Work: Surviving the Arts–What If I Don’t Want The Future?

~by Scott Pinkmountain

The Rumpus Interview with Miracle Jones (May 6, 2013) is a thought-provoking read. Miracle Jones is an enthusiastic and articulate proponent of new ideas and developments in publishing and the lit world, and he is very much putting the practices he advocates into action. His distaste and distrust for the New York publishing establishment is matched by his entrepreneurial spirit and his sheer positivity and optimism for new forms. And he’s an interesting writer, so the stories he self-publishes (in USB drives or online) are worth checking out. While I was inspired by much of what he said in The Rumpus interview – the future of books will be as communal locations, not as commodities, the publishing world should be globally distributed, not centrally located in NY and London, releasing a book on a USB drive allows you to include video, sound, images, multiple versions of a story, etc… – I was also left with a lot of questions. The biggest among them being simply, “What if I still like books?” And not just as a reader, but as a writer. What if I don’t feel a digitally self-published release carries commensurate significance to the effort I’ve given my work?

I put this question to a friend of mine, Heather Abel, a writer living in North Hampton. Heather is working on her first novel and would ideally like to see it published through traditional channels as a bound hard copy.

“I would definitely weep if it were not made into a tangible, held-in-hands, paper book,” Abel said. “Right now it exists in a document on my computer, and I know, on some level, that’s all any book is – the collection and arrangement of data, easily erased or forwarded or linked-to – but I want it to be paper and weighty and water-logged and dog-eared.” She’s aware that she’s a nostalgic luddite (her words), but she can’t help it. She was raised by two professors, her house filled with books. It’s what she knows and loves.

“I realize that this is bullshit, but it’s in me now. It’s my aesthetics. There was that New Yorker cartoon with two panels, one a living room like the one I grew up in, the one I tried to reproduce as an adult: bookshelves and turntable and couch and rugs; the other a room with nothing but a couch, screen, ipad, and ipod. I do understand that both rooms contain the same content, the same words or music, but I will always prefer the former; I will always think of it as superior, even though it’s not.”

So while she’s fully aware that Jones is probably right about the future of publishing, that doesn’t make it something she wants – both for her own work and the work she consumes. “I am the person who still prints out the articles from the internet. My idea for a business is a place like Instapaper, where you can save all the articles friends link to on Twitter and Facebook, but this company will compile them into a paper magazine for you, with nice photographs and art and poetry and fiction, and send it to you weekly. God, I’d love that.”

I asked Abel whether Jones’ approach of expanding the responsibilities of the writer to include making videos, coding, organizing events, etc… potentially detracts from the time and energy we can give to our writing (and thus presumably its quality). She conceded that the extracurricular work probably wouldn’t take up any more time than the futile web searching she does on a daily basis, but also noted that she’d just seen The Great Gatsby in 3D – probably the fanciest book video ever made – and it didn’t add anything to the experience of the book for her. To Abel, making a video, “Seems like a silly distraction, but who can argue with marketing?” She does, however, wonder if these skills are valuable enough that they should be taught to MFA students. “We had a mini-course on writing sex scenes. I’d actually prefer one on self-promotion and the internets.”

Regarding the issues Jones raised about self-publishing, I contacted someone else who, unlike Abel, has already started releasing some of his own writing online. Peter Landau is a writer living in L.A. After years of shopping first a memoir, then a kid’s novel, querying over 150 agents, landing an agent and being dropped by the agent, he decided to start self-publishing his work on Tumblr simply because he wants people to read it. I asked him how it felt after all those years just posting his work up online.

“For me it feels good. I mean… it feels bad because nobody seems to be going to my Tumblr. I’ve had no comments. I’ve had a few people on Facebook who say that they’re reading it, and I appreciate that, but there’s no guarantee that you’re going to make a living or even have people read your stuff.”

Would any of that have been different had he been published traditionally, in print?

“I feel it would be different, but I bet it wouldn’t, at least from what I hear from other people. There’s sort of a euphoria then there’s a let down. But at least the editor would be reading it, and maybe a score of people. I have this fantasy that is completely unrealistic – that it would be in bookstores and people would be picking it up and reading it, it would become part of the cultural fabric.” Both Landau and Abel acknowledge that their ideas about traditional publishing are outmoded, based on what they knew growing up. Landau knows his feelings about any significant difference between a published print release and a digital self-release are just that; feelings.

“But I feel a lot of things,” he said. “I don’t trust my feelings very much. It took me a long time to realize that writing is a process. The medium is indifferent.” So however his work is released, Landau views his main job as making the work and then getting over his expectations for what should happen with it. “I wanted that pat on the back. But that’s corrupting. That’s no way to go about writing something. I’m much happier just thinking of it as a process.”

Landau is in agreement with Jones about how narrow the mainstream publishing world is. “It’s become more conservative. You get a Ben Marcus every now and then, but for the most part it’s all very much the same. Even things that get a lot of accolades, they feel like they fit into a template. It’s just a shame because writing could be so much more. But it’s a business, and it’s a struggling business.”

Like many people, Landau views the publishing establishment as having moved away from an ethos of cultural contribution and fostering new voices toward simply making a bottom line. “I think I wrote a really good book, but it wasn’t a book that people felt they could sell. So that’s what it becomes about; is it a commodity? And it’s not a commodity to me. I’m going to do it whether they pay me or not. So I put it on my Tumblr.”

Landau knows, however, that Tumblr is an imperfect medium for serving a book. If you aren’t reading the posts right as they’re published, you might arrive in the middle, or at the end of the book. It’s a jumble, you have the book fed to you in reverse. And what about copy-editing? Or aesthetics, fonts, layout? Self-publishing and the digital reading experience are nascent. “The digital space is open, it’s in flux,” Landau said. “Design-wise, I think it took a hundred years, or more for words on a page to be templated into what we understand today as a book. And it’s not there on the e-reader. It’s kitsch – the flipping pages, mimicking the book. It’s not a book. It’s a new medium and it needs to be designed from whole cloth. It’s going to take some really creative designers to go there and make that digital space what the book became.”

Which leads us back to Miracle Jones. Jones has taken on coding and questions of design as part of his creative work. And while he may or may not have developed some new templates for the future of the book, he’s deeply invested in thinking about what comes next. So much so that it can be hard to reel him back to some of the questions that many are still mired in. One of my personal qualms with digital medium is its lack of physical presence – in part simply because it’s so easy to ignore or lose track of something that only exists in digital form (Heather Abel was unable to provide a link to a section of her novel that had been published online as she wasn’t able to find it anymore). I asked Jones about the drawbacks of this ephemerality.

I really do love books,” he said. “I’m not some kind of snarling futurist.” But within a few sentences, he’d leapt from “physically-encrypted 3D QR codes” to the possibility of scanning the sunset, and landed on using the internet as an eventual time-travel device. He’s not a snarling futurist, he’s a grinning one.

In The Rumpus interview, Jones suggested that if a reader is still craving the old-style book experience, they can head down to the POD machine (Print On Demand) with their USB stick, and drag their book back home. But not only have I never seen a POD machine anywhere, I live remotely, far from where there might actually be one, as do many readers. Ready with a list of possibilities, Jones is less concerned with problems than solutions. “More cunning entrepreneurs should be investing in POD printers and then building small bookstores around them, bootstrapping an inventory from POD returns and the niche obsessions of a cultivated local clientele. Same day delivery via local bicycle courier! Bookstores run like pizza parlors!”

Jones’ view is refreshing and inclusive, but he doesn’t have much sympathy or patience for those who aren’t yet ready for, or interested in joining the revolution. When I asked him about someone like Abel who’s logged 10 years on a novel and wouldn’t feel like posting her book online is a satisfying end to that process, he simply said, “So don’t post it online?” And likewise, about those who feel overwhelmed by making videos and organizing multi-media events, that these activities can draw energy away from the work of writing, Jones said, “So don’t do this kind of stuff? Do what gives you great joy and confusion to your enemies.”

Fair enough. It’s not Jones’ responsibility to carry the reluctant heel-draggers into not just the future, but the arrived present. Publishing is not going to become problematic. It’s not going become an elite, inwardly-focused, risk-averse, Brooklyn and Upper West Side sounding board, beholden to corporate interests, Hollywood blockbuster tastes and bottom lines. It already is. And of course Landau and Abel both know this.

“As for the exclusivity of the publishing world, I have not much to say,” stated Abel. “It’s terrible, but then again every institution I’ve ever been involved in has been exclusive and racist and sexist and classist and I am proud of those who fight against that.” And Landau has moved on to digitally self-releasing his work, but more out of frustration than the active enthusiasm for the medium that Jones has.

There’s an urgency and optimism to Jones’ message that is hard to dismiss. “Tech companies are capitalizing on the short-sightedness of the shell-shocked literary world, sucking the last revenue from the last people who don’t want to understand how the internet works. The fight now is reinventing physical space, reclaiming the art of narrative and book dealing.” It’s true. If you need proof, look to what’s already happened in the music industry. Apple and Amazon – a computer maker and a retail clearance mart – essentially control the worldwide music market. Jones’ framing of the discussion in the positive – let’s reinvent, let’s reclaim – is empowering. It’s infectious.

It’s also realistic. Jones points out that, “It is dumb to pretend that there is some kind of establishment with old-world style values and decency. The establishment retired out of despair.” Whatever hope we might have had for literary career or experience like that of our predecessors was quashed with the corporate consolidation of all the major publishing houses. It’s over. That being said, all three writers agreed on the necessity for editors, curators of some sort, which self-publishing often doesn’t factor in.

There needs to be some kind of gatekeeper. For the person that loves to read, how do you find a great book?” asked Landau. “I guess it’s through some of these online communities. If you have an affinity with a blogger or a website, and you go check out if they recommend something.” He relies on sites like The Bookslut, bloggers who are vetting the overly crowded field for the rest of us.

“W.W. Norton.  OR Books. Small Beer Press. The Atavist. These are the sorts of gatekeepers we should trust. I want to go through their gates,” said Jones. “A publisher ought to be no bigger than a pirate ship.”

Abel is more catholic about it. “I like to read books that have been chosen and edited by publishing houses, large and small.” Like many writers, though, she’s unconvinced that all the answers lie in self-publishing. “I do think that self-publishing, if it were to be widespread, would diminish the quality of fiction, but I’m not sure that it will be widespread. God, I could be so wrong, though.”

 

Scott Pinkmountain is a writer and musician living in Pioneertown, CA. His writing has appeared on This American Life, in The Rumpus, A Public Space, HTMLGIANT, and others. He has also released dozens of albums of both instrumental music and songs. He works as a music analyst for Pandora Radio.