crusher of dreams. There is a pervasive belief among unpublished writers that editors act as bouncers—“gatekeepers” being the popular term—who prevent a certain type of writing from being published. “Yes,” reply we editors, “bad writing.” “No,” protest these thwarted aspirants, “my writing.”

Now that the creators of the hundreds or perhaps thousands of new online magazines that spring up each year are free to publish all the neglected or misunderstood work they wish (without even the burden of word limits), what will come of this trampling down of the gates? a new literary renaissance driven by bold experimentalists heretofore gagged by the dictates of prevailing literary taste as held uniformly by every magazine editor in the country? We shall see.

Give 'Em Enough Rope

2010-05-21T09:27:00.000-07:00

Reading over Ken Auletta's piece in the New Yorker on the e-book platform wars, I was struck by a quote by an unnamed publisher who complained that "[Amazon] chose to do something irrational—lose money—in order to gain a monopoly."

In fact, as the ghost of Sam Walton would willingly attest, selling products at a loss to drive out scrupulous, non-conglomerated competition could be deemed highly rational for the right CEO—unethical, perhaps, and illegal in many cases, but not irrational.

The Reality of Copyright

2010-05-20T19:07:00.000-07:00

David Shields writes in Reality Hunger:

Copies have been dethroned; the economic model built on them is collapsing. In a regime of superabundant free copies, copies are no longer the basis of wealth. Now relationships, links, connection, and sharing are. Value has shifted away from a copy toward the many ways to recall, annotate, personalize, edit, authenticate, display, mark, transfer, and engage a work. Art is a conversation, not a patent office. The citation of sources belongs to the realms of journalism and scholarship, not art. Reality can’t be copyrighted.

Or at least you might think he did, until you check out the appendix of citations in the back and find it was said by Wlliam Gibson in Wired.

I read Reality Hunger with a thumb planted in the appendix to check the source of each section as I finished it, even those of a sentence or less in length—the exact opposite of the Shields’ intention, I know, but it’s how I was raised.

New Pages

2010-05-18T14:42:00.000-07:00

I received an update from the New Pages website that the final issue of TriQuarterly, which is good excuse to call attention to them and to Poetry Daily, two excellent examples of online organizations, supported by member sponsorship, that guide new readers to their member print magazines.

Better Mousetrap/Same Old Mouse

2010-05-15T12:38:00.000-07:00

Andrew Rice’s article in the Sunday Times magazine is admirable both for its scope and for its narrow focus. The piece profiles a handful of editors of online news and feature magazine start-ups. Many of them are refugees of paying jobs at now-defunct print magazines who have found that existing technology allows them to start up handsome ventures online on a small investment of time and capital; in the process they have also found making money is a separate matter, altogether.

What each of the editors—including Sam Apple of the Faster Times and Lewis Dvorkin of True/Slant—have in common is that they had developed a new business model in hopes of circumventing the most pressing obstacles of making a profit writing online, one being that ad revenues are small and hit driven and the other being that no one will pay for news and features online. Implicit in the article is a new normal in which the energy, creativity, and innovation that used to be channeled into content is being channeled into a quest to find the means to earn a living online. A corollary to this new reality is that the content suffers in the process.

Rice quotes a passage from the Faster Time’s mission statement that proclaims: “The crisis of American journalism is a financial crisis. Opinions posted on blogs are cheap. Great journalism is expensive.” Perhaps so, but each of these editors is aware that it is the tawdry and the profane that generates hits, and “great” journalism may be the very definition of an expense few online reader are willing to pay for.

Magazine Editing by Flash Mob

2010-05-12T13:11:00.000-07:00

When I read this article in the WSJ, my first question was Why? However, the more I thought about the idea, the more worthy the experiment seemed. Magazine editing is an act of aggregating energy—the energy of contributors, or editors, of printers, and distributors—toward a goal of turning out an issue on a deadline.

Having 1500 submissions to cull from, the issue is unlikely to suck. Whether it will cohere is a separate question.

One objection might be to the theme, hustle—“which,” the article says, “can refer to anything from speed to the actions of a con artist”—as another example of how the point of the thing seems always these days to become the thing. It would surely be more compelling to see a magazine produced in 48 hours on the theme of sloth—which can mean anything from slow to an animal that dangles languidly from tree limbs.

h/t R. Faust

A Message from Abroad

2010-05-10T14:16:00.000-07:00

in a post on the Author, Author blog in the Guardian, Pankaj Mishra salutes the pluck of American little magazines, commends the work of recent TriQuarterly contributor Eliot Weinberger, and closes with this:

This is the kind of desanctified criticism little magazines have always excelled at: reconsiderations of often canonical figures that dispense with plot summaries and prose connoisseurship, and move quickly beyond their declared subjects toward a larger moral, social or psychological insight. The light it sheds on literature is brighter than that of the post-publication review, theory-addled academic appraisal or bookchat on blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Notwithstanding the new virtual communities, little magazines continue to be the main sponsor of the vital US tradition of intellectual dissent, which one suspects may be needed more than ever in our busy new century.

Jose Saramago’s new book raises the question

2010-05-07T14:28:00.000-07:00

Can a blog be considered literature?

The consensus: no— not yet, anyway.

As the Scottsman says putting aside the fact that this collection of entries was printed and bound, it had not been considered by its author as a blog in the conventional sense.

Chicago Underground Library

2010-05-06T17:07:00.000-07:00

On the Chicago Underground Library blog, Denise Dooley posts an interview we did in conjunction with a donation TriQuarterly made of some of its archives to the library.

Also, visit the library's main page to learn more about its mission.

Teabagger, Spell-Check Thyself

2010-05-06T06:00:00.000-07:00

For the want of a copyeditor.

A Great Upheaval

2010-05-05T16:49:00.000-07:00

“Yes, the Railroad had prevailed,” Frank Norris writes in the closing pages of The Octopus. “The ranches had been seized in the tentacles of the octopus; the iniquitous burden of extortionate freight rates had been imposed like a yoke of iron."

On Sunday, we headed down to Pilsen for a reenactment of the 1877 Battle of the Halsted St. Viaduct. Everything old is new again... take a look at the video. The man with the bullhorn is Albert Parsons aka Paul Durica.

Yes and no are also adverbs

2010-05-04T17:41:00.000-07:00

Marianne, Art Director of Northwestern University Press, made lithographs as going away presents for myself and Susan Hahn. The quote is from the foreword to the first issue of TriQuarterly. Newman’s manifesto of 1964 has received renewed attention lately. We printed it on the late TriQuarterly To-day blog, and it was picked up by the blogs of a few other magazines, including A Public Space. The thesis is remarkable, not merely for its prescience but for the fact that while most manifestos are preludes to irony, as the drafters ultimately fall tragically short of their aspirations (see Charles Foster Kane), Newman’s foreword actually established the editorial principles that would remain intact for the next forty-five years.

Title Sequence

2010-05-03T18:17:00.000-07:00

For thirteen years, prior to May Day of 2010, I was the associate editor of TriQuarterly magazine and for that entire time served under the editorship of Susan Firestone Hahn. The events surrounding our departure can be tracked here, here, and here.

And my in own account of the events in Creative Nonfiction (Spring, 2010).

Because, in this case, an internationally renowned literary magazine, with a publishing history of forty-five years, was “transitioning” — in the sterile argot of a university’s communications department — to a website in said university’s continuing studies department, much of the focus of debate surrounding this action centered on the relative merits of print versus digital publishing, though it is fair to say that the move was as much the residue of the ordinary academic politics that pass — among a population over- represented by those who dribble a basketball with two hands — for sport.

That is the past. What is of interest is the present, and the reality of the present, as it is during any time of accelerated technological change, is of displacement, displacement of all sorts, though the sort of displacement that has always sparked the loudest ruckus in such times is the displacement of labor. Likely, there are fewer people today who earn a living from literary publishing than do playing professional baseball, and, as of last Friday, there are at least two fewer of them. Of course, in the eyes of industrialists and Republican lawmakers, such human discomfort is a signal of economic vitality, and to some degree they may be correct. I offer no apologies for print publishing. In fact, despite the straw arguments of digital-partisans, few book or magazine publishers have shown any measurable inclination to standing athwart history.

The question then is what comes next, for me, for us, for everyone. The fact is that circumstances are changing so rapidly that even technical consultants commissioned by corporations to anticipate the commercial landscape of the near future are often catastrophically (from the perspective of profit) wrong — catastrophic for them, anyway (what do the rest of us care?). Early adopters of the 8-track tape deck thought they were aurally experiencing the future of stereophonics; many Kindle owners reported a similar sensation while reading genre novels previously available as affordably only at WalMart.

What comes next? No one who grasps the enormity of the moment professes to know. I sure don’t. But we’ll see. Exposition suggests an ongoing revealing, an unfolding, not a resolution.

Stay Tuned

2010-04-28T04:41:00.000-07:00

We're officially launching on Monday, May 3, 2010.