The House of Words (no. 10): Doing what you want to do, 2

Why is The Throne of Psyche today's illustration? No good reason except that books shipped from the mill on the 25th and so pub date approaches. And that I am just as cat-on-a-hot-tin-roof antsy as any other writer with a new book of poetry, worried whether her paper progeny will ever find good homes and readers. Also, I suppose that we can class this publication as one of those alternative markets mentioned below: the university press. There. Reasons. Good enough for me. You?

10. Doing what you want to do, continued

It is unclear to most readers and a great many writers that major publishing houses intend to choose the books that will do well. The house attempts to consult the cloudy crystal ball of the times and point a finger at the books that will sell in good numbers. It then places good money on that bet. They back a very few fiction and nonfiction horses and treat them quite well. The first time I understood this way of doing business was when I learned that an upcoming lead book on a certain list was being pushed by three full-time, full-size bodies called marketers--and it was three months before “pub date.“ Meanwhile, I was adding my bit of luster to the same list and had the hangnail of a body but much closer to pub date, along with some other writers who each had a tidbit of flesh and a jot of attention.

You know that hackneyed expression, “the scales dropped from her eyes?” Think of the author, blinded with layers and layers of eye-scales. Things happen. Scales drop. At last she stands naked-eyed. C’est moi.

Perhaps I should add, in case you've missed this bit of slang, that pub date is nothing like a ploughman’s lunch with a beer but the date scheduled for a book’s launch. At a major house, a launch is either a big whopping party where they break champagne over the bow of your ocean-going boat, or it is something else. At the least, it is when your editor (or her assistant because she has already departed for Somewhere Else) taps your book with her pinkie finger; it tumbles into the well, sending up a trail of bubbles as it sinks and you jump up and down, trying to alert the world. Probably that's not the least. The least is when the publishing houses folds or collapses and re-structures just before your special pub date.

Without a push, you will likely have the sort of sales numbers that mean your publisher will want somebody with better sales numbers next time--or somebody with no sales record for bookstores to track. Without a push, you may find it difficult to move to an equally large and equally prestigious house. Without a push, you might as well be at a smaller house that is willing to give lots of attention and care. Without a push, you might find that you begin to think about alternatives. (We’ll get to some of those later.)

None of this did I grasp early on.

Continued

Curled up, Sunday afternoon...

BLOOM/Korach

It’s easy for women

to identify with Korach.

Why should all the power

Reside in one set of hands?

Why shouldn’t we

be able to speak to God

on our time, lighting

our own smudge-sticks hearts?

Why should our bodies

need concealment, like

faces of the Holy Blessed One

hidden from creation?

Sometimes when we say this

the earth swallows us whole

like Persephone, eater

of pomegranate seeds.

Sometimes we emerge

Like spring itself,

Overflowing with the stories

We learned underground

And the plain walking-sticks

Of everyone around us

Burst into improbable bloom.

This afternoon I finished 70 Faces (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing), the new book by the Velveteen Rabbi, Rachel Barenblat.  I recommend it.  Unlike many contemporary books of poetry, it has a large subject.  As the poet says, “The tradition of responding to scripture with our own creativity—writing interpretive stories which explore questions, close loopholes, and ponder implications—dates at least as far as the third century…”

And these are some of the thoughts and questions I had along the way.

• The whole idea of midrash as imagining what might go in the gaps is interesting—and, after all, gaps are where so many writings come from. I have a whole novel where I imagine what it would be like to be a Depression-era boy who runs away and rides the rails because I don’t know all that much about the times when my father did just that, and I’m curious. And yes, what happens in the Torah that isn’t explained or is off camera is enticing material for a poem. But what I am most curious about is the whole idea of midrash as a kind of alternative history (“Imagine a different story / Avraham and Sarah / setting forth together”): is that traditional or is that her own invention
•       There’s a kind of stairs of challenge in these poems. Lower down are poems that coincide fairly closely with what we find in the text. Up higher are other kinds of poems:  poems that insist on contrasting relationships and social patterns of the past and present times, holding up a mirror, as when Isaac and Ishmael are “not yet the ancestors of enemies / Abraham’s dark eyes in every face; poems that take something dry as dust and often dull or hard to follow like the Levitical laws and bring them to musing life (as in “Gevurah,” where the concept splits the form of the poem in vertical halves); poems that rethink narrative from a new vantage point, often that of a woman like Asenath, barely mentioned in the story; poems that shift elements from the far past into a technological present (the census: / these print-outs piled on the kitchen island / like petals from some vast magnolia scented with toner);
• ·         The poet likes to fool with cliché, leading to humor: “in case of jealousy eat my words”; “please let me live up / to whatever is coming”; “Being up there with God / at the mountain’s peak / was the best thing ever,” “chips off the God block,” etc.  This sort of humor depends on a penchant for simplicity of language and often for setting cliché next to something unexpected.
• ·         Is it possible to look at difficult, grotesque events like the spear-killing of Cozbi and Zimri and bring them into 2011 commentary without shading a bit into the p. c. and multi-cultural? But then there’s the Egyptian Asenath (daughter of Potipherah, a priest of On) in “Instead of Sons,” the way her story darkens as she gives Joseph sons, not the home-loving daughter she longed for but boys who belonged to someone else’s story / which would unfold / without her memory, without her bones.”
• ·         I am wishing that I could compare the form of these poems with those in Rachel Barenblat’s earlier chapbooks. They are, like a great deal of contemporary poetry, floating somewhere between formal and what is called “free,” although of course nothing is quite free They tend toward stanzas of a set length yet eschew metrics and set line length. I am fantasizing that she will make a statement about such things because I find issues of form interesting. (But it might be one of those subjects that only poets find so, and not even most poets.)
• ·         What I like best about these poems reminds me of Joseph Epstein in his grand essay on I. B. Singer, “What Yiddish Says”: “What makes Isaac Bashevis Singer's fiction so immensely alive is that its author understood that nothing has successfully replaced this drama, with its sense that one's actions matter, that they are being judged in the highest court of all, and that the stakes couldn't be greater. No contemporary human drama has been devised that can compare or compete with the drama of salvation, including the various acquisition dramas: those of acquiring pleasure, money, power, fame, knowledge, happiness on earth in any of its forms.”

With Paul Digby and "The Birthday Roses" on youtube

I promised a surprise to my facebook friends, and I promised it by midnight. I hope they'll forgive me for the slowness of uploads. I meant it as a bit of a salute to April Fool's Day, but the Day is tricksy and shook me into the 2nd.

So here's the Fool from my ongoing project, The Book of the Red King. And it's all thanks to the composing and photography and video-making of that lovely man, Paul Digby.

You may find the Fool at youtube:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEfrItrLfPA/ or you may look down the right-hand panel of this page and see a smaller version there in the youtube section.

If you would like to see the text of the poem, it may be found at qarrtsiluni as part of Two Poems from the Plant Kingdom: http://qarrtsiluni.com/2011/01/24/two-poems-from-the-plant-kingdom.

The illustration is of a painting by my penpal Graham Ward, "The King in Finisterre." I chose it in honor of the Fool's devotion to the Red King. Looking at Graham's fools and kings set me off in that direction once more back in October. I'd fooled with fools before, but never so much and so foolishly as in these past few months.

Thanks, Graham! Thanks, editors of qarrtsiluni! And most of all, thank you to Paul.

The House of Words (no. 9) Zephyrus side note to 8:1

Photograph of spaghetti courtesy of sxc.hu
and Marcin Jochimczyk, Sosnowiec, Slaskie, Poland.

zephyr said...

i wonder:

how many writers were successful enough to not need a job in the era when editors could focus on art and publishing houses were individual, home owned entities? Perhaps more novelists, poets, essayists were published but how well did all those books sell? How many were remaindered?

Are there fewer successful writers--writers who did not need to supplement their income from advances-- now that publishing has changed so much?

i wonder.

It seems to me there have only been a few in each generation in each of the arts who get to do what they want and not need another source of income (perhaps in the form of a spouse who brings in the cash). Clearly publishing has become a very icky business and fewer writers get published...but does it mean fewer get to do what they want for an income?

It is clearly harder to get published, but is it harder to succeed, financially, with one's art?

i don't know. But i think it would be interesting to see those statistics.

Dear zephyr,

Perhaps you could breeze about and find the answers! What a lot of questions, and the answers not always all that clear.

Historically, citizens of this country haven't been that good at finding great writers or presenting them with a living wage through book purchases, either because of international pillaging of texts and copyright problems or lack of promotion. The states tended to be more concerned with survival early on. In fact, the U. S. didn't have much interest in a full-time writer until Charles Brockden Brown, and he didn't make it as a writer for long. Cooper, Twain, Helen Hunt Jackson, and William Dean Howells in the nineteenth-century were certainly more successful (and Melville started out with a good seller, though descended into obscurity later), but plenty of others were rewarded less--and books like Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple were the bestsellers of their century. I have read Charlotte Temple, and I know whereof he spoke when Hawthorne complained of the "damn'd mob of scribbling women." (Actually it wasn't that bad. I have encountered worse. And Hawthorne didn't think all writing women belonged in the mob.)

I think most literary historians agree that the modernist era saw supportive houses rise. Editors had famously large roles in the lives of writers, even if the authors were a bit feckless--like Thomas Wolfe, say. The late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century saw plenty of magazines that paid writers, a help to Fitzgerald and Hemingway and many others. And as time went on, even less popular writers like I. B. Singer could count on some income from a publisher who might be a tad stingy but who took pride in his stable of writers. Anecdotes of the pre-war publishing world are full of stories of writers who camp out at their publshing houses or at magazine offices and are bailed out of fixes. Editors didn't depart, as they often do now, at a hat-drop.

All these things are in the realm of fairly common knowledge. We can tell suggestive anecdotes, and I bet you could check the most recent edition of that big fat reference book, The Literary History of the United States, and find a decent overview.

The issue today is not that fewer writers are not being published--we are publishing more writers than ever. And self-publishing has added to the spate. The number of books published per year has burgeoned in recent years. But I believe that fewer books are being properly edited, marketed, and distributed.

This erosion means that fewer writers are being sustained financially. That tendency is impossible to deny simply because of the great influx of the self-published, but I also think it true of national publishing trends because of what I read but also because of what I see happening in the writing community. I have a good number of friends who have been flattened by publishing events--the implosions of HarperCollins or MacAdam Cage, the lack of loyalty by a house to writers whose editors depart, and so on.

Now that writing is also MFA business, we produce more writers capable of a certain level of achievement. Here I remember Flannery O'Connor, who approved the squashing of young writers:  "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."  The more desirable programs are capable of funneling students into the publishing world and establishing contacts and sometimes contracts for them. The route from the pages of a dreamy young writer to finished book has changed for many.

You ask about "doing what you want" for an income. A mid-list writer who wants to break out and be self-supporting is going to work hard and do a lot of ancillary business. For example, writer Jeff Vandermeer went independent a few years ago, and with his wife he regularly cranks out the anthologies. As he is in what could be called literary speculative fiction, he crosses boundaries and has a foot in several worlds. That's helpful. Recently he published Booklife, a rather unusual how-to manual for writers, speculative, literary, and otherwise. Jeff is attached to various summer writing programs, and he has an outgoing nature and the energy to go on tour repeatedly. He is willing to try new ways of getting the word out; he collaborates with bands, filmmakers, and artists. He throws out all sorts of spiderlines and in the process makes a larger web for himself. The end result is that he can catch a greater number of flies and be more visible. But it's not easy, hiw way, not for the timid or those unwilling to work with others.

The current trend toward commercialism (or shall we say, seeking greater profits in a tight market) is hardening the lead-book strategy--more focus on lead books, less on the list as a whole. So I hear and read, anyway. That means a large publishing house is looking for a reasonably well-written commercial prospect. I might not call the whole enterprise "icky" as you do, for I have had many good experiences in New York, but I do feel sorry that finances thrust some of our historically fine houses toward the commercial. Of course, we Americans don't own them any more so it is difficult to pull away from the demand to increase profits.

In addition, the window of opportunity for a book to gain an audience keeps shrinking. The common wisdom used to be three months. You had to get your reviews well within that narrow window because bookstores would be returning stock after three months, and because the world moves on quickly. Changes in tax law so that publishers were taxed on stock-on-hand meant that U. S. publishers had an incentive to remainder quickly and keep books moving out of the warehouse to stores and then into remainder bins. The law of unforeseen consequences kicked in, as it usually does when the government (bunch of lawyers! let's have some farmers and shopkeepers!) is involved, and backlist books no longer were kept on hand as they had been previously.

Of course, the digital age is changing all this--easy to keep backlist in stock if it's just digital. But if one yields digital rights, other things become problematic. What about that house that wants to reprint my novel but wants to accompany a printing with digital downloads? But my digital rights are lodged elsewhere... Etc. (A good many people are avoiding the whole issue by going publisher-free, and we'll look at that later, as well as the small press world.)

The idea of the publisher's current list (minus the lead books, of course) as a mound of spaghetti that is flung at a wall to see what will stick is an idea I have seen over and over and over again. And I have heard editors say or write the same. It seems to be the metaphor that clicks and fits for a lot of people.

Here, let's try it!

I love home scientific experiments.

Okay, back from the kitchen with an extra-large colander of still-warm pasta: I drag out one of our three colorful, powerful home catapults (traditional Cooperstown 6th grade project, associated with Medieval Day.) The cats are interested. The brainy calico, Theodora, is wary. The incredibly sweet, rabbit-dumb, and now-shaved-for-spring (and to get rid of dreadlocks that culminated in her resemblance to a felt hat on peg legs) Blue Persian looks at me lovingly and rubs up against the catapult.

Ready? Bate your breath, people!

I launch the spaghetti at the wall.



Courtesy Brandy at clker.com

Splat!

It's publishing all over again.

What happens is that the bulk of the pasta immediately tumbles to the floor. Some clings for a while, waving feebly. A strand hangs from the wall, half attached.

Hope that helped. Kitchen science at your service, zephyr. I am perfectly willing to be wrong about any of the above (except the pasta--that the cats and I saw with our own eyes, right?) and guarantee nothing. No statistics here, but I'd be happy if somebody dug up the numbers and shared them.

Meanwhile, I'm going to fetch Susquehanna the dog. She wags her tail for spaghetti.

Good cheer,
Marly