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.

Memorial Day + Anne Carson's Nox + My First Literary Agent, the Crack Addict + Gordimer on Books & Libraries

A listing of all the young women and men soldiers who've lost their lives in the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (CNN.com: US and Coalition Casualties)

A op-chart graphic on the dead and unknown dead in the US's wars, from today's New York Times, by Robert M. Poole and Rumors presents the country's military history in a metaphorically arresting, unforgettable way. (Cf. above, at right, and click on the link for the larger view.)

Finally, here's a Memorial Day post written by veteran and progressive Todd Theise, who's running against Democorporatist Scott Garrett in New Jersey's Fifth Congressional District.  (H/t Digby!)

* * *

Memorial Day concerns remembering, memorializing and, to some extent, grieving, which brings me to the lone book not associated with any aspect of my teaching, writing, committee work, or university visitors that I've managed to read over the last 3 months, and it took just an evening: poet and classical scholar Anne Carson's extraordinary new work, which I will not call a book of poetry, though it is a highly poetic book, Nox (New Directions, 2010). The book has been covered extensively around the Net, so I'll describe it in a few words: in the way that only Carson can, the book combines an elegy to her deceased brother (the dedication, to "Michael," is "Nox Frater Nox" (or Night Brother Night), and a record of her translation of a particularly difficult Catullus elegy, Poem 101, "Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus." She translates the opening line as "Many the peoples many the oceans I crossed," and the rest of this short poem, a little beyond halfway through the book, surrounding it with a variety of other texts. There's a method that's quickly discernible: on the left pages, she usually (but not always) places lexical entries for each word in the Catullus poem, and on the right side, she features journal entries, snippets of notes to herself, very brief poems, visual images by and of herself, and sometimes of her brother, her own artworks, or any of these elements in collaged combination.

In and of themselves, these aspects of the book, especially by a writer of genius like Carson, would make for a worthwhile read, but the real showstopper is the book's physical form. The designer Robert Currie assisted Carson in creating the sort of affordable book-as-art you rarely see today (and sadly, especially at a time when physical books are facing possible disappearance as digital technologies increasingly dominate). The pages are full color, at times nearly convincing you that you're looking at Carson's journals instead of photographs of them, and the entire book is printed in accordion fashion, as the photos below show, and then placed in a gray oystershell box, which serves as a perfect bed for the reader to flip through it and enjoy it. You can lift it out of its box, of course, like an oyster, and it expands like a bellows, but having handled it a bit, it works fine either way.  For weeks, as the pressure to get through mounds of fiction kept growing, I found myself stopping and examining this work every time I was in the bookstore (always a refuge for me), and eventually, as I was dawdling amid a stack of stories, I picked up a copy. Despite its format, the book falls within the current price range for hardcover books, at $29.95. It reminds me of another remarkable, widely available work, British postmodernist B. S. Johnson's (1933-1973) 1969 novel The Untouchables, which consists of 27 sections held together by a removable wrapper and placed in a similar clamshell box. In the UK Secker and Warburg originally published this work, and Picador published the British reissue in 2008, while New Directions published the US version.



This is not, however, a book of poetry in any conventional sense, and to me represents the most experimental text Carson has produced. Even placing this alongside her very avant-garde work Decreation: Poetry, Essays, Opera (Knopf, 2005), the radical quality of this text stands out. It reminds me both of an assemblage in the plastic art sense (cf. Duchamp, Man Ray, von Freytag-Loringhoven, Rauschenberg) and of one perhaps in the philosophical sense (Deleuze and Guattari), with the elements determined by the author, put in play by her, gesturing towards but defying a set genre (poetry), but really to be assembled and reassembled by the reader. To put it another way, Nox comprises texts to be made into a text, that must be made into them, to be transformed not into narrative, as Johnson had done earlier, or Julio Cortázar with his great novel Rayuela (Hopscotch, 1963), but into poetry, into a poem, an elegy.  In a sense, it embodies the root idea of translation, which involves the ritual carrying over of the remains of the dead (trans-latus, carrying across), and also the very idea of remembering, which is to say, re-membering, or putting together the pieces again and a being mindful of the deceased, of the past, of their shared history, yet here, the remembering isn't just the author's, for her brother, but a collaborative effort, requiring the reader's involvement.

As with all of Carson's work, every return to the text provides and turns up something new, and I am enjoying now slowly making my way through the lexicon entries and thinking about how often the issue of "night" (nux in ancient Greek, nox in Latin) turns up in the examples, and also how each relates to the right-side materials, the Zettel that create this sad, powerful and novel conversational elegy.


Carson's Nox (New Directions, 2010), in its box (yes, that's Daneeyal Mueenuddin's stellar collection at left)

The box open, and the text inside

The 3-dimensional, multicolor quality of the text

Some of Carson's artwork, in the text

An example of a lexicon entry on the left, and one of Carson's texts, her translation of the Catullus poem, on the right

The book displayed in accordion fashion

The back of the book

* * *

When I have related the following story, or my rather reduced sense of it, to people, they listen politely, and I wonder, do they think I'm making this up? Because really, how often do you hear people use the terms "literary agent" and "crack addict" about the same person, in the same sentence? Yet such is the truth: my first (and former) literary agent is now set to become rich (again) and famous (or more so than he was), by giving his own account of his drug-addled career of a few years ago. Let me be clear that when he was my agent, although he wasn't able to sell my work (I did it myself), he was absolutely lovely and kind and encouraging and fun to be around, and I never thought for a minute that anything was amiss, and I gather it wasn't. He represented others quite well (including the author I wrote about above). But only a few years later, after he'd hit the jackpot with star writers and big advances...well, you can read the article.  And I just may have my students do so next winter. I think.

New York Times: "Tale of a Life, Unabridged: A Book Agent's Descent and Ascent from the Ashes"

* * *

Lastly, speaking of books and new technologies, I found this short piece in yesterday's Guardian Online worth noting: at the Guardian Hay-on-Wye Book Festival, Nobel Laureate Nadine Gordimer was advocating for the printed word over new technologies, and was especially calling for libraries, with print texts, in the shantytowns in South Africa (how many libraries could have been built and stocked with books for the billions spent on those World Cup stadiums?) and in similar places across Africa and the globe. In addition, she lamented the absence of bookstores as well in areas where black people were formerly segregated because of apartheid.  One simple point she made concerns the technological requirements for digital materials; she spoke about the batteries required for digital readers, but we might also press the issue of electricity too: without either, or affordable means to acquire and access them, what good is digital technology? If you can't charge your iPad or laptop, or access dial-up, broadband or wireless broadband, to what end are these technologies? (I did participate in the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) program a few years back, and while it did have its problems, it still promises a way around some of these issues.) Yet Gordimer's basic point is well-taken: books are one of the more robust technologies for learning that we have, and we should be wary of doing away with them, especially in the physical and material forms we now have, too quickly. She also noted that one of the most influential wriers for her was Marcel Proust and said that she'd read his magnum opus A la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time, 1913-1927) three times, first, in English as a girl (!), then in French, and then again recently in French. Would that I could find the time and space in this world to do so, even in English!