I finished In Parenthesis today. On the bus to Harvard to meet for lunch. See Mass Ave behind the page?
It’s a book that deserves to be pointed out, read with your lips moving, photographed even, but withers when talked through. Share it only as a secret.
This is my answer to a good question posed on a friend’s Facebook wall (and of course too long to post there.)
The key problem-in-search-of-a-revolution for self-publishing isn’t so much that self-publishing has a stigma itself…but rather that a self-published book hasn’t been vetted in a way readers yet trust.
I know that’s stating the obvious. But people rely on vetting for literary books way more than they do for movies or photos or restaurants. Literary books are much more of an investment in time (days or weeks of reading), money (usually over $20), and emotion (they can change your life in unpredictable ways). Yet still like movies and photos and restaurants, there are lots of books…Of the 22 million books registered with the Library of Congress, you have to choose which one to read now. So divide that limited time by your seemingly unlimited supply: If you start reading at age 3 and manage to read a book a week ’till your death at 100, you have to choose not to read 99.975% of all books.
Or put in psychosocial terms, traditionally embedded in your decision to buy a book is the opinion of the writer, agent, publisher, and bookstore/website who all thought the book was worth the cost of making it available to you, as well as the opinion of the reviewer and friend who recommended that you search that one book out. You have to choose one book out of 22 million available. You can’t possibly. So you need a shortcut: a vetting system.
Successful self-publishing means building a vetting system half as trusted as agent + publisher + reviewer, etc.
Inversely, men always like enterprises where the snags are either hidden or willfully ignored. See: Invasion of Iraq, 2007 mortgage meltdown, 2010 Gulf oil disaster.
But I didn’t grow up reading texts. I grew up reading books.
via Editorial Notebook – Further Thoughts of a Novice E-Reader – NYTimes.com.
I read with my wife’s Amazon Kindle for the first time tonight, and I have to be honest, I didn’t like it very much. These are the things I don’t understand about it:
These are aesthetic concerns, yes, but they have a lot to do with how I read, process, and remember stories and information. I have no confidence in my ability to remember something I’ve read on a Kindle, because there are no design cues to help me collate what I read. Turning letters into narrative or knowledge needs a storyteller or a teacher, functions good design have traditionally served…that is, functions books have traditionally served.
Christine Lee Zilka, who gives the Internet a good name after helping my wife and me through a tough time without ever having met us, invited a bunch of writers to a literary blog relay. I couldn’t say no. The rules: one writer publishes a 250-word post on his or her web page and tags the next writer in the line-up. Each piece begins using the last line from the previous post linked to a central theme: “A Stranger Comes to Town.”
Post 1: Man and ghost stared at each other. (Wah-Ming Chang)
Post 2: The river, he noted, had darkened. (Jamey Hatley)
Post 3: I didn’t think you’d come. (Stephanie Denise Brown)
Post 4: Jim is here. I feel it. (Mine, below)
“Jim is here. I feel it would be good to go over the one ground rule before we bring him in,” one owner said to two fellow-owners. They stared through the skybox window at the morning shadows, down at two black crewman in khakis who raked the dirt behind second base. “The rule: No one agrees to anything he says. Serious. If he so much as says great day for a ballgame, you stare at him like he’s full of crap.”
The owner stepped back out. Ice cubes clinked in a pitcher. Outside, behind home plate, sprinklers marked the seconds with a thik-thik-thik.
The door opened.
“Ellison Jim, SuperFan Contest Winner,” the owner said through a half smile, “welcome to New York. These are my colleagues.”
They all shook hands, and the four sat down at an diamond-shaped table. Wearing torn jeans and—challenging his hosts’ very hospitality—a Red Sox windbreaker, Jim unfolded a doodle. He said it simply:
“My son and I had this idea, right? Instead of having $500 luxury seats behind home plate stay empty all game, what if you guys let fans show up half an hour before the first pitch and bid what they want to pay?”
The others stayed duly quiet. One finally sucked in through his teeth and said, “You want us to bid down our best seats so that a wholly-drunk, half-employed HVAC repairman can get his logo-painted gut on ESPN?”
Ellison Jim didn’t as much as blink.
“It’s this or nothing, am I right?” he said. “And while raking in another mil’, you’d get to be working class heroes to me and my kid.”
The entire relay team in order of appearance:
1. Wah-Ming Chang http://wmcisnowhere.wordpress.com/
2. Jamey Hatley http://jameyhatley.wordpress.com/
3. Stephanie Brown http://scififanatic.livejournal.com/
4. Andrew Whitacre http://fungibleconvictions.com/
5. Heather McDonald http://heathersalphabet.wordpress.com/
6. Christine Lee Zilka http://czilka.wordpress.com/
7. Jackson Bliss http://bluemosaicme.blogspot.com/
8. Jennifer Derilo (to be posted on http://czilka.wordpress.com/)
9. Alexander Chee http://koreanish.com/
10. Nova Ren Suma http://novaren.wordpress.com/
Before the wife and friends and I go out to enjoy the birthday ridiculousness of Hot Tub Time Machine, I wanted to post one of the all-time great grounding poems. I’ve read this to myself the last few birthdays in fact. Certainly it’s difficult not to find the poem terribly sad; but it’s not sad. It’s a way of looking ahead honestly, to the ledger that some angel will have in front of him, with more in the “+” column than in the “-”.
“A Brief for the Defense”
Jack Gilbert
Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.
From Refusing Heaven (2005)
Over at the Identity Theory Editor’s Blog, I just posted a long piece lamenting the short-sightedness, incompetence, or both of small literary print journals that insist on posting little or no content online.
The necessities of print submission and distribution created, over decades, an entrenched sense of hierarchy, that good stories logically move from writer up to editor and back down to reader. But readers, with new online practices introduced by other media and applied to everyday life, expect a conversation with the people whose work they read. They expect a feedback loop. They expect access to literature.
These publications, then, are in trouble, because they don’t communicate with their readers when they easily could. They don’t seem to care that a generation is coming of age that loves books, loves talking about books, but which does it all with electronic mediation: ordering books on Amazon, posting a review on their blog, recommending a poem on Facebook, forwarding a bookstore’s email saying a favorite writer is coming to town, finding like-minded readers on Meetup.com to get drinks with.
This should be a golden age of literary journals. And it is, for some larger forward-looking publications. McSweeney’s, the New Yorker, Tin House, and others have found compatibility between financial sustainability and what my old boss Henry Jenkins calls “spreadability”, removing barriers to sharing content so that fans can build communities around that content.
Successful literary publications know that obscurity is the shortest path to failure.
“The end of the small print journal. Please.” — Identity Theory Editors Blog
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