January 26, 2010
Translation, Please
As I write in my latest feature for the Chronicle (UPDATE: the link is now free), translation is "having a moment, or a series of moments." It was the presidential theme of the Modern Language Association's most recent convention. Two university-affiliated publishing ventures, Dalkey Archive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Open Letter Books at the University of Rochester, have been working overtime to get more translated literature into the hands of American readers.
One of Dalkey's recent titles, Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksandar Hemon, has gotten some nice mainstream attention. The WSJ wrote about the book, and the NYT interviewed Hemon on its Paper Cuts blog.
If you pay attention to what's written about literature in translation, though, you'll notice that the people doing the translating are rarely named. (Props to Michael Schaub at Bookslut, whose review of Best European Fiction 2010 made sure to mention the stories' translators.) For my Chronicle story, I spent a lot of time talking to literary translators about what Lawrence Venuti has called the translator's invisibility. This is a particular problem for translators working in the academic world, where, as Esther Allen put it, being a translator "actively works against you."
In an attempt to broaden my horizons, I'm working my way through Best European Fiction 2010 now. So far it's a little heavy on Kafkaesque influences for my taste, and I don't know whether that truly reflects a lot of European writers' leanings--I'm willing to believe that but nervous about jumping to continent-wide generalizations--or whether it's a result of editorial taste. And maybe I'll change my mind by the time I get to the end of the book. In any case, it's fun to be taking "a whistle-stop tour of European fiction," as Tibor Fischer called the book in his Financial Times review. (He calls it "an appealing and applause-worthy project" but complains that it has "a slight bureaucratic stiffness about it" and hopes that future volumes will show "less deference to territories and more to talent.")
For more on how Americans deal with literature that isn't home-grown, read Jessa Crispin's astute take on the anthology, American insularity, and foreign influences at the Smart Set. To keep tabs on literature in translation and what's happening on literary fronts outside the United States, bookmark the excellent Literary Saloon blog, run by Michael Orthofer (@MAOrthofer on Twitter). Another great source for news and thoughts on literature and translation is Three Percent, a blog run by Open Letter's Chad Post.
Do you read literature in translation? Where do you go for good advice on what's available? Do you think U.S. publishers should get more translations into the market?
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January 07, 2010
Old Year, Old Biz, New Year, New Media
Happy New Year, everyone. Like a lot of people I know, I was not sorry to see the back of 2009, a year in which some very unpleasant things--personal, financial, global--occurred. There were good moments, too, which I try to remember to be grateful for--catastrophes narrowly avoided, for instance, and some fiction published.
Even though a new year is supposed to be a clean slate, a fresh start, there's always some lingering business from the old year to wrap up. I finished the year, as I have for the last 5 years, at the Modern Language Association's annual conference. The 2007 conference nearly broke my spirit. The 2008 confab, held in San Francisco, was better, even if I did blow out my knee climbing up Nob Hill in the wrong pair of shoes.
And the 2009 gathering, held in Philadelphia? The humanities job market gets gloomier all the time, but the meeting was a good one. Happy, even, in its hyper-theorized way. The official theme this year was translation, but the digital humanities made a robust showing. The unlikely star of the conference was a visiting assistant professor who couldn't afford to attend in person but whose paper on contingent-faculty hell, read in absentia, rocked the academic Twittersphere and provoked a lively conversation that's still going on, mostly on blogs now, a week after the conference ended. And Twitter itself, and the way it and other social media added layers of conviviality and interaction to the proceedings, added another story line to the narrative arc of the conference.
All in all, a good MLA, maybe even a very good one, and one that marked a turning point in scholarly communication, at least from where I stand. There won't be an MLA meeting in 2010, because the conference is moving to January. Thank god. Something to look forward to next year.
Meanwhile, enjoy 2010, everybody. I hope it treats you and yours well.
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December 23, 2009
More Fiction: Flash Forward Edition
The Collagist is a new online magazine published by Dzanc Books and edited by the writer Matt Bell. I have a flash-fiction threesome ("Twenty Questions," "It's Me," "It's You") in the Decmeber issue. Please take a look if you have a chance. You can also read an interview with me here. It feels good to be writing fiction again.
The December Collagist has a bunch of flash fiction on offer, and it's worth checking out if you're a fan of the short-short form or want a good introduction to it. In his editor's note, Matt Bell argues that flash fiction asks more, not less, of the reader:
In my opinion the best examples of the form are stories where the shortness of the pieces denies the straightforward plot, where the road to success often lies parallel to those of the prose poem and the micro-essay, with their heavily-laden language, their lyric structures, their emphasis not on the closing down of the epiphany but the opening up of the ending and its meaning. How could such a form be the right choice for attention-stunted readers and writers?
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December 04, 2009
How to Talk to the Media: Tips for Scholars
I was down in New Orleans late last month to give a talk at the Society of Biblical Literature conference. The topic: How to Talk to the Media. It was useful for me to think about the transactions between experts and journalists. I heard some eye-opening war stories from scholars who feel that they have gotten burned by media folk, especially by film-and-TV people in search of a quick sound bite about the Lost Tomb of Jesus or whatever the sensational find of the moment is.
My message was simple, obvious, and worth repeating: Journalists are not necessarily the problem. We can be a channel by which ideas make their way to a larger audience.
To make the expert-journalist interaction as smooth as possible, though, it helps to understand the constraints we work under, what we're looking for when we ask you to share your expertise, what you should know before you talk to someone like me, and how you can help me and my colleagues find you. (We can't interview you if we don't know you're out there.) I'm jotting a few pointers down here in hopes they might come in handy for some of you. This is not a complete list by any means, just some basics to think about.
First, the constraints:
--time. Deadlines, deadlines, dealines. In the trade, we call this feeding the beast, and it's a hungry one.
--space and story length. I might love to write a 5,000 word story about your work. The paper may only have room for 500 words. I don't like it any better than you do, but that's life.
--editors. I like to tell my editors that it's my job to get as much material into the story as possible and their job to take it out again. They love that. They're higher up the food chain than I am, though.
--a general audience. You write for your peers; I write for the senior scholar in the history department and the guy in the chem lab and the grad student in comp lit and the secretary in the provost's office and some random neighbor of mine who might pick up the newspaper or find an article online.
--ourselves. It's not quite fair to say that journalists are generalists; we have our own forms of expertise. But I have a better grounding in some subjects than in others, and that may be reflected in the questions I ask you.
Second, what a journalist is looking for when she/he approaches you. Sometimes I want an overview of a subject. Sometimes I want an informed reaction to an event, discovery, or idea. Sometimes I'm after context: How important is this event, really? What does it mean, how much does it matter? What do we need to know to understand it? Always appreciated: lively quotes, enthusiasm, passion for the work or the idea.
Third, what you should know before you talk to a journalist.
--What kind of story is she/he working on? Is it a scene-setting overview, a quick-turnaround news story, an in-depth analysis? It's fair to ask if you don't know.
--What kind of media outlet is the journalist working for? Do you know the publication or show? Again, ask or do some research of your own so that you have a sense of what kind of venue you're being asked to appear in. Don't make the mistake of treating "the media" as one animal; there are many species of us, and we function in some very different ways.
--Be prepared to have a long and complex conversation reduced to a handful of quotes (accurate and in context, we hope). See note about space and length constraints, above.
--Stay away from jargon or theory-speak. This is not the same as dumbing it down. Just remember you're not talking to a roomful of fellow experts in your field. A caveat: Terms of art and expert detail are necessary and welcome--anything that gives the story context and flavor.
--The journalist's reputation is on the line too. I don't want to get it wrong any more than you do.
--Most journalists do not pay for interviews, nor will we show you the story before it runs/airs.
Fourth, how can journalists find you?
--Think about what aspects of your work may be newsworthy or of interest to an audience beyond your field. Be honest, now. Not every journal article merits a universal press release.
--Make friends with your campus news service. The good ones know when to pitch, whom to pitch, and how often.
--Look to book and journal editors you work with to help spread the word about nifty ideas/monographs/special issues/reports/exciting debates and controversies/what have you.
--Make use of Twitter, Facebook, blogs, etc. as a way to share news (selectively) about what you're doing or to flag new twists and developments in your field.
--If you have a good tip or idea, get in touch with a journalist directly, but be judicious about it. None of us is lacking for email to read these days, and I have come to dread the epic voicemail pitches I sometimes get.
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December 01, 2009
Ten More Things I'm Thoroughly Sick Of
In no particular order of magnitude or irksomeness:
The Tiger Woods non-story
The White House party crashers barely-a-story story
Malcolm Gladwell-bashing
Kindle sales-figure updates
Pronouncements about The Future of News
The rise of the memoir genre
"The Nutracker" already (and it's only Dec. 1)
The word "provocative" applied to claims or assertions made by authors or essayists
Most of my wardrobe
Tofurkey
So. What's bugging *you* this week? Tell me all about it.
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November 12, 2009
Pod(cast) People
I'm a guest on this week's installment of Digital Campus, a podcast hosted by Dan Cohen, Mills Kelly, and Tom Scheinfeldt of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. The episode's theme is "Publishers Bleakly", and Dan, Mills, Tom, Josh Greenberg of the NYPL and I talk about some of the changes besetting (or reshaping) scholarly publishers and libraries. If you listen, I hope you find it useful. And if I said anything I'll regret, don't tell me.
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November 11, 2009
"The Singing Will Never Be Done"
Today is Armistice Day. It doesn't seem appropriate to dwell here on how powerfully affecting I find the Great War and the poetry that came out of those bloody years. Instead I'll point you to The First World War Poetry Archive, an amazing online collection of manuscripts, photos, and other artifacts and echoes of the war and the people who fought and died in it.
The archive, which is hosted at Oxford University but draws on other archives as well, has just launched its Siegfried Sassoon Collection. Here's one of my favorite passages from Robert Graves's memoir Good-Bye to All That, in which he tells a story about Sassoon, poetry, and battlefield heroics:
The Battalion's next objective was 'The Quadrangle,' a small copse this side of Mametz Wood, where Siegfried distinguished himself by taking, single-handed, a battalion frontage which the Royal Irish Regiment had failed to take the day before. He went over with bombs in daylight, under covering fire from a couple of rifles, and scared away the occupants. A pointless feat, since instead of signalling for reinforcements, he sat down in the German trench and began reading a book of poems which he had brought with him. When he finally went back he did not even report. Colonel Stockwell, then in command, raged at him. The attack on Mametz Wood had been delayed for two hours because British patrols were still reported to be out. "British patrols" were Siegfried and his book of poems. "I'd have got you a D.S.O. if only you'd shown more sense," stormed Stockwell.
If you go here, you'll find a link to an audio file of Sassoon reading his Armistice poem "Everyone Sang":
...My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away... O, but Everyone
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
Sassoon outlasted the War by decades. He died in 1967 at the age of 80.
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November 10, 2009
Thanks for the Memoirs
Journalists are handed a lot of evidence that the world at large doesn't think much of our trade. No-one seems to appreciate how selflessly we serve the greater good, what keen-eyed observers and trenchant analysts we are.
So there we are, feeling all righteous and aggrieved, and then the news cycle coughs up a reminder that sometimes we really don't have a clue. One recent example I found especially painful because it involved literary journalism, which has more or less been my home turf since the dawn of time.
On Nov. 3, the Philadelphia Inquirer published a story headlined "Celebrating the Memoir: Fiction's Day Is Done?" It's a profile of Ben Yagoda, a well-published writer who has a new book out called Memoir: A History. Okay, the guy has a new book and he was appearing at a local festival on "Memoir and Documentary Art." Fine, profile him. Perfectly sound logic there.
The trouble starts when the profile writer tries to go all big-picture: "The emphasis on memoir is so strong that autobiography, history and fiction may be endangered. And the reasons for memoir's popularity may rest in our very nature as Americans: In a land where the majority rules, individuality is exalted and memoir is more befitting the American ideal of resourcefulness." The story goes on to quote Yagoda: "When it comes to proving points and making cases, fiction's day is done," he says. Then it serves up some palaver about history books (we no longer believe in them) and book clubs (terrible places to talk about fiction).
Now I haven't read Yagoda's new book, so I can't weigh his arguments and conclusions with any justice. I can and do, however, take issue with just about everything else the profile would have me believe: the essentialist argument that "our very nature as Americans" means that we love memoirs more than anything else; the idea that we used to read fiction mostly to have points proved and cases made; the suggestion that history doesn't cut it as a genre any more and that book clubs are hopeless when it comes to talking about fiction. (I imagine book clubbers south of Canada and north of Mexico picking up copies of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, screaming "Novel!" and running for the exits, leaving their glasses of Zinfandel untouched on the coffee table.)
In a word: No, no, no, and no!
I'm going to go curl up in the Curmudgeons' Corner now and grumble about what my profession is coming to. Mark Athitakis has far more reasonable (and well-reasoned) things to say about memoir vs. fiction here.
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October 30, 2009
NaNoWriMo
That would be National Novel Writing Month. The goal: Write a 50,000-word novel between Nov. 1 and Nov. 30.
That's crazy talk, you say. I agree. So of course I have signed up to do it. How do you like my chances?
If there are other DC-based NaNoWriMo-ers out there--even in this acronym-soup town that's a mouthful--let me know how you're holding up under the strain of writing 1,667 words a day. Easy pie, as my 7-year-old would say.
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October 23, 2009
Fear and Writing
Much of the advice one hears about writing falls into what, for lack of a more inspired term, I'll call the man-up category. As in: Just do it! Believe in your book! Persevere! Embrace your creativity!
I'm all for confidence, although it's not always in great supply in my life. I do believe that perseverance--which appears in many different forms, not all of them recognized by the Writer's Marketplace crowd--is a very useful quality for a writer to have. We have all heard that lecture, and too often it has the effect of making the audience feel inadequate. ("If I were a real writer, I wouldn't take no for an answer.")
It's time to rehabilitate fear as part of the writer's arsenal. In man-up parlance, fear is a no-no. Fear is the bad thing, the inner critic, the cork in the bottle, the voice that says you'll never amount to anything, you have nothing to say, you really are a talentless hack, you killed a tree for this?
A lot of fear is destructive and distracting. Let me argue, though, that writers should learn to harness fear in a way that drives rather than hinders what we do and how we do it.
You're a journalist working on a story. Are you worried that you'll get your facts wrong and look dumb? That fear can drive you to make the calls and have the conversations that make the story worth a read. (There is such a thing as being too confident.)
You're a fiction writer worried that your stuff just isn't good enough to send out. Aren't you afraid that you might be wrong (and wouldn't you like to be proved wrong)?
Writers, what are you afraid of, and how can you use that?