http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/11/AR2008091103308.html?hpid=moreheadlines

Dana Gioia Retires. He was quite a  chap, after all. Check out his work for the National Endowment for the Arts; in retrospect, it is quite impressive.

I’m glad he’ll get some time to write for himself. 

—

The stars now rearrange themselves above you

but to no effect. Tonight,
only for tonight, their powers lapse,
and you must look toward earth. There will be
no comets now, no pointing star
to lead where you know you must go.

Look for smaller signs instead, the fine
disturbances of ordered things when suddenly
the rhythms of your expectation break
and in a moment’s pause another world
reveals itself behind the ordinary.

And one small detail out of place will be
enough to let you know: a missing ring,
a breath, a footfall or a sudden breeze,
a crack of light beneath a darkened door.

- Dana Gioia, from “Daily Horoscope”

– KW

Red Inc. Going Live in 5 Days

 

It’s true.  Any and all Susquehanna students willing to create a WordPress account and agree to the Blog Style Standards (forthcoming from Madeline and I) will be able and are strongly encouraged to submit to Red Inc. All those thoughts you’ve been holding back on the novel you’re reading for class? They’ve finally found a home. Your unedited rant on the ridiculous pretentiousness of Cleanth Brooks? Here’s a place to put it. And you can feel free to talk about the Twilight series, if you really have to. Even if you liked it.

Also check out the linked blogs on the right hand side of this post, where a growing list of SU Alum’s (and former Red Inc. contributors) can be found.

Get excited.

Kathryn

Poor or not-so poor Ron Silliman

Recently, Ron Silliman was asked by the Poetry Society of America (PSA) to judge the William Carlos Williams (an award given out to a trade press published collection of poems).
Of course, even though having Ron Silliman judge was a good idea in retrospect, the ending result was absurd. Silliman, whose blog is the most popular source for contemporary poetics, is a great choice because of his popularity and willingness to select a work that one might consider “on the fringe” or “outside the box” (or whatever cliche for the unconventional could be employed here).
Well that is certainly what the PSA received. Silliman chose Aram Saroyan’s “Complete Minimal Poems”, most of which was written and published in the 60’s.

Saroyan is most known for poems that I wouldn’t even consider poems; they are more or less visual experiences (which is interesting in its own right, but how far can one take this? Hasn’t Saroyan taken it as far as it could go?). Now when I say “visual experiences” I’m not talking about Saroyan in the same way one might talk about ee cummings or Tristan Tzara’s work (both of which drew some kind of influence from Cubism). Saroyan’s most talked about work (though one can assume not many people would know anything about him if it weren’t for Silliman’s blog) is the poem:

lighght

Now this is certainly cool to look at and impossible to say. Conceptually it’s great, because between the “li” and “t” is the unsayable “gh” phoneme, not once, but twice. The poem is abysmal and that’s what makes it so interesting.
Back to the PSA’s WCW award. The absurd thing about this (and I’m drawing from Bill Knott’s blog on this same subject http://billknott.typepad.com/billknott/2008/04/20/index.html ) is that Saroyan wrote most of these back in the 60’s and is now receiving help from Ron Silliman to have them brought to attention. Poor Ron Silliman. For all his talk about the School of Quietude and the post-avant, he has succumb to the same power process he claims to rebel against. [For those that don't know, the idea that an author selects a work for a prize based on merit alone and not for any other reason].
I don’t want to go so extreme and say Saroyan is entirely undeserving of this award, his poems do get us to think about poetry in a new way (certainly different from other “visual poets” like cummings or Tzara). The problem with Saroyan’s work is it is only going to be understood by a select few and thus it becomes just as inclusive as anything Silliman might attribute to the School of Quietude.

Also, on a note so unrelated note; if we take Silliman’s judgment seriously this allows us to see that Silliman is subverting the concept of the general “literary prize”; in a way Silliman’s judgment is more beneficial than what Zadie Smith pulled a few months ago denying an award to any of the work sent in for her to judge.

the horrible truth about dana gioia

His name is pronounced ‘joy-ah’. All of us were wrong. The whole semester.

A Small, Small World

The internet has made the world of publishing – and more specifically, the world of readers – more accessible than it ever had been. No longer would authors be the mystifying, or perhaps mythical, souls whose name is on the front and picture on the back of novels at the bookstore. New communication opens up for dialogues between author and audience and includes people further in the process of their favorite books. Even the publishing companies have found value in appealing to the little people. In a deal with LibraryThing, for example, some companies will send out advance copies of their books in exchange for an LT review of it. Yes, this still may be a corporate money-grubbing ploy, but still, how cool. People like me could get to review books like we’re people who matter. It’s a different way of operating than the exclusive and insular world that its seems like publishing has been. Authors also have to be connected on all the hippest social networking sites, either maintained by themselves or a lackey, as suggested in this article. Every friend/fan added extends their network a little further and would increase exposure of their work a little more, so it’s a practical business decision. But it also leaves authors open for their fans, who can leave comments – like talking to a real person! – and get cred for having cool “friends” in their Top 8. Everyone wins. But full websites and blogs are really where the action is. The pinnacle of this phenomenon, Neil Gaiman, simply breeds fangirls over at his journal – syndicated by Livejournal, where he probably gets the most attention. All in one his journal humanizes him and his craft, and keeps fans updated on the actual books. JK Rowling (who, granted, doesn’t need the exposure, but that makes the fanservice all the nicer) has a highly interactive site, answers questions on it, and has praised fansites. Jeanette Winterson maintains a fairly pretentious site with a monthly column and a link to her Myspace. And Christopher Paolini, author of Eragon, writes his own newsletters for fans. I’m always more willing to pick up a new book that I’ve kind of heard of than a complete unknown – even if the only connotation I have is “Hey, the author seemed pretty cool and down-to-earth on LJ.” Publishers and authors indulging their fans is a mutually beneficial deal; they build loyalty and exposure, we get a privileged and different look at our books and authors.

Some (other) things I thought were interesting:

Some (other) things I thought were interesting:

“A great time for small presses”, says publishing ‘vet’: http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6552045.html

A followup to my first post: whatwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com becomes the second ‘hit blog’ to have a book out later this year.

This website, which attempts to re-imagine books in terms of… what’s going to happen to them: http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog

I’m going to talk about a particular post on the if:book blog, which I wanted to post a picture of, but am not allowed to access that feature, so here you’ll have to click the link: http://www.futureofthebook.org/blog/archives/2008/04/illumination.html.

How cool does that look?!

When we passed around the Amazon Kindle in our class, most of us had a reaction of mixed disgust and awe. I felt like I was going to break it; someone else (I can’t remember who) was afraid touching it would contaminate them. But when I saw this thing created by some student in the UK, I was intrigued and excited. This kind of ‘book’ looks more like an art project (and upon investigating creator Kyle Bean’s ‘portfolio’, it appears that’s mostly what it is) than an industrialization. The thought of a way of making books a technological creation rather than a machine is what is so thrilling, even if this particular instance is just a visual representation of what is a possible piece of book-future.

It occurs to me then that it is really the ‘aura’ (thanks Benjamin) of the book that concerns me, the thing as an object, and not the actual experience of reading up-close. I still have to think about the matter a little bit more, but while I had been worried that reading was cheapened when it was relegated to the world of the screen, that is actually not the biggest qualm I have with an internet-dominated world of literature. While I care less about the preservation of the ‘CD’ as an object of ‘aural’ significance, that is probably because the significance of a ‘music object’ in general has been slowly decreasing through the lifetime of the ‘music industry.’ Once mix-tapes were being handed out by guys to their girlfriends left and right (about the time that I was born), it didn’t seem like there was a whole lot of integrity left for the art object of a musical document. However, a friend of mine that grew up in a house full of jazz records disagrees, and so we see how gaps in experience lead to the degeneration of old technologies. Anyway.

If only interactive techno-savvy books could look like art somehow, be type-set in stone and arranged in a delicate pattern of buttons, if only it could remind me, just a little bit, of paper or something, then I could accept the idea as not a deconstruction/reducer of the value of text. But until that becomes a reality, the Kindle will still be a scary thing to me not only because of its alien qualities, but for its lack of observable depth.

Fence Magazine’s In Rainbows

Thought some people in class would be interested in taking a look at this offer by Fence Magazine:

“Some of you may have received an email last Thursday introducing this our latest brainstorm: we have embarked on a month-long mission toward intricacy. You see, we realize that each reader has a different capacity for monetary devotion to Fence, and we want to make our pages available to anyone who sets their devotion at one dollar or more. Just like Radiohead.

So, if you follow this link www.fenceportal.org/support and click on the word “donate”, you can become a subscriber to Fence for one year, for whatever your increment may be. Payments are processed by PayPal (it’s free and easy to set up an account if you don’t already have one: www.paypal.com). Any gracious and lucky soul who chooses to pay $300 or more will become a lifetime subscriber, and will receive a receipt for your tax-deductible donation.

Fine print: This offer only good until the end of April, 2008. The new issue of Fence will hit your mailbox in early May, so jump on it!”

Where Have All the Short Works of Literature Gone?

The last time I walked into a chain bookstore, I searched the shelves for short story collections, novellas, poetry, one-act plays. And I naturally found almost nothing. Going to a chain bookstore is an exercise in frustration for the reader looking for shorter works of literature. Anthologies of American short stories—with the same pieces by Poe, Hawthorne, Hemingway, and Faulkner—abound. Other common items are anthologies of “the greatest poems of the English language” (none of which seem to agree—one anthology will have T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” another will offer “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” a third will present “The Hollow Men”). And one-act plays—unless the reader happens to have an unending love affair for Neil Simon—are harder yet to find. Novellas are at the bottom of the totem pole. Too long to be a short story, not quite long enough to be a novel. It seems that the only way to publish a novella is to have a name (like Ian McEwan or Philip Roth) and to have your publisher dress up the novella like a novel; McEwan’s On Chesil Beach and Roth’s Everyman—despite what their covers say—are really novellas in disguise. Both weigh in at about 200 pages, but the large font size and the wide margins indicate that somebody in the design department wanted these things to look like novels.

Even anthologies such as The Best American series provide, at best, a glimpse of short literature. Everything else—the collections by one author, for instance—are picked up by university presses. Granted, I’m happy that university presses are picking up the slack, but Barnes & Noble and Waldenbooks are not in the practice of keeping their shelves stocked with the latest publications from the University of Michigan Press or the Susquehanna University press or anywhere else, for that matter. I am convinced that there are lots of great stories, great poems, great plays, and great novellas/short novels out there. But nobody can get them because the chain bookstores are selling the “big” things and—as a post from last week argues—mixes in literature with everything else, anyway.

And even getting a short work out in the first place is difficult. In the novella course this semester, I noticed immediately that all of the novellas we read in class were part of some other collection. Then Steve Yarbrough, one of the visiting novelists, pointed out that in European countries, a person can go into a bookstore and find novellas, printed by themselves. (Granted, this is obviously hearsay because I’m taking his word for it, but I don’t doubt that America and Europe have different literary cultures. That he is married to the Polish literary translator Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough and spends several months of each year in Krakow only makes his claim more reputable.) I don’t think this problem ends just with literature, either. People will purchase seasons of television shows and movies, but when did you last hear common people—not just film nuts—talk about short films?

And the same is true of short stories and essays and poems. Who talks about them, aside from story writers and essayists and poets? Stephen King, in his introduction to The Best American Short Stories 2007 concludes that the American short story was alive, but not well. I can hardly wonder why.

Last weekend I went to D.J. Ernst Used Bookstore in Selinsgrove, where I purchased a copy of Iris Murdoch’s “Something Special.” Yes, this is not a typo—“Something Special” is a single short story. Fifty-one wonderful pages, written in Murdoch’s smart, thoughtful, and crisp prose, this single story was published by W.W. Norton in November 2000, almost a year-and-a-half after Murdoch’s death. It was a rare pleasure to find a single story, published in hardcover by a major house. I read it the other night, and reading this book reminded me of the joy in sitting down to read something short, brilliant, and slight. And because of this, I have to wonder how Americans can meet fantastic literature. Our bookstores are not selling gems like Murdoch’s “Something Special.” And that’s something that I find terribly unsettling.

Is the corporate bookstore ruining American literature?

This past weekend I found myself in suburbia, bored, and somehow lured into the flashing lights of the all too familiar corporate bookstore. I like to read, I like books, I like other people who like books, so why not?

 

I browsed the new releases and best sellers strategically placed two feet from the entrance of the store, a little distracted by the “adopt a greyhound” group and their dogs that also decided to occupy this space. Romance, self help books (Oprah’s book club’s finest), how you, as a catholic, can transform the world…is this really what people are reading? Apparently yes, given the crowd of “intellectuals” that actually “accidentally” pushed me out of the way when I browsed one section for too long. I finally found something that might be worth reading, but promptly put the book back on the shelf when I realized it was nearly $25. I haven’t bought a new hardcover in years and don’t plan on it anytime soon. I’ll wait until it’s used for $2 on half.com.

 

I made my way away from the romance and back to the “Food & Cooking” section, hoping to catch a glimpse of salmon cornets or caviar and oysters via The French Laundry Cookbook. Problem: I couldn’t find it. I searched the handy electronic database and realized that it was in the “Popular Chefs” section. There he was. Thomas Keller and the CIA cookbooks, right next to Sandra Lee’s semi-homemade garbage and Martha Stewart’s picture perfect dinner party.

 

Is this what America thinks of books? Can books be lumped together in one “hardcover” category, and can Americans be trusted to sort out the weeds? Does it not matter what someone is reading, just the fact that they’re reading it? Looking at my bookstore experience, readers seem to think so. In a recent conversation with friends, they compared how many Jodi Picoult books they had read, and I was looked down upon for having the lowest number (zero). It seems apparent that the majority of Americans see no problem browsing the bestseller shelves and paying $25 for the new Nicholas Sparks novel that, when asked, magically makes them more literate.

 

How does anyone expect the general population to be exposed to real literature if this is what they’re getting?

This Space for Rent

Even though the eager tween/teen audience of Cathy’s Book were just seeking what is, I’m sure, a moving and well-written piece of literature, they got a little extra bang for their buck. The authors, Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman, included product placement for CoverGirl cosmetics, so girls can read about the protagonist with her “killer coat of Lipslicks in ‘Daring’” and “eyecolor in ‘Midnight Metal.’” Subtle.

Not that anyone, least of all young teenage girls, is completely sheltered from advertising. Billboards and posters, old school style. Some magazines seem to be a single ad which spans a hundred pages, with a few articles to take up excess space. And some television shows wouldn’t be complete without a couple lingering looks at some well-placed logos. But books? The joke is on you, CoverGirl; nobody reads anymore.

The deal made with Procter & Gamble (CoverGirl’s parent company) was that in exchange for a few mentions of the CG line in Cathy’s Book, they would place advertisements for the book on beinggirl.com, a website with the same young teen girl audience as Stewart and Weisman were hoping to attract. Not a bad business proposal, no? Hard to say how greatly sales were affected by this unorthodoxy, but it ended up at #7 on the New York Times Best Seller list for children’s books in November 2006. Hopefully CoverGirl fared just as well in this deal.

But Cathy’s Book isn’t the first or only to offer space for ads. Other examples:

- The Bulgari Connection – commissioned by Italian jeweler Bulgari (surprise)

- The Sweetest Taboo – a few paid mentions of the Ford Fiesta

- Men in Aprons – for UK household appliance seller Electrolux (You can even buy the book from their website, if you’re so inclined, for only £6.99)

So while the phenomenon isn’t completely isolated, it’s not exactly common. And, as one might guess, not exactly warmly embraced by all either. No less a personality than Ralph Nader (okay, technically it’s Commercial Alert, his advocacy group) urged a boycott. We don’t want to be raising a new generation of consumers for advertisers to prey upon.

Is this a viable method for advertisement? We’ll have to consider the issue in two ways: 1) Does the product in question profit? and 2) Does this, or does it not, suck every ounce of credibility from a book which includes it? I don’t think that anyone, when given the choice between product placement in their novels or not, would opt for the books awash in ads. But if we do find ourselves in that situation, how acceptable would it be? Can you still read and enjoy a sell-out?

Books seem more sacred to me than television shows do, and TV has certainly been saturated. I know that’s irrational, and advertisers will attempt to defile one form of media just as well as another. But I would feel kind of… impure for reading such a transparent marketing ploy. (I put a lot of effort into feeling superior over the TV-watching masses.) I don’t even care about the children like Ralph Nader does, I’m just offended that my books may be invaded.

So, is this a fluke, or is this our future? The publishing industry hasn’t gone bankrupt yet, so I know which option I’m wishing for. Let’s all hope that these books aren’t a harbinger of a grim – but very fashionable! – fate for literature.