Fungible Convictions

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

My latest post is up at the Identity Theory editors blog, about the mental gamble it is to re-read a favorite book:

But re-reading other texts, even ones that provided the same feeling of accomplishment, can be a totally different, even crushing, experience.

I once tried to re-read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, the book that first got me to love literature. And I couldn’t get through the first chapter. I could hardly believe it. I thought the writing was awful, the characters flat, the premise almost silly.

And it hurt.

“The Risks of Re-Reading”–Identity Theory Editors’ Blog

A week from tonight, Lindsay and I will be drunk. And also married. The last month—which included the start of my MIT job—has therefore left hardly a breath to be had. So I think it prudent to run through some highlights:

• We booked our hotel and a bunch of activities for the honeymoon in Juneau. Had John McCain chosen Sarah Palin before we chose Alaska, honestly we might not have gone. Which would have been a shame. But such is the election season: I could easily imagine this conversation having taken place if the timing was different . . . “What about Alaska for the honeymoon? Actually, nevermind. Not with all the hubbub about Palin.” That said, as relaxing as the honeymoon will be, I’ll still be the one asking people at the next table what they think about their governor.
• MIT gave me a digital SLR, a Canon. Because I didn’t yet have a safe place to keep it in my office, I kept it at home for a while and got a chance to play with it. The quality of its photos are pretty stunning:

  

• Lindsay and I have had to make about half a dozen trips to Paper Source, as we’re designing and printing our own wedding menus, donation announcements (we’re giving money to the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society rather than distribute favors to the guests), and the program:
Wedding Program – Upload a Document to Scribd

But one of these trips to Paper Source led to the awesome impulse buy of adhesive, re-placeable 8.5″x11″ pieces of chalkboard. We stuck one on our freezer door:



• I’m falling behind (again) on Identity Theory work. Typically I sit down for a couple hours on a weekend and read through all the fiction submissions and then distribute the better ones to assistant editors for their thoughts. But wedding planning has pretty much spoken for every recent weekend. That and home improvement—receiving wedding gifts has necessarily forced us to throw some old things out, pass along nice things to Lindsay’s sister, or generally reorganize
• MIT work has given me a really good opportunity (among other good opportunities there) to make good use of a ton of tools. Since I shuttle between different offices throughout the day, I use Brightkite so people know where they can find me. My colleagues and the grad students love to network, so that ramps up my use of LinkedIn. Evernote is becoming key to keeping track of links and documents, and now that it syncs with del.icio.us, I’m bailing on del.icio.us. And people have pointed me to some ridiculous design resources: CSS Beauty, Best Web Gallery, Most Inspired, Creattica Daily, PSVibes, Fuel Your Creativity, Tutorial9, Web Designer Wall, PSDTUTS, Online-Photoshop Tutorials, I Love Typography, Fontfeed, and Digital Photography School.
• Lindsay had her bachelorette party last weekend. The various husbands and boyfriends got together to play Rock Band all night while the wives and girlfriends took Lindsay out. It was far and away the worst hangover I’ve ever seen in someone. I shouldn’t have laughed so much.
• The Red Sox are in the playoffs again. And I’m sad to say I barely noticed. That fact is probably the best illustration of how I’ve lost track of time during the wedding planning and job change: I’ve always measured out the year with the rhythms of the baseball season—April through October is the meaty part of life, while November through March is just Christmas and cold—but this year it’s been about countdowns. The countdown to August 25th (my first day at MIT), the countdown to October 4th (the wedding), and of course the countdown to November 4th (the election).
• Speaking of the latter, another reason I’ve missed the baseball season is Countdown. At either 8pm or 10pm each night, we take a break and watch MSNBC, and now that Rachel Maddow has her show at 9pm, that’s two hours Lindsay and I are spending on politics. We may very well stop watching after the election—we’re very aware that Countdown, for us at least, is there for cathartic reasons, to watch Keith Olbermann call people out on lies because we’re so tired of being lied to by people in government. Being lied to isn’t new, and Olbermann very much plays favorites and distorts the truth himself, but the stakes are so much bigger this time of year and the lies come so much more naturally, disturbingly so, and are in some cases so petty, that at the end of the day just before bed we need to watch someone fluent in the language of indignation.

My guess is I won’t post again until after the honeymoon. So if anybody has questions you want me to take to Alaska, let me know. And when I post again, my left hand will be a few ounces heavier.

New fiction on Identity Theory: “Without Biting the Fruit of Knowledge” by Jennifer Trudeau.

I’ve been really proud of the stories that have gone up on IdT in my time there, and there’s another excellent one we just accepted. It’s a fun job. Odd thing though: while the number of top-notch (clearly publishable at just a glance) submissions has remained steady, the number of really good submissions has increased and the number of really awful submissions has decreased. It’s making my and Ali’s and Drew’s jobs a lot harder. It used to be that fully a quarter of all submissions could be dismissed out of hand—they’d be 20,000 words long, have major spelling errors in the first line, be about cancer. That number has dropped to about fifteen percent. The ones we turn down instead are like the majority of our submissions—they’re really pretty good: great settings but flat characters; unique plots but based too much on coincidence; too workshopped.

UPDATE: Some kudos for “Without Biting the Fruit of Knowledge” from Dan Wickett at Emerging Writers Network.

Last Sunday I took over as fiction editor for one of the best sites for new literary writing, identitytheory.com. It’s a wonderful site, full of good political writing, book reviews, and its biggest draw, an enormous collection of interviews with the likes of Roger Angell, Barbara Erhenreich, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jake Halpern, Christopher Hitchens—and Susan Orlean, Sarah Vowell, and Howard Zinn twice each. Continue reading