Colin Marshall

The unsavory

(not this year's festival)

Visiting the L.A. Times Festival of Books this year, I spent my time between panels checking out exhibitors' displays. Just like at the AWP bookfair, it got me asking questions about heady issues of marketing, attention and connection. But this time I wasn't pondering why certain exhibitors weren't drawing me; I was pondering why certain exhibitors were actively repulsing me.

Unlike AWP, the #LATFOB (as were instructed to tweet) doesn't limit its fair to presses, journals and academic institutions. Booths, or at least tables, seem to go to whoever lays down enough cash, so mixed in with the relatively attractive likes of Taschen, Kinokuniya, Tin House, C-SPAN and Book Soup are the desperate, the creepy and the gut-level undesirable. There are certain booths I notice myself giving a very wide berth year after year:

• Scientology/Dianetics
• Religions of any stripe
• The "9/11" truth movement (resident in a corridor of the UCLA campus I've come to call "Truther Alley")
• Self-publishing firms (especially self-published children's authors who've rented a booth to pimp the character they've invented)
• Conspiracy theorists of any stripe
• Latin American revolución fetishists
• Political causes of any stripe
• The Ayn Rand Institute

What do these organizations have in common? I suspect that an answer, however provisional, will reveal something important about what's succeeds in earning meaningful brainspace and what doesn't.

I mentioned religions, but are all these entities are in some sense religions, or at least religious in their psychology? By that I mean how they urge you to accept propositions that are apparently untrue, untestable or both — also known as "beliefs." The religion-religions hammered their wedges' thin ends pretty hard: Scientology offered their usual "stress tests," the big Islam tent handed out copies of the Qu'ran pretty aggressively and I accidentally met the gaze of one Falun Gonger. (Pleading, shaky question asked Madelaine by a Falun Gong representative at Santa Barbara's Earth Day fair: "Will you help me?")

Who could argue that Truthers, hand-wringing JFK paranoiacs and dour revoluciónistas lack their own suites of religious-y beliefs? I foresee some blowback from lumping the proselytizing Objectivists in with this motley crew, but they've got their cool-kids-accept-this axioms too, even if they're, like, "A = A." Only the self-publishing segment doesn't quite fit, but many of the self-published are by definition pushing ideas of such weird marginality that they might as well be religious beliefs.

Is it simply that they all try so hard to convince you of something, kooky or not? Maybe the U.S. did conduct a secret war in Guatemala between May 1986 and September 1988. Maybe your self-published book of stories about "LeRoy the Wonder Marmot" does have actual literary value despite its inability to win any kind of imprimatur. Hell, maybe Muhammad was right. But jeez, must you be so freakin' insistent about it? It's the sebaceous desperation of the car salesman secretly terrified that you'll walk off the lot or the dude at the bar who doesn't quite think you believe his story about the two chicks at once.

Is it that, like any sales operation, they want something from you? This at first seems not to hold, since the booths I make a point of visiting surely want something too: specifically, my money. Kinokuniya didn't set up shelves and a cash register for their health. The distinction might be one of attitude, of signaling: there's a world of difference between implicitly wanting someone's cooperation and visibly needing it.

The intersection of overt salesmanship and alien beliefs is a bad place to be, especially if there's an ingroup/outgroup distinction at work: you're out and they want you in. because that'll raise their own status in the ingroup. Paul Graham astutely made a relevant point about identity:

You can have a fruitful discussion about a topic only if it doesn't engage the identities of any of the participants. What makes politics and religion such minefields is that they engage so many people's identities. But you could in principle have a useful conversation about them with some people. And there are other topics that might seem harmless, like the relative merits of Ford and Chevy pickup trucks, that you couldn't safely talk about with others.

There's no honesty in identity-poisoned discussions. Hence my advanced equation: implausibility + identity + obvious selling = yuck. You might argue that this it too specific to me. After all, somebody must have gone to all those displays I take pains to weave around. And you'd be right; stress testees weren't in short supply, nor were Qu'ran-grabbers, but then again, a lot of people want somethin' for nothin', even if that somethin' ain't much. (The science fair-style tri-panel posterboards about the Twin Towers' physical composition structural integrity didn't draw many onlookers, though I did at one point see the Reduced Shakespeare Company's Reed Martin squinting at one in bewilderment.)

But these whiffs of implausible identity-hawking wafted so thick and so rank from their pushers that I'm forced to consider the uncomfortable proposition that these exhibitors only convert people to their cause who already, in some sense, believe in it, even if they don't know about it. Only these "seekers," as I believe they're called, wouldn't be repelled like I was. Did they go in pre-inclined to believe that a 22-pound self-published autobiographical erotic thriller could be a success, that Tai Chi for Jesus is the one true path, that Xenu is the root of their problems or that Jews did WTC? Furthermore, did I go in inclined toward receptivity of whatever Taschen, Kinokuniya, C-SPAN, etc. had on offer?

What you learn from failed attempts at literary gambling

If you listened to my Denver travelogue, you know I attended the 2010 Association of Writers and Writing Programs conference there. Its sights, sounds, conversations and panels provided lord knows how much grist for my riff mill, but one part of the event indirectly gave me more to think about than anything: the bookfair.

This bookfair (compound theirs) collected into a vast cavern hundreds of exhibitors behind tables, in booths, on kiosks, etc., most of which were publishers, literary journals and MFA programs. The biggest names present were outfits like Melville House (from whom I bought Madelaine three novellas and Tao Lin's Eee Eeee Eeee), McSweeney's (with whom I tried, briefly and unsuccessfully, to haggle for Nick Hornby's Housekeeping Versus the Dirt), Tin House (I don't know anything about them except that they're relatively well-known), the Paris Review (who wanted ten bucks an issue at the start) and Bookforum (who were giving away free copies of all the issues I've missed recently).

But it was the small names that made me think. I returned to the bookfair on the conference's final afternoon, which I understood was when the exhibitors, saddened at the prospect of schlepping boxes of unsold stock back to the University of Southeastern Wherever, got ready to deal. After the Melville House buy, I took my remaining cash in hand and dove into the ramshackle small-press and tiny-journal village, looking to make a gamble on a oddity or five.

My enthusiasm quickly disintegrated into paralysis and disorientation. I wanted to buy something from one of these tables, but how to choose which table, let alone which thing from that table? I was lost in a landslide of unknown titles, unknown authors, bearded dudes and horn-rimmed girls. My only recourse being to the shockingly superficial, I started going by the books' cover designs (some of which were cool), the journals' titles (some of which were clever), the dudes' tweed jackets (some of which were ironic), the girls' tight patterns (some of which were striking) and the tables' giveaways (some of which were liquor).

Even that didn't work; I still couldn't pick anything. A copy of Affinity Konar's The Illustrated Version of Things sitting on Fiction Collective Two's table briefly caught my eye, but only because I recognized the name as that of a former fellow contributor to 3QuarksDaily. That's when it struck me: this chaos was a grand mal case of filter failure. I didn't have the filters to guide me toward any one option — or even a subset of options — and few of the option providers bothered to position themselves in filter-favorable ways.

The gates were all open; pretty much nothing stood in my way. With the exception of Mathew Timmons' Credit, an enormous book of credit card application text that retails for $199.99, everything was cheap to free — and certainly abundant. I know that (a) I was willing and in fact actively seeking to drop some bucks on unknown literary quantities and (b) there were novels, magazines, chapbooks, journals, reviews and what have you somewhere in the heap that I would love. But I didn't even have a guess as to which direction to turn to maybe sort of find them. What happened?

Possibility one: I just don't know enough. While I am a "writer" inasmuch as I spend a substantial chunk of my time arranging text and presenting it to an audience and a "reader" inasmuch as I spend another substantial chunk of my time reading text others have arranged, I'm an outsider in the world of Writers and Writing Programs. If I was an insider, I'd be aware of which house was which, which journal was which, which university press was which. I'd know who I'm compatible with, who's most likely to surprise and delight me. But then again, it's not as if I'm totally ignorant of publishing; I'm in contact with publishers on a daily basis because of The Marketplace of Ideas. I'm just not tapped into this subscene of a subscene, about which more in a bit.

Possibility two: The exhibitors offered a too-small, too-narrowly-defined and thus too-similar range of products. Most everything on offer, save McSweeney's Wholphin DVDs, was some kind of bound-paper text delivery system; only title, author, length, width, thickness, paper weight and surface design differentiated them. Nothing I could see, hear or touch gave me useful information about how much more interesting I was likely to find any given bound-paper text delivery system than the others. Astonishingly, this was as true for the exhibitors themselves as it was for their wares! I could easily find out the name and location of a small press, say, but what about their mission? Their principles? Their sensibility? Their aesthetic? Their territory on the map of literature? The painful part is that some certainly were extremely interesting — and some were undoubtedly so uninteresting that they'd sap out my interestingness.

Possibility three: The exhibitors aren't talking to the wider world. I was looking to buy a bound-paper text delivery system sending a certain sort of message. Were all my filters not stuck in fail mode, they'd be selecting for the works sending messages like "You'll find this poetry intriguing and funny," "This novel will enrich your inner life," or "This publication will point the way to interesting things." But everything around me seemed to be sending messages no more specific or enticing than, "This is a literary paper," "This is a novel," "This is a chapbook."

Worse, I feel a sneaking suspicion that the real messages might amount to little more than signals sent from and to the members of the aforementioned sub-subscene: "This author wrote a novel," "This author is really smart," "This author won the imprimatur of such-and-such press," "This book will make you seem like you Know What Time is Is, literarily speaking." I get the impression of MFA people — students, holders or aspirants — writing to, for and, to an extent, about other MFA people.

I read a New York Observer profile of young novelist Joshua Cohen, which revealed his none too pro-MFA attitude:

The novel [Witz], which comes out in May, was nine years in the making. Mr. Cohen began it the summer after he graduated from Manhattan School of Music in 2001. Unlike most young American novelists, he never sought an M.F.A. "The M.F.A. is a degree in servitude." Mr. Cohen said. "It is a way to keep writing safe — to keep reading safe from writing. That I would be criticized as being romantic, or impractical, for making that statement just goes to show everything that's wrong. Writing is a conviction before it is a craft."

The accusation that it's "a way to keep reading safe from writing" feels reasonably sticky, even if it's less than transparently clear. It gets at the reason you won't find me in an MFA program, or indeed, in any other branch of academe: the academy talks to itself. I want — and many of my friends want, and since you're here, you probably want — to talk to the world. I would blame my difficulty in finding something to buy at the AWP bookfair on the fact that its small presses and such don't talk to readers beyond their circle, but I'm not sure that's quite it. They may not care about connecting with the world too far outside the ivory tower. And that seems like the road to extinction.

This is why (former Marketplace of Ideas guest) Richard Nash is the smartest dude in publishing: he knows, and goes around saying, that the publishing business is the business of connection — of connecting readers with writers. Making more books isn't so much the issue, given that this country's coming up on 200,000 new ones per year. Making more books out of pulp, ink and glue is even less the issue, as medium and readership become ever more disconnected concepts. As someone who writes, I'd say it's all about readership; I'd write in iambic pentameter for the Cybiko if it meant more and greater reader connection.

But one critical step in the quest for reader connection is for readers to, like, know who the hell you are and what the hell you do. Wandering the bookfair's aisles, desperately trying to give some tiny publisher my money, I meditated upon the idea that profile height is the most precious thing in the world. If the profile of any of these books, authors, houses, poets, etc. stuck up just a bit higher, they'd have my cash now. Fortunately, a profile is, in theory, pretty damn easy to build in these days of Internet, but most of the books I passed by appeared to have been put out as attempted profile-boosters themselves. I don't know if that's a good idea. I'm sure I wouldn't put out a book without the profile to support it. Going the other way around seems perverse.

I ended up, by the way, at TriQuarterly's table. Unlike the vast majority of the other exhibitors, they offered their back issues from the early 1960s on, which already made them stand way out in a sea of late-2000s releases. The filter of time was at work: a volume of a journal that still holds up decades and decades on has its very existence to recommend it over the mass of stuff that all came off the presses in the last few months. My purchase was the fall 1972 issue, a hefty thing with neato graphic design and the theme "Prose for Borges". Borges — now there's a name you can trust.