C'est la fin (du terme/quartier)

The quarter has barreled towards its end and I am now in recovery mode, having felt more than a little flattened beneath it. At a certain point I had to impose mental triage and this blog, unfortunately, lay moribund on the gurney.  In addition to my usual commuting routine and a heavy traveling schedule from the very beginning of the year (classes began on January 3, and I had to attend a conference that first weekend) and to an exacting departmental committee assignment and my fulfilling and demanding graduate and undergraduate advisory and supervisory work, as well as delightful non-work-related projects, like the Roussel play, I taught two classes, the gateway introductory fiction workshop and a required course for senior creative writing majors.  Both demanded a tremendous amount of effort, mainly because of the mountain of reading (I assign multiple initial exercises, online threaded discussions on assigned texts, two short story drafts, and one revision in the intro fiction class, and in the senior class, I require a creative autobiography, weekly tweets on Twitter, a book review, a creative essay on one of six books I assign, an in-class report on one of the many articles I post, and a final paper or interview-with-analysis), but one of the immediate pleasures of both is being able to witness the development of the students' tools, artistry and confidence in the former, and the mastery of skills in the latter.  What was true for previous intro fiction classes seemed even more so for this one; a number of the students made evident imaginative and technical leaps in second drafts, which made me nearly start cheering every time I registered this as I read them. I always try to point this out in my typed comments, and sometimes I worry the students may think I'm being too enthusiastic and praiseworthy, but it is heartening to see a student whose first story tacking closely to her autobiography imagining, in her second draft, the lives of people much older, or different, or from a very different chronological period, and structuring the story with greater assurance, understanding how to create characters who come to life on the page, realizing what details will unlock the narrative in ways others would not, and so forth. As I read the final drafts this past week and weekend, what struck me repeatedly was how far some of the students had gotten, how much they had grown, how, in every case, they advanced--have advanced--beyond their earliest efforts, the tiny 1-3 page exercises, they first submitted to me in January.

With the senior majors, one of the most important things I left with was a feeling of hope for the future of literature, and hope and happiness for their own future projects and work, in and around the literary world. At various points this course left some graduating students with a mild--to serious--sense of gloom about the changing US literary landscape, but this year, perhaps because so much remains in the air--and poet and Northwestern University Press rights manager Parneshia Jones reminded our class during her wonderful visit that in the publishing industry as in life "things change every single day"--and so many tools are now available to writers, editors, potential publishers, all of us, more than one of the students told me that they felt "hopeful," that they could make a difference, that they would pursue careers as writers of every possible type and genus, as publishers and editors, as scholars and critics, and in roles perhaps not yet fully conceived or named, by anyone, as things moved forward. I am looking forward to seeing what they do, and they know they will have my support always.

For the required senior major class, "The Situation of Writing," I debuted three new books: Dunya Mikhail's Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea (Elizabeth Winslow, translator; New Directions, 2009), a memoir (of sorts) in verse, of the Iraqi American poet's life during the Gulf and Iraq Wars; Judith Ortiz Cofer's Woman In Front of the Sun: On Becoming a Writer and (University of Georgia Press, 2000); and David Shields's Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (Knopf, 2010).  Of the three, I think the one that provoked the least discussion was Mikhail's, perhaps in part because of its form as two long poems, the first more lyric than narrative and quite abstract as opposed to documentary, which required that the students--or any reader--think about what might constitute a "diary," how trauma and personal experience might be recorded and translated into lyric form, and what war poetry, or poetry written during and in response to war, might look like, all of which were challenging, to say the least. That said, the form also proved liberating from some in the class, and led students whose usual approach might have been a prose essay or creative nonfiction to write longer poems as their response.  The formal approaches of Shields' and another book, Adrienne Kennedy's People Who Led To My Plays (Theater Communications Group, 1996), also appeared to have a liberating effect on the creative essays and final projects, so while there were quite a few to read, their inventiveness (alongside their quality) made each a pleasurable task.

I sometimes think a version of the "Situation" class ought to be offered to all MFA, MA and PhD in creative writing students since it broaches many of the topics that writers not only should be thinking about but have to consider if they want to make writing a career, but from what I can tell, such courses remain a rarity. Which is a shame, but it also underlines how unique and unusual the experience the university's writing students, especially the majors, really is, and how much they are exposed to in addition to the extensive training in writing they undergo by the time they graduate.

MFA vs. NYC vs. Third Stream? or the World of Contemporary American Writing

Next quarter I'll once again be teaching one of the undergraduate writing program's required courses, one of my favorites, "The Situation of Writing," and one central component of it involves discussing contemporary American literary publishing; the processes by which books come into print or, nowadays, e-print; the relationship between writers, agents, editors, and publishing houses; how writers do or don't make a living from publishing literary works; and so forth.

Increasingly as part of this discussion the issue of the MFA degree and MFA (and PhD in writing/poetics) programs arise, and I have tended to juxtapose lapidary overview texts on 20th century American publishing (like Jason Epstein's charming The Book Business: Publishing Past, Present and Future, W. W. Norton, 2002, or André Schiffrin's much more polemical The Business of Books: How International Conglomerates Took Over Publishing and Changed the Way We Read, Verso, 2001) with more recent journalistic articles on New York publishing's crises as part of the discussion. UCLA professor Mark McGurl's 2009 scholarly book, The Program Era: Post-War Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard), provides an excellent, thoroughgoingly historicized and theorized reading of these programs, which have become increasingly normalized as the means by which American writers become (American) writers, but Mark's remarkable book is 480 pages, and really deserves extended treatment and discussion, worthy of a semester-long graduate seminar, which I unfortunately do not have in a 10-week quarter, especially given the amount of material I must cover.

I was thus extremely pleased to read Chad Harbach's essay "MFA vs. NYC," which appears in the journal n+1 and is excerpted in the November 26, 2010 online edition of Slate.  Though it has its faults, as any such wide-ranging, systems-summarizing piece does, from being too binary and tidy to too vague and generalizing in places, it nevertheless provides one of the best overviews of I've seen of what the contemporary American publishing world, both the longstanding, commercial mainstream one (headquarted in New York, but with major nodes in Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, and Philadelphia), and the increasingly parallel one that has developed in university MFA programs. Whereas I have tended in my classes to discuss the New York one, which is, as Harbach notes, in a period of extreme economic stress and structural change, the parallel one, located in MFA programs, is now as significant and important, and as much as the literary world hasn't fully reckoned with this, I would suggest that outside of figures like McGurl and many writer-critics, the scholarly world hasn't either. Moreover, though my introduction to the writing world was primarily through the New York angle, my personal trajectory has straddled the development of the MFA world, and I am now located within it. I studied in an MFA program and have taught in several; my publishing experience bridges both too.  If it is almost impossible now to live off one's literary publications in New York or most major American cities--which was not the case 25 or 30 years ago--it is also growing more and more difficult to get creative writing jobs, because of the supply-and-demand problem and university funding crisis, which, though nowhere near as bad as in the humanities more generally, is worsening. The MFA world, consisting by its very nature of artists, and being situated in the university, is still viewed with suspicion by the scholarly world--what is it that writers do?--and yet it has, as McGurl and Harbach note to differing degrees, as institutionalized and conventionalized as the instutions of which it is a part (and less so each day, apart).

The tensions between these two worlds have played out with several of the major American awards of late, especially the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Awards for fiction, which have been awarded to MFA-produced and based writers published not published by major houses.  In the case of Paul Harding's Tinkers, it famously was rejected by countless major publishers before it found a small publisher and went on to win the Pulitzer.

What Harbach doesn't discuss or even broach (in part because the world of n+1, situated as it is at the nexus of the NYC and MFA worlds, doesn't see it), is a third American literary world-system, however, parallel to both of these, which neither NYC's official publishing hierarchy nor that of the MFA programs, at least in the official sense, takes immediate or consistent note of, but which the structural and above all technological shifts and changes over the last 25 or so years have made possible, which is the autonomous/self-publishing/minoritarian/issue-based/grass-roots writing communities. This world, which is both diminished in key ways as elements of it have been assimilated by the NYC and MFA worlds (queer writing; black writing; black queer writing; etc.) and, for non-creative work, by the institutionalization of criticism, is the world of the slams; the world of community-based minoritarian organizations; the world that produced Language poetry, the Violet Quill, the Fag Rag Collective, OutWrite, Other Countries, Seal Press, Alyson, Gay Men's Press of New York, and so on, and that was already on the wane by the early 1990s. This is a world that many writers of my generation and I also came out of. The Dark Room Writers Collective, my first post-collegiate exposure to the literary world and an autonomous entity based in but distinct from the larger literary world in Cambridge and Boston, was inspired in no small part by and developed out of the historical, social and political trends of this world, as did a great many of the writers (Essex Hemphill, Thomas Grimes, Paul Beatty, Ntozake Shange, etc.) who came through the Dark Room in its earliest days.

But even then, all these competing worlds were already in play, and some of the Dark Room's literary avatars, writers who visited and read and provided advice, like Walker, had been honored by the pinnacle of the New York publishing world, the Pulitzer Prize committee, or Shange by the Obie and Tony Awards; Derek Walcott was an internationally renowned poet teaching in a distinguished M(F)A program, and would soon win the Nobel Prize; and younger writers like Elizabeth Alexander and Carl Phillips were in doctoral humanities programs and had received MAs or MFAs; and the pull of the university was something that every single writer in the Dark Room felt, and eventually followed (or succumbed to, as it were).  The NYC publishing world, as I said, has assimilated some writers from this realm, especially the most commercial ones, the older ones of a certain level of distinction and public recognition, and those whose work could be commodified and marketed as part of a niche (a historical style, period, etc.), and academe has done the same, with the focus being on intellectual thematics, schools, critical arguments which these writers might be said to have generated or been a part of. Death and time are powerful passports to either, I hate to say.  Nevertheless, a gulf still remains between the work of this sort that continues, independent writing and publishing not attached to or located either in the publishing capitals and not part of any educational institutions (I think, for example, of a superb small press like Redbone Press and its publisher, Lisa Moore, for example), and the NYC and MFA worlds, which have their own concerns, forms and modes of socialization, interests, understandings of politics, and so forth.

One person who always reminds me of this quite thoughtfully is poet and activist Jennifer Karmin, who at the pre-Poets Theater panel discussion broached the issue of resources in relation to the sort of project that had unfolded at Oracle Theater, and who such work was for, who had access to it, what its origins were beyond the ones usually suggested (the New York School coterie, for example, the Beat Poets, and similar groupings). Amiri Baraka, Sarah Schulman, and Sonia Sanchez are other contemporary writers, activists and critics whose life and work have underlined the connections and tensions surrounding these various streams for me. All began in what we might call this alternative or grass-roots stream; all have eventually moved into the university and taught creative writing; all have been honored or recognized, and to some degree published, by the NYC world; but all retain vital connections to the aesthetic and political sites from which they emerged.

I feel this tension in my own life and work, and it lies in part at the core of my critique in the talk I gave at the Museum of Contemporary Art, at the center of what I have been trying to think through but not fully able to articulate yet, has to do with the lack of recognition of this third or alternative stream, in relation to avant-gardism, even though at this point it really the only one capable of addressing, at least in a direct way, the ongoing concerns that many of us feel about the onward march of libertarian-capitalism/neoliberalism/communicative capitalism (to use Jodi Dean's term). It comes up for me every time not just my students, but writers I know in the world, ask no longer whether they should attend an MFA (or PhD) program but take that as a given and want me to parse and rank them, but also when I think about how some of the NYC-based folks, agents, critics, etc., simply could care less about what's happening on campuses, or even more so off them, unless there's the possibility of capitalizing on and somehow effectively commodifying this work so that it can become, well, a means to money, to influence, to a livelihoood.

This brings me back to what I have labeled this alternative stream, which I strongly believe is as crucial for contemporary American art as the other two, and my ongoing wonder about how effective it can it ever be, could it ever be, in a world in which the money remains, at least for the moment in NYC and with mainstream publishing, or what's left of it, while the entropic force and power has moved towards and has now diffused throughout MFA programs is another question, but such are my imperfect and still fully unworked-through thoughts after reading and thinking about Harbach's piece.

Talk @ Writing the Future Symposium, CalArts

This past weekend I participated in a symposium, "Writing the Future," at Los Angeles's MoCa: Museum of Contemporary Art, organized by writer and professor Christine Wertheim and sponsored by the MFA Writing Program and the MA in Aesthetics and Politics at the California Institute of the Arts.

I was on the first of two afternoon panels, with Juliana Spahr, a poet, critic and activist who's published many works and a professor at Mills College, and Mark McGurl, a UCLA-based scholar who's most recent acclaim has attended his study The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Harvard, 2009), perhaps the most authoritative study of American MFA programs you can find. The second panel comprised political scientist and media scholar Jodi Dean, and Christine Wertheim herself, spelling for Heriberto Yépez, who could not secure a visa to travel north from Tijuana. Matias Viegener moderated both sets of discussions.

Juliana spoke compellingly from a paper she'd written about her ongoing struggles with issue and experience of privatization, which was increasingly spreading like (a) Cthulhu (the indescribed-yet-described creature from horror pioneer H. P. Lovecraft's work), a figured she'd drawn from an earlier version of Mark's talk; in the symposium draft, he linked the fiction of David Foster Wallace and Lovecraft, questions of scale, the use of genre fiction, and the development of community. My talk, an improvisation from a long paper I wrote (and am still reformulating, especially after hearing what they had to say), broached the relation between neoliberalism and experimental/innovative practice, across genres and forms, asking "W(h)ither the Avant-gardes?" In it I cited Damien Hirst, the Black Eyed Peas, and the "Rethinking Poetics" conference as examples of the willing or at least creeping coexistence between avant-garde practice(s) and the sort of market-oriented, privatizing ideologies and structures that Juliana also explored.  These offered a prelude to Jodi Dean's superb talk about "communicative capitalism" (I have just withdrawn from the library her book Publicity's Secret How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy (Cornell, 2002), which presents an excellent walkthrough of this and related ideas) and how Net culture might be "bad" for writing. "The future is grim," she pronounced, visibly moved, at the end of her talk. The second panel concluded with Christine's exploration of the relationship between gender, language, culture, and colonialism, and included invocations of M. Nourbese Philip (yay!) and James Joyce.


Below are some images from the event and from the rest of my short trip to Los Angeles.  As I mentioned to C, we shall have to return there as soon as we can; I hadn't been in many years.

Christine Wertheim delivering her talk, with Matias Viegener and Jodi Dean at right

Mark McGurl, delivering his talk

Juliana Spahr, at right, before her talk

 Yours truly (Matias Viegener at right), photo by Juliana Spahr

The Symposium audience

The Disney Concert Hall, just down the street from MoCa

LA sky, through one of the brise-soleils at MoCa

A view from my hotel room (at the Kyoto Grand)

E. 2nd Street and Central Avenue (which I mentioned in a poem many years ago, though I hadn't been on it in at least 40 years)

One of the beautiful temples in Little Tokyo, near where I was staying


Downtown LA at dawn

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.