Readers Blog
Dear Ascent Readers,
This space is all yours. Feel free to comment about the work you find at Ascent or whatever else you want to share here. The only rule is be polite. This is an open forum for all talk about new writing and new reading. Have fun!
W. Scott Olsen, editor.
(For now, each post is a stand-alone instead of hiding as a reply to a subject thread. We’ll see how that works out. Newest posts are on top.)
Dear Editor,
My name is Seth Horton and I am co-editor, along with James Thomas, of the annual short story anthology series, Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri. I wanted to let you know that the University of Texas Press has just published our 2009 volume and we have listed Lawrence Coates’ “Belmont,” which originally appeared in your journal, as a “Notable Western Story of the Year.” In case your readers are interested, here is a link to the book: http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/horbep.html
I wish everyone associated with Ascent continued success.
Best,
D. Seth Horton
Co-Editor
Best of the West
Many thanks, Scott. You are wonderful.
Aashish,
That would have been in the old Accent. I’ll see if I can find a copy in the next few days.
All best,
Scott
Dear Scott,
I have been desperately trying to procure a copy of John Hawkes’s story “The Horse in a London Flat”. I read somewhere that it was published in Ascent/Accent. Is it true? If so, how can I get my hands on it?
Many thanks
Aashish
Hi Sophie,
Ascent from New Zealand is not the same outlet as Ascent from the United States. I have no idea how much your issue may be worth, but I’d simply hang on to it. Good lit is always a keeper.
Scott
I dont know if this is the place to ask but I have;
“ASCENT
A journal of the arts in New Zealand
volume 1 no 1 november 1967″
It has a cup stain on the cover and a name writen inside but is otherwise in good order.
Would anyone have a rough idea of what its worth?
I’m at a complete crossroads. I have been absolutely against the whole idea of an e-book or electronic based literature or journals, just because I always thought the point of reading was to curl up or close up with a book on a couch or by a tree or on a bus or on a train. And I always rationalised that it’s pretty hard to shift reading position or move quickly with a computer, so it’s not as good as a book.
However, the other day as I came back into Sydney airport from Hong Kong, I saw a lady carrying an e-book reader and I was absolutely fascinated. It looked kind of like a book – same size, same sort of print – and there were a few buttons to move back and forward, like flipping through pages. But I think what most took me back is that I had been going along on the premise that “no-one will ever use it, so it’s ridiculous.” Yet there she was: a lady with an e-book reader. And here we are, people looking through electronic based literature. So does that mean it’s the future?
Not necessarily. It doesn’t have to be the definitive “the”. I can see that it is “a” future, but it doesn’t have to be the only one, not just yet. The two forms (electronic and non-electronic), can exist together, hand-in-hand. Electronic is good as it’s immediate, its here and now, it is discoverable by the whole world, just like that *click*. And non-electronic is good as it is physical, tangible, romantic, real – and it has a longevity, and even a romance about it’s longevity – that “e” will never replace.
Although, even that is perhaps the ideals of a person who lived with both formats (is format even the right thing to say?). Maybe if and when e-books become “the” only future, no-one will care or know or remember any romantic values attached to having a physical thing.
In any case, it probably doesn’t matter, because there is very little any-one can do. Which is okay in itself. The world will continue to develop and evolve and in many ways it doesn’t even matter that it does. E-books may well creep up and cast great big shadows over printed format, and maybe at that point it will become such a matter-of-fact that the main concern will be what is coming to replace the “e”?
Personally, I like it. I’m not going to get an e-reader just yet (I think the proper term is digital book), but I’m not going to fight it. The number one thing for me is that there is writing out there, and I just hope that the integrity that seems (does it?) to go hand in hand with printed material makes it’s way across into the electronic format.
I guess to answer the main question – to have a journal is better than having no journal, and if people read an electronic journal, then better to have it again.
jamesbent.com/blog
In re Dawn’s/Menaker’s post:
I’m uncertain whether the desired “pot” here is the reading of a good book or the writing of a good book that gets read. But what can be done in either case? One can quit writing. One can quit reading. Yet neither seems to the point. Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it is exactly the point. Scary thought.
Why It Doesn’t Surprise Me that I Haven’t Heard of Any of the NBA Nominees, and Why That’s Probably a Good Thing, Because the Chances of My Finding Excellent, Provocative, and Wholly Unprofitable Books on My Own is More Unlikely than Ever Given the Unsettled State of Publishing on Planet Earth
I’m quoting here from an article of interest by veteran editor Dan Menaker, “Redactor Agonistes,” which you can find on the Barnes and Noble Review site in the archives by searching on the title. His opinions and recollections rhyme with my own experience, albeit at a much smaller scale, during my years as an editor at a small university press:
“I have this completely unfounded theory that there are a million very good — engaged, smart, enthusiastic — generalist readers in America. There are five hundred thousand extremely good such readers. There are two hundred and fifty thousand excellent readers. There are a hundred and twenty-five thousand alert, active, demanding, well-educated (sometimes self-well-educated), and thoughtful — that is, literarily superb — readers in America. More than half of those people will happen not to have the time or taste for the book you are publishing….
“Also, some 150,000 books are published in the United States every year. Let’s — once again without any real foundation — be really draconian and say that only 10 percent of those books would be in any way appealing to generalist readers of some intelligence. Let’s take 50 percent of that 10 percent, for no reason at all, just to be even meaner, and we end up with 7,500 books. That means that on average one hundred and fifty more or less worthwhile books are published every week in this country. Let’s cut that number in half, just to make the floor of our metaphorical abattoir really bloody. That makes seventy-five decent books a week. (By the way, that number is about twice the rough and generous estimate I’ve made based on actual experience.) How are seventy-five at-least-half-decent books going to receive serious and discriminating reviews in the few important places remaining for serious reviews every week? To say nothing of getting attention from prominent publicity outlets, like NPR and Charlie Rose and Jon Stewart? They’re not. They’re simply not. These statistical circumstances make publishing into a kind of grand cultural roulette, in which your chances of winning any significant pot are very, very small.”
I should have noted that I have read other work by some of the nominees and admire some of them.
Scott, the short answer from me is No. I’ve started the Bonnie Jo Campbell. But each year I read god knows how many books of poetry, short stories, and novels, and rarely does one of them turn up on a prize list. I sometimes read a nominated book after the fact.
This could mean any number of things, I suppose, some unflattering to me, but I think what it means is that prize committees and I have different ideas about what makes a book worth reading.
Dear Everyone,
Next week, the 2009 National Book Awards will be given in New York City.
The list of finalists can be found at:
http://www.nationalbook.org/nba2009_test.html
Have you read any of these books? Do you have any picks or predictions?
Scott
The fact that I think of myself as a person with a foot in both worlds defines how I look at print and on-line media — both worlds, as though they were different and distinguishable. I published in print extensively in the 70s and 80s, took a long break to make a career in the computer industry, and am now back to writing and, this time around, looking very closely at the on-line media. As many of your bloggers indicate, there is much more accessibility to on-line publishing, but there seems also a concommittent dismissal of it. What is on-line, like it or not, is not taken as seriously as printed media. Perhaps this is a conditioned response we will lose soon as a species, or perhaps it is embedded in the nature of the media. I suspect the future is primarily on-line, with great hoopla attached to perhaps yearly anthologies that come out in print, are noted and referred to as important distillations, but which are themselves seldom bought and relatively limited in distribution. The print anthologies, however, find a place on the furniture, whereas the on-line tends to be a serial experience — you try one, then move on to another.
Maybe it is like arguing whether travel by automobile or by Amtrack sleeper car is better. You may get where you are going with either, and at about the same speed, but it is an entirely different way of approaching the journey.
thanks,
Ken Poyner
I am an American writer living in London; after about a decade struggling with a second novel and two small children, I have returned to an early love, essays. I am here on my small island in the Atlantic, but will also always be partly there on the continent that raised me. While my work wants to be in America, I not only feel shy going back into the world of the independent literary magazines where I used to publish my poems, I feel bewildered. How to get my work out? How to get work in? Do I have to lick the queen every time I want to submit? Can I get my elderly parents to buy US stamps in bulk? It’s hard enough just to write in those hours between cereal and pick up. Browsing in the only way I know how, I found this new Ascent, in its first few days. I read the beautiful essays; I felt at home in the format, which is very easy to navigate. I will come back again, and am grateful to be able to access this online. As for books, I still need them by my bedside, and do get impatient reading on line for too long. My husband says that just as there some people are either pre or post summer of love, some of us are post the digital revolution, but this has to be the future of good work. So a thank you from London; I will spread the word.
Welcome to the digital world. At Blackbird, we have been astounded by the ease with which we reach a reader and with how easily a reader can find us. There is so much fine work being made, that I feel we fail as journals if we don’t do our best to find readers for it. I like Dawn Marano’s reference to Lewis Hyde: art is a gift that accrues value as it changes hands. May we all celebrate that culture.
Scott,
I say Bravo! for putting Ascent online. The technology is changing so quickly that I don’t think there is any question that reading online is becoming more comfortable and this suits magazines especially. I subscribe to the The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and GQ. All these magazines have sharp online content that complements the print editions. The online content is easy to access.
Books are different somehow and I am not sure what to say about that. We read them differently. We take more time with them and I cannot separate myself from the physical object and the idea of curling up with it. I love to do that with an object in which I can turn the pages, make pencil marks, and or paste sticky notes. The Kindle does not do it for me, even though it is designed to replicate much of what I just mentioned about books. But I have no problem reading occasional essays and articles online or printing them off. A great nonfiction web journal I read regularly is thesmartset.com. I like the way its content springs off my laptop. But I still love the physical objects of magazines and newspapers and I don’t believe they will ever disappear entirely.
I am thinking now of a movie–The Minority Report, with Tom Cruise–which gave a startling vision of newspapers and magazines of the future. In one scene, people were sitting on a bus (maybe it was a train), reading newspapers and magazines whose content was updating electronically on the spot. These things–the magazines and newspapers of the future–were foldable, with real pages, clearly some other material than newsprint, but I loved the idea.
I am sure one of the people on the bus (train?) was reading Ascent.
Reading Ascent online will be an interesting experiment for me. For the most part I do not like reading online, and find I scan more than truly read. Of course, I don’t usually read literature online. I read newspapers, salon, etc. However, I am motivated to read Ascent so perhaps I can make the transition to deep reading online. To me sitting in front of a screen is still work mode, not luxuriate-in-the words mode. So we’ll see. I do believe this is a good–and inevitably necessary–route for Ascent. I would rather read it online than not at all.
Like Kelly, I’ve got mixed reactions to literature online—and I haven’t come to many conclusions yet. Reading magazines and newspapers online is a completely different animal for me, simply because I do not wish to linger with them. Literature—whether it’s a book or a piece from a literary journal—is something different. Not only do I like to sit down on the couch with it, I like to write in the margins. The books on my shelf I consider most valuable are those that have the best notes in them. Notes that indicate a train of thought specific to a certain period in my life, a certain experience reading that book. My relationship with the written word on my computer screen is completely different—and not one that I’d like to have spill over onto my bookshelf.
When it comes to reading and rereading literary journals, I do have a few on my shelf that are falling apart with the rereading. This does not apply to many of them, simply because as an essayist, there aren’t enough essays in the standard literary journal to break the binding with my rereading. But I’ve started printing essays and such off the online journals (which are still few—mostly Brevity and Quotidiana) and putting them in a binder that I can keep on my shelf, take out when the mood strikes me to reread them, and add new margin comments to the ones I’ve written in the past.
It’s just as easy—maybe moreso—to send a friend or a student a link to a piece I’ve liked, as it is to hand them a journal off my shelf. And the sheer accessibility of the online journals cannot be discounted. It’s like I tell my comp students—it doesn’t matter what you read, as long as you read. Everything you read will teach you how to put a sentence together. (And you can also learn What Not To Do, as well.) You can learn as much from a fluffy book as you can from reading the classics. I learned more about the Catholic Church and what happens after a pope dies from Angels and Demons than I would have learned elsewhere. And as my classrooms become increasingly more digital, I suppose it’s natural that my literature become more digital as well. I don’t have to like it—or accept it in that form—but there’s always the option to print it.
I was having other thoughts about digital literature last week, when I posted a review of the 2009 Best American Essays on my Facebook page. I wasn’t thinking about accessibility of literature when I posted it; I just had some thoughts and that was a natural outlet for me. I knew my friends would be interested. But Facebook itself, for me, is more of a professional gathering place than others’ Facebooks. It’s where I can catch up with people I only see once a year at AWP. I can see events they’re having, books they’re releasing, and I can participate in conversations with people thousands of miles away. I think there’s great value in that. My friend Theresa has started The Letter Project, to collect letters from writers about writing. And there’s more. But twenty minutes after I posted my review, Dinty Moore emailed me and wanted to know if he could post it on the Brevity blog. I wasn’t expecting that kind of response, but it brought up a question in my head about the purpose of Facebook and the combination of Facebook and literature in this digital age. We post pieces that strike us as interesting, essays or other genres, thereby getting a piece of work out to a larger audience. My friend Pat posted a link to a Brian Doyle essay I hadn’t seen before—and probably would not have found with out that link. A great number of us found out about Ascent’s new format through Facebook. Facebook is how I’m staying informed about what’s going on there. But I would like to have some conversations (maybe at a future conference) about what Facebook, etc. has done to literature.
So I think there’s great value in digital literature, as long as the growth is organic and we can still retain what we like about the original literature. I don’t want to lose the experience of reading—which is completely separate from the medium of the writing itself.
Karen
Scott, what a handsome on-line Ascent! bravo, huzzahs, balloons and streamers for you! If music is leading the way, I imagine these works spinning out into personal gigabits of best reading, Genius mixes ferreting out new writers for us to read, Podcasts of the writers reading their work, artists posting responses, virtual roundtables and critique groups, installations of multiple voices. . .(though of course, there’s nothing like a book, to read in the bathtub).
Congratulations to you, and thank you for all your work, all these years!
cheers, Robin
I am so conflicted about “the digital future” that I would have to think for days to organize my thoughts, so here is a brief ramble: I share your instinctive distinction between books and other forms of printed matter, although, where newspapers are concerned, I do miss being able to grasp the whole before turning my attention to the particulars. Reading or browsing magazines online I am fine with, although the longer the piece, the harder it is to stay focused (digital fonts have no depth, meaning there isn’t much to focus on), and since I like long pieces, this is a problem for me. I truly hate the whole business of online publishers needing payment online for a submission: I understand the magazines’ pov, but (a) some of the fees are exorbitant (I don’t submit in those cases) and (b) I don’t know how and am afraid of learning how to pay on line (I don’t submit in those cases, either). As for poetry–a crucial dimension of poetry reading, at least for me (but why not everyone?), is reading the poem, or at least a significant portion of it, aloud. That is the only way to know how the poem feels in the mouth and throat and the only way truly to hear it. As for writing on the computer, yes, I do that, but only after I have first written the piece or section of the piece by hand. Okay, I confess that once or twice I’ve written reviews online. That’s once or twice. The computer outpaces my mind; I want–again–time to think.
Nevertheless, one recognizes the future when it slams into the present. But–oh, but–what will happen to the author? When his works are air and light, where is his bookshelf? His bibliography? Who will ever search through miles and miles of digital code to find lost poems, overlooked books, the story that has only just become pertinent to the present?
Hi, Scott, hi Ascent, bon voyage old wine in new bottles, or maybe that’s old photons in new circuit boards:
I’m the last person who should be responding to your questions, or harmonizing with your meditations. I have spent an unconscionably large hunk of my professional life doing lit mag editing old school. At the same time, I’m the guy who weaned The Georgia Review off letterpress, and introduced computers into its hoary penetralia. (No that is NOT a veiled sexual reference.) People said: your readers will complain. I got one letter from an antiquarian who disliked the new format. One letter. ONE LETTER. If anyone else on earth even noticed, they kept it to themselves.
And now you’ve gone and digitized a whole magazine. All I did was retool production methods: you’ve done away with paper! You’ve KILLED PAPER! Err, but I suppose you’re saving trees. Funny how that works.
We don’t know what the future holds, of course, but presumably we have certain designs on the future. I would dislike a future without serious, committed readers of poems and literary — damn, I mean good — prose. Personally, I don’t care a whit, no sir not a fig do I care, WHERE they read such things. I don’t care if they hire a skywriter to inscribe haiku in the air above their houses; I don’t care if they have ANNA KARENINA tattooed on their butts. If they have contortionist tendencies and want to read it that way, fine. (I don’t recommend having I HEART ANNA KARENINA tattooed on one’s butt, though, surrounded by a valentine; the lady had a mixed track record in matters of love.)
Here is a scary statistic: a reader’s poll along about a decade ago, that the median age of a reader of THE GEORGIA REVIEW (I don’t want to pick on that great magazine, I just know things about it; the same no doubt would apply to many other similarly positioned lit mags) was 58 years old. 58! And that was 10 years ago! I turned 59 a couple of months back, and I have no axe to grind about people that age, but come on: the MEDIAN AGE? How, we asked ourselves, do we get younger readers? We never were able to answer the question.
I would be willing to bet, Scott, that when the number of hits on your new site quadrupled your readership, that at the same time the median age of your readership was cut in half. At least. I can’t prove that, but it seems very likely. The young folks like the keyboards and screens, as David Letterman might say, if he weren’t, erm, preoccupied at the time. Older readers will have plenty to read; older readers will even find their way to online magazines and such. Nor do I want to pretend that digitizing literature is an instant panacea for drifting readership: it ain’t. Younger readers like older readers come in many flavors, and the majority of young people (like the majority of old people) wouldn’t read a haiku if it was printed on a beer can. They’d just switch to a dumber brand.
I have no problem reading texts onscreen, and the technology for such reading (ereaders, e-ink, etc.) is improving all the time. I have a pretty large library of free books from the 19th century, happily downloaded from Google Books (and elsewhere) hiding in my Macintosh, and I read them happily enough. I also like three dimensional, old style, books. I like what we are now prone to call “texts,” alas for the hideous terminology. My eyes are weak, but screens and paper are pretty much all one thing to me now. (Onscreen, I can easily make the font bigger, a good thing for dimsighted geezers such as myself.) Different people have different tolerances; your mileage may vary. But surely we have at least a marginally better chance of attracting younger, and maybe just different, readers to good writing without losing too many, if any, of the ones we already had.
Your production costs go down; your ease of production goes up; your distribution is instantaneous and ubiquitous; and your readership can respond immediately (as I am doing now) to what they read. I’m not anxious for paper to go away, and I don’t think it will; but I see nothing but upsides in the burgeoning digital literary culture.
Go for it, with my blessing.
That’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? My blessing?
Go with Dog, my son. Your magazine is the loaves, fishes, and soup bones of literature.
There are many things that I think I should feel worse about than I do: I inherited fragile fingernails and big knuckles and, as both of my sisters have lamented, “the Melvins’ thin lips.” Certain vocabulary words are just gone. I can’t see investing in a download from I-tunes of Jim Croce albums, which I have on cassettes, or the sound-track from Camelot that I have on an LP—much as I enjoyed them long ago. (TMI?: Jim Croce was the boyfriend I never had and Guenevere the contested beloved I never was.)
When I was new to the business of publishing, as a university press editor, and the industry began floating the idea of e-books, I did feel terrible. Just terrible. Briefly. Like many people, I was intoxicated by the smell of a new book from an early age (fourth grade to be exact when the Scholastic Book shipment arrived every few weeks). After months of working with authors on their manuscripts (and seeing those manuscripts through copyediting, typesetting, designing, proofing, and printing), that one first copy, plucked from a carton of books just received from the printer on the loading dock, seemed an absolute miracle. As an independent editor these days, I confess, I still insist on hard copies of the manuscripts I take on—not because they smell good, but because I adore my Sharpie felt-tipped pens and blue pencils (which are getting more difficult to come by, by the by. I’m buying them by the gross now).
I think I should feel worse, that is to say, about the print-to-pixel revolution underway in book, newspaper, magazine, and journal publishing. Instead, imperfect as paradigm shifts may be, it all makes sense in ways I didn’t expect. At the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh this past week I walked through a retrospective photographic exhibit, tin-types to digital prints, and everything in between. Either/or or both/and?: that remains to be seen. Me, I predict that beautifully assembled physical books will continue to be produced, but I’m less convinced that my next book will or should be among them. I’m serious: it will be worthy and artful but not something probably necessary for the ages.
Maybe, in its place, I’d choose the book by that incredible young author whose manuscript I’ll read next month; maybe his or her work truly deserves to survive on paper, that most enduring of media, in a vault someplace. And, please, may there be someone somewhere smarter than I am who sees the aesthetic and artistic importance of those works and insists on bringing ink in communion with fiber.
In the meantime, I’m choosing to feel just fine about all of this. I’m proud that my essay is in the first virtual edition of Ascent. Very proud. Lewis Hyde is right: art is a gift that accrues value as it changes hands – and minds. Forward.
And forward this website.
Dear Scott,
Readers are not hard to come by: Subscribers are. When the head of the Electronic Frontier Foundation says that “information wants to be free” his connotation doubles. Look at the music business, which usually leads, before the print business follows it into obliviousness, if not oblivion.
You’ve made Ascent accessible, which is great, so many more people will have access to it. They can pass articles around more easily, they can chat and comment more easily (though comments are a mixed blessing: Ask any newspaper editor what they think of the garbage that generally follows a story in the comments section).
And I don’t think there is such a thing as “reading”, or rather, that reading is now breaking down into types of reading: snippets, short form, long form, digital, print, hypertext, multimedia embedding or juxtaposing like “vook”. And by the way, it’s not new, just pervasive (think of text with silent movies, intros to movies like Star Wars, liner notes for the old record albums: How many times did you read the Dead’s liner notes and album covers while listening to the music?). For 500 years, a book was portable, now BOOKS are portable. You can take the entire contents of the Concord Public Library on a three-day vacation to Cape May. Text is portable: I can take it from anywhere and sample it into anywhere. Look at Felix Feneon or David Markson.
My question to you is when will on-line Ascent have a “printed” story by you about flying your plane over the Alaskan tundra with interspersts of a home video of you in the cockpit with Willie Nelson playing in the background?
Harold
Hi Everyone,
I thought I’d throw out a question to get the Readers Blog started.
As we’ve been moving Ascent from print to on-line format, I’ve received a great many emails saying, in one way or another, that this is the future. But the future of what?
Here are some observations and questions.
1) I love paper and glue. I love the printed book. But I also notice that while I go back to books and re-open and re-read all the time, I rarely go back to magazines–even literary magazines. While I cannot say I would enjoy Moby Dick on a Kindle, I can say I enjoy newspapers and many magazines on-line. Is there something about the beast itself that allows one format while not allowing another? It has to be something more than just size.
2) We say that reading on a computer screen is at some level unpleasant. But most of us spend our days reading on screens. We read email on a computer or a cell phone. We write our poems and plays and stories and novels and essays on computers. Has reading on line finally become usual or comfortable enough for the process of reading to become, for lack of a better word, invisible?
3) Looking at the analytic software for this site, I can tell you that yesterday (the first day anyone could see the site), people were reading. I can tell this by looking at how long people stayed on certain pages. (If they weren’t reading, they clicked on a story or poem or essay and then left it on their screen while they went and fixed lunch.) And, I can tell you that yesterday–on just that one day–we had four times as many readers as we had subscribers to the print version. *Is* this–the on-line format–the necessary future for the magazine?
All best,
Scott