School programs and libraries often encourage reading by holding summer programs that offer rewards to top readers. For example, finish 10 books and you get to pick a toy out of a grab bag. Some may find these programs salutary attempts to get kids to unplug and discover the joys of reading, but I have always been suspicious of them. What connection is there between how many books one reads and strong reading? Or discovering pleasure in books? If I were an 8 year old, I would skim as many books as possible to get a toy, wouldn't you?

These programs call to mind Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains. Carr argues that we are becoming superficial thinkers, skimming knowledge rather than burrowing down deep. The web is altering our neurological processes, he explains, causing our attention to scatter: We are losing our capacity to become absorbed in intense concentration.

Oops. You better read stop reading this column and answer that text. And since that first paragraph reminded you of reading A Wrinkle In Time in 3rd grade, you should probably tweet the title and add the hashtag “booksthatchangedmyworld." Also, did you email your mom back?

The antidote to this lack of focus? Slow Reading. John Miedema’s book of this title argues that we need to recover the art of immersion in books. The movement’s title may conjur an image of sipping a long-simmered mushroom soup reading Middlemarch, but Miedema is not just countering the speed of internet reading (or fast food); he is also encouraging us to remember that reading can be a source of pleasure, not just a course requirement or a way to get a toy from a library grab bag.

I googled “Slow Reading” so I could research this column and came upon this story from the Guardian: I scrolled to the end and she has just used the same conceit to write her column. The author makes the same points I have. Do I have anything new to add to the conversation about slow reading? Are we all just cycling through the same 140 character ideas?

I have been writing "Signatures," this column, for almost two years now. Although the title is taken from printing technology, I have always championed digital technologies and gainsaid arguments like Carr’s that would have us believe reading and writing are deteriorating. But I must come clean: I am feeling increasingly worried about my reading capacity. My lifelong habit of reading a book before I fall asleep is turning into a new twitter scrolling habit. I am writing more than I ever have in my life, but I am reading less. I worry.

I still become absorbed in books (Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad is rocking my world). But my attention wanders more quickly than it used to. Email, texts and, most distressingly, this really stupid Tetris-type game I downloaded onto my iPhone beckon. I am not ready to agree with Carr, but I am ready to take one day off the internet a week. I will turn on the perfectly named Freedom software for my Mac, delete that speed-reading email and hopefully find out how to  lose my self again.
 

A new submission model—wherein writers must buy a book if they want their work to be considered for publication—is shaking up the literary world.

The publishing industry faces an odd set of supply-demand imbalances. Supply of printed books outstrips demand, which is why remainder tables get piled sky-high, publisher layoffs abound, and author advances have wilted. Supply of writers also outstrips demand for their services, which is why the statistics about getting an agent for your book are so dismal.

But wait. There is a glitch in this economic equation. If so many writers are desperate to be published, those same “so many” should also be reading books, right?—doing to unto others, and all that. Theoretically—or common-sensically—each writer is also a reader, and thus there should as healthy a demand for reading material as there are writers who want to be published. Even more, you have to read in order to write. So it should be a big traffic circle—writers to readers, readers to writers, of supply and demand. Right?

Clearly not. Literary magazines, which traditionally are great places for new writers to break in, receive enormous numbers of submissions—thousands more than they can accept. Yet these same magazines sell barely enough copies to survive. This can only be so if people do not buy the publications into which they seek entry (although some of them may be reading them at the library).

What we have is a glut of people who want to be writers, who do not buy the consumer products of the industry they are seeking to join. This is not exactly the same as everyone wanting free content online, though it is analogous to, say, thousands of wannabe newspaper reporters never shelling out 50 cents for the local paper, or graduates of magazine feature writing courses refusing to pay for magazines.

The above scenario is what I imagine has been frustrating the editors of Tin House, one of the best literary magazines in the country. Last week, they announced a stunning new requirement for anyone wishing to submit writing for possible publication: All must buy a book first. From a “real-life” bookstore. And submit a receipt: ?

"In the spirit of discovering new talent as well as supporting established authors and the bookstores who support them, Tin House Books will accept unsolicited manuscripts…as long as each submission is accompanied by a receipt for a book from a bookstore. ... Writers who cannot afford to buy a book or cannot get to an actual bookstore are encouraged to explain why in haiku or one sentence (100 words or fewer). Tin House Books and Tin House magazine will consider the purchase of e-books as a substitute only if the writer explains why he or she cannot go to his or her neighborhood bookstore, why he or she prefers digital reads, what device, and why.?? Writers are invited to videotape, film, paint, photograph, animate, twitter, or memorialize in any way (that is logical and/or decipherable) the process of stepping into a bookstore and buying a book to send along for our possible amusement and/or use on our Web site.”

While this new requirement may seem draconian and cruel to the poor, struggling writer, many literary magazines and presses have submission fees ($25, say, to read your work). Tin House is not asking writers to fund itself, but to fund the distribution centers that sell it, and, more indirectly, the writers and publishers who supply content.

In response to Tin House’s requirement, Dzanc Books launched a more philanthropic and open version of the readers’ fee. For the month of July, if you buy a (literary fiction) book from an independent bookstore, Dzanc will donate a book to a school or library. Dzanc is reaching out to readers and writers alike—one need not submit anything to the press in order for them to donate. You just have to buy a book.

These new promotions seek to redress the rising disjunction between the supply of writers and the diminishing demand for writing. We could leap to two quick conclusions: First, that writers are not reading enough, and second, that libraries (and/or book lending and online full-text publication) are doing a bang-up job. Let us hope the answer lies in number two. But in case it is number one, why not ask wannabes to help sustain the business they hope one day to join?

Photo (cc) by Flickr user Margolove

I used to

A punctuation purist would claim that emoticons are debased ways to signal tone and voice, something a good writer should be able to indicate with words. But the contrary is true: The history of punctuation is precisely the history of using symbols to denote tone and voice. Seen in this way, emoticons are simply the latest comma or quotation mark. And despite the oft-repeated story that Carnegie Mellon professor Scott Fahlman invented the smiley and the frown face all the way back in 1982, the history of emoticons goes back much further.

In 1887, Ambrose Bierce wrote an essay, "For Brevity and Clarity," suggesting ways to alter punctuation to better represent tone. He proposed a single bracket flipped horizontally for wry smiles, "to be appended, with the full stop, to every jocular or ironical sentence."

Then in 1969, Vladimir Nabokov was interviewed by The New York Times, which asked him how he ranks himself among living writers and those of the immediate past. "I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile—some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question," he said.

So is it okay to invent punctuation marks? Absolutely. At first, writing had no punctuation at all. Usually, authors dictated their words to scribes, and were meant to be recordings of speech. The scribes were simply transcribers, and had no license to add anything not heard by the speaker. Also, no one read silently. All writing was read aloud.

A space is a punctuation mark, remember, so in those days, everyone used a script called scripta continua, which, as you may guessed, meant therewerenospacesbetweenwords. As more people began reading, itbecamehardertoreadthedamnedmanuscripts, and punctuation marks were invented to ease reading aloud.

The earliest marks indicated how a speaker’s voice should adjust to reflect the tone of the words. Punctus interrogativus is a precursor to today’s question mark, and it indicates that the reader should raise his voice to indicate inquisitiveness. Tone and voice were literal in those days: Punctuation told the speaker how to express the words he was reading out loud to his audience, or to himself. A question mark, a comma, a space between two words: These are symbols that denote written tone and voice for a primarily literate—as opposed to oral—culture. There is no significant difference between them and a modern emoticon.

It is true that some people go overboard, cluttering their writing with silly waving hands and kissy faces. But the same outpouring of new marks occurred in the Middle Ages, too, when the old hoary punctuation marks—the ones we now teach 5th graders—were new and exciting.

By the first millennium, manuscripts were overrun with unintelligible marks thought up by too-clever scribes. A few hundred years later, everyone tired of all the chaos and punctuation marks became more codified, streamlined, and fewer in number. Centuries later, the marks left standing were awarded a prized place on the typewriter keyboard, leaving scads of now forgotten /// and {>+ inside the type drawers of printing presses. Today, your computer keyboard still has a only a few doo-dads to supplement the letters.

And so it goes again. We started to play. We came up with a chaotic overabundance of new punctuation marks to better express ourselves. Given the pace of things, I’d say we have another decade or so before a few make it into grammar books. The SAT 2020 may test you on your proficiency in ? and :_(.
 

Photo (cc) by Flickr user Aj03

The "death of reading" march goes across our browsers, but in the publishing world, books still needs to be sold. Hence Book Expo America, the yearly meet-and-greet in the cavernous New York City Javitz convention center. The past two years of BEA were deemed "grim," as publishers worried about the internet and declining sales. But this year, the consensus seemed to be that things are "not as bad as we feared." In these recessed times, that counts for something.

I attended BEA for the first time and with great enthusiasm, but, as always when I am surrounded by thousands of strangers, I found myself seeking quiet corners to read instead of packed author breakfasts starring Barbra Streisand. From the aisles upon aisles of publishers, I gleaned certain things. Among them: 

1.  People are still reading. And they bucking every prognostication by choosing to read really, really long books. The buzziest book of BEA-the book advertised on the badges we all wore around our necks, in fact-is Justin Cronin's The Passage. The novel features vampires, a post-apocalyptic America, some secret government conspiracy, and viruses. It is just shy of 800 pages and pre-publication word is that it delights all the brows: high, middle, and low.  We will probably all be pretty tired of The Passage by August (and certainly by the time the Ridley Scott movie comes out). And yet I feel certain that many of us will lose at least a few days inside Cronin's universe; this one will be a hit.

2. Literary novels continue to have both buzz and cache. Leading the pack is Julia Orringer's The Invisible Bridge. In a Los Angeles Times review of the book, Tim Rutten writes, "If you're still looking for a ‘big' novel to carry into the summer holidays-one in which you can lose yourself without the guilty suspicion that you're slumming-then Julie Orringer's "The Invisible Bridge" is the book you want. " Orringer's novel about Hungarian Jews during World War II will not only be great, it will also class up your beach towel.

3. It can be hard to find the independents. Where do you get the lowdown on that quirky book you know you would love, if only you knew about it? Not at Expo. Thanks, then, for TheRumpus.net, a lively literary webmagazine, has rolled out a new book club that offers a monthly selection of great lesser-touted titles and a chance to talk about the books with like-minded folks.

4.  The book form is still unwieldly for many types of writing. Poems need not be bound into the slim volumes they are now, and when it comes to short stories, why do we need 10? One great short story could stand on its own on, say, your iPhone. Long-form journalism needs venues other than the disposal daily news or the deathly-for-sales anthology. Until we invent the best delivery vehicle for these not-really-booky types of writing, though, paper between two covers will have to do. I am excited about  The Fiddler In The Subway: The Story of the World-Class Violinist Who Played for Handouts…And Other Virtuoso Performances by America's Foremost Feature Writer by Gene Weingarten. Wiengarten is a brilliant feature writer for the Washington Post, and the title story, about the famous violinist Joshua Bell playing in the DC Metro, is rapidly becoming a classic of narrative non-fiction.

5. We are publishing way, way too many books.  At BEA I felt this viscerally for the first time something I have suspected for awhile. We could pulp a few hundred thousand without losing any of our lively book culture. I would love to attend another BEA that advertises itself as featuring "the fewest books ever!" 

So there you have it. In the meantime, let those "no one reads anymore" articles keep popping up on my search engine. I can handle them. Because for this summer at least, I will also have tomatoes to eat, sex to think about and great books to read.

Recently, a plea appeared on my twitter stream: “I'm begging for book money again: We are trying to complete a classroom set of THE HUNGER GAMES. Please RT.” The tweet contained a link to DonorsChoose.com, a website that allows teachers to seek funding for school projects.
 
I love DonorsChoose, but I wish it didn't exist. Nothing breaks my heart like a public school teacher who can't afford a set of paperbacks for her students. Given all the noise about how kids don't read enough anymore, you would think school districts might prioritize paying for books. But the reality is that many teachers and schools simply can't afford a classroom set of paperbacks—which is where programs like DonorsChoice come in.

There is another option, though. Any teacher can request free books from a private foundation. The catch? You have to teach a novel by Ayn Rand. The Ayn Rand Institute will cheerfully send out classroom sets of The Fountainhead or Anthem to any teacher who requests them. Just send an email to the Foundation and receive a box in the mail. The Institute also provides teaching guides and lessons. The other catch? You have to teach the works of one of the most controversial and overhyped writers in American literary history.

Since the free-book program debuted, over 1 million copies of her novels have been sent to high school students. I have worked with high school teachers who assign her novels. They do so reluctantly, given Rand’s philosphy of radical individualism and laissez-faire government. But for teachers, being able to give each student a copy they can take home with them means an opportunity for healthy class discusion. (My teacher friends also tell me the novel teaches surprisingly well: Students cotton easily to Rand’s proto-Tea Party politics.)

You have to give it to the Ayn Rand Institute: They have figured out how to keep their author’s works alive. Are there any other such programs? None that I could find. Recently, Scholastic launched an initiative that promotes free books for kids through a Facebook campaign, where the books go to K.I.D.S., or Kids In Distressed Situations. But this and other similar worthy endeavors do not help public school teachers. And as kids become teens, programs become scarcer: It's easier to raise money for children’s books than it is for high school texts.

Meanwhile, many high school English teachers are forced to scrounge through the school’s storage room year after year to find 30 copies of To Kill A Mockingbird. Or they get the Rand novels. Why do you think so many young Americans consider The Fountainhead their favorite novel? Why do you think her works continue to sell so well? Because so many young American have had a chance to read it, take it home, and discuss it in a classroom of peers. How many other such novels have they had the chance to so read?

Still, I think the Rand institute is onto something. What if major publishers offered public high school teachers free paperback copies of other classic literary texts? What if every author of a well-written, public-domain novel had an Institute promoting her work just like Ayn Rand?

I know—that's crazy idealistic. That would cost, like, $300 per classroom. Better to have teachers hustle on charity auction sites, or teach the uber-individualist and capitalist lessons of Rand to yet another generation.

Photo (cc) by Flickr user Stuartjones


 

There are so many different definitions of plagiarism-and so much written about it-that it can be hard to separate original writing from things you've read before. For example....

What one forgery scam can tell us about the tradition of author signatures-and where we go from here.

With J.D. Salinger, how can we separate the author from his writing? And now that he's dead, should we even try?

I have written about J.D. Salinger elsewhere in these pages, but his recent death prompts me to think about another angle: the myth of the Salinger-author. That Salinger was a recluse colors our reading of his work. What does Salinger’s decision to become a recluse mean to us? How does it contribute to our sense of him as an author? To authorship in general? An op-ed in The New York Times on February 1 suggests it represents a model of authorship unavailable to today’s hustling self-promoting writers. But it is more than this, surely.

Most come to Salinger with his biography—his half-century of silence—laid over the words like a palimpsest. We could not, of course. We could read the novel as a piece of writing untethered from the person who authored it. We could make meaning solely from the words, from the light paperback in our hands. Roland Barthes’s essay “Death of the Author” lays out this approach to reading: "Writing is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the body writing. Words, not the author who wrote them, should be our starting and ending points as readers." As soon as a fact is narrated, Barthes continues, "the voice loses its origin, the author enters his own death, writing begins."

So for a Barthesian, that Salinger chose to live for decades away from the madding crowds should not enter into our evaluation of his work. Yet most of us are not Barthesians, as Barthes himself noted: "The author still reigns in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines. The image of literature to be found in ordinary culture is tyranically centered on the author, her person, his life, his tastes, his passion. … The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it."

For whatever reasons (and those reasons are interesting and many), we want more. We crave a piece of the Salinger cross, to see inside that supposed vault of secret manuscripts, to have a private screening of the rumored five-minute surreptitious interview.

I bet Cornish, New Hampshire, will become a busier place than it is now, as more fans trek to find the house Salinger lived in, the diner he ate in, and the general store he bought his toilet paper in. I imagine the code of silence by which the town residents amazingly and touchingly abided will no longer need to be upheld.

People will go to Cornish to pay their respects, as literary pilgrims have done since the 15th century, when Petrach’s house was made into a tourist site, but they will also go to try to figure Salinger out, to tease out the wheres and wherefores of his decision to become a recluse. The myth of Salinger—by which I mean the recluse figure of our imaginations—will grow as a result.

So what will it be, if you are a Salinger fan? If you want to see where he lived for the past 50 years, hear more about his daily life, and read what he wrote at that town hall meeting—if you want, in other words, to pry into all those things Salinger so carefully kept from us—are you invading the privacy of your hero? Do we need to respect Salinger’s wishes for his life once he has died? Salinger protected his intellectual property as fiercely as he did his privacy, but he cannot protect what happens to his posthumous reputation.

"People coming & putting a bunch of flowers on your stomach on Sunday, & all that crap. Who wants flowers when you're dead?" Salinger wrote.  This week, he is being strewn with bouquets of lovely tributes.  What will we give him in the weeks and years to come? And what will it mean?

Illustration by Jo Tran.
 

How we can help Haiti move forward, through understanding.

A holiday shout-out to the Tudors, independent magazines, and charitable giving.

What we don't know about early America

Halloween + Literature = Edgar Allan Poe, right?

What could we gain by abandoning the test's timed essay? Better writers.

Is the combination question mark and exclamation point a sign of the times?

Richards Powers wrote his new novel by dictation. Does that affect the quality?