Steve Augustine -- author (various works at "The Ept, the Ane, and the Fantile":)

Steve Augustine of "The Ept, the Ane, and the Fantile":

1. CBT: Unknown musicians record their own music in basements -- and, if they've got talent, people take them seriously. Unknown film-makers shoot movies with DV cameras -- and, if they've got talent, people take them seriously. But unknown writers who self-publish -- in particular those who self-publish online -- are frequently snickered at whether they're talented or not, or, more often, given the publishing world's gesture of choice: the cold shoulder.

What do you think is the explanation for this? Is the publishing world the callowest of all the arts? Is it, despite the bromide that one not judge a book by its cover, the one in most need of a "package"? Or will the prejudice against publishing online change, once people become more acculturated to online creative work?

SA: The problem isn't with the publishing world, in my opinion, but with the audience; don't forget that workers in the publishing field are drawn from the same general pool as the readers. Reading isn't at the top of the list of most people's pleasures; far from it. It's my sense that most consider reading a chore, or very hard work, and I'd lay the blame for this on the educational system. Things might change in the schools of the near-future, when classes are conducted almost entirely in the form of sounds and pictures; maybe reading will come to seem like giddy escapist fun to our saucer-eyed, hairless descendants. Who knows?

As to the apparent contempt factor: isn't it more that the burden of proof (on the Artist) increases in direct proportion to the effort (on the part of the audience) the Art requires? Few cultural artifacts are less useful/more lifeless than a poorly-written poem/short story/novel. I can't think of an artform in which genuine talent is more necessary. The reader is understandably wary.

Remember, too, that no one can give you the "cold shoulder" if you don't approach them in the first place. The astonishingly liberating aspect of the internet re: self-publishing is that the reader comes to the writer. The writer is no longer forced to be that insincere supplicant, begging agents, editors, publishers or readers for the time of day.

I have no gripe with people who don't read. My only literary gripes are with professionals who author/publish/critique literary fiction in a half-assed way, and with readers who accept this.

Now, considering the prejudice against online literature, there's clearly a surfeit of irremediable shit to be found online. But that stuff's easily identified and ignored (filtered). Meanwhile, what's lost in the din of the "print" vs "blog" debate is the fact that the dominant riff...can blogs ever be as good as print?...is a leading question; is prejudicial; should be stricken from the records by the judge. There are online writers and critics who consistently generate material of a much higher standard than almost anything you'll read in a magazine or a newspaper these days. The print-published writers I know of who also "blog" are not tormented by ghastly paradoxes.

I won't name names, because I don't want to be labeled a (b)log-rolling arse-creeper, but the "bloggers" I'm praising here have the distinct advantage of writing without column-inch, deadline, or decorum-related constraints. The material they offer is usually well-researched, typo-free, elegantly argued, and often runs to far more than 5,000 words. Comparing the "blog" and "print" reviewers that I regularly read, it's only ever the "print" professionals that I catch bluffing and skimming their assigned books, either in apathy, or to meet a deadline.

Since most old-format writers are doing it for beer money and the very thin gilt of a faded prestige, it's simply not reasonable to assume that talent will cluster exclusively around the beer money. I'm acquainted with a London-based academic who publishes his exquisite arcana online, and there is no known equivalent in magazines and newspapers; certainly not in the lowbrow-by-comparison New Yorker.

2. One of the great achievements of 20th C. literature was the ascendancy of uncompromisingly honest, thinly veiled autobiographical fiction: writers from Penelope Mortimer, Violette Leduc to Philip Roth and Knut Hamsen come to mind. In the early days of the 21st Century, this is in real danger of being lost; as Adam Bellow describes in an upcoming interview, starting in the 1990s, large publishing houses generally gave up on being the breeding ground of this sort of fiction. And in effect this led them to give up on the mid-list literary first novel. And book review pages have very rarely given sufficient coverage to small press releases, thus consigning most of their titles to premature oblivion. The end result for the sort of novel described above is clear.

What can be done to reverse this trend? Or will certain kinds of literary fiction slowly be smothered by 21st Century dullness - what you once referred to as "the sinisterly dumb future"?

SA: At the risk of sounding hopeless, I'm sure there's nothing that can be done to reverse this trend, just as nothing can reverse its reversal. You can't march/boycott/legislate against the popularity of the hoola-hoop any more than you can do any of the above to bring it back.

The paradox/glimmer of hope in all this is that the very explosion in communications technology accelerating the arrival of that "sinisterly dumb future" also renders society's various culture-blocs far more fluid than they once were. A few thousand people who love the sort of novel that we're both afraid is vanishing will not only find each other online in forums and chat rooms, but will find the writer still willing to write that way (and may well end up being that writer's patrons).

For the sake of his/her own sanity, the fledgling writer must learn to think in terms of thousands (words/dollars/readers), rather than the millions of which the wannabe pop star is encouraged to dream. If we can make this adjustment, we can be happy.

Consider: this interview is a good example of the miraculous possibilities. Here I am, an absolute unknown, being given the opportunity to go on record with my crackpot theories and beliefs. Someone in Calcutta could well be nursing a Coke and frowning over these rambles at this very moment. If that isn't mind-blowing, it should be.

3. CBT: Turning to your own work: in a story, "The Graduate", recently published at your site "The Ept, the Ane and the Fantile", you describe scenes from an affair between Robert, a young man who seems not to be so much in between jobs as in between destinies, and the considerably older Miriam Wallace, the wife of a friend of his parents, Alan and Dot.

Robert and Miriam begin their affair in the present day after meeting (Robert can't remember if it's their first meeting) at a Christmas party. But the affair is framed very much within the context of his parents' long-standing relationship with Victor Wallace, Miriam's husband. In turn, the relationship Alan and Dot have with Victor is framed within the context of the swinging of the 1970s, Victor's first marriage to the now-deceased Marnie, and Victor's sexuality, which could be described both literally and metaphorically as fluid.

On the one hand Robert is sophisticated beyond his years. On the surface, he isn't fazed by his father's confession of what took place between his parents and the Wallaces several decades before. But why, then, Robert's judgmental response to his own parents? Is this the residual fastidiousness of adolescence, which is disgusted not only by the confessions of sexual need and adventurousness parents occasionally make, but also their unhip way of expressing themselves? (After all, Robert feels a need to place several of Alan's words in mildly denigrating quotation marks.) Or is Robert's reaction much deeper than that? (After all, Robert's upset is quite palpable: soon after Alan tells Robert about the foursomes he and Dot engaged in with the Wallaces, Robert has a vivid wish-fulfillment fantasy of a car crash that kills him and his parents.)

SA: I'm hesitant to answer any "why" questions about these characters (or my characters in general) because the skill I'm attempting to master in writing these people at all is to make them believable, and interesting, to the degree that when I put them in motion, the reader is engaged, asking her/his own questions, developing his/her own answers. Some of the questions/answers will be visceral (instantaneous) and others will come later. My answers to these "why" questions aren't definitive.

I had a discussion-via-email with a writer a few weeks ago and I floated the theory that once you get the characters right, the story writes itself, and I stand by that assertion. As Alexander Theroux says, "Character is plot." I create the characters, set the thing in motion and watch.

When I was young and less knowing about the world, I had the verbal facility to write well, yet no ability to flesh real characters; the characters I cranked out were wishful cartoons. I knew I wasn't a writer yet (though I have to say that plenty of young writers have launched careers with the same limited skill set, so maybe I'm stupid).

It's always a great pleasure to hear back from a reader whose grasp of psychology is so fine that I'm enlightened by the response, which is what I experienced reading your questions. I have the feeling you know Robert better than I do. I hope I won't seem lazy if I prefer to leave it at that.

I will say, in regard to "The Graduate", that I'm interested in anachronisms (in a world in which fads cycle so rapidly they overlap their own revivals), and in the fish out of water in general; the paradox that we're all fish out of water now, estranged from the era. Not to invoke old Alvin Toffler here, but the future arrived quite a while ago, though its proper inhabitants are still a few years away. In that sense, perhaps Robert, Victor, Marnie, Miriam, Alan and Dot are all unhappy ghosts. Maybe it's a mild-mannered horror story on one level.

But I must admit I laughed a lot while writing it.

4. CBT: "The Graduate" deftly sketches the mores of a particular age -- the 1970s -- and also a sensibility -- that of a particular social class that might most accurately be described as the gourgeousie. The 1970s are gone. And maybe, as far as Alan, Dot, Miriam and Victor are concerned, the heyday of the gourgeousie is gone, too: Miriam and Victor's behaviour seems motivated by a desire to hang onto the past even while Miriam is openly cynical about the attempt.

But the gourgeoisie is still with us -- is always with us: if educated, well-brought-up members of contemporary society have one prejudice, it is the prejudice of looksism ... a tendency to privilege beauty. What, if anything, does Robert symbolize as far as these two meta-phenomena are concerned? He's woefully ahistorical in Miriam's eyes -- apparently his knowledge of 1970s cinema is non-existent. And once he begins sleeping with Miriam, Robert is by far the more romantic of the two. Is Robert beyond looksism? Or is Miriam -- as Victor's first wife Marnie was for Alan -- so cute that she simply gets Robert's juices going?

SA: Well, privileging beauty is such a universal human tendency (at least to the extent that "beauty" started its conceptual existence meaning "strength/health/quality of genes") that I wouldn't blame any class or era for it. Current notions of beauty may or may not be decadent, but we are stuck with them while they're around; the consolation being that they seem to shift a lot. In the period stretching from my childhood to my first marriage, for example, I saw body builders go from being heroes for male adolescents, to pathetic figures open to ridicule, to mainstream cultural icons.

I can't worry enough about Looksism to speak out against it, though the degree to which "we" pretend to dislike what we love is always of interest. I can quite vividly remember, for example, as a very young man, pretending to abhor large breasts whenever my lover was a woman with small breasts, and then testifying to the opposite when the situation was reversed, whereas the Truth (all things being equal) is that we tend to want whatever it is we don't have...until we learn to master that problem, which may be a quirk in the wiring. The mastering of the problem may be what we call "maturity".

Also, I wonder if Robert really is the more romantic of the two? Is Miriam's speech("...is what we do erotic?") sincere cynicism on her part, or is she merely protecting herself?

Darwin wrote, in his autobiography, "A novel is a work of the first rank only when it has some character whom one can love, and if this character is a beautiful woman, so much the better." Coming from the father of the concept of Natural Selection, that's a pretty authoritative endorsement of Looksism.

5. CBT: "The Graduate" has many parallels to an earlier story, "Woman Older, Boy at Rest", except here the setting is Germany, and here the language of the story works differently. For example, the adulterous wife who picks up the young man and takes him for a drive in her malfunctioning convertible is described as follows:

"She looks much better with the yellow wig (now stowed in the glove compartment) off and her hair turns out to be a pearly bob raked by the wind’s dark fingers, thin as champagne but luminous and full of bounce, snapping back into shape at every available opportunity of stop light. Her facelift is a cartoonist’s allusion to speed, it looks intrepid, the way the corners of her eyes and mouth sweep back as she leans forward over the wheel, driving far-sightedly, but she’s a handsome woman with a softening jawline and a debutante’s nose, upturned, decorative, a master’s knifework."

How much is the woman in the story in strong possession of herself? At one point, the boy looks at her and feels envy: "Her confidence strikes him as a kind of wisdom". But she also seems painfully sensitive to the insecurities that aging leaves one vulnerable to: " 'Have you ever been with an older woman?' [she says] and he laughs so hard and long at this that she turns as red as a silver dish of Thanksgiving cranberries on her grandmother’s white embroidered table cloth in 1957".

Is age the great leveler? Or is her vulnerability primarily a woman's vulnerability, and an indication of the sexism of the genes?

SA: First off, I wouldn't say that age is the great leveler so much as Death is. Death, and the brevity of the human lifespan. When the rich of the distant future are living to be a healthy 500, "unfair" will take on a whole new meaning. As it is, I doubt that Bill Gates will outlive my grandmother, so that's the great leveler, and the one overwhelmingly "fair" aspect of life.

These two stories are permutations on an older woman/younger guy theme I address in other stories. "Woman, Older," features a character who also features in another story, "I am Philly Dawg," in which she dwells on her past, and is paired, metaphysically, with a black male teenager she spies on in a park, at night, in the dead of winter. She fears the black teen but she's perfectly safe, because he doesn't know she's watching. She watches in amazement as he sits on a bench, alone in the cold dark, weeping.

It's my feeling that in terms of any power struggles I present, the participants are always at an impasse or stalemate, appearances to the contrary, and that most power struggles in real life, on close inspection, are the same. (Of course I'm talking about things on a personal scale, human vs human; not what corporations, or governments, do to individuals). Winning and losing, in this sense, are fairytale concepts, and drive a kind of narrative that doesn't interest me. Without a winner or loser, the story has no "moral," and that's my philosophical position, as a writer, in a nutshell. No moral. The good are not rewarded and the evil are not punished. And are the good really "good"?

Do either of the older women in these two Autumn/May stories suffer the effects of sexism? I don't know. I only accept the words "sexist" and "racist" with the understanding that they're both deeply-ingrained aspects of human nature. If the concept of race itself isn't "racist", what is?

6. Turning tables, in your novella "The Bomb Collector", the main protagonist John is a rootless expat living in Germany who has several affairs, though they tend to be fleeting. Above all, John is conscious of how he is being affected by aging:

"Oh, so many pretty girls, then and now, frail and intimidating, saturated with that hot light that young men crave and go blind for (and that the savage ones smash into darkness sometimes, with words or fists). Bright outfits, long silks of dark and pale hair, trinkets of laughter…I wanted to cry and laugh about crying and sniff my tears and get on with it, move on, get myself out of the way, self-conscious about stumbling across that brave road with its mindless, fast traffic. My God, I’m old…that’s what those eyes…the eyes I made defiant contact with…that’s what they told me: you’re old. Some smiled, most scowled, a few frowned with puzzlement: you’re old. Don’t you know it? Get out of the road!"

Referring back to question 5, is age itself the great leveler? Or are there a variety of factors -- e.g., gender, social class, fame, looks -- that turn age into "age"; a characteristic that afflicts a salaried individual or an obscure artist, but is not applicable to a freak of health and fame such as a Picasso?

SA: "The Bomb Collector" is my meditation on middle-aged sexuality, framed as a refutation of standard practises in fiction (all those neatly predictable schematics). Things happen in this novel, as they do in life, and some of the things lead to other things and some don't, as they do in life: the overall "meaning" of the events in the novel only exist in the main character's interpretation of them...as in life. There are coincidences, but the only meaningful coincidences (traditional storytelling is full of meaningful coincidences, which are usually narrative shortcuts, or indications of a Divine Will at work, or both) turn out to be conspiracies. Again, as in life.

There is no arc, no progress, no fortune at stake, but the novel is short enough, and vivid enough, to maintain some readers' attention despite withholding these common spurs to page-turning. It's very much a soap-opera as written by someone who'd prefer to sell no soap.

It's significant that the main character of the book is middle-aged, because middle age is usually about the time that it dawns on some of us that one's life story isn't a supernaturally-intentional narrative; one's life story doesn't "mean" anything other than what one can make it mean, mostly in retrospect. As a young man, I had a butterfly alight upon the pointing finger of my outstretched hand once, and I thought that meant something. John, of "The Bomb Collector", now knows better.

How to salvage a dignity of meaning from the false starts, blind alleys and random decisions that the heap of data called his Life embodies? John's solution is to write a novel called "The Bomb Collector"...just as adults with deprived childhoods sometimes heal that wound by having children and lavishing the children with everything, some of us feeling that real life suffers the lack of an overarching narrative will heal that wound by writing fiction.

I'm not an atheist, but I'm definitely agnostic, and my work is very consciously divorced from the Judeo-Christian matrix upon which the novel-as-moral-instruction, or the novel-as-chronicle-of-progress, is founded. The notion of "progress" itself seems impossible without a Kingdom of Heaven towards which all human activity is supposedly moving, or a Watcher/God to please with our feats and sacrifices. Quirky soul that I am, I don't consider the invention of electric lighting, or the development of a Polio vaccine, et al, "progress"...I consider them consolations.

The only real "progress" or order in "The Bomb Collector" occurs on the level of the novel that John himself is trying to write about a character who...wrote a novel. Writing the novel, he learns things, his novel progresses; events in the novel have "meaning", or he tries to make them to. But in the novel outside the novel...the space that John inhabits...it's not that simple. Entropy rules.

Beyond all that, "The Bomb Collector" is a technical experiment in compressed-novel writing. As long-winded as my replies to your questions may seem, I never really mastered the trick of discursion...the ability to stretch out an idea until it snaps (or turns to warm gas). I've never had any idea or scenario that needed more than, say, one hundred and fifty pages to work itself out. I assumed for the longest time that this meant that I couldn't write novels.

Then it dawned on me that my talent (what there is of it) may in fact be a modern one...that compressed novels are just the thing for people who enjoy finishing a whole book in one evening. I'd say that "The Bomb Collector" covers as much ground as plenty of 300-pagers: just add water and it expands to full-sized.

There are prodigies of discursion, like David Foster Wallace, but I tend to honor the antipodal trick. There's something to be said for being able to express a longish thought with a shortish sentence.

Ironically, one of my favorite novels is the hefty "Underworld," by Mr. DeLillo. I say "ironically", but it's not ironic at all, as I consider that book to be a gem of compression; a 5,000-page epic squeezed into an 827-page novella.

7. CBT: John's most heartfelt involvement is with a woman named Moth who is, as they say in other regions of the internet, barely legal.

John feels both guilty and defensive about his relationship with Moth. At one point there is a passage in the novella that almost reads like a diatribe:

"There are any number of bluestockings of my acquaintance and in my age-class who would abhor this happiness in Moth’s skin. Fucking her wouldn’t even be legal for a teenage boy in most of the 50 states, and, even I, before weathering the existential sandstorm of being a forty-ish house painter with a high I.Q. in Southern California, would have looked askance at what I’m doing with her now. But, well, why not throw buckets of cold water on copulating dogs all day? Shoo away flies in mid-fuck, and haul your randy, gray-shanked baboons and goats and cocks and rabbits off to re-education camps. If Nature never intended middle aged males to fuck teenage females, She wouldn’t have made teenage males so useless.

"There’s bio-karma at work here, too, since many of the middle-aged women who would stone me for fucking Moth now…broke my heart by shunning me when they were young and I was a useless teenager myself. They were all busy with older men, back then, of course. One day, perhaps, Moth herself will be a middle-aged woman shaking her fist at the same disparity. Existence is a joke written in a dead language on a Mobius strip."

Why John's aggressive need to excuse his actions? Is this what the dull PC standards of the 21st Century have come to -- a world in which one not only has to be law-abiding and genuinely moral, but also pander to group-thinky edicts? Or is the voice in John's brain an example within the text of metafiction? In other words, is it an example of how the individual is permitted sexual freedom, but only if he or she can argue effectively against the subtle hypocrisies of our time?

SA: Well, as earlier stated, I hate to say "why", but in this case I can't resist (plus, I don't want to be the world's worst interview):

I think that diatribe is what you'd hear if you could put a stethoscope on John's brain. His thoughts are set on a constant, low-level seethe (therefore the violence that breaks out at the end). His aggression is the aggression of a creature whose natural self is "wrong" by most current standards: he's not interested in material status, he doesn't believe in the god(s), and he's sexually involved with a very young girl (late teens). Society frowns.

Rather than existing as a frustrated, conformist, middle-class citizen, plagued by fantasies at his desk job or in the pew on Sunday, John lives as who he is, though he pays a price: wherever he goes, wherever he stays, he's an exile. On top of the existential pain of accidental consciousness, there's the pain of civilization...of the individual trying to fit in with any group of humans larger than a tribe of a few hundred. The organization of millions of humans requires a bureaucracy, and bureaucracy is the womb of the Kafkaesque Hell. Artistic types and serial killers suffer the pain of civilization the most vividly, I think.

I'm always astonished at the people who pretend that their polite and politically correct public comportment is an accurate reflection of their inner selves. Older women with younger men...younger women with older men...it's not quite bestiality, is it? I tend to have a visceral reaction to the late-20th century spin on the word "appropriate".

The modern mania for euphemistic speech (calling the crippled "otherly enabled", or the overweight "curvy", or framing a military action to control an oilfield as a "struggle to establish democracy", etc) is not only divorcing words from their meanings, as Orwell pointed out, but people from their feelings, and the feelings from the bodies that host them. Meta-Fiction is one thing, but what we're actually witnessing is Meta-Life. The fiction didn't invent the condition, it merely reports on it. Welcome to the Age of Disjunction.

Finally, the delicious irony of the passage you quote is that John is gloating over his young lover, unaware of the fact that he's already lost her...to the arms of a middle aged woman.

8. CBT: Before meeting Moth, John has the briefest of flings with another expat named Amanda Nye. Amanda, to put it simply, doesn't turn John's crank. And so they have more of an encounter than an affair. But Amanda is smart and articulate and, John learns with envy, a published writer. Later, when John meets Moth, he tells her he writes and she responds with a somewhat naive admiration. This only turbo-charges John's dissatisfactions with his own life:

"She assumed, of course, that I was a published writer; that I earned my living from words. I could have taken her back to Amanda Nye’s place and introduced her, saying Now, this is a real writer, Moth; she has a book out and everything…unlike me. Instead, I acted the part for my little fan. To lie about being a published writer is to be closer to being a published writer than if one is honest about not being one, after all. I went into great detail about my book. If there’s one thing anyone who’s committed a year or two of his or her life to the founding and maintenance of a text knows, people with whom one can discuss the effort are far and few between. Songwriters have it easy: they ask for between three and five minutes of your time, on average. Painters even easier: usually, a glance will do it. But a writer…someone working on a novel…is truly a wretch, waiting for that rare patient angel with hours, days, weeks of attention to dedicate towards the reading and discussing of one’s goddamned creation."

Referring back to the theme raised in question 1, is there any hope for an individual like John? As he says, the novel asks so much from its audience in terms of attention that simply finding people willing to read one's work is a struggle. Furthermore, in an age when major publishers are downloading the vetting of first novel manuscripts to agents, and a substantial number of agents are eschewing literary fiction, it is fantastically difficult to make any kind of living from serious fiction writing. Is it over for the Johns of cultural production? Or do new technologies such as the internet offer new hope?

SA: I'm not even sure that John finishes writing "The Bomb Collector", or would consider himself a serious writer...people start diaries and novels all the time, and leave these things to languish in boxes while real life distracts them.

But my answer to your question is: when the dust clears (or congeals into stars), the internet will have worked out the issue of payment, both to the detriment of so many of us getting so much for "free" now, and to the delight of content providers (as some of us also are). I'm quite sure lots of hired guns are busy, thinking day and night, figuring out a way to wean us all of our free-online-content habit. We'll look back on these days with incredulous sighs.

My intuition is that those of us doing it now will have to wait a while to see whether there's money in our futures. We came along too late to participate in the heyday of the old form, and maybe a little too early to reap the benefits of the revolution.

But was there ever an era in which more than a handful of lucky bastards made money writing?

Nathan Whitlock -- novelist, critic (Quill and Quire) repost

Nathan Whitlock, author of the upcoming novel "A Week of This" and review editor at Quill and Quire: 1. CBT: Large Canadian publishing houses are now mimicking large American publishing houses by adopting a "no unsolicited manuscripts" policy. In other words, a writer must have an agent to have an editor at a large Canadian house even consider a book proposal. Is this fair or even rational, given that Canada has a disproportionately small number of literary agents? (We only have roughly a dozen individuals or agencies that a writer would find desirable to work with, compared to the hundreds the U.S. possesses. On top of this, a no unsoliciteds policy is not an inevitable result of 21st Century corporate impatience; both France and Britain have large houses that will at least consider unsoliciteds.) In short, are large Canadian publishers walling themselves off, and making it effectively impossible for lesser-known writers to gain even the most fleeting access to them? 

NW: Yes and no. The reality is that most big houses, despite official policy, often have some low-ranking employee or intern giving the slush-pile a once over. The other reality is that, as many people have pointed out, most slush is just that: thick, brown, mush that just clogs everything up. There is also the reality that, in Canada, it is very nearly impossible to not get published if you have any talent at all. Granted, you may be doing it for nothing or next to nothing, and you may end up publishing with a press that prints 500 copies of your book and lets them all sit in un-opened boxes in the publisher's mom's garage, but you can still get published, and with that published book comes a certain amount of automatic recognition (in some circles) that an ambitious author can build on. It all sounds grasping and tawdry, but that's how it happens, usually. With a published book, you have a better chance at nabbing freelance writing gigs, where you can get the attention of magazine and newspaper editors, who may be able to recommend you to more reputable (not necessarily larger) presses for your next book. So yes, big presses cut themselves off from raw talent by not checking the slush pile often enough, but raw talent can get published elsewhere, and a lot of what passes for raw talent is merely raw, as in sewage. 

2. CBT: In this interview series, R. M. Vaughan has commented that Canada needs a strengthened tradition of publishing genre fiction; by implication, our culture generally -- high and low (I think it would be fair to say Vaughan is self-consciously a high-brow writer) -- would benefit. Judy Stoffman, on the other hand, has argued that Canadians simply don't go for genre fiction. Who do you agree with more? 

NW: Canadians DO go for genre fiction -- they just keep getting told they don't. If you look at the actual bestseller listings from BookNet Canada any week of the year, you'll find that most of it is genre fiction, broadly defined. There is a surprising amount of Canadian literary fiction on those lists, which is great, but even there, the fiction that sells a lot often does so for reasons other than a mass appreciation for fine language. Plus, I tend to argue that middlebrow literary fiction is itself a kind of genre, with the same cliches and expectations and hungry (and often less discerning) readership. And that's fine, as long as it doesn't get confused with real literature, as it does in just about every weekend book section in the country. 

3. CBT: A lot of American literary magazines have a forceful online presence: they offer complete short stories to be read, they allow for online submissions. Canadian lit magazines (with a few exceptions, such as The Danforth Review) don't. A survey of the online presence of Canadian lit mags shows that they do not have much (or any) of their content online, and do not allow email submissions. They seem, to put it bluntly, behind the times. Should Canadian literary magazines be more pro-active in taking advantage of the internet? And given that a strong internet presence requires more labour, should they get Canada Council funding specifically for this? 

NW: Yes, and yes. With the accompanying proviso that free and online does not necessarily mean sloppy. That stuff needs to be edited and editorially considered, too, if it wants to be taken seriously. Otherwise, why do it? This doesn't just mean eliminate typos, but also eliminate sloppy thinking and work that is just a sloppy imitation of what you could find more professionally done elsewhere. Some online magazines recognize this part, and consequently offer things only they can. 

4. CBT: Should Canadian movie makers/TV producers work in much closer concert with novelists? Would all forms of fictional narrative benefit if there were this kind of integration between media? 

NW: Possibly. Novelists would get more money, which, speaking as one who will soon join their ranks, would be nice. I would say, though, that one problem these movie maker/author collaborations have had when they do occur, is that the movie makers, not all that well-read in CanLit, often approach some "big names" -- authors who get a lot of press and who are published by big publishers and who produce fat, impressive-looking novels that contain the barest of stories being smothered by a lot of dull, literary fat. We have a number of highly regarded mystery authors, for example, as well as horror writers, who could probably come up with a better movie -- or at least better dialogue -- than someone writing about lonely spinsters and symbolically oversignificant caches of letters found in symbolically oversignificant attics. Not saying that all the movies made should be mysteries, thrillers, and horrors (not that that would be a bad thing), but that a genre writer might have a better sense of plotting and pace than someone more concerned with limning the ineffable. (I should say here that I very rarely read genre fiction, and then only when paid to, so I'm not going all Stephen King here -- I just think that, as a medium, film is more conducive to the adaptation genre work than more literary work. Which is why The Godfather and The Exorcist and Seven will last longer than any Merchant-Ivory film. Even Apocalypse Now is as much a noir thriller as it is Heart of Darkness.) 

5. CBT: Do we, like the U.S., over-rely on MFA programs as "farm teams" for writers? The MFA model leaves a lot to be desired: instead of uniformly focussing on fostering talent, the classes are on occasion hot-houses of favouritism, cliquishness and brown-nosing. And the MFA model has no real tradition to justify its contemporary prevalence: from the 19th to mid-20th Century, during the height of the literary novel's popularity, the idea that one could "become" a writer by going to a university and taking courses in it would have been considered not only laughable but pathetic and wrong-headed. Does the MFA model need a revolution? Yes, emerging writers need mentorship, and yes, working writers need a day job. But is the current model lending MFA programs too much power in terms of determining who eventually gets published, and are there other, alternative systems you can think of? 

NW: This question could be called "leading the witness." MFA programs are the alternative system, as far as I'm concerned. I think their importance is overstated, though they are at least partly responsible for the cult of competence that has CanLit in its grip at the moment. Real writers will do what they do, inside or outside of that system. 

6. CBT: Thinking of movies: do we need a strengthened screen quota -- that is, a law obligating theatres to show Canadian content x number of days every year ... "x" being more than they do now? 

NW: I think we need better movies, at least. How that comes about, I have absolutely no idea. I have often tried to get a screenwriter friend of mine to explain the complexities of Telefilm funding, and it always ends up sounding like some satirical sub-Kakfka bit by George Saunderson or a skit by Stephen Frye and Hugh Laurie, with every stage of conception subject to new rules, new funding.

7. CBT: Implicit in many of the posts at your lit-blog "tk" is the idea that criticism matters; that honest, tough-minded criticism is necessary to keep a nation's literature from sinking into mediocrity. First, is this a fair description of your thinking on the issue? And is there currently a lack of sufficient good-quality criticism in Canada?

NW: Yes. And yes. 

8. CBT: You recently took Yann Martel to task over his over-the-top rhetorical style in an article he wrote for the Globe about his current campaign to meet Prime Minister Stephen Harper in the hopes of lobbying the government to increase funding for the Canada Council. Agreeing that Martel's writing style was conspicuously overblown ("Repent! Repent!" etc.), is it not nevertheless the case that he's fighting a good cause and should be cut a bit of slack? Or is this an overly Canadian response, and, given some of Martel's more questionable assertions ("Truly I say to you, there are only two sets of tools with which the rich soil of life can be worked: the religious and the artistic"), is it not healthy that writers are occasionally sharp with each other? 

NW: Inasmuch as Martel is not doing any harm -- or any good -- I am happy to let him send Harper's office another Penguin Classic every couple of weeks. I hope some underpaid intern there is having a good read, or at least selling them in the Byward Market for cash. I don't see any problem with writers being sharp with each other. Stephen Henighan, to his everlasting credit, has said some very sharp -- in both senses of the word -- things about his CanLit peers. He has also said some ridiculous things, and has had some sharp things said back because of it. That is as it should be, and it makes the whole enterprise more fun, more exciting, and more of interest to people who love books but hate the earnest, trembling, passive culture that seems to come along with books. (In case it needs to be said, I can't stand Stephen Harper, but his reading habits are the last thing I'm worried about. My worry is that he has read TOO much -- Machiavelli, Sun-Tzu, Kissinger - while many of his opponents seem to not understand the first thing about politics or strategy or the country they are seeking to lead.)

10. CBT: Martel's strategy for influencing Stephen Harper is to mail a book to the Prime Minister's Office every two weeks in the hopes the PMO will eventually relent and grant him a meeting. However, when one goes to the site Martel has built to promote his campaign, one notices a curious thing: although the whole point of Martel's project (apart from promoting "stillness") is to assist Canadian writing, there is very little actual CanCon at his site. That is, none of the the novels he's chosen so far (with the exception of "By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept") are by Canadians. And none of them -- not one -- is set in Canada. Similarly, Rick Groen, in a recent piece in the Globe entitled "Books Still Win" (July 13) waxes enthusiastic about the "life" that the literary novel still possesses and then primarily uses ... American and British examples. What's going on here? Canadian culture has had a long history of de facto or subtle colonization. But are we now at the stage where we are colonizing *ourselves*? That, in effect, we are not even aware of when we undercut our own own culture?

NW: Possibly. But then again, you can find "stillness" anywhere, can't you? I think that question requires an answer closer to the length of a book, to be honest. 11. CBT: Canadian culture has traditionally excelled at documentaries and news programming. Yet in recent years, journalists such as a personal favourite of yours, Mark Steyn, have been given platforms in national media. Steyn, to put it simply, is a joke. His writing evinces emotional imbalance (for example, his post-Virginia Tech Massacre ruminations on the Marc Lepine Massacre at L'ecole Polytechnique), and he is a light-weight in terms of his understanding of contemporary history (such as his version of what drove Margaret Thatcher to re-take the Falklands). Yet apart from the fact that he has settled in the U.S. (you recently linked to a perceptive article by James Wolcott in which Wolcott referred to Steyn as a "self-hating" Canadian), he seems to be determined to make his voice heard within Canada.... in other words, the bar of journalistic quality in the country will be lowered that much further. Returning to the question of criticism's role in maintaining a culture's equilibrium and health, are we at a point where we are just not serious enough about who is allowed in print in this country? Antidotes to fundamentally amateurish thinkers like Steyn such as FRANK have been relegated to user-unfriendly pay-per-use internet sites, where their influence is diminished. The CBC has stopped doing biting political satire a la Max Ferguson. And, with a few exceptions, bloggers in Canada apparently just don't care. Could we learn a thing or two from the sharp-tongued commentators of British and U.S. culture and increase the degree of cutting, intelligent comment in our country? 

NW: There certainly are a lot of dimwits in Canadian media, but that's a whole other interview. The few Canadian political blogs I have peeked at seem like pale imitations of the big American ones like Eschaton or Daily Kos. In fact, a lot of them use the same language and catch phrases as Eschaton's Atrios, about the same (American) issues. I would love to see more cutting, intelligent comment in this country. It's why, as bad as it can get, I love reading FRANK. The Canadian culture industry seems unable to admit how pathetic we are in so many ways. I would argue (as does Atwood in Survival, in a way), that admitting to that patheticness (pathetictude?) could be something to build on, culturally. A lot of Maritime writers have done it, Mordecai Richler did it, the Trailer Park Boys did it, why can't the rest of us? 

12. CBT: When discussing the hegemony of American culture over Canadian, Canadians repeatedly declare that beyond a certain point this is inevitable, and it is so for economic reasons. And while allowing that economic power is a massive factor in all aspects of life, is there not something else at work in the Canadian psyche? Is there not an argument for saying that Canadians (and perhaps here rabid types like Steyn have a point) just don't try as hard as they could? Consider the example of the lit-blogosphere. Here the argument that American culture reigns supreme because of economic advantage breaks down: blogging is free. Yet the Canadian lit-blogging scene is a pale shadow of its American counterpart. Moreover, speaking anecdotally, on average I tend to find the U.S. bloggers somewhat friendlier and more open to exchanging links, etc. Canadian bloggers (and please keep in mind that there are always exceptions) seem more prone to passivity. Evidence of this is the degree to which Canadian lit-blogs do not link to each other as much as they might in their blog-rolls or posts. As suggested above, do we need to do more to create our own literary and/or political culture on the internet? 

NW: Yes. (Though I will admit I have no links on my own blog, for a lot of semi-professional but possibly trivial reasons. Maybe I should.) The problem is that such a thing does not occur because we theoretically decide "this must be created" -- it happens because, as I said above, something is getting done in sufficient quantity and numbers that can't be found elsewhere. The political and literary culture on the net is not starving due to a lack of links, but because there's not enough good writing/commentary being done. What needs to be followed is a kind of cultural business model (and I admit I don't do this): find a niche, and pursue it relentlessly. A guy who works on comic books has created a massive archive, with commentary, of the complete evolution of Marvel and DC comic book logos - someone I work with showed me this. I don't even like comic books, but I was impressed. It's the kind of thing that would make a great coffee table book someday. That site probably gets more visitors in one day than all the Canadian lit sites (like mine) who link to this or that eyebrow-raising story about James Frey in the Guardian or wherever. That niche is covered, that audience is getting served. It's why my own site has ever less literary content on it and more and more cheap gags -- five minutes at the Quillblog (which I also blog for) or Bookninja or Goodreports or the Literary Saloon and you're covered, Guardian link-wise. BIO: Nathan Whitlock is the review editor of Quill & Quire, Canada's publishing magazine. His reviews, non-fiction, and fiction have appeared in the Toronto Star, Maisonneuve, Geist, The Globe and Mail, Toro, Saturday Night, and elsewhere. He was the winner of the inaugural Emerging Artist in Creative Writing Award and the Short Prose for Developing Writers Award, as well as runner-up for the Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award. His first novel, A Week of This, will be published in Spring 2008 by ECW Press.

STILLS WITHOUT SCRIPTS

Notables Dangeureux

Mark Kaplan on the un-ironic dangers of irony:

I read that one philosopher-blogger declared that everything he says is a joke. A declaration which would itself be a fairly predictable self-cancelling philosophical joke, no sooner made than evaporating in a question mark. Regardless, the remark reminded me of the empty, faux-ludic nihilism of contemporary ‘irony’ – serving no purpose, devoid of critical or satirical intent, endlessly putting its own speech in quotation marks and the world in brackets. Sometimes it poses as a Deconstructive provisionality, a radicalism so subtle & subjunctive as to leave things exactly as they were before; other times it is a paralysed mockery, its suspicion of seriousness, commitment or Causes merely the alibi of political compliance and withdrawal.


Steve Augustine on On Chesil Beach, middlebrow chivalry, and the dangers of premature beatification of the author:

McEwan’s schematic stacks the deck with the force of stereotypes so entrenched they feel like empirical laws of a natural science. Making the upper class female love-object in this novel superior in almost every way may feel like an expression of the author’s (unconscious? Self-hating?) class prejudice, but it’s also the de rigeur chivalry of the post-feminist celebrity, as it would be difficult to imagine a writer with McEwan’s following getting away with making any of the males in his couples more intelligent than their invariably attractive wives or lovers. Hewing obediently to this unspoken stricture is a minor failure of nerve that doesn’t, on its own, threaten the integrity of the work. But as McEwan ages and his stature grows and he devolves towards the artistic cul-de-sac of Elder Statesmanship, other strictures … other obediences to the sensibilities of his auditors … undermine his mastery. A certain squeamishness sets in.


Nathan Whitlock on the dangers of excessive artistic conservatism:

I'm not sure the world has gone so conservative – culturally, morally, and economically, things can get fairly frontier-town out there, and that's not such a good thing – but it's true that Canadian publishing seems to represent a virtual (and occasionally literal) de-linking of a huge chunk of society from the rest the rest of the world, a perpetual High Tea held on a floating barge that's slowly taking on water. I've watched a lot of people in books – writers, editors, publicists, booksellers, myself – voluntarily and somewhat subconsciously adopt a kind of narrowed cultural vision in order to survive/thrive in the business.

Jon Evans -- novelist, journalist

Jon Evans -- novelist (INVISIBLE ARMIES, BLOOD PRICE, etc.), journalist ("Apocalypse Soon")

Note: In order to put this interview in context, reading Evans' article "Apocalypse Soon" is recommended.

1. In a piece you wrote entitled "Apocalypse Soon" that recently appeared in The Walrus, you argue that print culture -- the publishing industry as it has traditionally been aligned -- is about the be hit by a meteor. And that meteor is digital culture. But these arguments have been floating around for several years. How soon is soon? And what factors can you identify that would bring about these changes in a way conducive to good writing and expanded opportunities for serious authors?

--

Well - that's actually not quite my argument. Culture is important, but secondary. The actual meteor will be a good, reasonably priced, widely available e-book reader that eliminates paper's most important advantage. The Sony Reader I mention in the article is a step in the right direction, but certainly not the answer. It's hard to predict hardware developments (other than Moore's Law) but there is a whole lot of research into various forms of electronic ink going on, so I'll stick my neck out and say we'll see something like that in less than five years.

Culture - well, there are already a whole lot of free books available online, and I think it's reasonable to assume they'll come pre-installed on these readers; we already have the culture of online file-sharing; we increasingly have the culture of people using their Palm Pilots, iPhones, Nokia E90s, etc., as major information intake devices. Once the hardware is available, I think a small but significant portion of the reading population will take to it immediately, and then their numbers will steadily grow.

Note, though, that the "iTome" won't conquer as fast as the iPod. I suspect hardly anyone over forty will adopt it. Paper will remain a significant, albeit shrinking, segment of the book market for a long time.

As for "conducive to good writing and expanded opportunities for serious authors" - I'm not at all sure these changes will be conducive to those things. Basically this is a question of economics: will there be more money in literature? And if so, will it be spread among more authors? (Allowing more to write full-time, which would presumably be conducive to good writing, and would also draw more talent into the field, thus expanding opportunities.)

This will only happen if a) more people read, and/or b) more money goes to authors, while c) we don't wind up with everyone reading the same fifty or hundred big-name authors, while everyone else scrabbles for scraps. I think c) is actually very unlikely, but I have no idea about a) or b).

2. In the same article, you argue the file sharing that is already changing the way music companies must model their business will have a revolutionary impact on publishing as well, once text-readers like the Sony Reader became common.

The resulting change, you continue, will lead to online distribution (including, as in the music industry, pirate distribution) of e-books. This will be likely to lead to two possible scenarios: one in which authors are not paid any more, and will have to rely on the generosity of patrons and other outside sources of income in order to survive financially, or one in which they are paid directly for their work.

It is probably safe to say that for many emerging writers, frustrated by the endless carousel of not having one's work read without an agent, and not getting an agent without an impressive publishing history, the prospect of "e-publishing" holds a certain appeal. But there are a lot of impediments to doing even this -- or at least, doing it well. For example one needs a bit of capital to build a really attractive website, manage the e-business, and generally avoid stumbling into too many of the pitfalls of DIY culture.

Do you also foresee a model in which businesses to help set up e-publishers also evolve? (I"m thinking of something more publishing-specific than the Yahoo start-yer-own-biz site). Or will we end up with an e-publishing culture in which corporate behemoths still dominate simply because they can pour more money into slick homepages, PR staff to focus on "viral" publicity, etc.?

--

The Internet already makes self-publishing a theoretically viable concern: go to lulu.com, sign up for free, upload a PDF of your latest opus, and sell print-on-demand hardcovers for $25, of which about $10 is pure author profit. It's every writer's dream!

Except of course it isn't. Because nobody has ever heard of the vast majority of lulu.com authors. Because most people still shop for books in bookstores. And most importantly, because everyone knows that Real Writers - ie those worth reading - are published by Real Publishers. And for the most part, this is entirely true.

It's less true in the online world, thanks to the increasing number of Real Writers publishing online - but still, even if/when distribution is no longer an issue, books that are professionally edited, copy-edited, and marketed, and receive the imprimatur of quality from an established arbiter, will retain an enormous advantage over amateur work, and rightfully so.

The thing is, there's no longer necessarily any reason for these things to be done by a single corporate behemoth. A large part of the barrier to entry to publishing has always been printing and distribution. If/when those are no longer necessary/relevant, an author could quite easily hire his/her own editor, copyeditor, and publicist, and bypass publishers entirely. (Many authors - not me - already hire their own publicists.)

Now, traditional publishers will still have major advantages. They have a stranglehold on bookstores, and even if paper shrinks to, say, 40% of the market, that's 40% authors won't want to ignore, which is an incentive to sign with a publisher. And publishers provide that imprimatur of basic quality. (Yes, there are a lot of bad books out there, but there are far, far more unspeakably awful unpublished ones.)

On the other hand, authors can make enormously more money self-publishing. (Because they don't pay for a publisher's overhead and failures). So I can envision a future in which occasional amateur digital hits come out of left field with no publisher; big-name authors maintain their own digital rights and sell their own digital copies (and/or hope pirate readers are willing to donate a buck or two); and traditional publishers get squeezed at both ends.

3. Stanislaw Lem once wrote a novel set in the distant future after a bacteriological epidemic has destroyed a substance hazily remembered as "papyr". As a result, this future society has lost virtually all records, all history, all knowledge. Compared to "papyr", "dijital" seems even more susceptible to massive losses of data because of some unforeseen catastrophe. Isn't one argument in favour of print culture over digital the former's relative permanence?

--

Well, technically yes, but first of all, nowhere do I argue that paper is going to entirely vanish, and second, even if this becomes a problem, it's a solvable one. Books could be archived in the same way that seeds for all the world's plants are being stored in vaults in Norway and other places. I suppose you get long-term durability for free with paper, and you have to put a little effort into it in a purely digital world, but it's only a little effort.

4. In many respects, the computer screen is not so much a "page"; it is a "flat-screen TV". In other words, computer technology allows a creative individual to use video and audio as well as text when creating narrative.

Continuing with the dinosaurs-and-evolution metaphor, do you see the e-book as being the final form of the online book? Or will it morph into something more multi-media?.

--

I think you want to ask a cognitive scientist, not me, but:

I suspect there will exist many, many multi-media works a la Griffin & Sabine, or graphic novels/comic books/manga - but text & video? Eh. I think in general, people respond to text in a fundamentally different way than they do to video (see also McLuhan) and context switching between the two will just be too annoying to be successful. Digital comic books, absolutely; digital movies, obviously; and video games will continue to grow and evolve (and that's a whole separate fascinating subject); but digital video intermingled with long sequences of text? My gut feeling is that will never be much more than a curiosity.

5. In "Apocalypse Soon" you also argue that in order to avoid an avalanche of self-published dreck, this new digital publishing paradigm must emphasize quality. But of all the qualitative adjectives that can be applied to literary creation, "quality" must be one of the most open to wildly different interpretation; after all, there is some very good work online that is "self-published", and some of the allegedly literary work being printed by major publishers these days is not conspicuously ground-breaking or even, on occasion, well-written.

How will "quality" be judged in a digital literary culture? Do you think newspapers will begin reviewing online writing? Do you think other lit-bloggers will do this review work? Who will assess "quality"?

--

Eh. That "quality" bit was more of an aside than a central part of the argument, to be honest, and it's only there 'cause the editor talked me out of removing it, a decision I now kind of regret.

Newspapers as we know them will probably not begin reviewing online writing regularly, mostly because they will be too busy dying. (They're already cutting down significantly on pages devoted to books.)

What is "quality"? Er. That's a deep philosophical question. I'm just this writer, you know?

I suppose it can be approximated by some mix of a) widespread readership; b) being approved and championed by The Authorities, whoever they are (English profs? professional literary critics? The big-name bloggerati?); c) influence on other writers (and other mediums); and d) whether or not the work lasts and is read by future generations. No one of those is good enough, and probably no two, but three or four serve a pretty good marker of Quality.

Online publishing/distribution isn't much likely to change that.

6. You also emphasize that one reason you want to take advantage of digital culture now is because very few authors (outside the SF examples you mention, such as Cory Doctorow) are currently doing it, and you would like to gain a little publicity by being one of the first in. However, you are currently stymied by your publisher's insistence that you not give your writing away for free online.

Are you planning to re-negotiate any publishing contracts you have? Will you insist that future publishing contracts you sign allow you to post digital manuscripts? And what is your agent's feelings about this issue?

--

I tried to renegotiate those contracts (by getting permission to publish online.) I failed.

My agent backed me 100% through all this.

I'll probably try to maintain digital rights in future contracts - but honestly, I don't think it much matters. I think this year was the right time, and DARK PLACES the right book, to publish online. Some other book a year or two from now will be the wrong book at the wrong time, which is one reason I'm annoyed at my publishers for failing to share my vision.

I'm actually serializing a weird but good little book called Beasts of New York online right now, in its stead, which I can do because I didn't sell it.

7. Canadian culture does not have a particularly high (or even visible) profile on the world stage. And the reason typically given for this is we are a country with a small population. Yet Canadian culture also tends to be subsumed within English-speaking Canada; certain cultural industries are constantly struggling to gain/retain an audience. (Example, when was the last time you saw a Canadian movie -- not one shot in Canada, but set in Canada?) This predicament is well-recognized by cultural commentators in English Canada, and, again, there is a ready explanation: the massive, ongoing influence of American culture.

But isn't this explanation now part of the problem? Doesn't it instill a sense of fatalism, and prevent Canadians from developing workable strategies that might strengthen our culture? In short, doesn't the "America usually wins" mantra become a self-fulfilling prophecy? After all, small population size and proximity to more powerful cultures do not spell cultural marginalization for other countries: South Korea, where I now live, has a population and economy approximately the same size as Canada's (49 million to our 35 million, and 11th largest economy compared to our 8th). Yet it has a tremendously vibrant and successful culture.

What is your own take on this issue? Any examples from your own experience? Or do you see the Canadian cultural status quo as just fine?

--

Well, there was BON COP BAD COP. But in general your point is well taken.

I think the biggest difference is that very little of South Korea's talent goes to Hollywood. I can easily rattle off dozens of Canadians who have been very successful in America's entertainment industry, and I'm sure you can too. There are still a lot of very talented people in Canada; but America is where the money is, and ergo it's where all the big hits are produced. South Korea is sheltered by its language barrier.

America's indirect influence might be even more important. It's such a huge pool of wealth that almost anything made in Canada is also made to be attractive to Americans as well - and such is the perception of America in Canada that this often means dumbing it down, making it more broad and more bland. The British make sharp, dry, well-written films and television (as well as a whole lot of crap) for a British audience, and American success is merely a potential bonus; in Canada, artists and entertainers (and I absolutely include myself in this indictment) almost always have one eye on the pot of gold across the border, and this subtly influences what we create.

8. In this interview series, R. M. Vaughan has commented about Canadian letters:

"A while back a writer friend of mine signed with a new agent. Out of curiousity, I went to the agency's website - every single one of the dozen or so agents had warnings underneath their interest lists: no science fiction, no mysteries, no horror, no thrillers, no fantasy books. In other words, nothing that might actually sell. We need to get over the tired prejudice against popular fiction in this country." [Feb. 20, 2007]

While Judy Stoffman has commented:

"All kinds of genre lit have been tried and none of it sold as well in Canada as, say, Margaret Atwood. It could be that Canadian readers are more serious than U.S. book buyers." [Feb. 13, 2007]

Who do you agree with more?

--

I take incredulous issue with Ms. Stoffman's statement that genre lit doesn't sell well in Canada - just look at the bestseller lists! - but I think R.M. Vaughan statement is more interesting. Major Canadian publishers certainly do publish genre fiction (I'm living proof) but it wouldn't surprise me if it's true that few to no Canadian agents represent such fiction. I think it's more socially acceptable to be passionate about genre fiction in America, and to some extent the UK, than it is in Canada; and that there is such a thing as a "literary establishment" subculture that is often dismissive of such fiction.

But who cares? Genre fiction sells very well, and if no Canadian agents represent it, then Canadian writers of such fiction should simply seek representation in America and/or the UK. They'll be better off anyway. Canada is a sufficiently small market that writers who actually want to make a living off their work almost invariably have to succeed in foreign markets as well. A major-market agent makes that success a lot more likely.

9. Should Canadian movie makers/TV producers work in much closer concert with novelists? Would all forms of fictional narrative benefit if there were this kind of integration between media?

--

My short answer is "no."

I write (thus far unproduced) screenplays as well as novels, so I can tell you with at least a little authority, they're very different animals. Some novels do lend themselves to being filmed, but the majority do not.

Like the abovementioned William Gibson, I too get "annoyed by people who seem to assume that feature films are the ultimate stage of novelistic creation, thereby relegating the book to the status of dull gray chrysalis."

10. A lot of American literary magazines have a forceful online presence: they offer complete short stories to be read, they allow for online submissions. Canadian lit magazines (with a few exceptions, such as The Danforth Review) don't. A survey of the online presence of Canadian lit mags shows that they do not have much (or any) of their content online, and do not allow email submissions. They seem, to put it bluntly, behind the times. Should Canadian literary magazines be more proactive in taking advantage of the internet? And given that a strong internet presence requires more labour, should they get Canada Council funding specifically for this? Or is this possible solution overly reliant on arts body funding?

--

Yes, they're behind the times and should catch up (although I suspect their forbiddance of email submissions is for fear of being swamped, which is probably a reasonable fear.)

As to whether the government should pay for it - this is a political issue I'm disinclined to get into.

11. When discussing the hegemony of American culture over Canadian, Canadians repeatedly declare that beyond a certain point this is inevitable, and it is so for economic reasons. And while allowing that economic power is a massive factor in all aspects of life, is there not something else at work in the Canadian psyche? Is there not an argument for saying that Canadians just don't try as hard as they could?

Consider again the example of the lit-blogosphere. Here the argument that American culture reigns supreme because of economic advantage breaks down: blogging is free. Yet the Canadian lit-blogging scene is a pale shadow of its American counterpart. Moreover, speaking anecdotally, on average I tend to find the U.S. bloggers somewhat friendlier and more open to exchanging links, and so on. Canadian bloggers (and please keep in mind that there are always exceptions) seem more prone to passivity. Evidence of this is the degree to which Canadian lit-blogs do not link to each other as much as they might in their blog-rolls or posts.

As suggested above, do we, as a national culture, need to do more to create our own literary and/or political culture on the internet?

I think part of our natural culture is that we're slightly more aloof than Americans, and I'm fine with that.

I think another part is obsessive navel-gazing about what it means to be Canadian and whether we should be trying harder to be less American, and, to be honest - sorry - this just seems like collective insecurity to me, and tends to make me roll my eyes and change the subject.

I actually think Canada is doing just fine, and Canada's online culture equally so.

Bio: Jon Evans is a novelist, journalist and techie who has lived a conspicuously peripatetic life, even by contemporary standards. Born in Canada and currently living in Montreal, he is in fact, as they say, "Montreal-based".

Apart from his books, his work has appeared in Wired, The Globe and Mail, and The Walrus. And he is serializing online his "children's book for adults" BEASTS OF NEW YORK.

STILLS WITHOUT SCRIPTS

Rolf Maurer -- publisher, New Star Books

Rolf Maurer of New Star Books:


1. Literature is in trouble -- that is, more trouble than usual. Why do you think this is? The increasing prevalence of TV? The distractions of narcotic subcultures such as video games? Sept. 11? Or is talk of the "death of literature" simple exaggeration?

The people who tell us that literature is in trouble are probably the same people telling us that there are too many books. These are the same people who, whatever era they happen to live in, long for the "death of literature".

I've noticed a funny thing. For the last five-plus years now, we've been hearing about how the trade book industry is in the doldrums, negligible growth, mediocre-to-poor profitability, "death of literature", people have stopped reading, blah blah blah. Then I have lunch with my printer. To hear him talk, things have never been better: new bindery lines, new plants, best year ever, etc. Where are all these books going? Probably where they've always gone, except not through traditional trade channels, which is what the doom-and-gloomsters are going by. What's in trouble is the traditional book trade way of doing things. As near as I can tell, people are eating up books as much as they ever have.


2. And what is literature, anyway? Should the traditional novel be considered the prime example of it?

The definition seems to be: anything that you read in a book or a fat magazine, that is meant to entertain/pass the time, scare, annoy, puzzle, thrill, or have practically any not-strictly-for-educational-purposes application, and which will probably end up being read by only by a tiny fraction of the population. The novel has been the prime example of it, absolutely: the novel form was invented to meet the needs of mass commercial literature. Contrary to what the blow-hards tell us, it does not correspond to any essential human quality, and narrative is not a naturally occurring substance.


3. Prizes and awards are playing an increasing role in determining an author's career-trajectory. In short, winning a major literary prize can win a writer a large audience overnight (not to mention, considerable fame and financial remuneration). But, as British critic Jason Cowley has observed, what is lost is the ability for readers to think in a critically complex fashion.

Are literary prizes dangerous in this regard? Do they convey to the public the message that "this book is worth reading and all these others aren't"?

For the most part bowling trophies for writing have always been marketing moves, made by people who are troubled that literature isn't compulsory in society and needs to be promoted, like milk, or sexual abstinence. It's nice to win one, but it doesn't mean every citizen is suddenly going to rush out and buy the book --- the obligatory congratulatory ads, &c., easily overwhelms the profit margin from the sales burst --- and looking at any old lists of prize winners and runners-up can be embarrassing. The cheque the writer gets is the best part. If we really cared this much about writers and what they do, surely there would be better ways of helping them pay their bills than the literary prize lottery.


4. Literary publishing has always been a marriage of art and commerce. But in recent years, the Cult of the Deal has become more influential, with agents demanding larger advances and marketing people paying especially close attention to sales figures. Is the "art" side of the business being pushed out?

Nothing's changed there. Publishing has always been run as a business, and this has been especially true since some time after the beginning of the 20th century, when the real costs of publishing declined to a point where gentleman-millionaires could run a small literary press out of their trust allowance. A money-losing business often, but a business.

People make the mistake of thinking that, because publishing in general is unprofitable, the people who are running the companies must be monkeys. It's likely that as print became cheaper and the cost of publishing came down, that is to say entry barriers to the publishing business were lowered, at the same time that considerable social prestige continued to be attached to books, meant a crowded and highly competitive industry. That's the reason publishing profits have declined.

The changes we're seeing in book publishing today are part of the same phenomenon we first saw in the 1960s, when companies that normally made fighter-jet guidance systems starting buying venerable publishing houses. Big business isn't monolithic. Until the present era the book trade was dominated by manufacturers: people whose business it was to make book-shaped widgets. And their interest in finance was more or less limited to the question of how much of it they needed to get their hands on paper, ink, presses, and talent.

Along came the finance sector: the only things these guys ever make is money. Baby formula, land mines: it's all the same to them. They were attracted to book publishing because of the *low* profit margins: they made the sector vulnerable. Whatever meagre profits the industry generated, it would flow to the banks, in the form of interest. And so we saw the consolidation of the big end of publishing in the 1970s and 1980s --- without there being any decrease in the number of new publishers --- and the rise of the bookstore chains, and the Ingram stranglehold.

And still, there's no letup in the number of new presses, and new writers, and new forms of literature.


5. Many major publishers now refuse to accept "unsolicited" work; that is, they will not even consider work unless it is agented. Is this a sound policy from point of view of finding the best new literary voices? Isn't there a chance good writing will be squeezed out?

The best writers often, but not reliably or predictably, end up --- or pass mid-career --- with the biggest publishers, but they almost never come from there.


6. Alternatively, for small presses that do accept unsolicited work, is the problem that the majors are squeezing the small houses at the distribution/retail marketing end? In other words, even when good writers get published by small houses, do they have a fair chance of winning an audience? Or are the major houses introducing an overly corporate, overly aggressive mentality to the book trade?

The distribution/retail marketing squeeze is part of the manufacturing--finance shift within the book industry that I was talking about just now. I presume that for the big boys, the centralization of book production, distribution and retail is bringing about some sort of "efficiencies", which probably means nothing more than the ability to externalize costs and squeeze out a little more profit. For the rest of us --- smaller publishers, smaller booksellers --- everything is mysteriously *less* efficient, particularly when you measure it in terms of $$. That's because the system isn't organized around the needs of publishers, writers, booksellers: it's organized around the needs of the finance sector. And it sure ain't working for the Happy Few who wander into bookstores --- to get back to something else I was just going on about, the book trade's statistical droop. Bookselling, the way it's set up at the moment, isn't doing a very good job of letting readers know what's really being written and published these days. It's making literature seem duller and dumber than it is.


7. Returning to the question of agents -- are they too powerful? If so, in what ways? Or are they a largely beneficial and necessary element of contemporary publishing?

Once you look at publishing primarily as a way of extracting the maximum amount of profit out of a capital investment, agents are as inevitable and necessary as lawyers, accountants, MBAs, and writers.


8. Does Canada have too many publishers? Or too few?

To state your question another way: Is it a good thing that almost any smallish group in society can fire up a publishing company, or is this a bad thing?


9. In your opinion, how will new technologies such as the e-book or audio books affect the "form" of the book?

Depends on what you mean by "book". It's possible that another form will supersede the codex, the way that the codex superseded scrolls and tablets. I'm not convinced that a few ounces of plastic wrapped around a board coated with micro-thin, biodegradable circuitry, running a software program written by some American video gamer who thinks 7-Up is a vegetable because it comes in green cans, is a good bet to render the book form obsolete, no matter how good the screen displays ever get. Nevertheless, those folks will keep on trying to get rid of books.


10. Putting aside the hype, does the Internet provide a real opportunity to publishers? If so, how?

Like everybody else, we're all trying to figure this thing out --- what it means to us as humans, as publishers, as readers. So far it's had less direct impact on what I do as a publisher than I was lead to believe. We still do the same thing here, albeit we do a lot of things, all in-between-the-writing-and-the-reading, differently and sometimes more cumbersomely.


11. And what role can traditional, venerable institutions such as libraries and English Departments play in reversing the decline in sales of literary fiction?

I don't accept that there's a decline in sales of literary fiction. Maybe the problem is with the definition of "literary fiction". Could it be that the readers' definition of this is different from that of the libraries and English Departments? They are after all institutions, and as such it's their job to lag behind on these things. Publishers aren't always much quicker on the uptake.


12. What projects are you working on now that you are excited about?

A few things. Our book on Wreck Beach is about to come out; I'm excited about that, not just because it's got some nudity and is therefore likely to sell, but because I get to put a little bit of the world that I care about out there. Also, an amazing book of concrete poems by Donato Mancini, a mad scientist. And a big book, a mega-project by our standards, that's coming out next year, about Frank Zappa's music.


bio: Failed journalist Rolf Maurer is now a ridiculous publisher. He has worked at New Star Books since 1981, and been the proprietor since 1990.