More bad news for American book coverage

It looks like the rumors were true about The Washington Post‘s standalone book supplement. According to The New York Times, Book World will cease publication after Feb. 15.

Book World was one of the last remaining stand-alone book review sections in the country, along with The New York Times Book Review and The San Francisco Chronicle’s Books section. The Washington Post’s move comes as the company, like most other newspaper businesses across the country, has been hobbled by a protracted downturn in advertising.

According to reports from Book World employees, the last issue of Book World will appear in its tabloid print version on Feb. 15 but will continue to be published online as a distinct entity. In the printed newspaper, Sunday book content will be split between Outlook, the opinion and commentary section, and Style & Arts.

Meanwhile, things aren’t looking very good for Quill & Quire‘s counterpart in the U.S., Publishers Weekly. The New York Times is also reporting that PW editor-in-chief Sara Nelson has been laid off, along with 7% of the magazine’s staff.

Ms. Nelson, 52, spent four years heading up the magazine and had become a lively presence within the industry, speaking frequently on panels and advocating forcefully for books in her weekly column.

According to a statement from [the magazine's owners] Reed Business Information … as a result of the restructuring, Brian Kenney, editor-in-chief of School Library Journal, will now be editorial director of that magazine along with Publishers Weekly and Library Journal.

It probably doesn’t need to be said that forcing one guy to edit three magazines is madness. The quality of all three titles is sure to suffer, no?

Nobel jury head slams U.S. authors

According to The Guardian, Nobel jury head Horace Engdahl has got a bit of a hate-on for U.S. authors, describing U.S. writing as “insular and ignorant”:

Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press that U.S. writers were “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” which he said dragged down the quality of their work. “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

Engdahl appears to be backpedalling a bit now, but he hasn’t offered any apologies. And we’re not saying he should: he’s entitled to his incredibly sweeping, pretentious, pointy-headed opinion.

The Nobel jury is expected to announce this year’s winner sometime over the next few weeks, and Engdahl’s comments have oddsmakers predicting that contenders like Philip Roth, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates needn’t bother to clear space on their mantles.

Oh, and for an alternate opinion of U.S. writing, the L.A. Times contacted Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the foundation that administers the National Book Awards, who said he wanted to send Engdahl a reading list of U.S. literature.

“Such a comment makes me think that Mr. Engdahl has read little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age,” he said.

Dying is easy, launching a small press is hard

Editor and author John Warner has a lengthy post on Maud Newton’s blog about the “non-success” of his fledgling publishing enterprise, TOW Books, a humour imprint that was supposed to make him “the Judd Apatow of the written word.” For all his self-effacing irony, Warner, the editor of McSweeney’s online, notes the crushing bathos involved in launching a small press.

Back then I imagined that the challenge for most publishers was content, and since our titles would be good, and rigorously curated, so that if you liked one, you’d like them all, we would take bookstores by storm.

I know, stupid.

A short few years later, Warner acknowledges that selling books has as much to do with publicity and distribution as it does with content, so to jump-start his business he’s employing a tactic that increasingly is becoming part of a publicist’s arsenal – namely, offering readers free copies of his books. The idea being that “in this day and age of Amazon and blogs and Facebook and MySpace, and LibraryThing, and Shelfari, everyone has a public forum where they can express their opinions.”

Warner’s piece is also a sobering reminder for humourless publishing-industry reporters to keep on their toes. From one of his press releases:

“According to Mr. Warner, TOW Books will be dedicated to publishing titles with staying power instead of relying on slapdash parodies, designed only to capitalize on a current cultural trend and rushed to market to make a quick buck.

“The first announced title to be published in early 2007 will be Kevin Federline’s Guide to Sudoku.”

I assumed the joke would be obvious, but this little nugget was repeated in the Publishers Weekly coverage of our launch as fact. “The second Tow Books title, scheduled for release in early 2007,” PW reported, “will be Kevin Federline’s Guide to Sudoku.”

The Internet, and other modern horrors

Perhaps in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of blogging, Guy Gavriel Kay has a piece in this past weekend’s Globe and Mail Books section about the perils facing authors in the digital age.

Gavriel Kay has a strong Web following himself and has been known to write blog-like diaries in conjunction with book tours, but that doesn’t mean he likes any of it. Overall, he believes the proliferation of chatter online has led to a decline in privacy.

For some of us, no context is “limited” any longer. That is the point I’m offering for consideration. And “some of us” can be pretty extensive. This isn’t about Brad Pitt or Amy Winehouse. Ask any high school student whose pratfall is recorded by a classmate’s camera phone and posted to YouTube. Or the microcelebrity (a nice term I first saw in Wired magazine) snapped while at a party looking less-than-sober, with the photo online immediately, to derision-inducing effect.

We are, in other words, always “on” now, at least potentially, always in a wider public than might appear to be the case, and it compels adjustments, and some regret.

Here, for example, is how he reacted when approached by four Yale students “with questions about other writers and their books”:

And I looked at them and “saw” four blogs, with links to a plenitude of others. Given the ease of searching blogs now – for my name, or those of the queried writers – it was suddenly impossible to treat this as a quiet exchange of thoughtful literary opinion. I was as careful as a politician in a scrum, all of us with teacups in hand in a beautiful room.

Now, Gavriel Kay may have a general point about the erosion of privacy in the wired world. But it’s difficult to understand his timid reaction given the students’ benign and unpersonal line of questioning. After all, a writer’s “thoughful literary opinion” is unlikely to come back to haunt him, even if it is circulated online. As Martin Amis pointed out in a recent essay, “What you say about something is never your last word on any subject.” Fear of being overheard certainly hasn’t kept Amis from running his mouth.

More hating on the Kindle

Criticism of Amazon’s new e-reader continues to fly, and the latest comes from a high-profile source: star American book designer Chip Kidd. In an entry on the design blog A Brief Message, Kidd writes:

I’ve been asked to comment on what effect I think [the Kindle] will have, if any, on book design as we know it. Here goes.

None.

Alas, Kidd’s complaints aren’t really Kindle-specific, and have a distinct same-old-same-old feel:

What no one seems to get through their thick skulls, even after untold millions of dollars have been wasted on the concept: PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO READ BOOKS ON A SCREEN. Why is that so hard for someone as obviously smart as Jeff Bezos to accept?

Far more damning, in Quillblog’s opinion, are criticisms like this one. Mobile-device commentator James Kendrick doesn’t dismiss out of hand the very idea of an e-reader; instead, he focuses directly on the Kindle’s design flaws. Which do sound pretty alarming.

Todd Babiak vs. toddbabiak.com

In a sardonic post announcing his reluctant embrace of the blogosphere, Edmonton author Todd Babiak (The Book of Stanley, The Garneau Block) expresses his instinctive distaste for self-serving author blogs:

I used to make fun of writer friends who had websites and blogs. Given our busy lives, with families and jobs and leaves to rake and, most importantly, BOOKS TO READ, where was the time to express unconsidered opinions about, say, chocolate? Besides, it always seemed an embarrassing exercise in self-love. “Shoot me,” I remember saying, to my friend, William, “if I ever get a website. The sound of it: toddbabiak.com. Tasteless! Boorish! Actually, don’t shoot me. Stab me, with something that isn’t even sharp. Just press really hard, again and again.”

Three months later, I had a website.

Maybe Babiak is on to something here – after all, so few Canadian authors’ websites are truly compelling. That may be because, these days, the blogs people actually read tend to be more akin to news aggregators than personal diaries. All of the self-obsession of first-wave bloggers has generally migrated to social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace.

For now, though, Babiak shares his thoughts on chocolate, airport security, and watching a man throw up on a bus here.

Dave Hickey makes a Believer out of Sheila Heti

There’s a great interview in the Dec/Nov issue of The Believer with notorious author and art critic Dave Hickey conducted by Toronto’s Sheila Heti.

The conversation ranges from the true nature of art, the role of criticism, Hickey’s current place in the art world, etc. – not the most thrilling-sounding stuff, but as James Wolcott writes on his blog, the interview is fun to read because Hickey “sounds like an actual human being talking, not a filtration device preening with little soundbites.”

For example, Hickey characterizes the whole notion of Fine Arts degrees as “training sissies for teaching jobs” and an efffort “to create an intellectual and pedagogical justification for the most frivolous activity in Western culture.”

Here are Hickey’s thoughts on arts in academia and government arts funding, a contentious topic this side of the border:

DH: I don’t think the government should touch art. Governments are risk averse. They encourage risk-averse personalities to be artists. Some good artists in their maturity – like me – will take a job at a university and continue to produce because they have trained themselves to produce. But the university environment is not a productive environment. It’s oppressive.

SH: It’s what?

DH: It’s not free. You cannot say what you want to. Let me explain. If I sell an article to Vanity Fair, they give me some money and we’re quits. I can take that money and spend it on heroin and Arab boys if I want to. But if I get the money I make from the university every year, that comes with a requirement that I not be a pedophile, that I not be a drug addict, that I not tell the truth, that I not say what I think about the president of the university. That’s what that money is. And if I take a job at a university and I’m a young person, I have six years in which I can’t express my opinion until I get tenure. Now, are you going to remember your opinions for six years? No!

SH: So if you eschew money from grants and from the government, then you’ve got to make money elsewhere–

DH: I wrote reviews of Porter Wagoner albums and squibs for titty magazines, but I fucking wrote them because I was trying to win and avoid all unavoidable compromises that presented me with the fantasies of comfort and security. I just like to write lucid prose. That’s my little thing. Why should it be easier for me than it was for Steve Tyler? Anyway, people don’t make literature, architecture, and art – the culture makes those things. We make books, buildings, and objects. We do our crummy little shit, and the culture assigns value to it, and I don’t think the culture needs government help.

How’s that for a Monday morning wake up call? Hickey also has some thoughts for those young or avant-garde writers and artists who feel they are not being given their due mainstream recognition:

The art world I came up into was very much like the jazz world I grew up in, which is to say, a relatively small thing. If you got to go see Miles Davis in a little bar on La Brea, that was great, and you didn’t sit around saying, “There was no coverage in the New York Times! Miles is not going to get any reviews!” You know what I’m saying?

Though Heti’s role in the interview is mostly to play straight (wo)man to Hickey, she does drop some hints about her own artistic future:

Increasingly I’m less interested in writing about fictional people, because it seems so tiresome to make up a fake person and put them through the paces of a fake story. I just – I can’t do it.

Uh, tiresome? As Hickey himself says, right at the beginning of the interview, about the creation of art: “if you don’t like it and it’s not easy, you shouldn’t be doing it.”

Faking your way through literary conversations

The most recent edition of The Times Literary Supplement contains a review of a book/essay entitled (in French) “How to discuss books one hasn’t read.” Written by French literature professor and practising psychoanalyst Pierre Bayard, the book tackles what must surely be a common problem: having to fake one’s way through conversations or writing about great lit one hasn’t read. Don’t feel guilty, Bayard says – you aren’t alone, and society shouldn’t be pressuring you like that anyway.

During a discussion of “literary embarrassment,” Bayard himself confesses to referencing Joyce repeatedly in his teaching, though he hasn’t read Ulysses, and he isn’t alone in his chutzpah, the review says:

Bayard focuses on a scene in Lodge’s novel Changing Places, in which the English academic Philip Swallow initiates his students and fellow academics into a “game of Humiliation,” according to whose rules players have to give the names of great works they have not read: the head of the English department who hasn’t read Paradise Regained is bested by the American academic, Howard Ringbaum, who, in a moment of professional recklessness, confesses to not having read Hamlet. Ringbaum’s mistake, according to Bayard, was to have made this unambiguous confession, for Hamlet is part of what Bayard terms our “virtual” library – works we cannot help but be familiar with. There was simply no need for Ringbaum to be so rash.

As discussed in the review, Bayard focuses on the question of reviewing without reading the works in question:

The most enjoyable chapter is on Balzac’s novel Illusions perdues … in which the hero, Lucien de Rubempré, who has come to Paris to find literary fame and fortune, receives a brisk lesson in the cynical conventions of Parisian literary journalism.… Rubempré, who is full of foolish notions about “la sainte critique,” learns from his more worldly friends that … to read a volume for review would be considered humiliating – it’s a task best left to one’s mistress: the reviewer’s job is to express general opinions about the author in question, opinions that comply with the wishes of one’s editor. Bayard would see this approach to literary journalism as “transgressive”: all opinions, no matter how ill-founded, are valid, and the book has ceased to have importance, “has ceased to exist.” Balzac’s chancers are free to construct their own virtual libraries.

The practice of reviewing a book without having read it inevitably brings Oscar Wilde into the discussion: Wilde (the patron saint of non-readers) recommended six minutes as the proper time to spend reading a book for review, and advocated reviewing as a good way of talking about oneself.

Quillblog should state, for the record, that Q&Q’s reviewers never try this at home.

David Bezmozgis on Leonard Michaels

Over at Nextbook, David Bezmozgis writes a lengthy tribute to the late American author Leonard Michaels, a writer who not only served as a formative influence on Bezmozgis, but eventually become a mentor, friend, and confidante.

I should say at this point that though I was a dedicated reader and entertained writerly ambitions, I knew next to nothing about the practical realities of publishing. I paid no attention to and couldn’t distinguish between the various publishing houses and knew nothing about their relative merits or reputations. I knew nothing about the arcana of lists, deals, rights, advances, tours, covers, print runs, or anything else. All books looked the same to me. They all participated equally in the wondrous, enviable state of being published. A more savvy reader, noting the poor availability of Michaels’s books, might have deduced from this something about the state of Michaels’s career, but this never occurred to me. I thought that anybody who wrote as well as he did had to be a great success, on par with Philip Roth or Saul Bellow or any other writer deserving of serious consideration. That his books were almost completely out of print I perceived only as matter of personal inconvenience to me, not anything that would be of consequence to Michaels himself. After all, he had written the books and they had been published. They existed. I imagined that anything beyond that was trivial.

Also at Nextbook is “Honeymoon,” a short story by Michaels that Bezmozgis once wrote a screenplay for, which is what began the relationship between the two writers. (The movie was never made – it’s about a young bride who falls for her mambo-dancing waiter at a Catskills resort. “Many were of the opinion that Dirty Dancing had exhausted the subject,” Bezmozgis writes.)

The future of bookchat

In The New York Times, arts reporter Motoko Rich uses the recent contraction of mainstream book review coverage as a springboard to discuss ye olde Blogs vs Newspapers debate.

There follows the expected back and forth, with litblogger Ed Champion arguing that blogs counter “the ‘often stodgy and pretentious tone’ of traditional reviews,” while National Book Critics Circle president John Freeman says, “We have a lot of opinions in our world. What we need is more mediation and reflection, which is why newspapers and literary journals are so important.”

One prominent litblogger, Maud Newton, gives the Times a welcome sense of perspective:

“I find it kind of naïve and misguided to be a triumphalist blogger,” Ms. Newton said. “But I also find it kind of silly when people in the print media bash blogs as a general category, because I think the people are doing very, very different things.”

And while it’s not mentioned in the article, this very funny cartoon also offers some perspective on the bookchat wars.