The Elegant Variation

EDITOR SACKED

I'm a great fan of The American Scholar so I was disappointed to learn that its editor had been booted over budget problems.

As word of her prospective departure circulated, some members of the magazine's editorial board reacted with surprise and anger. "I'm very displeased," said the novelist Thomas Mallon, who writes an annual column for the journal and recently joined its board. "My position is that you cannot run this magazine for significantly less money without seriously decreasing the quality. Even though I recognize that all academic organizations have been going through hard times, Anne has worked tremendously hard for a very modest sum."

Ms. Fadiman's salary is around $60,000 a year.

If you get a moment and unfamiliar with the journal, do check it out. (They also happen to run some very good book reviews.)

BIRKERTS RIPOSTE

The Reading Experience hosts an open letter to Sven Birkerts in response to his Bookforum essay. We'd link to it even if we weren't favorably mentioned. Honestly.

I don't know that I agree with you that the flaws in what's left of book reviewing and non-academic criticism are a carryover from this transformation of academic criticism. The real problem is that, going farther back, thirty or forty years ago the academy more or less claimed literary criticism in general for its very own. Real literary criticism virtually vanished from more general-interest publications, including Partisan Review, which in my view was always more interested in politics than literature, anyway. There are a few true literary critics still around--you mention James Wood, I would point to others, among them yourself--but they are published in the same one or two outlets, and the opportunities for longer critical essays focusing on the "merely literary" continue to become fewer and fewer. We're left with snark because that's mostly all that current reviewers know how to do.

But you are correct to point out some of the additional gloomy portents in today's literary "climate": corporatization, the influence of agents and others without literary skills themselves, the general intellectual fogginess of our time. You are entirely justified in being disillusioned by it all.

However, there happens to be a quarter of today's world where the atmospheric conditions are in fact much more favorable, a quarter you largely ignore in your essay. I am speaking of the online literary web sites and weblogs whose numbers have increased greatly over the past several years. (It is of course from this quarter that my own letter to you originates.) I believe you would find the quality of discourse at these online sources to be quite high, and in many ways free of the posturing and the affectations both of us deplore in so many of the print sources.

Dan touches on some of the points I raised in my Salon letter, albeit in a much more eloquent, less tossed off fashion. Do check it out.

VANITY FOR THE ARTS

We at TEV find vanity plates insufferable, and it's the main plank of our California gubernatorial platform to have them rescinded. However, if they do have to exist, they might as well offer some benefit - in this case, to the arts.

Arts License Plate Supports Arts Programs

"Without the experiences of art and its profound ways of anthologizing human consciousness, we are only partially developed as enlightened individuals. It is heartwarming to know that California citizens, by purchasing the California Arts License Plate, have proven their commitment to furthering the arts in our educational environment."
Wayne Thiebaud, Northern California artist and educator

If there is one immutable rule living about in the Golden State, it is that Californians love their cars. People spend hours detailing their cars, designing the vehicle's identity, and creating the ideal artistic statement on wheels. Clearly, Californians are proud of their creativity and how the arts play an important role in their daily lives. So, it is not surprising that a specialty arts license that supports arts programs is the most popular plate, according the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Depicting a brilliant orange sun over a coastline lined with palm trees, the Arts License Plate was the first license plate in the nation solely designed to benefit the arts. Designed by noted California artist Wayne Thiebaud, the Arts License Plate has sold more than 112,000 plates since 1994 and generated more than $6 million in revenue for arts education efforts and other local programs. Currently, revenue from plate sales funds the programs of the California Arts Council including arts education efforts for schoolchildren. At $30 for standard and $70 for personalized ("vanity plates"), thousand of Californians are branding their vehicles with an attractive, functional license plate as well as making an investment in the arts. (The CAC realizes $14.63 on each plate order and $15 on each plate renewal). It is with this commitment to supporting the arts that Californians are purchasing Arts License Plates.

"Without the experiences of art and its profound ways of anthologizing human consciousness, we are only partially developed as enlightened individuals. It is heartwarming to know that California citizens, by purchasing the California Arts License Plate, have proven their commitment to furthering the arts in our educational environment," says artist and Arts License Plate creator Wayne Thiebaud.

Unfortunately, when fiscal year 2003-04 budget cuts slashed the Arts Council's funding by 94%, the importance of purchasing an arts plate took on greater significance. In 2003, the California Legislature provided $18 million for CAC programs; this year that amount dropped to $1 million. As the 28-year old agency continues to meet its mission of advancing California through the arts and creativity, revenue from the sales of arts plates bulwarked the agency. Perhaps as a statement to the stark climate of arts funding, sales of arts plates have increased as more California motorists become "licensed art lovers."

In these difficult times, you can make a difference and help support the arts, by purchasing the Arts License Plate you will be supporting arts programs in schools, neighborhoods, and communities. Your investment in the Arts License Plate is crucial to supporting programs for at-risk kids, seniors, and thousands of Californians. Order the plate online at https://vrir.dmv.ca.gov/ipp/ippMain.jsp.

Orders take between 6-8 weeks for processing, however, ordering online speeds processing time. For ordering information and Frequently Asked Questions, go to the Arts License Plate section of the CAC Web site. (www.cac.ca.gov).

Thanks to Jim for the link.

PLUS CA CHANGE ...

The closing of independents and the homogenization of chain bookstores is hardly a problem unique to the US. Scotland is struggling with similar woes.

Yet book lovers in Edinburgh are lamenting the imminent closure of Bauermeister, the last remaining substantial independent bookseller in the city. This follows upon the tragic demise of James Thin - an institution venerated for generations and whose loss has been lamented by many. Other retail outlets have appeared, but none so far has adequately replaced that venerated institution. Indeed, they are failing to cater adequately not just for the city’s readers but also its publishers and writers.

Edinburgh, after all, is the capital city of Scotland, not just a regional city of northern England. Our literary tradition is distinct from that of our neighbours south of the Border, and so are our current literary tastes. There are authors located here who need to be promoted. We are currently blessed with many talents, such as the aforesaid Rowling, Rankin and McCall Smith, who compete on a global stage. Yet there are numerous other writers who are far less well known and who are struggling to be read on a Scottish, let alone global, stage.

EZ 4 U 2 SAY

LOL.

BIRTH OF THE COOL

We're on the road again (hiding out from the wrath of Lizzie), so we will probably dispense with links with a minimum of commentary today.

First up, the Seattle Times (syndicated by way of the Baltimore Sun), reflects on the longeivity of the word "cool":

Cool has been around for quite a while. Shakespeare used a form of cool as a verb and later the word morphed into an adjective, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. The word cool has been applied since 1728 to large sums of money and used to mean "calmly audacious" since 1825, the same source maintains. Cool, meaning fashionable, is "said to have been popularized in jazz circles by tenor saxophonist Lester Young," according to the etymology dictionary.

While we're on the subject, herewith our favorite Lester Young album.

CAMPBELL PROFILE

Joseph Campbell remains one of those problem areas for us. We're great admirers of the work itself, even as we wrestle with his anti-semitic legacy. We've done what we usually do in the case of these moral quandaries - decided not to think about it too much.

The Sunday Herald offers up a primer on Campbell, who apparently is not well known in Scotland.

Campbell went on to study at Columbia, and in Paris and Munich, becoming an expert in Arthurian studies. It was during his time in Europe in the 1920s that he was exposed to the ideas of people such as Picasso and Freud, whose work was to have a profound influence on him. Returning to the US in 1929, and with the onset of the Depression giving him little hope of finding a teaching job, he decided to hit the road in an effort to discover “the soul of America” and in the process, hopefully, discover his own purpose in life. He eventually reconnected with the academic world and made his reputation in 1949 by publishing The Hero With A Thousand Faces.

That book posited that the concept of the heroic journey occupies the heart of all the world’s cultures. Moreover, the stages of this journey, or mythic cycle, are essentially the same in every culture – whether it be the creation myths of Native Americans or the Book of Genesis. So what makes one culture different from another is not an exclusive set of mythical principles, but a distinctive inflection on the universal “monomyth” that moves us all. The wrappings are different, he explained, but underneath it is the same diamond.

There are numerous Campbell resources on the web, although most of them are a bit idiotically reductive, as though "follow your bliss" was (a) some unheralded bit of wisdom and (b) the only idea the man ever had. Neither is true, of course. But check out some of the sites, including the Joseph Campbell Foundation and his Books and Writers page.

UNCERTAIN FUTURE FOR TOLSTOY MUSEUM

The future of the Tolstoy Museum is in question - the building has been sold to a Russian construction company. (Yeah, we all know what that really means!)

The museum dedicated to Alexei Tolstoy, one of the Soviet Union's most famous writers and a distant relative of 19th-century novelist Leo Tolstoy, came under threat Thursday as it was discovered that the house in which it stands, one of Moscow's finest art nouveau buildings, has been sold to a construction company.

Occupying the rooms at 2 Ulitsa Spiridonovka in the heart of old Moscow, where Tolstoy lived from 1941 until his death four years later, the museum is in the grounds of Ryabushinsky House, the home of the more well-known Gorky Museum.

WOOLRICH COLLECTION

The SF Chronicle looks at a new collection of Cornell Woolrich stories.

As period pieces, taken on their own terms, they're well-nigh irresistible. In and between their sentences, a vanished era springs back to life. As Raymond Chandler, another author who rose from the pulps, said of Woolrich's (or Irish's) "Phantom Lady": "[It] is a swell job of writing, one that gives everything to every character, every scene, and never, like so many of our overrated novelists, just flushes the highlights and then gets scared and runs. I happen to admire this kind of writing very much."

YOU SHOULD SEE THE NOBEL; IT'S A GLORIFIED PAPERWEIGHT

In this account of a recent appearance by Michael Cunningham, he equates the physical Pulitzer award to a "knick-knack."

In talking about his Pulitzer Prize, Cunningham mentioned that the actual award was kind of a disappointment. "I was thinking of, like, a Heisman Trophy," he said, stretching out his arms to indicate something large. Instead --"well, the word 'knick-knack' comes to mind," he said.

"But it's nice to have," he added.