Remember Snoopy decorating his doghouse for the “spectacular, super-colossal neighborhood Christmas-lights-and-display contest” and Charlie Brown groaning, “oh no—my own dog gone commercial, I can’t stand it”—I felt that. In fact, I was beside myself.
And you know with HAUS RED and our love for process and publishing, we are not even searching for the true meaning of Christmas, whether Snoopy and Woodstock really understand each other, or to make sense of the particular sadistic pleasure of Lucy van Pelt denying Charlie Brown’s foot from ever making contact with that elusive football—though, that, I guess, is neither here nor there.
What I want to understand is where publishing is going. Because in 2017, Publishers Weekly named the president of Simon & Schuster, Carolyn Reidy, their Person of the Year. PW, while noting the National Book Award winner Jessmyn Ward, does not mention the signing of Milo Yiannopoulos and the subsequent cancellation of that book deal, amidst much outrage.
As a subsidiary of CBS Corporation, Reidy was appointed by Les Moonves the former executive chairman of CBS (who stepped down in 2018 amidst numerous sexual assault allegations). And when discussing the 2016 Republican primary, Moonves stated, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS. […] The money’s rolling in and this is fun. I’ve never seen anything like this, and this is going to be a very good year for us. Sorry, it’s terrible to say. But, bring it on, Donald.”
In 2018, PW’s person of the year was “the publishers of the bestselling Trump-related books. [They] took this approach to reflect the importance of the role that the Trump administration played in spurring the publication—and sales—of dozens and dozens of books. . . . With so many Trump books flooding the market, we selected the publishers of the five top-selling titles as of mid-November.”
My own dog gone commercial, I just can’t stand it! And so shameless at that—the write-up doesn’t even attempt to recognize the best analysis of the current state of affairs or ones that received substantial critical attention. If you, like me, believe publishers to be not only merchants of culture but also guardians and purveyors of culture, the balance is off and there is a need to step back and reassess.
—Nicholas Grosso
New York
September 2019
AUTHOR: RENEE GLADMAN
Renee Gladman is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose, most recently Calamities (Wave Books, 2016), and a monograph of drawings, Prose Architectures (Wave Books, 2017). Her entire series of fictional works set in the imaginary city-state of Ravicka are available from Dorothy, a publishing project: Event Factory (2010), The Ravickians (2011), Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge (2013), and Houses of Ravicka (2017). The series explores the relation of individuals and their environments, whether human constructed or otherwise.
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Danielle Dutton said, “As long as she keeps writing [the Ravicka stories], we’ll keep publishing them.”
Having published thirteen books with 8 different publishers—aside from finding an interested publisher—how do you decide which is best suited for a specific work? Is it their list or mission? Their resources? Working with specific editors or publicists within the publisher?
I think this happens a lot with small press publishing, and this was especially true in the late nineties and early aughts when I began writing books. Many emerging writers just really wanted to get their books out, but also were excited to support their communities. I was living in San Francisco when I began publishing. The world felt much smaller then, more things happening on a local level; so it made since to go with local presses. But I was lucky to be somewhere where I could find presses that were in alignment with the ways I was thinking about prose and what forms the novel could take within poetry. Having the early support of a long-established press like Kelsey St., which published my first and fourth books, and is also the publisher of one of my favorite writers—Mei-mei Berssenbrugge—gave me both the space and lineage I needed to push my writing in the directions it needed to go. And most of my decisions about publishers after that point were made along this same line of thinking. However, in this last decade, working with Dorothy and Wave Books, has been essential not only in bringing wider exposure to my work, opening up international opportunities, and allowing me to profit from my writing, but also and, more importantly, in providing homes for my thinking. They both feel like presses I would like to work with for a long time. They are professional, independent, and are risk-takers, which is vital for any contemporary moment.
In the Acknowledgments to Event Factory, you credit Samuel Delany’s Dhalgren. The crisis in Ravicka also made me think of the real-life crises described by Delany in Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and another (ongoing) crisis described by Sergio González Rodríguez in The Femicide Machine. (The former where the buildings and businesses are being pushed out or altogether destroyed with the inhabitants left behind, and the latter where the landmarks stay the same and the people are ever passing through.) What insights about how cities work have opened up for you with the writing and reading around these novels? Have you taken any actions or pushed particular policies in your communities as a result?
What drew me to Dhalgren those many years ago (it’s been sixteen years since I wrote Event Factory, which is in itself unbelievable) was a desire for novels about cities, where the cities took on the qualities of a character or at the very least a presence or force in the story. Not just a place where things happened but an atmosphere, the city itself a question or questioning about subjectivity and time, etc. Delany’s Dhalgren and Julio Cortazar’s 62: A Model Kit were intensely influential at that time. But I was drawn to the dark in Dhalgren, to a sense that the air was affected by the condition of the place. I haven’t re-read it since, so I’ve lost many of the details, but I do think the fact that Ravicka has that yellow (“crepuscular”) air had something to do with Delany.
I won’t say that the Ravicka novels are a-political, because my sense of what troubles urban spaces and what threatens communities, particularly communities of color is as woven into my thought as anything else, but they are also not intentionally political. As a writer and thinker, the city has provided an unparalleled topography for the thinking-through of many things. The fact that the city is an actual city is almost secondary to the metaphorical power of it as a space of difference, as a series of fields, as a very complex syntax that pressures how one moves and understands what movement is.
In an interview on Louisiana Channel, Zadie Smith describes reading novels from young novelists, particularly women: “Something emotional will happen and instead of responding either in the narrative or vocally as you would in ‘the traditional novel,’ the character will pinch a bit of their skin until it bleeds or do this or hold their jaw. It’s so strange, as if the body were a dissociated thing, you know . . . The idea of verbalizing an emotion is quite distant and the body is treated like this strange thing you have to drag around after you’ve finished your text messages and emails and virtual life, why have I got this flesh bucket that I’m carrying around?” (From 15:24, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LREBOwjrrw&t=106s)
In Ravicka, we find something like the other extreme where the custom and norms demand the full participation of individuals’ bodies. In The Ravickians, there is this passage: “My translators will have been stumped in finding an equivalent for pareis. There is no correspondent anywhere; no culture performs as extensively as the Ravickians. You cannot enter a place without proving to the occupants that you have a body. Not just to display the limbs and skin you carry around with you, but to prove you are in dialogue with them.” Could you discuss the physicality or presence of bodies in Ravicka? How conscious were you of not including popular, general use, contemporary technologies like smartphones and tablets in the city-state? How do you see them contributing to the future of cities? And how will their effects (if any) compare with those of print books (and maps for that matter), which are ever present in Ravicka?
When you invent a language and a culture, you find out what things, what interactions between persons are most important or most interesting. In English, we use our bodies to speak, but those choreographies are treated as accessory than essence. I wanted to think about a language that acknowledged how essential it was to have the body in speech, that a certain turn of the body can distinguish a phrase meaning one thing versus another, and that being able to sort through these differences is vital to communication. I also am quick to move to the absurd level of things, so it’s not just a lifting of the eyebrow in Ravic rather it’s a more elaborate lunging or bending of the body. I think putting body movement to speech helps one to feel less like one’s enclosed inside of something. I always want a more fluid and open channel between what I’m thinking and what I’m saying. Ravic allows for this.
In terms of technology, not only are there no smartphones or tablets in the Ravicka novels there are no televisions. I would argue there are no cars, except I remember a scene where someone is at a crosswalk, waiting for traffic to clear, and there’s a bus in Event Factory. Are there computers at all? There barely seem to be elevators. But, to me, this isn’t a refusal of technology. I mean, if you think about the equipment and science necessary to perform geoscography (the measurement and study of the migration of buildings), you’d have to agree there are some very complex technologies in play in Ravicka. The body itself is a very complicated technology there. I think it’s more that I’ve just never felt compelled to prove there’s realism in my narratives. I never want to read about someone pulling out their phone and opening an app or answering a call. I literally don’t want those words in my brain. I don’t want to live those moments of someone walking to a cabinet, retrieving a glass, turning to the refrigerator and pouring a drink of water, unless it’s Woolf or Henry James, where a hundred other things are unfolding in the mind as the glass fills.
I found the Ravicka novels to center on two particular, mirroring experiences: a) the individual moving about, traveling through the city-state and b) the individual trying to understand, measure the presence (or lack thereof) of the physical spaces (both those purposefully constructed/controlled by humans and those not) and how they interact in relation to time and their surroundings.
The elusiveness of the landscape called to mind something Giambattista Vico wrote, “The criterion of the true is to have made it,” a kind of Sisyphean task, where because the characters of the book did not create the landscape from scratch, it would always (at least partially) evade their firm grasp. In this way, Ravicka reminded me less of language and more of the human microbiome, billions bacteria coevolving with the human organism. In fact, there is this line in the note at the end of Houses of Ravicka: “To write was to wander through these folds, to try to see space as each of these things, always shifting, undoing, and to make the texts I built through this seeing vibrate,” which feels more feral, less conscious, a process closer to nature than the familiar formal constructs of city planning or fiction writing. Has the latest science on gut bacteria and the human microbiome influenced the development of these novels?
No, not in the least. But what I love about contemporary thought is the ways in which the vocabulary and methods of one field have the power to activate spaces in another. To think about fiction as comprising a billion organisms is to give fiction more space and more dexterity to be itself or push beyond itself. What I’ve loved most about having readers—being read by so many different minds coming from so many different perspectives—and how much the work expands from that contact. It changes the work and changes me the next time I go to write.
There is this passage in The Ravickians: “Why when I say dahar do you say ‘yellow’? I know that word. The air here is not yellow. It is dahar (yellow). If you are engaged in a translation and discover that a quality you need to convey does not exist in your language, the language into which you are moving, do not pick the next best thing. Sometimes you will have to put a ‘0’ there; this will indicate a hole” which closely parallels Anne Carson’s reflections on translating Homer in Nay Rather: “Μωλυ (mōlu) is one of several allusions in Homer’s poems to a language apparently known only to gods. Linguists like to see these names traces of some older layer of Indo-European preserved in Homer’s Greek. However that may be, when he invokes the language of gods Homer usually tells you the earthly translation also. Here he does not. He wants this word to fall silent. Here are four letters of the alphabet, you can pronounce them but you cannot define, possess, or make use of them. You cannot search for this plant by the roadside or google it and find out where to buy some. The plant is sacred, the knowledge belongs to gods, the word stops itself.”
How much of it was your intention to keep Ravicka, from their customs to the their landscapes, at a distance from readers? How do you use this tool as a writer?
I have no desire to make distance between me and my readers or between my subject and my readers, in fact I want the reader to get as close as possible to the conditions I experienced while writing whatever work is being read at that time. The reason that there is all of this foreign-ness and untranslatability and shifts in knowing and seeing is because these are the qualities of experience that make me most aware of being a person in a very large world. Writing about Ravicka, about its particular and sometimes bizarre customs, allows me to exist on many levels at once: I get to dream, to fabricate, to embellish, to be silly, be melancholy, be salacious, to think deeply, to interpolate whenever I want. It’s the best living.
EDITOR/PUBLISHER: DANIELLE DUTTON
Danielle Dutton is the author of Attempts at a Life, SPRAWL (a finalist for the 2011 Believer Book Award), and Margaret the First, named a best book of the year by The Wall Street Journal, Vox, Lit Hub, St. Louis Magazine, etc., and winner of a 2016 Independent Publishers Book Awards gold medal in historical fiction. She also wrote the texts for Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera. In 2009 she co-founded the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project, named for her great aunt, a librarian who drove a bookmobile through the backroads of Southern California, delivering books to rural desert communities. Born and raised in California, Dutton now lives in Missouri with her husband and son.
Particularly for small and independent presses, the role of editor is ambiguous, multi-faceted, diverse, often changing over time. As co-founder of Dorothy, how did you envision your role as editor? And since your 2009 launch, has the role changed?
Because the press would be mine and my husband’s, I knew being an editor in this case would mean I’d get to choose exactly those books and writers I wanted to work with and champion. That was basically the dream. I wasn’t sure it would work, and I’m regularly amazed at how well it has gone. I’m honored to be associated with every one of the books on our list.
In terms of how my role has changed over the past ten years . . . one thing is that as Marty (my husband) transitioned out of his job as Associate Director of Dalkey Archive Press (where he’d worked for over a decade, and where we both still worked as Dorothy was being hatched) he began doing more of the work a publisher would do, leaving me to focus on editorial and design. But we share a lot of the duties. It’s all fairly fluid. I think in the most important ways my job hasn’t changed. Dorothy has gotten bigger (some more attention and a “backlist” to manage—though we try not to think of any books as backlist as the word seems to imply that something important is over), but in essentials we’re doing the same work we were doing in 2009 when we were starting the press in our kitchen in Illinois, only now we’re in our dining room in St. Louis.
Actually, it occurs to me I shouldn’t speak for Marty. He’s doing a lot more now than he used to; a lot of the “burden” of our growth falls on him (the business side of the business).
As one of five publishers FLAVORWIRE lists as “changing the face of [publishing],” how do you see Dorothy within the larger publishing landscape in the United States? Do you have any interest in working with writers, editors, publishers, and/or people in publishing more broadly to effect change (i.e. the role of Amazon, the shrinking number of distributors, etc.)?
I see us as fairly outside the larger publishing landscape. We’re located in the Middle West. We’re a mom and pop shop. We’re volunteer run. We publish only two books a year. We don’t much care about sales. Well, I should clarify: we care that we do the best job we can do for each writer and book we take on, so of course we want the books to sell, because we want our writers to thrive, but financial concerns are not at all what drive our aesthetic choices. And all of this, as far as I can tell, places us on the outskirts of the larger publishing landscape. We’re publishing-landscape adjacent, maybe. Or maybe there’s a whole other landscape developing on the outskirts, a landscape of outskirtness populated by presses like Dorothy, Siglio, Deep Vellum, Wakefield, Transit Books, etc. In any case, the change we’re hoping to effect is in the work we do, in the model and aesthetics of the press itself (slow, sustainable, feminist, innovative) and in the value of the books and writers we publish and support.
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, you are quoted as saying “I’m not a public activist . . . but I felt like [starting Dorothy] was a way I could address something important. I saw at Dalkey there were so many fewer books coming in by women and the list was so male-dominated. Why would a woman feel encouraged to submit? I wanted to create a space where women felt welcomed. And frankly, on a personal level, I wanted to be working and creating relationships with women. I’m drawn to the sort of transgressiveness that often seems more available to women.” Pair this with what might be the press’s mission statement: “Dorothy, a publishing project, is dedicated to works of fiction or near fiction or about fiction, mostly by women.” In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom writes: “Our legions who have deserted represent a strand in our traditions that has always been in flight from the aesthetic: Platonic moralism and Aristotelian social science. The attack on poetry either exiles it for being destructive of social well-being or allows it sufferance if it will assume the work of social catharsis under the banners of the new multiculturalism.” Have you found Dorothy walking this line between destructiveness, social catharsis, and aesthetic exuberance?
Always we are working to find and champion books that we ourselves find cathartic, books that seem to provoke fiction or language or the world in necessary ways. Exuberance is our jam. Are we destructive? Creative destruction? If so, I suspect it’s only in as much as we represent an alternative model (i.e., slow! sustainable! feminist! innovative!) to the norm.
In the New Yorker, Lucy Ives’ writes of your novel Margaret the First: “Dutton’s work . . . serves to emphasize the ambiguities of archival proof, restoring historical narratives to what they have perhaps always already been: provoking and serious fantasies, convincing reconstructions, true fictions.” Playing in the archives, teasing out the stories behind (and in) historical documents reflects in many ways the role of a publisher (in deciding to highlight particular aspects, perspectives, voices over others). As a writer in your own right, how do the two forms (publishing and writing) influence and inform each other?
It’s pretty overused, but if I were to choose one word to describe the overlap in my editing and writing impulses it would be “curatorial.” Or maybe it would be “collage”? I’ve always liked to take things that attract or puzzle me and put them in proximity—things that vary in style or history or hue but that seem to whistle louder when you put them in a pattern, or that create a pattern when you whistle them into nearness. (Now I’m kind of seeing myself as a bowerbird.) Maybe to be a reader is always to be a collector? I think it’s fair to say that I am first of all, as a writer and an editor, a reader in the world.
How did the manuscript for Event Factory first come to you? And how has your relationship with Renee Gladman evolved over the four Ravicka novels; has your editorial approach to her work changed?
In 2009 I was already an admirer of Renee’s writing when word reached me (through the grapevine) that she had an in-progress series of novels looking for a home, so I contacted her and said, basically: If you will let me publish these books I will start a press. Incredibly, she said yes. I think Renee is one of the most important writers working today. I believe in the project of her writing, which is now also the project of her drawing, and so I didn’t need to see the books before I agreed to publish the first one, and in each case (four so far) I think she’s known we would publish whatever she brought to us. Having said that, of course there’s been an editorial conversation around each book. It’s been a lot of fun working with Renee. Actually, one of my favorite stories comes from editing Event Factory. It’s been ten years, but this is what I remember: I made a list of sentences from the book in which something somehow lost me. I typed up the sentences, which in itself was a pleasing thing to do. I think I made suggestions here and there as to what I thought might “fix” my confusion, but mostly I remember typing up the sentences and sending them to her. Her response was something like: Pick any eight of these and leave them the way they are, then go ahead and do what you want to the others. I loved that. I love her relationship to language and story. There’s a singularity to Renee’s thinking-in-language, her way of moving through a sentence, and I trust that. I guess when I edit her work (and this has stayed consistent across our interactions with the Ravicka books—though I think we worked the most on Houses, which I just re-read and I have to say it is completely brilliant) I’m trying to be a good reader. I feel like my job is to let her know where a careful reader got stuck. I trust her reactions to my occasional stuckness. I don’t usually push back.
I’m not always so light-fingered. Some of the most fun I have is when a writer and I sort of tear into things. But whatever the mode or degree of the editing, I always find it to be a weird and transformative experience.
In terms of how my relationship with Renee has changed . . . I know her a bit better. We’ve eaten together in two countries now. Last year my husband and I bought one of her drawings, and I think about her whenever I pass it. When I first contacted Renee in 2009 I’d only met her once after giving a reading at Brown, where she was a professor. I remember her in the audience nodding when I was asked why I called my writing (we were talking about my first book Attempts at a Life) fiction instead of poetry. I’d said I thought poetry already moved in so many unexpected directions, whereas it seemed to me fiction could still use some pushing against, and so it felt more exciting to say that what I wrote was a story, even if in some ways it seemed more like a poem. The very fact that people were asking why it was fiction was what excited me, I guess. And I knew from her nodding and from the work of hers I’d read that we shared some sense of what it could mean to be a fiction writer even when you didn’t know how to write fiction in the way so many people expect (don’t know how to/don’t want to). Essentially though, after ten years, I think basically I remain one of Renee’s biggest fans.
MARKETING/PUBLISHER: MARTIN RIKER
Martin Riker is the author of Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return, published by Coffee House Press in October 2018. Lit Hub described the novel as “A lush, comic, and bighearted journey through the minds and experiences of American strangers.”
Formerly with Dalkey Archive, Riker and his wife Danielle Dutton founded and run the feminist press Dorothy, a publishing project. Both teach at Washington University in St. Louis.
There is this one line that stuck out to me in the Dorothy profile from the Los Angeles Review of Books: “At Dorothy, all the books live, all the time”—referencing a move away from the binary of backlist and frontlist titles. [For those who haven’t worked in bookstores or for publishers, frontlist titles refer to books published in the last three to six months and backlist just about everything else. And I should add, backlist titles often receive no promotional support from their publishers. All publicity and marketing plans are loaded into those first few months leading up to and after publication.]
One of the biggest challenges, I imagine, is finding new ways to talk about books that may have been around for a few years already, because a publisher can only reach out to their network of reviewers and media outlets so many times with the same talking points—that and finding inroads with new audiences, finding readers where they are. To that end, how has Dorothy been able to create a new approach to the marketing and sales of books both new and old?
First thing I’d say is that when we talk about how we aren’t frontlist oriented, that’s true and it isn’t. Aside from group ads and a few other marketing things (selling the books as a set, displays in bookstores), we do, of course, focus almost all of our marketing efforts each year on the two new titles. In fact it would be corrosive to the backlist not to, because, with a very few exceptions, how a book fares upon its debut into the world will determine the trajectory of how it continues to fare after the publishing industry stops talking about it.
For us, seeing the backlist and frontlist as all one list is both philosophical and practical. Philosophically, it means that Dorothy, for us, is this ever-growing organism, ever-becoming, and all the parts matter. It means that in the deepest part of our Dorothy brains we’re not thinking about schedules as much as shape, not about seasons that come and go but about what the map of the land of Dorothy looks like. The most important practical implication, which is also the most expensive, is that we keep all of the books in print and available. That’s not the sort of thing that makes a very big impression on the outside world, I think, but it actually takes up a lot of time and resources.
In your conversation with Jeff Jackson for BOMB, you write: “[Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return]’s plentitude is made up of people living mostly in solitude, finding connection through media, though I will say I’m not entirely skeptical of the connections media affords. I mean, mediation is a fact of our lives, and we find our connections where we can, and I’m less interested in diagnosing loneliness and alienation than in thinking about how the sites of intimacy change as the world changes. And books, of course, are a form of media and a site of intimacy as well.”
This called to mind something Richard Nash wrote in Literary Publishing in the Twenty-First Century, “Books, like the tables and chairs, have receded into the backdrop of human life. This has nothing to do with the assertion that the book is counter-technology, but that the book is a technology so pervasive, so frequently iterated and innovated upon, so worn and polished by centuries of human contact, that it reaches the status of Nature.” Juxtaposing this with Renee Gladman’s comments on the technologies that appear in the Ravicka novels, whether geoscography (the measurement and study of the migration of buildings) to the complex technologies of human bodies that she references, how do you see the place for the various forms and ways of reading in today’s world (whether it be reading the expression on another’s face, a screen, or a physical book)? Where or how do you believe physical books facilitate connections, however broadly or narrowly defined?
Books facilitate all sorts of connections. The ones that interest me most are the connections with the (implied) author, with different ways the world has been thought about in the past or might be thought about, with values similar or dissimilar to my own, and with literature as an art form, as a living changing space. Those are the ways books feel most connective to me. I’m less interested in how books facilitate social connections, for example via social media. I’ve nothing against it, it just doesn’t have anything to do, for me, with the connections literature makes uniquely possible. That’s literature as content for some other sort of social interaction, replaceable by just about any other content.
I like Lewis Hyde’s “gift economy” idea and Wayne Booth’s choice of the metaphor “friendship” to describe why we read. For the good company. It seems almost too simple, but when I consider how much of the company that contemporary culture offers seems thin and fleeting, it does strike me that “for the good company” is the fundamental reason I read.
I can’t really speak to Richard’s quote. Renee I’ve always felt is less interested in “saying something” than in expanding the range of possibilities for what might be said (or thought), and this is how I read her books’ relationship to its thematic content.
In THE MILLIONS, you and Stephen Sparks discuss “the idea of the professionalized author”: “I would then attempt to describe the pleasure I get—with Diderot—from feeling that what I am reading is written not by a ‘professional’ but by an incredibly smart and interesting friend.”
In The White Review, César Aira comes to a similar conclusion about the professionalization of the novel, finding a possible alternative in “the avant-garde, which, as I see it, is an attempt to recuperate the amateur gesture, and to place it on a higher level of historical synthesis. In other words, it implies immersing oneself in a field which is already autonomous and considered valid by society, and inventing new practices within that field to restore to art the ease with which it was once produced.” Does Aira’s avant-garde alternative capture some of what Dorothy seeks to publish? What does the “interesting friend” offer that the “professional” does not?
Sure, that’s a good comparison. It’s like when Roland Barthes reminds us that the root of the word “amateur” is love—amo, amare. The word “avant-garde” is less accurate to my way of thinking about these questions, because embedded in an “advance guard” is the notion of progress and a Modernist emphasis on destruction and newness, whereas I think the way out of stultifying conventions can as easily be found looking backward as looking ahead. I teach a course called “Experimental Traditions” that basically argues that a lot of stuff we have historically called “new” is simply participating in traditions outside of the mainstream of the day; it is “new” in the sense that it is new to us, but it is not new to literature. This distinction is important to me not because I think newness is bad, or because I think nothing is legitimately new—some things are certainly new—but because the real point is not to be new but to be interesting, to be lively, for literature to feel like it is in the midst of life, wrestling with fundamental questions of how we put our lives, our stories, our language together.
When writing becomes a matter of mastery, of performing perfectly the expected steps, when it takes for granted how life is or should be and fails to convey any aspect of the messiness of making, then for me all the life drains out of it. The Dorothy list is full of life and energy, though. The spirit of trying things out. Each book does something different but what they all have in common is this freedom, not always a striving after “the new” but a carefree quality, a lightness in the face of expectation.
Danielle Dutton described Dorothy as “publishing-landscape adjacent, maybe. Or maybe there’s a whole other landscape developing on the outskirts, a landscape of outskirtness” characterized by “slow, sustainable, feminist, innovative” aesthetic. From the business side of publishing, do you see a landscape developing, something that is if not counter to the Big 5 (Hachette, Harper Collins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House, and Simon & Schuster) than at least attempting to create something new, dissociated from the professionalization (or hypercorporatization) of publishing in the United States? Outside of New York City, how does the physical landscape of St. Louis play into the work of Dorothy?
I love living in St. Louis, but I can’t say it’s a great place for publishing. Probably living here helps us stay mentally free of some of the less healthy hubbub of NYC. Less stress. But the only real benefit—which is a make-it-or-break-it benefit—is that our university jobs here, coupled with the low cost of living, allow us to publish whatever we want without having to worry about whether or not it will make money. Without that, Dorothy couldn’t exist.
But whatever non-commercial attitudes we might personally foster, at the end of the day Dorothy operates within the commercial publishing ecosystem. We are trying to get reviews in the same publications Random House is trying to get reviews, and that requires personal connections that someone in NYC is much better positioned to maintain. So far we have done pretty well despite those challenges, but each year it gets harder to keep up with who is working where (everybody in New York seems to change jobs every six months).
There are presses we consider our colleagues who take greater advantage of their position outside of the commercial sphere, physically and philosophically. Two Dollar Radio is a brilliant example of how a press with a primarily national and international audience can become a leader in local culture. And there are others. But that all takes a lot of time, and a certain kind of ambition—it becomes a fulltime endeavor—and one thing we have always been good at, and hopefully will remain good at, is making sure we don’t take on more than we can do and do well. Limiting our range of activity has always been part of the Dorothy ethos; doing very few books and giving every ounce of energy we have to them.
KEVIN HOLOHAN ON SAMUEL BECKETT: A NARROW ESCAPE
Samuel Barclay Beckett was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, he wrote in both English and French. Renee Gladman selected the following passage from Becket’s “The Calmative” as the epigraph to Event Factory: “But it’s to me this evening something has to happen, to my body as in myth and metamorphosis, this old body to which nothing ever happened, or so little, which never met with anything, loved anything, wished for anything, in its tarnished universe, except for the mirrors to shatter, the plane, the curved, the magnifying, the minifying, and to vanish in the havoc of its images.”
Filled with the pains and struggles of consciousness, Beckett’s work also alludes to a potential state of harmony if one is able to find the exact right balance of perseverance of self and a mindfulness for the world in which they exist.
“Comment puis-je vous aider?”
“Je cherche Monsieur Beckett, l’écrivain Irlandais. Je suis Irlandais.” (As if my Irishness was going to help matters!) It is quite possible I said something awful like “l’écritoire” instead of “l’écrivain” but he got my drift; he knew I was not looking for a writing-desk named Beckett.
“Monsieur Beckett n’est pas ici.”
The wary and long-suffering neighbor went on to say more that mostly outstripped my meager French but the meaning was clear: Mr. Beckett was not home, would not be back in the foreseeable future, I was not the first scruffy Irish fan to wash up in this apartment lobby and if I had any message to leave, he for one, would not be taking it.
I stood there in the lobby of the modest apartment building on the Boulevard St. Jacques looking at the two mailboxes side by side: Beckett and S. Beckett. Perhaps he and his wife Suzanne Déchevaux-Dumesnil had separate mailboxes. The S did nothing to differentiate them. I took a photograph of the two mail boxes and left, hero unmet.
I dodged a bullet that day. What on earth would I have said had Samuel Beckett been home? I had playfully joked that I had the perfect question to ask, a respectful tribute to the celebrated awkwardness of the prose of Watt, Beckett’s second novel with a wry reference to boots which figure so prominently in his work: “Do you wear and if so what size boots?” Jesus wept! I suppose I should be thankful to whatever forces had sent Mr. Beckett to his bolthole in Ussy-sur-Marne or out to walk the streets of Paris or wherever he was that saved me from embarrassing myself.
What brought me to that drab hallway? I was not generally an autograph hunter or enthusiastic fan type, but somehow I was there. I had gone to some lengths to obtain his address. This was 1984 and there was no internet so I had cajoled his address out of one of my college tutors. I wanted to pay my respects to Mr. Beckett. Why?
Growing up in Dublin with literary aspirations meant one was inevitably aware of the giant literary shadows that loomed over the small city, darkening every well-documented street and clouding the view of every bar-stool bard proclaiming how they could write better than [Insert literary eminence here] but couldn’t be bothered with the crass commercialism of it all and so put their genius into their backroom banter instead. The eminences followed you everywhere – Joyce, Beckett, Wilde, Synge, Yeats. They were a lot to live up to but for me Beckett did not clamor in the same way. His influence was quiet. It got under your skin. His was not a way of writing; it was a way of seeing and it was the voice the city seemed to use to describe itself to me.
My first experience of Beckett that I remember was a production of Rockaby in the Peacock Theater, the less august and more intimate space in the basement of the Abbey Theatre. An old woman sits in a rocking chair that rocks her and listens to her own disembodied voice, urging it on from time to time to the end of its incantatory tale. The top of my head lifted open that evening and nothing has ever looked the same since. The sparse, close-to-the-bone honesty of it was thrilling and, as I read more and more of his work I found this to be the thread running through it. I read everything I could get my hands on. I wrote bits and bobs, contagioned and imitative, foolishly adopting his cultivated lack of style as a style while scrounging for my own voice and my own stories to tell, my own blots on the silence.
I eventually escaped the influence of his non-style-style but kept something of the ethos, the need to write for and about the broken, the outsiders, people struggling to make sense of or invent a world that insists on behaving senselessly.
Reading the four volumes of his recently published letters (Vol 4 of which I had the pleasure of reviewing for the Irish Echo) confirmed much of what I had intuited over the many years of reading and seeing his work: the deep concern with the integrity of the work, the eschewing of celebrity and fame, the suspicion of “success” and his incredible devotion to and generosity towards friends and fellow artists. The man and his work continue to impress.
At one point some years ago, before my first novel was published, despairing of it ever seeing the light of day, I decided to stop writing to see what that felt like. No revising old stalled work, no jotting of notes, no voicemails to self, no notions on the back of envelopes, nothing. I lasted about two months of feeling adrift and bereft, like I was missing a limb. I came to understand that I wrote because it was my way of being in and making sense of the world, my own personal I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
Perhaps, had he been home that day in 1984, I would have suddenly come up with something better to say. Perhaps not. Either way, we were both spared the awkward horror of a nervous, callow me asking him: “Do you wear and if so what size boots?” and that is, I suppose, something to be thankful for.
LONELY CHRISTOPER ON PLACE AND SAMUEL R. DELANY: THE SPLENDOR AND MISERY OF BODIES, OF CITIES
Samuel Ray Delany Jr., Chip to his friends, is an American author and literary critic. His work includes fiction, memoir, criticism and essays on sexuality and society. His works include Babel-17, The Einstein Intersection, Nova, Dhalgren, and the Return to Nevèrÿon series.
Both Renee Gladman and Delany give personalities to physical spaces, public and private, naturally-occurring and manmade. In The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Walter Benjamin writes “The manner in which human sense perception is organized, the medium in which it is accomplished, is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well.” The personalities of these spaces reflect both their physical shape/design as well as the power structure and the individuals who inhabit them. The spheres and settings in Gladman and Delany’s writings are not indifferent but active participants reflecting and influencing narrative arcs.
Preeminent science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany (b. 1942) has published epic intergalactic adventure stories as well as intimate, earthbound character studies, but one of his major overarching themes has been the formation and function of communities and societies. The Return to Nevèrÿon series resemble postmodern sword and sorcery tales that use the premodern movement from a barter economy to a money economy to allegorize the contemporary movement from a money economy to a credit economy. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand speculatively investigates how systems of control are structured and propagated. Dhalgren is a story about a city absent of authority, who might want to live in such a permanent autonomous zone, and how things would work. The Mad Man is an academic mystery turned into a pornographic fantasia about the societal fault lines ripped open by AIDS. Through the Valley of the Nest of Spiders takes place in a heavily subsidized utopian community designed for working class gay men of color, valorizing the lives and desires of rural garbagemen. Delany harnesses (and embodies) the perspective of the outsider to provide a systemics of oversight gazing into hegemonic operations. Late capitalism alienates us from our communities and their inhabitants. As an Afrofuturist, Delany dares to imagine alternatives to current regimes and uncover the street-level modalities that run concurrent to while being suppressed by top-down city planning and management.
Quality of human contact is of fundamental importance to Delany. He distinguishes “contact” from “networking” based on purposes served. As Robert F. Reid-Pharr has it in his introduction to Delany’s book of two essays, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue, networking “is always established within the protocols of capitalist competition.” Genuine human interaction happens outside of and in contradistinction to entrenched municipal interests. That is why sites of contact, such as movie theaters and bathhouses, become targets for closure and removal (codeword: “redevelopment”). Whereas networking, even if it feels like “getting out there,” is a self-contained and self-propagating mechanism, contact is intersectional and generative. The area went from being the Deuce, a neighborhood whose uses were mediated by its residents and consumers, to the new Times Square business district, whose purposes are controlled by corporate interests which leveraged civic power against communal self-determination to forcefully rezone the land and remake it in the image of late capitalism. This was the transition from working-class utility to business headquarters and tourism. Not an experience itself but a company selling you the idea of an experience. The head honchos felt that Times Square was the wrong kind of playground, benefiting the wrong people, and it took decades of maneuvering to chase out purveyors of sexual exchange and raze their cum-stained monuments. The state was an enthusiastic enforcer but it was the Walt Disney Company that underwrote much of the expense incurred by this hostile takeover, an experiment in forceful assimilation, almost terraforming, that gave the House of Mouse the tools to expropriate and launder subcultures. First Disney took a major television network (ABC), then they took Broadway, then they took Lucasfilm, then they took 20th Century Fox, and on it goes.
The Deuce catered to several different kinds of men. Most of the moviehouses played straight porn despite what might be happening in the audience. Some guys were just there to jack off in solitude. Some were what we’d call today “MSM,” men who have sex with men while striaght identified, and a mouth was a mouth. A few homeless people lived there for the three buck daily admission fee. Delany was there as a gay man willing to engage in certain types of low risk sexual acts with whoever was interested. He also mentions “the transsexual bars, the hard-core hustling scene (male and female), the heterosexual peep show life” as other facets of a local culture wiped out with minimal protest because the affected communities were marginalized. As if Times Square existed just for a handful of creeps and junkies. The author notes, “It is the same argument that dismisses the needs of blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Asians, women, gays, the homeless, the poor, the worker—and all other margins that, taken together (people like you, people like me), are the country’s overwhelming majority: those who, socioeconomically, are simply less powerful.” For too many people the land was far more valuable than its established tenants. The social restrictions forced upon communities ravaged by AIDS were done so in the interest of “public health,” a precept that foreclosed “gay liberation” in its definitions of what is public and what is healthy. Delany sees this as regression to a pre-Stonewall moralism.
The new city is scrubbed of undesirables as authentic interactions are homogenized, arbitrated, and replaced by control. Delany states, “because there’s not enough intertwined commercial and residential variety to create a vital and lively street life, the neighborhood becomes a glass and aluminum graveyard, on its way to a postmodern superslum, without even going through the process of overcrowding—abandoned before it’s ever really used.” When real estate scheming goes way wrong, the endgame of gentrification becomes too demanding to function, which results in the “luxury blight” apparent today in neighborhoods like SoHo, where mom and pop shops were usurped by unsustainable high-end boutiques that went out of business leaving streets full of empty storefronts. Downtown Brooklyn is getting residential highrises one after another and most of them are half empty. Then there are the places that get fabricated out of whole cloth, such as the new Hudson Yards: an office and tourism district with its own designer shopping mall. A facsimile of a fantasy for the one percent. Similarly, as Sarah Schulman points out, our minds become gentrified along with our cities. Delany notes, “if every sexual encounter involves bringing someone back to your house, the general sexual activity in a city becomes anxiety-filled, class-bound, and choosy. This is precisely why public rest rooms, peep shows, sex movies, bars with grope rooms, and parks with enough greenery are necessary for a relaxed and friendly sexual atmosphere in a democratic metropolis.” His predictions have come to pass in the age of Grindr and other hook-up apps. We race around our maze of exclusion.
When television showrunner David Simon asked to retain Delany as a consultant for his show, The Deuce, the author declined. He felt the cultural imagination unique to the area in the 70s would be heterosexualized for HBO and that audiences at home would get a sanitized, knock-off version of the story. Reconstructing the gritty look of an erstwhile vice district is a neat trick of production design, but with no care for accuracy in representing the scene’s precise demographics, the show revives a subculture and its unique subeconomy only to flatly commoditize it for a general audience. The process is more important than the product because that’s where the real money is made. New skyscrapers in Times Square were not purposed to serve the community but to enrich the builders. Whether or not the space is used is secondary to how much money can be made through its construction. In Dhalgren, Delany shares with us a vision of the imaginary city of Bellona, where technology fails and the superstructure has abandoned the infrastructure. Instead of trying to capture the collapsed utopianism of the 60s, Delany envisioned a paradigm where destabilizing forces were exciting and useful to those willing to open themselves up to the experience. The lives of those who stayed behind out of arrogance or stubbornness are miserable. They violently attempt to maintain their capitalistic existence in a flexible unreality often functioning in direct opposition to the values and standards they cherish. But the angel-haired hipsters and other mad men find Bellona a festival of opportunity and under Delany’s pen they get to explore and gain. What is built around us shapes us and it should be the reverse.
READING CONSTELLATIONS
Ruin and Redemption in Architecture (Dan Barasch, Phaidon)
The Complete Short Prose, 1929-1989 (Samuel Beckett,
Grove Press, parent company Grove/Atlantic, Inc.)
Housing Problems (Susan Bernstein, Stanford University Press)
Endocrinology (Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, Kelsey Street Press)
Nest (Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, Kelsey Street Press)
The New Mathematics of Architecture (Jane Burry, Mark
Burry, Thames & Hudson)
Invisible Cities (Italo Calvino, Houghton Miflin Harcourt)
62: A Model Kit (Julio Cortázar, New Directions)
A Manual for Manuel (Julio Cortázar, Pantheon/Out-of-Print)
Dhalgren (Samuel Delany, Penguin Random House, parent
company Bertelsmann)
Times Square Red, Times Square Blue (Samuel Delany, New
York University Press)
Calamities (Renne Gladman, Wave Books)
Prose Architectures (Renee Gladman, Wave Books)
Radical Suburbs (Amanda Kolson Hurley, Belt Publishing)
The End (MC Hyland, Sidebrow)
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jane Jacobs,
Penguin Random House, parent company Bertelsmann)
The Other Book (Jordan Stump, University of Nebraska Press)
