January 2009 Archives
January 28, 2009
Posted at 3:53 PM in Lit Crit
The WaPo has finally announced that it will kill the stand-alone print edition of Book World and move books coverage into Outlook and Style and the arts section. No surprise there; rumors have swirled (what else do rumors do?) for weeks now.
What to say? I worked at Book World a long time, and I got used to it in its stand-alone print incarnation. But BW's talented staff will not lose their jobs because of the Post's decision. Literary news and reviews will still be part of the paper. Book World will have some kind of unified presence online. All of that is good.
Book World hasn't had enough readers in a long time, and there's a decent chance that more people will find and read Post book reviews in Style and Outlook than ever did when reviews ran mostly in the Sunday section. Also good, yes?
More reports here (Motoko Rich reporting for NYT) and here (NBCC blog) and some very sensible commentary from Sarah Weinman, who says we need to buck up and get on with it::
...for so long, literary culture has been a passive endeavor. One that prescribes what readers should read, what books should be paid attention to, a trickle-down effect that hopes, pleads for people to magically "discover" what is the best of books.
But now we're in the opposite age. Instead of passive intake, this is a world of active consumption and discussion, where people seek out what they want, when they want it at their own discretion. Looking for guidance and seeking things out aren't mutually exclusive, but readers should be--and are--suspicious of entitlement and suspicion that comes with books coverage being wholly separate from the larger world.
Book World's "demise" comes on the heels of yesterday's death of John Updike, truly one of the last great literary audodidacts, and not long after the death of John Leonard. Both those men understood how vital it was to engage with culture and beyond, to help those who were just starting out and to see the joy and the humanity in all that they wrote and read about. There's a void, but instead of crying over the spilt milk of a bygone age, let's move forward to engage, to excite, to entice, and to hold the reader in thrall to all possible things.
Stop salvaging; start suggesting. Stop whining; start writing.
Long live Book World.
January 26, 2009
Posted at 2:14 PM in Publish or Perish
Maybe not the best headline ever, but the funniest one I've seen today. Not that there's a lot of competition out there. ("Major U.S. Companies to Slash 45,000 Jobs" just doesn't cut it in the funny department.)
Posted at 9:44 AM in Publish or Perish
As you might have heard, it's been a little busy here in D.C. the last week or so. I caught some of the peripheral inaugural action--happy crowds, massive litter, bunting all over--in between writing two news stories, three blog items, and a feature for the Chronicle.
It turned out to be a big week not just for the country but for university presses. The Association of American University Presses released a sales survey that confirmed some of the gloomy anecdotes heard in publishing circles lately. Utah State University Press learned that it might get the axe because of cuts to the state budget. Layoffs hit Oxford University Press, the largest UP. (Cambridge UP also cut most of their U.K. printing operation.) And, in a feature I wrote for this week's Chronicle, university-press directors and sales managers share some anecdotes about how they're doing and what might lie ahead. (I heard the phrase "waiting for the other shoe to drop" over and over.)
Bottom line: Much of the news about presses was not good, but it could have been worse. The question now is how much worse it's going to get.
January 14, 2009
Posted at 2:43 PM in Ink-Stained Wretches
I am often dismayed by the news about the news these days. If you care about newspapers and what they do--and you should--it's terrible to watch as reporters and editors get laid off and coverage of such frivolities as foreign affairs and culture shrinks. Every morning, when I open the front door to collect the Post from the doormat (yes, our paper carrier is that good), I wonder how much longer I'll be able to indulge in that particular ritual.
Even if I have to give up the print paper someday (sooner than I expect, maybe), I don't believe that journalism will die. It can't--we need it too much. Delivery systems change and die; the hunger for news lives on.
My friend and former editor Richard Byrne makes a resounding historical case for print journalism's resilience in "Ranters and Corantos," an essay in the Nation, inspired by "Breaking News," an exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Renaissance journalism and the birth of the newspaper. Both the essay and the exhibit are fascinating glimpses into the struggles between the early modern press and the government, and reminders that print journalism has managed to roll with the punches for four centuries.
As Rich makes clear, it has always been a messy, imperfect, lurid, opinionated, and risky business. There's comfort in being reminded that the public's desire to know has remained strong since the first "corantos" (single-sheet folios) and pamphlets brought news of the world to British readers almost 400 years ago:
...the exhibit traces the profession that has satisfied that need from the gossipy manuscript letters passed from hand to hand in the late sixteenth century to the press's emergence as an economically viable force in politics and culture in the early eighteenth century. The exhibit's curators, Chris Kyle (a historian at Syracuse University) and Jason Peacey (a historian at University College, London), delight in making the more immediate connections between past and present. The 1613 pamphlet "The Wonders of This Windie Winter" is an early example of today's disaster journalism. And then there are the seventeenth-century entries in the true-crime genre: pamphlets describing deaths, "great and bloudy" murders or "barbarous and most cruell" beheadings, illustrated by rough woodcuts of the mayhem. But Kyle and Peacey also tease out larger issues lurking in the mass of early journalism they have culled from the Folger's holdings. In doing so, they provide a useful history of a complex interplay between government and the press at the industry's birth, and a valuable window into how journalism coped with (and survived) its early encounters with roadblocks and with transformative change.
If you're in D.C., you can catch "Breaking News" at the Folger through January 31. At his blog Quick Study, Scott McLemee (my predecessor on the humanities beat at the Chronicle) reads Rich's essay and adds a C.L.R. James twist to the conversation.
January 9, 2009
Posted at 4:25 PM in Humanities
Humanists rejoice! The prototype of the Humanities Indicators has been unveiled.
What are the Indicators? Lots and lots of data about the humanities in American life, inside academe and out. Why should you care? I explain here (subscription, sorry):
When it comes to hard data about what they do, policy makers and educators in the humanities have been mostly left out in the cold, forced to rely on isolated sets of statistics that do not give an overview of what is happening across the field. That changes today, as the American Academy of Arts and Sciences unveils the prototype of its long-awaited Humanities Indicators project.
Patterned after the Science and Engineering Indicators generated every two years by the National Science Board, the Humanities Indicators deliver a bonanza of statistics on almost every aspect of humanities education, employment, and research.
January 5, 2009
Posted at 4:09 PM in Academe
I couldn't get that Magnetic Fields song out of my head for about a week (thanks, Mark). Turns out that San Francisco can be all that pretty, no matter what Stephin Merritt says. That may explain why I enjoyed the 2008 Modern Language Association conference, held in SF Dec. 27-30, more than the 2007 gathering in Chicago (brrr). If you're curious about what 8,400 lit-and-crit professors wanted to talk about this time around, here are links to some of my reports from the convention:
Market Realities in San Francisco
Pedagogy Is Not a Dirty Word
Fear and Interviewing
A Buyer's Market?
The Last Roundup
