Random Media Guy

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

The Launch of a Concern and a Community

 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

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

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

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

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.