The Practice of Writing

Some musings on the impact of format on the "experience" of reading. 

ND.

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"Books are not just text. They are design, yes, and layout and so on, but they are also history and context, and sometimes, the digital road won't get you where you want to go. I tend to read on my phone when I'm on the tube or on a plane, mostly because I don't want to carry around the three or four books I may be reading at any given time, but also because my handluggage these days is largely composed of distractions for a sixteen-month-old."

"In setting out to demonstrate that Trilling still matters, Kirsch is asserting the value of literature and a literary culture. If Trilling thought and wrote, frequently, about the relation of literature to society, it was because, like Matthew Arnold on whom he “modelled himself in certain ways”, he saw in literature the necessary and most penetrating criticism of society, of “the way we live now”. Kirsch has written a book best described as a defence and elucidation of Trilling. The title expresses his position. Trilling matters because literature matters. It offers our best means of coming to an understanding of ourselves and of society."

"Having diagnosed a feeling or a situation or a place, an artist may be forever associated with it. We understand bureaucratic obfuscation that borders on terror, for example, in large part thanks to Kafka. A child’s face may have an uncanny resemblance to one in a Mary Cassatt painting, as if the artist had seen that particular face before you did. Many varieties of bourgeois ennui sometimes seem to have been invented (and not just depicted) by Chekhov. Graham Greene placed his own distinctive copyright on shabby little equatorial police states infused with self-pitying melancholy—Greeneland. When Wilde wrote in “The Decay of Lying” that “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life,” he implied that many experiences, thanks to art, have already established themselves as clichés when a person arrives at them for the first time. By now, for an educated person, a fresh experience of the Kafkaesque may be rare. To cite another instance of belatedness: in middle age I drove across Utah, thinking that Monument Valley looked like a background for a John Ford movie, which indeed it had been, many times. The entire landscape was boring and exasperatingly familiar to me even though I had never actually been there before."

"Let’s be clear: blurbs are not a distinguished genre. In 1936 George Orwell described them as “disgusting tripe,” quoting a particularly odious example from the Sunday Times: “If you can read this book and not shriek with delight, your soul is dead.” He admitted the impossibility of banning reviews, and proposed instead the adoption of a system for grading novels according to classes, “perhaps quite a rigid one,” to assist hapless readers in choosing among countless life-changing masterpieces. More recently Camille Paglia called for an end to the “corrupt practice of advance blurbs,” plagued by “shameless cronyism and grotesque hyperbole.” Even Stephen King, a staunch supporter of blurbs, winces at their “hyperbolic ecstasies” and calls for sincerity on the part of blurbers."

If you're a writer who works in a library, you might find this enjoyable.

ND

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Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth century who coined the word pornography. So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year, new titles are added to the librarian-porn bookshelf. This past season’s crop included additions like Hot for Librarian by Anastasia Carrera; Lucy the Librarian—Dewey and His Decimal by John and Shauna Michaels; The Nympho Librarian and Other Stories by Chrissie Bentley and Jenny Swallows; A Librarian’s Desire by Ava Delaney, author of the Kinky Club series; and soft-core selections like Sweet Magick by Penny Watson. The conventions of the form—the dimly lit stacks, the librarian’s mask of thick glasses and hair tied into a bun, et cetera—are, of course, well known. Unlike video porn, where these conventions are typically used as a wholesale substitute for narrative, porn books still feel the compulsion to tell a story, to make the glasses and bun mean something. I was curious just what story these new books were telling. What does our most current version of the librarian fantasy say about us? To answer this question, I visited the library.

[The acclaimed biographer Michael Scammell discusses the peculiar challenges and delights of his craft. Interviewed by Michael McDonald.]

...

McDonald: How do you view the essential difference between being a novelist and a biographer?

Scammell: To paraphrase the British literary critic Desmond MacCarthy, the biographer is the novelist on oath. He captured both parts of what’s important. Where he was very astute was in recognizing that the biographer is using the same arsenal of devices as the novelist; that is to say, the biographer is using characterization. It’s not simply enough to take the sum total of people’s impressions of someone, to collect them and put them all down on the page; a biographer has to select, too. One has to be able to set a scene in such a way that the reader is drawn in and convinced by what one has written, and that too is a novelistic gift.

McDonald: Facts alone don’t convince?

Scammell: It depends on the genre, but facts alone can never convince the reader. At the very least, there has to be an argument. In a biography, if the facts aren’t artfully presented, you end up with a flattened portrait. Let me put it this way: Quite a bit has been written about the suspension of disbelief in fiction. My wife, who reads more novels than I do, has a habit of picking up a novel, starting it, and then all of a sudden she’ll throw it on the table or chair. I say, “What’s wrong?” She’ll respond, “I don’t believe in this anymore.” And the biographer has the exact same problem. It’s twofold: One, does the reader believe what the biographer is saying to him about the subject of the biography? And, two, does the reader believe that the biographer has found the best way to say it? Of course, biographers also rely heavily on the intrinsic interest of their subjects, often too heavily, in my opinion, but credibility is even more important in biography than in fiction, because fiction is made up.

This touches on the other aspect of MacCarthy’s dictum: the oath. As a biographer, you must write only what you know (or think you know), what is genuinely fact based. You can’t make up a whole new character for your subject. You cannot—and here is where I think Edmund Morris went wrong in his biography of Reagan—imagine scenes and say, “This is what he would have been doing or thinking. I know it, because I know the rest of his life.” You can put down only what you have sources for—preferably more than one source. What you do, if you can, is get as many different accounts of your subject’s character and behavior as possible, and, in effect, you triangulate.

TL: One of the poems in The Glacial Stairway features the line ‘forgive me if I write badly’. A slightly facetious question, but since the text suggests it – what, do you think, does it mean to write badly, if anything?

PR: All over the poetry world people are throwing around the words “good” and “bad” and nobody hardly ever has a shadow of an aesthetic belief to support those judgements. Normally it’s gut reaction, opportunism, or surrender to endorsed attitudes, conformity to established procedures – and this happens at the “innovative” end of the spectrum as much as anywhere else. Occasionally it’s political, but the attempts I’ve seen to state an aesthetic basis for evaluating poetry have mostly been pathetic. “Poetry is a kind of magic” and so forth. Or the most abstruse philosophical critiques can be seen to be founded on pre-determined aesthetic choices. Most poets, let’s face it, make judgements which support their own poetry. In the commercialist zones, but not only there, we're are told not merely what is “good” but also what is “best”, and we are told it again and again. And the prizes and the appointments repeat it. The cast of this theatre of the superlative constantly changes, but the sales-talk doesn’t and hasn’t for at least 40 years. Poets are elevated ridiculously in a quest for heroic achievement which I think is neurotic. Poets are not in fact all that much better than one another. But it’s not only in the big publicity routines, it’s also in the avant-garde claques. The poet Douglas Oliver once suggested that superlatives should be avoided completely in talking about poetry.

Personally I look for a “poetic” quality in the writing. Poetry is after all what I am mainly interested in; so for me it is its own objective. But whatever that quality is, which may well involve certain echoic, historical tones, I’d want to see it as an active force, I’d want to recognise the world in it. And a balance of forces. But the important thing is perhaps that there’s no knowing where you’re going to find this, or how it may be disguised.

Larkin put considerable effort into establishing his persona, not merely as the represented speaker of his poems but as a real-life working poet. He presented himself as a full-time librarian who, at the end of a day’s work, after preparing and eating his solitary dinner and washing up, wrote unpretentious and “unliterary” poems, based on common experiences and the emotions they prompted. He maintained that there was nothing extraordinary about what he did. He once said of the experience that inspired “The Whitsun Weddings,” “You couldn’t be on that train without feeling the young lives all starting off, and that just for a moment you were touching them. . . . It was wonderful, a marvelous afternoon. It only needed writing down. Anybody could have done it.”

This is, of course, sheer fantasy. “Anybody” might have had a broadly similar emotional response to the wedding parties boarding the train at a half-dozen stops between Hull and London, but the claim that anybody could have written the poem is a secondary artifact of the mask that Larkin fashioned for himself. His own testimony and documents in his own hand show that he completed it only with great difficulty. In The Paris Review interview, he said, “I began it sometime in the summer of 1957. After three pages I dropped it. . . . I picked it up again, in March 1958, and worked on it till October, when it was finished.” Shortly after finishing it, he wrote to Monica Jones, his companion of thirty-five years, “I’ve never known anything resist me so! . . . I have just hammered it to an end, but really out of sheer desperation to see this fiendish 8th verse in some kind of order.” His manuscript workbook supports what he says in this letter.

His cover was blown in 1988, three years after his death, when one of his literary executors, Anthony Thwaite, edited the first Collected Poems. Despite Larkin’s saying that the order of the poems in his published collections had been carefully worked out to create a deliberate sequence, Thwaite presented the poems in chronological order, adding sixty-one previously unpublished poems—some unfinished—to the first section, “Poems 1946–83,” and twenty-two to the second, “Early Poems 1938–45,” almost doubling the number of poems Larkin was known to have written. About a half-dozen of these newly published poems were, in the opinion of some readers, as good or even better than poems Larkin had published in his lifetime, but the additional material diluted the effect of the original collections. In 2003, Thwaite, tacitly responding to vociferous criticism of the first Collected Poems, published a second version, which omits many of the unpublished poems—and all of the unpublished juvenilia—and restores what he calls “Larkin’s own deliberate ordering of his poems in each successive book.”

It remains a matter of dispute whether, on balance, the publication of so many poems that Larkin himself left unpublished served his reputation. It certainly destroyed the persona he had cultivated for most of a lifetime, and for this Larkin himself is chiefly responsible. He lacked the resolution and the ruthlessness necessary either to destroy his unpublished work or unambiguously to instruct his executors to do so. He left his trustees, Monica Jones and his lawyer, Terence Wheldon, all his work, published or unpublished, with “full rights” to publish what he had left unpublished, but in the next clause of his will he directed that his unpublished writings and his manuscripts be destroyed unread. A further clause directs his trustees to consult his literary executors “in all matters concerned with the publication of my unpublished manuscripts.” In his Paris Review interview, he was asked, “Do you throw away a lot of poems?” He answered, “Some poems didn’t get finished. Some didn’t get published. I never throw anything away.”

At a decisive point—about the age I am now, which is 69—the writer asks, “Do I write my life, or leave it to others to deal with?” I have no intention of writing an autobiography, and as for allowing others to practice what Kipling called “the Higher Cannibalism” on me, I plan to frustrate them by putting obstacles in their way. (Henry James called biographers “post mortem exploiters.”)

I consider what I write to be prose poems but not fiction, partly for formal reasons and partly because I'm not interested in "making things up." And although most readers aren't familiar with it, there is a tradition of the prose poem, extending back 160 years to the work of Aloysius Bertrand, which is seldom incorporated into the teaching of creative writing in the academy. Creative prose is subsumed under the term fiction, with the result that works that don't fit the category are ignored. But subsuming prose under the term fiction is like subsuming all of what can occur in a text under the rubric of character, or narrative. For example, the work of Baudelaire in prose is extraordinarily interesting. He was the first person capable of using prose as a closed, stanzaic form. Traditional modes of defining literary categories don't account for the way in which even expository prose is marked by the devices of literature. I often use Theodor Adomo's Minima Moralia to demonstrate how his essays, which may be only six or seven sentences long, use sentence length and prosody as elements clearly integral to his argumentation. Wittgenstein is another writer whose prose can be viewed from the same perspective. It's not an accident that a person who is an interesting stylist, like Derrida, can have a far greater impact than perhaps the weight of his ideas would suggest he should have, while equally useful thinkers who are not such compelling writers may be perceived as less important—Jurgen Habermas would be an example. By organizing our academic institutions around fiction rather than around prose, by subsuming all forms of prose into fiction instead of the other way around, a great deal of confusion has set in. At Berkeley, linguistics and rhetoric are departments apart from literature—compartmental aphasia.

In his polemic against the traditional novel, or rather against those who continue to write it when he believes it has lost its validity, David Shields frequently draws our attention to the fragmented character and accelerated speed of modern life, and the prominence of new media—particularly blogs, Facebook, and so on. He links this to a general eagerness to read what is both immediately contemporary and “true” or at least “documentary,” in preference to traditional fiction. “The key thing for an intellectually rigorous writer to come to grips with,” he tells us, “is the marginalization of literature by more technologically sophisticated and thus more visceral forms.”

I find it hard to understand why the technologically sophisticated is necessarily more visceral. The viscera are visceral, the old primitive gut: this pain, this pleasure, now. At the same time, I share Shields’s weariness with novels that, however elegant and intelligent, appear merely to be going through the motions, to be aimed above all at creating the package that will lead to prominence on the world stage, or at least commercial success (the two are almost the same thing).

If there is a problem with the novel, and I’m agreed with Shields that there is, it is not because it doesn’t participate in modern technology, can’t talk about it or isn’t involved with it; I can download in seconds on my Kindle a novel made up entirely of emails or text messages. Perhaps the problem is rather a slow weakening of our sense of being inside a society with related and competing visions of the world to which we make our own urgent narrative contributions; this being replaced by the author who takes courses to learn how to create a product with universal appeal, something that can float in the world mix, rather than feed into the immediate experience of people in his own culture. That package may work for some, as I believe my student’s account of dramatic upheavals in the Mongol empire will work for many readers; it has its intellectual ideas and universal issues: but it doesn’t engage us deeply, as I believe my other student’s work might if only he could get it right. And this is not simply an issue of setting the book at home or abroad, but of having it spring from matters that genuinely concern the writer and the culture he’s working in.

***a heuristic and aesthetic of radicalized junk bricolage***

"really a whole new way of thinking/acting/writing about contemporary capitalism's spectacular and apocalyptic failure and how to go beyond the worlds it has destroyed"

Here are five recordings from the symposium on Salvage Punk that took place at Warwick University. (There was one other excellent talk by Joyelle McSweeney, but something went wrong during the recording, so it's unlistenable).

The Speakers in running order:

Evan Calder Williams does a variety of activities concerning communism, ornament, horror, and cinema under the name Socialism and/or Barbarism. http://socialismandorbarbarism.blogspot.com

China Miéville is the author of several works of fiction and non-fiction, including Embassytown and The City & the City.

http://chinamieville.net/

Giovanni Tiso is a writer and translator based in Wellington, Aotearoa/New Zealand.

http://bat-bean-beam.blogspot.com/ 

Stephen Shapiro explores the interdisciplinary link between writing and entomology, culture and the bourgeois insect.

Nick Lawrence works on US literature of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries. Among his interests are Adorno, allegory, avant-garde poetics, Bolaño, found music, formally adventurous graphic narrative, political ecology, recycling aesthetics, and ways of making the logic of capital visible, definable and contestable.

"I have said that in the contemporary world literature suffered because so many things competed for our attention. That competition proceeds on two fronts. On the one hand, it offers a panoply of superficially attractive objects for our consumption and delectation: It is a world of apparently instant gratification except that the gratification is so ephemeral that it is conspicuously unsatisfying, more nominal than real. On the other hand, the competition for our attention also proceeds by attacking the very capacity for attention. Often, it seems to operate not by offering new objects for our attention, but by offering us a substitute for attention itself: a sort of passive receptivity that registers sensations without rising to meet them with the alertness of critical attention. We had the experience, wrote Eliot in The Four Quartets, but we missed the meaning. In this situation, the novel—which requires time, not instantaneousness, which requires careful attention, not its passive substitute—is going to have a hard time making itself heard."

"Monsters demonstrate, monsters alert us: whether or not the etymologies relating the word to both “monstro” (I show) and “moneo” (I warn), are correct, monsters act as a moral compass. The physical prodigy becomes a test of ethics and, in the move between literal and figurative, displays the crucial role fictions play in the establishment of value and the common sense. Or, one might say in the era when the Humanities are under such stress, thinking with monsters shows how an understanding of Nature, and of medicine, law and custom is impossible without cultural expression."

Somewhat depressing.

ND

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"We flatter ourselves into believing that we are more liberated than our stuffy ancestors. A sobering corrective to modern self-satisfaction is to realise that an ex-Muslim novelist would never now dare do what Salman Rushdie did with The Satanic Verses and write a book that said the life of Muhammad was less than exemplary. Even if he or she did, no one would dare publish it.

Challenging writing about economic crises is as rare. Diligent readers have every right to ask why so few financial writers warned them that the greatest crash since 1929 was on the way. As no less a personage than Her Majesty the Queen said to the academics at the London School of Economics, 'Did nobody notice?'

In Britain's case, any writer who had tried to research a book on the rapacious and authoritarian managers at the Royal Bank of Scotland or HBOS, for instance, or on the insanely reckless derivative swap and insurance markets in the London-based subsidiaries of Wall Street banks, would have run into the libel law. It is some barrier to overcome. The cost of a libel action in England and Wales is 140 times the European average. Contrary to common law and natural justice, the burden of proof is on the defendant. Even the few remaining wealthy newspapers, which have business models that have not yet been destroyed by the Internet, find it hard to afford a court case. For the publisher of a serious book, which would do well if it sold 50,000 copies, the idea of risking £1 million or more in a legal fight to defend it is close to unthinkable."

Comic book-cum-video game writer Paul Jenkins talks to Vice about the art of writing games. Video games should never be sneered at as a creative outlet for writers. 

Thanks to Fred S-S for bringing to attention.

I thought this was appropriate given recent events.

ND

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"I sometimes dream of situations that can't possibly come true. I audaciously imagine, for example, that I get a chance to chat with the Ecclesiastes, the author of that moving lament on the vanity of all human endeavors. I would bow very deeply before him, because he is, after all, one of the greatest poets, for me at least. That done, I would grab his hand. "'There's nothing new under the sun': that's what you wrote, Ecclesiastes. But you yourself were born new under the sun. And the poem you created is also new under the sun, since no one wrote it down before you. And all your readers are also new under the sun, since those who lived before you couldn't read your poem. And that cypress that you're sitting under hasn't been growing since the dawn of time. It came into being by way of another cypress similar to yours, but not exactly the same. And Ecclesiastes, I'd also like to ask you what new thing under the sun you're planning to work on now? A further supplement to the thoughts you've already expressed? Or maybe you're tempted to contradict some of them now? In your earlier work you mentioned joy - so what if it's fleeting? So maybe your new-under-the-sun poem will be about joy? Have you taken notes yet, do you have drafts? I doubt you'll say, 'I've written everything down, I've got nothing left to add.' There's no poet in the world who can say this, least of all a great poet like yourself."

The world - whatever we might think when terrified by its vastness and our own impotence, or embittered by its indifference to individual suffering, of people, animals, and perhaps even plants, for why are we so sure that plants feel no pain; whatever we might think of its expanses pierced by the rays of stars surrounded by planets we've just begun to discover, planets already dead? still dead? we just don't know; whatever we might think of this measureless theater to which we've got reserved tickets, but tickets whose lifespan is laughably short, bounded as it is by two arbitrary dates; whatever else we might think of this world - it is astonishing."

[Full Stop] Do you feel any professional duty to be on Twitter, or do you just feel that it’s an interesting way to be a writer in the world and communicate with your readers?

[WG] Fortunately, it has been from the start a completely ludic activity. It’s like play, and if it had been presented to me as some sort of public relations chore that I should undertake I would have probably pretended to be unable to figure out how to sign up! I would have never have gone there. In fact, when I first got on Twitter, I expected I’d be on there for three minutes. I thought, Oh, these kids. This is some sort of awful Facebook-y thing and I’ll just check it out. That’s how I got stuck being @GreatDismal. I glanced at my bookshelf and there was a book about the Great Dismal Swamp so I put that down. And I’ve been there ever since. But it immediately struck me as a very amusing internet activity.

[Full Stop] Absolutely. I think that’s the only way I can tolerate it — as this weird, mostly silly exercise.

[WG] Yeah. It’s just play. It works best as play. Except, on occasion, when something is actually happening in the world, it borders on becoming something else. The evening, in Pacific Standard Time, of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan was the strangest and by far the most intense experience I’ve ever had on Twitter. Someone I know through Twitter who lives in Tokyo tweeted this quick bit of broken panic, saying “Earthquake! Big one!” And I thought, Whoa! He’s joking. But I went to the US Geographic Survey Site and saw that there’d been a huge earthquake, just then, off the coast of Japan.

So I went back and I tweeted that, and I gradually found myself spiraling into this strange situation where people in Tokyo whose cell service was down, because so many people were trying to use the phones, were using their wi-fi links and Twitter to try and figure out what was going on. So there was this bizarre group communication going on between people in Japan and people in other places advising them what to do, and it was so profoundly post-geographical. To be a guy in Cancun saying “No! You don’t want to take the Yamamoto line, it’s not running! You wanna do this…” Very, very strange.

An excellent interview with arguably the most important Arabic writer of the 20th Century.

ND

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[Habash]

Place is nowhere to be found in your novels, and to be exact, it remains ambiguous. What explains this ambiguity?

[Munif]

As far as the exact definition of the place, this doesn't mean much to me for one major reason–the difference between one place and another is relative, marginal, and insignificant. If, for example, we discuss the political prison in a confined place such as Iraq or Saudi Arabia, it seems as if I am exonerating other places or as if the political prison does not exist in these places, especially when we know the political prison exists from the Atlantic to the Gulf to be exact, whether in terms of its environment, means, or concerns. Thus, I consider the generalization of this subject is the ultimate specificity because everyone is responsible and everyone suffers from the same problem. This is a special reading of society influenced by the nature of my life and movements, an experience that had given me a clear idea about the nature of these societies, the common denominator which unites them, and which in turn led me to discover no essential difference between one place and another, especially in the negative aspect of it.

[Pull this research up whenever someone says simple > ambiguous language.]

To understand why ambiguity makes a language more efficient rather than less so, think about the competing desires of the speaker and the listener. The speaker is interested in conveying as much as possible with the fewest possible words, while the listener is aiming to get a complete and specific understanding of what the speaker is trying to say. But as the researchers write, it is “cognitively cheaper” to have the listener infer certain things from the context than to have the speaker spend time on longer and more complicated utterances. The result is a system that skews toward ambiguity, reusing the “easiest” words. Once context is considered, it’s clear that “ambiguity is actually something you would want in the communication system,” Piantadosi says.

When it came to his work, J.D. Salinger was the ultimate control freak. He strove for absolute perfection in his writing and sought complete power over its presentation. He ordered his photo be removed from the dust jacket of “The Catcher in the Rye,” fought with numerous publishers over his book’s content and presentation, and his disdain for editing was legendary. When a copy editor at the New Yorker dared to remove a single comma from one of his stories, Salinger snapped. “There was hell to pay,” recalled William Maxwell, and the comma was quickly reinstated. Recently uncovered letters demonstrate how the author repeatedly refused any film adaptation of his classic novel. He felt no actor could properly fill the role of Holden Caulfield, although he quipped to Ernest Hemingway that he might be persuaded to play the part himself.

In a way, Salinger is still exerting similar control over our ability to define his legacy two years after his death on Jan. 27, 2010 – and he is using his writings to maintain that control. The difficulty in defining Salinger’s legacy stems from his decades of seclusion after his last publication in 1965 and the stubborn hope of millions that he continued to write for the next 45 years.

What have we learned about those years since Salinger’s death?

Whenever I drive over the mountain passes from Spokane to Missoula, I have a writing summit with my friend Nancy, an English professor. We share new work and critique the hell out of it. Last summer was different. I'd spent much of it living in Missoula, and each day I would trundle out of bed and head to Break Espresso, a coffee spot on the main drag, and settle in to write from 8 a.m. to noon.

I did that every day. Three or four days a week, Nancy joined me. Sometimes Jeff, an economist, sat with us. I've long been in the habit of spending my mornings writing in some public place. But when there's someone across the table from you, it's harder to sneak peeks at Facebook or look for great deals on outdoor gear from Steepandcheap.com.

I've written in this space before about the usefulness of a "writing date." You buy a kind of accountability when you're with someone and you're both supposed to be working. It's like study hall—there's a monitor there, and sure, you can pass notes or even whisper, but some internal bully will eventually tell you to shut up and get back to work.

[Richard Nash] If people want something, why do they think it’s not going to exist? Not to get all sort of laissez-faire capitalist about this, but I’m going to have a moment of laissez-faire capitalism here and note that if people want to read the book in its printed form, then I predict there are going to be ways in which they can ensure that they will continue to get it in printed form because people are going to be willing to pay for it.

I mean the reality is that soon enough—even right now, technically—anyone will be able to get a digital version of a book and go and get it made into a physical printed book if they want. I mean right now, whether you’re using the espresso machine or—goodness gracious—3D printing, which is very, very, very much in its infancy, any kind of manufacturing over the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years is going to be able to be done as a hobby. So if you want a printed book, you will be able to get a printed book.

It has been a fascinating phenomenon in the discussion around publishing how adversarial people get around other people’s choices. So if someone says “I like an ebook,” a person will respond “Ohhh, I can’t believe—how can you do that?” It’s like that obnoxious person who you don’t want to go out to dinner with anymore because they can’t just order what they want, they have to comment on what you’re eating as well. What’s been epidemic in this discussion is that when both camps talk about their own preferences, they have to malign other people’s preferences too, and make grandiose extrapolations about the consequences of other people’s preferences for their own. If they like printed books, they should be buying the damn things instead of whining about other people’s preferred mode of reading. So I’m tremendously optimistic about the future of the book as an object. I think the worst years of the book as an object have been the last 50 years.

[A publisher on the death of traditional publishers.]

"Long-term there’s no future in printed books. They’ll be like vinyl: pricey and for collectors only. 95% of people will read digitally. Everybody in publishing knows this but most are in denial about it because moving to becoming a digital company means laying off like 40% of our staffs. And the barriers to entry fall, too. We simply don’t want to think about it.

Amazon is thinking about it, though, and they’re targeting the publishers directly.

Publishers like to pretend that we make our money from discovering unknown talents for small advances and selling millions of their books. That’s a very small part of our business. The bestselling books are all written by celebs, by people with huge platforms, by fiction writers with a long history of bestselling books, or by people who do a proposal that’s on its surface brilliant. In short, there’s a bidding war among the publishers over the big books. We all know what the good books are–it all comes down to how much of an advance we’re willing to pay for them. The hotly fought-for books are the ones that sell. And while we might not make huge profit % on these, we make big profit $ on these. They keep the lights on by covering overhead. Better to cover our fixed costs by going all in on a few big books than trying to buy dozens of mid-list books."

Baudelaire had to believe in this fateful combination because his self-love demanded it. He was a hashish and opium addict who came to hate his habit but could not give it up. Yet if the visions or raptures induced by drugs enrich a poet’s consciousness, then the damage they also cause would be an acceptable price to pay. The Poe he imagines intoxicated himself partly because he could not stand himself sober. Baudelaire writes in Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Edgar Allan Poe, His Life and Works, 1852), “I am told that he did not drink like an ordinary toper, but like a savage, with an altogether American energy and fear of wasting a minute, as though he were accomplishing an act of murder, as though there was something inside him that he had to kill, ‘a worm that would not die.’” Poe’s drunkenness—and by extension Baudelaire’s—thus becomes a spiritual discipline of sorts.

In Baudelaire’s telling, the intoxication made Poe a superior poet, which is to say, a superior man. Killing the worm gave the writing life. “I think that very often,” Baudelaire wrote, “Poe’s drunkenness was a mnemonic device, a deliberate method of work, drastic and fatal, no doubt, but suited to his passionate nature. Poe taught himself to drink, just as a careful man of letters makes a deliberate practice of filling his notebooks with notes.” In Baudelaire’s understanding, alcohol loosed imaginative forces in Poe that sobriety did not offer. “One part of what delights us today was the cause of his death,” and Poe’s spiritual heroism, indeed his poetic sainthood, rested in his embrace of the life-poisoning alcohol for the sake of his art.

This is how legends, and cults, get started. Baudelaire’s version of Poe’s life, which is in large part Baudelaire’s concoction, became bohemian gospel. In the eyes of Baudelaire, Poe was downright holy: “I am adding a new saint to the martyrology; I have the story to tell of one of those glorious unfortunates, too rich in poetry and passion, who came into this lowly world, following in the footsteps of so many others, to perform the rude apprenticeship of genius among baser spirits.” Venerating Poe, Baudelaire was establishing his own claim to sanctity. He is a man who rises above others to attain creative beatitude. “A tendency to mysticism,” he claimed, had been part of his character since childhood.