Readings, Rated
Quotable Notables: Bezos on Slate
Deep thoughts of Amazon C.E.O. on the success of the Kindle: “I believe that reading deserves a dedicated device.* For people who are readers, reading is important to them.”
*Last I checked, this already exists.
Introducing: Franny the Bookstore Cat
Tonight, we’re pleased to present a new column about bookstores, written by Chicago’s own Franny the Bookstore Cat. Franny’s worked in bookstores for nearly twenty cat years, so you know she knows her stuff. Below, the first installment — stay tuned for another early next month.
In this column, I’ll be speaking regularly about the state of bookstores, primarily the independents. More than ever, it seems, the literary world is in a state of flux. Online magazines and news coverage are replacing newspapers and glossies as we know them. Kindles allow you to carry a whole library in your bag. Big box stores and websites are offering bestsellers at less than half their cover-price.
With the fall of big publishing, though, comes a renaissance of small presses, handmade zines, limited edition art books. I’m excited about the immediacy of the internet, too; don’t get me wrong. I like that people can hit a button after they read a story I wrote, and tell me how much they liked it. Ron Silliman gets the bipolarity of the current moment: “we’re simultaneously caught in the wonder of the new and true mourning for the losses of the old.”
I would argue that we’re not mourning yet, because nothing’s been lost. We’re rehashing, reconsidering, and even reviving. Certainly, some things are falling by the wayside, and this moment could feel like a dark age of sorts, but only if one is strictly taking into account the merging of major publishing houses to a paltry seven, or the fact that the most dismal statistics report 80% fewer independent bookstores than existed 20 years ago. In reality, we’re just figuring things out, enjoying the options, not nixing the old to usher in the new.
I’m going to talk about why bookstores still have a place in this world; how they’re a mini-revolution, already in action; how they are still exciting and necessary and sometimes boring and regular in the most wonderful way. I’m also going to tell you about the things that are threatening bookstores, and make suggestions about how you can have your cake and eat it, too.
First, let me just list a few things that bookstores can do that Amazon cannot:
#1: You can attend live readings with authors where you can ask questions and touch the human skin, probably uninvited, of the writer you so admire.
#2: You can ask booksellers a question, and they will give you impromptu answers they might be basing on the vibe they get from you, or the enthusiasm level in your responses to their suggestions. Sometimes those booksellers smell nice and you develop crushes on them.
#3: You can accidentally find books that you aren’t looking for but absolutely need. At a website, they might recommend a book in a genre similar to the book you are buying or by the same author, but in a bookstore your eye can catch on that vegan soul food cookbook across the room and only you see it as the perfect companion to Lorrie Moore’s Self Help.
This is just the start. Shall we?
Harriet Wraps Up 2009
Over at Harriet, the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Catherine Halley and Travis Nichols just posted links to the year’s most-viewed pieces. Many are beautiful and some are snarky — nearly all demand argument, which is kind of the point of a blog, yes?
Read up (Myles and Saroyan’s especially), ogle comment section flame wars, and read something aloud in memory of Craig Arnold. Props to Catherine and Travis for their hustle. [image credit Ibn Al Rabin -- read the rest of his comic here]
Gretchen’s on Chicago Tonight!
Last Tuesday, Literago.org co-founder Gretchen Kalwinski was a panelist on Chicago Tonight, chatting with Phil Ponce, author Brigid Pasulka, and Loyola Professor Al Gini about books to give and read this holiday season. They also chatted about books not to read, and PW’s male-centric 2009 best-of list. The footage is here and their lists of recommended books are archived here — congrats, lady! P.S. Al Gini: so, so right about Asterios Polyp.
Sale at Half Letter Press!
Holy snakes! Now through January 1st, all items at the Half Letter Press store are 10% off. The store, set up by Temporary Services, is a resource for creative people looking to spread word about experimental projects and publications.
“We are particularly interested,” say collaborators Brett Bloom, Salem Collo-Julin, and Marc Fischer, “in supporting people and projects that have had difficulty finding financial and promotional assistance through mainstream commercial channels.” (Check out the HLP free box and brand-new newspaper, going cheap at 23¢ per.)
Browse the whole archive for treats and schooling, also to brush up on Chicago history — we especially recommend the Atlas of Radical Cartography, Screaming In Music, and the Art Workers Won’t Kiss Ass poster (featured above). At a mere four bucks, it’s a quick cheap way to help politicize your kid sister, just in time for Christmas.
Readings, Archived
By now you know Literago as a lit event portal: we’re your hub for upcoming readings and readings reviewed. But keep us in mind as an archive, too. Starting today, we’re happy to feature excerpts — photos, video, text — from readings across the city. Send us your jams!
Here are two to kick us off, both from the same night in December. First, Steve Delahoyde’s video from the last Encyclopedia Show, themed “Hockey.” The night “was succinct and fun,” writes co-host Robbie Q. Telfer. “And Shanny made everyone cake.”
Second, an excerpt from Nell Taylor’s latest performance at rec room. In it, she riffs poetic on the Death of Print, which apparently includes hot dogs, Kool Aid, and the Messiah.
[Audience members were given paper cups containing half a cocktail weenie with a toothpick stuck in it. Enterprising readers may play along at home; tiny pickles and cheese cubes are acceptable substitutes.]
As the secretary of our order’s reliquary I know I may be speaking out of turn, but I come before you as a humble servant and with offerings.
I’m afraid we have some believers in the house tonight. There will be no healing and no miracles. No potato chips in the shape of Sam Zell crying tears of blood. We have been manipulated into forgetting one of our closest-held truths: There is nothing sexy about a bloated corpse unless it’s paying you.
We are all here tonight because we have shared a sinful romance with the idea of print. We left behind families and careers for the promise of residuals, 24-hour sunshine, abundant Kool-Aid and newsprint that never smudges, not even during our Sunday ritual of going behind the barn, smearing each other with paste and rolling around in the weekend edition. This is what we did for print. And now it’s leaving us.
You’ve done your best. Held the appropriate vigils, worn the shrouds, walked six times backwards around the rusty flat files we cram ourselves into during the Deadlines of Repentance. We rubbed our goats against the grain of their scalps, soaked the excess goat hair in the milk of proofreaders, brought the milk to a boil in a small saucepan, let it simmer then cool in a southern wind, paid respect to the alternate recipe in our special edition occult microwave cookbooks, dunked our heads in it, and tossed our freshly shaved hair on the bonfire to the scratchy gospel of flexi-discs. We’ve always done just as print instructed.
But friends, we’re propping up a false messiah. The print we’ve been desperately trying to sustain has no claim on us. Once it was powerful, something to aspire to. But gradually, of its own free will, it’s become isolated and irrational, gorging itself on hotdogs until dawn and insisting it can swim out to sea and be welcome on any foreign shore, such is the reach of its influence. Clearly, our father is possessed. I’m not certified in exorcisms, but I know when to call upon my training as a passive observer and let it drown.
I stood by and watched print gulp down water as it sputtered on about its own importance. The awards, the lists, the time it went on Oprah— losing circulation, turning blue, cries of “Someone blurb me” echoing off the cliffs we’re supposed to throw ourselves off of following this ceremony.
It stopped thrashing and floated there, such a short distance out that it could have swam back on its own. It must have made peace with its fate, maybe in its final moments abandoned its selfish desire to take us all with it. If it needed me, if it asked, I would’ve met it halfway and dragged it in.
Turning toward shore, it shouted: Aren’t I too big to fail? Picked up by a nearby banking cruise, the distress call was returned with only laughter. Print was never meant to get so big. And really, by comparison, it wasn’t. It drifted back, landing itself on shore with a sloshy thud, wrinkled and swelling at the same time as it dried, not quite emitting the smell of death yet but of a musty basement.
Big print fed on aspirations. It only floated this long on the delusions of loyal believers. We indulged it, thinking one day it might see us as its equal.
If you have been a believer in print as an industry, I’m sorry for your loss, but rest assured that it was never really yours to lose. Print, as we knew it, is still heaving up sludge on the beach and trying to sell joggers ads for used appliances. You can try to resuscitate it if you want, or sit around and wait for the resurrection, or leap to your own deaths as previously scheduled. But you’ll be leaving behind all the smaller, vulnerable cultures we’ve been nurturing in its image. [Remove weenie.] We’re responsible for them, to help them grow, and they can’t survive on us alone. It’s no longer possible to be your own audience. Did you eat your cocktail weenie? You have just cannibalized your own culture.
All the professionals and professional aspirants, please rise.
All the deliberate nonprofessionals, please rise.
I’d like to acknowledge the people who are still seated.
They are the real audience. The real audience is the people who don’t have a financial or reputational stake in print culture, but show up anyway. Please take a moment to notice how small the real audience actually is. This is why we’re in trouble.
All rise.
Please remove your cocktail weenie from your cup with your left hand and hold it in front of you. With your right hand, raise your cup. Turn your cocktail weenie so that the toothpick faces left. Please stab your neighbor’s cocktail weenie. We have met the post-apocalypse and it is us. Join or die.
Call for Odd-Fish Art
That little yellow guy at right is a nangnang, a seahorse-y creature from James Kennedy’s The Order of Odd-Fish. The book’s about Jo, a teenage girl who hangs out with talking cockroach butlers and Russian colonels and saves the world from evil forces. She’s rad.
In this scene from Chapter Twelve (which is also a papercut by Max Pitchkites) the nangnang’s biting off Jo’s fingernail. Props to how Max did it so it looks like an acid rock album/she’s bleeding … in outer space.
The book’s been lauded by everyone from Booklist to Timeout to, perhaps most importantly, readers everywhere. To wit: after Odd-Fish’s 2008 debut, James’s mailbox was insta-jammed with tons of awesome Odd-Fish fan art, including beer, stained glass windows, and a vomiting fish cake (see it all here). It was only a matter of time before he won the Newbery.
Soon Odd-Fish will be released in paperback, featuring a glitzy new cover by Paul Hornschemeier. Not surprisingly, James is planning an art-costume-extravaganza to celebrate. And he wants you to participate! You, Fancypants Screenprinter. You, Deviant-Art-ophile. You, Who Occasionally Doodles During Lunch. Everyone’s welcome.
Here’s a list of stuff from the book you/your friends/your students/your cousins might want to illustrate:
- a costume party in the desert
- a box falling from the sky
- a zeppelin fight
- a marching band on a beach
- a thirty-foot long purple and yellow monster with feathers and four wings
- a duel with flying ostriches and flaming lances
- a musical instrument that’s also a living animal you climb inside to play
All the art, be it glossy or gritty, will be on display at Collaboraction. On opening night, there’ll be a party with snacks and battle dancing, and in the weeks afterwards, high schoolers will tour the space to ogle the pieces, take performance workshops, and talk about the book.
Want more details? Check out James’s blog. Deadline’s March 1st!
CellStories: a very Meno Christmas
A tip for those Megabusing home for the holydaze: CellStories, a project delivering one short story to your phone, every day for free (Literago contributor Susannah Felts was recently featured) is running Joe Meno stories all next week. Monday through Thursday are reprints, and on Friday there’ll be a brand-new one. And hey: after Dinner With Mom, before Whisky and R-Rated Movies, why not submit one of your stories, too? Otherwise, you’ll just be Youtubing old Muppet Shows. Don’t think we don’t know.
Is Greater Than relaunches!
Literago is stoked to see that Is Greater Than (the online magazine spearheaded by whiz Paul M. Davis) will be posting new content in the New Year. Stoked! IGT is a finely-tuned, well-toned magazine with a range of content and super savvy editors — a great place to chat, find viz, and get solid feedback on work. Here, the call for submissions:
Is Greater Than, an online magazine published out of Chicago and San Francisco since 2007, is relaunching on Wednesday, December 30, 2009 and is looking for your short fiction, creative nonfiction and personal narratives, as well as articles, interviews and opinion pieces that examine culture in its many permutations — literature, music, art, film and much more. We pride ourselves on celebrating the unknown and the emerging, the people and topics that are deserving of closer consideration. We’re not opposed to turning the microscope onto pop culture, but that isn’t our focus. We’re not looking to “win the morning” with linkbait: it’s a big world out there, and there are many intriguing stories to tell.
Short fiction, creative nonfiction and personal narrative submissions should under 2000 words. Our tastes are varied — everything from brutal realism to tales of the fantastic — but first and foremost, we’re looking for polished work with a strong and unique voice. We’re also looking for articles, interviews, and essays on culture, running 800-1200 words, and are accepting both pitches and finished articles. Send your submissions to isgreaterthan@gmail.com, or visit the website for more details.
That photo has nothing immediately to do with Is Greater Than. We don’t even know if Paul likes cats. However! The awesomeness of the orange one’s curiosity is inspiring, his attention to corners not unlike Is Greater Than’s. Literago votes you bookmark the site now, and submit something to it soon.
The Silent Cessation of the Bookslut Reading Series
I think it’s weird that there hasn’t been more of a stink about the departure of the Bookslut Reading Series from Chicago. Admittedly, I only went to one of their events. I left said event within the first five minutes, exhausted by the prospect of standing in a hot, crowded room and terrified of having to hang out with this weird girl I went to college with sitting in the front row — all for one writer I wanted to see and two that I did not. That said, these were consistently decent events, and the fact that they were crowded irrespective of who was reading was encouraging.
Deep thoughts (Literago edition): Why, aside from one lonely tweet from the Poetry Foundation, has this been met with Internet silence? Tonight’s event with Audrey Niffenegger isn’t even on the Bookslut Reading Series main page. What the heck? This guy knows what I’m talking about.