Apparently, there's a new law in Indiana, slated to take effect in July, that will force bookstores that sell books that could be described as "sexually explicit" to pay a $250 license fee and be classified as an "adult bookstore." I guess we're supposed to be thanking the state of Indiana for saving us from subversive material like A Sport and a Pastime or The Lover or Gordon, all of which can currently (gasp! think of the children!) be found at a bookstore near you. But seriously, how can the state even expect to come up with a standardized guide of what constitutes sexual explicitness, seeing as how wildly subjective such a term is? And when did I miss the memo about all of us climbing into a time machine and getting beamed back into a different century?!
May 29, 2008
Crazy in Indiana
May 28, 2008
Porn? For chicks?
As a follow-up to my post last week, I point you to This Recording, a music/culture/whatever blog I often browse (this is not a blog I can read "cover to cover" ... their posts are hell of long and regular), whose editor Molly Lambert is pontificating on the nexus of porn, women and feminism. Last week another writer on this blog quoted Camille Paglia's idiotic assertion (to Playboy, no less):
The problem with America is that there’s too little sex, not too much. The more our instincts are repressed, the more we need sex, pornography and all that. The problem is that feminists have taken over with their attempts to inhibit sex.
Yes, feminists have taken over. Every time I'm at the video store, a team of them scamper up and snatch the porn right out of my hands. Actual, reasonable feminists (as opposed to the straw variety) don't want to inhibit sex. It's the industry's exploitation of women that's obscene, not the acts portrayed.
Lambert provides slightly more nuanced and less fear-based commentary on what's going on with porn:
Pornography is a forty billion dollar a year business made largely by and for men. But the most famous porn stars are women, and the fact that they work in a studio system which treats them as largely replaceable and disposable commodities isn’t lost on them. The people who make major money off of porn are mostly still men, but the industry’s biggest stars are nearly all females...
As with other things still somewhat socially entrenched as being “strictly for men” (sports, beer, video games, comedy, cars) women are equally interested in porn...
Women’s pornography as a genre is still in its infancy. But maybe girls wouldn’t feel so weird and conflicted about their sexuality if there was porn made for them instead of just about them?...
As far as feminist porn goes, I predict it becomes the next boom in the adult industry (the current popular trendlet is POV Porn). Women are a huge virtually untapped audience for pornography and it’s not like they aren’t already watching it online anyway...
It’s not that women hate hardcore (they don’t), there’s a way to do it so that it isn’t totally exploitative. ... What makes the bulk of what’s available so unappealing to women is the humorlessness and self-seriousness, the continuing focus on money shots as the be-all and end-all point of pornography.
Emphases mine. Word.
May 27, 2008
One Bookstore to Rule Them All
News reports speculate that Barnes & Noble might be planning on acquiring Borders.
As someone who is married to someone who earned his living as a Barnes & Noble bookseller for over a decade, I have a soft spot—that may be too strong, actually, maybe it’s an ambivalence that tips slightly toward sympathy—for B&N, so I get a little sad when I read that their sales are declining. But that might also be because I worry about how much (or how little) people are reading in general.
Do you think this consolidation will be a bad thing for the literary world? Or given the degree to which book sales are determined by Costco and Amazon anyway, does this really matter? Will the only place to buy books in physical space for most Americans soon be Wal-Mart? Is it already? Or would this consolidation be good? Like maybe the competition between the two companies that has driven them to open stores on opposite corners in every town, thereby driving away indie booksellers will finally cease now that they might no longer be engaged in a retail death match?
May 20, 2008
Bah
So this is really depressing. Meditate too much on the, uh, surplus of creative writing graduates, and the scene become reminiscent of the proliferation of serfs in Europe before the Black Death. After reading Gessen’s incisive little exegesis, it’s tempting to see money as a sort of chalk outline around one’s writing career.
(For the living circumstances of poets, that is. Fiction writers can get their hands on actual financial remuneration—as opposed to payment “in kind” or other intangible rewards—though as Gessen points out in the article, it doesn’t necessarily make the ledger sheet a whole lot better when applied against writing a novel full-time for a few years.)
I’m not totally convinced that Gessen’s economic destinies (teaching, journalism, or odd jobs) for writers is really as Calvinistic as all that.
Granted, editing and a good deal of arts administration jobs really do fall under the category of subsistence level living, but I think that underestimates the job value of English majors who can handle rhetoric, write a decent memo, communicate with a high degree of verbal facility, handle and organize a heavy paper workload, and stare for long hours without blinking at documents, thanks to reading interminable and thickly forested texts. Corporations (and the Government, I might add, which is already quite gray and only going to get more so in the next 5 years) badly need just such folks. Maybe this is because I’m a poet, with, on the face of it, a time commitment to a finished piece that is less daunting than that of a fiction writer, but I don’t think so. I regularly eat up two hours a day with writing, and would be perfectly happy to eat up at least four more. Though I think Gessen is right in that having a full-time other career prohibits (or severely limits) a lot of the business of writing (i.e. correspondence, interviews, handling readings, applying for grants, sending out manuscripts for publication) and well as the secondary activities (writing reviews, essays, blogging, commenting on other manuscripts, working for literary magazines or sites).
Having another non-writing career requires a sort of continuous hallucination in oneself as a writer. You have to believe that you are in conversation with other writers far removed (or, most often, dead). On good days, you feel subversive. On bad days, irrelevant. (Or perhaps in a form of economic/cognitive drag.) Is this worse than checking your fellow English department committee colleagues to see if they have latched rings, Medici-style, or wondering when the circular firing squad might come to town in the name of doctrinal correctness? I guess it depends on how distanced you feel from the means of production, so to speak. (My biggest fear on leaving the academy was that I would pine for the 15 story library, but then I found a spectacularly good interlibrary loan system in a major metropolitan center, and that really cushioned the blow.) This past weekend, I went to the Center for Book Arts in New York City, and while it was awesome, I’d be lying if I didn’t walk out of there feeling a little despondent.
May 18, 2008
The difference between criticism and censorship
Last night after a poetry reading I commented in conversation that I thought a certain Notorious B.I.G. song was sexist. I was surprised by the reaction this elicited--no one in the group disagreed with the assessment, exactly, but everyone seemed to disagree with my making it. The defense was, essentially, "it's art"--which made me wonder if my interlocuters thought I wanted to censor Biggie. I wasn't suggesting that he (or any artist) should not be permitted to write and perform and record a potentially offensive song; I was just voicing my distaste for the sexism. I vote yes for freedom of speech, but once you've spoken, your words are up for evaluation, and I don't have to like them.
This reminded me of the knee-jerk responses to feminist critiques of pornography--it is very difficult to object to pornography in practice (by and large an industry controlled by men) without defenders assuming you're opposed to pornography in principle, that you want to control the production of the obscene. I'm all for porn in theory, but in reality porn is sickeningly misogynistic too much of the time.
This group also brought in cultural relativism, i.e., this is just how it goes in hip-hop culture, and I can't come in from the outside and condemn it. I'm somewhat sympathetic to this argument; certainly, I'm not from the 'hood. But I think cultural relativism has its limits. (For example, female circumcision--I'll never think this level of mutilation confined to one gender is OK, however steeped in tradition.) If hip-hop culture makes a practice of devaluing women, I'm not sure that should go unexamined from without or within.
May 15, 2008
Lit Mag Heaven
The second issue of
May 13, 2008
Edna St. Vincent Millay gave good face.
This past weekend, I got an email from Michael Gushue of VRZHU Press containing the image to the left in which he and several other DC-area poets offer their reinterpretation of the famous 1914 Arnold Genthe photograph of young Edna St. Vincent Millay in a flowery tree. Back when I was like, 15, and everyone in my honors English class was assigned to write a long (10 pages!) "research paper" on a poet of our choosing, I chose Millay in no small part because, in addition to liking her poems (I still do), I thought she was super-pretty in this picture (ditto).
Revisiting this image got me thinking about iconic author photos, and what it takes to make a good one—not just one that will arguably endure the test of time, but even one that will be sufficient for the moment. It also got me to thinking about how silly author photos can be and how often they suck/beg for mockery, as Jim Behrle used to point out on his apparently now tragically defunct feature "What the hell is up with your author photo?"
According to Frances Wilson in the Guardian a couple years back, "Author photos are always embarrassing, either for the author or the reader" and therefore we should "get rid of the damn things." Is she right? What, readers, are your favorite author photos of all time? What are your least fave? What are your tips and strategies toward the creation of a book jacket image that at the very least is not "embarrassing"?
May 7, 2008
Blowback
VQR has gotten itself chastised, it seems, by the Net, for being a bit too frank about some visceral reactions to the slush pile. Make one tiny little joke about simians, and you end up having to apologize to... well, all of you.
The offending post has been removed, but you can see snippets of it in the comments here.
I think what we have here is a cultural failure to communicate. There’s the culture of the blog, which—like email—tends to reward immediacy and the cheapest forms of entertainment (i.e. glibness, snarkyness, confessionalism, even trolling). And there’s the culture of the literary magazine, which is more predominantly (and historically) Apollonian, genteel, the organizational equivalent of a tea cozy, where decisions and tastes are mutely orchestrated from behind the scrim of an editorial silence. Readers tend to come to literary magazines deliberately, whereas on the Net, one’s browsing interest (which may or may not touch the actual content of the work consumed) wars with the instant boredom and the latent velocity of any web consumer away from the page/blog/webzine.
VQR’s dispatches from the killing ground of the slush pile are no worse than anything I’ve heard of in editorial rooms, and after reading, I dunno, upwards of 100,000 poems in the service of various lit mags, there are several filters that drop into place over the years in order to make you not totally exhausted and self-loathing.
One of these filters is an instant amnesia that takes effect seconds after you finish a poem from the slush pile. (If indeed it is worthy of slush—good poems snag you, even if you’re in auto-mode, or the rest of the submission is abysmally bad. During my editorial career, I once selected a single poem (and put it first in the next issue) from an otherwise horrendous batch by a poet who seems to have never written anything else even remotely as good—and in fact has written some of the worst lines I’ve ever come across.) This way, you don’t take terrible poems home with you in your head.
Second, there’s... well several methods of emotional release. I have heard of editors reading especially dire poems aloud in a pirate voice (especially badly executed lyrical poems), of a wall of shame of the worst metaphors received, and in one case, the aerodynamic half-life test (meaning, the duration of time between opening a submission and flinging it across the room towards the recycling bin). Is this the apex of professionalism? No. It’s stress relief, and a way of convincing yourself that not all of the careerism, mediocrity, repetition, blandness, and misplaced optimism (and the fear of the aforementioned in one’s own writing) that is a constant note in all areas of the literary life does not, in the end, carry the day. The best editors I’ve known are those who can walk away from a few hours of reading submissions in thwarted hopes of finding something singular, and still be excited about writing themselves, rather than feeling dispirited and queasily afraid that a virulent form of verbal entropy has been gnawing at their brains from the inside.
I’m sure it’s the same in other subcultures, where one constantly questions the worth and relevance (not to mention the meager monetary rewards) of one’s activity, and the recurrent sensation of struggling for a small portion of an already small audience. Combine that with the headiness of the net (say, for instance, with Diagram’s claim of 160,000 monthly hits), and it’s not always pretty. But not out of the ordinary.
There needs to be an anonymous relationship with the submitter, for two reasons. First, because if you don’t have one, you enter into correspondences like this. And clearly someone’s professional, emotional, creative, and possibly sexual needs will not be met. Second, because the reader of literary magazines are going to encounter these poems anonymously, so the best way to model the suitability of the poem for an issue is to respond dispassionately (if not astringently) as an initial acid test. Despite common, underlying assumptions to the contrary, no one is forced to read poetry. Poetry has to make the case for itself, and to total strangers. This is what I try to remember when I sometimes receive puzzling comments on my 350-odd rejections. The editor or reader (who most likely is getting little or no financial recompense) may have just rejected hundreds of poems, and the last horrible one was about Crete, which my poems also references.
Perhaps it wasn’t the most professional thing for VQR to post what should stay secret inter-office cultural communiqués, but then again, how often do you encounter “professional” and “blog” in the same sentence? As a form, it tends to be, well, informal. The only “safe” form of institutional writing is a press release, and you’re not going to get a readership for your blog if all you post is essentially advertising (especially when, with the proliferation of blogs, one’s allergy to official communications and disguised solicitations only grows). In my experience, VQR’s flavor of snark is not a tremendous departure (if at all) from a great deal of editorial culture (and I’m not speaking here for Ploughshares, merely as a private consumer).
May 3, 2008
I can’t keep it up much longer, this unrecognizable dancing
I was a bit annoyed at first when my boyfriend insisted that we stop at the library on the way to Whole Foods yesterday — turning the excursion from a quick, pleasant outing to the “market” to a string of mere errands. But the Brookline Library turned out to be a very rewarding detour. The NEW BOOKS section had a whole shelf of poetry and I veritably squealed to see how many books from my mental to-read list they had. As I pulled one after another from the shelf, I looked at John in disbelief: Can I take as many as I want? My experience with the NEW BOOKS at libraries has generally been that the ones I want are perpetually checked out. I half expected some kind of limit per “customer.” But! Nobody reads poetry! So more for me. I walked out with:
Brenda Is in the Room and Other Poems (Craig Morgan Teicher)
Fragment of the Head of a Queen (Cate Marvin)
Quaker Guns (Caroline Knox)
Human Dark with Sugar (Brenda Shaughnessy)
Something Bright, Then Holes (Maggie Nelson)
Nomina (Karen Volkman)
Plus a big beautiful coffee table book on 100 contemporary artists from Phaidon. All free!! I asked John why they had such a good selection and he said maybe because Brookline has one of the highest literacy rates in the country. (I couldn’t find any data to back that up. But if it’s true that literacy and affluence are highly correlated …)
It thrills me to have new books, but then, it thrills me to have new underwear, new hair products, new condiments, so perhaps this says less about my “literacy rate” and more about my materialism rate. Perhaps relatedly, my reading habits suffer less from having too little to read and more from having too much. There are books I want to read littered all about my apartment. I must start over 100 books per year, but I only finish maybe 20 or 30. Economist Tyler Cowen sort of recommends this approach -- he claims people would read more/faster if they let themselves abandon books they weren’t enjoying. But I often abandon books I am enjoying, when another imminently enjoyable one falls on my desk…
May 1, 2008
If You're Bored at Work Today...
Check out the digital writing project that Penguin UK has created, We Tell Stories, a kind of chose-your-own-adventure feature for some of their authors' work. As for it's entertainment value, I was thoroughly amused for about ten minutes, but it's an interesting way to highlight these books and to draw people to the Penguin site. And speaking of using media to market literature, I've noticed it's becoming more common to see "trailers" for novels. I'd be interested to hear what people think about this trend, if book marketing folks are just getting up to speed, or if using promotional tools originally meant for films and online games somehow signifies a step in the wrong direction.
