A Review I Didn't Write

I was supposed to write this for The Rumpus,  but felt that I had to beg off since I was at such a loss to appreciate this book. I am sure it will find some sympathetic readers, but I just couldn't get on board with its efforts, and was mostly bored and annoyed as I made my way to the end. It doesn't help much to put pans and slams out there for books that aren't exactly raking in the readers anyway. I also felt like maybe my reaction revealed my lack of imagination, and was worried that it would undermine my authority as a reader if I were to write a review mostly consisting of "I don't get it." And maybe I am not the best reader of that kind of work these days -- I want fiction to be at least a little reader friendly, to be absorbing -- yes, to challenge and engage with formal adventures, to make you work a little, but still have basic elements like plot, and interesting characters, and setting. I did write out my puzzlement, which is what lies below.

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Reading Pharos Editions’s reissue of Jason Schwartz’s A German Picturesque, the big questions that immediately come to mind are, Why bring a book back from out-of-print? What and why is non-narrative fiction? How do I read a book that is all style, yet is not poetry? Why did Ben Marcus choose this as his one book to resurrect, and what light does that shed on Ben Marcus’s literary ambitions?

Down the thrifted book rabbit hole

I am working on a craft project that ended up overlapping with my professional interests pretty significantly, as I should have predicted it would.

I wrote about the project, decoupaging pages for old books onto the back of bookcases, on a new blog I began in order to practice my wordpress skills and have space for non-work related writing.

But then,  it clearly spilled over into work life, because as soon as I started getting intrigued about the book we'd found (a letter was tucked into it!), I discovered so much more about it and its author and the beautiful network of connections and information that the digital archive allows us to learn these days.

In Which I Have Thoughts about Irish Publishing

Responding to Publishing Perspectives: Ireland's Tradition of Small Presses

This came out in July, but I was busy writing, editing, and prepping for my course this fall (in which I taught a novel by Colm Tóibín, another lauded  Irish writer who has moved to the US and who is not published by an Irish house [though a quick search indicates that his first two houses were now defunct small Irish presses Raven Arts and Pilgrim Press, back in the '80s, before he moved to being published in England].)

I did an MA at UCD on Irish lit and a PhD on Irish poetry at UC Santa Barbara (so there are my bona fides), and one thing I became entirely fascinated by was the role of the publisher in Ireland. I can't recall the exact numbers off the top of my head, but the arts council report during the boom years showed that about 30% of what was in Irish bookstores was from Ireland, and that only about 30% of Irish authors were published in Ireland.

I spoke with the publisher of a great poetry press back in 2006 about this, and I remember that he -- and later, others -- told me that he felt the problem was not lack of demand, but lack of distribution for Irish titles in Ireland.

Conceptual Memoir -- is this a thing? In France, apparently

Recently ventured back into literary criticism a bit for the Two Lines blog.

Since my dissertation discussed constraint in poetry, and that meant lots of reading in the conceptual poetry arena, I was pretty familiar with the approaches and goals of Georges Perec and Édouard Levé as conceptual writers. I'm very intrigued by the question of how one disrupts expectations of litrary grandeur and meaning, and uses ordinary things instead to create art, playing with audience expectations of entertainment or enlightenment (blame Beckett and Joyce for dragging me down this road). Perec's I Remember came out this year from the beloved small press David R Godine, and Levé clearly saw himself in a line of descent from Perec's experiments with narrative forms in prose. So I proposed writing a blog post on both in anticipation of our November event as a way of contextualizing Levé's work and responding to a book newly available to American readers.

Also, I'm SO excited that the Center for the Art of Translation's Two Voices events program is hosting Lorin Stein of The Paris Review in conversation with our marketing/online editor Scott Esposito (also an editor and critic in his own right) and the talented translator Jan Steyn on Wednesday 10/5. Both Steyn and Stein translated Levé for the Dalkey Archive, and Scott's written a ton about Oulipo's influence on literature. I'm just squealing in girlish nerd joy (on the inside) that I get to meet the editor of one of the foremost, most canonical literary journals in print.

So, here's the link to my brief essay (about 1200 words) about the connections and differences between the two authors: "Connecting the Dots"

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I also conducted an interview with Margaret Jull Costa this summer that was posted on the Two Lines blog -- she's quite the force (translated any and every important Portuguese or Brazilian author you've heard of [Saramago ahem ahem]) -- and has been given an OBE for her service to English literature!

A Cautionary Tale? Or an Inspiration? Both?

I was asked to discuss my career path by the career center at my undergraduate institution.  Since I feel like a scrambler more than a planner at this point, I found that quite funny, but tried to answer their questions truthfully (if optimistically).

Here's the result! 

Fall: The Academic Job Season

I let my MLA membership lapse this year, stopped going to conferences a year ago, quit pursuing academic publications in favor of writing ones for places that paid. I gave the job market three tries, and never even got a request for an interview. Which, looking back, makes plenty of sense -- despite the importance of doing so, I never published a peer-reviewed article. What was I thinking? But in the end, that pushed me back out into a life that might turn out to be a better fit.

I got a new job that I love, as associate editor for the literary magazine and eponymous press Two Lines (look how pretty our covers are!). How lucky is that? What a dream opportunity to work with incredibly well-read colleagues who genuinely care about poetry and avant-garde literature. I'm working out this life that's part reading and writing, part editing, part adjuncting for the best program on the planet for adjuncts: the Fall Program for Freshmen, run by UC Berkeley Extension for spring admit Berkeley freshmen. Teaching smart kids, editing literature, writing for fun and money -- all good. I even teach and hold office hours in Wheeler Hall, which is also the home of the English dept at Berkeley.

Then I opened an email a month ago about local jobs in higher ed .

Abuses of Hand-Lettering in Book Jacket Design

This should be a much longer post, with many more citations.

But basically, as I have been immersing myself in book jacket design, and paying hawk-like attention to the look of literary novels everywhere I go, I've noticed a trend for illustration on covers, and especially hand-lettered titles.

I first noticed it after seeing the exact same trend in wedding invites to an overwhelming degree (maybe because I'm getting married and am designing my own invites, which, yes, I set in lead type and hand-printed, so I am a bit of a luddite and a hipster don't judge me). I love the look, but it seems layered in that postmodern, hipster irony of reproducing the nostalgia for the thing using the very technology that has replaced it. Especially when the hand-lettering is then printed using letterpress, but rather than using lead type (as is PROPER), using a photopolymer plate. Double layers of obsolete technology!

But I digress.

I do love the look, but the book world is getting a bit saturated with it. It make zero sense to me, for example, for Jhumpa Lahiri's new novel to have a parchment cover and watercolored words:

Lahiri's most recent book, The Lowland

Seriously, what does that tell you about the book? Other than that the graphic designer who made the jacket likes to underline things. It has no connection with her previous work, even though her last book, with its gorgeous cover, was published by the same house.

Anyways, I do think that it can be used well, but I think it's interesting that it's being used across so many genres, whereas oftentimes typeface choices are so genre-limited. I noticed the following books in particular because they use a hand-lettered title, but it seems to jar with the genre, content, or audience one would think the publisher and author are trying to convey. Is this a case of graphic designer revolt?

             

 

  

I am sure these are all lovely books. Who could turn their nose up at Achebe? Roddy Doyle will have you laughing your head off. But WHY use the same signifiers for fiction and non-fiction? The answer has to be the aura of the handmade object, and the attempts of fine books to look not mass-produced, to look special, to look like you really need to buy and own this precious, hand-made just-for-you object. And to update classics to look fresh (Achebe and Waugh just won't resonate with current marketplaces otherwise, I guess?). As paper books war with ebooks for customer dollars, the materiality of the object is becoming emphasized as a positive. Ebooks aren't chipping away at hardbacked sales, but they've destroyed the massmarket, rack-size paperback. If you want to buy something a machine made, you'll download the digital version, and all the books in your pocket library will have the exact same font (typeface), the covers won't matter, and you'll likely delete or remove the book once you're done instead of passing it along to someone else and starting up the oh-so-desired word-of-mouth campaign. So I get the inspiration. It's possibly also behind the emphasis on chalkboards and personalization Etsy has been hammering for years. But you can't apply the same idea to everything! It's the cheap easy way to connect to current trends, but is it servicing the book or just demonstrating the in-the-know-ness of the designer?

OK, to pull my cranky pants all the way up, the worst offender in design, overall, bar none, of recent books in this trend is, in my opinion, Cartwheel. 

Holy crap I don't want to ever look at this jacket again (I got like three in their publicity carpet bombing exercise and have been trying to give them away). It makes no sense. I mean, I like the subtle curve in the actual title, and the spokes radiating from the center do evoke an actual cartwheel, but overall it just feels scattered and totally, totally unrelated to the novel -- and doesn't even have the excuse of echoing her previous book. There's a bird, and what seem to be post-its with rough-pencilled scrawl -- but as described in the jacket copy, the novel is basically a ripped-from-the-deadlines fictionalization of the Amanda Knox story. What the heck is the connection of this pinwheeling cover to an international tale of lurid crime and uncertain guilt? How does this stylishly designed cover tell me anything at all about the book? The cover is a vital piece of information to help a reader engage with a book, and this one, I believe, does a horrible disservice to book and author. It feels like a designer got fed-up with feedback and Portlandiaed the jacket.

Writing for Free, Reading for Free: The Economics of Academia and Publishing Today

Academics entering the media world tend to move from one exploitative arena (low-wage academic work) to another (unpaid freelance writing). But writing must never be an act of charity to a corporation. Ask for what you are worth—and do not accept that you are worth nothing. Insisting on payment for your labor is not a sign of entitlement. It is a right to which you are entitled.

-Sarah Kendzior, "Should Academics Write for Free?" 

Medium -- a new iteration of publishing/sharing writing/writing for free. Medium offers us all an audience because praise should be pay enough (though now, apparently, they are paying some writers decently). Medium was founded by Evan Williams (also, a liquor), who also founded Blogger (write for free -- for yourself and your friends), and has been in charge (possibly a founder? multiple stories abound) of Twitter (write for free, briefly, to the world, your friends, and clients). On Here and Now recently, Williams was asked about his new venture, and he described the year-old platform as providing journalism and stories to a wide audience who just can't find it elsewhere, apparently. He also emphasized the ability to share one's writing with the world, which writers just can't do elsewhere, apparently. Those darn editors and gate-keepers -- I thought that the internet was supposed to have knocked them down already? Williams evaded the interviewer's question of what void he was trying to fill, explaining that, really, this was a longer twitter. However, what he is actually replacing is the curated, edited magazine.

Book Covers I Love

I am super into the silhouettes and paper cut outs I've seen all over the place lately, and I love the ways in which people are using those on book covers now, as seen in the next two images:

The Monsters of Templeton by L Groff

The Snow Child by Eowyn Ivey

Mr. Penumbra's combines my favorite things: books, San Francisco, and something slightly magical. For a girl whose first job was selling books in a little indie bookstore on the CA coast, this book is irresistible  And the cover's use of neon that looks like highlighter -- and which glows in the dark -- is a fabulous wink at the shadow of "Penumbra" (*polishes her high school Latin*) and the fluorescence of a 24-hour bookshop.

Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Flora feels super-traditional, but with the edge of the initial letter of the title falling off the front cover, there's a bit of an edge. I love the grace and drama of the title, which looks like a signature, and the bright punch of the author's name against the blue of the dress.

Flora by Gail Godwin

Also, I want to read all the books.

Money and Motivation

One of the ways in which spending your twenties as a grad student in a humanities department warps your view of yourself and your world is with regard to self-value. Not just "I must be a shitty person and scholar because I don't get this 'body without organs' " deal, but the work we do for which we are not paid, and the work for which we get paid so very, very little.

In graduate school, I planned events, I entered data, I taught myself software programs, I compiled webpages, I proof-read, I managed other graduate students, I researched, I read, I wrote, and I taught.

And for few of these gigs was I paid, and then, it was not well. This translates well to academia, where service and research are the perqs that you earn by teaching. You are grateful to be able to have the time and space to voluntarily, on your own time, research, serve on committees, mentor students, etc.

But this mindset, I am finding, is counter to everything outside of academia. I do not think the importance and value of a job can be measured by its salary. I do not think that those who earn $30,000 must or should work less hard than those who earn four times that. So that's good. But this belief in dedicating all to a job -- and in editing and writing "on the side" of the "real" job -- is not always helpful to getting ahead. I ask myself, is my genuine wish to work longer hours than I am paid fair to me and my partner? Really, I should be compensated for all time worked, so am I being a sucker by gladly bringing work home with me? Or since I am young and trying to build a career, should I be grateful for everything and anything I can get?

What's the difference between an underpaid, part-time editor working harder than s/he's being paid for and a young engineer at a startup sleeping at the company HQ and dedicating him/herself to their launch date? Is it just money? compensation? prestige? Or are they both naive, in fact, and should be rallying with other workers to demand fair wages?

One of the consequences of our new economy seems to be both flexibility and instability. If we are all eminently replaceable, we each must always be working harder than we are being paid in order to be the most valuable person to the company, it seems to me. Maybe all of the American economy is just catching up to a trick that academia's been playing on its citizens for many decades longer.

Typography and Book Design

I am mostly an amateur enthusiast when it comes to book design and typography. I have handset letterpress and made my own very tiny book, I have read guides on typography (for fun, mind you), and have studied the material construction of books of poetry as part of my dissertation. So, I know the terminology, but I have not worked with inDesign, I've never worked with commercial printers, nor have I worked within comercial constraints.

Still, I have OPINIONS -- of course I do. And when our galleys came back with a half inch, max, of margins, 12-point Times New Roman font, and single spacing, I nearly flipped. I've already explained several times that you can't use a regular old serif typeface (ahem, "font" so I don't sound like a ponce) as your typeface for a title. And that you should match your title page and chapter headings closely in spirit to the typeface used on the cover. All you have to do to know that is look at literally ANY decent book.

These galleys looked like someone just took a Word file and printed it -- which was basically what was done. I felt bad, because it had looked fine as a PDF, so I OK'd it. It was astonishing how different it looked on screen and in print. Amazing how cramped and dense 35 lines per page looks compared to 25.

I think one thing my grad degree has taught me is how to learn the conventions of one's genre, and how to appear to belong. And how to teach yourself everything, since no-one else will do it for you. So I get frustrated when people don't do that.

Three Weeks to Go

All of February, and the first five days of March, I was working on a chapter about the elusive, creative  Irish poet Catherine Walsh. I find her asyntactic, paratactic writing to be extraordinarily challenging to make an argument about, because to me, it could be so easy to prove wrong. This, I've realized has been a huge problem of mine in grad school: I can always see the holes in my own argument, and that not only paralyzes me, but I keep inserting caveats and undermining my own claims. In high school I was an attorney in our Mock Trial program for  three years. I was very good at it, but partly because I always felt that I was lying because I could see all the holes and gaps in my argument and the strengths of the oppositions, so I frantically tried to fill those gaps in as much as possible. Yet, the feeling of telling half-truths was always there.

But, in any case, I finished writing 40 pages. I sent it off, despite the fact that I knew there were huge problems in it (like.... not having a convincing argument), but I had to move on, so I let it go. I promptly received feedback from one of my committee members to the effect that he loved my close-readings, but did not perceive a strong structure holding it together, and wants me to rewrite/revise. Which I expected. I didn't expect the praise for the readings, nor for him to get back to me so quickly!

I'm trying to move forward to writing the intro now. At this point, sans intro, I believe I would estimate my dissertation to be about 140 pp. A bit light, but that doesn't include the interviews I'll be including. I've been looking at tons of intros -- they vary from 15-50 pages, and I've even heard of a 95 page one! I am just hoping mine will be 30. I am excited about it, partially because it requires mostly a literature review and historical background for the project. I think it should be a matter of positioning myself among the other scholars.  My dissertation is light on footnotes, especially this most recently chapter, which I am afraid might be symptomatic of a lack of deep contextualizing reading. Hopefully I'll have the opportunity to make it up in the intro.

I am taking time off from work to finish this project -- thank goodness my boss is OK with that. Only 1 more week, though, and then I'm back. That means 7 days to write the intro, then, as quickly as possible, address issues with the first  chapter, add another 10 pp to turn 1 chapter into 2 shorter ones, and rewrite my 3rd chapter. I hope the latter Herculean tasks can be accomplished in 10 days.

Simultaneously, I am trying to oversee production, acquisition, editing, etc for the publishing company, Right now, I am taking a backseat, but that doesn't stop the publisher complaining to me of costs (maybe he shouldn't have an amateur do the typesetting and maybe he should pay his printers) and the authors complaining to me about missing checks. The only thing I can do abut either of those is nag the people with money.

I joined a website called Versatile Ph.D. recently. Great forums and support for making a career outside of academia. My only concern is how many of the English Ph.D.s are now either dissertation editors (perpetuating the very system that they left) or are freelance editors. Both seem like unsavory choices, to me, but maybe I only see the instability of freelance work and not its upsides.

OK: I need to get a page or two written today, and then I will be on the right track! 5 pages every day for the next 7 days will sort me out!

Dissertation Saturday

I have been exhausting myself in preparation for the publishing company's marketing meeting on Monday -- felt sick and feverish last night, but i think I got it out of my system today. I spent 5 hours yesterday basically on data entry -- just entering in marketing information and sales copy for our reps at our distributor to read. It was important for me to do, since I needed to understand the different copy and its different purposes (catalog vs back jacket vs whatever), but certainly for next time, I will simply put it all in a Word doc and have an intern do the actual entry. Painful stuff, and frustrating. Also, found a major typo on the title page of one of the books about to go to print. *headache*

Today began slowly, which was nice. Got some still-warm pastries from a wee French bakery and had tea this afternoon with an old friend and her daschund. Lay on the couch and read a piece by John McPhee about structuring non-fic while my adorable cats curled up nearby. He resists chronological order for thematic or other forms of organization  I feel that writing about poetry should always really be thematic -- otherwise you are just doing a slow-ass line-by-line reading that shows none of your own impetus, and let's the poem dictate the reading entirely. I have been struggling with organization, but one of my committee members complimented me on the structure I used in the chapter I sent him! He said he felt the braiding and weaving was responsive the poems I was reading, which also involved the interweaving of texts. Hard to write a straightforward, A-B-C chapter about two poems, neither of which move in a direct fashion.

Reading a great book on lyric today edited by Mark Jeffreys. I'm trying to think through these two poems by Heaney and Boland, and how they might go with the rest of my dissertation. I am also incredibly behind -- I was supposed to have this chapter done by the end of this month, and instead I realized I have to totally rewrite it and that means starting from scratch on the research/theory/framework side of things. So, thinking about subjectivity and community, separation of the poet, etc. I also had a tiny epiphany that the poems I am looking at are actually both from sequences, which gives me much more to talk about with regards to form! Because clearly both are attempting to expand the lyric, which, as Jeffreys writes in his intro, is seen as removed from history (and possibly in opposition to it). Heaney's "Tollund Man in Springtime" is clearly a narrative composed of sonnets, while Boland's "Domestic Violence" (first poem in the sequence here)  is more like a multi-faceted approach to a single topic (basically her own backlist, pardon my cynicism).

So, I am going to try to finish this chapter by the end of the first week of February. How? Magic, of course. I like a quote I read recently, “Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” ― E.L. Doctorow. I just have to keep moving. And writing. Tonight my plan is, after dinner (and wine, so we'll see), to chop up my existing chapter, finish the book on lyric, and maybe get started on a book about politics in Ireland. I am concerned about this chapter, but I also don't want it to drag down my last chapter AND INTRO that I have to write in February. Holy crappola.

I am skipping out on a major convention for the publishing job, but I told my boss before I started that I couldn't do this event. I'll be giving a talk at the ecopoetics conference! So ridiculously excited about this, even if it does cut into my writing and work time. I have been anticipating this for a year -- and it's in my own backyard, and I think I already know a quarter of the people going. Lucky me. This is what I'll miss.