Over the next month or so we're going to be offering a new series of guest posts (read the first series,"The Next Decade in Book Culture" here). Our question: How are you handling the rise of the e-book? Are you reading on Kindle, the Sony Reader, the Vook, have you reserved an iPad? Are you buying e-books? Reading e-galleys? And how's it working out for you? Let us know your quibbles, quirks, happy and not so happy adventures in e-reading. First up is NBCC board member John Reed, author, teacher, Brooklyn Rail books editor.
I had lunch yesterday with a book editor from one of the corporate behemoths; the conversation now is giddy with dread and anticipation, prospects and portents dire. Talk turned to what she called, “a rush to the backlist,” which is something I’ve been hearing about for a few years. It makes sense for publishers to review their lists and emphasize their properties, especially those with some copyright left (let’s say fifty years). What’s surprising to me is the discussion of the public domain, an area of publication better suited to small presses. Imprints from the larger publishers that publish heavily in the public domain, whatever the sales numbers, will erode their identities, which is all they have of value. Small presses will always have an advantage on the public domain books; they can give more time to the translation and the package, and produce a book that, despite the original publication date of the title, still has a “new discovery”’ vibe.
The e-book, with all its bells and whistles, is soon to come—not just pages that flip, but the integration of a full platform computer. The real revolution will soon follow: a whole different kind of content. What we’re about to see isn’t just a book anymore, it’s something else, a new art form. We probably have a good sense of the first generation—a sort of cross between a website and a textbook—but the second generation remains indistinct. For the public domain titles, the e-book means a lot of free reading; it also means that the backlist, the “Great Writers” of yore, will be working in a format that is antiquated to the technology, sort of like listening to the radio or watching a black and white show on a color tv. Long term, not where a major press wants to position itself.
This presentation from Prof. Sree Sreenivasan, titled Advanced Social Media for Book Critics and Others in the Book Biz, was delivered at the annual NBCC membership meeting on March 11, 2010 at The New School in New York, NY.
Prof. Sreenivasan is Dean of Student Affairs at Columbia Journalism School & contributing editor for DNAinfo.com. More information about his workshops can be found at sreetips.com.
The Business of Book Reviewing: Changes and Challenges, a panel of NBCC members, coming up at Virginia Festival of the Book:
Fri. March 19th, 2010 - 4:00 PM
With Ron Charles (Washington Post), David Montgomery (Chicago Sun-Times, The Daily Beast), and freelancers Rebecca Skloot and Katharine Weber. Hosted by Bella Stander, Book Promotion 101.
Moderated by: Bethanne Kelly Patrick
Location:
City Council Chambers
605 E. Main Street
Charlottesville, Va.
National Book Critics Circle Announces Its Winners for the Publishing Year 2009
On Thursday, March11, 2010, at the New School’s Tishman auditorium in New York, the National Book Critics Circle announced its award winners for the publishing year 2009. Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall (Holt), a Booker Prize winner last year, won the fiction award. The board saw it as an extraordinary accomplishment, original in voice and ambitious in style, that brings us into intimate contact with a compelling Cromwell.
The poetry award went to Rae Armantrout’s Versed(Wesleyan University Press) for its demonstration of superb intellect and technique, its melding of experimental poetics but down-to-earth subject matter to create poems you are compelled to return to, that get richer with each reading.
The criticism award was given to Eula Biss’s Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays (Graywolf), a quintessential essay collection that reveals emotional truths about our country. In biography, Blake Bailey’s Cheever: A Life (Knopf) won the biography award for a powerful example of reportage, a close reading of the life and the circumstances that delivers a superlative understanding of who the writer was. Finally, in autobiography, the board honored Diana Athill’s Somewhere Towards the End (Norton) as a funny, exact, philosophical reflection, told from the end of the author’s life yet never presuming that age grants special wisdom—only some affecting and unexpected stories.
Each day leading up to the March 11 announcement of the 2009 NBCC award winners, Critical Mass highlights one of the thirty finalists. Today, NBCC board member James Marcus discusses poetry finalist Rae Armantrout's Versed (Wesleyan University Press)
For much of her lengthy career, Rae Armantrout has cocked a skeptical eye at the American language—as if it needed a background check and a good body frisk. It wasn’t the music of words that aroused her suspicions. It was their capacity to sneak in bad faith and political flab under the radar. And yet Armantrout’s poems, with their tendency, as she has said, to “focus on the interventions of capitalism into consciousness,” have nothing of the ideological hall monitor about them. They are instead playful, poignant, and metaphysically alert—never more so than in Versed, her tenth collection.
Here as elsewhere, she has a fondness for the snub-nosed, snapped-off line bequeathed to American poetry by William Carlos Williams. Her attitude to the sort of humble objects that prompted Williams’s famous credo (“No ideas but in things”) is a little more complicated. She begins “Name Calling” with a tongue-in-cheek denunciation: “Objects are silly. / Lonesome / as the word ‘Ow!’ / is.” And yet in the next stanza, she seems more than willing to pay them mind:
Could we grant them
a quorum—
dense,
with the shiny
glossolalia
of the leaves,
the resilience
of open-ended
questions?
She is similarly ambivalent about the very idea of metaphor. On one hand, it strikes her as an endless series of bogus equivalencies. In “Equals,” such representations seem downright sinister: “One lizard / jammed headfirst / down the throat / of a second.” In “Integer,” Armantrout is even more straightforward: “Metaphor / is ritual sacrifice. / It kills the look-alike.” Yet her own poems are constructed out of marvelous (if strictly rationed) bits of figurative language, and she knows we are more or less stuck with the “mesh / of near / approximations.” In “Scumble,” a witty riff on the arbitrary relationship of words to the things they represent, she asks:
What if there were a hidden pleasure
in calling one thing
by another’s name?
Oh, but there is. Doubters need only immerse themselves in Versed, whose vigilant, often beautiful poems seem to reset the reader’s mental instrumentation—what Armantrout calls the “whirligig / of attention, / the figuring and / reconfiguring / of charges / among orbits / (obits) / that has taken forever.”
Click here to see Rae Armantrout read from Versed.
The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.
By 1921, Henry Ford’s company had a lock on more than half the U.S. automobile market, turning out 2 million Model Ts a year, with a cost of production 60% lower than it had a decade beforehand. This was not the “race to the bottom” of today’s globalism, searching for the cheapest possible labor, either, for when Ford announced he would pay workers an incentive $5 dollars a day, it was twice the industry standard of the time. It was not the production line per se but the close and careful choreographing of multiple processes simultaneously that allowed for the industrial efficiency, the approach that came to be known as “Fordism,” as Greg Grandin explains in Fordlandia.
Grandin’s book is an account of a Ford project little known today, the establishment of a rubber plantation on a tributary of the Amazon in the Brazilian jungle, but along the way it also presents a lucid and nuanced analysis of the contradictions built into Ford’s brand of paternalized capitalism. Even as he catalogues its failures, Grandin notes that Ford’s impulses toward social engineering “compare well with what is available in much of the world today.”
Over the course of nearly two decades, Henry Ford pumped tens of millions of dollars into funding two American towns in Brazil, “complete with central squares, sidewalks, indoor plumbing, hospitals, manicured lawns, movie theaters, swimming pools, golf courses, and of course Model Ts and As rolling down their paved streets,” Grandin writes. (Ford, born on a farm in Michigan, hated cows; today one of those golf courses is grazeland for cattle.)
The major purchase of Brazilian property, on the shore of the Tapajos River, was roughly sketched out by two employees Ford sent there in 1927, who drew a line on the map encompassing 5,625 square miles. The state of Para ended up ceding Ford slightly less, but the nearly 2.5 million-acre swath was about the size of Connecticut, and the half that represented public land was given to Ford free, the government was so eager for development in its backwater regions.
Ford understood “that high wages and decent benefits would do more than create a dependable and thus more productive workforce; they would also stabilize and stimulate demand for industrial products by turning workers into consumers.” In an ideal sense Ford was an admirer of Emerson, and he pictured in his methods a kind of holism that Grandin interprets as “an American pastoralism that didn’t oppose nature and industrialization, or man and the machine, but saw each fulfilling the other. “ Yet “both his car and his factory system worked against the world he hoped to bring into being,” Grandin asserts.
The eccentricities and worse of the man—Ford’s anti-Semitism, for example—are well explored by Grandin, who rounds out his chronicle of hubris and steady slippage in the Amazon (including uprisings by the workers) with accounts of Ford’s penchant for attempting to create self-sustaining village industries and planned communities, several of those in Michigan. When production of latex proved extremely problematic, Ford’s mission was then rationalized as a civilizing one. Ford hated FDR’s New Deal, but the 1930 revolution in Brazil that brought Getulio Vargas to power, propelling pro-labor, FDR-style legislation, helped him a great deal, but one of the multiple ironies in Fordlandia.
As Grandin sees it, “Born more from political frustration at home than from the need to acquire control over yet another raw material abroad, Fordlandia represents in crystalline form the utopianism that powered Fordism—and Americanism.”
Click here to watch Greg Grandin discuss Fordlandia (courtesy of Democracy Now!)
The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.
In a literary world where only one Italian intellectual gets to be world-famous at a time, Ignazio Silone (1900-78) enjoyed that perch in the middle years of the 20th century. Although the literature Nobels in his lifetime went to Deledda, Pirandello, Quasimodo and Montale, Silone's complex profile—novelist, activist, editor, political theorist, former communist turned gently anti-communist tribune of socialism—made him an authoritative and admired figure. Praised by the likes of William Faulkner, Thomas Mann and Bertrand Russell, he died with the aura of "classic author" about him, his 1930s novels Fontamara and Bread and Wine translated everywhere.
With the notable exception of Primo Levi, whose well-earned American apotheosis led to multiple biographies in English, modern Italian novelists and intellectuals rarely find an American biographer, let alone one with the grasp of Italian intellectual culture possessed by the fine Hofstra historian Stanislao Pugliese. His Bitter Spring is a gift, the first thorough study of Silone in English. Anyone especially interested in Italian literature or mid-century European intellectual history should be even more grateful, for Pugliese does the best job yet of explaining a man who seemed inexplicable even to his Irish wife of three decades, Darina Laracy.
Having lost both his parents and 5 of 6 siblings by the age of 14, the writer born Secondino Tranquilli in Pescina dei Marsi, Italy—an Abruzzo town devastated by a 1915 earthquake that killed his mother and some 70 percent of its populace—grew up with a profound sense of life's injustice and a forceful determination to fight it. A co-founder of Italy's Communist Party at 21, he became a commited opponent of Mussolini at home.
One of the many aliases he took on as a roaming Italian Communist activist—"Ignazio Silone," which he chose while languishing in a Spanish jail in 1923—would later become his nom de plume. A 1927 visit to Moscow , during which he quickly intuited the advancing authoritarianism of Stalin as the latter turned on Trotsky, spurred Silone's questioning of doctrinaire communism. By 1931, clinically depressed and expelled from the Italian Communist Party because of his independent stands, Silone turned to expressing his anti-fascism in committed, realist fiction written during exile in Switzerland. Skeptical, savvy, cosmopolitan, yet ever drawn to the humble Catholicism exemplified by St. Francis and the spiritual, ascetic Celestines, Silone, with Fontamara and Bread and Wine, captured the fight for justice of Abruzzese peasants armed with Catholic folk wisdom, trickle-down Marxism, and little else.
After World War II, Silone became Italy's leading liberal intellectual, co-editing the prestigious journal Tempo Presente from 1956 until 1968 when he learned, to his dismay, of its covert funding from the CIA. He resigned and thereafter devoted himself wholly to writing. After his death, in 1996, another controversy broke out about Silone's loyalties when Italian historian Dario Biocca found letters suggesting that Silone may have been a minor informer for the Fascist Party during his 20s. The issue remains cloudy. The whole of Silone's life better indicates that whatever favors he may have traded with a Fascist policeman for specific purposes, and whether he was a double agent or a triple agent, he was never, ideologically, a Fascist sympathizer. A fairer assessment was the one delivered by Italy's president upon Silone's death in 1978: Pescina's cultural warrior as the "noble, rigorous, inflexible, democratic conscience of contemporary Italian culture."
Pugliese untangles and evaluates the still mysterious threads of Silone's secretive life and undercover affiliations better than anyone so far. More important, he brings back to life a writer whose reputation has unfairly receded. Like Camus, who once remarked to Simone Weil's mother that Silone deserved the Nobel Prize more than he did, Silone tolerated no acolytes or disciples, and resisted invitations to power. (He declined the posts of Italian ambassador to France and head of Italian state broadcasting.) Silone never developed literary worshippers who might have kept his flame alive. Bitter Spring eloquently unpacks why so many distinguished figures of art and culture saw kindred greatness in the man who flintily described himself as "a Socialist without a Party, a Christian without a Church."
Click here to watch Stanislao Pugliese discuss Bitter Spring.
The NBCC awards ceremony is free and open to the public, as are the readings by NBCC finalists on Wednesday, March 10. To purchase tickets to the reception following the awards ceremony, click here.
Commentary on literary criticism, publishing, writing, and all things NBCC related. It's written by independent members of the NBCC Board of Directors (see list of bloggers below).
The postings on this blog represent the views and opinions of each individual poster and are not representative of views held by the National Book Critics Circle as an organization, or the NBCC board as a whole. Everything on this blog is copyright protected
poetry finalist 
Critical Mass highlights one of the 
via RSS feed
