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What the Litblog Co-op engendered
I will continue to hold my weekly tongue until we relaunch this website in a month or so. But the announcement that the Litblog Co-op is ending demands comment, I think.
Last week, the conversation at The Reading Experience quickly began to focus on the loss of an organized place for literary discussion and on the efficacy of either granting awards or making collective recommendations. As a publisher who always stands to benefit from such organized efforts, I suppose I should be focusing there, too. Yes, we in this publishing house deeply desire such recognition for our novels. I don’t want to be disingenuous about our aspirations. But ultimately focusing on the Co-op’s “organized” efforts seems to me off the point.
“Read This!” notwithstanding, however well-intended and effective the efforts of the Litblog Co-op have been in bringing attention to novels and collections that are otherwise overlooked, that has not been its greatest value. What it has accomplished through organization isn’t, I think, nearly as significant as its (decentralizing and perhaps dis-organized) affirmation that the conversation about things literary is wider, longer, and deeper than the more audible talk about some single book in some single season.
Neither, I think, should the question of the Co-op’s worth be formulated around the possibility that an organized website could gain a notable measure of validating literary authority — even though that, too, is important to all of us. The NBCC’s reaction to the “democratization” of such authority is truly telling. And with the long-running tight review harmonies and the ever lessening space in traditional review outlets, we can all agree that serious readers are now in genuine need of a knowledgeable, wide-eyed, and unfettered literary eye that is committed neither to canon-making nor to any pursuit informed or validated by commercial measures.
If I veer to close to cultural studies here, I hope that Mr. Green and Mr. Pitts will forgive (or at least indulge) me.
Here are the works of fiction that I have either begun or finished reading (or both) in the past three weeks:
The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Diaz)
Cosmos (Gombrowicz)
Ferdydurke (Gombrowicz)
Tom Bedlam (Hagen)
The Learners (Kidd)
Speak, Memory (Nabokov)
A Person of Interest (Choi)
Yeah, I learned a long time ago to read more than one book simultaneously, and I’ve been on planes a lot lately. Where is there time for the unsolicited manuscripts I must read each month? And what am I searching for? I don’t know the answer to either question. But I do know that such ongoing reading is important to my being an effective acquisitions editor (among its other effects). And I know that the wealth to be found in reading arises from the wonder and disagreement within the conversations that reading generates. I value and choose to read a work of fiction, not so much for its oppositional qualities, but for the same thing I desire from all works of art: The potential or capacity to put culture into motion in whatever way that culture can be moved. (Whether this is an assertion of “progress” or not – and it isn’t – is grist for another mill at another time.)
What the Litblog Co-op and all that will follow it, all that it has so valuably engendered, brings back to the world is precisely that wide-ranging (oppositional) conversation. This is far more significant, I think, to what we all do than is whether the effort could have been or ever be “organized” sufficiently to acquire authority in any measurable sense.
Over a generation ago academics fully closed new writing outside the doors of approved literary culture. To study contemporary literature (as opposed to contemporary literary theory), one had to enter writing departments or do great battle with the entrenched “modernists” on the faculty—or leave. Outside the academy, only the independent presses and the little magazines kept literature vital. This, it seems to me is organic and precisely what was the case throughout the 20th Century, culturally the longest century. And it is the process that the Litblog Co-op reclaimed; they re-set the independent-press, little-magazine process outside of the literary gates and into a borderless world. This is not only invigorating, it’s important.
The forces that drive a conglomerated publishing industry are not nurturing to writers. And the sooner we understand this, the better for literature — including the commercial literature we publish here. These days, when acquisitions editors judge an author’s second manuscript by the Bookscan number for his or her first book, what books are acquired? Can editors ever successfully argue for a “break-out” novel? These days, when bookstores stock (or do not stock) an author’s third novel based on whether the second one sold through, what chance does that third novel have to be sufficiently available for the searching reader?
Yes, I know that customers in bookstores don’t browse as they once did (there’s a media reason for that, too). And I know that Abebooks and Amazon and others in the ether appear to be the solution to this particular problem, but online booksellers can reattach book reading to a sufficiently intractable book community only if the conversation about books is wide and lively. Without that conversation, and within the shadow of instantly searchable national sales information—vitality in literature is truly and horribly endangered.
I don’t believe this to be overstatement. Indeed, I think this use of sales figures to preclude or direct the reading habits of a nation is a genuine threat to the development of true writers, to the ongoing life of literature itself, even to the culture as a whole, a threat that is far greater than any posed by the Universal Digital Library.
Litbloggers should eventually move on to other endeavors, become not only conversationalists, but producers of literature. The literate life is a consuming one, and it seems to drive a desire to produce, and to make, to build and to print. It takes time to murder and create. New generations of bloggers will come after, to continue widening the literary and cultural discussion. What the roomless salon of Web 2.0 and after offers to literary culture is breath to a smoldering fire.
I for one am grateful that, after so many years when conglomeration in publishing and in bookselling — that is, when perfect “organization” —had been progressively tightening the sluice of reading, the weblogs were built with purpose like locks around the Great Falls. That is a process, that won’t end with the Litblog Co-op. It is a vital process that, as acknowledged by Mr. Green and his commenters, already is expanding outward. The Co-op was a rich beginning, and those of us who reflect on what we’ve read should be grateful that the bloggers first showed us we are not alone in our refusal to be pulled along in the media-directed current.
Fred Ramey
posted 25 March
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