Please Pardon the Quiet

The Millions is going to be dark this week while we make some big changes behind the scenes. What are we working on? Check back in a few days to find out!

- C. Max Magee @ 5:37 PM ~ comments: 1 ~

 

Hiroshima and Nagasaki Remembered

August 6th marked the 64th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and today marks the anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. As part of its op-ed page this weekend, the Los Angeles Times offered several firsthand accounts of the bombings by survivors, taken from a documentary made by the Hiroshima Peace Cultural Center. You can find the complete, translated transcripts of these testimonies at this link.

Here is an excerpt from the testimony of Akihiro Takahashi who was 14 at the time of the Hiroshima bombing:

That was the moment when the blast came. And then the tremendous noise came and we were left in the dark. I couldn't see anything at the moment of explosion just like in this picture. We had been blown by the blast. Of course, I couldn't realize this until the darkness disappeared. I was actually blown about 10 m. My friends were all marked down on the ground by the blast just like this. Everything collapsed for as far as I could see. I felt the city of Hiroshima had disappeared all of a sudden. Then I looked at myself and found my clothes had turned into rags due to the heat. I was probably burned at the back of the head, on my back, on both arms and both legs. My skin was peeling and hanging like this. Automatically I began to walk heading west because that was the direction of my home. After a while, I noticed somebody calling my name. I looked around and found a friend of mine who lived in my town and was studying at the same school. His name was Yamamoto. He was badly burnt just like myself. We walked toward the river. And on the way we saw many victims. I saw a man whose skin was completely peeled off the upper half of his body and a woman whose eye balls were sticking out. Her whole baby was bleeding. A mother and her baby were lying with a skin completely peeled off. We desperately made a way crawling. And finally we reached the river bank. At the same moment, a fire broke out. We made a narrow escape from the fire. If we had been slower by even one second, we would have been killed by the fire.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 8:31 AM ~ comments: 0 ~

 

Curiosities: Smoldering Eyebrows

• E-book pricing wars continue. Sony tries to hit the Kindle where it hurts by offering cheaper e-books. Meanwhile, $0 is becoming an important price point at the Kindle store.
• Sam Anderson hates Thomas Pynchon.
• An indie bookstore fan uses our bookstore tour as a jumping-off point for a literary day in Manhattan. You can too.

- Editor @ 2:30 PM ~ comments: 0 ~

 

Book Lovers

Sonya Chung's first novel, Long for This World, will be released by Scribner in March 2010. She is currently at work on a second novel, Sebastian & Frederick. You can learn more about Sonya and her work at www.sonyachung.com.

It starts out innocently. I recommend Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son. "I think you'd like Johnson," I say, after reading one of his short story drafts. "The violence and the tenderness together. 'Emergency' will knock you out." He's never read Johnson before. I know it will knock him out.

It does (of course). He can't stop talking about it. I introduce him to some of Johnson's poetry. What else? he asks. Meaning: more, more, I want to be knocked out again.

We'd talked about minimalism. I recommend Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. He is European, so I am sure he's read it, but he hasn't. Again, he loves it. What else? Now I have cred. Now we're rolling.

He goes back to Europe. The email exchanges begin. He sends me "In Memory of My Feelings" by Frank O'Hara. I send him Galway Kinnell's "The Bear." Don't be intimidated by Kierkegaard, he writes, start with the Diapsalmata. And Proust goes fast, once you get into it. Read Sherwood Anderson, I write. Winesburg, Ohio.

Then David Foster Wallace dies, and we both read Consider the Lobster before even mentioning it to one another. What a coincidence. The Dostoevsky essay. Yes, yes, the Dostoevsky essay.

Rilke creeps in (of course he does). He reads Letters to a Young Poet, I read On Love and Other Difficulties. It all comes together in Rilke, he writes. It crystallizes. Yes, I write, Rilke goes his own way, beauty and goodness are one - not sequential, not interdependent, but one.

More Hemingway. I find him unanalyzable, I write. The greatest work is like that, don't you think? I read For Whom the Bell Tolls and quote this passage:

Then there was the smell of heather crushed and the roughness of the bent stalks under her head and the sun bright on her closed eyes and all his life he would remember the curve of her throat with her head pushed back into the heather roots and her lips that moved smally and by themselves and the fluttering of the lashes on the eyes tight closed against the sun and against everything, and for her everything was red, orange, gold-red from the sun on the closed eyes, and it all was that color, all of it, the filling, the possessing, the having, all of that color, all in a blindness of that color. For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

My God, I write, what is there to say? Yes, he writes back, I could not have stated it better, the way pure language leaves you speechless; I feel exactly the same way.

For two months, neither of us writes. His father is ill, my manuscript is due. An awkward, quiet phase, during which I slog through The Brothers Karamazov (can't seem to keep my head in the game - guilt, theology, melodrama. Too much, too much...). He writes again, responds to my last email in which I complained about the Twilight phenomenon in the US. There are so many other better guilty pleasures, I'd written - Edith Wharton, Balzac, Palahniuk and Pelecanos. Yes, he writes, recalling a particular page-turning summer of his youth: Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying, Borges' A Universal History of Iniquity. All mind-blowing, all in one week.

Then, a small thing I notice - a reference to the Norwegian writer Erlend Loe, which he'd recommended some time before, maybe more than once. When you get to it... he writes. That book really changed my life. When I get to it. In the back of my mind - a tiny thought, barely perceptible - I think: when am I ever going to get to Erlend Loe, when I've got Jean Rhys, Bolaño, Toni Morrison, and Tolstoy on the nightstand? I think also about whether I'd ever say such a thing: That book changed my life.

He writes that The Name of the World - a minor Johnson novel I'd recommended as an alternative to Tree of Smoke - didn't speak to him, but Douglas Coupland is wrecking him. I write that since it was the scene in The Name of the World where the narrator has an atheistic epiphany (he is sitting in church and realizes, ecstatically, that he doesn't believe in God) that really got me, I'd be interested in Coupland's Life After God. But really, I only half mean it. In the back of my mind, I think: I am too old for it.

I don't know exactly how old he is, likely a few years younger than I; but now I begin to wonder just how many years.

He's reading more David Foster Wallace, sings the cultic praises of Kerouac (I roll my eyes a little). He raves about Lars von Trier (ok, but Breaking the Waves made me literally vomit). I recommend In Bruges - Martin McDonagh is kind of a genius, I write - which he watches and then reports back as "odd" and "all falling apart at the end." We both agree that "Sonny's Blues" is indeed a masterpiece.

I don't hear from him for over a month. I do google searches on Erlend Loe and read this at 3000 Books:

If Tao Lin is the self-referential, disaffected freak-pop on the literary twenty-something's jukebox, then Erlend Loe is the guy sitting in the corner at the piano, picking out notes that eventually turn into a tune.

I add Life After God to my goodreads.com to-read list.

I think: what the hell am I doing?

He writes again, back from travels. I decide to throw in a curve ball, just to see what happens. Everyman's Rules for Scientific Living by the Australian novelist Carrie Tiffany is the best book no one's ever heard of, I write. I happen to believe this, but I don't imagine he'll agree. For good measure, I add: Have you seen Superbad? I could watch that movie over and over again. (This, too, is true.)

I think: what the hell am I doing?

The next I hear from him the email is short. He has deadlines to meet. He is planning a trip to Berlin for work, then Venice with his girlfriend.

You must bring Death in Venice along for the trip, I write.

Ah, yes, it's been years, he writes. I suspect it holds up over time.

I suspect it does, I write. One of the great literary endings. The decrepit Aschenbach, slumped over in a beach chair, that final reverie of youth and eros.

He asks me if I am on Facebook.

I write yes.

Let's be Facebook friends.

Yes, let's. (My mind flashes to all the profile photos of me and J. - grilling fish on the porch, gussied up for a film opening, canvassing for Obama.)

I read on about Erlend Loe: "Naive.Super is a tiny charmer, a ripe fig that falls out of a budget store Christmas cracker onto your toe. Sure, it's 12 years old, but it remains a fresh antithesis to the meta-literary swagger of the 21st century, an antidote to superanalysis and overcomplexity." I think: that sounds refreshing. And J. might like it, even though he generally prefers nonfiction. I click, moving it from my wish list into the shopping cart.

- Editor @ 7:16 AM ~ comments: 5 ~

 

Socialism Vs. the Beautiful Game

Millions readers who follow European soccer, the progress of democratic socialism, or international tax policies may be interested in Jonathan Last's article in the Weekly Standard this week about how Gordon Brown's recent tax hike - from 40% to 50% on the top tax bracket - is decimating the English Premier League. (And yes, I mean that Weekly Standard - the one edited by Bill Kristol, the one so many love to hate.)

According to Last and others (like Arsenal manager Arsene Wenger), the Premier League's inability to keep or attract players like Cristiano Ronaldo (who left Manchester United this transfer season for Real Madrid for a record 80 million pounds), the Brazilian striker Kaka (who spurned a 100 million pound offer from Manchester City to go to Real Madrid for less), Karim Benzima, Franck Ribery, Samuel Eto'o, David Villa, and Jermaine Pennant can all be traced to England's new 50% income tax and the falling value of the pound. That and Spain's 2005 "Beckham Law" that allows high-earning "foreign executives" a special tax rate of only 24% rather than 43%, its usual top-bracket rate. The Spanish law is so named because David Beckham was the first foreign national to be given this status - and because the law was backdated to 2003, the year he joined Real Madrid from Manchester United.

- Emily Colette Wilkinson @ 7:02 AM ~ comments: 0 ~

 

Mope Free: Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli

At the risk of being exposed as a graphic novel novice, my problem with the genre has always been that graphic novels never quite seem to take full, exuberant advantage of the potential afforded by the form.

Too often, no matter how visually accomplished and how intricately plotted, the characters (paradoxically perhaps) are too one-dimensional. To put it simply, they are mopes. Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth is a towering achievement of intricate artistry and bifurcated plotting, but Jimmy himself doesn't buzz and hum along with the rest of the presentation that Ware provides.

In my experience with graphic novels, Art Spiegelman's Maus is the towering exception to this rule. The two-volume set eschews the angst to give a gripping history lesson. The books were, for me, a stirring departure from angst-filled graphic novels like Chester Brown's I Never Liked You, and Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, which tread the same emotional ground as Corrigan.

And so I picked up David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp knowing next to nothing about it and wondering if it too would shroud an awkward, angst-filled character in glorious, hand-drawn finery.

The answer is no, but before I get to that, I should note that Polyp is a gorgeous book, an object with beautiful textures and colors within and without. This isn't a new insight, but Polyp reinforced for me that these lavishly produced graphic novels will be among the niches in which the future of the physical book is secure. I would not have wanted to experience the book via the wan light of the screen.

Polyp the book is pleasingly tangible, and so is Polyp, the book's eponymous protagonist. Asterios Polyp is an architect, drawn in sleek geometric form by Mazzucchelli. Polyp's twin brother Ignazio died at birth and narrates the story from the ether, while also appearing regularly in Polyp's dreams. Unlike Corrigan, Polyp's as assured and complicated a character as you'll see stride through a graphic novel (this side of the super heroes of course). Mazzucchelli threads two plots in alternating chapters, one plot following Polyp from birth to a successful career and to marriage and the other following an older Polyp beginning with his 50th birthday, when his apartment catches fire and he gets on a train to go as far as his money will take him. Polyp is drawn in the classic mold of the hard-headed architect that so many writers have found to be fruitful archetype. But unlike the stony Howard Roark, Polyp is brimming with contradictions and a capacity to evolve under his architect's mask.

Joining Polyp is a colorful cast of characters, who, like Polyp with his architectural angularity, have their own traits subtly mirrored in the style Mazzucchelli uses to draw them. At its heart, Polyp is a love story about Polyp and Hana, a sculptor. In some ways the plot follows a more recognizable romance (or even romantic comedy) trajectory, but Mazzucchelli has many other threads going and delves into - with glorious abstract detail and inventive art and hand lettering - questions of free will, theories of representation, and the nature of the self. But the path of Polyp and Hana is the most moving element of the book. Here Mazzucchelli's artistic cleverness is used to great emotional impact. When Hana and Polyp are getting along, they are drawn in with same line weight and color, but when they aren't, Polyp becomes a jagged, assembly of orthogonal solids, while Hana becomes sketchy and impressionistic.

A note: It took me about two hours to read this book. The book lists for $30 (Amazon has it for $20). It was a very immersive two hours, and the pages are detailed and would support repeated readings. It occurred to me that most books occupy your time for many more hours but often cost less. But its also true that few books are as engrossing and offer a visual experience on this level. A better analogy is a DVD of a favorite film, also offering two hours of immersion and bearing repeated watching, but costing more than a paperback might.

Another note: I know next to nothing about Mazzucchelli, but I've heard that he is very highly regarded for his Batman: Year One book and also that Polyp, unlike his comic-related projects (no matter how worthwhile), is an opportunity to see his vision unmitigated by the necessary adherence to the the established tropes and tics of characters like Batman. PW said of him, "For decades, Mazzucchelli has been a master without a masterpiece." Is Polyp a masterpiece (as PW goes on to assert)? It might be. Polyp doesn't have the mind-bending density of Corrigan, but it has both a novelistic and artistic exuberance that will make me much more likely to reach for it again.

- C. Max Magee @ 3:30 PM ~ comments: 4 ~

 

Fillet of Mockingbird in a Gladwell Reduction Sauce

In his most recent article for The New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell asserts that "one way to make sense" of To Kill a Mockingbird "is to start with Big Jim Folsom." It's a thesis that rings all the Gladwell bells. There's the near-nonsequiter. There's the insistence that to understand something you thought you already understood, you have to know about something Gladwell knows about (in this case James "Big Jim" Folsom, an Alabama governor of the 1950s). And there's the hedge, the stab at plausible deniability: well, this is only one way to do it. But on the evidence of Gladwell's obtuse reading, starting with Big Jim Folsom is precisely not a way to make sense of Harper Lee's novel. Rather, it is a way to make a hash of it.

The flaws in Gladwell's scorched-earth positivism, in both its rococo and its populist moods, have been so amply documented - and not only in the Letters page of The New Yorker - that it may be time for a counter-backlash. The high dudgeon with which The New Republic took Gladwell's most recent book, Outliers, to task seemed to me to miss some of the charms that have landed it on the bestseller list. Disregard the sociological claptrap, and it's clear that Gladwell is not a scientist, but an entertainer. The pleasure we take in his arguments - in which Laban Movement Analysis becomes the key to dog training, and football to teaching, and Lawrence of Arabia to Rick Pitino, or vice versa - is the pleasure of the high wire act, or, more aptly, that of the magic show. If things go well, the audience gets a little fizz of insight. If the trick goes wrong, nobody gets hurt, because, after all, there never really was a rabbit in that hat.

There is something unheimlich, however, about watching Gladwell bring his rhetorical illusionism to bear on the already illusory realm of literature. In his glib reduction of Harper Lee's most enduring fictional creation to a "Jim Crow liberal," he misses the forest for the trees.

The raison d'être for Gladwell's debut as a literary critic, we are told, is that "a controversy... is swirling around the book on its fiftieth anniversary." Well, now it is. This controversy apparently has something to do with "Atticus Finch and the limits of Southern liberalism," and to resolve it, Gladwell decides to re-open the trial of the falsely accused Tom Robinson, which is the novel's climax. Some historical evidence is dragged in, but we will pass over in silence Gladwell's conflation of "cases of black-on-white rape" with "allegations of black-on-white rape." The point is to re-examine Robinson's defense attorney, Atticus Finch.

According to Gladwell, Finch has perpetrated a kind of ideological malpractice. To wit:

Finch wants his white, male jurors to do the right thing. But... he dare not challenge the foundations of their privilege. Instead, Finch does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages them to swap one of their prejudices for another.

More galling, to Gladwell, than this refusal to bait his jury is the turn-the-other-cheek ethic underlying it. Finch tells his daughter that it is not O.K. for her to hate anyone, even Hitler. "Really? Not even Hitler?" Gladwell asks. The question would be a gratuitous flourish, except that it discloses Gladwell's supra-rational frustration with Finch's "hearts and minds" approach to the world's ills. You see, this approach "is about accommodation, not reform."

If Finch were a civil-rights hero, he would be brimming with rage at the unjust verdict. But he isn't. He's not Thurgood Marshall looking for racial salvation through the law.

Well, obviously. Otherwise Harper Lee would have named him Thurgood Marshall, or Shmurgood Shmarshall, and would have made him a heroic civil-rights reformer. But in addition to not being Thurgood Marshall, Atticus Finch is also a fictional character. This is not a trivial observation. Contradictions, blemishes, and blind spots are to be cherished in characters (and, some would say, in real people). Indeed, one way of reading the end of the novel is not that Atticus Finch has hypocritically "decided to obstruct justice" with his crony the sheriff, as Gladwell would have it, but that he has come to see the shortcomings in the inflexible moral code for which Gladwell has earlier chided him. He has discovered that all men are not the same, that the criminal Bob Ewell (incest, assault) and the innocent Boo Radley (reclusiveness, pallor) must be held to different standards.

Certainly, Finch's notions about racial equality do not match the liberal nostrums of our day. It would be weird if they did. Moreover, they may (or may not) be Lee's notions. To Kill a Mockingbird certainly contains more than its fare share of racial stereotypes, which, like its accommodationist view of race, are worth discussing (as are the elements of Oliver Twist that today make us cringe). A more nuanced article might have made the argument that To Kill a Mockingbird has a didactic streak, and that it puts Atticus Finch forward as an allegorical figure of enlightenment. Or that readers of the book have mistakenly read him allegorically, rather than as a human being with human limitations. Or that To Kill a Mockingbird is not a very good book, and is racist to boot. Indeed, the latter may have been Gladwell's reaction on taking up the book again in 2009.

But he hasn't chosen to make any of those arguments. And so his triumphant conclusion - "A book that we thought instructed us about the world tells us, instead, about the limitations of Jim Crow liberalism" - rankles. No, we want to say, it tells Malcolm Gladwell about Jim Crow liberalism. Slighting the novel's achievement on account of its anachronisms is like dismissing Huckleberry Finn because of the ways Twain caricatures Jim. There are good reasons why these books are on the most-banned list; that they record liberal blind-spots is not among them.

Moreover, Gladwell's thinly veiled hostility toward To Kill a Mockingbird betrays a fundamental misapprehension about the novel, as distinct from the satire or the polemic. Following George Orwell, he seems to want novels to provoke "a change of structure" rather than "a change in spirit." That is, he wants them not to be novels.

No one is going to canonize Harper Lee as the high priestess of negative capability (just as no one would nominate Orwell for high priest.) But the durability of To Kill a Mockingbird would seem to vindicate her method. Despite the "limitations" of Atticus' worldview, the narrative that encompasses it has - no less than the righteous rage of reformers - paved the way for an epochal, and as yet incomplete, revolution in the way Americans think about race. And unlike a legal verdict, no one can overturn it. Not even the Roberts court. Not even Malcolm Gladwell.

- Garth Risk Hallberg @ 8:30 AM ~ comments: 11 ~

 

Nabokov, Wallace, and the Incredible Shrinking Book

Bezalel Stern is a lawyer and freelance writer who lives in New York. He is currently at work on his first novel about the life and times of a Wall Street day trader.

I was vaguely shocked and cautiously appalled to learn last week that Vladimir Nabokov's "new" novel, The Original of Laura, due for release in August, isn't, in fact, much of a novel at all.

"This very unfinished work reads largely like an outline, full of seeming notes-to-self, references to source material, self-critique, sentence fragments and commentary" Publishers Weekly writes, in the first review of Nabokov's posthumous work. "It would be a mistake, in other words, for readers to come to this expecting anything resembling a novel."

Yet, the hype that has been building around this book for years - years! - has totally eclipsed the fact that the book is, in fact, actually "138 index cards". This hype, by the by, has enjoyed more than a little support from Nabokov's son Dmitri, and his, in retrospect, frenzy-building public questioning about whether to publish the text, which his father asked to be destroyed.

Given a charitable guess of 50 words per index card (Publishers Weekly says most of the index cards contain less than a paragraph of notes), this comes out to a "novel" of a little under 7,000 words. In other words, the text being published would be comparable to a 25-page short story (if, indeed, it were a story at all). Which makes one wonder how bad a deal Playboy, which bought the rights to excerpt the new book, got. Is the Playboy tease going to be flash fiction?

I guess the fact that this book will soon be published (and the fact that I will almost certainly purchase and read it) leads me to ask two big (to my mind) questions, one Nabokov specific and one more general to the world of publishing today.

First, why is it that when it comes to the world of Nabokov we are all suddenly academics? I know of few people outside of the academic world who purchase annotated works, yet I have literally dozens of friends who have purchased, and devoured, The Annotated Lolita. Now, Knopf is publishing The Original of Laura by reproducing the original cards, "with a transcription below of each card's contents." Obviously, the main reason Knopf is doing this is to fill the pages - it is hard, even in the best of times, to sell a 25-page book for 35 dollars. But there is also the thrill that I know I get and others must get as well of Nabokov scholarship. Enjoying what the master wrote, how he wrote it. Puzzling the pieces together.

Perhaps this scholarship-craze is particular to Nabokov (a strong and unverifiable contention, I know) because his novels demand it. You can't read a book like Pale Fire, or even a relatively simple book like Pnin, without knowing that you're entering a world, Borges-like, of so many levels, of labyrinths upon labyrinths. Breaking the labyrinths down into the fundamentals of the maze (to draw this metaphor out) seems helpful not only in receiving new material from the master, but in analyzing this new composition to shed light on how the older, more familiar works were composed.

Second, though (and this is the more problematic question for me), why is it that books are being published in the contemporary market that don't have the length or stamina of books. I am thinking, in particular, of David Foster Wallace's commencement speech to the Kenyon College 2005 graduating class, published posthumously as This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. I had read the commencement speech long before it was officially published. In fact, shortly after Wallace delivered it a friend sent it to me over e-mail. It took me about fifteen minutes to read. And I read slowly.

Not that it shouldn't be written, or read. On the contrary, Wallace's commencement speech is both moving and necessary, in a way that many full-length texts are not. Yet, why the subterfuge? Sell it as an essay, in a magazine, or in a volume with other texts. But why pretend that this is a stand-alone book?

In order to fatten up Wallace's speech (lacking the help of index cards that Nabokov so conveniently provided), the publisher decided to print only one sentence on every page. So, not only is this essay published in book form, it is actually less pleasant and more cumbersome to read than the e-mail I received of the speech was four years ago.

I guess, my plea is, then, to stop the games. If you're publishing something that's great writing but that clearly isn't a book, don't call it a book. Call it an essay. True, you probably won't be able to sell it for $15 (the list price of Wallace's speech). But on the other hand, think of all the paper you'll save.

- Editor @ 7:06 AM ~ comments: 2 ~

 

Dispatches from Vilnius

Three flights and twenty hours after departing New York, I arrived in Vilnius, Lithuania, the land of potato pancakes, sour cream, and Baltas beer, where "thank you" is pronounced "achoo," like a sneeze. Vilnius is the city closest to the geographical center of Europe, and because it's also at a cultural crossroads, the city has been hit hard by the forces of history. Napoleon's army liberated Lithuania from the Russians in 1812, and during their later retreat through Vilnius, forty thousand men died. The twentieth century saw both German and Soviet rule and genocides at the hands of the Nazis and the KGB. Independence came less than twenty years ago, when Lithuania was the first of the Baltic States to throw off Soviet rule. Even now, landlocked Vilnius is the hardest of the Baltic capital cities to travel to.

I came to Vilnius by way of the Summer Literary Seminars, which is currently holding its first ever Lithuanian conference. Poets and writers have traveled from as far as Australia and South Africa to take classes with writers like Lynne Tillman, Phillip Lopate, Mac Wellman, and Peter Cole. Class days are interspersed with lecture days, and all days usually end with readings. The Lithuanian stage director Gytis Padegimas spoke about the state of contemporary Lithuanian drama and how critical resistance to new playwrights keep many of them from writing. Almantas Samalaviciu, the editor of Lithunia's largest cultural journal, traced the developments in twentieth century Lithuanian literature, from Soviet rule through the liberation. But not all of the focus is on Lithuanian literature. Catherine Tice of the New York Review of Books gave a lecture on the contemporary essay and its provinces. Max Winter of Fence and Mike Spry of Montreal's Matrix offered guidance on publishing with North American literary magazines.

With Vilnius as our campus, the history of place, as well the new sights and sounds play a large role in the conference, too. Over a handful of entries, I plan to guide you through some of the more interesting discussions and events of the conference, and intersperse some Vilnius culture as well. If you want a head start, Open Letter recently published a translation of Ričardas Gavelis's Vilnius Poker, the preeminent postmodern Lithuanian novel. Or for more of a historical background, turn to Laimonas Briedis's City of Strangers. I'm on Lithuanian time, which is notorious for lagging behind, but more dispatches will be coming soon.

- Anne Yoder @ 6:15 PM ~ comments: 0 ~

 

Writing for Free

This HuffPo writer is right. Not paying writers is not a business model. Or if it is, it's not a sustainable model. She touches on many good points in this debate, namely that only those that can afford to write for free will do so, meaning that we'll increasingly be hearing from the idle rich almost exclusively.

There's a voguish notion going around, espoused vocally by Chris Anderson as he stumps for his book Free but also creeping into job listings for any number of online publications, that you write for free in order to make a name for yourself and to get your personal brand out there. Once you've got sixty posts under your belt at HuffPo, the idea goes, you can take your "clips" and go find a paying gig or pitch a book or get speaking engagements.

If you are a good enough writer, you can probably jumpstart a career this way (though if you're good enough you probably didn't need a jumpstart in the first place), but do not operate under illusion that when someone invites you to write regularly for free, you are anything more than a cog in their pageview-generating machine. Paying writers nothing is just a way to increase profit margin.

Certainly, times are tough and its hard to make a living wage as a writer these days, but if a place fancies itself a business, then it can afford to pay you something, maybe not much, but more than nothing.

If you can find no one to pay you to write, start your own website and write for free for yourself. You won't feel like you're getting ripped off, and any success you find will flow directly to you, not the pageview counters who cash the checks. The tools that let you showcase your own writing online are free, easy to use, and plentiful, so it's worth putting out your shingle and seeing if anyone shows up.

(This item also appears alongside responses from Eve Batey and Richard Nash at The Rumpus.)

- C. Max Magee @ 12:48 PM ~ comments: 3 ~