The Struggle for Independents (from Salon.com)

The struggle for independents

The bankruptcy of a book distributor sent shock waves through the indie publishing world, leaving small presses like McSweeney's struggling to survive. Can the Internet help keep them afloat?

By Priya Jain

Jun. 21, 2007 | McSweeney's is holding a garage sale of sorts. An e-mail sent out last week announced that, "for the next week or so," the publishing house founded by Dave Eggers would be selling its new books at 30 percent off and its backlist at 50 percent off. It is also, by way of eBay, auctioning off donations from its more well-known contributors: One could bid on an original Chris Ware comics page, a personal tour of "The Daily Show" guided by John Hodgman, or a "one-sentence apology to your boyfriend/girlfriend, written and signed by Miranda July."

But the excitement stirred by the McSweeney's e-mail had less to do with the booty on offer than with the alarming news that McSweeney's needed to raise money at all. For fans, and for those who follow book-trade news, the e-mail raised the possibility that the much-beloved publisher could become another casualty of a bankruptcy saga that has engulfed the independent-publishing world for six months.

The bankrupt company in question, Advanced Marketing Services, was the parent company of Publishers Group West, which distributed books for more than 130 independent book publishers. "For us the timing was particularly bad," says Eli Horowitz, the publisher of McSweeney's Books, which has lost about $130,000 in actual earnings as a result of the bankruptcy. "We had a new Nick Hornby book and [Dave Eggers'] 'What Is the What', which was our best seller of all time."

McSweeney's is far from the only publisher that's taken a hit: As a result of the bankruptcy, either directly or indirectly, small publishers Soft Skull, Hugh Lauter Levin and Inner Ocean have been acquired by larger publishers, and Carroll & Graf and Thunder's Mouth, two Avalon Publishing Group imprints, have folded. Tiny punk-rock publisher Re/Search puts out two titles a year, but this year it'll be lucky to release one; publisher V. Vale was planning to update and reissue a book on William S. Burroughs for its spring title, "but we didn't have the money even for the down payment on the printing cost," he says.

Not every publisher is hurting so deeply, but the bankruptcy has left the small-press world at least temporarily wounded, and has probably changed it for good. "This was the biggest bankruptcy that's ever happened in publishing history," says Munro Magruder, the associate publisher of the new-agey New World Library, which publishes Deepak Chopra's books. "And its implications are going to be felt for some time."

Horowitz says that part of the problem is the tenuous nature of the business. "For all of these publishers, it's a break-even business at best; you just try to stay afloat to do what you love to do. If we found ourselves making money we'd probably take on more ridiculous projects we'd want to do. It's not really a business that's equipped to absorb a big chunky loss."

The fact that AMS/PGW's financial troubles could affect publishers so dramatically also serves as a reminder that, despite indie publishing's do-it-yourself ethos, the one area in which it hasn't been able to escape the middleman is in distribution. You can't sell a book if no one knows where to find it, and in helping them overcome that problem, PGW had become indie publishers' most indispensable partner.

"The beauty of PGW was that it allowed the publishing and editorial people to focus on publishing and editorial and not worry about being a marketing and sales organization," says Charlie Winton, who started PGW 30 years ago and sold it to AMS in 2002. PGW also allowed bookstores to find independent book publishers easily and helped small presses put together large shipments they wouldn't have been able to handle on their own. And it helped turn books like the Earthworks Groups' "50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth" and Charles Frazier's "Cold Mountain" into bestsellers.

Ironically, PGW -- the largest American distributor of independent publishers -- was by all accounts having its best year ever, and the financial troubles of AMS, a corporate giant that mainly distributed to wholesalers like Costco and Sam's Club, brought it down. AMS filed for Chapter 11 on Dec. 29, a result of being unable to bounce back from SEC and FBI investigations into its advertising accounting practices -- which led to three executive indictments -- and a class-action suit on behalf of its shareholders. As Horowitz points out, "It wasn't the indie distributor; it was a big, old-fashioned corporation with accounting problems."

Or, as Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash puts it more bluntly, "The independents got fucked by the Enron of publishing." When AMS filed for bankruptcy, PGW's assets were frozen, which included book sales for the last quarter of 2006 that belonged to its clients. Instead of receiving that money on Jan. 1 as expected, publishers were left uncertain as to when -- or if -- they would get paid, an especially panicky situation considering that the sales in question covered the holiday season, the most profitable time of year for any publisher.

Then, at the end of February, the Perseus Book Group successfully took over the majority of PGW's accounts, rescuing PGW's employees and paying the publishers 70 percent of what they were owed. Although many publishers were quite happy that Perseus -- a group that, like PGW, is focused on independent publishing -- had taken over their accounts, they found themselves losing 30 percent of their sales for the fall of 2006.

Even for those publishers who could take the fourth-quarter hit, the new deal with Perseus meant shifting over to a different payment schedule, which will leave many publishers virtually penniless until August. "Over the very, very long run, it's no big deal," says Nash, "but in the short run it is, and the short run is how smaller independent publishers live."

Nash, who has been running Soft Skull since 1993, was one of the publishers who couldn't bank on the long run. "I remember seeing the new contract and thinking, This is going to be a pain, but not realizing the impact until putting numbers into a spreadsheet and [seeing that] I was going to be a quarter of a million in the hole by September and October," he says. "Around then I started talking to Charlie Winton." In May, Winton bought Soft Skull for his new publishing house, Winton, Shoemaker and Co., LLC. "For Soft Skull itself," says Nash, "we ended up in an incredibly lucky version of an incredibly unlucky situation in that no one knows how to operate an independent business profitably better than Charlie Winton."

Winton sold PGW to AMS in 2002 so that he could focus on his growing publishing house, Avalon Publishing Group. "People ask, 'Do you wish you had kept PGW?'," he says now. "At some point that question becomes personal, but the business had gotten so big that it was necessary for PGW to go to a new place." In a feat of serendipitous timing, Winton was in the process of selling Avalon to Perseus when AMS/PGW went bankrupt. "The PGW bankruptcy occurred just as we were going into final papers in the Avalon sale," he says, so "part of the opportunity was the fact that they were already in a deal mode with me." Winton, however, couldn't save Carroll & Graf and Thunder's Mouth, two Avalon imprints that Perseus axed after buying Avalon from Winton. "I've been on the record that I've been very disappointed with the outcome there," says Winton.

All of the publishers Salon spoke with were happy to be working with Perseus, which has kept the PGW sales and marketing team intact, thus making it easier for the publishers to transfer their businesses smoothly. The odd thing about this salve, however, is that it has forced independent publishing distribution to conglomerate like a big corporation. Perseus' distribution arm now owns both PGW and Consortium, another independent-press distributor, which means it distributes books for more than 300 publishers.

If the demise of one corporation, AMS, could hurt indie publishing so badly, what does it mean that the majority of the indie-publishing world now relies on Perseus? "Not necessarily by intention, but by outcome," says Nash, "in the Texas hold 'em of independent press distribution, American independent publishing had collectively placed its entire pot in Perseus. If Perseus goes under, who knows what will happen."

For those that survive, the AMS/PGW/Perseus story serves as a good reminder that independent publishers are best off when they're self-reliant. Felice Newman, the co-publisher of Cleis -- which specializes in sex and gender books from authors like Tristan Taormino and Violet Blue -- estimates that Cleis lost about $100,000 in the bankruptcy and takeover, and had to sell off discounted books on its Web site and "cut everything to the bone," she says. Thanks to the fact that Cleis also sells direct to sex-positive stores like Good Vibrations, and wholesale distributors, they were "able to go on without any distributor for a few months," says Newman. "Cleis has been able to bounce back completely -- which means if this hadn't happened, we would be flush now."

The best tool that indie publishers have is the Internet, of course. McSweeney's was inspired to hold its online sale by a similar, successful move that comics publisher Fantagraphics made a few years ago when its distributor filed for Chapter 11. Like McSweeney's, Cleis appealed directly to its readership and offered discounted books on its Web site. "We got this outpouring of love and support from our authors," says Newman. "We asked them to send people to buy direct from our Web site, and sales increased a lot." Munro Magruder says that New World Library, which acquired the smaller Inner Ocean as a result of the bankruptcy, was lucky in that "we're a larger publisher, we've been around for 30 years, we simply had the financial resources" to deal with the bankruptcy. But it too asked some of its authors to do an e-mail blast and urge readers to buy directly from the publisher.

In this, at least, independent publishing is retaining its intimate, DIY flavor. Horowitz, who says McSweeney's has received "thousands of orders in the last few days," quips, "I don't think Bertelsmann can send out an e-mail saying, 'Hey, guys, we need to sell off some books so we can put out some more.' In a way this feels like a whole town coming together, and to me, this is all of a piece with what we're about."

Nick Montfort's interactive vision

Nick Montfort has been doing important work in/on the narrative convergence between traditional and new media for the better part of a decade now. His interactive fiction Book and Volume is nothing short of stellar, both in its writing and gameplay.

Montfort defended his doctoral dissertation on narrative variance in interactive fiction at the UPenn this morning, in which he argues:

My vision is for a fourth era of IF, one in which interactive narrating joins interactive fiction. It wouldn’t preclude other independent IF production, but it would bring IF more fully into the literary life of our world and use computation in new ways to do some of the important work of literature and art. If IF does become a more prominent part of our cultural life, we could expect to see landmarks like these.



I just finished teaching a course on games and literature this past quarter, and we often wondered out loud about a similar convergence/timeline. I'm also curious what us Now-Whatters have to say about Montfort's prognostications.

What say ye?

New Starcherone Sampler

Starcherone Books has posted a pdf sampler of excerpts from its most recent books: see FINALLY, A NEW SAMPLER.

This 87 page wonder features excepts from recent Starcherone titles by Joshua Harmon, Sara Greenslit, Harold Jaffe, & Jeffrey DeShell, as well as from the expanded second edition of my own Endorsed by Jack Chapeau and Nina Shope's selection from the anthology, PP/FF, edited by Peter Conners.

If you like what you see there you can also purchase our books directly from the Starcherone website. As an entirely volunteer-run non-profit, we can sure use the sales revenue!

Now, back to your Baconator haikus!

Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor, Your...bacon(?)

I've been getting a disturbing amount of web traffic lately from people seeking information on a new hamburger called "The Baconator." So much so, in fact, that I'm holding a haiku contest. Deadline is July 1.

Have you eaten your Naked Lunch?

In my neverending spate of William S. Burroughs-related projects, I'm preparing an piece for a 50th-anniversary collection of essays on Naked Lunch to be released by Southern Illinois University Press. The anniversary, btw, will be in 2009.

I've taught the novel a number of times, and, always always forget that what I now gloss over in the text from my repeated readings...well...many readers still find shocking, patently offensive, disturbing, etc.

In fact, I've started to classify NL as one of those books, like Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, that many people own, but few actually read.

So, I wonder if any of you could share your thoughts on this--has NL been important to you? Have you read it? Do you own it?

My supposition is that the book's major legacy has been in non-print media: the adoption of Burroughsian editing/identity-mixing techniques in everything from YouTube to Second Life to MTV to the cult of popular celebrity. Conversely, I'm not sure that the text has been succesfuly co-opted, or "made safe" in the last five decades for the literary establishment. Thus, the literary legacy of the text may stand with the small presses such as Chiasmus or Spuyten Duyvil, willing to publish literature for concerns which exist to some extent outside the marketplace and the reversed economy of traditional academia (although, yes, I know, not completely).

Perspectives welcomed--and I'll integrate responses into the article. Reply here or directly to me at dschneiderman AT lakeforest DOT edu.

Best,

Davis

don delillo : falling man

In his famous (some might say infamous) appendix to his influential study, The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard contends that the postmodern work struggles continuously, if paradoxically, to find a way to present the unpresentable. Its goal, whether in the form of one of Ad Reinhardt's all-black canvases, Beckett's Unnameable, or David Lynch's Lost Highway, is to "enable us to see only by making it impossible to see"; to "please only by causing pain."

There are some situations, Lyotard maintains, that by their very nature cannot be thought about or articulated within the bounds of reason. There are some events—he cites Auschwitz—whose atrocious complexities refuse to be reduced to conventional understanding, conventional storylines and forms, to anything other than what they are: manifestations of unimaginable difficulty and radical existential unease. In the wake of such limit situations, you can only say, along with one of the characters in Don DeLillo's astonishing Falling Man: "Nothing seems exaggerated anymore. Nothing amazes me."

The task of presenting the unpresentable is central to the recent haunting and haunted genre of fiction called the 9/11 novel. Perhaps this accounts for the critical cliché that there are no good ones out there.

For my full review, please click here.

burning Kansas (City)

Peculiar news here from Kansas City, where an indie bookstore owner staged a public burning of books to protest "society's diminishing support for the printed word":

"This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today," Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne didn't have a permit for burning.

Wayne said next time he will get a permit. He said he envisions monthly bonfires until his supply — estimated at 20,000 books — is exhausted.

"After slogging through the tens of thousands of books we've slogged through, and to accumulate that many and to have people turn you away when you take them somewhere, it's just kind of a knee-jerk reaction," he said. "And it's a good excuse for fun."

Thoughts? (Debra, I'm especially looking in your direction...)

Mad Hatters NYC June 10 Blast!

EXTRA! EXTRA!
SAVE THE DATE: SUNDAY, JUNE 10TH! The Mad Hatters will present their first
FUNDRAISING EXTRAVAGANZA
at The Gallery Bar, 5 – 11 + PM
120 Orchard Street, The Lower East Side, NYC
http://madhattersreview.com
On June 10, 2007 the literary multimedia webzine Mad Hatter's Review (MHR) will host their first Live-action Multimedia Fundraising Extravaganza at Gallery Bar, an innovative new venue/art space in Manhattan's Lower East Side. The event will consist of live music, dancing, readings by MHR contributors and guests, screenings of video art and animations plus a possible special guest or two, infamous Mad Hatters' facoctails at an attractive discount, and edible morsels (while they last). There will also be a silent auction and an OPEN READING at the end of the featured performances.
Mad Hatters' Review is a unique online multimedia magazine featuring edgy, experimental, gutsy, thematically broad, psychologically and philosophically sophisticated writings, music, and art. The magazine specializes in collaborative ventures, bringing writers together with artists and composers to create a full sensory reading experience. Poetry, fiction, non-fiction, dramatic pieces and experimental whatnots are displayed adjacent to images of original artwork and accompanied by musical compositions or authors' recorded recitations.
The evenings' live musical offerings range from the experimental adventure of an improvised duet by Ben Tyree (acoustic guitar) and Will Martina (cello) and the 21st Century Composed (Jazzy) Improvisation group The Push-Pull Quartet (Ben Rush Miller & friends) to rocking, rolling, and swinging international music for DANCING by The Alphabet City AllStars.
There will be a showing of video art and animations by Jean Detheux, Jeff Lowe, Orin Buck, Debra Di Blasi, New Zealand film makers, and possibly others. Poetry and Prose Readers will include Eric Darton, Ranbir Sidhu, Rich Murphy, Tsipi Keller, Jason Price Everett, Urayoan Noel, and Andrew Taylor. The work of these authors can or will be found in the pages Mad Hatters'.
There will also be a Photo/Art Slideshow, featuring works by Joel Simpson, Jean Detheux, Peter Schwartz, Tantra Bensko, Dee Rimbaud, Roz Dimon, Brian Hutzell, et al. A Silent Auction will include donations of books by Michael Rothenberg, Vernon Frazer, Denis Emorione, Burt Kimmelman, George Held, Tsipi Keller, Vanessa Place, Stephanie Strickland, Debra Di Blasi, G. K. Wuori, & Jessica Treat, artworks by Robert Kirschbaum, Anne Pearce, Donna Kelsh, Debra Di Blasi, Tony Baloney Juliano, Joel Simpson, Peter Schwartz, Tantra Bensko, et al., and cds/dvds by various artists.

The event will begin at 5 pm. Gallery Bar (http://www.gallerybarnyc.com) is located at 120 Orchard Street, near the corner of Delancey St. ("F" train to Delancey).. Tickets for purchase online cost $15 and will be available through June 9th via PayPal (Address PayPal payments to madhattersreview@yahoo.com), or $20 at the door. This event benefits the Mad Hatters' Review and its local programs promoting innovative art and literature.
Contact Carol Novack (Publisher/Editor) and
Amy Bucciferro (PR Director) at madhattersreview@gmail.com Subject Line: Fundraiser
TO MAKE A TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION, PROCEED TO https://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/contribute/donate/580

fc2 innovative fiction contest

Eligibility

The Ronald Sukenick/American Book Review Innovative Fiction Contest is open to any writer of English who is a citizen of the United States and who has not previously published with Fiction Collective Two. Submissions may include a collection of short stories, one or more novellas, or a novel. Works that have previously appeared in magazines or in anthologies may be included. Translations and previously self-published collections are not eligible. To avoid conflict of interest, former or current students or close friends of the final judge for 2008, Michael Martone, are ineligible to win the contest. Employees and Board members of FC2 are not eligible to enter.


Judges

Finalists for the Prize will be chosen by the following members of the FC2 Board of Directors: Kate Bernheimer, R. M. Berry, Brian Evenson, Noy Holland, Brenda Mills, Lance Olsen (Chair), Susan Steinberg, and Lidia Yuknavitch.

The winning manuscript in 2008 will be chosen from the finalists by FC2 Board of Directors member Michael Martone.

Selection criteria will be consistent with FC2's stated mission to publish "fiction considered by America's largest publishers too challenging, innovative, or heterodox for the commercial milieu," including works of "high quality and exceptional ambition whose style, subject matter, or form pushes the limits of American publishing and reshapes our literary culture."

For contest updates and full information on FC2's mission, history, aesthetic commitments, authors, events, and books, please visit the website at: http://fc2.org.


Deadlines

Contest entries will be accepted beginning 15 August 2007. All entries must be postmarked no later than 1 November 2007. The winner will be announced May 2008.


Prize

The Prize includes $1000 and publication by FC2, an imprint of the University of Alabama Press. In the unlikely event that no suitable manuscript is found among entries in a given year, FC2 reserves the right not to award a prize.


Manuscript Format

Please submit either TWO hardcopies of the manuscript, or ONE hardcopy and one Word file of the manuscript on a labeled CD.

The manuscript must be:

--anonymous: the author's name or address must not appear anywhere on the manuscript (the title page should contain the title only); include a separate cover page with your name and contact information;

--typed on standard white paper, one side of the page only; paginated consecutively; bound with a spring clip or rubber bands; no paper clips or staples, please.

Please include a self-addressed, stamped postcard for notification that manuscript has been received, and a self-addressed, stamped, regular business-sized envelope for contest results.

We strongly advise that you send your manuscript first class.

Please retain a copy of your manuscript; FC2 cannot return manuscripts. Submission of more than one manuscript is permissible if each manuscript is accompanied by a $25 reading fee. Once submitted, manuscripts cannot be altered; the winner will be given the opportunity to make changes before publication. Simultaneous submissions to other publishers are permitted, but FC2 must be notified immediately if manuscript is accepted elsewhere. FC2 will consider all finalists for publication.


Submission Address

Full manuscripts, accompanied by a check made out to American Book Review for the mandatory reading fee of $25, should be sent to:

Ronald Sukenick American Book Review Innovative Fiction Prize
American Book Review
University of Houston-Victoria
School of Arts and Sciences
3007 N. Ben Wilson
Victoria, TX 77901-5731


CLMP Contest Ethics Code

CLMP's community of independent literary publishers believes that ethical contests serve our shared goal: to connect writers and readers by publishing exceptional writing. We believe that intent to act ethically, clarity of guidelines, and transparency of process form the foundation of an ethical contest. To that end, we agree to:

1) conduct our contests as ethically as possible and to address any unethical behavior on the part of our readers, judges, or editors;

2) to provide clear and specific contest guidelines--defining conflict of interest for all parties involved; and

3) to make the mechanics of our selection process available to the public.

What are genres?

Following up on Timmi's & other posts, I'd like to relate an experience recently that has me scratching my head.

I've been working very lately in a narrative form I've kinda made up, but borrowed from new techniques in oral transcriptions of native tales, where line breaks are used to indicate breath pauses. I've had Olson in my background for years and this put me in touch with "projective verse" in a new way -- I've always liked the field composition notion and its urging for one to make decisions at each new moment in the process of making the work. Sukenick relies on this quite a bit in In Form, which was also a big early book for me.

But what I've always written is so-called fiction, as per Sukenick. So it feels to me like I'm writing fiction when I write, for instance,

"Ah, Woodchuck

I will tell the story
of Woodchuck

One day
God looked down

On the people and
the people were having

a bad time
because of the sportsmen

The sportsmen would travel
in cars along the roads

so all the people had to do
was put out their heads

or stand up out of their holes
and the sportsmen

would shoot them from the road
with rifles

To die
when all you want

is to look out of your hole
is a bad thing" etc.

it's fiction, to me, but with line breaks.

I sent this out recently to someone who'd asked me for some new work and he said, yeah, he'd like to publish it, but could I rewrite it as sentences. Otherwise, he'd have to pass it to the poetry editor (who, he gave me to think, might not be so well inclined...). So the piece will soon appear ...

"Ah, Woodchuck.

I will tell the story of Woodchuck.

One day God looked down on the people and the people were having a bad time because of the sportsmen.

The sportsmen would travel in cars along the roads so all the people had to do was put out their heads or stand up out of their holes and the sportsmen would shoot them from the road with rifles.

To die when all you want is to look out of your hole is a bad thing." etc.

Well, this raises all sorts of questions regarding the definition of fiction, but from other situations than those discussed already, it seems to me. That is, it seems that the working definition of fiction in the marketplace (and the marketplace of ideas, for that matter) is as a resticted form. On one side, we have poets who write without line breaks increasingly, and whose work is most often called Prose Poetry -- that is, a species of poetry that happens not to employ line breaks. A poetry editor receiving a piece without line breaks likely wouldn't think twice about publishing a work without running past a fiction editor. From another side, "creative non-fiction" claims that the discourse of fiction isn't as serious or relevant in the "real world" as their discourse -- even though fiction writers throughout the twentieth century regularly employed (more "creative") non-fiction in collage and fragmanted narrative forms -- a la Sukenick, Kundera, Vonnegut, Kingston, Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson, etc.

It seems as if the territory allowed to fiction in the dominant consciousness these days is a very limited one. Frequently I hear people who pick up Starcherone books say, "It's like poetry..." or "I don't know what to calll the form with your books." To me, it's fiction, but it seems as if I assume a larger territory for the form than is currently accepted.

Poetry's identity in a culture where fewer and fewer people read is less compromised than that of fiction. Fiction, on the other hand, it seems to me is starting, even in the reading public, to suffer from definitions given it by marketplace forces that privilege realism. There's a great review in the new ABR (yes, more than one, but one to the point) by Anis Shivani on the new Harcourt "Best New American Voices" short story anthology. Editor Sue Miller claims in her introduction to the collection that there's not "a workshop story" in the entire book, but Shivani argues there's nothing but -- and then masterfully defines what constitues a typical "workshop story": "occur within realistically identifiable milieus and settings...; history, politics, and culture serving only as background to individuals' private struggles," etc.

I don't know how it might be done, but I think part of reclaiming fiction must reclaiming be its SPACE -- space that the atrophied contemporary mainstream models of fiction has ceded away.

I think the first version above is better (though containing the same words) than the latter -- it preserves the question of whether fiction can use language as its tensions and traditions may allow, much as any other form or genre would allow. Eugene Onegin wrote a verse novel way back when, and Nabokov dabbled with line break -- not to mention the line smashing of Federman. But when "form" became "genre" -- a subtle shift in nomenclature in recent years -- we may have gotten the short end of the shtick.

at the very least...

Lance poses the question What should fiction (or writing) do?

“Should” is one of those words that makes me nervous. Nevertheless, although I’d be loath to offer up a list of shoulds and should-nots to be observed by all writers, I’ve discovered, thinking about this, that I can come up with at least one should with considerable confidence.

Fiction should transport the reader to a place s/he has never been, however powerfully the work might resonate with the reader’s own experience and understanding. This is the minimum of what everyone demands of the visual, aural, and performing arts, and fiction should be no exception.

The fiction I love best induces a textured state of mind that I carry around inside me for as long as I’m reading it, that I regret losing when that state of mind fades a few days after I’ve finished it, but that I can recover whenever I begin reading the work again. This is above all an effect of language, and one that seems utterly magical when I think about it. How does it happen? I suppose it involves a certain sort of textual synergy in which many elements come together with such power and coherence that one is transported into an altered state, and because one is transported, one feels the reality of the book’s imaginary. By this I don’t mean simply that the characters seem “real” or the details of the setting plausible. I mean the imaginative logic underlying the work’s voice and style and, perhaps more intangibly, its choice of detail, syntactical preferences, rhythm of the sentences, and formal structure, all of which combine perfectly to create feelings and perceptions and sensations and thoughts that constitute a place we would never have been able to visit on our own.

Here’s Wallace Stevens:

The man bent over his guitar,
A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, “You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are.”

The man replied, “Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar.”

And they said then, “But play you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.”

Most writing, of course, doesn’t create a textured state of mind that infuses one’s whole reality for days at a time and leaves behind it a trace memory of such rapture that one never forgets. But any fiction worth reading should at the very least take us to a space that is outside of the one already in our heads (though it may be a familiar space we’ve visited often before, cozy and comfortable for some or boring and stifling for others, but always small and limited). Even the most mediocre fiction must be able to do that for at least some of its readers (though it’s obviously not going to succeed in transporting those who find such familiar high-volume tourist spots tedious and ugly).

Living with Virginia Tech

I have no doubt that everyone on this blog was riveted by the events that took place at Virginia Tech last week—particularly since Cho Seung-Hui regularly took classes in a field in which many of us are currently teaching. The enormity of the event looms large—5 faculty and 27 students dead—and I can’t help but reflect on my relationship with some of my own troubled students. We all have them: every semester, students who come from difficult backgrounds, others who are on medication for psychiatric problems, and still others who should be, sign up for my fiction classes. Every semester, violent fictions are submitted for critique to my workshop. What seems to be missed in the reports that have arisen about Cho and his work, however, is that violent fictions are written as frequently by “healthy” students, as by students who are still coming to grips with their problems.

As the public tries to come to some kind of understanding about what role creative writing, academic bureaucracy, and our mental health system may have played in last week’s tragedy, I’ve become frustrated by the continued association between Cho’s violent “predisposition” and his creative work: that his writing was oracular for the terrible events that took place last week.

Stephen King is the most recent “expert” to chime in on the matter:

“For most creative people, the imagination serves as an excretory channel for violence: We visualize what we will never actually do….Cho doesn't strike me as in the least creative, however. Dude was crazy. Dude was, in the memorable phrasing of Nikki Giovanni, ''just mean.'' Essentially there's no story here, except for a paranoid a--hole who went DEFCON-1. He may have been inspired by Columbine, but only because he was too dim to think up such a scenario on his own. On the whole, I don't think you can pick these guys out based on their work, unless you look for violence unenlivened by any real talent.”

(Read the entire piece at: http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20036014,00.html)

I understand why it’s much easier to blame the work or the person, rather than addressing the systems in place that might have caught Cho before he took the incalculable actions he did. If Stephen King were the least bit introspective, he’d try to address the larger context arising from VTech. Of course then he wouldn't be Stephen King.

At this point, some of us have no doubt read (or read reports of) Cho’s plays “Richard McBeef” and “Mrs. Brownstone.” For better or for worse, I’ve seen material as violent in my classes. Television and video games (or a simple lack of talent) might be blamed for the all-too-easy transition between character development and violence in works like these. (Certainly, our workshop discussions inevitably take up the question of genre, the influence of the media on the scene of the literary, and the role that language plays in the creation of voice.) But that question, for the moment, belongs to a different day.

Let’s face it: Cho's writing isn’t what clued his professors in that he was ill. From what I’ve read, it was his persona in class—his inability to relate to students or his teachers. His actions and behaviors (an unwillingness to speak, photographing other students with his cell phone, hiding his face etc) were the evident and eerie disruptive force in those classrooms—not his work itself. I’d like to think that, if any of us had a similar student, we would have tried to flag him or her ahead of time, to call attention to such inappropriate behavior. What’s frightening is that Lucinda Roy (then Chair of Creative Writing) seems to have tried her best in this regard—to no success.

What I fear from this event—my reason for posting at all—is that Cho’s actions will change the field in which we work: that administrations will censor what students turn in to class (perhaps through obligations put on instructors to report violent work), though more insidiously, and more worrisome, is that student will begin to censor their own imaginations. For example, one student who handed in a manuscript with pedophilic content this week prefaced to the class that it was written “pre Virginia Tech.”

This might be just one sad outcome arising out of larger, far more tragic circumstances.

What has become more than evident however is that academic bureaucracies aren’t equipped to handle one lone distressed student. Certainly, our mental health system is too clunky and inadequate to handle the isolated minefield that represents a single person’s mind.

kurt vonnegut : 1922-2007

Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday night, 11 April, of brain injuries he sustained after a recent fall in his Manhattan apartment. He was 84.

I'm not sure if he's thought of as experimental these days, but I am sure his crazy-funny speculative imagination, brutal political satire, acidic existential irony, poignantly unfussy prose, and liberating structural waywardness lured a host of my generation during our teens onto the wilder side of fiction, into narrative irreverence and opportunity.

I'm also sure I consider Slaughter-House Five (1969) one of the best novels about World War Two, not to mention one of the best of the second half of the twentieth century. By way of a eulogy, let me simply quote a passage from it. Billy Pilgrim has just been snatched by extraterrestrials called Tralfamadorians who intend to put in a kind of cage in a kind of zoo on their planet.

There were two peepholes inside the airlock [of their spaceship]—with yellow eyes pressed to them. There was a speaker on the wall. The Tralfamadorians had no voice boxes. They communicated telepathically. They were able to talk to Billy by means of a computer and a sort of electric organ which made every Earthling speech sound.

"Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim," said the loudspeaker. "Any questions?"

Billy licked his lips, thought a while, inquired at last: "Why me?"

"That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because the moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?"

"Yes." Billy, in fact, had a paperweight in his office which was a blob of polished amber with three ladybugs embedded in it.

"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why."

Goodbye, Kurt. There are a lot of earthlings still unstuck in time who will miss you.

interview: mark danielewski

Electronic Book Review just posted a new interview with Mark Danielewski, author of the amazing fictive experiments House of Leaves (2000) and Only Revolutions (2006), here. A few teasers:

On centripetal versus centrifugal novels:

House of Leaves is what I would call a centripetal book. It's about interiorities and history and progeny and ancestors. [Only Revolutions] was pointedly a centrifugal novel. It was about getting outside. It was about looking at landscape. It was about addressing what the open was. It was about—not only an academic level—reading Agamben's "The Open" and readdressing what Heidegger was talking about with "the open." Looking at the naturalists, looking at ecocriticism.

On television, movies, & novels:

My job is to write something that could not just as easily be seen on television or at the movies.

On what is absent in Only Revolutions:

You know, one of the things this [Only Revolutions] resists is vision. The word "light" never appears. With the exception of some colors mentioned, it never quite paints those borders, the edges, it's always resisting the edges. . . . So the word, for instance, "spectacular" is never there, because it comes from speculare, to see. Words that are about seeing, for the most part, were taken out. I've been described—not as dogmatic as Oulipo—but there's a resistance to certain things.

On the future of the book:

My feeling is that there is going to be a technology that will look like this book. The three dimensional quality is an experience that cannot be done away with one reading tablet. I think what's going to happen is there are going to be pages that are as thin as this, and you can go to "A plague on both your houses" and you can click on it, and you'll connect: "Romeo and Juliet. FDR also said it." And suddenly you have this connected tissue.

review : lynne tillman : american genius

What I think I enjoy most about Lynne Tillman's American Genius: A Comedy (Soft Skull, 2006) is its extraordinary investigation into the limits of interiority and the lusciousness of torqued language—two areas of experience that prove virtually impossible for any other art form to engage with as fully, as deeply, as resonantly as the novel can.

In many ways, this novel is about a series of lacks. There is no real plot, no real character development, not much forward motion, almost no dialogue. It's even difficult to tease out the setting. The funny, bright, wildly neurotic narrator, Helen (we don't learn her name until the narrative moves into its endgame), may be a patient at some sanatarium, a resident in some New Agey artists' colony, a visitor at some wacky spa. The outlines of the external world are fuzzy at best. What's important, rather, is the movement of her mind, the musicality of her thought, as she obssesses on the pleasure of cotton socks, the vicissitudes of various skin conditions (hers and others'), the Manson killings, the slave trade, Calvinism, Eames chairs, the beloved dog her parents had put to sleep, her dead father, her increasingly unmoored elderly mother, the people surrounding her whose quirks she notes in gossipy detail.

What's important, as well, perhaps even more so, are stunning sentences like the following typical two, which share a great deal with the oceanic language of Woolf, the feverish eye of Bernhard, and which go a good way toward rethinking what a sentence can be, what it can do, and how, through their relentless digressive qualifications that skirt conventional grammar:

Everything is a problem in some way, I can't think of anything that's not a problem from the past for the future, and I often worry, frowning to myself, unaware that I'm frowning, my lips turning down involuntarily, which I've been told to stop doing since I was a child, because it creates the impression that I'm sullen and also etches fine lines around my mouth, but I can't. My father worried about the future, which presumably he could imagine, but I can't, just as I can't imagine lines like tributaries running from the river of my mouth the way they do from my mother's, who was angry, who'd abandoned her girlish hopes of marrying a violinist named Sidney, and who often speaks of him now that my father is dead, wondering where Sidney is, and also wondering where my father is, if he is outside, waiting for her in the car that he loved.

Jeffrey Deshell lauded this novel last December in Now What's posts concerning the best alternative fiction of 2006, and I've only recently found the time to settle down with it. Thanks, Jeffrey. Thanks, Lynne Tillman. What a strikingly intelligent, mischievously obsessive, beautifully written book.