MFA vs. NYC vs. Third Stream? or the World of Contemporary American Writing

Next quarter I'll once again be teaching one of the undergraduate writing program's required courses, one of my favorites, "The Situation of Writing," and one central component of it involves discussing contemporary American literary publishing; the processes by which books come into print or, nowadays, e-print; the relationship between writers, agents, editors, and publishing houses; how writers do or don't make a living from publishing literary works; and so forth.

Increasingly as part of this discussion the issue of the MFA degree and MFA (and PhD in writing/poetics) programs arise, and I have tended to juxtapose lapidary overview texts on 20th century American publishing (like Jason Epstein's charming The Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future, W. W. Norton, 2002, or André Schiffrin's much more polemical The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read, Verso, 2001) with more recent journalistic articles on New York publishing's crises as part of the discussion. UCLA professor Mark McGurl's 2009 scholarly book, The Program Era: Post-War Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard), provides an excellent, thoroughgoingly historicized and theorized reading of these programs, which have become increasingly normalized as the means by which American writers become (American) writers, but Mark's remarkable book is 480 pages, and really deserves extended treatment and discussion, worthy of a semester-long graduate seminar, which I unfortunately do not have in a 10-week quarter, especially given the amount of material I must cover.

I was thus extremely pleased to read Chad Harbach's essay "MFA vs. NYC," which appears in the journal n+1 and is excerpted in the November 26, 2010 online edition of Slate.  Though it has its faults, as any such wide-ranging, systems-summarizing piece does, from being too binary and tidy to too vague and generalizing in places, it nevertheless provides one of the best overviews of I've seen of what the contemporary American publishing world, both the longstanding, commercial mainstream one (headquarted in New York, but with major nodes in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia), and the increasingly parallel one that has developed in university MFA programs. Whereas I have tended in my classes to discuss the New York one, which is, as Harbach notes, in a period of extreme economic stress and structural change, the parallel one, located in MFA programs, is now as significant and important, and as much as the literary world hasn't fully reckoned with this, I would suggest that outside of figures like McGurl and many writer-critics, the scholarly world hasn't either. Moreover, though my introduction to the writing world was primarily through the New York angle, my personal trajectory has straddled the development of the MFA world, and I am now located within it. I studied in an MFA program and have taught in several; my publishing experience bridges both too.  If it is almost impossible now to live off one's literary publications in New York or most major American cities--which was not the case 25 or 30 years ago--it is also growing more and more difficult to get creative writing jobs, because of the supply-and-demand problem and university funding crisis, which, though nowhere near as bad as in the humanities more generally, is worsening. The MFA world, consisting by its very nature of artists, and being situated in the university, is still viewed with suspicion by the scholarly world--what is it that writers do?--and yet it has, as McGurl and Harbach note to differing degrees, as institutionalized and conventionalized as the instutions of which it is a part (and less so each day, apart).

The tensions between these two worlds have played out with several of the major American awards of late, especially the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Awards for fiction, which have been awarded to MFA-produced and based writers published not published by major houses.  In the case of Paul Harding's Tinkers, it famously was rejected by countless major publishers before it found a small publisher and went on to win the Pulitzer.

What Harbach doesn't discuss or even broach (in part because the world of n+1, situated as it is at the nexus of the NYC and MFA worlds, doesn't see it), is a third American literary world-system, however, parallel to both of these, which neither NYC's official publishing hierarchy nor that of the MFA programs, at least in the official sense, takes immediate or consistent note of, but which the structural and above all technological shifts and changes over the last 25 or so years have made possible, which is the autonomous/self-publishing/minoritarian/issue-based/grass-roots writing communities. This world, which is both diminished in key ways as elements of it have been assimilated by the NYC and MFA worlds (queer writing; black writing; black queer writing; etc.) and, for non-creative work, by the institutionalization of criticism, is the world of the slams; the world of community-based minoritarian organizations; the world that produced Language poetry, the Violet Quill, the Fag Rag Collective, OutWrite, Other Countries, Seal Press, Alyson, Gay Men's Press of New York, and so on, and that was already on the wane by the early 1990s. This is a world that many writers of my generation and I also came out of. The Dark Room Writers Collective, my first post-collegiate exposure to the literary world and an autonomous entity based in but distinct from the larger literary world in Cambridge and Boston, was inspired in no small part by and developed out of the historical, social and political trends of this world, as did a great many of the writers (Essex Hemphill, Thomas Grimes, Paul Beatty, Ntozake Shange, etc.) who came through the Dark Room in its earliest days.

But even then, all these competing worlds were already in play, and some of the Dark Room's literary avatars, writers who visited and read and provided advice, like Walker, had been honored by the pinnacle of the New York publishing world, the Pulitzer Prize committee, or Shange by the Obie and Tony Awards; Derek Walcott was an internationally renowned poet teaching in a distinguished M(F)A program, and would soon win the Nobel Prize; and younger writers like Elizabeth Alexander and Carl Phillips were in doctoral humanities programs and had received MAs or MFAs; and the pull of the university was something that every single writer in the Dark Room felt, and eventually followed (or succumbed to, as it were).  The NYC publishing world, as I said, has assimilated some writers from this realm, especially the most commercial ones, the older ones of a certain level of distinction and public recognition, and those whose work could be commodified and marketed as part of a niche (a historical style, period, etc.), and academe has done the same, with the focus being on intellectual thematics, schools, critical arguments which these writers might be said to have generated or been a part of. Death and time are powerful passports to either, I hate to say.  Nevertheless, a gulf still remains between the work of this sort that continues, independent writing and publishing not attached to or located either in the publishing capitals and not part of any educational institutions (I think, for example, of a superb small press like Redbone Press and its publisher, Lisa Moore, for example), and the NYC and MFA worlds, which have their own concerns, forms and modes of socialization, interests, understandings of politics, and so forth.

One person who always reminds me of this quite thoughtfully is poet and activist Jennifer Karmin, who at the pre-Poets Theater panel discussion broached the issue of resources in relation to the sort of project that had unfolded at Oracle Theater, and who such work was for, who had access to it, what its origins were beyond the ones usually suggested (the New York School coterie, for example, the Beat Poets, and similar groupings). Amiri Baraka, Sarah Schulman, and Sonia Sanchez are other contemporary writers, activists and critics whose life and work have underlined the connections and tensions surrounding these various streams for me. All began in what we might call this alternative or grass-roots stream; all have eventually moved into the university and taught creative writing; all have been honored or recognized, and to some degree published, by the NYC world; but all retain vital connections to the aesthetic and political sites from which they emerged.

I feel this tension in my own life and work, and it lies in part at the core of my critique in the talk I gave at the Museum of Contemporary Art, at the center of what I have been trying to think through but not fully able to articulate yet, has to do with the lack of recognition of this third or alternative stream, in relation to avant-gardism, even though at this point it really the only one capable of addressing, at least in a direct way, the ongoing concerns that many of us feel about the onward march of libertarian-capitalism/neoliberalism/communicative capitalism (to use Jodi Dean's term). It comes up for me every time not just my students, but writers I know in the world, ask no longer whether they should attend an MFA (or PhD) program but take that as a given and want me to parse and rank them, but also when I think about how some of the NYC-based folks, agents, critics, etc., simply could care less about what's happening on campuses, or even more so off them, unless there's the possibility of capitalizing on and somehow effectively commodifying this work so that it can become, well, a means to money, to influence, to a livelihoood.

This brings me back to what I have labeled this alternative stream, which I strongly believe is as crucial for contemporary American art as the other two, and my ongoing wonder about how effective it can it ever be, could it ever be, in a world in which the money remains, at least for the moment in NYC and with mainstream publishing, or what's left of it, while the entropic force and power has moved towards and has now diffused throughout MFA programs is another question, but such are my imperfect and still fully unworked-through thoughts after reading and thinking about Harbach's piece.

Wylie's seismic venture + Writers' homes + Better writing? Start blogging

It was only a matter of time before an agent took this step, and unsurprising to anyone deeply familiar with the Anglophone publishing world is the person who's done so: Andrew Wylie. Bypassing the major publishing houses, he's established a deal with Amazon to produce and publish ebooks, under a new imprint he's founded, Odyssey Editions, by some of the 700 authors under his representation, including some of the best known in the world, like John Updike, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and Salman Rushdie. Odyssey will start with 20 ebooks, including Rushdie's award-winning Midnight's Children.

Publisher Random House, part of the Bertelsmann publishing conglomerate and print publisher of some of Updike's, Roth's and Rushdie's books, is so upset at Wylie's tack that they are refusing to conduct any new business on English-language books with the Wylie Agency. Other print publishers of his authors, like Simon & Schuster (part of CBS), and Penguin (part of Pearson), remain mum.

Quoting the Huffingtonpost.com article,

"The Wylie Agency's decision to sell e-books exclusively to Amazon for titles which are subject to active Random House agreements undermines our longstanding commitments to and investments in our authors, and it establishes this Agency as our direct competitor," Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum said in a statement.

"Therefore, regrettably, Random House on a worldwide basis will not be entering into any new English-language business agreements with the Wylie Agency until this situation is resolved."

Since this cuts print publishers out of what is increasingly the most viable and lucrative area in publishing, people in the industry are extremely worried, and, as Kenneth Li's recent article in the Financial Times notes, it could be the end of the 500-year-old publishing industry at it's evolved.  Supposedly Wylie's authors and author estates will receive 50% royalties, which would represent a windfall over the 25% royalties they now get with standard ebook contracts, and the 12%-15% they get with standard print contracts.  As Li's article notes, the threat of this sort of action has led some publishers to negotiate generous ebook royalties with other agents, like Amanda Urban.  Yet Wylie's prominence is such that other agents will likely follow suit, and this opens up possibilities not only for writers with agents, but perhaps even more so for non-agented writers who have access to proprietary software or to independent publishers, have or can create a readership, and can strike deals with the online sellers. A brave new world of publishing indeed.



***

A work of art? Sort of. A bit disturbing, nevertheless, wouldn't you say? Actually, it's an image of a piece in Edward Gorey's house (aha--now it makes sense), one of many in A. N. Devers' Writers' Houses, an online collection of images and texts about writers' dwellings.  According to Madeleine Schwartz at The New Yorker's book blog, which is where I learned about the database, the featured homes include Edgar Allen Poe's, Pearl S. Buck's, Emily Dickinson's, John Steinbeck's, James Merrill's, and yes, Edward Gorey's.

Devers is deeply interested in writers' living spaces (that is, more than the particular rooms in which they write, which Susannah Raab has photographed, and Diana Fuss, among others, has written critically about) and encourages visitors' images and accounts of pilgrimages to them.  (I'm assuming she means writers no longer with us.)

Almost everywhere I visit I associate with the writers and artists who've lived there, but I only occasionally seek out the homes--especially if they're not house or apartment-museums--of these figures. I did visit Poe's room during my years down at the University of Virginia, and like many a schoolchild in St. Louis, I was taken to Eugene Field's house, which is a famous museum. Last year when I was in Cuba I did try to visit José Lezama Lima's house, which I was told was a museum (I also thought of the Havana homes of Reinaldo Arenas, Severo Sarduy and Virgilio Piñera, neither of which I imagine the government would be happy to have on maps), but I wasn't able to find it, though it turned out that I was staying only a few blocks from it. On the other hand, one of the hotels where I stayed was the home-in-exile, for some years, of the great Spanish poet Juan Ramón Jiménez, and I did photograph the commemorative plaque in the lobby, though I wasn't able to find out what rooms he'd stayed in.

If you could visit the homes of 2-3 non-living authors you admire, who and where would they be?

***

Someone is always slagging off on blogging and online writing, but not everyone thinks it's such a bad idea. Blogger and online writer Mary Jaksch, for example, solicited ideas to improve her writing, and the common aspect of the responses she received was, no surprise to anyone who writes regularly or teaches writing, was that practice makes perfect. At the top of her list of 73 helpful responses and suggestions on becoming a better writer was one that will probably make Andrew Keen (no relation) and Lee Siegel explode: to blog. Blogging, and regularly doing so (as I once used to do!), was, she thought, a surefire "winner." I agree, though I think it's probably best if it doesn't crowd out other projects (fictional, poetic, dramaturgical, essayistic, a mélange of all of these, etc.) that you're working on. Some other commonsense suggestions from Jaksch:

13. Write in different genres: blog posts, poems, short stories, essays.
14. Read grammar books.
15. Write without distractions.
16. Challenge yourself: write in a crowded cafe, write on the toilet, write for 24 hours straight.
17. Take a trip. Road trips, beach trips, bus trips, plane trips.
18. Watch movies. Can you write the story better?
19. Write. And then write some more.
20. Read, think, read, write, ponder, write - and read some more.
21. Read your stuff aloud to anyone who can stand it - including the cat.
22. Go back and cut 10% from your word count.

One small note about this last point: anyone who's ever submitted her work to an editor knows that cutting can be one of the most difficult things to experience, but my personal experience has been that editorially suggested brevity almost always produces a better final piece--except twice, when an editor thought that commas I'd been using (in part in homage to John Edgar Wideman's style, which I adulated when I was in my early 20s) should be converted to periods, transforming a story into near-gibberish, and another time, when a review of Gary Fisher In Your Pocket was hacked down so much that it verged on nonense. When the writing program's 2010 visiting fiction and creative nonfiction writers--George Saunders and JoAnn Beard, respectively--were discussing their experiences with The New Yorker, both noted the sometimes brutal editorial cuts they'd suffered and battled over. In the case of both authors, I don't think there's any question that the resulting works, published in the magazine, weren't at least somewhat stronger than originally submitted. Of course editing doesn't always work out so well, but if you do it enough, on your own work as well as others', it can often prove fortuitous.

Senior Readings + Epstein on Publishing's Future + Problems of Digital Media Preservation

Customarily in the university's undergraduate writing program, graduating senior majors and minors read at the end of the academic year, in late May and early June. This year, however, the readings moved to this just-concluded winter quarter, which meant that the spring quarter wouldn't be so overloaded, but it also translated into 2 readings per week for several weeks at first, and then 1 reading, usually on Tuesday evenings, up through this--exam--week. For the last three months, 2 to 3 seniors, paired with a faculty member who teaches in the program, have read.  I participated this evening in what was the final reading, with three seniors, Allie Keller (whom I taught in her introductory fiction class), poet Meriwether Clarke, and Aaron Kuper (a poet who was in my Situation of Writing Class). I hadn't heard Allie present her fiction in several years, and had never heard Meriwether or Aaron read, so it was a pleasure to hear all three of them. Aaron, who has a connoisseur's eye for books (once he brought for show-and-tell a well-maintained, hardbound, mid-20th century copy of Oscar Wilde's The Ballad of Reading Gaol at a midwestern bookshop), seemed to have taken to heart one key suggestion of one our class readings, of reading other poets' work in addition to your own, in Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" I didn't know that he was going to do so (he read poems by Millay, Verlaine, and Sandburg), but I'd decided, after the panel discussion on Saturday and a review of all the translations I have done, a great many of them for and on this blog, that I'd pick a selection of them, and read four to end the program.

I've never read any of my translations at the university, so this was a first for me, but I'd also never read any non-English texts aloud either, so I chose one poem each from French (Alain Mabanckou's "Séjour Terrestre"), Portuguese (Manuel Bandeira's "Desencanto"), Spanish (Severo Sarduy's final poem from his series, "Cuadros de Franz Kline"), and Italian (Eugenio Montale's motetto "Il fiore che ripeti"), and read both the original and my English translation. It was, to put it simply, really fun. I ended by reading one of my favorite poems from Seismosis, "Color," which with several others was recently translated into French. I didn't want to overdo it, though, so I read only the French translation of "Process," the one-line poem that opens and closes the volume. The English and French ("Processus") rhythms differ, but the words themselves are quite similar. And with that, I helped to bid our wonderful seniors goodbye. Congrats to all of them, and as I said at the reading, it's been a honor to work with and teach them.

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I mentioned before that in the Situation of Writing class we read Jason Epstein's charming, memoiristic survey of his profession, Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future (W. W. Norton, 2001), which explores both the transformations in the last half-century of mainstream literary publishing in the US and Epstein's particular role in them.  In "Publishing: The Revolutionary Future," a short piece that appeared in the March 11, 2010, New York Review of Book, Epstein revisits many of the themes in his book. He once again discusses many of the major challenges facing his industry, as well as the current possibilities inherent in the electronic and digital platforms that had only just begun to appear a decade ago. In particular, he touches upon several issues that he didn't explore as much in the earlier work in part because of the state of e-publishing then: the question of social networking sites' role in the creation of new works; the potential proprietary problems with digitization; and the "cloud" approach not only increasingly central to computing but to thinking itself.



Concerning the first topic, he argues that while collaboration on certain projects is possible (and I can testify personally to this), to an immense degree the work of literary creation is solitary. All the workshopping and Facebooking in the world cannot transform a poem, say, in the way that a writer herself, even with aid from such sources, can and must do. With regard to the second issue, of digitization, Epstein suggests a practical approach that would benefit readers while not disadvantaging publishers, though it raises a basic question: in the digital world, can you really, fully own a book as you've been able to for centuries with a hardcopy version?  This question rose in sharpest relief recently when the behemoth sales site, Amazon, at decided to delete digital copies of Orwell's 1984, at the request of the book's publisher, from Kindle users who had downloaded it. With a hardcopy book, this simply would not have been possible. Amazon was heavily criticized, but as the largest online retailer in the country and the owner of the propietary software--if not the actual content--through which Orwell's book was displayed, they had and demonstrated how much control they had in a way that would not be possible with a hardcopy book--unless, of course, we descended into a Fahrenheit 451-type scenario, or some similar confiscatory scheme.  Is "purchasing" a book from Amazon on its or similarly proprietary software then only a form of rental or leasing? If so, why isn't this discussed more? And given the instability of software, aren't there multiple dangers involved with this particular format? Should someone who "buys" a book for the Kindle also be able to print out a hardcopy version...just in case?

On the third topic, he cites the "nihilism" in the anti-textual push for a "collective brain" that would "[reproduce] electronically on a universal scale the synergies that occur spontaneously within individual minds." Among the issues I've noted and others in the article, this one did not come up in the earlier book, perhaps because the concept was only nascent even among researchers at that point, but we're now at the stage where the "cloud" concept has begun to take off. In the absence of texts as we've known them, their materiality, or even the hard drives on which our digital files have been stored, can we even speak of textuality any more, or are we now onto something completely different? Are changes not just in materiality but in consciousness itself, in relation to this concept, pointing perhaps to a new ontology of thinking, creating and reading?  What is the appropriate metaphor beyond the "cloudlike"?  What stands in for the virtuality that is more than concept but still not fully in our grasp, except in evanescent flashes?

Epstein's perspective here, as in the book, brims with hope and not a little caution. His print-on-demand machine suggestion still has yet to take hold, but it still seems feasible and, perhaps, one route to counter the deep fears and creeping reality of the anachronization, dematerialization and detextualization of literature. These contraptions very well may play a huge role in our literary future, not only by allowing us, to a degree not yet known, to identify, print and own books we have only dreamt of or been able to access via libraries and archives, but also in saving some of the artifacts of our contemporary literary culture, such bookstores, which as physical entities seem poised, like the mainstream publishing industry and all the industries once related to it, to fade into but a ghostly shimmer of their former selves.

∫∫∫

Epstein, though citing the fragility of digitization, doesn't explore the question of preservation, both of past electronic and digital works, or current or future ones. In this past Monday's New York Times, Patricia Cohen, in "Fending Off Digital Decay, Bit by Bit," discusses some of the chief issues librarians and archivists face in accessing, preserving and presenting, for research and public interest and enjoyment, works originally created in a digital format. She focuses on Emory University's impressive display of author Salman Rushdie's personal archive, which includes not only book covers and handwritten journals, but

four Apple computers (one ruined by a spilled Coke). The 18 gigabytes of data they contain seemed to promise future biographers and literary scholars a digital wonderland: comprehensive, organized and searchable files, quickly accessible with a few clicks.

Yet those searchable files aren't so easy to reach, because with "born-digital" materials, which is to say, in dealing with particular types of hardware and software, there are any number of challenges.

Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper. Even if those storage media do survive, the relentless march of technology can mean that the older equipment and software that can make sense of all those 0’s and 1’s simply don’t exist anymore.

Imagine having a record but no record player.

Cohen goes on to talk about how Emory, like Stanford University--in part because of its geographical location at the very heart of Silicon Valley--and the University of Texas's library, has become a leader in this area, addressing and solving some of these problems, but the larger questions the article raises are legion, and yet they aren't so frequently and publicly discussed, whether you're talking about future e-books and formats, past electronic files and digital materials, or the lifespan of many types of hardware and software. Cohen notes that Stanford's library has set up the nation's first digital forensics lab, starring FRED (Forensic Recovery of Evidence Device), a recovery machine, to address hardware and software access and preservation issues. Emory's library, she adds, has received funding to emulate Stanford's effort. At Harvard, one of the nation's largest library systems, the archivist has been storing the 50+ floppy disks received as part of John Updike's bequest until a policy and systems are in place to deal with them.

Erik Lesser for The New York Times
Salman Rushdie at Emory University in Atlanta, which is currently exhibiting his personal archive, including personal papers, and electronically produced drafts of his novels.

As I pointed out to the students in my class, I don't have a computer that can run any of the ancient 5 1/4" floppy disks I used in college, or even know of anyone who has the hardware to run Xywrite, which is the specific software program I used; and while C and I do have some old Macs at home, I don't know if I can still open many of the 3 1/2" disks that hold some of my earliest literary efforts and who knows what else? Some of them are now saved to an old iMac, which itself has careened towards obsolescence. And then there are all the online works I've created, like my old website, accessible, though only in part, via the Wayback machine. But what about projects that have been scrubbed from the Net altogether?  I also don't see emails as artifacts to be saved, but should I? Do I want people to be able to comb through them? I still write letters, but I can say with assurance that my approach to drafting handwritten letters always entails more care than any emails I write except those for work, which also receive a high level of attention. As regular readers of this blog know, my grammatical and spelling mishaps, especially when I'm writing with a TV playing the background, are legion.

A friend who's an archivist at a major public research responded to an email about this by noting that this is an issue he's been thinking about and trying to address for some time. He noted that he tries to get writers to think about printing out drafts, the issues related to electronic and digital media, and what preservation and access might look like. What he didn't say, and what the article suggests, is that there are, as of now, no clear standards on how to address these questions, which will become more pressing with each passing day.

Illinois votes + Amazon vs. Macmillan + Tissue as commodity + Golden Girls grow gays

Today's Primary Election Day in Illinois, and a number of key posts are on the ballot, from the US Senate seat, formerly occupied by President Barack Obama and now by his notorious successor, Roland Burris, to the Governors' seat, whose previous recent occupants include a convicted felon (George Ryan) and a man (Rod Blagojevich) who tried to sell the just-mentioned Senate seat to the highest bidder, was impeached by the state legislature, and will soon appear on a TV reality show, to various municipal and local positions, including one that almost no one outside of the state knows about but which has been a rag of contention for years, the powerful Cook County Board President's office. That seat is currently occupied by Todd Stroger, whose father suffered a massive stroke, thereby handing the gig to his son.

Since I vote in New Jersey, I'm a spectator in all of this, but I have to say that while I was somewhat frustrated with the lackluster options in the New Jersey elections that put Rovian Republican Chris Christie in office, I would feel even more disillusioned if I had to choose from the rogues' and hacks' gallery vying for these various Illinois seats. Let's just take the US Senate seat. On the GOP side, the leader is Mark Kirk, a sometimes moderate (by Midwestern standards), sometimes right-wing Congressman representing Chicago's wealth North Shore. Kirk was outed as gay, via a really sleazy media-leaked rumor, by one of his GOP opponents, a very nasty operator named Andy Martin, who has zero chance of winning. Facing almost no real competition Kirk, who ha moved politically to the right to secure the nomination, will very likely win the GOP nomination, where he'll face young, fairly progressive Democratic projected-winner Alexi Giannoulis, the current State Treasurer. (David Hoffmann, the state Inspector General, a former Federal prosecutor, and a truly progressive candidate with a clean (including anti-Daley) record, probably doesn't have a chance, but if he did, he would make the best Senator out of all the candidates.) Ironically enough, Giannoulis's family mint and former employer, Broadway Bank, is in serious financial trouble as a result of its lending policies over the last 8 years. During Giannoulis's tenure as Chief Loan Officer from 2002 to 2006, Broadway Bank jumped heavily into the subprime lending business and other risky banking activities. While Giannoulis has argued that he wasn't really involved in the problems that now place Broadway Bank on the brink, a review of the record belies this. As Treasurer he's done a decent job, particularly in the midst of the current economic calamities, which have hit Illinois, the nation's 6th most populous state, very hard, but his banking tenure, and his refusal to be explicit about his role in it, are troublesome.

On some of the major issues facing Congress, and in particular the Senate, it's clear where these two will land. Kirk has been reciting the GOP's health care initiatives mantras, which will do little to improve the ongoing health care cost crunch or resolve the longer time economic crisis the country faces, while Giannoulis would be a reliable vote for the current Senate health care/insurance reform bill, down to supporting Obama's flipflopped position on taxing higher cost plans, yet he also would probably support a reconciliation bill that included more progressive reforms like a public option. Kirk seems likely to oppose major banking reform, while Giannoulis, whose family firm would be affected by the legislation, probably would back it. On national security, Kirk appears likely to back any administration initiatives that track closely to Bush's, which is to say, most of them, while Giannoulis could very well be a firm supporter of Obama's on many national security initiatives, but also outspoken on ones that progressives have identified as particularly problematic, such as the delayed closure of Guantánamo, the glacial withdrawal of troops from Iraq, and so on. As to whether Giannoulis can defeat Kirk in the general election will come down to the general economic conditions in the state, how well he can appeal to people in the populous, centrist ring counties around Chicago, how vigorously he deflects criticism of his family bank's fiascos, and how much he delineates himself from the Blago-tainted Democratic cast. Kirk's chances will depend upon how much voters across the state are willing to hold their noses and vote for a Republican, people's sense that he would be willing to work with the Democrats and Obama as opposed to being yet another GOP obstructionist, and how many Chicagoans and Chicagoland suburbanites show up for the general election.  The after-effects of the outing and his denial will have little effect at all, because Giannoulis, like Burris, has a strong pro-gay record and wouldn't use Kirk's hypocritical record against him.

And so it goes down the line. The country and state are in sad shape, and many of today's leading candidates appear to offer little in the way of viable solutions for the nation's or state's problems.  There are Green Party candidates running in a lot of these races, and if I could vote here, some of them would get my vote, but I also don't think hardly any of them have a realistic chance to win in the upcoming general election. One candidate has stood out for me: Democrat S. Raja Krishnamoorthi (above right, Huffingtonpost.com) a former Obama campaign employee and current candidate for the Illinois Comptroller position. One of his ad taglines is "Another candidate with a funny name," and his commercials and posters emphasize "RAJA," with the aim of getting people outside Chicagoland to vote for him (he grew up in Peoria, about as middle-American as exists).  Based on his background and record, he appears to be one of the best options Illinois voters will have today.

###

Returning to the publishing tip, one of the most noteworthy issues this week has been the battle between mega-retailer Amazon, the largest online bookseller in the country and proprietor of the Kindle e-reader, and Macmillan (part of the McGraw-Hill conglomerate, I believe), over a pricing dispute. To summarize, Macmillan objected to Amazon's loss-leader pricing of e-books at $9.99, and wanted to sell e-books for more, by moving from a wholeseller model to an agency model. The fact that Apple just debuted its iPad, which represents direct competition to the Kindle, and agreed with the country's five largest publishers (Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins Publishers, Macmillan, Penguin Group, and Simon & Schuster) to sell e-books at a higher $12.99-$14.99 price point, threatened Amazon's power and buttressed Macmillan's complaint, since the publisher would be undercutting themselves by selling books at differing prices on a similar platform. Amazon responded in brutal fashion by severing all purchasing access Macmillan's books, not only removing buy buttons from Macmillan's print books on the Amazon website, but also also cutting Kindle owners' and user's access to Macmillan's texts.  Just like that.

Quoting the Publisher's Lunch site (I don't have login access, but h/t to Lisa M.):

Among the books subject to the greatest potential short-term effect of Amazon's buy-button removal is Andrew Young's just-released THE POLITICIAN, which curiously still ranks at No. 9 on Amazon's bestseller list (and has been between No. 4 and No. 6 today at Barnes and Noble.com). Hilary Mantel's WOLF HALL was at 69 on Amazon last night, falling steadily today and now at No. 128. Atul Gawande's THE CHECKLIST MANIFESTO: How to Get Things Right was at 34 last night on Amazon, now at No. 66,--and has risen from 112 up to 86 at BN.com in the same time period. (These numbers change slightly every hour we've been checking them.)

Amazon has now relented, but larger issues remain. What is an equitable price for e-books, which do not require much of the cost of hardcopy books; there's no physical printing or storage or shipping involved, so should they be priced as anywhere near as high as trade paperbacks? How much power and control should any retailer or hardware company like Amazon have over publishers, and should a retailer which is also a hardware maker also be allowed such overwhelming control the means of distribution? Yet on the other hand, if a bookseller is offering a deal that's more financially beneficial to readers, should a publisher be able to trump that?  How should we think and talk about the publishing and distribution systems in light of these dramatic technological changes?  Should the sellers be making the extra profit off these works, as the agency model suggests, or shouldn't that be going to authors, who are responsible for the works themselves--i.e., the content?  And, even more basically, what is an e-book, really?

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This morning I was given to mull over the deep and historic mistrust many Black Americans, including my own parents and many friends of mine, have had with the medical profession, the government and affiliated private institutions after I read this New York Times story about poor, Black tobacco farmer Henrietta Lacks, who died from aggressive cervical cancer back in the early 1950s. Denise Grady's article discusses a new book, by Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Crown, 2010), which explores what Johns Hopkins Hospital did with her cancerous tissue--her body--after her death, how the ubiquitous HeLa cells developed from that tissue have enabled an array of medical discoveries, and even enriched some of the researchers and corporations using it, though not a dime nor, for years any recognition or thanks went to the Lacks family, which was devastated by the loss of this then young mother and wife. Moreover, this all happened without Mrs. Lacks' or her family's consent, or even knowledge.

The racial, class, and educational gulfs between the Lackses and the doctors and researches enabled this, paralleling other Black Americans' experience with the US medical system. According to the article, hoever, Skloot points out similar situations are still occurring half a century, despite beefed up informed consent laws. Courts have tended to side with the scientists as opposed to patients and the family of the deceased, provoking a new movement for "tissue rights" and greater ethical inquiry into who owns removed bodily tissue even in the face of legally binding agreements, and what happens and who benefits, and at what cost, when that tissue--after surgery or death--represents not just a vital element in invaluable, life-saving research, but a valuable commodity as well.

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Today's laughter link: Christwire: The Golden Girls: How One TV Show Turned a Generation of American Boys into Homosexuals. Two names: Bea Arthur, Rue McClanahan.

Not humorous at all, but a positive sign: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen spoke out strongly today on behalf of repealing the odious "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy that has led to the discharges of thousands of valuable military personnel. Unfortunately, we do not need another year of "study." Ask the UK, Israel, and other countries for pointers, and take lessons. Just get it done, and swiftly!

On Publishing

Counting down...one more week till classes are done, and all the wonderful students I've had the opportunity to work with for the last few years graduate and do great things in the wider world.

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Requiescant in pace "Queen of the Blues" and longtime Chicagoan Koko Taylor, historian and multicultural visionary Ronald Takaki, Buffalo Braves baller extraordinaire and "Iron Man" Randy Smith, actor David Carradine, and eminent foreign policy scholar Ernest May.

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I've been wanting to write about the book business, so to speak, for a while, but haven't found the time or energy to do so. (That mental energy has been on the wane for a while.) Instead, I've been culling articles I've come across or that others (Reggie H., Lisa M., Anthony) have forwarded to me about what's been going on with publishing, writing, and such things of late. I had envisioned a grand, synthetic post about the state of publishing, but I realize that's not going to happen, so let me try something more modest.

I'll start with a bit of news, which is that about a month ago, I received the annual royalties for both of the books I've written or co-written, and so, THANK YOU to every single person out there who has ever bought either book, but an especial thanks to those who've bought either of them within the last calendar year. They are rarefied creatures, more poetic than regular reading fare, so I really do appreciate the readership (and the reviews, positive or otherwise, and all who've taught both works, all of it!). I've received royalties for Annotations for several years now; those began appearing after the return period had ended, which followed the first few very good years of fine reviews and a second printing. For those unfamiliar with the term "return period" or the concept, this stretch in a writer's relationship with her publisher occurs when bookstores can and do return your books to the publisher if they're not selling or want more shelf space for other books. The publishers ship the books back and I believe they receive credit for them. (It used to be the case that the chains did this more than small and independent bookstores, though Amazon's and Sam's Club's/Wal-Mart's vast storage facilities may have mitigated this to some extent, at least for books with smaller press runs.)

On an annual royalty statement, returns usually show up as a negative tally against your advance, so if you got a hypothetical $10,000 advance, returns are counted against that advance until you've sold enough books to earn back that $10K. (Thus for the huge advances, say $250K on up, authors have to sell enough books to pay those back before they can start receiving royalties, and often that doesn't happen.) Larger publishers are known to do one of two things to books that are returned in bulk: sell them to a remainder house for a pittance, meaning the publisher gets something on the dollar for them but the author gets zero, or pulp them, in which case the book can go out of print. Remaindered books are the ones you often find online or on a remaindered table at bookstores, and they'll often carry a mark on the bottom edge of the pages to indicate they were remaindered. They also usually sell for a fraction of the original cover price (a $25 new hardcover book can sell at a remaindered price for about $5, meaning that the bookstore selling it could get $4 profit if they paid $1 to pick it up from a remainder house.) New Directions, the small, independent publisher of Annotations, however, has a fairly sterling record of keeping its books in print, and they've neither remaindered nor pulped it. In fact, it has earned back the advance, and so now I am receiving a small but regular trickle of royalties. With Seismosis, published by a very tiny and fairly new publisher, 1913 Press, the situation was a bit different; we didn't receive an advance (as is the case for most poetry books), but it too has sold, and so both my co-author and I received (a very small but welcome) compensation for it this year. I mention all of this because the return policy is one of the worst aspects of the book business, but it is not the only bad one; others include outrageous advances to authors for books that do not sell, publishing too many books, dumbing down books, paying the bookstore chains to feature certain books at the exclusion of others, and above all, steadily conglomerating and expecting outrageous profit margins on a business that was never meant to bring in money like others (software, discount investment houses, luxury goods, etc.). Yet in a way these may be more indicative of the book business of the past--or which is passing--and less of what is unfolding now.

Now I am not the first person to speak about the sickness of the book industry, or its considerable structural, formal, and material changes; there are quite a few books that detail its woes, which have been unfolding before our eyes for the past two decades. Andre Schiffrin's coruscating The Business of Books: How the International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read (Verso, 2000), is a classic, but there are others, like Jason Epstein's memoir Book Business: Publishing Past, Present, and Future (W. W. Norton, 2002) or Laura Miller's study Reluctant Capitalists: Booksellers and the Culture of Consumption (University of Chicago, 2007), that launch a raft of insights about the history and contemporary particulars of American (and international) publishing. But even taking these books' many felicities into account, the contemporary publishing situation is so fluid that none of these works fully grasp it. At the structural level, several of the chain bookstores, which had been the bane for so many for at least a decade, are financially teetering, leaving Amazon (and Wal-Mart), a diversified retailer, as the nation's the major bookseller. The distribution has stumbled badly over the last few years. In material terms, print book sales, like sales of almost everything, keep tumbling; sales of audio books, a moneymaker for some presses, have plummeted; and only e-book sales are rising. This last bit of good news ties directly into the rise of Amazon's Kindle, the major e-book reader on the market today, and similar electronic book technologies, like Scribd, Stanza, which I have on my iPhone--the cost of most Kindle texts is far less than publishers charge for hardcover books of any sort. One of the traditional publicity and promotional avenues, the newspaper, is also faltering badly; these days it's not only book reviews sections or even book reviews that are facing extinction, but the very papers in which they appear. So how are publishers--the big publishers, in particular, which is to say the conglomerates that control the vast majority of publishing today--responding? What are they going to do? Will smaller publishers become the standard again? Will print-on-demand finally take off? Will people migrate to electronic books over printed texts, and will those persist, like radios or bicycles, as useful and perhaps quite necessary, but for the most part superseded but still valued technologies?

Lisa Moore, a great small-press publisher (Redbone Press, in at least one of whose books my work has appeared) and correspondent, hipped me to one of the best recent takes I've read (and I've been collecting quite a few of late). It's by Farrar Straus and Giroux Senior Vice President and author Elizabeth Sifton and is "The Long Goodbye? The Book Business and Its Woes," it appeared in the May 20, 2009 edition of the Nation. (I must note that FSG, though part of a huge German-led conglomerate, Holtzbrinck, remains one of the sharpest publishers in the industry.) Sifton anatomizes the situation rather thoroughly and at times wittily, offering such thoughts as:

In America, pubescent vampire novels are selling like crazy to readers of all ages, also memoirs about cats and puppies; classics are still in demand, as are cookbooks about cupcakes, of which there are an amazing number. Books by brand-name writers continue to populate the bestseller lists (though not racking up the numbers they used to). Every week the trade bulletins report hundreds of new books being signed up, sometimes for absurd amounts of money, by dozens of publishers. Self-indulgent excess doesn't go away, then. This exorbitance in the book sector, as in the gigantic financial and housing sectors, has been weakening our culture for decades. Hubristic, ill-considered follies reached notable highs under the Great Deregulator, President Reagan, but to be fair, book publishers then (many still carrying the names of the confident men who had founded them twenty-five, fifty, 100 or 150 years before) were panicking, for they were losing their once dependable base, and Reagan made things worse by cutting federal funding for libraries and other appropriations that had helped to fuel America's postwar advances in literacy and book-based education.

and

Their ever more powerful agents have successfully decoupled the size of the royalty advances they receive from any estimate of the books' eventual earnings, and routinely assure them that if Knopf or Norton or Morrow fails to earn back the upfront money, it's because their masterpieces were badly published, not because the advances were implausibly high. This is cheering, of course; writers' egos are always shaky, and they tend to forget the sage warning that you should disregard compliments extended by someone whose income derives from your own. Also, they won't acknowledge that literary quality may decline as advances increase; only rarely is a writer liberated into confidence-inspiring freedom by following advice from greedy publishers about Pleasing the Crowd. Willa Cather wasn't the only fine writer who refused advances for being, in her view, unethical, nor was D.H. Lawrence the only one who found them demeaning. The agents have much to answer for.

What now? Publishers are battening down, and chain stores are struggling, having staked so much on nationally merchandised dreck, having committed themselves to imitating the look of the big indies but never quite matching their tighter local focus and skill in "hand selling" genuine books to readers. Anyway, the entire world of American retail business is veering toward obsolescence. Must books now find their way in cyberspace?

This leads Sifton to query what the future not only for publishing, but for reading and books in general will be, particularly in relation to the Internet. (She mentions the lawsuit against Google's unauthorized scanning of copyrighted books, which New Directions, like countless other publishers, was party to.) She has no answers, but is wary, and doesn't trust publishers to do the right thing(s), or perhaps isn't sure if they'll even know what the right thing is until it's too late, despite their self-interest in doing so. She ends the piece by quoting John Locke to make her point, and so the larger question remains: what now?

Sifton's overview and critique proved an interesting lens through which to read New York Times book beat reporter Motoko Rich's blasts from the BookExpo America, the annual US bookseller's convention, which took place two weeks ago in New York City. In her March 29th entry, she noted the "gloom" cast by diminishing book sales. Even the convention itself had shrunk, and some publishers and booksellers were present in obviously reduced fashion, while others did not attend at all. The next day, she posted a more positive, peppier article that, that focused on publishers' thoughts on e-books and which, I noted to Reggie and Lisa, I could have filed from Evanston; it said little that you might not extrapolate from the previous day's downcast report, though some details, like the decision to distribute cards with links to online .pdfs of works, versus actual print galleys, was enlightening. (This reminded me of the fact that at least for the last few years in most of my classes, I've decreasingly distributed photocopies of any articles, and have posted either online links or .pdfs on my courses' Blackboard sites. Even coursebooks are less like from now on.) One other noteworthy bit of news was that on one of the BEA's many panels, acclaimed author and screenwriter Sherman Alexie's declared that he refused to let his novels be distributed in electronic form, and that when he saw a woman on his plane to New York reading a Kindle, he "wanted to hit her." Whoa, Sherman! (He has since apologized.) Rich also submitted entries about the event (naturally) on the Times's Paper Cuts blog, such as what the most recommended books were. Many seemed to be new works by previous seasons' breakout authors, or anticipated bestsellers by prior bestsellers, though there were a few, including a family saga that favored Gone With the Wind (ugh!) and a nonfiction book about a plane crash survivor (just the thought makes me wince) that editors could not put down. But of course, it's always a roll of dice, isn't it, and I don't think publishers would like to think of themselves as engaging in something akin to Steve Wynn's business, would they? As to the larger questions Sifton's piece raises, Rich had (and has had) few answers.

Lisa went to BEA, and sent back a few links--June 1 and June 3--from Shelf Awareness, a great resource on the publishing trade, and both presented different angles on the BEA. The first gave an overall portrait of a trimmer but livelier convention, with some key changes on display and more attendees than the previous year in LA but fewer than two years before in New York. Media representation, however, rose from around 1,250 to 1,700. (Hmmm.) I hadn't realized that having authors in attendance was formely frowned upon, but the Shelf Awareness writeup suggests that booksellers and readers raved about the opportunities to interact with authors. Lastly, as Lisa noted in an email, this entry gives a fuller context for the Alexie panel.

And then Reggie sent (and I'd come across) yet another take, by Elizabeth Eaves, in Forbes, entitled, "Why Write?" Her ultimate take:

In short, book-writing is a worse-than-ever means to a livelihood, and mass-market renown is disappearing as a concept, fractioning into a million niches. Ultimately the only good reason to write books remains what it probably always was: The compulsion to try to entertain, persuade or make meaning is irresistible, and the process absorbs you like nothing else. If it doesn't, there's no reason to bother.

Write because you love, because you surely won't be making money from it from now on (unless you're lucky, Oprah Winfrey picks your book for her club, you tap into some existing or unforeseen market, and...bingo! But I'm back to the games of chance analogy, see?). But again, to the larger question, whither publishing as we knew and know it, or rather, wither...?

Tuesday Musings

Another busy week, but the quarter is nearly over, my second-to-last big reading responsibility now done, and only various exams to participate in or administer. As for the big class, three more class meetings, and three more authors to discuss: Donald Barthelme ("The Glass Mountain"), Theresa Ha Kyung Cha (Dictee), and Junot Díaz (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)--and the huge theoretical concept of post-modernity/post-modernism, which, when I drew a schematic of it on the board on Monday, drew thanks from several of the TAs.

I also went to two talks, my colleague Evan Mwangi's penetrating discussion of Ngugi's Maitagari on Monday, which led to a conversation about translation, local languages, and Kenyan censorship of Gikuyu texts versus their English versions; and then tonight a presentation on the legacy of Aimé Césaire, led by colleague John Márquez and featuring Aaron Kamugisha, Paul Breslin, Doris Garraway, and Barnor Hesse. Brilliant people, to put it simply, speaking with cogency and subtlety about a brilliant man. (Did you know that Discourse on Colonialism was one of the leading political texts of the 20th century? If you didn't or doubt it, I know Hesse can convince you.)

I may try to say more about both events soon, but tomorrow I'm on a panel with another brilliant colleague from my department, Alex Weheliye, in conversation with Daphne Brooks, from Princeton. We'll be taking part in a discussion on African American Studies and the disciplines, with this one being English and American literary and cultural studies.

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The news of Teddy Kennedy's malignant brain tumor really saddens me. I know things look grim and it's too early to start memorializing him, so let me just say that I am glad I did once have an opportunity to vote for him, back in 1988, when he ran against Joe Malone, though one of my favorite memories of him was from 1994, when we'd moved from Massachusetts, and Kennedy, again up for reelection, faced a younger Mitt Romney. C-SPAN televised one of the debates that took place in downtown Boston, and we sat cheering, many states away, as Kennedy argued rings around Romney. The TV audience was cheering and applauding so much it sounded like a revival. Of course he won that election, as he has every one since 1962, when he assumed the Senate seat his brother had held before his election (and which a family friend, Benjamin Smith, kept warm for two years). It'll be hard to imagine a US Senate without Teddy Kennedy--but then I said I ought not start memorializing him now, and I won't.

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What you reap, you sow. In many cases. In big-league global publishing, this is an old and bleak story, told quite succinctly and with brio by André Schiffrin, and it has yet to get any better or less ridiculous. Out with hatchet man Peter Olson, in with...

New Head of Random Comes from Bertelsmann Printing Unit May 20, 2008
Bertelsmann is appointing the head of its worldwide printing operations to replace Peter Olson at Random House, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Markus Dohle, 39, who heads Arvato Print, one of Bertelsmann's most profitable units, is described as "entrepreneurial" and has helped Arvato expand into such unrelated businesses as repairing cell phones, storing pharmaceuticals and running call centers and billing systems, the paper said. Dohle has a degree in industrial engineering and economics from a German university and has no publishing experience.

Hartmut Ostrowski, who became Bertelsmann's CEO at the beginning of the year, headed Arvato for five years and has "vowed to shake up [Bertelsmann's] slow-growing businesses." In the past year, Random sales fell 6% and operating profit was down 5%. Random represented 10% of Bertelsmann's sales and operating profit last year.

Olson blamed the depressed numbers on a lack of megasellers last year. This year already looks brighter: Barbara Walters's memoir, Audition, has a million copies in print already and forthcoming titles include a new novel by Christopher Paolini and a biography of Warren Buffett.

Ostrowski has said that he wants other parts of Bertelsmann, including Random House, to diversify as Arvato did. According to the Journal, "an area of interest" for Random is educational services.

Now don't you think this news will make Random House's editors, authors, and readers feel a lot more secure? Call centers, Buffett bios, "educational services".... (H/T Lisa Moore).

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This is one of the snarkier obituaries I've read in a while. A name I vaguely recalled from childhood, he's probably totally forgotten now. (His white elephant of a personal monument, because rich people still have the power to commemorate themselves as they see fit, no matter how ridiculous the results, however, has been radically transformed.) That still wasn't enough for the New York Times's obituary writer to serve up a dose of corrosive Schadenfreude. Read it, you won't be bored.