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.

Dr. Syntax Edges Prosody by a Nose

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

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

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

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?

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.