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.