The Reading Experience

"The purpose of the National Book Award is more direct: to promote the legitimacy of books, or at least of trade publishing, publishing as an industrialized activity. The Times piece on this year’s NBA openly wonders about the relevancy of the award, given that none of the finalists in any category have sold more than 19,000 copies. This in a world in which trade publishers plow their energy into the wall-to-wall promotion of a ghost-written memoir of Sarah Palin. A world in which there are over 200,000 titles published each year, compared with the 8,000 or so that were the norm in the years right after World War 2. Is it any wonder that serious writing seems lost in the blather of how much I’m going to have to pay Barnes & Noble to have my cardboard display of this week’s vampire novel up towards the front door?" (more)

"For whatever my non-activist uncredentialed social analysis might be worth, I agree with [Walter Benn Michaels] that wide redistribution of wealth — maybe even to, oh, 1950s curves — can only be achieved by paying attention to wealth, and that talking about racism, sexism, homophobia, and snobbery is insufficient. So why does he keep talking about them? For that matter, why does his talk about them get published and publicized?" (more)

"In 2007 I sent out 122 submissions, both poetry and fiction, three publishers for each story or set of poems, repeated on rejection. By the end of June this year, I’d sent out nine. Twenty-two years ago when I made the decision to work on my writing, to make a serious effort to turn out a body of work before I croaked, the submissions and occasional publications were important to me—a reminder that this was something more than a hobby. I don’t have to be reminded now. I want no less to find readers, but not like that… and probably not those readers." (more)

". . .in Baudelaire's poems, the first truly great urban poetry, the peregrinations of the flâneur turn into a kind of work. There is no rest for the Baudelairan flâneur. His double vision enables him to see the degradation of labor into endlessly repeated empty moments even as he knows the city offers up glimpses of a world we pretend doesn’t exist. Baudelaire's poetry is full of fleeting glimpses into the grotesque and the immeasurably ancient lurking in the center of Paris, the most modern city of the nineteenth century. . . ." (more)

". . .politics does not harm aesthetics—not finally. In discrete public moments when the novel is used as a whipping-boy or as a bludgeon for one partisan cause or another, yes, maybe it does, but I am confident that these blows are never mortal." (more)