Reading Ahead

Contemplative Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 13:43:00 +0000

In re: my last post: Is contemplative, long-form reading coming to an end because of late-Modern focus on speed and technology? Here's T.S. Eliot from 1934's "Choruses from The Rock":

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.

The End of Time (Narrative Version)

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 15:38:00 +0000

My recent talk at Concordia College, A Brief History of the Book-Like Thing, or How to Read a Delivery System, Easy Lessons in Elementary Mediology (the title reflects a lame, nerd's joke when he speaks to an audience of academic scholars), was a survey of narrative delivery systems (I'll call this last term a retro-neologism, 'though I know there is a neologism for such a concept but I can't remember it at the moment) from the cave-drawings at Lascaux to the digital reader. To each technology developed that delivered narrative to the reader, I applied current publishing industry standards (the Roman wax appliqués on wood were faulted for their lack of durability during beach-reading, for example). I ended with the simple statement "The next delivery system will break down narrative time so far that time itself will not really matter." Almost all post-talk questions asked about that statement.

My point was that during the past few thousand years both the delivery system and the narrative it contained included a concept of duration. The former means the durability of the words on the stone, papyrus, vellum, paper, etc., which survive for a specific amount of time. The latter refers to the "story" itself, which, even when there is no linear or sequential time involved, has duration, for the most part. (Space is also a consideration, and the time and space interplay is of interest, as in Régis Debray's characterization of the book--meaning the codex-like thing--as "une chose delimitée," but I won't deal with that here.) New works by David Shields (Reality Hunger) and Padget Powell (The Interrogative Mood) deny duration and internally obliterate time, which may be an early result of the recently developed narrative delivery systems. This approach isn't entirely new, of course (read Fé lix F énéon's Novels in Three Lines) but current and coming delivery systems may lend themselves to this new type of narrative. For example, 'though the Japanese have delivered full, plot-heavy novels on the cell phone, would the duration-free and plot-free narrative be better-served by the cell phone (or Twitter), and vice-versa?

Goodbye to All That

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:03:00 +0000

Despite the obvious Robert Graves reference, I’m actually thinking of a nostalgia theme here, a false past that says more about a wan present and an anxious future than Graves’s good riddance salute. I’m talking about the late days of the book-printing plant. Of course, books, especially trade books, will last a while longer, perhaps a good while longer, and printed books will continue through print-on-demand and the like, but now’s the time to visit book-printers before they join the past-fuzzy ranks of the scriptoria. I have had the pleasure of touring a couple of these clickety, fragrant buildings where the descendants of the great printers still ply their trade. Their giant Japanese, six-color separators (my last visit was to a dust jacket printer) and the smell of ink are like suet to a finch. It reminded me of sniffing the mimeographed papers of my school days, but more overwhelming. The clanking of old fashioned presses is gone, replaced by clicking and speed. And then out near the loading dock are piles of books, awaiting cartons and shipping to readers around the country, newly printed, bound, and covered by these unsung literary champions. When all is digital and we lament the loss of books as household design objects and their natural tactility, I’ll remember perfumed visits to book-printers. Like bakeries in the morning. If printed books survive, if the will of content overwhelms the imperative to convenience, these men and women will be their heroes.

Why a Johnny-Come-Lately Thinks Comics Matter to Literary Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 17:29:00 +0000

I came early to comics (in my waning toddler years) and lately have come back to them (in the incipience of my dotage) and it wasn’t easy. After fifty years of reading rectangles of letters and lots of white space, reading comics, in which the writing comprised only about 5% of the page and illustration about 80% (and margins the other 15%), I had to re-train myself to assimilate the comic’s different organization.

But as I read further in the comics world, I am finding the bursting of narrative line fascinating. Sure, the traditional six- or eight-panel book still exists, but when I read I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly and J.M. Ken Nimura, with undertones of superheroes in the dialogue and drawing, I was reminded that comics have the ability to “spring” narrative from its traditional linearity of the eye. I’m not talking about Félix Féneon and Tristan Tzara and Bryon Gysin and cut-up techniques, but the way that comics can re-flex the eye that solely word-based books cannot. Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman are experimenting with types of focus in their RAW Junior line of children’s early readers. Placing words in a bubble, they take on both increased and reduced significance, depending on one’s point of view.

I would appreciate anyone who reads this to recommend non-comics “sprung” narrative. I’m not talking, for example, about Carole Maso-style, short-paragraph work or the poetry of Ricardo Sanchez, but visual-based, not-illustrated work, which may or may not have been influenced visually by comics.

Future of the "Book"

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 18:21:00 +0000

There's a great video on the If:Book blog about from France on the future of reading, mainly about the next steps of digital readers. Click here and then click on the YouTube video Possible ou Probable. The dialogue is in French but it's not necessary to understand what's going on.

Sherman Alexie on eReaders

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 18:03:00 +0000

It has been reported that Sherman Alexie made negative comments about the Kindle at the recent BookExpo but perhaps they were simply the asking of questions about the social and political nature of "book-like things" and the delivery systems technologists from the monks who invented the codex to Gutenberg to E Ink have wrought. Read his follow-up comments here. What's interesting is that you can't stop the movement of technology but that fear and anxiety emerge from the darkness ahead. Read Trithemius's In Praise of Scribes (1492). There have indeed been significant changes in the aesthetics of "delivery systems" and book culture over the past thousand years, which have always had an effect on the way books are read.

The question of why a $249 iPod is more acceptable than a $249 Kindle is an interesting one. It lies, to some extent, in financial priorities and issues of time and pastime. It also may lie in the difference between a book and a record/CD, which are currently old technologies. In the old days, when you bought a record, a cassette or CD, you then needed a player, so we got used to that. With an iPod, you simply have another player. With a book, when you bought the book, you had the capacity for an immediate experience, with no intermediate need. With an eReader (Kindle, Sony Reader, etc.), you do. What Alexie is showing us, clearly and directly, is that intermediacy has its consequences.

e-Rock, e-Paper, e-Scissors

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 20:37:00 +0000

E Ink, the people who brought you the electronic displays behind the Sony Reader and the Kindle, has been purchased by Prime View, the people who brought you e-paper. Click here for their predictions on the future market for electronic reading. To read more about e-paper, click here. Proving that C.P. Snow's two cultures retains validity, I can't make head or tails out of the explanation of e-paper on the Prime View site.

Here Comes the Book

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:44:00 +0000

Logos magazine continues to publish provocative and intelligent articles about the history of publishing the book. Click here for an article by Miha Kovak that discusses a history and projects a future for the codex-style book. It's a companion, in many ways, to Ruediger Wischenbart's article I posted last week.

Ripping the Covers Off the Book

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Thu, 28 May 2009 16:57:00 +0000

Dr. Luediger Wischenbart is in New York from Vienna for BookExpo, which gives me the opportunity to post a link to his interesting article on what constitutes a book. Click here for the .pdf.

Slow Reader

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Wed, 27 May 2009 15:51:00 +0000

One of the pitfalls of working in the literary profession is that one is often required to read very quickly, even when the work itself requires slow reading. One of my remedies (and I have chosen that word specifically) to demon speed has been to read Proust, whose clauses need to be read slowly if one is to make any sense of the sentences. Reading needfully slow literature fast is a bad habit, but such "speed-reading" may also end up as a boon to the reading of new types of short-form literature.

Now along comes the digital Evelyn Wood. Those of you under the age of 50 may not know that Evelyn Wood's speed-reading course was made popular in the early 1960s because John F. Kennedy, Jr. boasted of reading at 1,200 words a minute after taking the course. If memory serves, after Evelyn Wood training, one read down the middle of the page, accumulating an understanding of key words and phrases. The claim was that comprehension did not suffer. Woody Allen once said, "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It involves Russia."

Researchers writing for the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) have developed a method of highlighting thematically in digital texts so that one can skim, since, they say, that is how people "read" now anyway, cherry-picking only the ripe key words and phrases. Click here for a link to the PARC reference and the abstract. The article, by the way, is "controlled", meaning that you either need to take out a membership or purchase it.

P.S. By the way, this year is the centennial of Evelyn Wood's birth.

Elisabeth Sifton on The Book

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Fri, 22 May 2009 16:57:00 +0000

Elisabeth Sifton's thoughtful memoir/essay on the future of the book in The Nation.

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20090608/sifton

New Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Mon, 04 May 2009 15:51:00 +0000

Spent part of the weekend looking at various (fairly) new types of publications. New Directions is bringing out the works of B.S. Johnson and The Unfortunates is quite an interesting experiment, a sort of boxed-set of sequence-able book pieces. It seems to have led to some of the electronic work that easily allows for fiction without fixed sequence, such as Caitlin Fisher's These Waves of Girls, "published" in 2001, which is fun but I would love to see more mature work in electronic format. This stuff will work well on e-readers and I would even love to see an iPod-like "shuffle" so that the work itself will change with each reading, while the reader has no control over the sequence. A few of the other finalists in the Electronic Literature Organization's 2001 prize program are also interesting. For conservative newbies like me writers like Michael Joyce and Shelley Jackson are revelations.

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 21:18:00 +0000

“…done for, there was no way back, the end was here, the absolute end…”

--Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Illych

A few posts back I noted that I thought reading on a tablet reader would change the way immersive literature would be read, that traditional, plot-driven literature would miss the metaphor and illusion of “edge-to-interior, interior-to-edge” the printed book provides. As book-readers, we appreciate traditional books because we read them in their printed versions. But tablet-style readers will “flatten” our ability to immerse ourselves. On the one hand, this will open new ways of writing. In English, Beckett and Burroughs will most likely emerge as the godfathers of literary abstraction, Markson, Shields, and Danielewski its avatars.

But as they read in digital format, which emphasizes surface-tension, will the next generation of screen-readers understand the deeply running waters of previous literary generations? Will they be able to appreciate it unless they read in the delivery format for which it was intended? As I wandered through the Bonnard exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently, and stared at a Rothko painting in the Smith College Museum of Art yesterday, I was struck by how the former could rail against the frame and the latter ignore it. If you removed Bonnard’s late paintings from their frames, would they retain a strength built on the violence against the frame? If you add a baroque frame to Rothko, will he retain his surface tension? If you force Tolstoy into a different delivery method—an uncomfortable frame—will the reader understand what made past generations appreciate him? Will holding plastic by the fingertips provide the illusion that life is lived within the cover, which feign a natural environment full of transcendental emotion? As we approach the composition of new literature, “life lived within these covers” will not matter, because the literature itself will be abstract. The question is will the illusion of the past be unattainable in the delivery methods of the future?

The next generation of machines may have the ability to create illusion, as did the printed book, or enhance abstraction, the way the current ones do. Or perhaps accomplish both. That way they won’t kill Tolstoy for future generations, and it won’t really be the absolute end.

Thinking about Future Reading

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 20:17:00 +0000

A few books that discuss topics in the future of reading, though without spending much time directly on them:

Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody. Penguin Press. Shirky became a Twitter darling last week during his apprearance at SXSW. I assume the title refers to Joyce's Finnegans Wake, but I don't remember a direct reference in the book itself. Maybe I missed it or maybe he purposely omitted it. The sections (not whole chapters) that refer to the post-Gutenberg years and the lessons learned for our own age are particularly interesting about the future of reading.

Cory Doctorow, Content. Tachyon Publications. The Zen-master of the e-reading revolution. His chapters on the e-book are fun and informative. He notes the differences between printed books and e-books from the point of view of marketing, sales, copyright, etc. but he falls short of a clear look at discussing in what ways the technological change might affect the reader and the writer. And the annoying way of simply printing the [references] to digital hotlinks I could do without.

Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur. Doubleday. I agree with very little of what he writes compared to the above two writers. Some of his "facts" (in fact) are not proveable. For example, he describes Wikipedia's content as "unreliable" and contrasts its amateur writers and editors to the "100 Nobel Prize winners and 4,000 expert contributors" to the Britannica's site. Full disclosure: I co-edited an encyclopedia a few years ago, and when it comes to encyclopedias and accuracy, I doubt Keen has ever edited one. He then quotes Lewis Mumford, completely out of context, to support his claims, when he should be sampling both encyclopedias (as Stacy Schiff did for her New Yorker article a couple of years ago). I can imagine that when he and Shirky get together they come to blows.

Saul Bellow and the eReader

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 18:14:00 +0000

What would Saul Bellow have thought of the eReader? Following is an excerpt from his The Adventures of Augie March:

And I lay down and finished the Five-Foot Shelf Einhorn had given me, the fire and water-spotted books I had kept in the original box. They had a somewhat choky smell. So if Ulysses went down to hell or there were conflagrations in Rome or London or men and women lusted as they did in St. Paul, I could breathe an odor that supplemented the reading.

Question: what does reading smell like? What does it feel like? What does it look like? What does it sound like?

Reading the Literary in America

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:36:00 +0000

The awarding last week of the best translated book to be published in the United States in the past year raises questions about the change of interest in the U.S. in “pure” cultural products from beyond its boundaries. Two developments in the past few years have made an impact: the first was PEN American Center’s World Voices Festival, which focused several days of attention on writers from around the world, who come to New York to participate in readings, panel discussions and interviews with their American counterparts. Thousands upon thousands of people attend these 60-odd events that take place.

The second is Chad Post’s Three Percent (named after the fraction of literary titles represented by translation, although Chad makes a good case that the number is actually much lower, and closer to about .5%). Chad gathers as many translated titles as he can on his web site and blog to try to get the word out to a broad audience. His recent awarding of a prize for the best translated book takes publicity one step further.

I was involved in a very small dust-up last fall with the Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, which took place solely in digital news, after he said that it would be difficult for an American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature since Americans are too isolated and ignorant of world literatures. I don’t have to go into my reasons here for thinking that a stupid statement, but I would like to examine a bit why Americans (in general) do not read translated literary books.

First, let’s admit that Americans don’t read many literary books at all, translated or not. The New York Times bestseller list—the old one, which listed only 10 or 15 books—in the 1960s might have boasted several highly regarded literary authors, which is generally not the case today. Americans for the most part read for entertainment, and sometimes enchantment (to use Nabokov’s descriptor), but rarely for the erotic intensity of wordplay itself. The erotics of reading or, as novelist Christopher Sorrentino once described it to me, the ecstatic of reading, has never been widespread, but it seems to be even less so nowadays, particularly in the adult world. I can’t tell you how many adults I meet nowadays who tell me their favorite book is something I would classify as a young adult novel. The winner of the National Book Award in Young People’s Literature far outsells the Fiction winner. Cormac McCarthy’s “young adult novel”, as one literary blogger described The Road to me, far, far outsold any of his previous novels for adults.

In reading Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity recently, her chapter on the narrative imagination focused for the most part on older novels as helpmeets for the cultivation of humanistic principles (Dickens, Ellison). Yet the novel of abstraction, such as Beckett’s trilogy, and refraction, such as those of Carole Maso or David Markson, finds only a tiny audience. Two million people a year will go to the Museum of Modern Art and view abstraction. Why does text suffer from the burden of verisimilitude?

I went to the New York Comic Convention a couple of weeks ago. I arrived mid-afternoon on Saturday, and had to cajole my way in because it was sold out. Sold out? My daughter, aged seventeen, went with me, dressed as Ragged Robin from Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles. Lots of other people dressed as their favorite characters. The fantastic is in, especially among younger people who grew up with the fantastic and the commercial. Story is in, simplicity is in (obvious good versus obvious evil, even when the comic book characters are flawed), manic Manicheanism. The novel of meaning is so…yesterday.

The literary community needs more excitement. When was the last time you saw a novelist of the late night shows? Remember when Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Mary McCarthy would appear on The Tonight Show because they were witty and charming and intelligent and outrageous? Who are their counterparts now, and when will they bring us in from the cold? Americans need that in their authors. One part artist, one part philosopher, one part harlequin. Here’s my suggestion: I think Jonathan Franzen should marry Paris Hilton, the way Arthur Miller married Marilyn Monroe. It doesn’t have to last long, but it would give a few writers the opportunity to appear in photographs like the one with Monroe, Miller, Signoret, and Montand at dinner in the 1950s. Kiran Desai and Brad Pitt. Achy Obejas and Ellen Degeneres. Like Bernard-Henri Levy and Arielle Dombasle. I think I’m onto a new program here, something I could coordinate. I wonder if I can get a grant.

The American Republic of Letters, Part Two

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 22:47:00 +0000

Politics and power have always played a role in literary reading. Who reads what and why is not always based on taste, as it has for the most part been in our bourgie era. In various times and epochs it has also been influenced by education, political censorship, sexism, money, marketing, religion, ambition, and technological advances. The medieval Catholic Church was one of the most obvious lords of literature, both restricting and preserving great books. Its influence into the Spanish Inquisitional era is very well documented in Irving Leonard’s Books of the Brave (out of print, I believe), where the Spanish administration in Madrid and Seville could control every book sent to its colonies, until it exported printing presses, and lost control both of ideas and then the colonial states themselves. Contrast that with the privately run English colonies, where control was exercised by local ministers, if at all.

Our own era is witnessing a vast shift in power and influence in literary reading, and though we have often bantered and argued about who influences our reading habits and why, certainly those we considered primary influencers are trying desperately to “re-tool” in order to retain their influence as it slowly slips away.

For about two decades we have watched enrollment in college English courses deteriorate and the number of English majors decline (viz., Andrew Delbanco’s article The Decline and Fall of Literature in “The New York Review of Books”, November 14, 1999), done-in by a variety of forces, including a willful need for obscurantism and even irrelevance; the number of independent booksellers decrease by two-thirds, picked off one-by-one first by superstores and then by the internet; and newspaper book reviews have all but disappeared, killed by the interplay of digitization and cultural anarchy (the idealistic kind, not the chaotic kind).

Without flogging the trope that “as moveable type, blah, blah, blah”, the advent of digitization is changing the power structure of who reads what, in many, many ways, including everything from creation to consumption, and the new “players” include the great digitizing companies such as Google, Amazon, Apple, eInk, and a host of bit players who create apps, blogs, and other things that appeal to recently created patterns of consumption. But they are not the only power players. Corporate copyright fiefdoms are in the midst of creating the Celestial Jukebox. If libraries of the future have no right to lend information, the copyright-holders—often large corporate entities—will control what we read, and even re-read. Of course, the opposite may happen, and anarchy-oriented organizations may figure out a way to yippify the literary universe. Small presses linger on the margins, wondering if the new structure will bring them more influence. In any case, the old power structure is changing, and the American Republic of Letters is in the process of creating a new booky politic.

Flat Screen Novels

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 22:54:00 +0000

Today’s introduction of the second wave of the Kindle brings to mind certain aspects of reading on a screen versus reading on a traditional book.

According to Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading, the physical layout of the book as we know it supposedly evolved around the time of Julius Caesar. In fact, Manguel attributes the folded nature of the book to Caesar himself, who found it difficult to carried rolled scrolls on his person as he was riding into battle with the Gauls. The opening of The Gallic Wars, Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres (All Gaul is divided into three parts) gave rise to the folding of a large page, or printer’s sheet, into four parts (which resulted in the quarto), eight parts (the ubiquitous octavo), and the mostly outmoded twelve parts (the duodecimo). This lasted about 2,000 years, until Sony and Amazon, “taking a page” out of Caesar’s book (where will that expression go, I wonder), decided that the most comfortable way to read would be on a tablet, as the middle-easterners did before the scroll, a single, smooth, untextured screen, a rectangle of limited size. (By the way, I’m kidding about Gaul being divided into three parts as having given Caesar the idea for the book).

One difference between the screen and the printed book is that the former has no depth while the latter has the illusion of depth. When you read an e-book, you read from edge to edge. When you read a printed book, you read from the edge to the interior, and then the interior to the edge, again and again and again, a metaphor of immersion (unlike edge to edge reading). And this is the case whether you read left to right or right to left (or even up and down, as do the Chinese, since the sequence of columns moves to the interior). The “frame of reference” becomes the center. The physical act focuses the reading experience.

Another difference is the lack of uniqueness for the book as an object. Even though you may be reading a Stephen King novel along with a million other people, the object in your hand is a unique item. Sure, your own Kindle is unique, but the cover to the book never changes, and again flattens the reading experience from a unique physical experience with unique content to the same physical experience with unique content.

Is this bad? Only to those of us who grew up with the metaphor of depth and immersion. I find it interesting that, as cinema explores the illusion of three dimensions on a two-dimensional screen and virtual realities re-define artificial “reality”, the e-book is providing the means to move in the opposite direction, away from representation. It’s also interesting that, even though King today promoted the Kindle at the Amazon press conference, I believe that his story-based work will actually be less successful as a reading experience (aesthetically) in e-book format, simply because it is figurative and the e-book is not.

From time to time, I read books on my iTouch, and I find it most successful as an experience when I read material written for the screen, not things written for the printed book. Several posts back I suggested that Amazon give 100 Kindles to writers around the country and see what they come up with when they approach writing for the screen, writers of all different stripes, from Bruce Sterling to Nora Roberts to Mark Danielewski. Then we might see reading on the Kindle as a new aesthetic experience. Right now it's just a convenience.

The Future of the Literary Past

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 22:03:00 +0000

Rumors abound that backlists have seen their day, paralleled by diminishing influence in the professoriat. If that is true, the future will mean fewer classics, read mainly by mandarins, oddballs and nerds, and the canon will ossify even more than it has. I doubt this will be the case. Digital downloads (despite DRM; see yesterday’s post) and on-demand printing will ensure consistent availability. DVDs of films made from Jane Austen’s work will furnish a clever marketing tool (viz, Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road). Classic authors are as much “brands” as contemporary best-selling authors.

However, the number of authors and works from the retreating past for the most part decreases as the dates grow distant. Imagine a funnel turned on its side and seen in profile. Who reads Epictetus, for example (despite its importance to Philip Lopate’s recent novella “The Stoic’s Marriage” from Two Marriages), even though he was a schoolboy staple in the late nineteenth century? There is no room for him now that we have Bourdieu, Foucault, and Derrida. At the same time, the mandarins, oddballs and nerds keep re-discovering and printing, hoping against hope that even 1,000 people will read such wonderful works as The Gallery by John Horne Burns.

Perhaps this is where the famous—and now discredited—long tail will have an effect, where not only the famous, but the eccentric (e.g., James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner) will find a readership of a couple of hundred a year.

Who Will Own American Literature?

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:46:00 +0000

Change has come rapidly to the business of American literature in the past thirty years: conglomerization, new delivery methods, the declining influence of the literature professor, restrictive copyright laws, etc. Of course, literature has always experienced external control over who reads what and why. Government censorship, commercial cost, the exigencies of marketing, the outrage of parents, the clergy, and the community continue in various forms around the world.

This creates a panorama one could call the American Republic of Letters (not in the nineteenth century sense of an exchange of correspondence). Portals of access have disappeared, while others have developed. Newspaper reviewers are ignored. Literary critics are invisible. Graphic novels, which are 95% image, are taking an increasing segment of the traditional “book” market, especially among the next generation to come of age. The publication of literary works drifts from large to small presses, which have significantly less power to publicize and market, at least for now. The bookstore wars have ended (for the most part), at least between the large and small bricks-and-mortar stores. In ten short years, sales have shifted to a struggle between distant and local purchasing. Government is unable to keep books away from almost anyone with a credit card. Copyright is becoming permanent, leading to angry exchanges between publishers and scholars. There is a real question whether public lending libraries will survive, not because they are not needed, but because book-lending will no longer be needed by enough people to make them a community priority. DRM (digital rights management, a code that may allow a copyrighted work to open only on the device for which it was purchased or solely to the user who purchased it) threatens one of the great grass-roots traditions in reading: the enthusiastic passing of books from one reader to another.

All this will affect the whys and wherefores of literary reading in the United States. It always has. What has also endured is the political wrangling that created reading opportunities. The small press "movement" is one. A backlash against American arrogance and insularity manifested in the lack of literary translation in the United States is another. The NEA's "The Big Read" is a third. Ownership rights.

Immigrant Fiction--European Style

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 17:24:00 +0000

A recent post in the Guardian by blogger Andrew Gallix (that can't be his real name: sounds more like a cross between Gallic and Asterix) about the new immigrant and ethnic fiction of France raises questions of the supposed globalization of experience as literary lode. Working class immigrant and ethnic fiction played a large role in America's twentieth century, focused to a great extent on assimilation to both the ethos of America and the middle class. By the early 1980s, thanks in large part to the work of Maxine Hong Kingston and others, immigrant fiction turned from assimilationist to work of cultural exploration, "exploring the hyphen" it was sometimes called. Think now of Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz and how different their work is from say, that of Louis Chu and Ed Rivera. I wonder, however, if the specific minority group fiction in foreign languages--say, Paris's banlieue--will appeal to the American sensibility, as did Zadie Smith with White Teeth or Hanif Kureishi with My Beautiful Laundrette (which came to America through the movies). It poses intriguing problems for the translator who must take English-laced French and develop a new code to convey the pervasiveness of American popular sensibility without losing the sense of foreign-language creep in French. The future of translation--both language and experience--becomes increasingly interesting as argot digs deeper into the literary realm.

Robert Coover

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:30:00 +0000

Although you may want to watch Robert Coover's A History of the Future of Narrative on the Electronic Literature Foundation's site, his title is misleading and is more like a history of narrative and technology. If he were really talking about a history of the future of narrative, he would be talking about past directions and predictions that may or may not have come to pass, roads developed and not, dead ends, even maguffins (a sort of "history of the idea of the future"). For example, the predictions for hypertext fifteen years ago have been vastly modified with new technological advances. For a more interesting read on the history of narrative, look at Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading.

The Death of E-Literature

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:34:00 +0000

Check out Andrew Gallix's article in the Guardian about the death of e-literature.

5 Under 35

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 14:51:00 +0000

A bit of publicity for this year's list of 5 Under 35 emerging fiction writers from the National Book Foundation, part of the future of literary reading. All of these writers have published one work of fiction (novel or short stories), are under 35, and were selected by a former Winner or Finalist for the National Book Award:

Matthew Eck
The Farther Shore
(Milkweed Editions, 2007)
Selected by Joshua Ferris, 2007 Fiction Finalist for Then We Came to the End

Keith Gessen
All the Sad Young Literary Men
(Viking Press, 2008)
Selected by Jonathan Franzen, 2001 Fiction Winner for The Corrections

Sana Krasikov
One More Year: Stories
(Spiegel & Grau, 2008)
Selected by Francine Prose, 2000 Fiction Finalist for Blue Angel

Nam Le
The Boat
(Knopf, 2008)
Selected by Mary Gaitskill, 2005 Fiction Finalist for Veronica

Fiona Maazel
Last Last Chance
(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008)
Selected by Jim Shepard, 2007 Fiction Finalist for Like You’d Understand, Anyway

The Metaphysics of the American Literary Industry

noreply@blogger.com (Harold Augenbraum) — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 20:07:00 +0000

A couple of years ago, I was asked by a small college to give a talk on the state of the book business. The word “state”, however, connotes a static condition and the book business is anything but static. The CEO of Barnes & Noble wrote a few years ago that the state of the book business is change, so what I’d prefer to discuss is ideologies of change, art, and prestige in the book business, and the literary publishing business in particular, in other words, the metaphysics of the American literary industry. A couple of caveats: I am going to speculate and nothing I say can be proven, which, of course, sets me squarely in the middle of the history of discussions of metaphysics.

A literary work is the expression, in words, of a balance between perfect chaos and perfect order, on the shifting ground of idea and meaning. This equilibrium lies at the heart of the metaphysics of the American literary industry. The work of art is rendered by a single individual, and the manner of the rendering is often called the author’s “voice”. Each of these renderings is unique and elicits a unique response from its reader because, and this may sound odd, “it wants to”. By creating a unique response in each reader, the literary work creates a multiplicity of responses, which, in turn, creates an unstable environment in which one consumes that work. In short, each reader reads a different book. And if each reader reads a different book, then the product itself can be called “unstable”. I don’t want to flog the decades-old debate initiated by Roland Barthes’s 1968 article “The Death of the Author”. Instead, my central question is: does the instability of a literary text and the audience’s response to the text create instability in the literary business as a whole?

In 2005, according to the records of Ingram Book Distribution, the foremost book wholesaler in the United States, and R.W. Bowker, the foremost book statistician in the United States, 195,000 titles were published in this country, a tripling of the number since the late 1960s, and retail sales totaled between $17 billion and $25 billion, not too shabby for a so-called mature industry, which investors have said is a no-growth business. The instability of an industry that produces so many individual products with so few grouped brands is understandable. It would take 195,000 individualized marketing plans to exploit each product and even if it had the capacity to do so the industry itself has been criticized for having little marketing capability. Accurate reporting systems, which would help in developing effective marketing strategies, are hindered by a lack of central data-gathering mechanisms or lack of technical ability of independent-minded booksellers to collect and report statistics, or the reluctance of some independent-minded retailers to share data with others. Even recent developments such as Neilsen BookScan can only claim reporting within a margin of error of a whopping 20 to 30% because they don’t have access to all booksellers. Three years ago, the Association of American Publishers released a report on smaller publishers that extrapolated percentages from a 5% survey response. So data cannot realistically be used to make an accurate analysis the state of the book business overall. Compare this to the film industry, which can tell you on Monday morning what its weekend grosses were.

But does constant change emerge from sheer numbers or is its source deeper in the production and consumption of the literary work itself? Translating literature from its aesthetic shiftiness to a regularized industrial structure may be possible, but literature in a generally free publishing environment resists real industrial regularization. Such an environment may exist in some sections of the business, such as thoughtful improvement of distribution systems and back office operations, but both the product development side of writing and editing and the product positioning of marketing resist analysis and a subsequent re-integration into the path a book takes from conception to reading—specifically because of the very unstable nature of both creation and consumption of the art form itself. This is why it is so difficult to predict a book’s sales.

The situation is, of course, shared to some degree by the music and film industries, and in other ways by the visual art industry, and one can make a case that any business environment will be affected by its consumer use of the product, as the British business guru Charles Leadbeater has suggested. What sets literary books, music and other arts apart from other consumer products is that they appeal solely to the intellect and the emotions. They are used to fill human needs other than the practical, and by not being utilitarian, are inherently unstable as consumables. I would think we all share most basic responses to a car, but we don’t always share responses to a literary work.

When it comes to the vast numbers of titles published in the United States, the number of professional constituencies who work in the literary industry mirrors the multiplication of titles published. From the most obvious—writers, publishers and readers—the list quickly grows to over 20. Each group within the business has varied interests and needs, and this does not even include self-publishers who act as their own editors, publishers, marketers, distributors and reviewers or who use professional services for these activities. Each professional group exerts control on the process that runs the gamut from idea to consumption, becomes proprietary of the product, and links his or her economic benefit and prestige to that product. With the insertion of so many layers of workers who read the text and then re-interpret it for their own needs, the industry becomes varied and balkanized, standing anxious and unstable on a swaying podium of multiple needs, goals and meanings. The literary industry has not only been able to survive, but continues to poke its head above the water level when for a hundred years its critics have predicted, like Madame Sosostris, it will die by water. In fact, one could argue that the American literary business was much more chaotic in the nineteenth century before strict copyright protection and organized distribution.

This situation represents a type of “modern condition” in the literary business, affected by constantly changing copyright law, evolving ideas of freedom to publish in the United States, growth in the number of individual entertainment and artistic media that appeal to the public, and the development of new technologies. If you look at other countries, for example, with different laws from those that govern the United States and most of Western Europe, Vietnam, for example, where the state controls the apparatus of publication and distribution, the literary business is more stable, but few people in the western world would advocate such a system. If one looks at nineteenth-century America, in many ways the literary business was even less stable before the United States signed onto the international copyright law in 1891. Militating against stability is the persistence of the individual voice in literary creation (though many people believe this is fading and is being replaced by the execution of blueprints of art) and the desire by many, many people for self-actualization through the publishing of one’s thoughts, ideas and memories, which has created a vast proliferation of texts that by its very nature increases instability throughout the process, from the germ of an idea to the reader’s assimilation of the text.

How one harnesses and controls an environment in which 195,000 products are generated each year is the question publishers have been asking for about a generation, perhaps two, since the late 1950s when publishers began to consolidate and then were bought by media conglomerates, which now control about 75% of the book market in the United States. Compare this to, let’s say, the auto industry, and imagine if the Big Three car makers, or if you add the foreign automakers into the mix, about 10 automakers, and tell them that they will have to market 195,000 models without the benefit of significant consumer advertising and the fact that now, with the advent of the internet, almost anyone with an idea or the will to create can market competing products. This is what faces the literary business. Then add to the mix the proprietary nature of intellectual property, emotional attachment to unprofitable books on the part of the twenty-odd constituencies that make up the literary business, and tension between commerce and art, and you have a basic snapshot of the marketplace of literature today.

These twenty-odd constituencies make up the multi-voiced and heteroglossic nature of the literary business and add to the industry’s general instability. They run the gamut from the writers, who create the initial product, to readers, the final consumers of literary work. In between are agents, editors, copy editors, small, medium, large, specialty, academic and other publishers and their marketing and sales teams and accountants, book designers, publicists, wholesalers and distributors, book printers, librarians, all types of booksellers including independent, chain, college, street, second-hand, and otherwise, book festivals, intellectual property attorneys, literary organizations, book reviewers, bloggers, industry pundits, gossip columnists, radio interviewers, advertising sales-people, book group organizers, teachers, college professors, and literary critics, and I may be forgetting a few. In the literary business, opinions proliferate. Can you imagine, for example, the marketing team for General Motors deciding that one of GM’s products won’t sell, so they give it a marketing budget of zero dollars, which happens all the time to literary books? Or telling the designers and production people that they’ll have to do their own marketing of the new Cadillac since they have decided that the new Chevy has more potential in the marketplace?

Among these varied groups, voices vary as well, and they oscillate between competing ideologies of art and commerce. Stridency toward either of these depends on a person’s relative commitment to one pole or the other. During the past twenty five years, in particular, loyalties to art versus business have become increasingly pronounced, perhaps as a result of growing corporate control of the book business, though there has always been an element of antagonism between the two. Beginning in the 1960s, publishing companies began to consolidate. Random House acquired Doubleday, Alfred A. Knopf, and Pantheon, family established and run companies. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, however, an increasing conglomeratization took place as “media companies” began to acquire publishers. Paramount and Gulf & Western purchased Simon & Schuster, Pearson acquired Penguin, Bertelsmann acquired Random House. Profit margin took on a more intrinsic decision-making role. Corporatization made regularization a significant goal. Although such formidable publishers as Andre Schiffrin, who was forced out of highly literary Pantheon Books during this period, could claim in his memoir Business of Books that the older style of acquiring, editing and marketing books actually results in superior financial returns—this may be true: it is difficult to prove since the environment for reading is so different now in the age of the mass media. Schiffrin’s book is as much manifesto as memoir, a secular Leviticus of rage against a system that Schiffrin believes has discarded its former dedication to art and individual thought in favor of commerce. During the same period, bookselling became dominated by large chains and, later, on-line booksellers, to the detriment of smaller, independent stores who claim a more “human” and community orientation than the chains. Depending on one’s point of view, all this was either bad or good, which often represents a restrictive moral judgment.

Such judgments are made on a highly individual basis. At a recent public literary program one prominent author, in response to a question about what she would change about the book business, said she would prefer less corporatization. The novelist Jonathan Lethem offered free film rights to his new novel, citing part of the reason as his opposition to “the commodification of literature”. Statements of this sort reveal the writer’s acceptance or rejection of art and commerce and a personal and idiosyncratic balance developed between the two. Independent booksellers, some small press owners and staffers, directors of literary organizations, and others often share this outlook. When faced down by the structures of big business, they retreat into almost messianic diction. In order to achieve their own goals, they often have to participate in situations they might not like, but they frequently do so reluctantly and often seek ways to avoid its control. Reluctant capitalists, as Laura J. Miller dubbed booksellers and their employees.

Other considerations intervene in the choices members of the literary industry make about where they will stand along the spectrum of art and commerce, including varying concepts of what constitutes dynamism, ideologies of intellectual freedom and choice, which are often based on idiosyncratic views of democracy and capitalism, a need for personal and professional autonomy, and the nature and value of prestige. Americans often mix an altruistic purity into the process of how they decide what is personally valuable to them as people interested in the literary business. For example, despite many criticisms of American book awards, they have, for the most part, rejected the financial benefits that come from corporate sponsorship, which have been embraced by English book awards, and avoided the direct corruption of French awards.

Few publishing companies, large or small, will make literary decisions based solely on financial considerations—though this may change as profit pressures mount—but realistic assumptions do indeed take on very different roles at different companies and even within imprints at larger companies. Some, such as the former Time Warner Book Group (now called Hachette Book Group USA since its purchase by the French media empire Hachette) and HarperCollins (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) are known as commercially driven firms, but even they have less profitable divisions that focus on more literary works, such as Little Brown at Hachette and Ecco Press, which HarperCollins rescued from financial disaster just a few years ago. Some small presses portray themselves as mission-driven, and their prestige comes from their placement in opposition to the larger presses and as a corrective to a perceived narrowness in mainstream publishing. Akashic Books’s tag-line is “reverse-gentrification of the literary world”. Dalkey Archive Press has its own mission statement: “Since 1984, Dalkey Archive Press has made available to readers the finest works of world literature from the past 100 years. The intention of the Press is to serve as a permanent home for these works, so that they will continue to be read by present and future generations.”

By placing themselves in opposition, these presses, and many others like them, create an alternative prestige based in their adherence to a credo of the primacy of art that, as the French social critic Pierre Bourdieu has shown, adds non-financial economic value to their work and lifts their place in the literary industry. Even among larger publishers, acknowledgement of artistic achievement is reflected in the announcements of significant book awards being placed prominently on most publishers’ web sites, since awards create value in the literary industry, and, as a result, in the society in general, as James English has discussed in his book The Economy of Prestige. Individual publishing voices within the larger industry, known as imprints, and the ongoing establishment of independent small presses represent a constantly renewing resource, which is a great tradition in American letters. Note the names of small, mission-driven presses and imprints that begin fresh and independent and then become parts of larger presses. They have always provided larger presses with alternative voices. Ticknor & Fields, Viking Press, Hill & Wang, Carroll & Graf, all independent presses whose distinctive voices have been absorbed into larger presses, though often still retaining their individuality. Despite being a part of giant Random House, Alfred A. Knopf is as known for its literary publications as Grove Atlantic, an independent. Laboring in the fields of the literary lord are such literary-minded editors as Paul Slovak of Viking Penguin, Jonathan Galassi of Farrar Straus & Giroux, Morgan Entrekin of Grove Atlantic, and Sonny Mehta of Alfred Knopf. Add to this the dedicated alternative press editors and publishers such as Johnny Temple of Akashic Books, Richard Nash of Soft Skull, Nicolas Kanellos of Arte Público, John O’Brien of Dalkey Archive, and many, many more. In addition, distribution mechanisms for small and independent presses that act as an alternative to the major presses and distributors have emerged in the past 30 years, including Bookslinger, which became Consortium, Publishers Group West, which is now owned by Perseus Books, and Small Press Distribution. While these developments bring important alternative voices to the public, they may also add to the instability of an industry that seems to grow daily in order to feed the need for artistic outlets. Charles de Gaulle purportedly asked the question, “How can you govern a country that produces 246 different kinds of cheese?” Perhaps we should ask how can you expect to organize an industry that produces 195,000 books a year? The other question one should ask is: is it important to the health of the industry that it be regularized or is the instability of the industry actually an asset?

How this affects creativity and writing is difficult to gauge. From all accounts, larger presses are publishing fewer “literary” titles. However, as small presses grow in both number and size, they may offer additional outlets for publication. Digital publication has been established, but its future in the book business is anybody’s guess. Fifteen years ago hypertext was all the rage, and yet it has retreated to almost nothing. A useable e-book is within our grasp and several digitizing projects are well along in their process, meaning that within the coming five to ten years readers will be able to read any book ever published at any time, anywhere in the world. How this affects literacy and literariness is also difficult to assess. It will, however, affect the metaphysics of the industry and raise new questions for copyright, literary production, distribution, marketing and even the way we read. As John Perry Barlow, the former lyricist for The Grateful Dead, once said, “Information wants to be free.” Whether that type of freedom needs organization or it will organize itself by the reader’s usage is a question to be left for the future. The link between creativity, which is personal and idiosyncratic, and the structure of the literary business, which relies on the idiosyncratic reading and involvement of its constituents, seems evident. Various ideologies either create instability or are created by instability, ‘though I have no idea which comes first. Literature magnifies individuality and, one hopes, will continue to do so, if we’re lucky.