"Publishing from the Provinces”

The most obvious meaning of the title of Ivor Indyk's essay is that Australian publishing is “from the provinces” of the world's geography as well as from the southern extremities of the old British Empire. Though Indyk immediately says this is not what he means, it is still something I’d like to examine for a moment. The provinces of Australian writing lie at the bottom of two stacked English language gravity wells, not just one.

The two great centres of English language publishing are London and New York. The geographic outer provinces of publishing are everywhere, even in London and New York. The question of provincialism goes on and on; it all depends on who has the talking stick and where the azimuth is. (Hence the irregular Gobshite Quarterly essays or rants under the general title “Every Edge A Centre.”)

Non-empires have small (i.e., unimportant, unbroadcast) literatures. If a work is found to be astonishing, e.g. Norwegian Knausgard's six volumes of autobiography, the work is translated, its author praised, raised and highly paid. Norwegian writing is not.

Norway is not a current or recent world power: there are no colonies or former colonies where Norwegian is a mandatory subject at every school, Norwegian books are on every syllabus, and Norwegian is the lingua franca of business, government, social mobility and ambitious writing.

The literary/artistic worth of things written, painted, played, drawn, built or projected is often inseparable from the current economic power and associated standing of the culture producing it, its possession of cultural colonies.

This point was elided when post-colonial literature in English was called “Commonwealth Literature,” complete with intellectual sniff. There was no real azimuth outside London. “Literature” stood alone and above the working class, slanting the clattering factories, the conditions of women, gunboat diplomacy, slavery, trading triangles and the bloody reality of imposed paradigms. The Church of the Book stood beside the Church of England, a two-person trinity as immanent, eternal and unchangeable, regarded and disregarded as the original.

The concerns of the books we studied were held to be universal or universally applicable when they were often, also, if not only, the concerns of a (foreign) ruling caste.

In my own literal province, “American Literature” only appeared as a studyable subject during the Vietnam War. (Britain left the Common Market in 1964. Time to study our new paradigm, our new friends, defenders, masters...)

(Perhaps I was the only one befuddled. Perhaps I resisted understanding that all these magic nets of language were also foreign and self-interested flim-flam. My parents’ and culture’s quarrel with “education” was based on the long experience of a working class and religious minority of the political nature of education. Perhaps I resisted their understanding because I resisted their insistence that that was all there was to it. I was already outside the family and the group. I was a teenager, a foundling, mix-up at the hospital, a writer to my fingertips and spine.)

But Indyk is actually anxious to discuss a certain kind of writing, what he calls "the outer provinces" of imaginative writing in English in Australia.

He describes and discusses five titles: the novels Blindness and Rage, by Brian Castro, Border Districts, by Gerald Murnane, and The Swan Book by Alexis Wright, and the poetry collections Empirical, by Lisa Gorton, and Heide, by Pi.O. All these are recent titles published by Giramondo Publishing, of which Indyk was the founding editor and publisher.

Of Castro he says:

… [T]his play of mirrors, of repetitions and inversions … is characteristic of the imagination at full stretch, in the province of literature I am describing…. In this far province the imagination rules, in its own unruly fashion.

Of Murnane he says:

It is as if he is out to demonstrate, that the imagination which produced … worlds within worlds is still active, still revelling in its own inventiveness.

Of Wright he says:

Wright’s most recent novel The Swan Book begins with just the kind of recursion I have been examining … that movement in which the imagination seeks to expand beyond the condition of neglect or indifference, or in the Indigenous case negation, to declare its power.

Of Gorton and Pi O he says:

Both titles make use of citation and montage, and draw on an encyclopaedic range of sources, and both mobilise expansive perspectives through these means.

And of this type of work in general he says:

The sense of being unregarded, and therefore unconstrained (the element of play), the recursive inventions of an imagination which seeks to move beyond its frontiers, the encyclopaedic aspiration which seeks to discover the whole world in a remote part of it – all these suggest a willingness to experiment with perspectives, in both space and time, both formally and in terms of the responsibilities perspective entails.

From the type of work these writers create Indyk moves on to describe the writer's hope and puzzlement at the general response to it:

To reside in the literary world, in the outer provinces of publishing, is to become used to the discrepancy between expectation and response. Each book carries a unique significance and value, both because of the effort that has gone into its crafting, and because of the contribution that its writing makes to language and the imagination. I suppose no public response could ever do justice to this sense of value… What to make of this craziness, the absence of readers?

I understand Indyk's sympathy for writers whose books are lost in the marketplace because they do not do what more commercially successful books are doing. I admire him for going to bat for the writers he publishes. At the same time I think there are other contours to the situation.

Indyk says, “Each book carries a unique significance and value, both because of the effort that has gone into its crafting and the contribution that its writing makes to language and the imagination.”

There’s a marvellous passage somewhere in Pilgrim At Tinker’s Creek where Dillard describes, vividly, how our stupendously over-productive world runs on wasted effort: uncounted trillions of unnecessary sperm, rivers of unfertilized fish-eggs...

The built-in prodigality of natural processes means that some writers will produce some books which don't find readers. Effort alone does not create significance or value. Significance and value are communal judgements. They can't exist in isolation; they can't come into being because one individual announces them. There's nothing as isolated as an unread book. A book's contribution to its community or culture is also a communal judgement and decision.

On the other hand, not belittling the kind of book and writer Indyk is describing is a matter of common decency and respect. Respect is a matter I’ll return to in a moment.

If we ask, How can a largely unread book contribute to language and the imagination? answers can begin to emerge.

If books like these were taught they would start to become known, their methods shown to have value, as saying something the community or culture can learn, as seeing something that had not been seen before, saying something the community or culture might find beautiful or witty or amazing. Under those conditions books like these could begin to make a contribution to the community's language and imagination. Books like these have to be aggressively championed into communal awareness before they can become part of a culture's conversation.

Failing that, being admired and discussed by, and influencing, other writers is the only way this kind of writing can make a contribution to culture. Books selling 50 copies or so (which is the figure Indyk quotes for Brian Castro's title — in any case, books selling fewer than a thousand copies in Australia) will not be able to contribute to "language and the imagination" unless a significant number of those copies are bought or read by productive and more widely circulating writers who use or praise the original work. The chance that posterity will resurrect and re-evaluate an unknown or forgotten work is so small the notion should be classed as a delusion.

The kinds of writers Indyk is speaking of used to be called writers' writers. The phrase implicitly admits the work doesn't have a wide readership. But it also includes respect for the work and the writer's skill. Sometimes it also means the work has been mined more than once for useful tropes or techniques, making/keeping the writer's reputation alive at least in the writing community.

In general, baroque or rococo recursiveness in writing is the taste of a small percentage of readers. It’s a literary game you do or don't enjoy, a taste you may or may not have. Once these books become more widely known and perhaps taught, discussed, acknowledged, I suspect their popularity would still be on a par with a week of Difficult Listening.

But respect and influence and popularity and money aren’t the same things. Only a thoroughly mercantile culture would insist they are.

Working in or from the outer provinces is hard on artists generally, not just writers. You hear of one, a completely neglected genius of a painter, fifty years ahead of his time, who spends the last twenty years of his life in illness and alcohol, when in New York he’d’ve been rated as highly as De Kooning. You hear of another, who's left the schmoozing art world altogether, makes watercolour sculptures, pencil drawings, and laser print collages, hundreds of works in his basement no one has ever seen. You hear of a third, whose experimental fiction doesn't sell, who destroys his marriage and reputation because he can find no publisher for anything beyond a book review.

In a culture where limitless personal ambition is encouraged and the operating principle is winner take all, my question is: But how much should the "losers" lose?

Mercantile culture most often speaks of writing/art in terms of prizes, print runs and sales. The real question is respect, of which money has become the general index.

How can Australian culture respect its artists? (A subset of respecting everybody.)

This is a genuine question. The farthest province of physical and imaginative Australian cultural production also contains the opposite of being ignored into artistic nonexistence. That opposite is being worked to death, out of sight, into functional nonexistence because your work is in such demand.

The farthest province is a shed in the outback. It contains the forced labour of elderly Aboriginal painters.

And so in my Moebius strip of a question, the other side, the same side, is this: In a culture where limitless personal ambition is encouraged and the operating principle is winner take all, who are the winners?

And how, and how much, and what, should the "winners" win?

The Wheel of Fortune

We were launching Golems Waiting Redux at Publication Studio in 2011. Friends came, bringing an old friend who has bicycled all over the world. This friend mentioned that he worked near the Houses of Parliament in London; the Millennium Wheel is been built where he used to park his bicycle.

I don’t know why this remark struck me so forcefully, even though quietly, that it stayed with me ever since, but it did, and it has. I’ve looked at photos of the wheel across the river from the Houses of Parliament, understood at a gut level that the location of the Wheel was the announcement of a new world, a new regime, an insult to old physical and organizational structures; its sheer size a trumping, trouncing shout that former gravities have been overthrown.

But despite all this I couldn’t quite grasp why it was a giant Ferris wheel that said so.

The thought would nag at me from time to time, or rather, my lack of understanding would.

Sometime late in 2017 the faithful dinner companion and I were watchingAgnes Varda's Faces places – blu-ray from our local county facility – and, as always, disappointed that the dream has ended, needing to be less brutally ejected into the word we live in, we watched the bonus material.

There was a group photo of all the European directors present at that year’s Cannes. We watched it being set up, and then captured by a thousand points of light / flash-assisted, wild-game long-lenses.

At that moment something very strange happened to me.

The faithful and I, watching bonus material all our lives, have always felt an unspoken fellowship with the directors, cinematographers and other creators of the flick. Being writers we always felt that we were engaged in the same activity: creating something that did not exist before, seeing it, hammering like Hephaestus until the words fitted like gold to airy thinness beat. Feeling that lighting, blocking, acting, directing are cognate activities, talking about the deleted scenes - should have been included, trimmed or deleted altogether - looking at this nuance, that implication, marvelling, examining, talking shop.

But this photo at the 2017 Cannes was different. The day was grey and the colouring was odd, a kind of grey sepia. The people standing on the stage there looked alien to me, when they never would have before. The thought crossed my mind: these are the people in charge of what we see. They seemed to belong to a completely different sphere or species, to have stepped in from another universe.

The Wheel by Parliament is the ancient & mediaeval Wheel of Fortune. That was an undercurrent of my original take on it. But I didn't understand its sudden, loud, declarative appearance, or its shout of victory.

Its appearance now is relevant because of precisely this: the vast gap between those who have wealth / power / cultural capital / achievement / fame, and the rest of us.

The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.

Moving from our sofa into the photo taken at the Cannes Film Festival would create such a radical transformation of our income, housing, healthcare, clothing, diet, location, mobility, choices and liberties that it is literally unimaginable.

So radical and swift and complete… It would feel as though it could be explained only by the intervention of Fortuna (or that bastard derivation, Destiny), whose deeds have long been represented by the Wheel.

And lest we forget… The Wheel rotates through the whole 360 – losing a job / healthcare / housing, becoming ill and homeless would be such a radical transformation downwards as to be the kind of horror in prospect that keeps you working, head down, lips buttoned, silent, for years or decades. This part’s not inconceivable or unimaginable at all. It’s a street away, a block away, a supervisor away.

The Wheel is evoked instinctively in societies of great inequality.

I'm Afraid of Americans

My next collection is I'm Afraid of Americans. In some ways it's hard to know what to say about these stories & vignettes.

They are set in and are also from the South Bay area of Los Angeles during the '80s, after decades of immigration from Back East and The Midwest, Mexico, Central America, Vietnam and the Pacific Islands. The pieces are portraits of Americans and others, moments of culture shock, the framework of American culture seen through very foreign eyes.

Some are specifically set in and around a minority-majority high school in the aftermath of Proposition 13 and Ronald Reagan's ascent; others are snapshots of souls in a zeitgeist.

Three selections have now been published at Unlikely Stories:

Learning About Electricity
Processing Data
Roberta's Funeral

Thank you, Unlikely Stories!

Last year The Gravity of the Thing published an early version of The Cohort of Mist, Fog and Fire from the same collection. Thank you, TGOTT, and see you at Wordstock!

"Therapy" appeared in Vine Leaves Literary Journal in 2013, and in Vine Leaves' 2013 Best Of.

I'm Afraid of Americans will be published in Spring, 2018 and will be added to the fine selection at GobQ Books. The print edition will also be available at Mother Foucault's Bookshop, Powell's,  Broadway Books and Amazon. And there will be e-books.

The Crucifixes

I'm very pleased with this book, pleased with it beyond reason. The design by R.V. Branham is simple and beautiful; the Democratica font reminds me of Uncial and Half Uncial lettering, mediaeval manuscripts.

That alone would be wondrous.

But the thing about it, I came to realize, is that it reminded me that when I was 13 one of our set texts was a kid's biography of Marie Curie. And remembering that, the feeling of reading it, I realized that that child and I hadn't admired Marie Curie, but Maria Sklodowska. I didn't imagine the lab, the nuclear industry, the Nobel prizes. The later part of the book had little hold on me. Only the search and the finding.

This book is the radium distilled from the pitchblende.

Douglas Spangle - 2016 winner, the Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award

There is a footnote in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, which cites an unconsciously gender-based and class-based argument by Aldous Huxley to the effect that, because of more generally-available education and technological advance, there may be 4 men of literary talent now to every 1 of earlier times. Huxley’s corollary is that the demands of our vastly-expanded market must result in the production and consumption of a great deal of trash.

If we look at rock’n’roll we see that musical talent is widespread. Of course it is and always had been – where does the music in ethno-musicology come from if not from the ethnos? Where did folk music come from if not from the folk?

Folk tales. Border ballads. The blues.

Literary talent is similarly widespread, and that’s one of the things verbal art is now demonstrating and discovering to itself and the wider community. Speech and narrative clearly confer an evolutionary advantage. Narrative is central to humanity, and so is sputtering with rage, and so is singing.

Open mic is a forum / venue / performance / form which has proceeded quietly, and often just out of the range of vision of more formal and established literary forms and institutions.

That is its virtue, in many ways.

Being out of official sight means that literally anyone can apply, anyone can have their say and be heard. Because it is free and accessible, the concerns tend to be common human concerns – love, death, taxes… Like SF fandom it can be limited in scope by being invitational in nature – you can get fragmented groups and communities. But once the event or series is known the invitation is established, and the invitation remains open as long as the series lasts.

The Slam Poetry end of the spectrum can be quite formally innovative. The grass-roots, my first time in public end of the spectrum can often be perceptually innovative and emotionally subtle. Occasionally there is an astounding feat –

One night in late 2006, at the Broken Word open mic at the Alberta Street Pub, founded by Arlo Voorhees, a young woman read a long set of linked sestinas. They built and built and built, a Jacob’s ladder of exploration and explication from the nerve-ends of a relationship. It was the only piece I ever saw receive a standing ovation. It was a tour de force and a force of nature and ferocity.

Michael Shay organized a group of six active attendees – Douglas Spangle was one of the six – to edit the second published volume from those Broken Word readings. We all asked who that young woman was. None of the regulars knew her; none of their friends knew her; no one who listened to Talking Earth, on KBOO, knew her. We never found her. The poem's not in the book.

But we had heard it. We remember our mounting amazement as it built and crescendo’d – And then it disappeared as suddenly as it had appeared, this amazing piece of art from, in, and of the community. Where it has always come from, where it has always been.

For those of us caught between I can’t go on and I must go on, open mic gives us the chance to draw from each other the spirit to go on.

And so we come to Oregon, Portland, and Douglas Spangle. Who has nurtured this form and forum of weekly readings for more than 30 years.

The Broken Word reading at the Alberta Street Pub (founded and emceed by Arlo Voorhees, occasionally emceed by Douglas Spangle, and featuring readers such as Judith Fay Pullman and Jaqueline Freeman) followed the Meander reading (founded by Elizabeth Domike and Elizabeth Archers, occasionally emceed by Douglas Spangle, and featuring the intricately-talented Andrew Macarthur, sadly no longer with us); and Meander followed the reading at Murray’s Pizza (emceed by Douglas Spangle), which followed the reading at A Shot in the Dark (sometimes emceed by Douglas Spangle), which in turn followed the long-running reading at Café Lena (emceed by Doulgas Spangle with Brian Christopher Hamilton), which succeeded the long-running reading at the Satyricon (emceed by Doulgas Spangle, and featuring such writers as Walt Curtis and Katherine Dunn).

That takes us back to 1983. 2007-1983.

From 2008-2013 Douglas curated Verse in Person at the northwest branch of Multnomah County Library. The Stone Soup reading at Marino’s, was founded by Curtis Whitecarroll, an alumnus of Broken Word, who Douglas had mentored. Stone Soup and its successors, Ink Noise, Word Warrior and Poets' Challenge have featured writers such as Dan Encarnacion, Coleman Stevenson, Brita Emeel, Brenda Taulbee, and JM Reed. The young & formidable poets are often transplants to the city from elsewhere, though not always, but because of Douglas Spangle’s work, they have a committed emcee, a gathering place, a continuing reading series, and an audience.

Nurturing open mic that is not all that Douglas has done – in addition to producing fine poetry of his own he was active in Portland Artquake / Write Out Loud, co-edited Rain City Review (which debuted many Pacific Northwest writers, from Sherman Alexie to Lidia Yuknavitch), has written for Anodyne and The Asian Reporter, produced the last Portland Poetry Fest (dedicated to Mary Barnard) and been a Visiting Poet at Benson High School. His activities in and on behalf of poetry in the Pacific Northwest are really too numerous to mention here.

With the 2016 Stewart H. Holbrook Literary Legacy Award, the Oregon literary community recognizes the devoted nurturing of the weekly readings that has been the hallmark of Douglas Spangle's life: the constant, selfless, week-after-week-after week welcoming, nurturing presence, giving a venue and a voice to those who may go on to be well- and widely-known, to those who come and go in a single night, to any who write a name on a sign-in sheet.

And we at GobQ/Reprobate Books books add our heartfelt congratulations!

Outtakes

This is what I would normally have done with these three photos - eliminated any skewing because the camera wasn't quite straight, eliminated as much of the background clutter as possible (literally, on the stage, guitar cases and cables and the other things we subliminally edit ourselves, watching the speakers and following the conversation), making formal structures of lucky or accidental - or, occasionally, moments I can prepare for because there's a repeated pattern of movement.

I'm not a photographer in any accepted sense - no name badge, no enviably long lens for zooming past the clutter and architecture of the setting, and these factors are compounded by a certain lack of technique and, ultimately, limited talent. I can't move up to the stage or speakers without being rude. Sitting in the front row is about the best I can do.

What I can do, if we've snagged front row seats, is look at the stage and setting and listen to myself react to what has been assembled. Projections on the screen above, the lines of the room, the size of the figures on the chairs or standing at the podium in relation to the size of the room. The figures are often constrained by these lines, much as I feel and see people constrained by forces and events.

And so I rotate and crop, partly because off-kilter horizontals or verticals distract and annoy me so much I can't concentrate on the image itself, partly because the image will look sloppy otherwise, partly to draw attention to the heart of the image and the reason for producing it.

(Rotating and cropping are necessarily the same action with a defined (square or rectangular) format. But the difference between the darkroom - as far as I remember, it is so long since I've been in a darkroom - and digital photo editing is this: in the darkroom you could end up with a smaller image, and that would be OK. The proportions within the frame would remain the same. Or you could, in extra steps, enlarge and so alter them if you chose. In digital editing, with the kind of low-end editor I use for lack of time to use more complex software, after rotating/cropping, the remainder of the image floats and fills the area of the original. The edited image is an enlarged selection of the original.

And so these first three images in particular came to appear more...formal, monumental, than they had been in the taking.

And that gave me a lot to think about. Although these photos were taken at a staged event they are a subset of street photography. Which:
a) depends on intuition, experience, and luck
and
b) possibly because it is so serendipitous, so unlike studio photography, is often despised by the gatekeepers of "art"

But art it is. It is only the continued snobbery of studios and gatekeepers that says otherwise.* Photography began as street photography: the standards have been set by people like Andre Kertesz, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Vivian Maier, combat photographers from the American Civil War to Stalingrad to Tokyo, wildlife photographers, National Geographic photographers, photojournalists of all stripes (including their founder, Margaret Bourke-White)... And so I crop and rotate, hoping to make the image stand (up to the tradition, to the expectant gaze, against the expected view).

Suddenly confronted with formal, straitened images, I looked and compared, compared and looked, and decided in this instance to post the originals instead. They were truer to the good humour and relaxation of the moment. There's a laughter and liveliness to them that was worth showing.

The first reverts to this:

The second to this:

And the third to this:

Later that same day there was a panel with three speakers. One of them had to leave early so I couldn't get an individual photo of her. I didn't post any of the individual pix I did get because leaving someone out would have been... rude. However, I'm delighted with this example of purest luck.

There was a piano onstage. I might have mentioned it. Unmovable, ungetaroundable. By chance the woman sitting next to it was dressed in black, and if I squirmed around a bit in my seat I could make the two black masses merge. There were silver beads in the weave of the woman's stockings. I took several photos - and in this one she is looking up, her face is catching the light, her clothing merges into the cropped mass but distinctive shape of the piano. The frieze fragment's curve on the wall echoes the piano's, the black edge of the projection screen above her points down to the figure like a kind of large arrow, the woman's fingers indicate the tension of her focus and also echo the upward thrust of her face.

A good image by compositional principles, something snatched from the clutches of Time, something I did.**

==

* It is not photography in the studio sense, where the lighting is controlled and the composition likewise, and all elements indicate the photographer's understanding of the requirements of painting. (Which was the dominant earlier form of image-making, the standard to be no worse than - that's is the origin of studio snobbery: fear of being confused / dismissed with the lowly street.)

** When I bought my first SLR I had to think very carefully about what made me want to take pictures (I didn't have the money to spend on all those lovely accoutrements.) The answer was always: something I saw that made me want to keep it, hold it still against the flow and subtractions of Time. 

Orpheus in Melbourne - 2000

And the Answer Is -

In the little time I have to read I have been pursuing* Joseph Anton, Rushdie's account of his years in hiding after the Iranian fatwa /death threat issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses.

I find the publishing details fascinating, and the identification of both courage and cowardice compelling. Of course they surround or compose Rushdie's concern with free speech and free movement and the horrendous stacking of power which is addressed in the U.S. Constitution in the non-establishment clause.

Around the middle of the book he writes a letter to Religion. The final paragraph of the letter reads, in part:

What sort of club is it that makes it compulsory to be a member? I thought the best clubs were exclusive and tried their damnedest to keep the riffraff out.

And it occurred to me, the kind of club which makes membership compulsory: a protection racket.

==
*I never peruse books; I'm always behind, trying to catch up -

Evening on the Edge of the Arafura Sea

Where it meets Darwin, and Australia looks out to Asia.

And Now for the Diamonds

The Stars Like Sand, a book of Australian SF alternative history, speculative, or otherwise non-mainstream verse, edited by P. S. Cottier and Tim Jones, is here -

i.e., is now on my bookshelf -

It contains Les Murray, Chris Wallace-Crabbe, Dorothy Porter, John Shaw Neilson, S.K. Kelen, Philip Salom, Les Wicks, Dorothy Hewett, and me

- & I can't help smiling.

& so my thanks to the editors & conceivers & pushers & doers of this project. Nothing like this is easy.

A Summary of Things from This Year

I promised a friend a Summary of Things from this year. (You may avert your eyes if your name is not Sheila. Or you may carry on reading. As you prefer.)

At In Other Words Merida, there are some poems, in memory of an old and dear friend, here, and poems on general principle, here.

There is a short story, also, here.

I found a cache of manuscripts in my cupboard when I was going through it last Christmas, and have been fixing the stories & flashes & fragments in it (more slowly as the year moved on and I needed to do Other Things). However, one of the splinters of flash from that folder is here (on p. 20), and is also in Vineleaves' 2013 Year's Best.

We published A White Concrete Day: poems 1978-2013, by Douglas Spangle, in October (with its amazing blurb by Ursula Le Guin) and Gobshite Quarterly, issue 13-14 should be back from the printer in time to enliven everyone's Holiday Season.

And so here we are, a-wintering again. Time should become sluggish, like the supercooled river, and slow, and slow, so we can see it passing.

Callou, callay!

Callou, callay!
The galleys, the galleys
for White Concrete Day!

And the first chapter of Swimming with Heraclitus, "Stephen and the Others," has just been published, here.

But I Have Also Been Doing Other Things

And they are here and here.

The Last Aha

"That thing you showed me last week," he said, a minute later.
"The analytic I put in for the book about the Rule of St. Benedict."
"Yeah. That was great!" His face lit up. Then he remembered the desk he sits at now. "But I'm not sure we should be taking the time to do that."
"I don't, any more," I said.
And I don't.
It was a farewell gesture, a piece of panache, the last piece of real cataloguing I'll be able to admit to.

And though I took a large Motrin for my back and went to bed about 9, I woke about 2 and couldn't sleep. So I read for a couple of hours, The Lantern Bearers, for the sense of being present at the last night the Legions were in Britain, the night the light at Rutupiae officially went out. And as I read on I found myself wondering why these words were joined at all, the pages yellowing, the adjectives close-packed, various and exact for those craggy and flowering landscapes; suddenly wondered what good it was.

But I read the rest of it over the next few days, and though those books don't engulf me the way they did when I first encountered them, TLB did remind me: Sutcliff's subject has always been how to live past the end of the world.

On Being a Publisher

Publishing – small press, micro press, book packager, co-publisher… Over the last 10 years GobQ has published Gobshite Quarterly – a multilingual quarterly magazine (now back I print after a long hiatus), co-published Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages, a multilingual dictionary of language from the dark side; a bilingual edition of Gato Eficaz, an early novel by Luisa Valenzuela; and Golems Waiting Redux, an account of the vandalism of local sculpture in downtown Portland in 2002.

The first time I ever held a manuscript in my hands was when Oriel Gray let me take Scraps of Paper home to read. It was her memoir, fresh and vivid. There was something about the unbound pages and the indented lettering (Olivetti portable) that made me shiver – some life or power fresh from her mind and hands came, straight and unmediated, to my hands and mind.

Though that manuscript became part of my furniture for almost 30 years, I forgot what handling real manuscripts is like. When RV Branham suggested starting a magazine I wasn't paying much attention, truth to tell. But when the manuscripts started coming in…. I'll never forget the day Vénus Khoury-Ghata's Words arrived at the Gobshite Quarterly office, as a mailed fax from Marilyn Hacker in Paris. It was a delirious experience: I couldn't focus on them, the sense of awe and strangeness and déjà vu was so strong; I couldn't stand quite upright. I put them down and picked them up again, read them, and finally took them to my own office – a quiet, west-facing room upstairs, with nothing but a desk, 2 chairs and 2 windows – even northern light on the one side and filtered western light on the other – and laid them on the desk, in order, and began again. They were so good, and so far outside the realm of English poetry that having them in my hands felt made me feel as though something I'd never known but always known was trying shake itself free of the categories I always thought in, or lived in.

We ran them all in issue 1, in French and English. (That is, we ran 14 in French and 13 in English: The New Yorker had bought one of the translations.)

In that issue we also ran "Sirens," a short story by Frederic Raphael (Two for the Road, The Glittering Prizes), which hadn't placed in England. It's a great story, another world-view shatterer. I couldn't believe it'd been "Good luck placing it elsewhere"-d. In England. Couldn’t believe it.

The 3rd most wondrous experience was an email from Palestine (long after we'd given up hope), allowing us to reprint some of Mahmoud Darwish's poems. (Typesetting the Arabic was an adventure – it was eventually done by one of the partners in a local printing business, who'd studied Arabic and been to Syria for a year as a Fulbright scholar. As we didn't have the right font at the time we scanned the page as a jpg and InDesigned it that way.)

Marilyn Hacker also brought us the French poet Marie Etienne. Writers from Cuba and Mexico and Argentina contacted us, looking for translators; translators contacted us, looking for publishers (Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Poland), and we found translators and published them.

On a visit to Portland Julienne Eden-Bušić chanced to see us mentioned in The Oregonian. She brought a treasure-trove of new Croatian, Slovenian, and Bosnian poets – Tomica Bajsić, Barbara Korun, Dubravka Oraić-Tolić and Ferida Durakovic, as well as prose-writers Edo Popović and Gordan Nuhanović. Tomica Bajsić's poetry was – seeing it in manuscript was just a rush, it really was. Seeing something that good, and new, already accomplished and huge with future possibility – fills you with hope and joy and repletion, all at once.

The other astonishing thing about publishing, perhaps particularly about Gobshite, was that the printed object travelled roads we'd never imagined. People kept saying they'd run across a copy in a train in Spain or some other obscure way-station. The Algerian poet Amari Hamadene contacted us after seeing a copy in an Algerian café.

And just as well the manuscripts shake the world and then travel beyond imagining, because the financial dance of publishing is awful. We were just beginning to get some ad-revenue when our major distributor collapsed, leaving us with pennies on the dollar, unable to return to print until very recently.

And we are beginning to return to print, using Portland printers and very small runs. Issue 12 came out just before last Christmas, featuring a short story by Lidia Yuknavitch, essays on the Occupy movement by Richard Melo and Joyce Reynolds-Ward, Occupy sketches by Shannon Wheeler, an excerpt from a lost Russian novel about the Revolution (by Anatoliy Mariengoff; we are hoping to co-publish the entire book when translation is complete), an etymological reminiscence by Katherine Dunn; short, surreal prose-poems from Denmark – all sorts of things that do not appear elsewhere in English, and certainly not in conjunction with each other. We intend to print issue #13-14 this coming autumn.

Though I usually function as factotum, reader of first or last resort, proofreader, poetry editor, image-bank, and bookkeeper for Gobshite I am preparing a couple of books for publication later this year. One is almost ready; the other, which will be larger, I haven't quite mentioned to the writer, yet… I'll drop by later this week, and have a word.

The Myth of Balance

It’s been clear to me for a very long time that my body and mind move in very long cycles of writing, not writing, or writing first muddles and drafts of complex things and then refining them, also over a long time. It is even more clear to me now that I've moved into another one of these periods of assembling the basic material for something new.

At work we have an employee program run by fellow-employee volunteers, called the work / life balance program. My HMO also recommends work / life balance and runs, sometimes, free classes for those of us having difficulty finding time for our actual lives.

It has escaped their notice however that jobs – such as are left to us – are not structured to accommodate this kind of cycle. And as long as the economy uses the employment / income model of roughly the last hundred years, they won't be.

There is no balance possible when I need a month or two to concentrate on what I’m doing – not because I'm a poncy pretentious artist, but because my mind cannot be in two modes at once. When I'm in this phase and totally preoccupied I can barely do arithmetic, let alone the myriad things I need to do to stay competent at my job.

This complete mind-fog is part of my fundamental cycle.

There is no balance possible. The job takes precedence: I have to earn our livings, housing, food, clothing, medical care.

It's very likely that most of what I feel ready to produce will never be completed, or maybe even begun.

Just don't tell me it's because I lack time-management skills.

The notion that work of originality or depth can be done without something close to total immersion – that promulgated, amplified, prettified, zen-veneered, pietistic, blame-shifting, money- and interest-laden notion – is false from top to toe.

It's (another piece of) industrial propaganda.

Lists & what they accomplish

In her essay Toward a More Complete Measure of Excellence, Roxanne Gay remarks:

In Best American Short Stories 2011, six stories were published by a little publication called The New Yorker. Granta, Tin House, and McSweeney’s each had two stories in the anthology. These magazines are undoubtedly publishing excellent writing but their dominance also tells us that beyond the elite tier of magazines, it is more challenging for excellence to be recognized or acknowledged.

The three most interesting parts of BASS 2011 were the foreword by Heidi Pittlor, the introduction by guest editor Geraldine Brooks, and the list of Notable Stories at the back of the collection, a list that does include stories from a broader range of literary magazines while also listing a mind boggling nineteen (by my unofficial count) stories from The New Yorker and several stories for each of a number of other elite magazines like Ploughshares, Tin House, Ecotone, and Granta.

And so Roxanne Gay identifies the literary equivalent of the ruling class. As things stand now, the peasants are unlikely to appear in those pubs, that pub, or any pub those pubs & that pub will deign to acknowledge.

Which wouldn't matter two hoots if there weren't further commissions and royalties at the end of the procedure. Advances and royalties are money, and money is time.

Oh, and respect. Respect for breakfast can set you up for the day.

(At the same time this is not a new situation. The NY Times Book Review was founded to showcase the products of the paper's major advertisers. [See The end of intelligent writing: literary politics in America, by Richard Kostelanetz.] Institutional log-rolling is as old as mass publishing.)

However, in addition to its ability to pickle you in annoyance, this situation cripples the creation of culture. We need to see these books, these stories, these poems; we need them as readers and as writers; we need to interact with the most true and resonant things that are being pointed at and exclaimed at and WTF'd at and wondered at and written about, the inner worlds and the outer –

And we need to be able to do it now.

Not being able to readily read the material that is not included, not alluded to, rendered invisible; not being able to hear about it and thereby find it is killing our ability to make and remake our understanding of ourselves and everything else.

This situation – the ruling class and the invisible ruled – closes down our possibilities at the moment we need them most.

Globally, André Schiffrin has it nailed.

And, as Schiffrin points out, implicitly, the issue isn't power; it's control. Ownership gives control. Over what is said, what is permissible to say – not under my roof – what is effective speech, what not.

Yes, there is the internet. That marvellous device which removes your distribution problem and replaces it with a publicity problem. We can do it without the mass organs of yesteryear – we can network and link and post and comment and create and… But we have to keep at least the net free. We, collectively, have to control something. We have to occupy our voices and our contacts and our contacts' contacts – or our future will not be ours to occupy, at all.

Details, Moments

During one of our initial discussions about how to structure Golems Waiting Redux, I showed Daniel some details I'd cut from xeroxes of some of the photographs. I had them tucked away in my work-diary as a talisman against work and the way its sameness and its neverending tiny crises can drain the time out of you till you're at the end of another year with nothing done, and exhausted nonetheless – And as a reminder that the project would be done, because Daniel wanted to do it and I would see to it that we didn't let it slip out of sight and out of mind.

Daniel liked the details a lot, suggested we put some of them in the book. "…And so then there are these little moments happening…"

I'd never heard details called moments before. They'd been details since the time of Ruskin, if not Vasari.

It was an odd usage, so I put it away to know about and remember for its oddness, for the way it cut the piece out of the whole, and, somehow, speak as though the whole were momentarily forgotten. The word seemed to me to do this in a way that the word detail could not, because detail always suggests the whole.

Well, the neverending tiny crises continued and I forgot about moments/details, until I read (crisis interruptus) this on Lidia Yuknavitch's blog some months later:

Someday they will write about these things.

Look: this is as far as I've got. Perhaps this is all I have to say.

Theo already enjoying the idea of the cigarette he plans to light upon reaching his production company in fewer than ten minutes.

Look: just here just like this.

We must try to mature more quietly.

The nicotine inhalation. The energizing burn. Pleasure's smoky rush.

Like this and nothing else.

This is part of a page from Lance Olsen’s novel Head in Flames, published by Chiasmus Press. The typefaces represent the 3 different voices in the book – but it's not the fragmentation and interweaving that struck me so much as the insistence on the micro-moment within each fragment. Like this and nothing else.

Lidia goes on to say that Chiasmus books are meant to wake you out of the mental sleep that other books maintain and serve. I take it that she means, largely, corporate publishing.

(There are honourable exceptions here – Le Carré's subject has always been fury at the sheer bastardry of the people he went to school with, the British Ruling Class. The Cold War wasn't the subject, it was the setting of his signature works.)

And so it seems to me that there are 2 sorts of fragmentation going on right now in the semi-unconscious processing in our mental lives: the first, the detail becoming the moment, space-based art becoming time-based art, seems to me to not only invoke flow instead of stasis, but to reject stasis and the whole picture. Even the idea of the whole picture. (Although, if you are teaching and critiquing a piece, or even looking at it, perhaps what you call a detail doesn't matter so much. You're pointing and talking and the whole piece is right there.)

The second acknowledges the whole picture: the ruling philosophy and apparat of our (political, experiential) lives, and rejects it overtly (on political, experiential grounds) to build again from the experienced moment on up.

The universe beginning with a grain of sand.

Digital Rights Management

Until now publishers rewarded writers on a sliding scale: the more copies sold, the more the writer earnt.

Digital Rights Management could be seen as a way to track the published copies for honest royalty purposes. However, because DRM does not prevent piracy it cannot track all the copies of a file. Putting DRM on a book does not ensure proper payment for either the writer or the publisher.

An illustration:

There is no legitimate e-book version of Curse & Berate in 69+ Languages. Those copies are all pirated; the publishers and editors make nothing from them. I don't think there was an e-book clause in the contract; if there was, we removed it, wanting to deal with that separately. Several major illnesses & one merger & acquisition later, we still haven't broached the matter – firstly, the creators and publishers have been pre-empted by the pirates, and secondly, the creators need to get other projects done. GobQ is a very small operation.

For very small-scale operations, piracy really does matter: it does the producers – the writer/editors, the small publishers – out of income that is significant on that economic scale.

As Doctorow says, DRM essentially locks a customer into a particular supply-chain, and this has nothing to do with paying the writer or covering the costs of production and publication. All DRM does is limit the number of copies the less technologically-savvy can access. It creates an artificial scarcity in certain paying segments of the market. DRM exists to make the e-world mimic the hard-copy world and so maintain old (read mega-corporate) commercial structures.

The real question is how to compensate writers and publishers. The answer seems to me to lie in moving away from the per-copy model.

The trouble is we don't know what to replace it with.

Homework: What would happen if Stephen King made no more than, say, Tom Spanbauer? What would that world look like? How would attitudes to writers and writing and publishing change? What would happen to the book trade?

(Due Fri. Sept. 24, at 5 p.m. No extensions.)

The Geometry Set

Sometime in the 1930s my father bought this – a draughtsman's set. After my parents were married it lived in the soft darkness – rarely-worn scarves, soft gloves – at the back of one of his wardrobe drawers. I'd occasionally see it when I was desperate and had left my brass compass at school (2/6 at the beginning of each school year because I had a gift for losing them), and had geometry for homework. I seem to remember he lent it to me the day I had to sit for a scholarship exam, when he also lent me his slim, brown, worked leather briefcase with sturdy wrap-around zip. I saw that a little more often than what I thought of as the geometry set, but not much more.

I won the scholarship (much to my shock). Mostly, I think, because he lent me these magical instruments.