Making Literature Now (Post*45) - Softcover

Hungerford, Amy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804799407 ISBN 13: 9780804799409

Publisher: Stanford University Press, 2016

Synopsis

How does new writing emerge and find readers today? Why does one writer's work become famous while another's remains invisible? Making Literature Now tells the stories of the creators, editors, readers, and critics who make their living by making literature itself come alive. The book shows how various conditions―including gender, education, business dynamics, social networks, money, and the forces of literary tradition―affect the things we can choose, or refuse, to read.

Amy Hungerford focuses her discussion on literary bestsellers as well as little-known traditional and digital literature from smaller presses, such as McSweeney's. She deftly matches the particular human stories of the makers with the impersonal structures through which literary reputation is made. Ranging from fine-grained ethnography to polemical argument, this book transforms our sense of how and why new literature appears―and disappears―in contemporary American culture.

About this title

About the Author

Amy Hungerford is Dean of the Humanities and Professor of English at Yale University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Making Literature Now

By Amy Hungerford

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2016 the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8047-9940-9

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction: Writing from the Rabbit Hole, 
1. Making Literature Now, 
2. McSweeney's and the School of Life, 
3. Reading Novels in the Net, 
4. GPS Historicism, 
5. How Jonathan Safran Foer Made Love, 
6. On Not Reading DFW, 
Afterword: Present-Tense Archive, 
Notes, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Making Literature Now

The editors of McSweeney's literary quarterly and press have long assumed we want to know how their work is done, have assumed that their readers somehow cannot help but ask. And these editors, which include most prominently the writer and book designer Dave Eggers, have been right. At first, culture watchers were curious about how the literary quarterly came to be, because the enterprise seemed far-fetched at its founding in 1998: McSweeney's was to be a quarterly that would thrive without compromise with the market; it was initially focused on humor writing, a nearly nonexistent market in print; and Eggers required that early submissions be explicitly rejected by mainstream venues, making the quarterly a home for writing that was experimental or sometimes — we should admit it — simply raggedy. The retro book design and increasing elaborateness of the quarterly's bindings and graphic art, and the ever-changing literary ideas that surge through issue after issue, have made questions about how it did its work relevant in new ways as the growth of the internet has raised predictable worries about the future of the book. How was it possible to lavish these objects with editing and embossing when the ebook was making paper itself look antique? So the question about how Timothy McSweeney's Quarterly Concern and the books that soon joined it under the McSweeney's colophon are made has persisted throughout the enterprise, and the editors have been obliging in answering it, dedicated to showing, in loving detail, how books — or at least, their books — are made.

Those accounts have been focused on the practicalities of book production, and have often taken the form of detailed cost breakdowns, like this one from the first issue:

TO ANSWER YOUR QUESTION: this journal, of which 2,500 copies were made, cost $4,109 to print (approx. $1.64 copy). Shipping to and from Iceland, where this was most assuredly printed, was about $1,400, bringing the total bill to about $5,509.

Issue 5 reprinted an invoice from the printer in Iceland showing what all the different elements cost, right down to the optional shrink-wrap. The December 2009 issue, no. 33, an old-time, one-off broadsheet newspaper called the San Francisco Panorama, had a whole section devoted to "print runs and costs." And a deluxe version of this impulse rolls out in full color in The Art of McSweeney's, a coffee-table retrospective published in 2010 (Figure 1.1). It features drafts of cover designs, commentaries about paper stock, and discussion of the technical details associated with die-cut covers and the French flaps of issue 12. We even see the Oddi print shop in Iceland, the staff there, their machines. Each of these examples can be unpacked: the early costing out justifies, and implicitly apologizes for, the price charged to readers in an effort to rinse the transaction of commercial traces; The Art of McSweeney's documents the highly regarded book design work of Dave Eggers and also honors the other kinds of workers — factory workers, writers, editorial staff — who play a part in making beautiful books; the Panorama's accounting implicitly argues that the newspaper can flourish as a medium even in the virtual age.

But from first to last, despite the varying aims these descriptions of process serve, they have been framed by a DIY exhortation: it is possible to make the books you want to read and hold. "Impossible, You Say? Nothing is impossible when you work for the circus," declares a splash page at the front of The Art of McSweeney's, and a personal letter from Dave Eggers goes on to encourage the faint of heart. It is a message rooted in the anticommercial DIY ethic of punk in the 1970s and 1980s, and in its spin-off, the zine culture of the 1990s. That's where Eggers, McSweeney's founder, got his start making the short-lived cult zine Might, based in San Francisco, downstairs from the offices of another little start-up called Wired. And there is anecdotal evidence that these accounts of the bookmaking process did in fact inspire others to make books that would transcend the subgenre of the zine world, just as Wired did and McSweeney's has. Notably, Mark Greif, one of the editors and founders of the journal n+1, acknowledges that he and his collaborators studied the accounting statements in the early McSweeney's issues before they launched n+1, and decided that making a journal was financially within reach on the basis of the evidence they saw there.

But of course the "making of" story is a feature of contemporary media culture that transcends McSweeney's and these materialist versions of it. The rise of the DVD film release, with its deleted scenes and director commentary, has made a stand-alone documentary genre into the expected side dish at any home viewing. The "making of" story answers not only the film geek's love of craft but also the star hound's love of gossip. Its literary forms are less ubiquitously packaged with the literary object itself, although we see them sometimes in the "P. S." guides appended to paperbacks aimed at the book club market. More frequently, the "making of" story emerges from Terry Gross's or Oprah's interview couch, from the little prefaces before book-tour readings, and from the industrious work of reviewers and academics. And McSweeney's doesn't neglect this version of the "making of" story for its own books, either. Alongside the numbers and invoices and stories about cardboard, we find another kind of process described in McSweeney's: the process of how the content of the magazine comes to be and who is writing it. In this respect, the quarterly's self-representations become more vexed, and to understand them, a little background will help. The foundational fact is that Eggers became famous as a writer by writing about himself and his family, which is to say, he became famous by revealing, in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, the process by which he himself was made.

Pushing Back on Backstories

Eggers built a successful career on the platform of stories about process, stories that at the beginning were identical with self-revelation of various kinds; early responses to that debut have conditioned his subsequent relationship with the media, with an animus reminiscent of Philip Roth's decades-long response to Iriving Howe's critique of Portnoy's Complaint. Eggers became wary of people interested in him as a person, especially after a family tragedy made his public life even more fraught. The experience has made Eggers's relationship to the memoir, and to nonfiction writing more generally, especially "complicated"; in writing about living people now — in What Is the What and Zeitoun — he takes a Hippocratic approach: First, do no harm.

Despite Eggers's undeniable suffering, a certain schadenfreude was also projected toward him as his success grew, and he was often accused of fostering a coterie of insiders in the journal. That vague resentment persists: in December 2009, frustrated customers on the street trying to buy copies of the Panorama at announced locations, and finding none, complained online about McSweeney's insiderish operations and exclusivity. Descriptions of that morning from the McSweeney's staff make clear how distribution problems defined that chaotic day — delivery trucks were an hour and a half late, and when they did arrive, publicity was such that the paper sold out within hours, sometimes straight off the truck. The perception that McSweeney's was merely playing hard to get bespeaks the resentment that drifts around their public image like the native fog of their city. An awareness of distribution systems — part of the material backstory that will crop up again later — allows us to see how the aporias of market structures are transformed by public responses into the cultural capital of scarcity. Late delivery trucks, and more generally the corporate structuring of book distribution and sales, do not so much explain away or correct such public perceptions but allow us to see how the market, rather than the personalities or beliefs of individual actors, might produce them.

All of this is to say that curiosity about the human elements of how books are made, about the lives that go into them and the lives that come out of them, is something McSweeney's has both acknowledged and deflected, that its editors have both invited and defended against. And again the examples appear at the start of the quarterly and in retrospective moments: issue 5 includes a table of contributors to the quarterly up to that point for the convenience of media watchers who want to summarize what the quarterly is about without actually reading it, and adds a handy graph to explain just how much of a coterie publication it is — or is not (Figure 1.2).

More elaborately, and more entertainingly, issue 11 includes a DVD of authors reading their work from the volume (called "Deleted Scenes" and "Extra-Deleted Scenes"), which in turn includes a documentary on "The Making of the Issue No 11 DVD," as well as the "The Making of McSweeney's Issue No 11 DVD (with Director's Audio Commentary," "The Editing of 'The Making of McSweeney's Issue No 11 DVD,'" and so on. Here the self-consciousness about making becomes parody and deflection (an homage perhaps to the parodic rock documentary This Is Spinal Tap). The message is that to be interested, as a reader, in the human contexts of art making is, in a word, silly. And more: in playing with that human backstory, McSweeney's protects texts like A Heartbreaking Work from such inquiry, implicitly rereading that book so that what applies to the project of McSweeney's, what seems to connect the personal story with the story of books, is not the memoir's anger and tragedy but rather its self-conscious joking. Reading A Heartbreaking Work back from issue 11 of the quarterly, we get the portrait of the artist as funnyman.

A more substantive deflection of the desire for backstory — one that, like Eggers's memoir, simultaneously extends and withholds the story that would satisfy such desire — can be found in There Are Many of Us, published by McSweeney's in 2010, a glossy book about the "making of" Spike Jonze's short film "I'm Here" (the DVD tucked stylishly into the book itself). We might first note that the book is published by but also displaced from McSweeney's itself: it is about Jonze's film, a film he made while working with Eggers on Wild Things, a more elaborate commercial project which Jonze describes as the negative impetus for the smaller project. Inside this book we find nested another "making of" story, one that emphasizes the democratic underpinnings of the film. The implicit argument is that we need "making of" stories, we need the book of the film, because without them art is not so much hard to understand — this is not commentary, really — as hard to imitate. Jonze wants to tell us about "the people we worked with who hadn't worked in film before" (21); "I think I am drawn to nonprofessionals," he writes, "because I feel like I am a nonprofessional: there's no right way or wrong way, there's just the way that feels right" (Figure 1.3). The book includes short first-person essays on the experience of making the film by nonstars like David Kramer, a bookstore owner who was asked by a friend to be the rock star character in the film; Meryl Smith, a sculptor of paper animals that live mainly in her apartment; Aska Matsumiya, a newbie songwriter; and Sonny Gerasimowiez, a robot designer. We even get the facsimile of Aska's penciled song draft (Figure 1.4). All are friends of Spike Jonze, or friends of his friends, and yet none, the book suggests, is a Hollywood insider.

Setting this project next to the "Making of the Issue 11 DVD" documentary, we can see that this book skirts our curiosity about how art is made in a different way. It suggests that if we want to know about the people who make art, we ultimately need simply to look inside ourselves. And in this way the book offers another kind of antidote both to the resentment of artistic insiders and to the power of celebrity. The book itself relies on the celebrity of Spike Jonze — it belongs to a whole set of projects that emerge from Dave Eggers's contacts in the industry and in mainstream publishing, including the nine-hundred-plus page novel by director John Sayles (A Moment in the Sun) that the press published in 2011. But within the logic of There Are Many of Us, celebrity sits invisible behind a mirrored surface that flatters those who gaze into it. The implicit exhortation — an extension of the DIY message — is that "there are many of us" already making art, many of us writing and making books; and if we would embrace the DIY ethic there could be many more of us.

How are books made today? From what social world does literature arise? In all of McSweeney's attention to process, are they telling us what we want to know? Of course not, despite all that these examples do tell us about a fantasy version of artistic production. In reading the essays in There Are Many of Us, certain untold stories all but clamor for our attention: How did the network of "friends" out of which the film was built come to be? How did this particular amateur songwriter come to count Spike Jonze among her friends? What can we say about that network, about the social world of this art? How does the work happen in the traffic between people, their formation into a group, a coterie, an office, a class, an institution, a public, a counterpublic, a school, a neighborhood, a network? These are the terms of contemporary debates about method in literary studies, words that turn us toward sociology, toward the theory of public life, toward systems theory. What I want to do in the remainder of this chapter is open up the kinds of "black boxes" that Bruno Latour gives us in his study of lab culture, Science in Action. There, he shows us the facts and equipment of science — for example, the double-helix structure of DNA or the computers that allow scientists to image that structure — in the process of becoming true, of becoming something unthought that we simply use. In the case of McSweeney's, the black boxes are both the aesthetic artifacts that the press produces and the networks through which they are distributed. Scientific facts and computers don't come packaged, like There Are Many of Us, with making-of books (though these are spawned in the market when facts or certain technologies become interesting enough to the general public); aesthetic objects that do come with such stories attached provide us the opportunity to see the story of production as something that has become part of the product itself.

Making a True Thing

The remainder of this chapter tells its own such making-of story, of how McSweeney's came to have an iPhone app called The Small Chair. Why is that a story to illuminate the world McSweeney's inhabits? One answer, the simple one, is that Russell Quinn, the maker of the app, is a human being embedded, like all of us, in a socially and materially structured world, and because he is part of a group of people who collaborate to make art that reaches thousands of people and connects them to each other. And how is this a critical story, a scholarly story; how does it differ from the stories of minor artists in Spike Jonze's book? Because in learning it, and then telling it, rather than reading it out of a representation already embedded in public cultural production, one is up against some of the most vexing questions that face anyone thinking hard about literature today. The work of learning and telling this story is an effort to move beyond the DIY ideology of the artist-in-all-of-us to a more nuanced sense of what happens between writers and readers. The idea that we are "all" writers, and fewer of us readers, is already a depressing fact of life for those who teach in departments where creative writing is taught; Matthew Wilkens's demonstration of the massive rise in the publication of novels in the last two decades gives us some data to back at least the production side of that intuition. And as Chapter 3 will show, the relationship between production and consumption of the aesthetic is where the cutting edge of publishing is staking its claim: it is the social, in other words, that the publisher is in the business of selling.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Making Literature Now by Amy Hungerford. Copyright © 2016 the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0804799407
• ISBN 13: 9780804799409
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 224