That's plain hilarious.

On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 5:57 PM, David Bircumshaw
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Also somewhat apropos, but rather veering off the edge:
>
>
> http://uk.videogames.games.yahoo.com/blog/article/11851/
>
> a dire warning
>
>
>
> On 18 April 2010 01:36, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Apropos of discussion: some of you might be interested in this blog
>> post of Chris Goode's, where he talks about Salt's marketing
>> strategies, which was posted elsewhere. xA
>>
>>
>> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
>> From: David Lace <[log in to unmask]>
>> Date: Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 7:54 AM
>> Subject: Blog post critical of Salt's marketing method's
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>>
>>
>> Found the following blog post criticising Salt's marketing methods:
>>
>> http://beescope.blogspot.com/2007/04/johnnys-so-long-at-fair.html
>>
>> The blog post is very long and deals with lots of things other than
>> Salt. So I've taken the section about Salt and pastd it below. If you
>> want to read it on the blog then scroll down the blog post till you
>> get to paragraph 15:
>>
>>
>>
>> A depressing thing worth mentioning in passing: I think I have to
>> confess I've finally reached my elastic limit with Salt. If you don't
>> know Salt, it's been for the past few years an incredibly busy
>> independent press, based in Cambridge, mostly producing poetry, about
>> half of which I suppose falls within the ambit of my particular
>> interests (in late modernist work and its close allies). They've
>> harnessed print-on-demand technology to enable them to be more active
>> and in some respects more daring than any publisher in this area has
>> ever been before. Their list is huge and growing and, when they
>> finally get The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk out, I'll be (in a
>> very small way) on it. The books themselves are not that robust as
>> objects, but more and more attention is obviously being lavished on
>> the cosmetics and that's probably not a bad thing. Perhaps the most
>> contentious aspect to Salt's operations is that Chris Emery, who's the
>> prime mover behind the press -- and, whatever I'm about to say, is an
>> excellent bloke doing what he takes to be the right thing -- has from
>> the get-go been boldly pragmatic about trying to get the work to new
>> audiences by borrowing techniques, particularly around marketing and
>> merchandising, from other (bigger) players and sectors, and allowing
>> Salt to conform as far as possible to those pressures and assumptions
>> that shape the literary publishing industry.
>>
>> So a few days ago I get their newest print catalogue and at this
>> point, with the best will, I have to hold up my hands and say I no
>> longer recognize my own aspirations and commitments in this material.
>> This really is the ugliest motherhugging brochure I've ever seen for
>> poetry, possibly for anything. Salt is describing itself as "the UK's
>> hottest independent literary press", as if any meaningful
>> reconciliation could ever be made between the words 'literary' and
>> 'hottest'; a block of text on both covers insist that I should
>> "HURRY!" to claim an online discount -- in other words, I should HURRY
>> to concede that poetry is a kind of material that need not be
>> categorically distinguished from, say, cut-price carpets. Across two
>> dozen pages, huge photos loom of these indescribably unprepossessing
>> poets' faces -- I mean no disrespect to the gentlemen (and three
>> ladies) in question, some of whom are friends, I'm just wondering at
>> what point we decided to agree that promoting poetry on the basis of
>> what its authors look like was a decent or honourable trade-off with a
>> personality-obsessed literary culture. Substantial but entirely
>> uncontextualised samples from each text are dumped on every page in a
>> wretchedly outmoded and barely legible grunge typewriter font. Seeing
>> writers of the stature and integrity of John Wilkinson and Alan Halsey
>> peering out of this mess like nervous animals in a deregulated Russian
>> zoo is, honestly, painful.
>>
>> It's like that moment a few years ago when J.H. Prynne was suddenly
>> the object of a media spasm due to some survey of British literary
>> activity being published which suggested that he was, you know, a good
>> poet: and suddenly Iain Sinclair's popping up on the Today porgramme
>> with one brilliant pre-worked line (that trying to settle the
>> precedency between Prynne and Philip Larkin was "like comparing
>> electricity to nougat") and a lot of mischievous and strenuously
>> disingenuous playing-down of the difficulties by which a novice reader
>> is confronted in reading Prynne for the first time. As a dissenting
>> friend wrote to me then: "It's good that people are talking about him,
>> but there's no point pretending he's Patience Strong."
>>
>> I'm sorry to say I think (on this evidence) Salt has now reached a
>> place in its development where it is quite cynically and grossly
>> misrepresenting some of the work on its list. To place Wilkinson's
>> work, or D.S. Marriott's, under a banner that says 'sensational' and
>> 'hot' is to distort that work and the kinds of relations it's
>> interested in establishing with readers. I'm the first to agree that
>> seeking a wider readership for difficult poetry in these modes is a
>> necessity. I also think the breadth of Salt's list may help with that
>> task. (I can imagine, for example, a reader taking a chance on Anthony
>> Joseph's genuinely sensational -- and very finely made -- The African
>> Origins of UFOs, and taking the leap from there to Marriott or to
>> Bruce Andrews even, and all of that being OK.) But in its promotions
>> and some of the language it uses to talk about the work it represents,
>> it is plainly and quite actively aping a broader culture that seeks to
>> soothe or airbrush or neutralize difficulty as if it were an
>> embarrassing but remediable fault in self-presentation rather than an
>> index of certain deep engagements that are integral to the original
>> positioning of the work, not a reducible feature of its surfaces.
>> There is no clue anywhere here that the work is not simply challenging
>> but actually demanding -- it requires a kind of bravery and
>> attentiveness on the part of the reader (I think attentiveness is
>> becoming a kind of bravery in itself, actually) without which the
>> standard contracts simply fall into a sort of disconsoled nullity. And
>> this is the urgent problem with Salt's strategy: it is making promises
>> that the work cannot, must not, endorse or hope to honour, and the
>> result of this, downstream, is bruised and disenchanted readers who
>> will not be able to understand -- and why should they? -- why it is
>> that non-mainstream poetry has let them down in a way that the dull
>> gestures of the mainstream never have.
>>
>> The odd thing is that I'm pretty sure Chris Emery would say all the
>> same things about the poetry that I'm concerned about here. Perhaps
>> he'd say it's just a matter of degree -- presumably there are some
>> lines he wouldn't cross because they'd seem disrespectful to the work
>> and to its audiences, and he and I just draw the lines in a different
>> place. But I'm not sure about that. Last week I did a reading gig for
>> the literary society at my old school in Bristol and had a fascinating
>> discussion afterwards with an extremely bright young woman who's
>> working on Kafka and who rejected, pretty much out of hand, my 'two
>> streams' account of recent mainstream vs. modernist poetic practice:
>> she was insisting (not without strong argument) that the differences
>> in approach to language-use and, for example, pictorialism were simply
>> matters of degree. What I didn't quite manage to articulate at the
>> time was that, in so far as she's correct, nonetheless such matters of
>> degree are determined in part by the priorities that individuals and
>> groups of writers establish for themselves, and these priorities may
>> exert quite absolutely contrary pressures on writing activity that may
>> in some other respects seem broadly continuous across the spectrum. On
>> this newest evidence, Salt's foremost priority is selling books, not
>> supporting and promoting poetry. Perhaps that's fair enough --
>> "supporting and promoting" is the kind of phrase that normally crops
>> up in the mission statements of charitable organizations, and that's
>> not what Salt is. I'd be interested to know, though -- in the week,
>> incidentally, when the Arts Council's Grants for the Arts scheme is
>> cut back by 35% (as part of the current push to ensure that in 2013
>> this country has absolutely nothing going on of any artistic or
>> cultural merit or importance whatsoever) -- how much the significant
>> recent ACE award to Salt has had a bearing on, or was from the outset
>> dependent on this kind of lurid promotional crap. Or whether, as has
>> recently been the case with a project of mine, it's simply a case of
>> putting out the advert that generates the largest number of sales,
>> with no particular regard for the sensitive management of the
>> audience's expectations or a scrupulous fidelity to the ambitions of
>> the artwork at -- or perhaps no longer quite at -- the centre of the
>> activity.
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>>  Editor, Masthead:  http://www.masthead.net.au
>> Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
>> Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com
>>
>
>
>
> --
> David Bircumshaw
> "A window./Big enough to hold screams/
> You say are poems" - DMeltzer
> Website and A Chide's Alphabet
> http://www.staplednapkin.org.uk
> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
> Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/david.bircumshaw
> twitter: http://twitter.com/bucketshave
> blog: http://groggydays.blogspot.com/
>



-- 
Editor, Masthead:  http://www.masthead.net.au
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Home page: http://www.alisoncroggon.com