the Prairie Schooner blog

A Story About the Type

by Timothy Schaffert

he colophon—the “note about the type” that sometimes closes a book—has a certain musty elegance. It’s best read aloud in your mock Orson Welles, while sipping a Negroni (a cocktail that tastes like a French kiss from a heavy-smoker who’s been sucking a cherry cough drop). Whether the age in which we live is post-postmodern or post-post-ironic, the colophon is a Pepe LePew-ish mix of adorable and arrogant, and certainly contributes to the bookishness of a book—today’s e-books care barely a smidge about the type, with Kindle setting every last word in the too-cute-for-words “Caelicia.”

The colophon’s poetic insignificance—detailing the history of the inventor of the shapes of the letters—seems anomalous to the no-nonsense, practical-minded, plot-driven novel. Therefore, it lends itself well to fictional revision, inviting both reverence and parody, as do so many aspects of our sentimental and lofty literary culture. It may be imprecise to declare colophon-inspired fiction a sub-genre, and examples of it have existed for too long to be considered a trend, but we offer here a brief bibliography of various acts of colophonia:

• Last year’s My Dog Ate My Nobel Prize: The Fabricated Memoirs of Jeff Martin included a colophon that personified the typeface as a boozy has-been.

•  Him Her Him Again The End of Him (2007) by Patricia Marx skews the colophon with a bit of literary vaudeville regarding an un-modern font invented by “the tongueless monk.”

•  Tim Dorsey’s novel of Hollywood, The Big Bamboo, carries its sprightly satire beyond the final page and right into the colophon, which is actually a fake news bit regarding an “epic thriller about rival neo-classical typesetters.” 

• Andrew Steinmetz’s poem “Monograph” (from his collection Hurt Thyself) cheekily examines the various quirks of publisher, printer, and author, from the Library of Congress listing to the unnumbered last pages (“…these blank white pages appear / to represent God…”), including the note about the type that bespeaks “the publisher’s sense of modesty.”

• Though an honest-to-god font, the Fairfield typeface gets a somewhat whimsical treatment in the note about the type of I Have Fun Everywhere I Go: Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World by Mike Edison. The note indicates the type’s “loyal following among late-twentieth-century pornographers looking for a high degree of transparency in their printed work.”

• A 2007 entry in the New York Times book blog Paper Cuts examines the “twee” and “borderline obnoxious” nature of colophons, highlighting the playful approach Stacey Greenrock Woods takes in her memoir I, California. The reader responses in the lower scroll-down are worth a read to, and direct you to a few other examples of colophons in literature: Jonathan Safran Foer has a penchant for toying with text, as demonstrated in his novel Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, but his short piece “About the Typefaces Not Used in This Edition” features no tricks of typography; Ron Carlson’s short story “A Note on the Type,” that appeared in Harper’s in 1993, is a fairly traditional bit of fiction (regarding a man’s development of a typeface) that many regard a modern classic.

• McSweeney’s  established its signature mix of Marx Brothers, literary meta-fiction, and typographical whimsy early on: issue #3 of 1999 includes a fictional riff on the very real Garamond (both typeface and designer). (The issue also includes a piece by David Foster Wallace that runs along the magazine’s spine.) The 2000 anthology Mirth of a Nation: The Best Contemporary Humor includes phony submissions guidelines, a note about the editor, and a note on the type (a colophon dismissed as “silly” in a review by the Chicago Tribune), all by McSweeney’s editor/founder Dave Eggers. McSweeney’s has subsequently featured a fictional colophon on its website, as written by Ben Greeman, which includes reference to a typeface consisting of “pebbles arranged in a shallow bed of sand and viewed from the top of a tall tree.”

• “A Note on the Type” by Ravi Mangla appeared in the literary journal elimae, and examined the style of “typographer, lithographer, kitemaker and philosopher Jerome Gabriel Mathieu” and alludes to a pulped early version of The Catcher in the Rye.

•  Among the finest examples of this colophon tomfoolery has to be Bruce McCall’s “A Note on the Type,” published in the Shouts and Murmurs section of the New Yorker (Oct 6, 1997). In it, he outlines the history of “Backslap Grotesque Italic Semi-Detached,” then goes on to include “A Note on the Writer of the Note on the Type,” “A Further Note on the Type,” “Added Note From the Writer of the Note on the Type,” and “A Final Note on the Type,” swirling us deeper into a comic miasma of self-reference worthy of S.J. Perelman.

•  Other examples of note: Mark Jude Poirer’s collection of short fiction from 2002, Unsung Heroes of American Industry, includes the story “A Note on the Type,” which attempts to restore proper distinction to a designer named Urg Kis; Alexander Theroux satirized the form in his short “A Note on the Type,” about a type called Rubberfab, that first appeared in Review of Contemporary Fiction in 1991; and Ray Russell published a piece called “A Note on the Type” in Paris Review—previously in the journal, he’d published another bit of literary camp: a lawyer’s letter to an author, outlining the potential for libel.

[With all this in mind, Prairie Schooner will be embarking next year on a digital project to include colophon-inspired fiction, satire, and poetry. Watch this space for details about submissions, etc., or “like/follow” us on Facebook/Twitter.]

Debutantes

I see that my intentions roar out in front of my practices. But I still want to draw your attention to two our our contributors: Robin Ekiss and Kristin Naca. They've been selected by Poets & Writers as part of their annual debut poets roundup. Their debut? Books, of course. You can find a connection to Ekiss's book here, and Naca's here.

And Poets & Writers has a debut meta-roundup here. See if you can find your own faves at the start of their careers.

These States of Poetry

Over on Poemshape, Patrick Gillespie has some interesting takes on the state of poetry. He’s a thoughtful guy, and the article he’s written is interesting, but I kept disagreeing with the piece. I want to sort out some of my reactions, and I thought it might be useful to share those reactions here.

His first concern is that you couldn’t stop someone on the street and get them to name a contemporary poet. He notes, via John Barr, that poetry is not part of any mainstream conversation. He also frets that About.com’s Top Picks doesn’t yield a Top Ten list for poetry (though a few of the top lists do include poets and poetry books).

He moves on to what prompted his ruminations: the recent death of Ruth Lilly, she of the drugs and poetry (a “you’ve got peanut butter in my chocolate” combination if I’ve ever heard one). He argues that her gift to the Poetry Foundation artificially revived a moribund enterprise and that—given its declining state—the better option would have been for her not to have given the money. He asks, rhetorically, that if poetry is so great a thing, why did it need the Lilly money to survive? He suggests that the Foundation, and the art of poetry itself, needed to die (if you will) so that others may live. He then laments Harriet Monroe’s original intent for Poetry, that poets could find an audience without being beholden to newspapers that demanded sentimentalized fluff. And it’s here that the argument lurches for a moment. It turns out that Gillespie wants a return to the marketplace that Monroe and her contemporaries saw at the time and were dismayed by. His contention is that market forces will make poets write for an audience composed of…It’s a little unclear. But they’d have an audience if they wrote well.

Right now, though, Gillespie says, the only audience for poetry is poets. In particular, poets in academic settings or who underwent academic training. So poets should be thrown out of the academy and made to face the mob rule of public opinion. He invokes Darwin by insisting that only the fittest would survive.

And right there is my deepest suspicion of the piece. Is the marketplace a Darwinian space? How does poetry evolve? How does survival of the fittest apply to art?

My first concern is that Gillespie uses “fittest” to mean “best.” That’s a problem with understanding Darwin and natural selection, but I’ll leave that aside. What’s hard to understand is how poetry is to attain any kind of fitness, or how an audience is to decide on best. My further concern is that the marketplace isn’t, in fact, a Darwinian space. Evolution, natural selection, these are blind processes. Better mousetraps, better poetry, larger supersizes, these are designed, and then the audience is manipulated—or at least the attempt is made. And sometimes a product survives, and sometimes it doesn’t. But does that survival express a fitness to a local niche? I have a hard time thinking that it does. And certainly not in the way that a finch beak evolves in reaction to the changes in food sources for the finch. On the other hand, the Poetry Foundation found a way to reproduce and continue.

He cites the great artists who have survived, but I think it’s important to note that we don’t know who we’ve lost. We almost lost Bach, for instance, and Van Gogh. Is Howard Finster a great artist? Henry Darger? But we can get into a long argument about canonicity and privilege that might be a dead-end for this discussion.

I worked for a while with Ted Kooser on the American Life in Poetry (paradoxically, a program funded in part by the Poetry Foundation) and got to drive Stephen Dunn and Billy Collins around for a reading in a different place and time. Kooser’s beloved here, and his ALP project can be found in hundreds of newspapers (and all over the Web). Dunn reads a bit like a poet of his generation: fascinating little essays framed by sharp detail. Collins played to a packed house and made the assembled teachers, students, and locals laugh as well as cry. Kooser, Dunn, and Collins all have academic backgrounds and have found an audience.

So I wonder. Is our culture too obsessed with the easily consumed? Fast food. Light beer. One of the commenters on Gillespie’s post noted that the UK has a very different relationship to poetry. It’s fair to wonder about a culture that doesn’t favor the meditative, the reflective, the contemplative. What kinds of pressures does a large, potential audience of that character put on its poets? Perhaps it drives them into academies.

From here, we get into a quickly twisting kaleidoscope of hypothetical scenarios. I want to assure Gillespie and others that poetry—even outside the academy—seems to be doing well. At least, if the number of books, presses, online spaces, slams, and zines is an indicator. Poetry might not be part of the larger cultural discussion, but I’m encouraged that highly placed politicians read poetry.

But I still can’t TiVo it.

 

Choices

I would have named this post "potpourri" or "cornucopia," but those both seemed like bad ideas, really. But there are...things...happening in the spaces beyond this office that I wanted to draw your attentions to.

First, we have William Kloefkorn's poetry up on Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac. Kloefkorn's an old friend of Prairie Schooner, and a great literary representative from Nebraska.

Second, we have a very favorable review of the Fall 2009 issue--the Baby Boomer issue, in case you had nodded off for a moment--over at NewPages.com. They do great work for writers, editors, and readers, and you owe it to yourself to head over there. I would suggest daily, but I'll let you pick your own frequency.

Lastly,a bit for our more academic parts of the audience. Louis Menand has a long piece in Harvard Magazine about professionalization and the PhD. It's not really shocking, or surprising, or much of a revelation, but the man's articulate as hell, and he's fantastic and synthesizing information, so it's worth a read. I think the only thing he misses is the rise of white collar trade schools that have a thin veneer of humanities education, but I might have been reading too fast.

As always, I'd be very interested in our readers' reactions to any of these quick clicks.

On the Road

One of my Facebook friends uncovered a little gem in the deep, winding mine that is the internet: Google Lit Trips. The Lit Trip is an intriguing application of Google Earth, and a potentially useful way to bring the physical details of literature--and history (perhaps more especially)--alive in a sort of electromagnetically grounded sort of way.

My question to you is this: what lit trip would you like to see? or take for yourself? And what would you take with you to read (besides Prairie Schooner, of course)?

Returning

I'm just back from a short beach vacation, so I'm not sure if this is a prodigal's return or a fool to his follow (after growing up in the evangelical church, I just can't exorcise the scriptural phrases). I'm trying to sort out everything that's happened in my absence, so I'm still feeling a bit scattered. Thus, for your delectation, a few choice morsels from the interwebs (and may I suggest, while I'm about it, dropping by StumbleUpon as an outlet for your "feed me something random" needs):

First (if you can get past the frightening ads for teeth--maybe teeth whitening?--at the top), Bartleby has the Cambridge History of English and American Literature up. Along with its usual amazing resources.

Next, let me suggest an essay over on Bookslut that takes up Emerson's ideas about writing, especially creative writing and the importance of reading.

Lastly, I will point you toward an educational resource: Scribbling Women.

Now go. Unscrew the locks from your doors. Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs.

Since We're in an Electronic Thicket

I figured you might be interested in this piece that NPR did yesterday (that would be March 25th, if you're clicking by sometime in the future and haven't noted the timestamp below automatically). It's about electronic books--didn't I put up a comic about that recently?--and what digital rights management (DRM) means for the future of ebooks. Be sure to check out the lengthy comments.

And I wanted to ask: Would you want Prairie Schooner on your Kindle?

From the Electronic Wilds

I found the following comic at the (usually gaming-oriented) website Penny Arcade! The exclamation point is theirs, I should point out. As someone who's fascinated by the new Kindle and the managing editor of a literary quarterly, I have to admit to a certain powerful ambivalence.

Has anyone out there handled the new Kindle yet? Any delights or disappointments to report?

Been There, Done AWP

Back now from the diverting lights of Michigan Avenue, from my three coffee-roused mornings, and from the hordes of aspiring and established writers bustling in the streets of Chicago, I’m happy to report that this year’s AWP was a wonder. Not in the fanatical, awestruck sense of the word, but wonder in the sense of how people stay upright and sprightly over the course of four days. True to my confession, I found myself beckoned each day in twenty different, but pleasing directions. And as thought, the panels on Latino writing were amazing, but especially the Breach: Emerging U.S. Latino and Latina Poetry panel.

At the helm were Roberto Tejada, J. Michael Martinez, Gabe Gomez, Carmen Gimenez-Smith, and Rosa Alcalá, from left to right respectively. Certain I was in for a treat I took out my poet’s notebook and took notes—simply because this particular generation and community of poets is my scholarly interest. Five minutes into the reading I wasn’t disappointed, and the end drew near, I still wasn’t disappointed. In fact, many AWP attendees to my mind missed one of the best readings.

Even so, this year’s conference was abounding with budding and accomplished talent. At the Diode & Anti- reading at the Fine Arts Building downtown, I ran into and introduced myself to Paul Guest, one of our Prairie Schooner Book Prize winners. His reading was as stunning as his book. To this end, I saw writers I knew, recognized from bookcovers, and wanted to know after I was introduced to them personally. Of course, some of them I’ve read for years, some for a couple years, and some I will be sure to follow now in the years to come.

Until Denver, though, I have many papers to grade and poems to read before I sleep. To each of you I met, thank you for your generosity of spirit and welcoming presence. I can’t wait to see you in the Mile High City.

                                                        -John Chavez

NB: We received a lovely little review on NewPages.com. They're a great resource, and they deserve a little extra traffic from you.

The Band and Their Solo Projects

One of our two senior fiction readers, Dave Madden, is too professional to point out in this space that his side project, The Cupboard, received an approving nod from Luna Park, an interesting online quarterly (and, they say, occasional) review of lit journals. Such as ourselves. And The Cupboard. It’s an interesting site, so head over there to learn more. You’ll see that they liked the story Madden and his co-editor, Adam Peterson, selected.

It’s a movable feast around here, people, and it’s just a whole damn lot of fun to work with writers like Dave. But don’t tell him I said that, OK? He’ll try to kill me.