Fungible Convictions

Tonight Brookline Booksmith held a talk/reading in honor of small Boston publishers. But not really. Speakers included representatives of Ploughshares, Post Road, Redivider, Salamander, and Quick Fiction, but no one from a press, per se.

As such, the audience was drawn from the unpublished masses—I know that sounds perjorative, but everyone there really did seem to want to know the answers to the most basic lit mag questions: what info should my cover letter include, what about simultaneous submissions, etc.

It also served as an impromptu visual reunion for my Emerson College classmates—none of us had the chance to talk, as Brookline Booksmith is an incredibly cramped, face-forward-or-die kind of venue, nothing like the friendly environment of the Enormous Room during the most recent Four Stories reading.

To have a “small press night” and not have any actual presses says a lot about the Boston literary scene. The scene is very writer-centric, first of all. The ratio of magazines submitted to to magazines subscribed to is probably 10-to-1. And second of all, writers here don’t think in terms of books. Boston writers want to publish poems, stories, and collections. Are we lazy? Are our sights set too low? Whatever it is, it means writers here a) ignore small book publishers, even though it’s easier to turn a small profit in your spare time with a small book press than a small literary magazine and b) forget their role as reader and financial supporter of other writers.

Tomorrow night I’m heading to the Somerville BBQ joint Red Bones (which will be hell during the fast) with Bill to celebrate the paperback release of The Legends of Winter Hill. I don’t know if I’ll know anyone but Bill there, but I’m sure I’ll enjoy the more down-to-earth audience. If you’re a local reader of Fungible Convictions, be sure to make your way to Red Bones at 7:00pm.

From Marilynne Robinson and her apologia for fiction “You Need Not Doubt What I Say Because It Is Not True”:

I know of no way to parse that phrase, once upon a time, in terms of English usage—it seems sui generis. In the same way the Latin writers used the word olim, to mean, paradoxically, you need not doubt what I say because it is not true. It may be that, in acknowledging fiction as fiction, the readers or hearers divest themselves of a kind of self-interest. We are normally protective of our sense of reality—we want to see ourselves, and to be seen, as competent judges of the truth of things. This is how we retain a faith in our own sanity, among other things. Fiction relieves us of this defensiveness—in fiction we expect surprise, irony, reversal. In effect, we expect to be fooled.

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In the United States, we are a solitary bunch, and we have very few of what can be called purely social values—that, for example, families should live in the same town, that an unmarried daughter should take care of her mother in her mother’s old age, that a church’s mission is to minister to the weakest everywhere, not just those in attendance on Sunday. We Americans lock our doors, and we watch or read the news whose slant we’re prepared to agree with. We’re individualistic, awfully so.

But fiction rallies against individualism. It forces the reader to believe in a world he is not—can never—be fully a part of, because it belongs to the writer, lives in her mind. To read fiction, you must be humble, you must be social. You not only suspend your disbelief; you suspend beliefs. To that effect, fiction, to the militantly individualistic, is a powerful, terrifying weapon.

From the Wall Street Journal:

Jeff Kleinman, an agent with Folio Literary Management, said publishers could add a clause to the author’s warranty section in their contracts, stating that to the best of the writer’s knowledge the facts in the book are true. “The point being, if the author’s found to egregiously misrepresent the facts, the author could be sued for breach of contract,” said Mr. Kleinman via email. “Wouldn’t that be a lot simpler than asking an agent, or even a publisher, to verify and fact-check every book?”

Of course the cheapest thing to do is blur the line between fiction and non-fiction altogether. And why not? Fiction readers want to know what authors use from their own lives in their books, and non-fiction readers want to know what events were embellished. Poor James Frey—by all accounts A Million Little Pieces still would have been a heck of a book if he didn’t lie.

Here’s some perspective: Robert Byron wrote a fabulous, yarn-filled travelogue called The Road to Oxiana. So much B.S. in a book once passed off as fact. So much good writing.

The New York Review of Books (excellent site organization in support of its print version, though it contains some design errors such as forgetting to reset line-height after using a large initial cap) ran a piece about Jimmy Carter’s book Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis that highlights my very favorite rhetorical trope: convertible arguments!

Antistrophon, argumentum ex concessis, peristrophe—call it what you like but capitalizing on convertible arguments, aka rhetorical jujitsu, is one of the most effective ways to disarm your interlocutor! For example, Jimmy Carter and his reviewer in the NYRB neuter the Republican shibboleth “culture of life” by pointing out all the “culture of life” positions that result in death. From the article’s quotation of Carter’s book:

Canadian and European young people are about equally active sexually, but, deprived of proper sex education, American girls are five times as likely to have a baby as French girls, seven times as likely to have an abortion, and seventy times as likely to have gonorrhea as girls in the Netherlands. Also, the incidence of HIV/ AIDS among American teenagers is five times that of the same age group in Germany…. It has long been known that there are fewer abortions in nations where prospective mothers have access to contraceptives, the assurance that they and their babies will have good health care, and at least enough income to meet their basic needs. . . .

In some predominantly Roman Catholic countries where all abortions are illegal and few social services are available, such as Peru, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia, the abortion rate is fifty per thousand. According to the World Health Organization, this is the highest ratio of unsafe abortions [in the world].

Moreover!:

The homicide rate is at least five times greater in the United States than in any European country, none of which authorizes the death penalty. The Southern states carry out over 80 percent of the executions but have a higher murder rate than any other region. Texas has by far the most executions, but its homicide rate is twice that of Wisconsin, the first state to abolish the death penalty. It is not a matter of geography or ethnicity, as is indicated by similar and adjacent states: the number of capital crimes is higher, respectively, in South Dakota, Connecticut, and Virginia (all with the death sentence) than in the adjacent states of North Dakota, Massachusetts, and West Virginia (without the death penalty).

Why bring this up? Because when you’re writing on the Internet, authors tend to be a bit more, hm, assertive than they are face-to-face, rather like politicians’ rhetoric. Bold claims are made. Then they’re amplified. And then they’re easily eviscerated, at least given a proper chance (which isn’t guaranteed). The expiring honeymoon for Web 2.0 concepts serves as a good example: those touting the new web’s revolutionary functionality have been put in their place by others showing, usually with commendable patience, that it’s not all that functional yet. AJAX, social tagging, and the rest will have its time—just don’t misrepresent what it can do at present.

In other words, the surer you are about your own beliefs, the surer you’re about to be on your ass. I guess that’s what Fungible Convictions are all about.

Review by Pollyanna Rhee

Editor’s note: Now that the redesign of the Freedom Tower is moving downtown New York towards the “practical” skyscraper-as-bunker aesthetic, we’re glad Ms. Rhee sent along this review of a new book on another controversial, practical New York tower.

With the ebullient prosperity after World War II, the private car, buoyed by federal highway funds, and air travel began to displace railroads. In order to offset losses railway companies began to take advantage of their valuable real estate holdings. As owner of a dozen blocks in Midtown Manhattan the New York Central Railroad with real estate developer Erwin S. Wolfson began development schemes on Park Avenue. In May 1958 a plan for the largest commercial office building in Manhattan was revealed. Eventually the structure would break other records—the largest mortgage, the most steel ordered for a single construction job, the largest lease in history, and, just a few months back, the largest known selling price for a single commercial building. The prize for signing the aforementioned largest lease was name and signage rights for Pan Am. Continue reading

Friends and I, since the mid-90′s, have had this running debate:

True or false: Bad fans make for bad bands.

I had always gone with True, beginning with the Dave Matthews Band, of which I used to be a fan, of which I am not proud.

It’s pretty straightforward. I thought Dave Matthews and Carter Beauford and the rest were good musicians. When they weren’t jam-banding, they recorded good, tight pop songs, and not of the type I otherwise heard. With no older brother to recommend better, more sinister fare and with hip English teachers still battle-ranking the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, Dave Matthews was a pretty inventive guy for me. I . . . liked him.

But then I went to a Dave Matthews Band concert in ’97, and I saw the type of person my fanhood made me. Apparently I wore Abercrombie. And white ballcaps in support of the University of South Carolina (“Go Cocks!”). And I got up on my womenfolk, who didn’t care they were being got up upon. And if I checked lefthand fingertips, I would have found light calluses of those just learning to play guitar—a little “Ants Marching” from the newbies, a little “Satellite” from the more-accomplished, a little “Back to Being Friends” from the especially lascivious. And I pre-partied in the parking lot with my guitar, my dudes, and an illicit case of Beast. Continue reading

A review by Jason F.C. Clarke

What is it with maverick directors and superhero movies? Tim Burton started it. He’d had back-to-back sleeper hits (Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure and Beetlejuice) when he signed on to direct the original Batman. Bryan Singer made the fun and inventive film The Usual Suspects, then went on to direct X-Men, X2 and now Superman Returns. Sam Raimi worked his way up from genre flicks to his dark masterpiece, A Simple Plan—then took the reigns of the Spider-Man franchise. Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) is working on an adaptation of the Japanese graphic novel Lone Wolf and Cub (and for a long time was attached to an adaptation of Alan Moore’s Watchmen). Continue reading

by Andrew Whitacre

Imagine, say, the R&D folks at an automaker tell their boss, “Market research shows our potential customers hate orange. We are therefore launching a new line of orange cars, and only orange cars, until our customers come around.” Insanity, yes? But this is an insanity shared by literary magazines: each lit mag is published precisely because no one wants to read it.

Sure, there’s also the ego of the founding editor, a moral sincerity, communal desperation, or sustained glee. But a motive all lit mags have in common is a belief that certain stories—and not others—should be pushed in front of the eyes of otherwise indifferent readers. It’s an industry dedicated to breaking entrepreneurship’s first rule: you can’t create your market. The market’s there, lit mag folks insist, people just don’t know it yet!

Year after year, though, magazines fail because they couldn’t convince people to care. Continue reading

Most often it’s the little things. Or the quiet things. Or the things that go by at first without notice. Continue reading

Should Steve Almond bother you? Should you find it condescending that he’s got a reading comprehension test on his website? Should you get the icks from Almond’s writing about teaching the sexy, sexed-up female students in a writing workshop very much resembling his own at Boston College? Should you down some ipecac because his most assured writing in The Evil B.B. Chow and Other Stories is in a story called “The Idea of Michael Jackson’s Dick”?

Ugh, yes. Steve, you have freaked us out.

But what’s especially bothersome is the writing in B.B. Chow is technically good. It’s measured. It’s pointed. It’s—well, it’s like this passage from a story about a woman with a crush on a computer repairman, “Wired for Life”:

At the word warranty, Charlie shied away. His eyes welled into little pools of sullenness.

October, he said.

Janie nudged her boobs against the glass counter. The receipt says 90 days.

Charlie smiled miserably. He did not look at Janie, nor especially at her boobs, but carried the adapter with its cord dragging behind and set it down on his worktable and disappeared into the back of the shop. He returned with his spool of solder and hunkered down before his sadder [sic] gun while Janie pretended not to notice. There was a delicious, excruciating aspect to the tableau.

Continue reading