Other perspectives on the AWP Conference in Austin:

- Sycamore Review.
- C. Dale Young (a contributing editor to VQR).
- Iambic Cafe.
- Notes from Evil Bender.
- The Virtual World.
- fade theory.

The AWP Conference got into full swing yesterday. The bookfair is more enormous than ever—somewhere around 750 exhibitors. The Austin Convention Center is hosting a basketball tournament, a car show, and the bookfair, if that gives you any idea of the scale. The Austin location is great—very close to legendary Sixth Street—so everyone has had a chance to escape the compound from time to time for food and, yes, drinks. The panel I was part of yesterday was well-planned (by Missouri Review’s Speer Morgan) and standing-room only. I was discussing the “renaissance” of the literary magazine with Bret Lott from Southern Review, David Lynn from Kenyon Review, T. R. Hummer from Georgia Review, and Speer. I think we, as editors, focused a good deal on the logistics of the recent sweeping changes at these magazines—the nitty-gritty of our redesigns, our websites, our newly computerized systems. The questions from the audience were great and right on target. Almost everyone wanted to know what the impact of these changes would be or has been on our content. Best of all, Peter Cooley, who has contributed to every magazine on the panel, asked what these changes would mean for the lit mag’s quest to find the elusive general reader. It’s a great question and one that every editor wrestles with. We all talked about our concerns about our aging readers (research indicates that the average subscriber is in his or her late 50s), the narrow slice of attention that we can command in an increasing media-saturated (and web-dominated) environment, and the dwindling budgets that exist for trying to stem the tide. If that sounds slightly depressing, it actually wasn’t. I came away from that session—and I hope everyone in the crowd did, too—with unusual optimism. If things are a little tough for university quarterlies right now, I got the sense that there is, at least, a group of energetic and enthusiastic editors out there working.

Before I read Daniel Karlin’s excellent new book Proust’s English, I had never given a thought to the word “smart” as part of the French lexicon. Either its vogue in French is long passed, as Karlin suggests, or I do not travel in sufficiently “smart” company when I am in France, but I have never heard the word used in French, where it means roughly “fashionable” or, as we might say in English, “chic.” It can have this sense in English too although it is not the most common English meaning. I remember accompanying my mother on shopping expeditions when I was a little boy. She had a favorite saleswoman at a clothing store who would say as she surveyed my mother’s appearance in a dress she had just tried on, “Angela, you look so smart in that.” This usage endured in English far longer than it seems to have done in French. Jane Austen, in a letter of 1805 (when she was nineteen), says, in speaking of a certain Miss Seymour, “neither her dress nor her air have anything of the Dash or Stilishness which the Browns talked of; quite the contrary indeed, her dress is not even smart . . . ” The word must still be used this way although I haven’t encountered it in some time. Among younger speakers, it may have been replaced, at least for a while, by “cool.”

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After all the hoopla about how Hollywood is out of step with middle America, did the MPAA lose its nerve? It certainly looks that way. Munich, a film many viewed as covert criticism of the war on terror (co-written by recent VQR contributor Tony Kushner), received no awards; Good Night, and Good Luck, which was also seen as a critique of the Bush administration, received no awards; and Brokeback Mountain (based on the short story by Annie Proulx, another recent VQR contributor), which had dominated every other award ceremony, received wins only in best adapted screenplay and best director. None of its actors were honored, and best picture—incredibly—went to Crash. Why would the one picture that didn’t earn a spot in the category walk away with the win? Could it be because it was the one picture that did not feature a main character who was homosexual or a plot perceived by some as too political for average Americans? Even in the best documentary feature category, March of the Penguins won out over much more important films, such as Darwin’s Nightmare and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

In the evening’s first acceptance speech, George Clooney said, “We are a little bit out-of-touch in Hollywood. I think that’s probably a good thing. We are the ones who talked about AIDS when it was only being whispered, and we talked about civil rights when it wasn’t really popular… This group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939 when blacks were still sitting in the back of theaters. I’m proud to be part of this Academy, proud to be part of this community, proud to be ‘out of touch.’” If only the Academy were as proud of that track record.

James Monroe: 1817–1825, by Gary Hart. Times Books, October 2005. $20

The author, former U.S. Senator from Colorado and candidate for the Democratic nomination for President, has written a small but serviceable biography of the fifth President. Monroe, whose reputation has long suffered by comparison with those of his fellow Virginians like Washington, Jefferson, and Madison, deserves a better hearing and has received one from Hart. He correctly notes that Monroe had had a reasonably distinguished career in the military, something that set him apart from his immediate three predecessors, and therefore had long taken a broader view—as had Washington—of the federal government’s responsibilities. The War of 1812 made plain to many Americans the shortcomings of strict republican ideology but Monroe was still ahead of most in his party in this “Era of Good Feelings” in calling for greater expenditures on fortifications, a gaze directed more toward westward expansion, and a more realistic view towards policies that smelled distinctly Federalist or (later) Whiggish to some nostrils. Hart also examines deftly and at length the evolving outlook that eventually led to the so-called Monroe Doctrine. Though The American Presidents Series, to which this belongs, is necessarily cursory, this volume represents what will probably be seen as one of the better contributions. Monroe did not need to be lionized and Hart has resisted that temptation, one to which many biographers succumb. He was not a great thinker but his pragmatism seems to have been about what the country at that time needed. He was indeed a more significant figure than posterity has generally acknowledged. This small work may help correct that slight.
—Lou Tanner

Jyllands-Posten, the Danish newspaper that originally published the Mohammed cartoons, has now posted a manifesto, denouncing the ensuing violence, signed by twelve intellectuals—including writers Salman Rushdie, Irshad Manji, Taslima Nasreen, Chahla Chafiq, and Ibn Warraq. Considering the authors, the language is remarkably generalized and occasionally even obscure:

Like all totalitarianisms, Islamism is nurtured by fears and frustrations. The hate preachers bet on these feelings in order to form battalions destined to impose a liberticidal and unegalitarian world. But we clearly and firmly state: nothing, not even despair, justifies the choice of obscurantism, totalitarianism and hatred. Islamism is a reactionary ideology which kills equality, freedom and secularism wherever it is present. Its success can only lead to a world of domination: man’s domination of woman, the Islamists’ domination of all the others. To counter this, we must assure universal rights to oppressed or discriminated people.

This vague wording conceals the urgency of this matter—the fundamental clash of cultures underlying the mounting problems of the world. Personally, I prefer Rushdie’s own clearer statement made in the pages of the Fall 2004 issue of VQR:

The need for this open dialogue was demonstrated on September 11. The world’s stories are no longer separate from each other. You don’t have the story of America over here, the story of Saudi Arabia over there. Most people in New York, in the United States, I suspect, would not have thought of the story of al Qaeda as having much to do with them, but then, on that terrible day, al Qaeda became the story of New York and Washington, D.C., and all of the United States as well. We can no longer seal our cultures away from each other. We cannot pretend they belong in separate baskets. Everyone’s story is everyone else’s story, or can become so in a flash—or in an explosion.

This time it’s in the Village Voice that’s been caught running made up stories—and in a totally inconsequential cover story on Neil Strauss’s ridiculous book, The Game, no less. The Gothamist has it right when they say that the most embarrassing part of this story is that “[i]n the old days, the Voice used to write about important, political stuff—now it’s about spoiled, rich guys picking up girls. Bah!”

VQR has been honored as the winner of the Phoenix Award for Significant Editorial Achievement, presented by the Council of Editors of Learned Journals (CELJ), the major international organization supporting editors of academic journals. The Phoenix Award is the top award conferred in the scholarly division and was given to the journal that demonstrated dramatic and significant improvements for the period from 2003 to 2005.

This is our second award from CELJ in the last twelve months. Last year, they awarded us the Parnassus Award for Significant Editorial Achievement, which honored the best single issue of a literary or belletristic journal, published within the previous three years. Both the Phoenix and the Parnassus are given every three years. So we’re not only the first journal to receive awards from CELJ in both the literary and scholarly categories, but we will hold these top awards jointly until January 2008. In case you can’t tell, we’re extremely honored and pleased.

Here’s the full story, in case you can’t get enough of our gloating.