Reviews and Articleshttp://cantara.squarespace.com/reviews-and-articles/en-US2009-11-07T21:36:15ZSquarespace Site Server v5.8.0 (http://www.squarespace.com/)Let It Rain Coffee by Angie Cruz | Reviewhttp://cantara.squarespace.com/reviews-and-articles/2005/9/10/let-it-rain-coffee-by-angie-cruz-review.htmlCantara Christopher2005-09-10T22:00:00ZBefore the good solid immigrant section of Manhattan that is Washington Heights turns into yet another deracinated artsy-yuppie wasteland, let it have a chronicler, and oh God, let it not be Angie Cruz. This is not to say that Cruz is a bad writer, or that Let It Rain Coffee is an entirely bad book. But it is a compromised book, and a reader hoping to get a revealing glimpse into the life and dreams of the struggling Dominicans of that neighborhood will be sorely disappointed.

What compromises Coffee is, ironically, its authors good intentions. Clearly, Cruz has a strong desire to portray in a sympathetic light the people she's left behind. Also as clearly, she is eager to bestow upon them the benefits of empowerment. But good intentions alone have never been, and never will be, enough to bring a story to life. Cruz is a controlled writer. Her phrasing is earful, her structure passable, she is well-educated in her craft. And there are fleeting moments when her characters do become flesh and blood. But these are too few and far between and never, at any point, do they coincide with crucial plot developments.

The book begins in the early 1990s when Don Chan, the slightly addled, newly widowed patriarch of the immigrant Colons, arrives in the Heights to live out his remaining days with his son's family. In Cruz's hands, the Don remains only a potentially fascinating character. The abandoned orphan of immigrants - Chinese laborers in the Caribbean - he has learned to love his adopted country of the Dominican Republic, enough to fight for its liberty during the oppressive days under Trujillo in the mid-60s. His son, Santo, is a former comrade in the struggle and now something of a disappointment; his daughter-in-law, Esperanza, is a hopelessly glamour-struck fan of the old nighttime soap Dallas, in fact has named her daughter Dallas and her son Bobby, after that TV show's most sympathetic character. There is palpable friction in this addition of yet one more body in the apartment, on the street, in the neighborhood. More instinctively perhaps than purposefully, Cruz is able to convey the skin-surface tension that infects the simple chores of day-to-day living in an area so packed (as anyone who's ever fought for a clean dryer in a St. Nicholas Avenue laundromat can tell you). The usual elements of tenement literature crop up. Santo is killed in his cab. Dallas's best friend dies in childbirth. Bobby goes to juvie. Esperanza spends too much money on finery and winds up in debt. And meanwhile back in the DR, Don Chan's other, beloved comrade in the struggle, Miraluz, gets fed up with the slave labor conditions in the garment factory where she works and starts up her own collective, with unbelievable ease.

Here, with this, I believe Cruz tips her hand.

What Cruz plainly believes - what she has invested an entire fictional account into - is her idea of capital. Not capitalism, let's be clear on this, or any other sort of ideology, but the idea that empowerment can only spring from a basis of accumulated and interactive resources, emotional and intellectual, as well as financial. This idea, facile as it sounds, must not be underestimated. To citizens of developed countries, capital is as natural as air or water, but to places that have never been stable enough, for whatever reason, to take root in the world's economy, it is more revolutionary than simply workers controlling the means of production.

You see Cruz's plan when Bobby uses the computer skills he learned in the joint to upgrade Miraluz's factory, or when Dallas, maturing emotionally, returns to Esperanza the money she's stolen from her, or when Esperanza herself decides to meet her debts head-on and open a bank account. While admirable, though, they remain just a plan. None of these developments happens organically, from character, and they ring false.

Esperanza's own awakening, the denouement of the book, is the best example. A Dallas soap fan, remember, through sheer coincidence she does happen to encounter on an ordinary commuter train none other than Bobby Ewing himself, that is to say the actor who portrayed him, Patrick Duffy. Duffy - who I did happen to meet in passing in Hollywood in the late 70s - in real life speaks in the precise, detached manner typical to practicing Buddhists and nothing like he does in this encounter. In other words, he is a distinct person, but in Coffee he is just another uninterested guy, strategically positioned to torment Esperanza and burst her bubble. When she, at last, is confronted with this absolute evidence that there's no Southfork, no bejeweled wife, no Bobby Ewing, that this generic white man has nothing to do with her or her existence, Esperanza finally faces reality. But it is a dreary climax, a disservice to a living person, and - worst of all - a squandered opportunity.

To stake a real and crucial moment in the life of her character on the portrayal of an actual person was a gamble, a literary gamble which the author badly lost, because Cruz still does not understand the nature of the game. Still, someday she might - and at that point her career will be one worth watching.

Originally published in Small Spiral Notebook, 2005.

]]>The Irresponsible Self by James Wood | Reviewhttp://cantara.squarespace.com/reviews-and-articles/2005/9/5/the-irresponsible-self-by-james-wood-review.htmlCantara Christopher2005-09-05T22:01:17ZBear with me, it's a headache enough to be writing a review of a book of book reviews. If you're lucky to be reviewing a critic with a vision - as far reaching and encompassing as, say, the late Guy Davenport's - you can loosen your grip a little and allow yourself to be swept forward by the clear beauty of his arguments. If the critic is just another twitchy provocateur, like Dale Peck, you can respond to the cheap thrill of his barroom jeremiads, give him as good as you get, and extricate yourself without a bruise.

But if the critic is someone like James Wood, then you're in trouble. Wood is somewhere between the Davenports and the Pecks of the world: Neither a far-reaching visionary nor a soured novelist with an axe to grind, he encounters literature with nothing more nor less than a definite cast of mind and a talent for neat phrasemaking. These two qualities, topped off by his prestige as an Oxford grad and former chief literary critic for The Guardian, would be enough to carry Wood's reputation through any spate of flabby essay reviews, if only he wouldn't trip himself up by insisting on some sort of half-baked assertion to tie them together. In other words, his second collection of previously-published essays, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel, could well have stood on its own, simply as a collection of essays, some good, some not so good, and some so wrongheaded they have to be read twice. For a critic, this is an entirely normal and respectable batting average.

As it was, the title itself threw me. I was prepared for what I hoped would be a knowing look at Fielding and Gogol and Firbank, and other masters of the kind of comic novel that actually makes you laugh out loud. Instead, The Irresponsible Self begins with a bewildering declaration by Wood that there is a type of stoical, tragicomic fiction, a secular "comedy of forgiveness" he calls it, that came to its own around a hundred and fifty years ago, and which is distinctive and progressive from the religious "comedy of correction" that found its heyday in 17th and 18th century satire (religious because it busied itself with the correction of human behavior through exposure and ridicule, whether gentle or ungentle).

This appears to be a continuation of his argument in The Broken Estate, his first collection of previously-published essay reviews. There, Wood pinpointed the mid-19th century as the moment fiction took on a brand new burden, and he blamed Matthew Arnold for it. For in trying to make the Christian message palatable for unbelievers, Arnold proposed that the mythos - the stories - that comprised the belief system of Christianity could be demoted to the low rank of folk and fairy tales, as long as its values could continue to be transmitted. As a foundation for civilization, Christian values work as well as any, better than some, and from a rationalist perspective this tradeoff seemed just fine. But to the collective consciousness it was a near-fatal blow. Because if we're no longer able to read our destinies, duties, the patterns of our lives in the Bible and Hagiography, where do we read ourselves?

In The Irresponsible Self, Wood posits that this is the modern burden of fiction - to be that textual mirror. However, we (as authors? readers? He doesn't make this clear) were to quickly discover that humans, being more complex creatures than had been in earlier times imagined, ultimately are unknowable, unreadable. Neither does this attempt to read, to know, automatically lead to individual happiness or safety in a sad and dangerous world. So, because we're all equally together on the same rudderless sinking boat, metaphorically speaking, we cut each other some slack for looking like idiots thrashing about uselessly. We "forgive" each other.

This is a cramped argument, fuzzily composed, but not too hard to follow. If only Wood would stick to it - but he doesn't. It is, he says, the subject of "many of this book's essays, the implicit and not always explicit subject". To which I cry out, my God, man, don't equivocate! I am a state-educated housewife who needs to know the cost of groceries. Is The Irresponsible Self supposed to be an examination of the tragicomic unknowableness of the modern human psyche as portrayed in novels, or are you just spreading frosting on yesterday's rolls?

So let's get to the essays themselves - all of which first saw the light of day either in The London Review of Books, The New Republic, The New Yorker, or other prestigious publication - and some of which, but not all, have the word "comic" or "comedy" shoehorned into their titles. There are a number of unnecessary filler pieces on Tolstoy, Shakespeare, Dostoyevsky, Babel, Joseph Roth; unsatisfying reviews of works by Coetzee and the novelist-priest J.F. Powers (his dryly amusing novel, Morte d'Urban, about Catholics in Lutheran Minnesota struck, in my youth, a personal chord); an out-of-place essay not on V.S. Naipaul strictly, but Naipaul's father; valiant attempts to introduce to a wider audience the 19th-century writers Shchedrin-Saltykov, Giovanni Verga (of Cavalleria Rusticana fame) and Bohumil Hrabal (from whose work resulted the perennial arthouse film, Closely Watched Trains); and a warm, but, for this book inappropriate, appreciation of Saul Bellow that first appeared as an introduction to a collection of Bellow's stories. Wood assigns V.S. Pritchett and Henry Green their rightful place in English letters, in fairness, but says nothing that hasn't been said before. And, his piece on the Latvian-born Canadian filmmaker-writer, David Bezmozgis, has the weird feel of exoticism.

Fortuitously, the essay on Don Quixote is grounded in a thorough knowledge of the book and the life of Cervantes, and does much to wash away the hippie-dippie "Man of La Mancha" idealism that this essential but under-read work has been erringly painted with. And Don Quixote is a masterpiece of comedy. But Wood, focusing on the second volume - in which the "real" Don Quixote must assert his reality over the "false" Don Quixote (after the enormous success of the novel's first volume, Cervantes was dogged by a plagiarizer) - enters a twisted, Nabokovian forest of mirrors and misses the obvious point: This was simply the case of an author trying to protect his intellectual property with the only weapon he had at hand, his sheer genius. Cervantes wrote rings around his two-bit counterfeiter and beat him into obscure dust.

Where he does get it right, where the essay totally lives up to the book's conceit, is with Italo Svevo, famed for being the ESL student of James Joyce and for authoring that 20th-century classic of absurdity, The Confessions of Zeno. But placed as it is halfway through this motley collection, its quality sticks out like a cowlick.

Now to Wood's more consequential essays, dealing as they do with living authors. He has gained notoriety for having described Tom Wolfe's novels as "placards of simplicity" that editorialize and pontificate, and for accusing Wolfe of lacking in basic human feeling; his deconstruction of the 1998 novel A Man in Full would support these accusations. However, Wolfe's relevance as a journalist and observer petered out in the early 70s anyway; he has thereafter demonstrated, time and time again, his utter inability to create characters more subtle and complex than stereotypes - new hybrid strains of stereotypes, but stereotypes nonetheless - and his helplessness in recreating and interpreting current events, employing, as he does, nothing more elutriating than a sloppy reporter's shorthand. Wolfe is much too easy a target, but Wood's attack is nevertheless satisfying to read.

Fellow Brit Zadie Smith rates better, although her 2000 debut novel, White Teeth, is described as peopled with characters who are "not really alive, not fully human", whose connectedness is forced. Smith is, however, young, talented, energetic, and filled with good intentions, and Wood is inclined to take it easy on her, provided she avoid the vampiric sway of Dave Eggers and David Foster Wallace, and other proponents of the kind of work he calls "hysterical realism" (described below), as well as refrain from mimicking the worst strains in Dickens. Ragging on Eggers or Wallace is not a problem for me, but this Dickens wrinkle is new. Perhaps it was growing tiresome to lay blame on the usual Sterne-Joyce-DeLillo track - all masters of large, busy and exhaustingly experimental books - for their deleterious effect on modern letters, or more precisely, on modern letterists. Dickens is not known for experiments. He's only famous for writing large, generous-hearted stories that captured and kept his public. Astonishingly intuited narrative architecture is his one true gift to modern writers and, sadly, the one most ignored, distrustful as we are of beginnings, middles and ends. He did, however, also employ exaggeration, hyperbole, coincidence, and funny names to maintain the attention of his audience, and now it seems that any and all of these maneuvers are being condemned under the term of grotesquery - not in result, but in intent, as if Dickens had purposely tried to infuse new "meaning" into text with extra-narrative tricks, like an MFA candidate. But of course he was doing nothing of the kind. He was the simply the commercial television of his day, and Uriah Heep is no more cunningly monickered than Will & Grace, only nowadays no one gets the joke.

To Jonathan Franzen, who experiments less and worries more, Wood oozes a kindness, responding to the charm and directness he perceives in the author's personality. With much sympathy he reports on Franzen's public bouts of ambiguity toward "social" culture (like his on-again, off-again affair with Oprah's Book Club) and his desire to keep The Novel contentious with Society - although this is too obviously just another instance of a high-profile artist wanting to have his cake and eat it too. As for The Corrections, "He is at his finest when being ambitious and even theoretical about the soul, when he is examining consciousness." For Wood, this is the highest praise he can bestow.

Only somewhat redemptively, a subject far worthier of that particular praise, Monica Ali, receives this collection's most considered analysis. If the first function of a novel is to put a human face on consciousness - as Wood (entirely correctly, in my opinion) has stated and restated in so many words throughout his career - Ali has fulfilled that function and more in her 2003 first novel, Brick Lane. She well deserves Wood's admiration for her ability to chronicle fifteen years of an immigrant's journey from uneducated teenaged bride to mother, wife, and self-realized woman in the slums of London, by paying attention to her character's steadily growing perceptions, and describing them strictly within the limitations of Nazneen's level of knowledge at the moment. In other words, getting into her character's skin and making her real. (Which has never been, and never will be, the wrong artistic choice.)

But even as he praises, Wood minimizes, or even purposely ignores, main points of the book that are crucial to its shape and intent - the parallel story of Nazneen's sister in Bangladesh, for example - in order to stress some by now inanely shrunken point. Also, troublingly, it seems to be sort of a surprise and relief for him to find 21st-century communities in which faithfulness and tradition are still a matter of life and death (as in, for example, honor killings). The isolation of the Bangladeshi residents of Brick Lane, Nazneen's fatalism - the consequence of her religion and her lowly station - attract Wood. (Tellingly, isolation and fatalism are the qualities he found so fascinating in the works of ruralists Verga and Shchedrin, mentioned above.) Well, Nazneen might be a fatalist, but she's no footpad. Her little domestic rebellions, from stabbing her bumptious husband "by accident" during her regular chore of cutting his corns, to entering into an affair with a neighborhood wheeler-dealer, are as much a part of her mental assimilation as the steady intake of new factoids about her adopted land. Narrowly as ever, Wood not only gauges interior life solely (that is, divorced from action and causality), he uses this gauge in bestowing his regard to the new but as-yet underdeveloped citizens of western literature.

Perhaps if Salman Rushdie were a little more humble, a little more isolated and fatalistic, James Wood might like him better. So annoyed is Wood with the excessive personal pleasure Rushdie now enjoys, post-fatwa, that, for him, Rushdie's eighth novel is tainted by it; his review of Fury is a dazzling pyrotechnical display of vituperation, and more fun to read than the book. Fury is not a good novel, but it at least displays a vestige of the fearless self-indictment the author displayed in better work - Shame and The Satanic Verses spring to mind. The "tinkle of restaurants" that Wood so decries in superficial Manhattan novels has an ominous undertone in Fury. Depending how you feel about Rushdie as everyman, his autobiographical character's guilty thrashing and trashing about in the over-rich details of New York life can either be sympathized with, or seem ludicrous and crybaby.

But I'm not interested in defending Rushdie here, as his body of work is hulky enough to take a brass knuckling now and then. What I would like to address is a term famously coined by Wood and used in this and other essays: "hysterical realism". About as apt as Dale Peck's own pejorative phrase, "recherche postmodernism", it encapsulates:

...brilliant cabinets of wonders. Such diversity! So many stories! So many weird and funky characters!...The mere existence of a giant cheese or a cloned mouse or three different earthquakes in a novel is seen as meaningful or wonderful, evidence of great imaginative powers. And this is because too often these features are mistaken for scenes, as if they constituted the movement or workings or pressure of the novel, rather than taken for what they are--props of the imagination, meaning's toys. The existence of vitality is mistaken for the drama of vitality. One of the awkwardnesses evaded is precisely an awkwardness about the possibility of novelistic storytelling. This in turn has to do with an awkwardness about character and the representation of character in fiction, since human beings generate stories...

An uncommonly clumsy description from Wood, but he does have his finger on this particular bloating disease of current top-tier fiction. (Not that it's been difficult to identify - B.R. Myers condemned it in 2001 in "The Reader's Manifesto", and it was enough to send him howling back to Stephen King.) It is, however, in no way any kin of magical realism, nor has it ever been, although Wood has associated hysterical realism with magical realism for years, either by deeming it "magic realism's next step", or, in a more cautious mood, taking care to differentiate the frantic cousin from its sedate relation once removed. Let me say again: Hysterical realism is not magic realism. The phrase, in fact, I'd prefer to see for this kind of writing would be "narrative consumerism" and it would be more to the point. Think of it: Identity achieved through having and having and using up - isn't that what these ill-starred glossaries of western civilization are all about?

Magical realism can be the most generous and profound form for a writer to portray individual perception; in magic realism, there is room for the divine. Reason enough to keep it at arm's length from the profanity of narrative consumerism.

This deliberate blinkeredness, this inability to correctly discern the difference between the sacred and secular pathways to fiction-making - even more than the distressing narrowness of his taste - is Wood's big trip-up, and it is odd to see it come from a critic whose life's work appears to be to create a religion out of literature. But if the act of writing is a divine act of creation in of itself, literature is just a game.

But - it's a game for believers. That being the case, you're being called on to play fair, James, play fair.

Published in Small Spiral Notebook, 2005.

 

]]>Murder in the Genre | Essayhttp://cantara.squarespace.com/reviews-and-articles/2005/8/1/murder-in-the-genre-essay.htmlCantara Christopher2005-08-01T22:00:00ZThese are the facts from the police blotter: In the early hours of July 22, in the quiet seaside town of Cape Coral, Florida, Joshua Henninger, 16, and Jeremy Chapman, 23, lured an acquaintance, 17 year-old Mariner High honor student Annamarie Randazzo, to Henninger’s home with a cell phone call. Once she arrived, one of them struck her. Both of them then tied her up, put her in her own car and drove to an unknown location where they both repeatedly raped her, then killed her with repeated blows. They then drove to a wooded area where they placed her body in an abandoned refrigerator and set her afire, then drove her car back to Cape Coral and set it to blaze in a vacant field.

Motive? As Henninger confessed when the police finally found her remains on August 6, they wanted to see what killing someone would feel like. They chose Annamarie because, at four feet eleven and one hundred pounds, she'd be no trouble. Filipinas like her and me tend to be small.

How I discovered this case has to do with the blogosphere and my desperate desire to make it in the romance genre. The mother of Chapman, you see, is Sheila Lynn Viehl, who in seven years has managed to publish twenty-nine books in the categories of contemporary romance, Christian romance, romantic thriller, romantic fantasy, and romantic science fiction. That her books are, overall, merely sketchy, formulaic and derivative escapist fare is an insignificant factor compared to her considerable value over the years to the self-styled writing community, of which I am a fringe member.

She is, from all reports, a nice woman. She is helpful to beginners. In the area of mutual stroking that is the unique engine of this genre, she is generous. And - until this incident - she has remained accessible online to everyone. It was this trait, in fact, along with her prolificness and cheery professionalism, that drew me to her blog, Paperback Writer, which until yesterday I kept on my own blog’s list of daily reads. On Tuesday morning the 9th I checked in at Paperback Writer as usual, and found an uncommonly grave posting:

“The press may or may not have a field day with this story. I don't know; I've never been in this position before,” it began, and then went on to recount  the story of Jeremy, her son, the one never mentioned in her official bios. His mental instability, his criminal record. Her long humiliating efforts to help him and stick by him through his encounters with the law. Her final decision, once he reached adult age, to cut ties with him. “I felt threatened by his  behavior...I did this to protect my two younger children, their father, and me.” It ended with the news she had gotten, that her son had just confessed to murder.

Within three minutes of this posting came the first comment, and it was supportive. Within twenty-four hours, over a hundred and fifty comments were in, almost all sympathetic - the few upsetting comments having been, understandably, deleted. I was tempted to add my own condolences. After all, I was also a mother with a son the same age, and with a history of mental illness (albeit war-rape trauma) in my family.

What stopped me was a strange omission I noted while scrolling through the comments: There hadn’t been one single mention of the victim by name (actually, victims - after killing Annamarie, Chapman killed his 66 year-old roommate).

Whereas, as I counted, there were no less than 28 uses of the word “hug” in the comments - as in “big hug”, “bear hug” and “you need a hug”.

Now, I’m not going to join the other camp, the one blinded by rage and grief, that is lashing out at Sheila Viehl for the crimes of her son. I believe that she did her best, that she is a decent enough person and that this incident will  stay with her for the rest of her life. I believe, too, that she has not played unfairly by not letting her fans and readers know about Jeremy before now. Authors are not obliged to be ruthlessly honest about their personal lives.

But cozy easy sympathy is the weakest of human virtues, inadequate at best, unctuous at worst. Since Tuesday, bloggers have been nauseating in their support of Viehl. One praised her for not getting “drama-tastic”. Another accused her detractors of being “subhuman”. Yet another composed a parable about little forest animals and a duckling who did a very bad thing. When compared to the blogs of Mariner High students, their rage and grief raw and real on the screen, from the time Annamarie was abducted to the time her body and her killers were found - “They burned her fukin car” - "Please bring my sister back!!!” - “I can’t go on” - those postings of praise take on a particular moral repugnance.

“You all offered the understanding and support that I needed so desperately today, and I'm so grateful,” Viehl posted yesterday. “A few others in the writing community have not been so kind, and I'm sure there will be more of  that. What these people say about me may seem vicious, but ultimately it's  meaningless. To them I'm not a person, but an opportunity. Don’t defend me to them... Keep us in your thoughts.”

Her only mention of the murdered: “Families, loved ones and friends of the victims are suffering, and some of them are taking that out on me. If you come across something like this out there, don't attack these people. They don't know me or my family, or what we're going through.” Now, even if you take into account Viehl’s likely shock and emotional numbness in the face of the situation, this still comes across as a measured, regally distant, unchecked by reality, and needlessly self-interested statement that teeters dangerously close to demagoguery.

If you think I’m exaggerating, think of of those 150 (or 500, if you count her other websites and personal email) comments that came unbidden, within hours, from her well-wishers. In the face of such loving support, how could it not be tempting and justifiable to almost any of us writers to want to come out, eventually, with a surefire bestseller - entitled, say, A Mother’s Anguish: Stardoc’s Creator Speaks Out on Her Troubled Son, or even to become the founder of a national support group called, say, Mothers of Murderers?

Because. Because. You have to remember. You have to remember. That on this day, at this hour, even as I am writing, Annamarie Randazzo’s charred body is lying in a coffin at a funeral mass in Florida, surrounded by her heartbroken schoolmates, her best friends, her sister Melissa, her parents.

That is the reality, and there is no percentage in seeking the crown to this particular court of pain when all you can ever hope to be is the retinue.

Twenty-nine books in seven years is an exceptional achievement, maybe even an enviable one. As it turns out it almost certainly came at a price. A lesser writer might defend the separation that was so clearly evident, might insist that the authorial distance must always be kept between the perfect world of a writer’s creative mind and the imperfect world of the reality in which she lives.

But it would be better to admit, with humility, the debt that all of us writers, whether of escapist fiction or so-called serious fiction, owe to reality: To let reality inform not only what we write, but how we write, and the choices we’re compelled to make in order to keep on writing.

The alternative is to build on sand, ignoring the fact that the concrete truck is about to pull up any minute. And that's not authorial distance. That is insanity.

Originally published in Literary Revolution and Altar Magazine, 2005.

]]>Writing in the New Publishing Paradigm | Essayhttp://cantara.squarespace.com/reviews-and-articles/2005/7/1/writing-in-the-new-publishing-paradigm-essay.htmlCantara Christopher2005-07-01T22:00:00ZMy first publishing venture was at the age of ten. Equipped with typing sheets, my mother's office stapler and manual Smith Corona, and, most wondrous of all, a box of carbon paper, I created twenty copies of a work entitled Faculty Frolics, a collection of stories about the totally imaginary romantic doings of the staff of Waite Park Elementary School. It was about as silly and scandalous as a fifth-grader could write. I charged ten cents per copy and sold twelve. Even my teacher bought one.

Twenty-five years later I dived into publishing again, this time with an even longer stapler, an electric typewriter, and a Kinko's copier instead of carbon paper. It was the early 90s during the height of the Do-It-Yourself movement, and I was a housewife, living with my partner Michael and our son at the epicenter of DIY, San Francisco.

For the benefit of you youngsters out there who barely remember what life was like before personal computers and the internet, let me tell you how it was with us rinky-dink publishers back then. You typed your zines - or, if you were feeling particularly artistic, you handwrote them. And unless you had a basket of cash to fling at some professional binder, you put together your books and magazines manually. Whether you had a large run or small, that was no picnic. I remember collating parties at the notorious leftist labor zine, Processed World, where we'd all get mightily stoned before commencing the daunting task of assembling 3000 copies of the newest issue in a single night. For my own publications, the slipstream fiction zine Absinthe and the Filipino humor zine Bakya, I was compelled to enlist my then-preteen son to help me carry boxes of freshly-run sheets home from the copy store. During the final days of Bakya and Absinthe, in order to minimize the construction process I devised a clever way to fold a single sheet of paper to turn it into a 5-page book, and stuck with that technique until I stopped publishing altogether. If you ever come across one of these quirky little issues (which I'm told are still floating around in the zinosphere), please let me know.

Let me clarify a point here. DIY publishing has never been entirely synonymous with small press publishing - a la Coffee House or Grove - which has its own concerns, and in many ways follows the business model of its larger kin: You listen to an agent, read her client's work, accept it, pay him an advance for it, publish it, garner acceptance of it by way of good publicity and good reviews, sell copies of it, and pay him royalties. It's only in scale where major and minor houses differ.

DIY publishing - which really started to take off once high-quality photocopying became easily available to consumers -  had much more in common with DIY music. The poet who made up little chapbooks to sell at her readings was a kissing cousin of the band that taped its own cassettes to sell at gigs. Both thrived on being able to offer their audience something palpable, something outlasting the ephemeralness of their public appearances. And though it might be argued that the Do-It-Yourself zine craze spread during the 80s and 90s because of grassroots outrage at the corporate takeover of creative culture, it really just had to do with the very basic impulse possessed by almost all writers: to get their ideas out to an audience as quickly, broadly, and tangibly as possible.

Technological advances, like shareable computer files, dedicated ebook readers and print-on-demand machines, are the new vehicles of these ideas in what has been dubbed the New Publishing Paradigm. Despite what you might have culled from news items these past five years in Publishers Weekly or MediaBistro.com, the new paradigm wasn't launched by a bunch of Old Paradigm, fist-shaking New York editors who got dumped when big conglomerates like Bertelsmann and Holtzbrinck took over their various publishing houses. This is evident because the New Publishing Paradigm isn't business as usual, it's not the author-to-agent-to-publisher-to -bookstore-to-reader route, simply at another address.

It is, rather, DIY with better machines, and it's being run by people like you and me. And on its own terms, it's succeeding and going places that no author, publisher or reader could have dreamed of a generation ago.

Let me give you the example of my own experience. In late 2001 I wanted to publish my partner's recently-written novels and didn't want to go the route of the so-called self-publishing POD portals like Xlibris, iUniverse, or 1st Books (now AuthorHouse) which exuded then, and still exude - although a little less strongly nowadays - the bad odor of vanity publishing. So, I started an imprint called CityFables, a name I thought would reflect the whimsical fantastic nature of Michael's books. We had a dismally low amount of capital, but fortunately I found a hungry new little POD company that printed trade-sized paperbacks as high in quality as the ones in Barnes & Noble, that didn't charge for setup, required only a small minimum run, and delivered in one week.

Now, this was a mere four years ago, but still far enough back in time when any printing on demand was viewed with a great deal of suspicion, and the very idea of self-publishing itself was held in absolutely no literary regard whatsoever, Virginia Woolf, Walt Whitman and James Joyce be damned. So, lacking a business model, I made up my own:

For each of the books, print a hundred copies; sell fifty at full price to break even (easily accomplished, as Michael and I were running a writers group at the time and could sell copies to our members); keep the other fifty for reviewers, public readings, book fairs, and just to have around for stock. (The POD printer could always supply more, within days, as needed.)

But - give away online the PDF version, the shareable computer file, as quickly and widely and for as long as possible.

If this goes against the grain, this concept of giving away for free the work you've sweated over, possibly to be debased, defiled, or worse, ripped off, please consider the words (quoting from Tim O'Reilly) of fellow author and award-winning science fiction novelist, Cory Doctorow, who famously gives away his work:

The enemy of authors isn't piracy - it's obscurity.

And if the prospect of non-obscurity, that is, of getting your name and your work known by thousands of people all over the world, isn't sufficient to overcome your righteous desire to be financially compensated, ponder this: Once you launch your work into cyberspace, it immediately becomes part of the permanent body of human knowledge. Your work is indexable, google-able, findable, sendable, shareable, judgeable.

More important, it gets the opportunity to become Cool. As even the great Patrick Nielsen Hayden, Managing Editor of Tor Books and therefore top honcho of the biggest moneymaking science fiction house in the world, has acknowledged, the most underrated reason why people copy things off the internet is the simple desire to Share Cool Stuff with friends. What author could object to being introduced to his public in this way, by fans to other potential fans?

I must disclose at this point that my decision to give away Michael's books wasn't entirely altruistic, or unsystematic, because at the very beginning of launching CityFables I equipped each of his titles with several information-gathering tools. I used, for example, a download counter and a hit tracker, and made sure to include in the file an email address for responses (he got a surprising amount from retirees as well as students, who wanted to know more about his subjects - the Sixties and San Francisco - including a young Turkish student who eventually wrote a thesis on Michael's entire body of work). All these services, I must add, can be gotten for free online. It was sort of like BookScan, the rating service of the traditional publishing trade, only I wasn't interested in counting retail sales as much as finding out who downloaded Michael's books and where they were.

In short, I was searching for his audience.

When I toted up the download statistics for Michael's three novels after nearly a year, several interesting things stood out. One, that if people were inclined at all to download any one of his novels, they'd usually end up downloading all three; two, that people who downloaded his novels tended either to be college students in Canada and Australia, who downloaded in the afternoons, or a variety of people in the countries of Eastern Europe, who downloaded in the evenings; and three, that even without having his books listed at other, larger, better publicized online free download centers - that is, just from adding keywords to search engines that pointed only to the CityFables website, where the books could be downloaded - each of his three titles attracted an average of two downloads per day, bringing the yearly total to nearly two thousand for all of them. A swift mental calculation tells me that, even allowing for errors of miscount, his entire output has been downloaded - as of spring 2005 - about 8000 times, and that's not even counting whatever digital copies or printouts were made for the purposes of sharing. *

In the Old Paradigm, if this were a sales or readership figure it would be laughed off the board - until you stop to consider that the most promising nominee for last year's National Book Award sold a total of 1300 copies of her novel. We have now gotten to the point where vetting by agents, publicists, marketers and Michiko Kakutani is no longer sufficient to rouse even the nerdiest bookaholic to buy a book costing two to three hours of the average wage.

And here's the kicker. People aren't reading less, they're reading more. It's just the way they're reading that's changed. They're reading off computer screens, ebook readers, Palm Pilots. They're downloading PDFs and printing out the pages as they need them. At present a friend of mine in Austria, the publisher Jorg Hotter, is attempting to negotiate a deal with the phone company there to include monthly billing for his service, which plans to send regular installments of new novels to subscribers to read off their cell phone screens.

So - you're willing to trade the chancy prospect of being published by a traditional house more than two years after they've bought your book; of getting an advance you may have to give back; of royalties that cut your percentage when your book is wholesaled; of getting a cover illustration you can't stand to look at; of being allotted a publicity budget that wouldn't buy a Big Mac; of having six weeks of glory on the back shelf at Barnes & Noble, only to eventually discover that every copy of your book that wasn't sold was turned into mulch (yes, they do that!) -

If you don't mind trading all that for the Olympian power and tranquility of just being able to write, write, write and get your words out the moment you're ready to a responsive audience, then please, consider writing in the New Publishing Paradigm.

Write a memoir, a diatribe, a bit of porn. Make it good. Don't lengthen it, shorten it, dumb it down, or geek it up because you're trying to second-guess an audience whose reading habits you don't understand. Don't compromise. It will get read. I'm a housewife with a useless BA from a crappy university and if I can follow de Toqueville on my RocketBook reader, you can too.

The world we're living in these days isn't big enough to encompass the current explosion in human activity. We need to enlarge the world, not narrow it. We need more ideas, not fewer.

In response to an intellectually refined, Russian-born acquaintance of mine who recently remarked with disdain, Now anybody can write a book, I say, Yes! Isn't that fantastic?

Because we need more books, not fewer. And we need them now.

But let me take a breath and leap off my Olympian Mount to address at last a subject dearest to the heart of every writer, and that is money.

Is there money to be made in the New Publishing Paradigm? Well, if you disregard the newsmaking six-figure deals which are, one, as likely for an author to win as the lottery and, two, in the last analysis big expensive ads for the publishing houses themselves anyway, let's just say there's about enough money in the NPP as there is in the OPP. Online genre fiction magazines, when they pay, continue in the great tradition of doling out bupkes to writers - a penny a word is still the norm. Most literary online journals, like their prestigious printed siblings, don't pay at all.

At this particular moment in literary history, the single bright light is for authors of ebooks in the area of genre fiction, but it's not where you'd immediately think - not in high-tech science fiction, say, or lurid thrillers. It is, of all places, in the line of erotic romance. Women have money to spend for ebooks, the internet does not daunt them, and their hunger for good unformulaic stories remains unabated. Of all the types of e-fiction out there, this is the one that has provided the most reliable income for the most writers. It is actually possible to make a living writing strictly for this subgenre. True to the girl who wrote Faculty Frolics, I have dabbled here myself, with some success. (Don't look for me. I'm writing under a pseudonym.) It's the one area of writing where I believe I have any hope of finding recognition and steady remuneration.

Offline in the world of PODs, the situation is, perhaps, slightly better, because self-published print-on-demand books are now being considered sort of the triple-A team of major league publishing. A writer who can afford the thousands of dollars it takes to have her work privately edited, proofread, polished, packaged and market-analyzed stands a good chance of eventually being noticed by one or another of the big houses, who would be enchanted by the thought that there's very little else they'd have to do (read: pay for) to bring her little moneymaker to the marketplace. An influential litblogger (an online diarist focusing on literary matters) named GirlOnDemand specializes in reviewing self-published novels from POD portals like iUniverse and Xlibris. Although most, she reports, are absolute crap, occasionally she finds one or two gems in her reading pile that are major-house quality, and she's as pleased as anyone in the business when these titles do get acquired. On her blog is a list of POD novels that eventually made it to Kensington, St. Martin's, Crown, and other traditional publishers, and it's an eye-opener. (Just remember the next time that Reese Witherspoon movie comes around to cable - it started as a POD book.)

And while you're setting aside copies of your own POD novel for stock, be sure to wrap up a few to keep pristine. Mint editions of John Grisham's first novel, which he paid to have published, are selling on eBay for upwards of three thousand dollars.

Meanwhile, Michael's readership continues to grow around the world at a slow but steady pace, while I dream of becoming the new Daphne du Maurier, only sexier. And who knows? My own present forays into the marketplace of remunerative publishing may eventually reap some big rewards. But as an author I can't count on the marketplace to supply the creative juice I need - that all of us writers need - to keep on writing.

In the New Publishing Paradigm, it's there: The immediate response from engaged readers. The satisfaction of knowing that your work is going out to a wider audience than any author could have dreamed of in the past. The awe and wonder - and conferment of responsibility - when you realize that your words might, just might, be around for another generation or two to come.

* Read more about Michael's novels, then download them!

]]>How to Save Literature | Memoirhttp://cantara.squarespace.com/reviews-and-articles/2002/11/1/how-to-save-literature-memoir.htmlCantara Christopher2002-11-01T23:00:00ZTemporary Roots

George Whitman, that irascible old legend, held the flyer and read it carefully while I waited at the counter of Shakespeare and Company.

"So let me get this straight. You’re not charging any money for people to join your writers group?” he said finally. No, I answered. “Okay,” he said, “go ahead and post it for free.”

And that was how PariSalon4665 The International Writers Support Group began - with a notice soliciting for members on the bulletin board of the most famous American bookstore in Paris.

But let me backtrack. About a month earlier, my partner Michael and I had arrived in Paris. Years before we met in San Francisco, Michael had been, among other things, a Vietnam-era veteran, former commune leader and stage lighting designer. But soon after we became an item at the Eureka Theater I got pregnant, prompting him to chuck the bohemian life, cut his lovely long hair, grit his teeth, and move us to New York, where he took a low-level corporate job. As an accountant, yet. Domestic life had its pleasures but it was quiet. We lived in a sixth-floor walkup in a funky apartment building in the East Village inhabited mostly by struggling young artists and we had little money, not to mention a toddler son who demanded constant attention. After a few years of being disgusted by the disrepair and filth around us (this was the pre-Giuliani 80s) the last straw came when I took him to the swings across the street in Tompkins Square Park, where an interesting artifact on the ground caught his eye. “Oooh, mats dis?” he said. It was a syringe with blood still in it.

Well, that was it. I told Michael that for our kid’s sake we had to get out of New York, even if we had to go back to San Francisco, which is what we did. We stayed with friends until we could set ourselves up, Michael got another corporate job, and I temped and did the housewife bit. The search for Art and Culture ceased to be uppermost on our minds. San Francisco’s scene had grown pretty barren anyway.

But as our son grew I also grew restless and very cranky. I wasn’t writing anymore. I’d thought I’d lost the juice of my youth. I picked fights with Michael. He was exasperated.

“What the hell is it you want?” he yelled at me.

“I want us to go to Paris!” I wailed. We had talked about this through the years as a sort of pie-in-the-sky dream, that we go to Paris together to write our books.

“Okay,” he told me. “Just be patient. We’ll get to Paris.”

Well, it had taken eleven years more of Michael putting in time at a hateful job, but we’d finally made it. If we were starving for culture we were finally getting our fill of it, although the expensive tourist apartment we were staying in was eating through our savings, and the uncertainty of our sojourn wasn’t prompting Michael to hunker down and finish his novel. We’d have to decide soon whether to go back to the States, back to our apartment and our teenaged son, or proceed eastward to Prague, where living was cheaper and where I’d be able to find work as an ESL teacher.

We were sitting in an English bar in the Rambuteau area weighing our options, when I picked up the local expat magazine, the Paris Voice. Glancing through the classifieds, I saw an ad for a sublet in the 20th arrondissement for only 3,000 francs a month - roughly 450 US dollars.

Terrified that someone would snap up this incredible bargain before we did, I ran to the phone.

“Rap Here”

Although it has its share of cobblestone streets and mansard roofs, the 20th is not considered the most picturesque quartier of Paris. But with its immigrants, flea markets and Communists, it looked like home to us from the start. The sublet, on a winding sloppy street called rue des Grands Champs, was a one-room, ground-floor, TV-less flat that was leased by an artist named Perlmutter who came to Paris every summer to paint and returned to New York every winter to exhibit. We signed the papers for the place without any trouble, probably owing to the fact that no one else wanted it.

“If you’ve never been in Paris in winter before, I’d better warn you,” Perlmutter said, handing us the keys, “it gets pretty bleak. You can go three weeks without seeing the sun.”

“That’s okay, Michael and I will be nice and cozy here,” I said, grinning like an idiot. “We’ll be like Mimi and Rodolfo.”

“Or Scott and Zelda,” intoned Michael darkly, the realist in the family.

The first thing we did once we settled in was to arrange our writing areas and our writing schedule - remember, this was a one-room flat. The second thing we did was to scour all the English-language newspaper articles, listings, and ads we could find to learn what kind of expatriate literary community was out there - a much sorrier exercise. Of course reading the ads is not going to give you the whole picture of a place, but it does give you a good idea of its economic underpinnings. And to read all the ads for lectures, classes, salons, you’d think there was a big healthy world of English-language writers in Paris. Of course the thread that ran through all of them was that you had to pay for their company.

So where was the spontaneous comradeship? The conviviality of struggling artists? The fun? If Michael and I had wanted to pay for our fun we would have stayed in America.

I told Michael flat-out that it was all right for him - like Proust, he did his best writing in mental isolation and solitude - but I couldn’t work in a vacuum. I needed to be around other writers, the more varied their experiences and viewpoints the better. (Being a Filipina from Minneapolis, diversity has always stimulated me.) Okay, he shrugged, see if you can get some people to come over.

The next day, with what I see now as incredible naïveté, I went over to the cybercafe near Sorbonne Number Six and set up a website on Geocities (which assigned me the “address” geocities.com/paris/salon/4665) simply stating that we were forming an anglophone writers group in Paris and leaving a number for interested writers to call. When a week passed and no one called I was despondent. It was then Michael strongly advised me to go over and put an ad up at Shakespeare and Company. I was hesitant. I mean, the place was a holy shrine! True, it wasn’t the Shakespeare and Company of the 1920s, of James Joyce and Hemingway, but didn’t Sylvia Beach hand over the great legacy of expat literature to George Whitman, owner of the current place? And who was I to importune upon this living legend?

“He’s not a museum piece,” Michael said, rather testily. He told me what he knew, what almost everyone knew about Whitman and about his ongoing contributions to Literature - which included the Tumbleweed Hotel, the little area on the second floor where indigent writers in transit were allowed to sleep and work, free of charge. After running a commune himself, Michael must have felt a great sympathy.

“So it’s not like he’s living on some high plane, the guy’s been supporting writers almost all his life. I don’t think he’d mind if someone came along and offered to take some of that load. Anyway, that spot where the bulletin board is - every American in Paris passes by that bulletin board.”

“That’s great,” I said, “but we sure can’t offer anything like the Tumbleweed here.”

“No, but we can do like Gertrude Stein did. We can offer writers a steady place to meet each other, read their stuff aloud, and get some food and drink too.”

I started to get excited. Once Michael said “we”, I knew it could work.

So that’s how I ended up at the counter of Shakespeare and Company, with a small flyer advertising for members for what was still just called The Writers Support Group. By the end of the week we’d gotten a dozen calls.

Since we didn’t have a bell people could ring for our flat, and since I didn’t want to give every unknown prospect our door code, I used Perlmutter’s leftover art paper and made a sign for our window which overlooked the street, which said “Writers Support Group - Rap Here”. I still have the sign, in case we ever need it again.

We Few, We Happy Few

The trouble with having an open door policy that admitted any and all self-described writers was that we got a lot of lonesome tourists and travelers - one-shots, in other words. And although we did get to meet some bilingual French and the occasional Brit, our regular group, once it settled into its groove, became comprised solely of American expats.

But even so it had variety. There was Hillary, who planned revenge on her superiors simply by chronicling their uproarious diplomatic gobbledygook; Amy, who had a razor-sharp intelligence and homey Georgia accent, and wrote lurid thrillers; Lori, the academic who longed to set down on paper the sweeping drama of Arab and American immigrants in Paris; Victoria, the recent divorcee, whose new life included writing a mystery; Manda, the jazz star-cum-playwright who came over in the 70s and was gratified to find that one stereotype of the French was true - they do idolize black American singers; and last but not least, Bob Stoner, known as Stone, who came over in 1968 during the student revolution and stayed to write, produce, and direct plays and eventually run his own traveling theater.

Except for Amy, who joined in because Hillary brought her, everyone else came in cold. I can’t say any of us produced a major work, although among us we did finish short stories, essays, a couple of plays which we all read aloud, and some novels, including Michael’s. And we had a great deal of fun together. Also, Michael and I were learning a few things. We were learning how to listen better, and how to critique effectively, both during meetings and between meetings, when we copyedited members’ manuscripts (gratis, of course). And in sharing our own technical problems with the group, we were learning how to improve our own writing.

But just as importantly, we were learning what makes a writers support group work.

I wish our experience could have lasted longer, but after nine months in Paris it became necessary for us to return to the States. Stone vowed to try to keep the group going, but I wasn’t overly hopeful that every single one of our regulars would continue. As for being published or produced - well, that seemed even more unlikely. Being published or produced seemed such a faraway thing to all of us. But I’ve been proven at least partly wrong. Stone’s still writing and directing plays (in which Victoria acts) for his own traveling theatrical company, Vagatur, and Manda’s gone on writing for the stage. Last spring she had her first production, and in the audience were Stone and Victoria.

We all still email to each other, and whatever there is still of PariSalon4665 in Paris remains with them.

The Future is Now

Perlmutter hadn’t been kidding about the Parisian winters, they were dreary enough to make you turn existential. But there was one ray of brightness in late March - the International Book Fair. It was being held in a major convention center way on the other side of town on a cold drizzly day, but I didn’t care. I love book fairs and made up my mind to go. (Michael didn’t join me, he was out and about with our son, who’d come for a visit and was thrilled to be going to real bars with his old man.)

It was well worth it, and not just to witness the reverence thousands of ordinary Europeans were showing for the written word, or to delight in the vast display of books in multitudinous languages.

I got a glimpse of the future.

It was in the back, in the area marked “Technologie”. There, some American rep was giving a demonstration of Rocket Ebooks. Half a dozen computers were logged on to French and German ezines. A display from Adobe was proudly offering the latest release of their program that could create elaborate documents which could be sent through email - PDFs.

And smack in the center was the machine, a print-on-demand machine. It was amazing, just amazing - to watch an electronically-stored document (a book composed of nothing but air and ideas!) transformed into a book you could hold in your hands in couple of minutes.

I looked around me and had an epiphany: Here was the future of literature. To be able to write, to get your words out quickly and cheaply, without barriers, to as large an audience as you dared approach - this was going to be a true revolution.

And I was determined to be a part of it.

The Torch is Passed On, Sort Of

It’s been two and a half years since I went to that book fair. A couple weeks ago I got an email from Stone. He’d just finished a short book on the Islamic experience in post-9/11 Europe and wanted to know if I could help him find someone to publish him fast. Since leaving Paris, Michael and I had started PariSalon4665 up again in San Francisco, and this time it was an unqualified success. As well as the group that met regularly in our home, I had a website going, three literary ezines, an online newslist, and an email newsletter. My own stories were being published in other magazines and I’d also managed to publish a friend’s novella myself as an ebook, and find a small press to take on Michael’s novels (he’s written two more to date). They’re now available as paperbacks and ebooks. To top it off, the new group was about to come out with its own POD paperback anthology.

I gave the names of several publishers to Stone, and told him if he struck out with them I’d publish his book as a PDF ebook and offer it as a download on my website. Hearing from Stone was great, but it was making me nostalgic. I asked him how everyone from the old group was doing, of course, but I also asked him how Shakespeare and Company was doing too.

How’s George Whitman? I asked. You told me once you’ve known him since the 60s. Can you give me the real lowdown, is he the real heir to Sylvia Beach? What’ll happen to Shakespeare and Company when he’s gone?

This is what he wrote back:

 

George went to Paris after the war to meet Sylvia Beach, who he’d idolized for years. She let him work at the counter, but she never let him upstairs near the literary scene, that was all her domain, you know... Afterward he opened his own bookshop, the one you see now, and in the 50s and 60s he attracted very different writers from Sylvia’s - Lawence Durrell, Henry Miller, Anais Nin, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti... When Sylvia was dying, he visited her at her deathbed and got her permission to rename his shop after hers, Shakespeare and Company, to carry on the tradition, “pass on the torch”...

George’s group was always more fragmented than Sylvia’s but in my opinion they took more chances, stylistically and in their lives. As far as the business part of running a bookstore, Sylvia was way better. I don’t know who’s going to take over the shop when he’s gone. I think he’s always felt in her shadow. But George has a fine sense of literature - and if you’re trying to pass on a literary tradition, that’s the main thing.

By the way, thanks for all those addresses. I’m sending you the manuscript too... See if you can do anything with it...

Peace from Paris, Stone

July 2002

Originally published in The Best of PariSalon4665 Anthology (Brave New Books, 2002). Download a free PDF copy of the complete anthology here.

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