Authors Accept Censors' Rules to Sell in China

by: Andrew Jacobs

BEIJING — Chinese readers of Ezra F. Vogel’s sprawling biography of China’s reformist leader Deng Xiaoping may have missed a few details that appeared in the original English edition.

The Chinese version did not mention that Chinese newspapers had been ordered to ignore the Communist implosion across Eastern Europe in the late 1980s. Nor that General Secretary Zhao Ziyang, purged during the Tiananmen Square crackdown, wept when he was placed under house arrest. Gone was the tense state dinner with the Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev when Deng, preoccupied by the throngs of students then occupying the square, let a dumpling tumble from his chopsticks.

The dumpling sentence has been removed from the Chinese version.

Mr. Vogel, a professor emeritus at Harvard, said the decision to allow Chinese censors to tinker with his work was an unpleasant but necessary bargain, one that allowed the book to reach the kind of enormous readership many Western authors can only dream of. His book, “Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China,” sold 30,000 copies in the United States and 650,000 in China.

      

“To me the choice was easy,” he said during a book tour of China that drew appreciative throngs in nearly a dozen cities. “I thought it was better to have 90 percent of the book available here than zero.”

 

Such compromises, almost unheard of just five years ago, are becoming increasingly common as American authors and their publishers are drawn to the Chinese market. With a highly literate population hungry for the works of foreign writers, China is an increasing source of revenue for American publishing houses; last year e-book earnings for American publishers from China grew by 56 percent, according to the Association of American Publishers. Chinese publishing companies bought more than 16,000 titles from abroad in 2012, up from 1,664 in 1995.

 

This month, Chinese book agents and publishers flocked to the Frankfurt book fair, aggressively bidding on the works of Western writers and offering handsome advances, especially for titles by best-selling authors. China can also be a gold mine for royalties. Last year J.K. Rowling took in $2.4 million here, and Walter Isaacson, the author of the biography “Steve Jobs,” earned $804,000, according to the Huaxi Metropolitan Daily in Chengdu, which publishes an annual list.

 

But while best-selling mysteries like “The Da Vinci Code,” by Dan Brown, or classics like Gabriel García Márquez’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude” are often faithfully translated, the authors of sexually explicit works or those that touch on Chinese politics and history can find themselves in an Orwellian embrace with a censorship apparatus that has little patience for the niceties of literary or academic integrity.

 

Some books, like “Fifty Shades of Grey,” the erotic blockbuster by E.L. James that has been published in more than three dozen countries, may be beyond salvaging. A Chinese publisher who reportedly paid handsomely for the rights last year has so far been thwarted from bringing it to press, according to industry executives.

Foreign writers who agree to submit their books to China’s fickle censorship regime say the experience can be frustrating. Qiu Xiaolong, a St. Louis-based novelist whose mystery thrillers are set in Shanghai, said Chinese publishers who bought the first three books in his Inspector Chen series altered the identity of pivotal characters and rewrote plot lines they deemed unflattering to the Communist Party. Most egregiously, he said, publishers insisted on removing any references to Shanghai, replacing it with an imaginary Chinese metropolis called H city because they thought an association with violent crime, albeit fictional, might tarnish the city’s image.

 

Mr. Qiu, who writes in English but was born and raised in China, said that he had reluctantly agreed to some of the alterations, and only after heated discussion, but that others had been made after he approved what he thought were final translations. “Some of the changes are so ridiculous they made the book incoherent,” he said in a phone interview. Having been burned three times, he said he has refused to allow his fourth novel, “A Case of Two Cities,” to be printed in China.

Other authors have resisted, too. In 2003, Hillary Rodham Clinton ordered her memoir “Living History” pulled from Chinese shelves after she discovered that large sections of the book had been excised without permission. More recently, a Chinese version of Alan Greenspan’s “Age of Turbulence” was shelved after he refused to approve significant changes to the book.

 

James Kynge, a columnist for The Financial Times and the author of “China Shakes the World: A Titan’s Rise and Troubled Future — and the Challenge for America,” walked away from a potentially lucrative deal last year after one publisher demanded that an entire chapter be cut. “As a journalist committed to accuracy,” he said, “I felt it would be terrifically hypocritical to waive that principle just to gain access to the Chinese marketplace.”

 

But such stands, it seems, are becoming increasingly rare. Many writers say they are torn by their desire to protect their work and the need to make a living in an era of shrinking advances. For others, it is simply about cultivating an audience in the world’s most populous country, a rising superpower that cannot be summarily ignored.

“As an academic who doesn’t write for a large publication, I’m always happy to have a readership that extends beyond the three people in my family,” said Rebecca Karl, a professor of modern Chinese history at New York University whose book “Mao Zedong and China in the Twentieth-Century World: A Concise History” was recently purchased by a Chinese publishing house. She said most of the cuts demanded by her publisher, Hunan People’s Publishing, were relatively painless, although she fought back on every one of them. “It’s about what I expected,” she said.

What she did not expect was that the book would be withheld from publication. The book was rushed to publication for the coming 120th anniversary of Mao’s birth, but when Ms. Karl came to China for the launch in June, it had been canceled. “It could end up never being published,” she said.

 

Jo Lusby, managing director at Penguin Books China, which has published 250 foreign titles in the past eight years, said she often finds herself trying to ease communications between indignant Western writers and the Chinese editors whose job it is to iron out passages they deem unacceptable. In most instances, she said, the Chinese side refuses to bend.

 

Even if the process remains opaque and unpredictable, publishing executives say the broad outlines of China’s censorship regime have changed little in recent years. Topics that deal with ethnic tensions, Taiwan and Falun Gong, the banned spiritual movement, are off limits, and books that contain even a passing reference to the Cultural Revolution or contemporary Chinese leaders can expect fine-toothed scrutiny.

 

Gone are the days of the 1990s when Chinese publishers would buy boundary-pushing titles from abroad and hope to sneak them past the censors. The country’s 560 publishing houses are required to employ in-house censors, most of them faithful party members. Then there is the General Administration of Press and Publications, whose anonymous apparatchiks can order the removal of chapters or kill an entire book. (The administrative agency did not respond to requests for comment.)

 

But it is the editors at Chinese publishing houses themselves who often turn out to have the heaviest hands. “Self-censorship has become the most effective weapon,” said the editor in chief of a prominent publishing house in Beijing that publishes more than 300 foreign titles a year, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “If you let something slip through that catches the attention of a higher-up, it can be a career killer.”

 

For Western writers, the process can be time-consuming and confounding. Mr. Vogel, whose Chinese publisher, Sanlian, is one of China’s most respectable publishing houses, said it took a year to settle on a final translation, which was adapted from the unexpurgated version published in Hong Kong. Friends of Mr. Vogel told him the book was considered so sensitive that even the children of long-deceased party luminaries mentioned in the book were given a chance to comment on the galleys.

 

Many deletions involved passages that detailed squabbles between top leaders or specific adjectives, like those describing Mao Zedong as “paranoid” and “vindictive.” Edited out, too, was the phrase suggesting that Deng, then in his 80s, was aloof from the yearnings and complaints of ordinary Chinese.

 

“The impressive thing is how much actually got through,” Mr. Vogel said.

 

Michael Meyer, whose 2008 book, “The Last Days of Old Beijing,” laments the destruction of the city’s historic fabric, had a similar reaction after seeing the final galleys of the Chinese edition last year. “I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop,” he said.

      

A cover of the version sold in the U.S. (left) and the version sold in China. The cover sold in Taiwan also has a different look.

In the end, editors made a few predictable deletions — including a reference to the Tiananmen Square crackdown and a passage in which the artist Ai Weiwei criticizes the city’s leaders — and a title change that sought to cast the book as a nostalgic love letter (“See You Again, Old Beijing”).

For Mr. Meyer, the most amusing changes involved two text messages sent to him by a New York architect who was attending a municipal planning session in a large coastal city.

The first described the presence of a young woman, who was hanging on the arm of a middle-aged man with a comb-over and loudly sucking on a lollipop. The second message announced that the man was the mayor and the woman was his mistress.

 

The passages were removed.

from: NY Times

Turning A Page Inside a Rural One-Room Library

by: Jennifer Davidson

There's one state highway running through Myrtle, Mo. It's a sleepy town in the Ozarks, population about 300. There's no bank or restaurant here, but enormous oak and persimmon trees loom over a small stone building right next to the road. Half of it is a post office; the other half, a one-room public library.

Rachel Reynolds Luster took over this branch four months ago with the goal of creating a learning hub. She calls herself a curator, not just a librarian.

Her first task? Filtering out some of the favorites of the previous librarian.

"It's been interesting working this transition with her," Luster says. "She was quite upset that the cooking magazines were gone. But we recycled them all, and we kept some holiday cookie editions."

Luster scanned her shelves for the one book she felt every library must have: the Greek epic The Odyssey. "I looked, and we didn't have one — no library in our system had one," she says.

Connecting Rural Communities
While the Myrtle library receives taxpayer money, it gets only $200 a month for books and supplies. So Luster has used social media to garner donations from people around the state. She's already secured about 1,000 new books.

She's one of thousands of rural librarians trying to bring a sense of community, learning and connectedness to their isolated areas. The Institute of Museum and Library Services estimates that nearly half of America's public libraries are rural, and many of those are staffed by only one or two people.

"Often, the library is the only place in a small community that people can go to access technology, to fill out job applications, to continue their learning," says Tena Hanson of the Association for Rural and Small Libraries.

She says libraries in remote places are lifelines for rural communities because the Internet doesn't always reach towns with rugged terrain.

Adventures In Reading
The Myrtle branch is open only three days a week. So far, Luster has hosted bake sales, book fairs and weekly story time for kids. That's in addition to her duties as a mom, the parent-teacher organization president, the fiddle player in a band and a Ph.D. candidate.

One of Luster's patrons is 10-year-old Blake Brooks. His dad is a truck driver, and his mom stays at home with their five kids.

Before discovering this library, Blake's favorite pastime was digging up worms and beetles. Now, he steps off the school bus, finishes his chores and homework, and just ... reads. He says he likes to imagine he's in the books he reads.

On this day, Luster has a thick green book waiting for him. It's The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Blake has never heard of it before. He checks out the book, tucks it under his arm and heads off to start his next adventure.

from: NPR

One Way For An Indie Bookstore To Last? Put Women First?

by: Cheryl Corley

As recently as 25 years ago, there were more than 100 self-described feminist bookstores in the U.S. — stores focusing on books written by and for women. Like most independent bookstores, though, their numbers have dropped dramatically over the years.

Chicago's Women and Children First is among the few feminist stores still standing, and one of the largest. The store opened 34 years ago in 1979. Now, after a long, successful run, the store's owners say they're ready to retire — and they're looking for a buyer to continue the store's mission.

Early Supporters Of Women, Books And Community
 Linda Bubon and Ann Christophersen opened the bookstore partly out of frustration. As graduate students in literature, they often couldn't find books in print of the women authors they wanted to study. "So, you know," Bubon says, "that's when it occurred to us that, hey, there's a hole in the marketplace here that we could fill."

With $15,000 between them and the help of friends, they built their own bookshelves — and spent the money on books. But from the start, they looked beyond those homemade shelves.

"We wanted wide berth for not just feminist-themed material, but also just to support the work of women in books and in community."

They also wanted to provide children's books, especially books about girls. "That took a while to develop in publishing, where there were, you know, really heroic little girls," Christophersen says.

"Or just active," Bubon adds. "Active, not passive — not waiting to be rescued but going about their lives."

Their bookstore has proven popular with children. Once a week a parade of children, many in strollers pushed by parents or nannies, come to Women and Children First.

Jess Bower, a nanny, brings the 2-year-olds she watches every week to the bookstore. She's heard about the owners' plans to sell the store. "I hope it stays independent," she says, "because it's such an important spot to have in the neighborhood. There aren't a lot of other stores nearby, a lot of other bookstores."

And the store has been a hit with adults as well. Big-name authors, as well as lesser-known writers, have made Women and Children First a must-stop on their book tours.

Mystery writer Sara Paretsky, who introduced the tough female detective V.I. Warshawksi in her novel Indemnity Only, first met the store's co-owners in 1982. She says, "A store like Women and Children which will aggressively look for women — for women's voices — is, in a way, more important now because there is so much clamor out there in the blogosphere. It's hard for any one voice to be heard."

Wanted: New Owners, New Energy

Like most independent stores, Women and Children First struggled with competition from big box stores as well as a faltering economy. But, Bubon says, "every challenge that came along we really faced, we didn't turn away from."

The bookstore used different strategies to operate with less money. Christophersen slashed her salary for several years. The store sold textbooks to local colleges and it joined a successful lawsuit against Barnes and Noble and the now-defunct Borders.

Christophersen says it's time now for the two of them to retire and for someone new to take on the job she and Bubon love.

"The economy is really much better now," she says. "We are doing just fine and I think there are opportunities to do better with some younger, more energetic person."

Or some older, energetic person, says Christophersen — someone looking for a new career, perhaps. Or anyone wanting to carry on the mission and the purpose of a feminist bookstore like Women and Children First.

from: NPR

Why Netflix Or Spotify For Ebooks Will Work

by: Jeremy Greenfield

Many publishing industry observers don’t think that Oyster or Scribd or any other “Netflix or Spotify for ebooks” will work in the consumer marketplace.

Why?

The rights issues are very complicated. Agents and authors may not go for it. Publishers may not go for it. Consumers may realize that it’s not worth their money. The list goes on.

Yet, companies like these keep on popping up and there is considerable investment in the space. Scribd CEO Trip Adler believes that his company alone could turn the idea into a billion-dollar business. And he thinks there’s room for competition, too.
At least one publishing industry analyst agrees with him. I talked with James McQuivey, Ph.D., an analyst at Forrester who covers the book publishing industry, about why it’s time for this idea to work and why the naysayers are wrong.

Jeremy Greenfield: So, why will this work?
James McQuivey: All the evidence suggests that consumers love subscription content models — it’s the original model of magazines and newspapers and cable, and now it’s the power behind Netflix. I believe it would work with books, but like the ebook model in the early days, it won’t work until the publishers are ready to embrace it, which they won’t for a whole host of reasons.

JG: Well, HarperCollins, which is the only major publisher to have signed on with both Oyster and Scribd, seems to have embraced it.
JM: Scribd had to offer Harper Collins unprecedented access to the customer in order to get it into the model. If it doesn’t work, HarperCollins loses nothing, but if it does, HarperCollins finally has a customer relationship it can build on.

JG: What about people who say that readers, when they think about it, won’t really want it?
JM: I don’t have survey data about whether people want a subscription model and, frankly, I think the survey data wouldn’t be very promising — asking people in 2008 whether they wanted to stream Netflix content would have also resulted in low numbers. You have to see it to know if you want it.

JG: Amazon has the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library. It seems to say that it’s popular and being used. Is that a clue?
JM: I wish we could get any indication from Amazon on how many Prime customers use the lending library, which is the closest thing we have to a mass market subscription model.
Amazon’s Prime customer relationship, because it includes all this free stuff (video included) that nobody knows how to compete against or measure, is hard to see coming.

JG: Perhaps Amazon understands something with offering this “all you can eat”-style service but only allowing one book to be read per month.
JM: “All you can eat” is not the way to look at subscription models. That’s not how Netflix built a business with nearly 10 million DVD subscribers. It’s not how cable subscriptions work and it’s not how buffets work. You can’t pocket food for later, for example. Subscription models are designed to reduce the friction of transacting, pure and simple. It removes a mental barrier to sampling content and it reduces the perceived loss associated with making a poor choice. Digital subscriptions let you bail out of any download. That’s the essence of subscription: The feeling of having everything you want without the risk of making a bad choice, all pre-paid.

The more people fail to understand why subscription is powerful, the less they’ll be able to exploit its opportunities. I have played a role in helping some very large companies embrace subscription and it has been with this message: Consumer psychology prefers and eventually dictates subscription access to content experiences.

JG: Is it worth it to publishers to play?
JM: Only if the subscription manager — Scribd or Oyster or whoever — gives up the customer — not just the data, but direct access — which was my original point about why HarperCollins is doing this and why everyone else should, too. Trip [Adler, Scribd CEO] is smart about this. It’s his last shot and giving up the customer was the only way to go. Publishers who refuse to join just aren’t paying attention to the importance of having a direct customer relationship.

from: Forbes

Brick-and-Morter Bookstores Play That Print Card Against Amazon

by: Lynn Neary

When it comes to book publishing, all we ever seem to hear about is online sales, the growth of e-books and the latest version of a digital book reader. But the fact is, only 20 percent of the book market is e-books; it's still dominated by print. And a recent standoff in the book business shows how good old-fashioned, brick-and-mortar bookstores are still trying to wield their influence in the industry. You might even call it brick-and-mortar booksellers' revenge.

At the center of this story is Amazon, and it's no secret that there's little love lost between the traditional book world and the giant online retailer: Publishers and booksellers think Amazon wants to put them out of business. When the Justice Department brought suit against Apple and five major publishing companies for price fixing, a lot of people in the book business were apoplectic: They firmly believe that if an antitrust lawsuit should be brought against anyone, it's Amazon.

So many within the industry are happy to look for any weakness they can find when it comes to Amazon. Recently, they found it in Amazon's decision to not just sell books, but also publish them.

About two years ago, Amazon hired a well-known literary agent, Larry Kirshbaum, to launch the New York branch of their fledgling publishing business, which until then had been based in Seattle. This was seen as a big move because New York is the capital of the publishing business, and Kirshbaum was a major player there. Everyone figured he could use his clout to attract big-time authors to Amazon's trade publishing brand, and everyone was watching very closely to see what happened.

And that's where the revenge part of this story comes in. A lot of booksellers said enough is enough: Not only is Amazon trying to take over the retail side of the book business, it's also going to take over publishing? Some independent bookstores decided they wouldn't carry Amazon Publishing's books and, even more importantly, Barnes & Noble — the country's biggest bookstore chain — and some big-box stores followed suit. Neither Amazon nor its authors expected that kind of backlash, and a couple of pretty big Amazon releases never really took off.

That's where things stood last week when the news broke that Kirshbaum was leaving Amazon to become a literary agent again. His departure was widely viewed as a sign that Amazon Publishing could be in trouble, done in by the likes of Barnes & Noble. Amazon quickly stepped in to say that reports of the demise — or near demise — of its publishing business were greatly exaggerated. In fact, Amazon says it plans to expand its New York business.

Jeff Belle, vice president of Amazon Publishing, says the publishing house's business model isn't dependent on big-box stores like Costco and Target, or on selling books outside its own platform. (It's certainly true that Amazon has cornered the online bookselling business and dominates the e-book market.)

But powerful as it may be, some writers really do want to see their books on the shelves of certain stores. And those authors might be inclined to stick with traditional publishers. So, even in this digital day and age, the bookstore still has some clout.

from: NPR

Junior Varsity is Where the Work Gets Done

by: Eliot Schrefer

Six years ago I published my second book, a novel for adults featuring a brutalized teenager and snappy conversation on yachts. After my commercial debut, I had museum-hush hopes that this follow-up… was… Literature. But in retrospect all I’d written was a strange, unwieldy novel, which my publisher quietly escorted out back to sink into the bog. It didn’t even go paperback, and my editor was always out to lunch when I’d call to ask why. A review summed the book’s prospects up in one word: “grim.”

I was indignant, wounded, 27. Betrayed by the world, I locked the door and did what I generally do with bad news: I went online and watched plane crash re-enactments. Then I showered, sat down to a blank screen and a blinking cursor, and prudently decided it was time to change direction. The next novel was a comedic sendup of fantasy-novel conventions, in the vein of William Goldman’s “The Princess Bride.” I sent the manuscript to my agent, who decided I’d written something young adult. We sent it to a young adult editor, who decided it belonged a bracket younger. My natural book voice, apparently, is that of a 9-year-old.

As, I’d like to argue, it is for all of us.

I’ll admit that at first my new career smarted — the “young” in Y.A. felt like the “junior” in J.V. — though at the same time, I was relieved to be playing on what I imagined was an easier field. But once I was officially writing for young adults, it didn’t seem easy at all. My editor, David Levithan, had maddeningly simple advice: the only thing a Y.A. novel needs is a teenage protagonist. “But surely,” I insisted, “I should also reference how massive Myspace is becoming and that Hilary Duff is way pretty, right?” (It was 2007, remember.) Mr. Levithan shook his head, suddenly concerned about my suitability. I shook my head, suddenly concerned about my suitability.

So I stopped asking questions and started writing. And getting into the mind of a teenager changed the life of this grown-up.

If you’ll allow me: the interior life is a sphere of thoughts and implications zapping around, and it’s so chaotic in there that we learn to limit the sphere’s radius because to do otherwise is to let everything we encounter, from broken nestlings to broken dates, reach the level of “why does anything exist?” We spend years working out that perfect radius: rein it in too tightly and life is mechanical, let out too much slack and life is paralyzing. If we’re lucky, as adults we figure out how to allow thoughts to rise but yank them back before they reach the yawning, oxygen-less, existential atmosphere — in other words, we keep our musings sufferable and practicable. But writing for young adults means untethering the line, letting our thoughts again reach the vague and desolating levels that they did so insistently when we were teenagers. A first kiss has as much to do with the knee-shaking discovery that we exist in a shared universe as it does with the fear of locked braces.

When I turned in my first officially young adult novel, my editor didn’t cut for content. He didn’t strike a single moment of sexual desire or brooding or bad language. What he did was set a pretension barometer twice as strict as adult fiction’s and started deleting every time the arrow ticked over.

I’d fight for precious phrases: “A teenage reader can understand ‘the curious uplift of dashed hopes,’” I’d sputter. “Let’s not patronize!”

But David let only 1 in 10 of those expressions survive — and it was just what I needed. Under the current rules, Y.A. literature doesn’t have official limits as far as appropriateness and tone. Instead, if there is one truism of successful Y.A., it’s that the book’s unrelenting emphasis must be on character and event, and not the brilliance of the author’s viewpoint. For me it was a humbling experience, trying to shed the essential narcissism of my writer’s project because my teen readers wouldn’t tolerate it. But on crawling out on the other side, I saw that what Y.A. novels value above all else is storytelling. It took me even longer to realize that that needn’t lessen a book’s complexity — it just prioritizes the reader’s experience. Ultimately, if there’s a refrain I hear from the many adults turning to Y.A., it’s not that the books are any simpler. They’re just more pleasurable.

A reading experience I dread is to invest hours in a heralded and beautifully written book, only to have the curtain pull away and reveal that the novel’s purpose all along has been to serve as an elaborate proof of the writer’s specialness, that the pen kept writing long after the content ran dry. “I didn’t quite get the story the author was trying to tell” is the more polite reader’s version of, “Screw you, author, for making us come to a restaurant you picked, making us order what you wanted, and then not even letting us get a word in edgewise.”

The commercial versus literary debate was my fatal cramp while I was writing my adult books, and I’ve been relieved to discover how rarely the distinction comes up when writing for younger audiences. I think that’s in large part because writers of Y.A. are officially writing for someone else, teens. The essential difference between writer and imagined reader splits open the “by me, for me” feedback loop that caught me in that second novel, and instead prioritizes the reader’s experience over the author’s own nagging grandiosity. That’s not to say that literary, harder-to-access fiction isn’t pleasurable or important (though I do think that it’s all too easy to mistake obscurity for profundity), but the explosive growth of Y.A. as a genre can and should lead all authors to some soul-searching about whom they’re writing for in the first place.

---

 

 Eliot Schrefer is the author most recently of “Endangered,” about a girl surviving wartime in the Democratic Republic of Congo while caring for an orphan bonobo ape.

from: NY Times

Against 'the death of the novel'

by: Sam Sacks

The vocabulary of literary ennui is now so familiar that it produces its own kind of boredom. We have seen it in John Barth’s much-anthologized essay “The Literature of Exhaustion”; in Zadie Smith’s confessions of novel-nausea; and in the tireless self-promoter David Shield’s cut-and-paste “manifesto,” “Reality Hunger,” in which the author declares that he is “bored by invented plots and invented characters.” J. M. Coetzee blurbed that book, confessing that he was “sick of the well-made novel with its plot and its characters and its settings.” At the close of an otherwise magnificent review of Norman Rush’s new novel in the London Review of Books, Benjamin Kunkel makes an offhand mention of the death of the novel, a doomsday pronouncement so commonly invoked that it often seems more like a reflex than a reasoned argument.

One of the most genial voices of disillusion is that of the novelist and critic Tim Parks, whose warmly contrarian complaints about the state of writing have been appearing regularly on the New York Review of Books blog. His installment last week (upon which he has somewhat expanded in an essay published today), is an honest, provocative, and maddeningly wrongheaded meditation about his unhappiness with what he calls “traditional novels.” The depth and scope of Parks’s dissatisfaction is fairly intimidating. He feels “trapped” within the expected forms of fiction writing, especially those of realistic fiction. These books’ basic traits, he thinks—“the dilemma, the dramatic crisis, the pathos, the wise sadness, and more in general a suffering made bearable, or even noble through aesthetic form”—have become mannered and artificial to the point of irrelevance. Even worse, their typical trajectory, from “inevitable disappointment followed by the much-prized (and I suspect overrated) wisdom of maturity,” is oppressive and harmful because its universality enforces a single way of understanding the world—a way that not only leads to the disenchantment that has come upon Parks but which also sustains a “destructive cultural pattern”: “We are so pleased with our ability to describe and savor our unhappiness it hardly seems important to find a different way of going about things.”

The essay is diaristic, and this is part of what makes it interesting: there is something forlornly personal in its lament. Parks’s repeated distrust of novelistic wisdom seems telling. Latent in the life devoted to literature is the promise—although we don’t perhaps know where this promise comes from—that books will, in time, arm us with experience and maturity. But what if the solace of wisdom fails to arrive? Parks relates meeting with a former mentor who, retired and confined to a wheelchair, confessed that once-beloved novels by Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Elizabeth Bowen, Henry Green, and others had come to appear like “empty performances.” There may seem to be a lie inherent in works of realism that, in the final reckoning, fail to prepare you for what reality actually brings. And how futile it must feel, as a writer, to inexorably repeat that lie in each forthcoming book.

If Parks’s essay were strictly part of a memoir, there would be no cause to object. But he is also a critic, and, to a dangerous extent, he is putting forth his disillusion as a judgment on the state of literature. This tendency to project one’s own cynicism onto the books that failed to magically prevent it has become a little too frequent these days, and it needs challenging.

The fallacy, to my eyes, is in the invidious distinction between traditional and nontraditional novels. Parks places writers like Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Lydia Davis, and others who have taken part in the “postmodern adventure” in the latter camp, but on the whole he’s sketchy about what he means by the term. What’s clear, though, is that the word “traditional” is derogatory, signifying derivative, clichéd thinking (Parks makes reference to “passable imitations” of nineteenth-century novels), while its alternative promises freshness, liberation, “a way forward in words.”

But Parks isn’t talking only about mediocre novels when he invokes the tyranny of tradition. By his way of thinking, anyone who uses elements of conventional forms has done so out of either unthinking habit or unwilling necessity.

But this is untrue. For many, if not most, writers, things like plot, character development, and catharsis are not narrative fallbacks but dynamic tools that give shape to the stories they’re passionate to tell or develop ideas that are uppermost on their minds. The art of storytelling is ancient, but it is a flighty kind of world view that automatically equates oldness with staleness. Missing from Parks’s essay is the recognition that talent transmutes tradition. Gifted writers can make accustomed methods feel as new and vital as a work explicitly devoted to structural innovation. In both cases, the object is the same: form is used in the service of artistic vision.

The week that I read Parks’s piece I also read two newly published novels that might imperfectly occupy opposite poles on the imagined spectrum of the traditional and the transformative. Daniel Alarcón’s “At Night We Walk in Circles,” about a travelling theatre troupe in South America, contains everything that Parks rejects. The book’s avowed storytelling template comes from the stage, or stagelike radio programs, such as “This American Life.” Alarcón’s main characters are actors and playwrights, and, in his exploration of the ways that performance can bleed into real experience, he embraces melodramatic plot turns, situational irony, climactic convergences, and the tragic downward arc toward innocence lost. I had my quibbles—parts of the story are saccharine-sweet—but much of the book is animated by this bravura theatricality, and it’s very often lovely and moving.

László Krasznahorkai’s “Seiobo There Below,” in contrast, has no truck with orthodox plotlines. The virtuoso novel is an arrangement of temporally and geographically distinct but thematically connected encounters with the sacred. Each chapter winds obsessively around an object of veneration—a great work of art or a religious icon. The chapters themselves are numbered according to the Fibonacci sequence, which has its roots in ancient Sanskrit texts and relates to the idealized mathematical concept of the golden spiral. Krasznahorkai’s sentences approximate the form of an endlessly involuted spiral—they extend for pages at a time, always turning back on themselves in order to recreate the whirling immediacy, both the awe and the fright, of confronting something otherworldly.

“Seiobo There Below” actually addresses Parks’s wish for a narrative form that is more Buddhist than Judeo-Christian—one that doesn’t place the experience of living on a continuum that moves significantly from a start to a finish but, rather, holds our attention upon the moment, focussing on the “savoring of present experience.” But it is not a matter here of exalting one book over another, which is every critic’s prerogative. (Parks expresses mandarin amazement at the possibility, but the fact is that many serious readers get a lot more out of Alarcón’s kind of novel.) The point is in acknowledging that neither book is any more fundamentally “relevant” than the other. Both do the only thing that fiction can do—as best as they can, they harness their stories and themes and truths to a chosen form and style. Each aims for an effect and, to different degrees, each achieves it.

This sounds banal, but it bears repeating: this is all that a novel is. I’ve always loved the wonderful tautology that Tolstoy used when “explaining” the decisions he made while writing his magnum opus, with its symphonic medley of adventure writing, love stories, and social and historical disquisitions: “War and Peace is what the author wished and was able to express in the form in which it is expressed.” In other words, he viewed form as practical means to an end, not a confinement from which he had to perform weird contortions to escape.

Of course, Tolstoy also thought that strict adherence to conventional forms would hinder the writer of brilliance, and it goes without saying that great works make use of, or subvert, commonplace devices in bold and inspired ways. But implicit in Parks’s essay is a discontented yearning for something quite different from ingenuity—the groundbreaking, paradigm-shifting “way forward” that he desires sounds oddly salvational, a newly discovered way of seeing that will break him out of his present funk like a religious epiphany. Yet to imbue something as abstract as narrative form with talismanic, revelatory properties is to insure the very disillusionment that he is desperate to dispel.

What about brilliance, beauty, truth? Parks doesn’t deny that these qualities exist in today’s literature; he merely contends that they have ceased to carry meaning. That in itself should point up the severe limitations of world-weariness as a guiding philosophy. If brilliance and beauty are traps, then consciousness itself is a trap, and the world, as Hamlet famously opined, is a prison; but even Hamlet understood that he was, to some extent, full of it.

In the Book of Ecclesiastes, the first and best “death of the novel” jeremiad ever written, the despairing Preacher observes, “Of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” The ultimate lesson of maturity, the anti-wisdom insufficiently grasped by traditional novels, may indeed be that all great literature is vanity, all of it “empty performance.” In that case, Parks should heed his own advice to savor present experience and privilege “sense and immediate perception” above an artificial “construction of meaning.” Or he can listen to the Preacher and simply read and write joyfully during the small portion that he is allotted. There is so much passion and wonder in today’s fiction; it is his fault, not that of the books, if he lets those things go unseen and unfelt.

from: New Yorker

The future remains bright for libraries

Metro Vancouver readers are 'reluctant' to abandon the printed book.
by: Gerry Bellett

Sandra Singh would not describe herself as a futurist but the Vancouver Public Library's chief librarian does not hesitate to contradict those who peer into the future and predict the death of the printed word.

Such a death also hints at the possible redundancy of such beautiful edifices as the main Vancouver Library, the nine storey Colosseum that holds 1.3 million items and covers a full block at Georgia and Homer.

"The principles of why libraries exist are enduring," said Singh. "They have always been about ensuring everyone has access to information, ideas, knowledge, cultural expressions - things needed to inspire and inform us, and that will never change," she said.

"What does change are the technologies by which information, knowledge and ideas are created and exchanged and for many years the physical book was the mode for that. And it's going to be for many, many years to come - it's an enduring format," she said.

With the arrival of ebooks and the seemingly irresistible onrush of digital information and the breathless pace at which it is advancing, it would seem the printed word must soon be overwhelmed. But Surrey's chief librarian Melanie Holden also has her doubts.

As in Vancouver, the number of ebook readers is growing, but that's only part of the story.
"I'm not saying it's a backlash," said Holden, "but we are finding people are reluctant to give up the printed book."

The printed word One of the most surprising findings of a recent readership survey was that teenage readers appear to be the printed word's most stubborn supporters.

"The demand for printed teen books had risen. And that's not what you might expect," said Holden.

"Maybe kids have enough technology and perhaps they want something low-tech and have discovered it's more restful to read an actual book and that there's a solitary pleasure in it."

For Singh and Holden, the future will be a blend of the physical and the digital.

If anything, the digital revolution has cemented the future of libraries, says Singh.

"It's made libraries more important than ever before. It's a common misconception that with the Internet, information is free and reliable, wellresearched and thoughtfully presented," she said.

"That's not the case. Unbiased information is pretty hard to come by and you have to do a lot of work to get at it and you often have to pay for it. What libraries have always done is pool the resources of the community so together we have access to what, individually, we couldn't afford."
And that is not going to change, added Singh.

"Today we've got physical books and electronic books - some are free and some are subscription - and they come on a number of different platforms and then there's this huge amount of information on the Internet," she said.

"So it's rather like drinking from a fire hydrant, only the water isn't always of the best quality - some of it's contaminated - and you have to have extraordinary patience to dig through it all to find the stuff you can trust so you can make decisions based on good information, not just expedient information. It could take you many hours to do this but a trained librarian will help you through it in a lot less time."

A digital future It was the desire to spread knowledge to the working class and the poor that led to the 19th-century growth of public lending libraries in Europe and North America.

The democratic necessity for removing the economic barriers to enlightenment is as apparent in the digital age as it was 110 years ago when the Carnegie Library opened it doors at Main and Hastings, says Singh.

"Everything digital isn't free, so we are still in a situation where if you can afford to access it, you
can. But if you can't, too bad," she said.

"Libraries are the antidote to that and this is important today when books are born digital and published in digitalonly because now we are looking at a future where not only does the library have to buy the digital book but also the device needed to read it for those who can't afford to," she added.

"Some libraries have already done this but we didn't want to jump in right away because the device market was so unstable and we didn't want to invest in a whole bunch of machines and need to replace them six months later. But there's getting to be some stability in the device market now so now we are going to start looking at that."

(The library is operating a successful ebook lending system in conjunction with community groups working with adults with low literacy skills.) Busier than ever More people than ever are using the Vancouver Public Library system. An estimated 74 per cent of Vancouverites used the library in 2012, with 6.6 million through-the-door visits, and 5.2 million online visits.

"How people are using the library depends on how comfortable they are with technology. We have some users who just borrow ebooks and we never see them come through the doors and then we have a whole bunch of people dedicated to print and some move in between. So our circulation is really high and stable with the electronic circulation growing exponentially," she said. Last year, the library circulated 10 million items, of which 200,000 were electronic books. In 2010, the electronic book circulation was 30,000.

The evolution of libraries The library of old was quiet as a church but the sanctity of silence on behalf of the solitary reader has given way as libraries have evolved into places for group study or discussion and space for community events.

Surrey's new main library that opened in 2011 was designed to meet a future that would require more dynamic use of space than being a repository for rows of books and silence.

Already Holden would like it if the library could open at least another meeting room to augment the three existing. "Libraries are much noisier. We still have one small space for quiet study: it has room for about 20 people. The rest is open space and people are free to talk and converse," she said.

"When I walked through the building today, we had two story times happening for kids, a couple of author readings, the Rotary Book Club was meeting, we had a program for adults with learning disabilities, plus there's people hanging around in the coffee shop and a school tour going through.

"It's not like it used to be."

from: Vancouver Sun

Tired Metaphors? Ciao Contestant!

'Masterpiece,' an Italian Reality Show for Writers
by: Tom Rachman

TURIN, Italy — A novelist craves solitude. Reality TV craves intrusion. So, what happens when writing becomes a broadcast spectacle?

That question will soon be answered on Italian state television, which on Sunday is introducing “Masterpiece,” a show in which aspiring authors vie at literary challenges until one contestant wins a major book deal — and a level of publicity that few novelists achieve over a lifetime of quiet toil.

 

All the conventions of the TV talent show are present: the tantalizing possibility of fame, excruciating exposure, an expert panel delivering life-changing verdicts. There’s even a “confessional” room where contestants can express their anguish (on video, naturally).

 

If “Masterpiece” turns out to be a hit, the producers may try the concept in other countries — a prospect likely to both appall and intrigue the publishing industry. At first glance, many consider the concept crass; then again, how often do novels get even a mention on prime-time television?

 

To develop “Masterpiece,” the Rai 3 channel collaborated with FremantleMedia, a company that has produced and distributed reality franchises around the globe, from “American Idol” to “China’s Got Talent” to “X Factor Indonesia.” The challenge was to create captivating television while avoiding farce — like the Monty Python sketch in which sports announcers call the play-by-play while Thomas Hardy writes “The Return of the Native.”

 

During the shooting of an episode last month, the expert panel — the novelists Andrea De Carlo, Giancarlo De Cataldo and Taiye Selasi — sat behind a desk while makeup artists darted about blotting foreheads and touching up lipstick. Facing the judges, four contestants perched behind their keyboards, with every typed word projected on screens for all to see, as a timer above their heads counted down and cameras swooped in for close-ups.

 

Afterward, Maria Isabella Piana, a 66-year-old retired schoolteacher from Sicily, stood backstage awaiting the verdict on her assignment: a diary entry from the perspective of someone who has gone blind. Ms. Piana applied to be on the show after failing to find a publisher for a novel she wrote tracing the lives of a group of Italians from the 1960s to the present. “Not being known was the impetus that pushed me here,” she said. “Maybe with a tiny bit of visibility, there’s hope.” Minutes later the judges voted her off the show.

 

Alessandro Ligi, a 49-year-old Roman lawyer with an unpublished novel about failed love, found it a struggle to work before the cameras. “There’s nothing more intimate than writing,” he said. “It’s something I do alone and I don’t tolerate anyone even peeking at my computer.” His assignment was a one-page story from the perspective of a man who must watch his lover marry someone else.

Soon Mr. Ligi was summoned to read his work aloud. He entered the darkened studio and took his place on a red carpet under hot spotlights in front of the judges. He clutched a sheet of paper and attempted to give his reading a little oomph. The delivery was stiff; a bead of spittle trembled on his lip.

 

The panel decided that Mr. Ligi could stay for the next challenge. The next day, he would pitch his novel to a celebrity guest during a 59-second elevator ride.

 

Alessandro Baricco, a prominent Italian novelist who has appeared on more conventional literary TV shows, declined an invitation to participate in “Masterpiece.” “If you have someone capable — young, with talent and desire — and you want to make their life difficult, then make them into a TV star,” he said in an interview.

 

“Masterpiece,” he said, “will give many people an idea of literature. But it’s not the idea shared by most people who actually do it.”

 

Whatever ideas Italians have about literature, many want to produce it. Rai 3 required prospective contestants to submit an unpublished novel. Within a month, nearly 5,000 had flooded in.

A team of readers worked through the slush pile, and producers then conducted screen tests, selecting a dozen contestants for each of six episodes. The judges winnow that down to four hopefuls per show, based on their submitted manuscripts and responses to the judges’ questions.

Each of the four participates in an event (watching a wedding, in Mr. Ligi’s case, for instance, or spending a day with the blind, Ms. Piana’s task), then returns to the studio for a writing assignment. Participants have 30 minutes to complete it, and then must read it aloud. The judges deliberate, then dismiss two writers. The last two compete by giving 59-second pitches to literary celebrities and revising their manuscripts, with one contestant then chosen to proceed to the finals.

In February the six finalists will be joined by three expelled contestants brought back by the judges and three chosen by the public in online voting. After further challenges, one writer will triumph.

A leading imprint, Bompiani, is to publish the winner’s novel in May, with an initial print run of 100,000 copies — a huge number in the struggling Italian book market, where a first novel that sells 10,000 copies is considered a success. Even in the United States, sales of 100,000 copies of debut fiction would be outstanding.

 

Ms. Selasi, a British author who lives in Rome, initially had misgivings about appearing on Italian television, which is notorious for featuring goatish old men among young dancing girls. “Doubt No. 1: ‘Women on television in Italy’ is not a phrase synonymous with literary fiction,” Ms. Selasi said, laughing. “But at the same time, I loved the idea, the presumption that this could work.”

 

“Masterpiece” won’t necessarily identify the best new author in Italy, she acknowledged. It seeks only the best of those who dare participate. And a little daring is required to succeed in writing, Ms. Selasi said.

 

“Shy or not shy,” she said, “you’re going to have to — if you want to be a published writer — expose yourself in some way.”

 

The exposure that a writer must undergo to become published and promote sales can pose tricky issues. Increasingly, authors are encouraged to wade into the marketing and publicizing of their work, supplementing traditional readings with Facebook author pages, personal websites, online reader forums, Twitter feeds and YouTube trailers. Some writers relish communicating directly with readers; others recoil at hawking their work.

 

But brash self-promotion is not new in literature. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus paid for his own book tour, and Maupassant sent a hot-air balloon over Paris emblazoned with the title of one of his short stories, according to Tony Perrottet, an author who wrote an essay on the subject, prompted by his reservations about “peddling my work like a Viagra salesman.”

 

One of the “Masterpiece” judges, Mr. De Cataldo, noted that even illustrious Renaissance artists indulged in brazen self-advancement. Michelangelo and Caravaggio, he contends, “would have been completely at ease” in a talent-show setting. As for a writer like Kafka — well, perhaps, he would have stayed at home. Still, reality TV?

 

“Italy is a country where people read less and less — they’re publishing more books and selling fewer,” Mr. De Cataldo lamented. “The book is dying, and we must do everything we can to save it. Even a talent show.”

from: NY Times

Marvel Muslim Girl Superhero Kamala Khan Destroys Bad Guys as Well as Stereotypes

Kamala Khan isn't your average teenage Muslim girl. Though she lives in New Jersey and juggles the identity crisis that's often part-and-parcel of growing up Muslim-American, her shape-shifting is of a literal sort.

That's because Kamala Khan is a superhero, code-named Ms. Marvel.


In February, Marvel Comics will launch a series featuring the shape-shifting Khan, who fights family expectations as well as supervillains, reports The New York Times.



Khan is the brainchild of Marvel editors Sana Amanat and Steve Wacker, who concocted the character together after Amanat entertained Wacker with anecdotes from her Muslim-American childhood. When author G. Willow Wilson heard about the project, she was eager to jump on board as the series' writer, particularly as she's written a graphic novel before, 2008's "Cairo."
Carol Danvers, who previously fought crime under the name "Ms. Marvel," is now known as "Captain Marvel."

G. Willow Wilson said in a press release, “I wanted Ms. Marvel to be true-to-life, something real people could relate to, particularly young women. High school was a very vivid time in my life, so I drew heavily on those experiences--impending adulthood, dealing with school, emotionally charged friendships that are such a huge part of being a teenager.” Willow went on to say, “It's for all the geek girls out there, and everybody else who's ever looked at life from the fringe.”



How will audiences react? “I do expect some negativity,” Amanat said, “not only from people who are anti-Muslim, but people who are Muslim and might want the character portrayed in a particular light.”

However, Khan won't be the only superhero confronting traditional stereotypes and gender norms about what a hero should be. The Times reports that Marvel's other titles with female or minority leads include an X-Men series highlighting women, and the "Mighty Avengers" series which has many nonwhite faces.

This Ms. Marvel also isn't the only Muslim superhero. Marvel introduced niqab-clad Sooraya Qadir, code-named "Dust," as part of the X-Men universe in 2002. DC Comics gave Lebanese American Simon Baz the Green Lantern ring in 2012, and a new Pakistani television series features "Burka Avenger," a girl fighting against misogyny and corruption in her society. Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa has even dreamed up a whole universe featuring mainly Muslim superheroes called, "The 99," which banded together with The Justice League in 2010 for a six-issue crossover miniseries.

One thing's for sure -- we can't wait to see the Muslim Ms. Marvel kick butt and take names.

from: HuffingtonPost

Designing Libraries That Encourage Teens to Loiter

by: Amanda Erickson

A lot of public spaces try to keep teenagers out (remember those high-frequency noise generators that play a pitch only kids can hear?). But the New York Public Library is trying something different. What if they designed a space specifically for teens? What would that look like?

Their answer can be found on the third floor of Harlem's Hamilton Grange branch. The 4,400-square-foot space is the NYPL's first full-floor space dedicated to teens. It cost $1.8 million to build, and was just honored as a 2013 winner of the American Institute of Architects Library Building Awards.

Architect Lyn Rice says the design challenged library norms in some important ways. "There's a calm that descends on most reading rooms," he says. "The expectation is that people will physically behave." The teen floor turns that expectation on its head. Instead of siphoning teens off into different rooms (and locking away noisy activities), the space is airy and completely open. The openness means, among other things, that it only takes one or two librarians to monitor the entire space.



The focal point of the floor is a 20-foot-diameter glass wall (with an open top) where kids can go to play Wii or Guitar Hero. (Special speakers create a column of sound that prevents most of the noise from filtering out).

L-shaped lounge benches can be rolled into a variety of positions. A bamboo bleacher offers plenty of seats for small groups to chat or work on homework. There's also a Snack+Chat Niche (the first time the fastidious NYPL broke its eating and drinking prohibition), and a Study Zone next to exam prep stacks.

 

Rice says his team renovated the floor on the cheap, using paint and low-cost materials to fill the space. "Teens appreciate the rawness," he says. "Rich materials might be a little bit of a turn-off."

The key, he says, is a space without much security, where kids feel free to just hang out. "It makes teens feel as if they have free reign over the space," he says. "They don't feel like they're under this intense adult scrutiny."

All images courtesy of Michael Moran and Rice+Lipka Architects

from: The Atlantic Cities

Should Literature Be Useful?

Two recent studies have concluded that serious literary fiction makes people more empathetic, and humanists everywhere are clinking glasses in celebration. But I wonder whether this is a victory for humanism’s impalpable enrichments and enchantments, or for the quantifying power of social science.

The two studies, one by a pair of social psychologists at the New School, and another conducted by researchers in the Netherlands, divided participants into several groups. The methodology was roughly the same in both studies. In the New School experiment, one group read selected examples of literary fiction (passages by Louise Erdrich, Don DeLillo, and others); another read commercial fiction, and another was given serious non-fiction or nothing at all. The subjects were asked either to describe their emotional states, or instructed, among other tests, to look at photographs of people’s eyes and try to derive from these pictures what the people were feeling when the photographs were taken.

The results were heartening to every person who has ever found herself, throughout her freshman year of college, passionately quoting to anyone within earshot Kafka’s remark that great literature is “an axe to break the frozen sea inside us.” The subjects who had read literary fiction either reported heightened emotional intelligence or demonstrated, in the various tests administered to them, that their empathy levels had soared beyond their popular- and non-fiction-reading counterparts.
The studies’ conclusions are also particularly gratifying in light of the new Common Core Standards, hastily being adopted by school districts throughout the country, which emphasize non-fiction, even stressing the reading of train and bus schedules over imaginative literature. Here at last, it seemed, was a proper debunking of that skewed approach to teaching the art of reading.

There is another way to look at the studies’ conclusions, however. Instead of proclaiming the superiority of fiction to the practical skills allegedly conferred by reading non-fiction, the studies implied that practical effects are an indispensable standard by which to judge the virtues of fiction. Reading fiction is good, according to the studies, because it makes you a more effective social agent. Which is pretty much what being able to read a train schedule does for you, too.

Americans have always felt uncomfortable about any cultural activity that does not lead to concrete results. “He that wastes idly a groat’s worth of his time per day, one day with another, wastes the privilege of using one hundred pounds each day”: though Benjamin Franklin was fairly indifferent to money himself, the sentiment he expressed in that bit of advice became a hallmark of the national character. Idleness is still anathema in American life. (Kim Kardashian, who has restlessly turned her idle time into a profitable industry, is a Puritan at heart.) And the active daydream of writing and reading fiction is idleness in its purest state, neither promising nor leading to any practical or concrete result. From the didactic McGuffey Readers that lasted from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth century to William Bennett’s “Book of Virtues” in our own time (a liberal response, “A Call to Character” by Colin Greer and Herbert Kohl, was published a few years later), the American impulse to make room for literature by harnessing it to a socially useful purpose has taken many forms. You might even say that the two archetypal fictional American characters, Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, invented by the country’s most scathing satirist, are essentially arguments for the superiority of idleness over any morally, socially or financially useful American activity.

Perhaps it is appropriate, in our moment of ardent quantifying—page views, neurobiological aperçus, the mining of personal data, the mysteries of monetization and algorithms—that fiction, too, should find its justification by providing a measurably useful social quality such as empathy. Yet while the McGuffey Readers and their descendants used literature to try to inculcate young people with religious and civic morality, the claim that literary fiction strengthens empathy is a whole different kettle of fish.

Though empathy has become something like the celebrity trait of emotional intelligence, it doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the sensitivity and gentleness popularly attributed to it. Some of the most empathetic people you will ever meet are businesspeople and lawyers. They can grasp another person’s feelings in an instant, act on them, and clinch a deal or win a trial. The result may well leave the person on the other side feeling anguished or defeated. Conversely, we have all known bookish, introverted people who are not good at puzzling out other people, or, if they are, lack the ability to act on what they have grasped about the other person.

To enter a wholly different realm, empathy characterizes certain sadists. Discerning the most refined degrees of discomfort and pain in another person is the fulcrum of the sadist’s pleasure. The empathetic gift can lead to generosity, charity, and self-sacrifice. It can also enable someone to manipulate another person with great subtlety and finesse.

Literature may well have taught me about the complex nature of empathy. There is, for example, no more empathetic character in the novel or on the stage than Iago, who is able to detect the slightest fluctuation in Othello’s emotional state. Othello, on the other hand, is a noble and magnanimous creature—if vain and bombastic as well—who is absolutely devoid of the gift of being able to apprehend another’s emotional states. If he were half as empathetic as Iago, he would be able to recognize the jealousy that is consuming his treacherous lieutenant. The entire play is an object lesson in the emotional equipment required to vanquish other people, or to protect yourself from other people’s machinations. But no one—and no study—can say for sure whether the play produces more sympathetic people, or more Iagos.

Indeed, what neither of the two studies did was to measure whether the empathetic responses led to sympathetic feeling. Empathetic identification with the ordeals suffered by Apuleius’s golden ass, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Shakespeare’s King Lear—a play Dr. Johnson wanted to be performed with a revised, happy ending because he said its spectacle of suffering was too much to endure—Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov, Alyosha, or Prince Myshkin, Emma Bovary, not to mention the protagonists of misanthropic modernists like Céline, Gide, Kafka, Mann, et al.—empathetic sharing of these characters’ emotions could well turn a person inward, away from humanity altogether. Yet even if empathy were always the benign, beneficent, socially productive trait it is celebrated as, the argument that producing empathy is literature’s cardinal virtue is a narrowing of literary art, not an exciting new expansion of it.

Fiction’s lack of practical usefulness is what gives it its special freedom. When Auden wrote that “poetry makes nothing happen,” he wasn’t complaining; he was exulting. Fiction might make people more empathetic—though I’m willing to bet that the people who respond most intensely to fiction possess a higher degree of empathy to begin with. But what it does best is to do nothing particular or specialized or easily formulable at all.

Fiction’s multifarious nature is why so many people have attributed so many effects to imaginative literature, some of them contradictory: catharsis (Aristotle); dangerous corruption of the spirit (Plato); feverish loosening of morals (Rousseau); redemptive escape from personality (Eliot); empowering creation beyond the boundaries of morality (Joyce). Fiction ruined Don Quixote, young Werther, and Emma Bovary, but it saved Cervantes, Flaubert, and Goethe.

It’s safe to say that, like life itself, fiction’s properties are countless and unquantifiable. If art is made ex nihilo—out of nothing—then reading is done in nihilo, or into nothing. Fiction unfolds through your imagination in interconnected layers of meaning that lift the heavy weight of unyielding facts from your shoulders. It speaks its own private language of endless nuance and inflection. A tale is a reassuringly mortalized, if you will, piece of the oceanic infinity out of which we came, and back into which we will go. That is freedom, and that is joy—and then it is back to the quotidian challenge, to the daily grind, and to the necessity of attaching a specific meaning to what people are thinking and feeling, and to the urgency of trying, for the sake of love or money, to profit from it.

Lee Siegel is the author of two collections of criticism, “Falling Upwards: Essays in Defense of the Imagination,” and “Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television.”

from: New Yorker

Want to be seen as well read? Then listen to these shows...

There are several fine websites that save you the trouble of having to read books for yourself
by: Anna Baddeley

Over the years I have managed to fool a number of people into thinking I am terribly well read. My secret – well, three secrets – are Radio 4's Book of the Week, Book at Bedtime and the Classic Serial, whose episodes I save up to devour all at once on iPlayer. These fabulous free audiobooks used to be awkward to listen to, involving balancing acts with laptops in steamy bathrooms.

My iPad has been a liberation. Using a tablet as a portable radio is by far the best way to access the internet's vast archive of free literary audio.

One hands-free route into classic fiction is Librivox, essentially an audio version of Project Gutenberg. The website, recently given a makeover, offers around 7,000 free audiobooks read by (mostly American) volunteers. Like Gutenberg, it is a noble project that suffers from a lack of editorial control. While I'm sure there's great stuff to be found, there's an awful lot of Great Expectations read by Dick Van Dyke.

My top tips for literary-minded listeners are:

1) American broadcaster Michael Silverblatt's incomparable archive of author interviews. Name any famous novelist from the past quarter-century and I'll bet they've appeared on his radio show, Bookworm. Highlights include chats with David Foster Wallace and Martin Amis.

2) The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, which gets a writer to read another writer's short story, sometimes resulting in unlikely pairings. I enjoyed hearing David Sedaris somehow manage to make Miranda July a lot less irritating.

3) Lit Bits, an intelligent and irreverent London-based programme where an academic and a literary journalist invite a guest writer to mull over subjects ranging from art to football to sex.

Now, I advise you to cancel all social engagements and run a hot bath.

from: Guardian

Budgets Challenge Libraries, a 'Point of Integration' for Immigrants

by: David Gonzalez

You can always tell what time of year it is by the array of books that greet visitors to the Sheepshead Bay branch of the Brooklyn Public Library. These days, volumes on women’s suffrage, the Constitution and democracy occupy a place of honor in anticipation of Election Day.

“We have educational talks to remind the community about the privilege of voting,” said Svetlana Negrimovskaya, the branch supervisor. “We explain to them how so many people went through hardship to get the right to vote.”       

Granted, the people who pack this library know from hardship. Many, including Ms. Negrimovskaya, come from the former Soviet Union. Many others are from China or Latin America. There is a smattering of Albanians, Poles and Pakistanis. Just a year ago, they were all reeling from the flooding, blackouts and stress wrought by Hurricane Sandy. To them, this boxy, plain library was a haven when it reopened three months after the storm to offer books, Internet access and even counseling.

Now if only the candidates who will win next week’s general election would take this place as seriously. Financing New York City’s three public library systems is an annual set piece of political theater, where City Hall proposes reduced budgets that are deplored and haggled over until the City Council restores much of the sum. According to a report last January by the Center for an Urban Future, since 2008 the Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens libraries have endured cuts of nearly $65 million.

Library advocates said the current allocation of $106.7 million for all three systems is the first not to have cuts, though five years of decreased funds despite increased public demand has taken a toll — hours have been reduced, capital improvement has been postponed, and much-needed employees have not been hired.

“The libraries often can’t plan beyond a year because they don’t know what the budget is going to be,” said Julie Sandorf, president of the Charles H. Revson Foundation, which recently gave $10,000 grants to the Sheepshead Bay branch and four others. “It’s not like schools or parks, who start with a set budget. The libraries start from zero.”

Ms. Sandorf said that for $50 million more each year — “a rounding error in the city’s $70 billion budget” — all of the city’s libraries could be open 50 hours a week, instead of the current average of 43 hours. “If we are talking about a knowledge-based economy, this is what we need to do,” she said. “The problem is there is a huge gulf between the decision makers in this city who can pay for books or iPads and what is going on in every single library branch in the city.”

Shrinking budgets in Brooklyn resulted in the library system not having operating funds to hire any additional children’s librarians for five years until this year, said David Woloch, the Brooklyn system’s executive vice president for external affairs. And while the system’s 60 branches need $300 million in capital improvements, he said only $15 million was available this year, requiring triage to see whose roof or cooling system was in the worst shape.

Despite these challenges, branches like Sheepshead Bay offer countless services to an unending stream of people, including language and citizenship classes, arts and crafts, preschool story time, chess and even a Russian literature fan club.

Last Wednesday, a couple played Scrabble at a table while another couple studied for a nursing test. Nearby, a man browsed a selection of Korean movies, while another thumbed through recently arrived books in Russian. Upstairs, children did their homework or checked their e-mail.

“If you are going to be educated, you have to be in touch with the culture,” said Laura Sermassan, an immigrant from Romania who meets her three sons at the library each day after school. “It’s a point of integration into American culture. It’s a support.”

Ms. Negrimovskaya, in her office — where the shelf behind her desk has dictionaries in Yiddish, Russian, English and Chinese — was already looking forward to Tuesday’s gathering to mark Hurricane Sandy’s passing and the community’s rebound. She said people came alive when they were able to come back.
 

Then again, her neighbors have always been excited about the place. She recalled a woman who showed up in her slippers, eagerly asking how she could get on the Internet.

“I asked her if she had ever been on the Internet,” Ms. Negrimovskaya said. “She told me, ‘No, I never even saw a computer in Russia.’ I only asked her one more question: ‘Do you have a library card?’ ”

 

She smiled as she recalled the woman’s answer.

 

“Library card? I have a MetroCard!”

from: NY Times