Mrs. Churm, on the prospect of my being called for campus interviews:

"I can’t believe you use that harsh deodorant soap on your face. You need to start using moisturizer."

Good advice, really....

I probably never mentioned it, but I’m originally from Southern Illinois, a geographically and culturally unique region that’s been marginalized for decades.

Recently I was invited to speak at my old high school about writing, teaching, and growing up in that town. It was always my impression that the school had provided us a good education, something I planned to mention. Coincidentally, the day I drove down, the local news was reporting that the high school had won a U.S. News & World Report Bronze Medal in their nationwide “Best High Schools” rankings.

The award, on closer inspection, factored in the expected gap between poverty and achievement, which drove the school’s score higher. A teacher told me that 40% of their student body are at or below the poverty line; U.S. News determined that 44.2% are “economically disadvantaged.” Evidently the assumption is that poverty will necessarily make those who suffer it less educationally fit as well.

Other teachers that day asked if I ever saw any of their former students in my classes at our large state university upstate. I had to admit I never had, in 10 years on the job. But, I said, there are 30,000 undergrads on campus, and I teach no more than 100-250 in a calendar year. (In big lecture classes I might never get to know where students are from.)

The guidance counselor told me their students were being accepted, but many never matriculated. “Affordable” state university education—tuition, fees, housing and incidentals currently start at about $23,000 per year—means one thing to many who live in urban and suburban Chicagoland, and another thing entirely in the chronically economically-depressed bottom third of the state.

According to university data, 38 undergrads from that county enrolled at the university in Fall 2005 (the most recent data available). In all 30,453 enrolled that fall, but only 26,761 were from within the state. That means .14 percent of in-state undergrads came from Williamson County. The county’s population in 2005 (63,617) was .5 percent of the state’s. The difference between the rate of enrollment at the university and the state population was nearly -3.6 times in deficit.

On the other hand, 2,177 undergrads from Lake County, Chicago’s wealthy North Shore, enrolled at the university in Fall 2005. That means 8.1 percent of in-state undergrads came from Lake County. Lake County’s population (702,682) was 5.51% of the state’s. The difference between the rate of enrollment at the university and the state population was +1.47 times in surplus.

This seems to mean that, populations adjusted, someone from Williamson County is more than five times less likely to enroll at the flagship university in the state system than someone from Lake County, where median home values can run to three-quarter million dollars.

Put another way, Lake County’s population was 11 times that of Williamson County’s. But Lake County’s enrollment was not merely 11 times more. If it was, you’d multiply Williamson County’s 38 students and get 418 students from Lake. Instead, Lake got 2,177. Power has a way of serving itself at table first, and Champaign-Urbana is sometimes called “Chicago South” when school’s in session.

The southernmost 16 counties in the state—Alexander, Pulaski, Massac, Union, Johnson, Pope, Hardin, Jackson, Williamson, Saline, Gallatin, Randolph, Perry, Franklin, Hamilton, and White—fared about the same. Their population in 2005 was 2.7 percent of the state’s. They enrolled .88 percent of all in-state undergrads, which makes for a deficit of a little more than three times.

No doubt it matters that some school districts on the North Shore can spend nearly $19,000 per student, who can then afford to be more competitive than those in a place like my hometown, where district revenue is only $8,000 per student. It’s also possible there are fewer young people in the population of Southern Illinois, or fewer who want to go to college, or to go to college upstate. (I doubt all three.)

In fact, none of these figures may tell a meaningful story, but the possibility of inequity touches a nerve. I was admitted to this university from high school, but when financial complications arose, an administrator here told me I’d have to drive up to do paperwork in person, on the chance that it would lead to aid. I didn’t have a car, or even money for a bus ride, difficulties which will sound ridiculous to many, I suppose. In the end the problem felt insurmountable, the final straw, and I went first to a community college on a scholarship then quickly to the army.

Bothered by the high school guidance counselor’s worries last week, and being a curious guy, I asked the Director of Undergraduate Admissions here if she knew of regional disparity. She replied, “We have been doing more in southern Illinois to encourage students to apply and choose Illinois, but we still have work to do.”

She said her office could produce applicable data based on zip codes, but that it would be weeks or months before they could get to it.

“I am always open to suggestions on how we can better recruit the southern region,” she said.

I’m open to offering suggestions but had never considered the problem before. What books or other resources are available on suburban and urban regions using disproportionately more state resources than rural ones? What solutions might there be?

When explaining how to prepare adequately for creative writing workshops, I ask new classes to take their peers’ work home and read it more than once, to make generous line annotations, and to write one-page letters on the back for more global concerns. All this is prelude to the verbal discussions that will take place when we reconvene for workshop.

I remind them that most good writing is supported by detail, so when they make critical assertions they should back them up with evidence from the texts themselves. Then I do a little patter on what I call the poles of critical commentary.

The North Pole of student comments goes like this: Dear Peer, this story is great. I’ve never read such a great story, and it’s going to get you an A in this class. In fact, when you walked in on the first day of class with your hat turned backward, I thought you were a published author and knew I could spend the rest of my life basking in the glow of your work because it’s so really very great. I love you.

The South Pole of commentary is no more helpful: Dear Peer, your story sucks. Never in all the sucking world has a story sucked as bad as this one sucks….

Both poles are sterile. Obviously, what you want instead is commentary from the fecund tropical zone of criticism, lush with insight and details, equatorial in its balance. I do my best to help students find their way there.

But yesterday I started the South Pole thing and heard myself saying, “…never in my life have I sucked anything that was so….”

I froze, reminded instantly of a faux pas I committed once in a lit class several years ago. I’d meant to say, about a murder in a film version of Frankenstein, “The guy whacked him.” But I got confused with the phrase “bumped him off,” and what I said aloud was, “And then the guy whacked him off.” The classroom erupted in a riot. I managed to regain control, if not my dignity, after I laughed and said that was another thing entirely.

But it does raise the question of what a teacher might say or do unthinkingly in the classroom from which there would be no recovery. My acquaintance Crazy Larry says: audible fart. You?

Friend of The Education of Oronte ChurmDinty W. Moore has been getting attention for a story he recently published at the journal The Normal School, out of California State University at Fresno.

“Mr. Plimpton's Revenge: A Google Maps Essay, in Which George Plimpton Delivers My Belated and Well-Deserved Comeuppance” tells Dinty's amusing tale involving a Datsun with "clay fenders," various drugs, and multiple, paranoiac run-ins with Paris Review founder and writer George Plimpton.

(Maybe there’s a whole genre in this: Crossings with Plimpton. In my case, the rich young attorney brother of my young rich professor invited our MFA class to a party in honor of Plimpton when his book Truman Capote came out. The idea was that the release party, held during the Miami Book Fair, would be a Black and White Ball like the one Capote infamously hosted and which is described in the book. This latter one was held around the rooftop pool of the toniest hotel on South Beach. I remember Mr. Plimpton as tall, gaunt, and slightly perverse-looking. He wore a black tuxedo and an ornate black silk mask shaped like a frilly butterfly that covered most of his face but his lips, and his distinguished white hair was a little mussed and sweaty in the heat. He looked like an ambassador fresh from the orgy room. He was, as he’s always described, gentlemanly and gracious, even when the women in our cohort, including a novelist I could name but won’t, and my companion, the future Mrs. Churm, discovered the delights of the Cosmopolitan and sloshed down 4,200 of the neon-colored drinks then said awful things about Allan Gurganus, whose was standing right there.)

The Washington Post, for one, loved Dinty’s story, though its writer does question if the use of the Google Map was distracting. “Even in 2010, not everything written on the Internet has to be interactive. Right?” he says.

The idea of using Google Maps goes back a ways. The Lawrence Journal-World thinks it might have produced “the first example of Google Maps within a story on a traditional news site.” And a couple of years ago, Penguin Books posted at their site We Tell Stories a story by Charles Cumming that used the satellite image layer of Google Maps. (See snapshots from the story at io9, since the original won’t load for me now at the Penguin site.)

It’s a fair (and, it seems to me, large) question, to ask when illustrations or interactivity bring something to the party in textual stories. The writer at io9 makes a case for certain science-fiction stories working well with Google Maps, based on plot. “If the [Cummings] story is about a man being tracked and followed, then it is also told in a way that allows us to track and follow, clicking onward through maps of the man's experience.” Dinty’s essay seems to meet this criterion too, since it’s about the surreal tripping (literally) over the same man in different geographies.

As the io9 writer admits, there are limitations, as there are with any form. In considering whether readers of science fiction would want to follow the path of characters in, say, the novels of William Gibson: “[M]aybe all of that is a bit cheesy…too much like the origins of D&D, replayed all over again in an era of satellite mapping…like some bad dot-com fantasy, where handheld devices will give us access to things we've never experience [sic] before….”

I’m tempted, though…. What if there were a writing contest for this sort of thing, hosted by some blogger? With cash and prizes? Best original essay, short story, or poem that uses a Google Map, or one of the Google Maps mashups, in an integral way in its telling? Judged by someone with—yes—street cred in this sort of thing?

Regardless of all that, take a look at this interesting discussion of the Joyce Walks mashup, which provides a different sort of mapping opportunity for readers.

Maybe it’s already being done in more ways than I’ve seen, but the use of these maps could be interesting for all manner of literature. Imagine reading Graham Greene’s The Quiet American in Vietnam and following Fowler around Saigon, where many names of streets and landmarks were changed after 1975. Or following the maps drawn from Farewell to Arms by the scholar Michael Reynolds, but in greater detail and with supreme accuracy. One might—almost—be tempted to buy an iPhone. If that's what it does.

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain. Eds. Rohan Kamicheril and Sal Robinson. Open Letter, University of Rochester. November 2009. $12.75.

Review by Okla Elliott

The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain, (whose editors have done two other Words without Borders anthologies: Literature from the “Axis of Evil” and Words without Borders: The World through the Eyes of Writers), is a unique, and in its own modest way, a necessary book. In it, you will find work by the likes of Milan Kundera, Peter Schneider, Vladimir Sorokin, and many others of considerably less fame. You will also find a facsimile of a letter written by US Senator Bob Dole to a Yugoslavian dissident; reprints of dozens of photos, posters, book covers; as well as poetry, song lyrics, speeches; and official reports by secret agents on citizens in former Soviet nations. Somehow in the mere 231 pages of this book, the editors have successfully given an overview of the reactions to the fall of the Wall inside these countries and abroad, and from nearly every sector of society from politicians to pop culture icons to literary figures.

And so, when I say that this book is likely destined for little or no popular audience, I am more condemning the public readership than the book itself. That said, however, I do predict that instructors in disciplines as wide-ranging as comparative literature, international studies, post-Soviet history, and pop culture analysis will find this book a wonderful text for classrooms at all levels of instruction. The book is also a perfect purchase for academic libraries.

One highlight in the book is the short story “Paris Lost” by Wladimir Kaminer, which is both wonderfully satirical and well-translated by Liesl Schillinger. The story recounts a faux Paris that was built in Russia where Russian citizens were sent under the pretense that it was the real Paris—a lie the narrator’s uncle did not believe when he was sent. The humorous possibilities and the potential for social commentary are obvious, I think. Kaminer also coins the term “ideological condom,” a turn of phrase I found both funny and accurate.

Another highlight is the poem “Report from a Besieged City” by Zbigniew Herbert, one of my favorite poets of all time and generally considered one of Poland’s (and the world’s) finest. Alissa Valles is the translator here. Valles, you might remember, was the center of a major controversy a few years ago when she was chosen over John and Bogdana Carpenter to translate Herbert’s definitive post-mortem Collected Poems, much to the public dismay of legendary translator and poet, Michael Hofmann, who reviewed it scathingly for Poetry, thus setting off a bitter debate. I guess we know which side of that little debate the editors of the current volume have fallen on. I am not as passionate as Hofmann is about his preference for the Carpenters’ translations, but I do agree with him that they are superior. That said, however, Valles’s translation here does the job and conveys much of the joy of the original.

Sadly, many of the original languages of the pieces in this anthology are utterly unknown to me. I did my best to find the originals of those works originally written in German or Polish and can attest to the overall good quality of those translations. As for the half-dozen other languages represented here, I have no clue whatsoever as to the quality of the translations. I can say that the translators chosen are in most cases well-regarded, though there are a handful of new faces here, which adds, if not veteran skill, then at least fresh blood.

All in all, I recommend this book without reservation and foresee a reasonably solid future for it.

***

Okla Elliott's non-fiction, poetry, short fiction, and translations have appeared in A Public Space, Indiana Review, International Poetry Review, The Literary Review, The Los Angeles Review, and New Letters, among others. He is the author of two poetry chapbooks and is co-editor, with Kyle Minor, of The Other Chekhov.

When I started teaching eons ago—by which I mean 12 technology years—most ambitious teachers hoping to see the work of their class in print could only photocopy booklets of student writing for the class’s own consumption. In 1998 we might have been calling these efforts ‘zines, since rhetoric departments believed that using the word “‘zine” was avante-garde in the way Russians in War and Peace think they’re awfully sexy speaking French.

Remember, websites were not easy to build then, and blogs were a thing for the future. Click to see how Yahoo’s and our government’s sites looked in the mid-‘90s. And remember how big a splash that coffee pot made? We were hard up, man.

But students were enthusiastic and inventive with the platform they had, as I’m sure it has always been. (Think of how enthused the art class in Lascaux was with their work.) More to the point, students’ writing improved with an increased awareness of audience. One semester at the University of Miami my students produced full-color “magazines” on the city they knew from life and from their reading. (Our photocopy print run was fewer than 50 copies; enough for parents, roommates, and friends.) Knowing their work would be put into hands other than mine, in a form that looked something like what a consumer might actually read, students took more pride in authorship and worked through multiple drafts of writing they’d otherwise resisted.

Since then I’ve tried course management software for semester-long collaborative writing. In its archive function the system can serve as a kind of clunky, unattractive, but comprehensive online publication. Blog templates are free and easy now, of course, but in some ways that strips the product of its thrill. Every goober keeps a blog.

Then a couple of years ago Print On Demand technology started becoming practical. Coincidentally, about that time university administrators requested we find opportunities for undergrad research and publishing. I began to think that one of my classes might compile a real book, print it with PoD (or go paperless, as with Featherproof Books’ chapbooks), advertise by word of mouth and online, and sell it by PayPal or through some distribution channel. (Distribution is a very large problem.) Any minimal profits could go to a worthy charity, but even better the experience would be a practical, real-world one for students, which is sometimes hard to get in the humanities.

Such a project would, I felt sure, be restricted only by imagination, leadership, and talent. After all, the Foxfire books, which I’ve always admired, were done with high school students, and Dave Eggers compiles his Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies with high school students too. What might intelligent undergrads accomplish?

I wrote a couple of posts here about the new print technology. At the time I was this close to starting my own book publishing company and had talked to some genuinely excellent people about collaboration. I even had the idea worked out for the first book—a funny but significant one, for a wide readership—which could be put together with or without student involvement. I was about to make a call for submissions here at the blog. Then my novel was accepted, other opportunities followed, and I almost gratefully backed away from what would have been a massive task.

One day after I’d started writing my nonfiction book, my commissioning editor told me that the publisher was interested in my working with students at the university to produce an oral history of the town. This offered a return to my previous idea without the additional mess of becoming a publisher.

I put in months of work setting it up: Getting the uni’s okay on students working on it as a class project, rearranging two semesters of my teaching schedule, organizing creative nonfiction classes around the idea of Studs Terkel-like work, trying to understand how the institutional review board would want their approvals and consents for what they’d view as testing on human [interview] subjects, figuring out how the residential academic unit that would host my special topics course might let in non-resident students, asking around if anyone wanted our filthy lucre, etc. There were difficulties and resistance at every turn, except in giving away free money.

Then my editor quit. No contract had been produced. Both the managing and the new commissioning editor claimed not to have been told about the discussion and asked me to make a new pitch. Right at the start of the semester one of my lackluster students told an amateur historian—and former mayor—in town what we were hoping to do, and the guy submitted his own book proposal to the same publisher and fouled up the works, which I only discovered a couple of weeks ago.

C’est la guerre, I thought with Gallic weariness. Je reviens à la première idée, les ‘zines. Toujours les ‘zines.

But I decided to try one last thing before I pulled the plug. The week after New Year’s I came up with a different idea for a print anthology and wrote a proposal to a good academic press. The director called me less than 24 hours after I dropped it in the mail and gave me the go-ahead. I don’t have a contract in hand yet, so I don’t want to be explicit, but it’s looking good.

Ever get the feeling that smiling through the thrashings you take in trying to get something done would be the mark of brilliance? I hope that’s not true.

When Martin Riker, Dalkey Archive Press's associate director, told me he'd be moderating a panel on literary translation at this year's MLA, I asked if he'd write something here about the session. Kindly, he agreed. --Churm

***

“Training Translators” at the MLA

The announcement that the presidential focus of the 2009 MLA conference would be on translation was received with something like shock and awe in the literary translation community. Although the vast majority of professional-grade translators make their living as university professors, such devotion has hardly been reciprocated by academia itself, which traditionally has failed to treat translation as serious professional work or literary translation as a serious intellectual-artistic discipline. Thus MLA President Catherine Porter’s choice of translation as her focus seemed an unprecedented concession in a battle that until now had seemed more like a lost cause.

Part of it, no doubt, stems from the increased attention the translation “issue” has gotten over the past several years (in fact I would date this attention precisely to the aftermath of Sept 11, 2001), attention that has been brought into being by the combined efforts of translators and translation publishers and that has resulted in, among other things, the establishment of new programs for translation studies at several universities in the US, including the program at the University of Illinois to which Dalkey Archive Press is affiliated. And it was in this capacity—as associate director of Dalkey Archive Press, which alongside U of I’s Center for Translation Studies has been developing a variety of educational models for translation training—that I came to moderate “Developing a New Generation of Translators,” a roundtable discussion about the future of literary translation in the academy, and in particular about what role academia might best play in the training of future translators.

The session broke down into two parts: First were the thoughts of the panelists—Lawrence Venuti (Temple U), Suzanne Jill Levine (U of California, Santa Barbara), Bill Johnston (Indiana U), Emmanuelle Ertel (NYU), Edwin Gentzler (U Mass, Amherst), Benjamin Paloff (U Mich)—who were asked ahead of time to address “the best means for training translators and what changes need to occur within the academy for the discipline of literary translation to evolve”; and second were the ideas contributed by everybody else in the room, which was large and packed with leaders in the translation field such as Michael Henry Heim, David Bellos, Susan Bernofsky, and Elizabeth Lowe, as well as Catherine Porter herself. My goal in the rest of this write-up is just to record the salient points, sans commentary by myself, although I probably will not be able to resist one or two asides, for which I apologize in advance.

The panelists moved back and forth between very practical nuts-and-bolts suggestions and more widely conceived critiques, bordering on ontological reconceptualizations, of contemporary translation pedagogy.

Emmanuelle Ertel talked about the importance of balancing theory and practice in educating younger translators, and how crucial that balance is to a successful academic program. She made the interesting suggestion that programs might best focus on a single language (in NYU’s case, French); that among other things, this type of focus can make the “workshop” model more viable. I believe she meant also that such a program would therefore be housed within a foreign language department—a point I mention because not all panelists saw foreign language as the best place for translation to reside or thrive.

Bill Johnston, who heads the certificate program in literary translation at Indiana University, introduced the idea of competency-based education as a model for translation studies; that is, a focus on what students need to do, rather than what they need to know. He pointed out that translation work has feet in both scholarship and in creative writing; that as such it is a kind of perfect hybrid of reading and writing; and that this dual nature of translation work needs to be taken into account in figuring out how it can better work for and within the academic community.

Benjamin Paloff from U of Michigan took issue with some of the presumed assumptions surrounding the topic (translation studies in the academy), in numbered points that I will in turn number and paraphrase as such:

Assumptions: 1) “students don’t have sufficient command of a second language”; 2) “students lack necessary expertise in foreign cultures”; 3) “there are no places to publish translations”; 4) “there is a lack of institutional support for translation work.”

Responses: 1) actually the real problem is that students lack command of English, which is much more important to good translation work; 2) sort of the same as #1; 3) there are lot of publications dedicated to translation, but we lack a culture of translation that makes these apparent to students; and 4) well, this one is more tricky.

What was more tricky is that of course a number of US universities do have programs for translation studies, not least of all the programs represented by these panelists, even if (this is no longer Paloff speaking, this is me) somehow these pockets of interest and energy have never developed as a viable academic community so as to create a presence and a respect for the work of translation as a widely recognized and regarded field of professional academic endeavor. This is of course despite the fact that virtually every major period of advancement in human knowledge—and certainly in humanistic knowledge, and even more certainly in literary innovation—can be traced to a consequent increase in translation.

Paloff called for more interdisciplinarity in translation studies, a point that was taken up by others as well.

Edwin Gentzler described the translation MA program at U Mass, Amherst, and spoke in particular about the non-traditional (or “experimental”) forms of translation that he teaches in this program. He was concerned about the ways in which he has observed the marketplace exerting pressure on students not to pursue these types of translation, and he put forth a vision of an academic translation program as a place where the possibilities of translation should be explored, a point that Lawrence Venuti picked up on later on.

Suzanne Jill Levine was at MLA in part to celebrate the new edition of her book The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin-American Fiction (which Dalkey Archive publishes) and she briefly offered some of the relevant points from that book, pointing out, for instance, that translation is a form of literary criticism (inasmuch as any translation is inherently an interpretation of the text) and that in training translators we are above all training great readers. Levine picked up on the notion of inter-disciplinarity—her own newly founded program at UC Santa Barbara is a doctoral emphasis in translation, working across a number of departments.

The last panelist was Lawrence Venuti who began by suggesting we throw everything that currently exists out (from the kinds of translation taught to the sites of teaching to the pedagogy) because what we really need is a sustainable translation culture. Currently, Venuti said, echoing Gentzler, the most sophisticated forms of translation are neglected within translation studies; he came out strongly against the workshop model for emphasizing practice over theory and imposing its own aesthetics upon students, and said that such programs run the risk of shaping translation education to the market, whereas translators should be taught to question the market. He agreed with the need for translation as an interdepartmental collaboration (he would have such a program housed in the English department, but he is against a free-standing program, since everyone in the humanities should have a stake in translation practice), although he was quick to point out that becoming a great translator takes decades of work, and an undergraduate program does not even begin to scratch the surface.

I had invited Professor Venuti onto the panel assuming he would take a position seemingly in direct opposition to the types of applied translation programs Dalkey Archive has established with the U of Illinois (post-graduate fellowships, for instance, with an emphasis on practical experience), and I’m sorry we didn’t have more time to talk about how or whether such programs would fit within his vision of a sustainable translation culture. Overall, though, the panel seemed to be less divided on the issue of training versus theory than I had expected; what emerged was more a discussion of the relationship between these two aspects of education, where they should be located (in or outside of the academy? If inside, where inside? And who should be involved, and how?) as well as, fundamentally, how translation studies as a discipline should be conceived.

At this point I got up as moderator and announced that I had only one question prepared for the panel, which I hoped people in the audience would also feel welcome to respond to, and it was this: Here we are at the MLA and it’s potentially an important moment. The MLA’s president has made translation the special focus of the conference, and so the literary translation community seemingly has the academic floor in a way it hasn’t before. My question is, if you could have one thing result from all this, what would it be?

This write-up is already pretty long so I’m going to just list the responses I was able to write down. The first person to respond was MLA President Catherine Porter, from the seventh or eighth row. These are of course all paraphrased.

Catherine Porter: to encourage that translation become an ongoing focus of this conference and of other academic conferences so that it begins to take a greater place in the consciousness of those in the academic community.

Suzanne Jill Levine: more funding, whether it be from the schools, foundations, wherever.

Edwin Gentzler: to see students encouraged to bring their translations to publishers, including more experimental (his word) translation forms.

Benjamin Paloff: to encourage more widely knowledgeable translators stemming from greater interaction between departments.

Susan Bernofsky: that American universities all start to offer translation studies as a necessary component of a humanistic education.

Bill Johnston: that translation studies moves back toward the study of English and literature as the prerequisite knowledge for good translation.

Emmanuelle Ertel: that more programs are established seeking a balance of theory and practice.

Elizabeth Lowe: the integration of translation studies into other curriculum.

David Bellos: that of the 8,000 or so attendees at this year’s MLA, perhaps 2,000 of them go back to their universities with a greater interest in translation as a discipline.

Michael Henry Heim: that of the 8,000 or so attendees at this year’s MLA, all 8,000 of them go back to their universities with a greater interest in translation.

I’ve no doubt missed a lot in this write-up, for which I blame the difficulties of moderating and taking notes at the same time. A man from American University Paris suggested that there was too much control described in the panel, and said he would “preach some loss of control” in the study of translation. Other audience members chimed in with ideas. No doubt I’ll get emails from half the people I mentioned here, correcting my translation of their statements—that is a whole different translation issue—and I can only hope ours and the other MLA sessions dedicated to translation (Esther Allen moderated one focused specifically on the issue of tenure accreditation for translation work, which I was sorry to miss) will indeed lead to more forums in which everyone can set the record straight.

As for myself, I agree with Suzanne Jill Levine’s wish: increased funding! It seems that, more often than not, when anything radical happens within American culture, it’s because somebody threw a whole bunch of money at it.

***

E-mail Martin Riker at riker@dalkeyarchive.com. Painting shown is not of Mr. Riker; it's Saint Jerome, patron saint of translators, by Domenico Ghirlandaio.

My mom always said that her sister Margie, an artist, started married life around World War II knowing how to cook only two things: Fudge and spaghetti. Twenty-five years later Margie had added a few other things to her repertoire, mostly sweets that even as a kid I never really liked: Strawberries hand-molded from Rice Krispies and chopped dates, rolled in red granulated sugar and topped with bitter little green frosting stems; crescent cookies with almost no sugar in the dough but a blanket of powdered sugar on top that was easy to breathe in and choke on; and crumbly shortbread balls that were really an apologia for unexcellent butter. Spaghetti remained popular as the main course, as I remember, and the fudge was always tooth-achingly sweet and good, if a little granular. When she grew older and the husband she’d tried to cook for had died, Margie dined like an ascetic, on toast and cups of hot tea, as if acknowledging she’d been a culinary poetaster all along.

Still, some of my fondest food memories are from her kitchen, where there was a large round oak table with a lazy Susan that encouraged family-style meals and long talks, at which even the youngest had an equal role. Best of all were winter holidays that insisted we be together indoors. My grown cousins taught me to play card and board games in that kitchen and let me taste sweet wine. At New Year’s, Margie’s Great Northern Beans and ham bubbled on the stove until a light crust formed on top and starchy drippings were baked hard down the side of the pot. Margie said every bean you ate that day was a dollar you’d earn in the new year, though an exact figure could never be calculated since she’d boil them until their atoms recombined to make a motile sludge that grumbled and steamed like a banker.

Never pin your financial hopes on a legume. Ham and beans is really about making use of what one already has at hand, driving one’s own good luck by not wasting opportunities, such as a few handfuls of hard dried beans and the inedible shank of a pig left over from Christmas dinner. It’s food for the poor, who dream of dollars one at a time. If ever there was an adjunct’s dish, this is it.

But what would I do with prosperity anyway? Re-roof the house? Fund new research interests? No, I’d buy my sons the biggest Lego set in the world with all the coolest and hardest-to-find figures in it. Then I’d hire somebody to pick up all the gottverdammt Lego pieces strewn around this house before I stepped on them with my bare feet and broke my neck—again.

I could even float the struggling university a loan so at the end of the month they could hand me something like a real paycheck.

You won’t get rich quick on Margie’s beans either, but enjoy a bowl this New Year’s. I’ve updated her recipe so even the tenured will like it:

***

Recipe for Instant Karma beans:

1 lb. bag of dried Great Northern beans
Leftover ham bone, with a little meat still attached
2 or 3 cans low-salt chicken broth
1 medium onion, diced
1 rib of celery, sliced thin
1 large carrot, peeled and chopped
1 tbsp. olive oil
2 bay leaves
1/2 tsp. baking soda
Black pepper to taste

Rinse and pick the beans for bad ones and stones. Soak overnight in cold water. Rinse and drain.

Make a stock by bringing to a hard boil the ham bone in enough cold water to cover it. Skim foam and impurities during first 10 minutes. Add bay leaves, reduce heat and simmer 3-5 hours, topping with chicken broth as needed to replenish what boils away. The stock will need to be salty in the end to flavor the bland beans, but if it starts to get overpowering, top up with water instead of chicken broth. Some people like to add a little brown sugar, but there’s no need if the ham was glazed. (Glaze will impart cloves and spice too.) Remove the bone and bay leaves when done. Pick the bone for any meat that can be shredded and returned to the stock. Discard bone and bay leaves.

Make a mirepoix by sautéing the onion, celery and carrot in the oil until the onions are translucent.

Add mirepoix, beans, and baking soda to the stock. Add water or broth as you see fit. Bring back to a boil then simmer for at least two hours, or until the beans begin to fall apart and their own starch thickens them. Pepper to taste; I’d start with a lot of it and go from there. You could also use white pepper if you don’t want to sully the beans’ color, or cayenne. Or let people add their own hot sauce at table.

The dish should be somewhere between thick soup and a stew. If the consistency rounds the corner to look like porridge, you might as well stick an immersion blender in it and blend it all smooth. No harm done. Serve with buttered sweet cornbread and a glass of cold milk, and meditate on what just rewards would look like if luck were on your side….

Happy holidays to all our Inside Higher Ed readers, and many thanks for following the blog. The Churm family wishes you a restful and enjoyable semester break.

--Oronte, Mrs. Churm, Starbuck, and Wolfie

Dalkey Archive Press is the largest publisher of translated literature in the United States, but Associate Director Martin Riker makes clear to visitors that Dalkey believes literature is an international art form that transcends national boundaries. One result of all this is that not all their books are by writers working in other languages, and not all are fiction. Riker also cheerfully admits they publish books to their own tastes. When pressed, founder and director John O’Brien says those tastes run to the “subversive,” since he doesn’t like terms such as “avant-garde” or “experimental.” One writer who happened to be eating lunch at Dalkey last week, during my first brief visit, described the aesthetic as “bat-shit crazy.” (Others feel Dalkey doesn’t publish experimentally enough. No pleasing everyone.) They’ve been publishing since 1980.

Dalkey also publishes The Review of Contemporary Fiction and the magazine Context, “a triquarterly publication intended to create an international and historical context in which to read modern and contemporary literature. Its goal is to encourage the development of a literary community.”

I’d never been to Dalkey before but can’t imagine why not, since they moved to the University of Illinois three years ago from Normal, Illinois. Yesterday I returned at Riker’s invitation to have a better look.

Their current building, formerly occupied by Printing Services, looks a little like a pole barn from the outside and is on the southernmost edge of campus on a bad gravel road, out where the university has pushed the last evidence of its Morrill Act origins. Inside it’s recently renovated, but business-austere. There are half a dozen cubicles for interns and translation fellows beyond an unmanned receptionist’s desk, and small offices with windows along the wall for O’Brien and Riker. Cheap, durable carpeting covers concrete floors, and overhead there are fluorescent light boxes with wiring running each-to-each in conduit pipes.

Riker, I’ve been told, studied with David Foster Wallace at Illinois State University and went on to do a Ph.D. in English with a creative dissertation at the University of Denver. His responsibilities have varied over the years, but his main job at Dalkey now is marketing, while John O’Brien spends half his time on editorial duties and half on fundraising. There are another four permanent staff members, smart, young people in their twenties and thirties.

Riker took me into their back storage room filled with metal shelving. I probably exclaimed over the shiny new books, and he said, “This is just the tippy-tip. Review copies.” Dalkey had been using the University of Nebraska Press for its distribution but in August moved to W.W. Norton, which could provide world distribution and better sales support, not unlike what Norton provides New Directions Publishing, which Riker says shares some customers with Dalkey.

Riker explained that Dalkey has 470 titles, a consequence of their never allowing titles to go out of print. Obviously it’s a big benefit of publishing with them, so canonical as well as emerging authors publish with Dalkey. (Unbelievably, major commercial publishers have let titles such as William Gass’s The Tunnel lapse, and Dalkey now publishes it alongside his Temple of Texts, Finding a Form, and other books that have been important in my reading life.) Similar situations brought Dalkey the works of Stanley Elkin, Carlos Fuentes, and other world authors. Fuentes is especially a fan of the press, Riker said, and Dalkey will release the first world publication (in English, and before a Spanish-language edition) of his new collection of essays.

The mini-warehouse is filled with stacks and stacks of beautiful books with modern covers designed by Danielle Dutton, and Riker handed me copies of several titles, including ones by Goncalo M. Tavares (“three more coming soon, we like to have several by our authors”), Jean-Philippe Toussaint, and Stanley Crawford. He gave me Crawford’s Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine and said it’s become a cult book (“a captivating short work almost beyond description,” says The New Yorker) and one of his favorites. He said reprints are harder to get press coverage for, so he “hand-sold” this book to indie booksellers, and it was picked up by Daedalus. It’s easy to see that Riker, laidback, funny, but deadly knowledgeable, does this very well. Now that Norton sells the books to accounts such as Borders and Barnes & Noble, and 50% of sales come from Amazon and other online sellers, Riker has more time to spend on marketing. Dalkey’s new anthology, Best European Fiction 2010, edited by Aleksander Hemon and with a preface by Zadie Smith, has gotten very good attention, including at the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and PRI’s The World.

When we emerged from the stockroom, a meeting was underway for the six permanent staff, who had spreadsheets at a long table with John O’Brien installed at the head. I’d heard O’Brien could be gruff or imperious, but he looked a little like Santa, if Santa wore a herringbone jacket over a sweater and Oxford shirt and had been to London or maybe Barbados recently. He definitely had a twinkle in his eye. As I sat down at the conference table Riker handed me a Dalkey catalogue. A line drawing of a bust on the cover looked suspiciously like O’Brien in deep repose.

The staff were in the middle of a conversation about what to call an internship. “There are bad connotations of ‘intern’ here,” O’Brien was saying. “Not in England.”

“How about just ‘fellowship’?” Jeremy Davies, Dalkey’s main acquisitions editor, asked.

“Mentorship?” O’Brien said.

Their conference space is just an area carved out of the single large room and is bordered by vertical and horizontal file cabinets and bookshelves. The shelves are filled with old books, reference books, foreign-language books: Golden Age of the Twenties, a tired Russian dictionary held together with packing tape, a biography of Max Perkins, a book titled Druhe Mesto with diacritical symbols I’m having a hard time reproducing here. Stacks of boxes (“Misc. Stuff from Marty’s Office” in permanent marker) and a dozen unused office chairs line the wall, next to someone’s mountain bike (a graduation tassel hanging from the handlebar with a pot-metal “08” on it), lots of black production binders with three-inch spines, a Hammond wall map of Africa, and an unhung art poster propped on top of a shelf.

Talk turned to the main topic: endowments and other funding for a non-profit literary press. O’Brien, a former tenured professor at Illinois State, ran the meeting as a teaching opportunity, by Socratic method, rather than as a corporate meeting with an agenda. He was explaining to the staff the Press’s goal of establishing an endowment and said an endowment would provide economic stability but would not, however, relieve them of the responsibility of selling books or fundraising. It would offer protection from ups and downs in the economy that they don’t currently enjoy.

“Or in case of sudden change in administration at the host university,” he added wryly.

O’Brien said, “Protection. What are the threats? What if our distributor went bankrupt? We just got out of two distributorships before they went bankrupt.”

Riker said, “You mean that most recent thing?” He started to correct O’Brien by saying that that outfit wasn’t bankrupt, just foundering. O’Brien said no, he meant the two before that.

O’Brien said they’d lost 75% of their support from the Illinois Arts Council, which is virtually defunct. As recently as two years ago, the press got $26,000 from the IAC (and significantly more annually before that), but last year it went down to $13,300. Dalkey’s annual budget is $1.7 million; only three percent of that comes from the state of Illinois in various forms. But, Riker added, talking to the younger staff members at the table, they were living in the state now and should write letters to their representatives about arts council funding.

O’Brien then turned to charitable foundations. “The worst time to go to a foundation asking for support,” he said, “is when you’re in distress. All you get is sympathy.” He defined other threats: “If Borders goes under, it won’t just be millions and millions of books flooding back to publishers from them. Because of the policy of Barnes & Noble to put stores across from Borders, would they still operate those stores? And if not, would B&N stock come flooding back too?”

O’Brien asked, “What are the opportunities of endowment?” He eventually answered himself: Office support in London (where there is now a young office), or maybe a New York office too. The ability to hire a tech editor at a salary of $60,000 instead of $22,000. Even the ability to compete against commercial publishers for editorial acquisitions. “For instance, if William Gaddis was still alive….” O’Brien wistfully left the suggestion dangling.

“If we’d had an endowment when we moved from ISU,” O’Brien continued, “we could have done it right, smooth as could be, we could have taken a semester off. Also: We had to pulp a number of books in the move to Norton rather than warehouse them, ship them from Nebraska, or move them from a different pay schedule. The move was an opportunity, with costs, and an endowment would have helped with all that.”

“Anyone know the old stock market joke? Know it?” O’Brien challenged editor Davies. “You should.” A man has stock in a company, and the value keeps going up and up. It reaches an improbably high price, and the man tells his broker to sell so they can clean up. “Sure,” the broker says. “To whom?” It’s the same with fundraising for publishing, O’Brien said. The stock of Dalkey—its reputation—goes up and up, but how do you locate the people out there who want to support it?

O’Brien then put his production assistant Jessica Henrichs on the spot by asking the difference between Dalkey’s fundraising and that of, say, a Champaign, Illinois, community theater company. With much prompting, O’Brien got his answer, that the theater had several advantages. Its staff could draw a circle of some radius around the city and know that 90%—or all—of their donors resided within it. They could see these donors arrive, know what kind of car they drove up in, greet them as they came in the door of the venue. O’Brien said some of that could still be done by zip-code demographics, for instance, but it wasn’t the same and not as focused. “The theater company can get instant feedback on the lousy play they put on,” he said, and get to know the patrons and matrons. “If someone thinks the lighting was bad, you use that to discuss donations for new lights.” It was also fairly easy for theater personnel to know which causes patrons donated to in the past, or if they ever donated at all. Literary publishing doesn’t have access to all this information, O’Brien said, and these are the downsides of fundraising for it.

At O'Brien's request, Riker began to list advantages they had in their mission as publishers, spokesmen, and preservationists of literature. One well-to-do donor might dearly love a particular Dalkey author and feel that in his donation he’s not only keeping the writer’s books in print, but that the books will “get around” because of Dalkey’s network and reputation. This will lead more readers to that writer, which will help ensure his work’s cultural survival, and so it goes. Another donor might have an interest in a particular region—maybe her family immigrated generations ago—and while her support of the press through authors from that region of the world wouldn’t be a cenotaph, exactly, it would serve her own interests in mutually beneficial ways.

O’Brien said that funding, whether it was an endowment or annual donations, comes in the shape of a pyramid. Maybe five or 10 people give very large amounts, but literature largely has not benefited from these. There were many people at the bottom of the pyramid with a few dollars to spend, but many of those bought Dalkey’s books and considered their work in support of the press to be done. He himself as a young man wouldn’t have contributed to New Directions; he just bought their books. No, most of the money came from hundreds or thousands of miles away, from New York, LA, New Mexico, sources which defy conventional fundraising practices.

There was discussion for a few minutes about the very top of the donor pyramid, the “obscene amounts” given by the likes of Ruth Lilly, who provided Poetry magazine with maybe $100 million, Riker said.

“They got more like $64 million out of it,” O’Brien said. “A rule for donors: Never give more than an organization can handle or it’ll make a mess of it.” He mentioned a defunct magazine that burned through an enormous endowment and departments at Yale who got money from donors “at the very top.”

O’Brien believes that Dalkey’s endowment will come from a few people at the very top of the traditional philanthropic pyramid. He cited as an example a recent $2 million donation to the Press to establish a named series. He then turned to Melissa Kennedy, Dalkey’s office manager, on his right. “So this is a softball right down the middle of the plate: Where are they going to come from?”

“From a few individuals?”

“That’s right,” O’Brien said, the expression on his face, made for comic effect, was like that of a teacher who’d asked a student why Joyce is an Irish writer and was told it was because he was from Dublin.

At this point someone suggested a break, and Riker asked O’Brien to make it a lunch break. I was invited to sit with O’Brien in his office, and we had an interesting chat (I’ll post some of that separately). When the subs were delivered I excused myself to check phone messages and gulp down a sandwich, and a few minutes later the meeting resumed on how to find potential donors, people who have saved money over the years and would see Dalkey’s work as something they would like to support. The “regular Joes,” as someone put it.

“As regular as us, anyway,” O’Brien said.

“We don’t need somebody swimming in money,” Davies said. “Just wading in it.”

Together, and again mostly by O’Brien’s Socratic method, the group recounted that the profile for such a person might include an interest in an area, region, or country. “What else? Just gimme one part,” O’Brien prodded.

“Interested in the future of Dalkey?” Kennedy ventured.

“Probably not,” O’Brien said.

“Long in the tooth?” Riker said. “Young people don’t read books.”

“And they have no money,” O’Brien said.

“I was kidding,” Riker said. (He was indeed kidding; those 18-26 may be Dalkey’s core readership, the age when many of us came to reading serious literature.)

They discussed several cases of people with relatively low lifetime earnings bequeathing tremendous amounts because they never spent any of the money in life. “It’s not unusual in the chronicles of philanthropy to see these people leave two million, five, ten million,” O’Brien said. “Children interfere with that.”

Davies said in his polite, soft voice, “So you’re saying cheap, lonely….”

I began laughing from the far edge of the table, and Kennedy cried, “What must you think of us?”

There was more discussion on finding donors among cultural societies, alum groups, or from the university. The university has a dedicated fundraiser, O’Brien said, but the person has to work to help 55 departments. O’Brien said he’d thought of asking Dalkey’s authors to give the names of three major donors in their home countries. He’d like to ask the authors if they knew them, and if the authors would be willing to help pitch the idea of donation.

O’Brien ended the meeting suddenly by saying they’d pick this up again to take specific actions and make dramatic progress in the near future. He and a young staff member donned coats and sunglasses, and O’Brien lit a cigarette as they went out the door, priming himself for his meeting with the dean.