The question is, who's standing in for Medusa?

So sayeth the NY Times. Perseus Book Group, which is the single largest indie-pub distributor, signed a deal with Apple for Apple’s (idiotically named) iBookstore. Among the 300+ small presses who distribute through Perseus are City Lights Books, The New Press (excellent nonfiction catalog), Vanguard Press (an imprint of Perseus for all you lefties out there), and Running Press.

At first blush this seems like a good thing: more distribution channels equals more cash flow to authors and small publishers, right? And it’s a smack in the face for Amazon, because another strong ebook seller means big ol’ AMZ can’t just charge whatever the heck it wants. It puts authors in charge, right? Or at least publishers. And this is obviously a list of Good Things. Read more »

I’ve been thinking about minor characters lately, about how major they really are—the texture, realism, and depth they add. In an essay called “Extras, Chorus, Supernumeraries, and Walk-Ons: Bringing Minor Characters to Life,” W.D. Wetherell describes some of their significance like this:

Minor characters not only add color to a story but can reflect something about the central action in a story, serving as a counterpoint to what is going on in the foreground. Sometimes minor characters can also be reflections of parts or characteristics of major characters—fragments of the self whom the major characters meet long the way. (Creating Fiction 58)

I had this sentiment in mind over the weekend while reading Rose Alley, by Jeremy M. Davies, since the book doesn’t have major characters. Instead, each of the thirteen most prominent characters gets his or her own chapter. Regarding this book, I am particularly interested in the idea Wetherell brings up about minor characters serving as “counterpoint to what is going on in the foreground.”

In Rose Alley, many of the characters are gathered to create a blue movie about Dryden when production is paused due to the 1968 student riots in Paris. The fact that there isn’t a “story” in the novel–no narrative progression towards an arc and resolution–seems fitting when the subject of the book is a break in progress. The result is that each major character becomes a minor character, and each serves as counterpoint to what is really happening, which is nothing. This sets the premise for the 169 small pages of dense, rich, chocolate-and-raspberry-tort-delicious, prose. Read more »

You’ll have to forgive me – all two of you, who probably don’t actually keep track of when one posts, anyway – for “forgetting” to blog last Tuesday at my usual time. I happened to get muzzled by portfolios, baggy-eyed umpteenth drafts, and good ole, it’s-almost-fucking-spring-break-who-cares apathy. So yeah – feel free to upload a waggling finger or a switch, or whatever, I’ll download it with haste.

So I flew home to Muncie, Indiana, in time for In Print V, Ball State University’s festival of first books. Being a BSU alum, I obviously strutted into AJ 175, intentionally refusing to look undergrads in the eye in the same way investment bankers refuse to look in the eyes of the waiters they hand their credit card to. Actually, I awkwardly slid into the fourth or fifth row of seats and hunkered into my chair, keeping my eyes peeled only for ex-profs and former fellow students, still hanging on. I pointed, waved, and winked accordingly, and shortly before the reading began, the profs, introducers, and visiting writers congregated around the front row, shaking hands, laughing, going through all that.

I heard a voice a few rows behind me say, “Dude, look at all the lit people hoarded together by the podium.

I looked over my shoulder, saw a guy – probably about 21 – nod his head. I followed the nod across the chairs of the lecture hall, filled with students with notebooks in their laps, and to the congregation up front.

“No shit, bro,” his buddy said, transitioning into a masquerade. “Uhhh, James Patterson sucks.”

“Yeah,” the head-nodder said, “Uhhh. Hunt for Red October is airport fiction. Uhh.”

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I kept finding all these interesting links this week, and couldn’t decide which to talk about, so here are a few things of interest.

First, a crime novelist is sued for defamation after setting her novel (including a murder) at a famous Paris fabric store. Now, I can’t see how she would actually have to pay the millions they’re asking for in damages, but if the case does turn out like that it would be setting a scary precedent for anyone wanting to use real-world settings in their books.

Next, USA Today interviews Nicholas Sparks about a new movie adaptation starting Miley Cyrus. If you can skip past the parts where she talks about hitting on her costars and not even reading the book the movie’s based on, you’ll find some pretty… interesting… comments from Sparks himself. First, he claims he does not write romance (something I’m not too bothered by), but then he says that there are no other authors writing in his genre. And that he’s not formulaic. Really?

A design blog I read also had this post about books turned into art. They do look really cool, but it does hurt me a bit inside to see that done to books. All in all, I liked this Chicago Manual of Style purse better.

Finally, here’s an article on The Things They Carried, twenty years after it was published.

Happy Monday!

This week I read Deja Everything by Adam Hammer.  It was quite honestly the most fun I’ve had reading poetry in a long time.  Adam Hammer’s poetry is funny and touching and somewhat sad all at the same time.  The best poet you haven’t heard of.  It got me thinking about how little being a well read author actually matters to the quality of the writing.  Sometimes people get lucky and a book or manuscript will be discovered after another book becomes popular like Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. But unfortunately, Hammer was killed in a car wreck in the early eighties so besides the soon to be released posthumous chapbook, I don’t think Hammer will have a chance to really stand out as the monumental poet he could have and probably should have been.  In a way, when I am introduced to works like Deja Everything I really treasure that I and only a handful of others are lucky enough to have the pleasure of reading Hammer, like he is our own little secret and was writing just for us.  Its true I have these selfish thoughts, but at the same time I am a little disappointed that aside from the few people I share my copy with, people will probably stop reading his poetry and how odd it is in this time in history where there is so much information available to us, how many wonderful authors are just not being seen and how many authors like Adam Hammer have we entirely missed our chance to get to know.

You smell them. You say that print won’t die, that it can’t, because who’s going to throw their Kindle across the room when they realize a fuming hatred for the work they’re reading. The tangibility is important—you want to hold it, flip pages, earmark, and write marginalia. You take several and organize them in different systems to see which fits you best: by color, Library of Congress, Dewey Decimal, publication date, or just alphabetical order. You hope that other people come to your apartment and admire them—“Oh, you have a copy of such and such!” or “Wow, you have a ton of books!” always with the unstated “Geeze, you must be smart” right under the surface. You buy multiple copies of the same book with different covers because you can’t believe how well the artist interpreted Jane Eyre yet again. You shy away from asking:

Are books fetish objects?

The last time I went to Portland, I stumbled upon the magazine Veneer. It’s got a limited run and a subscription that is pricey as hell because they aren’t exactly books so much as pieces of art. Books with strange forms—one looks like it just got dipped in meringue (but you’d never lick a book, now, would you? That’s just gross.).

And you can’t read them, exactly: it’s all excerpts, without beginnings or endings, and one excerpt doesn’t follow another logically. There might be pieces of a science journal article on macrobiotic plant life followed by marriage records and then a DOD diagram. Nothing is related except in the aesthetic of the editor. They’re shipped with toys—a notepad by Sturtevant, a ladies’ single white glove—random objets trouvés.

Are these books for the sake of owning books? Are books just another fetish object?

I bet you didn’t know that tomorrow is World Poetry Day. I didn’t know, and I’m a poet.

We’ve had much discussion here on Bark about lifting poetry’s profile in America. And wouldn’t you know it, I can’t find a scrap of American news on the internet about exhibits, readings, or poetical celebrations to be held tomorrow. Instead, I get a sarcastically funny Vanity Fair article about Tiger Woods, the sexting poet from the beat-generation.

And I get articles with obvious typo’s:  ”In 19999, the UNESCO designated March 21 as World Poetry Day.”

So, come on, America. If Mongolia, the UK, and Trinidad and Tobago can get their love on for poetry, so can we. And doesn’t an exhibition named “Writers- Intellective Gentiles” boost your confidence?

Verso Advertising has helped publishers market books since 1989 and to continues to do so.  They pooled 110 million internet users across 5, 100 websites about their book buying habits. The results are available as a slide show on their website. Here are some interesting tidbits:

-28% of the eighteen-years-or-older population read a book for more than 5 hours a week. (These folks are referred to as “avid readers” in Verso’s results.)

-Of those 28%, more than two thirds are baby-boomers or of older generations.

-There’s not much difference between the number of buyers who shop at chain stores (21.4%) or at local independents (21.5%), and both of these are higher than online retail (20%).

-Traditional in-store marketing tools are still more effective than online presence.

-Of the online marketing, search engine marketing is more effective than author sites/blogs, social networks, and online adds.

-Forty-nine percent of those taking the survey says it’s not very likely they’ll purchase an e-reader.

-Over 45% of males aged 18-34 admitted to illegally downloading an e-book in the last twelve months.

Check out the show for yourself, the most interesting slides are those where Verso analyzes the data and proposes marketing strategies or predicts the future of book buying trends. One question to ponder, which Verso does, is whether or not reading is a function of age or a generational thing. In other words, will the younger generations of today grow up to read as much as baby-boomer-and-above generations?

My husband and I are in an ongoing discussion about this. I think the baby boomers and greaters read more books when they were younger and therefore grew up to buy a lot of books. My husband thinks they weren’t, but more free time after retirement and more disposable income has made them so.

What do you think? Will we have future book readers? Or, maybe only future gamers?

The Patron Saints of Mediocrity

Under any other circumstance, a room filled with people telling you about your mistakes sounds like hell, but it’s exactly what a creative writing workshop is. For those of you who haven’t had the pleasure, a workshop is a group of aspiring writers sitting in a circle, critiquing a particular piece. You’re paying thousands in some cases to be intellectually abused, for classmates to ejaculate outdated literary theories about your work as if they were their own thoughts, or to suggest rewrites in their own aesthetic.
Workshop is, however, a necessary evil. It informs us of what an editorial meeting at a magazine would look like for our work. It also shows you what your peers are doing, and in most cases, it hopefully makes you competitive. I’ve borrowed a considerable amount of money to go to college, enough to buy a brand new Escalade with 22” rims and the book or revelations airbrushed on the paneling, just to attend workshop. My creative writing degree pretty much guarantees an uncertain financial future, but I needed to find capable readers for my work. In the real world, people who are willing to read your work aren’t good readers, and good readers aren’t willing to read your work. A workshop is another litmus test for how you handle failure, how you deal with a roomful of smart people who read a lot telling you to start over.
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But I’m not sure what it is supposed to be. Entertaining? Joyous? I don’t think it’s supposed to be ridiculous, either. Maybe that’s why it’s funny. But then the song is actually infectious. Is the fact that he seems to be strolling through the (soundstage) world bursting with song what I find so hilarious? The way he moves his eyebrows? The fact that I can’t tell — but am pretty sure — that this is not meant to be ironic?