1. In response to our publishing the ten most common titles of work submitted to us, two folks have managed to use all of those titles in poems of their own. Greg Santos kicked it off, and Erin Keane followed up with one of her own. And, actually, they’re not bad. It’s those vital clichés again.

2. In a sign of the coming apocalypse, VQR has a Twitter feed. Twitter basically being the opposite of a quarterly publication, we’re not sure that we could justify this move to @JamesSouthallWilson.

3. An essay on the high rates of depression and suicide in Cuba, Lygia Navarro’s “Tropical Depression,” published in the Winter 2009 issue of VQR, has been reprinted in an abridged form in the May-June issue of Utne Reader.

4. With renewed interest in the 1918 flu pandemic, Robert Mason’s “Surviving the Blue Killer, 1918″ from our Spring 1998 issue is newly relevant. Mason tells his own story of surviving the epidemic and the larger, global story. In 1998, “the blue death” had largely been forgotten, a story that grandparents would just as soon not tell their grandchildren. After a few years of avian flu concerns—and now with swine flu spreading quickly—it’s probably as widely-discussed as it’s been since 1919.

5. A brief article from the April 6, 1925 Time magazine:

Gamaliel Bradford, Archibald Henderson, Luigi Pirandello, Witter Bynner, Joseph Collins—with these, among lesser names, did the Virginia Quarterly Review (issued by the University of Virginia) dress out a maiden number dated April, 1925. Editor James Southall Wilson, Professor of English at the University, explained that this was only natural. Old tunes best demonstrate a new organ. For the future, the Quarterly coveted “the adventure of presenting distinguished first work wherever it can be found.” It would be, in a measure, “peculiarly concerned with themes growing out of the life of the South and especially cordial to the work of able Southern writers,” but in no sense sectional. It hoped, in brief, “to be intelligently entertaining.”

6. Since URL shorteners are uncool, as of April 3, it’s time for URL lengtheners’ chance to shine. Hence DickensURL.com. Give it a URL, it’ll give you a much longer one comprised of a random Charles Dickens quote. The new URL for this blog, for instance, is http://dickensurl.com/­1676/If_you_could_­see_my_legs_when_­I_take_my_­boots_off,_­you’d_form_­some_idea_of_­what_unrequited_­affection_is. Which turns out to be a line from his 1848 Dombey and Son, the book preceded by Martin Chuzzlewit and followed by David Copperfield.

I think we can all agree that this Dickens URL is better than our current one, which employs that unfortunate word, “blog.” Which is one more thing we’d have a tough time justifying to James Southall Wilson.

In Friday’s New York Times, VQR Contributing Editor Tom Bissell had a nice appreciation of David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon Commencement Speech, now released as a book titled This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life. Bissell found himself, like others, returning to Wallace’s work upon receiving the shock of the author’s suicide. The central dilemma of such a process is that intensive reevaluation at this sensitive time can lead to a desperate attempt at unearthing signs—clues, they might be incorrectly called—to answer suicide’s ineluctable and unanswerable question: Why?

Bissell also draws attention to Wallace’s invocation of the cliché that the mind is an “excellent servant but a terrible master.” He quotes Wallace: “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master.” Bissell writes that in the print edition of the speech (I have only read the version posted online) this passage has been removed. He explains:

It is not difficult to understand why. Any mention of self-annihilation in Wallace’s work (and there are many: the patriarch of “Infinite Jest” is a suicide; Wallace’s story “Good Old Neon” is narrated by a suicide) now has a blast radius that obscures everything around it. These are craters that cannot be filled. The glory of the work and the tragedy of the life are relations but not friends, informants but not intimates. Exult in one; weep for the other.

I agree that references to suicide in Wallace’s work have been made more potent by what the writer eventually did, and it will likely be some time before such associations fade, if at all. But I think it is a mistake to excise such passages. Removing the passages connotes a value judgment that no one, save Wallace himself, is equipped to give. It is one of the few responsibilities of the reader to treat those two aptly named arenas—the glory of the work and the tragedy of the life—as challenges to be understood separately. It is not, I would argue, the responsibility of the editor to do so for us by removing any references to suicide because that’s the way the author died. (This modification of the text also raises the disturbing prospect that similar deletions would be made in other work by Wallace or that “Good Old Neon” would not be included in a future edition of the author’s collected stories.)

Wallace, like any other artist, deserves to be examined in his totality, while keeping in mind the essential distinctions between the life and the work. References to suicide in his fiction and essays may be craters that can’t be filled, but we must still look at them all the same, just as we would examine a ruined building to understand the cost of war or would establish a commission to fully investigate the Bush administration’s application of torture and learn how it can be prevented in the future. To do otherwise is to imply that we can’t handle what’s right in front of us. It also carries the implication that Wallace was somehow wrong in discussing these issues at all, or that we will only listen to a gifted artist when it’s convenient.

In time, the loss of Wallace’s suicide will not go away, but we will be able, I hope, to look at these unfillable craters as a necessary portion of the larger landscape of his work. It would be a disappointment if he comes to be seen as mostly a “suicide writer,” like Sylvia Plath, but hopefully his work is suitably wide-ranging—and our critical faculties patient and open-minded—to see how much worthy truth is here. Let his editors be sensible enough to respect the author’s intentions by allowing us to grapple with what was committed to the page, however difficult that may be.

It was a bit more than three months ago that I picked Vikram Seth’s novel A Suitable Boy out of my to-read pile, and I just recently passed the book’s halfway mark. Weighing in at 1,349 tightly-printed pages (591,552 words, according to Wikipedia) this sprawling, multi-layered depiction of post-Independence India is one of the longest single volume novels ever published in English. It is not the best book I have ever read, far from it, and I admit that I have I have been tempted more than once to put it down, to move onto the next book in the pile. But as I passed the halfway mark, I realized that I have rather enjoyed the process of reading A Suitable Boy, not in spite of its length, but because of it. I relish the chance each night to stretch out and immerse myself in this unfamiliar world, to read just for the sake of reading.

In a world that fetishizes speed, a world in which Twitter tops the news cycle and literary critics opine that “The death of the novel is yesterday’s news. The death of print may be tomorrow’s headline. But the great American short story is still being written,” the act of reading such a long book, of returning again and again to the same hefty tome, feels almost perverse. Why would I spend my leisure time hunched over A Suitable Boy when I could be reading any number of shorter novels or short story collections, when I could be watching Top Chef or updating my Facebook status or looking at porn on the internet? Who has time to read anything anymore, let alone an 1,400 page novel? After a long day at work and soccer practice and pilates who wants to hack into the dense thicket of a seemingly interminable book? In a world where the ethos is, as University of Virgina English professor Mark Edmundson wrote, to “skate fast over the surfaces of life and cover all the extended space you can,” the long novel is a ponderous brontosaurus with its head in the canopy, lazily chomping leaves while an army of swift moving, razor-clawed creatures are building a new civilization its feet. It is a relic, teetering on the edge of extinction.

But perhaps longness is what we need most these days. At the end of a day filled with text messages and mass emails, blog posts, instant messages, and YouTube videos, after all the pixels have disappeared into the ether, perhaps there is something to be said for settling in with a lengthy and time-consuming novel. It doesn’t have to be A Suitable Boy. There are dozens of doorstoppers out there to choose from, from The Kindly Ones to Infinite Jest or War and Peace, Remembrance of Things Past, A Dance to the Music of Time, Clarissa, The Man Without Qualities, Tokugawa Ieyasu, or Dream of the Red Chamber.

Our Spring issue features an essay by Ted Conover, “Slipping from Shangri-La,” that chronicles the yearly trek remote mountain villagers in the Kashmiri region of Zanskar make on a road formed entirely by ice (“the chaddar”). Conover, along with his English guide Seb, joined these villagers on their journey and experienced for himself the rituals, dangers and hopes that this unusual road inspires. Recently, I e-mailed Conover with a few questions, and he was kind enough to elaborate on the difficulties he faced on the ice and how his experience in Zanskar has influenced his writing and reading of late.

1. Your current book project is an exploration of roads around the world and “the costs and benefits of connectedness.” What initially drew your attention to this particular “road” in Zanskar?

Roads versus isolation is a big theme in my book, and when I first heard of the chaddar, I thought of remoteness tempered by this extremely tenuous connection to the outside world and was intrigued. Later I learned that the Indian government has a plan to put in a road above the chaddar—that, in other words, the chaddar might be even more temporary than I thought, subject to replacement by a massive construction project. How people thought about that, I imagined, would be worth finding out. Beyond that, the chaddar trek sounded pretty thrilling to me; and the trip also serves as a way to tell the story.

2. The walk sounds physically demanding; were you aware in advance how physically difficult this experience might be and did you do anything special to train for it?

Mainly I was afraid of getting too cold. [My guide], Seb, had done the trek numerous times and, via email, helped with a lot of my questions about gear—mainly what to wear when you stop moving, and how to sleep. I’m medium-fit and do a lot of daily walking living in New York City.

3. You mention that sixteen-year-old girls from Reru walk on the ice and snow in their socks, or wade into ice-cold rivers in their bare feet; it seems apparent that the Zanskari don’t view cold the same way that Westerners do. Do they recognize that their climate is brutally demanding, dangerous even, or do they accept it as part of their home?

They understand cold better than I ever will. I think that, to the students, getting your feet wet was something unpleasant—but it was possible only because, paradoxically, it was so warm out that the ice was thin. That’s inconvenient but not the kind of cold—the wounding cold—that they really worry about.

4. We see people react differently to you throughout the essay—some are willing to open up, while at least one wanted to stay as far away as possible. How do you think the Zanskari, whose contact with the outside world was quite limited until forty years ago, view the presence of Westerners?

They are an extraordinarily lovely people. They’ve had contact with the larger world, through traders and caravans and Tibetan Buddhism, for centuries. Toward us they were almost invariably welcoming, warm and curious.

5. You describe several rituals that the Zanskari perform before and during the chaddar walk to promote a safe journey—the mock departure, for example, or the throwing of pebbles toward home; did any of their spirituality trickle down to you and Seb? Or did you view the walk in more pragmatic terms, keeping one foot in front of the other?

Actually, I didn’t tell the whole story of the monk who helped to determine an auspicious date for our departure. When Seb and I were sitting around drinking tea with him, our host, Lobzang, asked if we had any questions of our own that the monk might help us with. I knew that Seb had been thinking about getting married for some time—his girlfriend was back in England—and I suggested he ask the monk about that. So he did—and Seb ended up marrying her, about five months later, on the exact day the monk specified.

I’m neither very religious nor superstitious but . . . given a choice between starting a hard trip on the date a monk says is best, versus starting on any other date, I’d totally go with the monk.

6. Finally, what are you enjoying reading these days and how, if at all, does it inform your own writing?

I finally read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which I guess I’m not alone in finding profoundly good (if scary to get started on). Next up is Stacey D’Erasmo’s new novel, Sky Below, which I heard her read from at the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference.

Really good fiction inspires me—nonfiction narrative is a pretty new form, and there are so many directions to explore. Next to my bed is Catherine Barnett’s collection Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes are Pierced. I think that everyone who writes nonfiction should read poetry every day. The most inspirational book for my book on roads was probably John Stilgoe’s Outside Lies Magic: Regaining History and Awareness in Everyday Places. It’s a fantastic book about seeing more carefully.

All of us at VQR World Headquarters™ got a kick out of seeing contributor Kanishk Tharoor featured on The Colbert Report on Thursday night, talking about the upcoming Indian elections:

Kanishk’s essays have been published widely, but he’s a relative newcomer to the world of fiction. But what a start it’s been. In our Summer 2008 issue we published his story “Tale of the Teahouse,” which won our Emily Clark Balch Prize for Short Fiction and is currently nominated for a National Magazine Award.

Professional pollster and PR guy Mark Penn writes in today’s Wall Street Journal that “more Americans are making their primary income from posting their opinions than Americans working as computer programmers, firefighters or even bartenders,” and that “there are almost as many people making their living as bloggers as there are lawyers.” This is wrong. This is not just wrong, it’s wrong by several orders of magnitude. The mind reels at how an apparently-bright guy could write such a fundamentally inaccurate article and get it published in a major U.S. daily. I want to catalog some of the most egregious factual sins present in this piece.

By way of establishing credentials, I’ve been blogging since 1996, I’ve run blogs with substantially more than 100,000 monthly unique readers, I’ve derived varying levels of income from blogging, and I am, at this very moment, being paid to write this blog entry. And, for what it’s worth, I had a small role in exposing Stephen Glass as a fabulist.

Penn’s thesis is that average American citizens are becoming professional bloggers, offsetting the loss in journalists, with millions enjoying a revenue stream from blogging and nearly half a million making a living at it. That’s wrong on its face. There’s simply no way there there’s more than, say, 10,000 Americans are paying for their basic life expenses purely through blogging.

Let’s look some of his claims individually:

The best studies we can find say we are a nation of over 20 million bloggers, with 1.7 million profiting from the work ,and 452,000 of those using blogging as their primary source of income.

Almost two million people generating income from blogging sounds like a lot. What’s his source on that? blogworldexpo.com, a website promoting a conference for bloggers. But that dubious source actually claims something very different:

1.7 million American adults list making money as one of the reasons they blog.

That’s not to say that they make money, just that they want to make money. Many people write novels because they want to be rich, but that doesn’t mean that all aspiring novelists are wealthy. So we can see that claim—one of the pillars of Penn’s article—is totally invented.

And what’s the source for the claim that 452,000 people employing blogging as their primary method of income? An undated GalleyCat blog entry that’s repeating Technorati’s state of the blogosphere report from last year, which reported that 2% of “personal bloggers” claim that “my blog is my primary source of income.” And where did Technorati get that number from? They conducted an e-mail survey of 1,290 adult bloggers from 66 countries. (Given the self-selecting audience, respondents are bound to be more likely to people for whom blogging is an important part of their lives, which is to say people whose livelihood depends on it.) Technorati doesn’t extrapolate any of their figures, referring only to the percentages of their sample set, so where does Penn get this 452,000 figure from? Well, if he figures that there are over twenty million American bloggers (say, 22.6 million), and 2% (of international bloggers) claim that blogging is their primary source of income, then that works out to 452,000 (Americans, apparently). So Penn has taken an internally-valid 2%, extrapolated it out using the manufactured number of twenty million, and concluded that 452,000 Americans are making a living on blogging.

How good of a living is this? Penn explains:

It takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year.

Well, those are some very specific numbers, so they should be easy to check. Technorati explains the $75k figure:

The average annual blogger revenue is more than $6,000. However, this is skewed by the top 1% of bloggers who earn $200k+. Among active bloggers that we surveyed, the average income was $75,000 for those who had 100,000 or more unique visitors per month (some of whom had more than one million visitors each month). The median annual income for this group is significantly lower — $22,000.

That doesn’t mean that “it takes about 100,000 unique visitors a month to generate an income of $75,000 a year,” as Penn claims. It means that among those with at least 100,000 visitors—and as many as a million—the average income is $75,000. And, again, that includes “the top 1% of bloggers;” given that Technorati surveyed 1,290 bloggers, that’s a number based on a survey of…13 people. This is a bit like saying that in a room with 99 homeless men and Bill Gates, the average net worth is $580M. Accurate, but not helpful.

And what of bloggers who make money not from advertising, but instead are paid to write blog entries for others’ sites? Penn writes:

Bloggers can get $75 to $200 for a good post…Most bloggers for hire pay $80 to get started, do it for about 35 months, and make a few hundred dollars.

The source for that is a blogger, who conducted an informal survey of “20 top-tier tech bloggers and social media consultants.” Using this dubious data, Penn totally mispresents the data provided by author Marshall Kirkpatrick, who wrote:

What kinds of rates are our respondents seeing? The low end of the scale was $10 per post for very short posts. Almost everyone else said they were paid $25 per post. One person said they were paid $80 per post! One respondent said they were paid $200 per item of long-form writing; bloggers often do other kinds of writing as well.

So an average of $25 and an extreme of $80 becomes, in the hands of Penn, “most bloggers” being paid $80 “to get started,” while “one respondent” being paid $200 becomes, without explanation, “a few hundred dollars” and the norm for those who “do it for about 35 months.” The linked source for that time frame is Technorati, who cites 35 months only as the average tenure of all bloggers that they surveyed. The number has nothing to do with being paid, expertise, or this “few hundred dollars” figure that Penn apparently pumped up from the $200 maximum.

I could go on, but I’ll stop with just one more tidbit, one that’s so obviously wrong I just can’t let it pass without notice. Penn claims both that “one out of three young people reports blogging” and that “three out of every four are college graduates.” There are 83 million people under the age of twenty in this nation, a third of which leaves us with 27 million young bloggers. Not only is that seven million more people than Penn says are blogging in the whole of the nation, but also a surprisingly-well educated group of kids, if three quarters of them have graduated from college.

Writers make mistakes. Editors make mistakes. Publications make mistakes. Lord knows that I’ve contributed to all three. But the series of accidents required to yield an article this inaccurate boggle the mind. Remember, Penn is a world-famous political pollster—he was Hillary Clinton’s chief political strategist for her presidential campaign and he was Bill Clinton’s pollster for his 1996 campaign and his second term. He’s not just some random guy.

Penn should, in short, know better. But if he doesn’t, why doesn’t the Wall Street Journal?

The winners of the 2009 Pulitzer prizes were announced yesterday, and I can’t help but wonder what the announcement—and implicit acknowledgement of what was considered newsworthy over the last year—says about the state of society and media.

It sure was a good year for the New York Times, as the publication took home five awards, the second-most in its history, and a haul that brings their grand total to 101 since the awards were instituted in 1917. I like the Times as much as the next person—I have my favorite columnists and bloggers, I read the magazine every Sunday, and truth be told, if I am idly sitting at a computer and check the news without thinking about it, I am probably more likely to type in nytimes.com than anything else. But here’s the rub: is this the only newspaper that prints writing worth reading? Especially in an era in which communication across venues and public access to information have only continued to grow? Is it really a good thing for readers if the best talent (or what is presumed to be the best talent) clusters at only a few newspapers?

But speculations about literary monopolies aside, where things really get interesting is comparing topics between today’s Pulitzer Prize winners and those from a decade ago. Some things, it seems, don’t change. Scandal always brings out good stories. (Here’s to you, Eliot Spitzer.) Journalists still like to take on those in positions of authority who abuse their power.

Yet it is when we turn to the international and commentary categories that we are reminded how much the world has changed since 1999. Surprisingly, although we may have forgotten, there were financial woes in the late 1990s, and the 1999 Pulitzer for international reporting went to the Wall Street Journal for its coverage of Russia’s financial crisis. A decade later, however, the prize went to the New York Times for coverage of America’s military and political challenges in Afghanistan and Pakistan. After two wars, billions of dollars, and thousands of lives, it is sobering to remember that only a decade ago, none of what has dominated international affairs and international reporting for years had even happened yet.

In commentary, 1999’s award to Maureen Dowd reminds us of a topic most Americans would prefer to forget: then-President Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky. A decade later, presidential behavior is still making the news, only this time it is Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post who takes home the award for his coverage of the election of the first African-American president.

Can we even imagine what will be newsworthy in 2019?

The ten most common titles of submissions that we’ve received in the past two years:

1. Untitled
2. Aubade
3. Gravity
4. Prayer
5. Homecoming
6. Night
7. Drowning
8. Home
9. Sonnet
10. Sleep

The laws of probability dictate that repeat single-world titles are far more common than multi-word titles, which is why these are all single words. Since we receive more poems than any other genre, and since poems are more likely to have single-word titles than other genres, almost all of these are poems. These don’t represent a huge percentage of our submissions (we received seventeen works entitled “Untitled,” for instance), but they do stand out for their frequency.

Oddly, there’s no overlap with the top ten from the last time we did this.

1. A lot of magazines are thinking about raising their rates, Stephanie Clifford writes in the New York Times, in an effort to offset the decline in advertising. Some publications have cut prices to pump up circulation (Parents, Elle’s, Fortune, and Fitness dropped between 34-51% each), while some have had great luck taking precisely the opposite tack. The Economist is up to $7/issue and $100/year, while its circulation has increased by 60% since 2004. (Its reputation has likewise climbed in the same period—it’s an unexpectedly hip publication.) Also more expensive while experiencing increases in circulation: People, The New Yorker, Real Simple, Cosmopolitan, and Vanity Fair. I guess VQR was just ahead of the curve when we raised our rates a year and a half ago.

2. Fans of the Oakes twins’ art will enjoy Make magazine’s video of them employing their concave easel. If you have no idea of what I’m talking about, read Lawrence Weschler’s profile of them in our current issue, recover from having your mind blown, and then watch the video.

3. VQR contributor Ashley Gilbertson has a photoessay in Time about the high rate of suicide among military recruiters. The high-pressure job and the prevalence of PTSD among combat veterans serving as recruiters make one of the safest jobs in the military surprisingly deadly. If you haven’t already, be sure to read Ashley’s “Last Photographs” and “The Life and Lonely Death of Noah Pierce,” each of which have won many accolades. Also, I recorded an interview with Ash in December, in which we discussed suicide among recent combat veterans.

4. Photographer Peter Funch takes a series of photos in the same place, over the span or hours or days, and combines the images to express a theme over time in a single photo. The result is chock full of win. (Via Boing Boing)

5. Blogger Keith Montesano interviews Jennifer Chang about History of Anonymity, which we published as a part of the VQR Poetry Series.

6. poetry.LA videotapes poets giving readings in Southern California, and then shares them on the internet. You can start with Poet Laureate Kay Ryan reading in San Clemente last year.

7. Several media executives have teamed up to establish a single-sign-in industry-wide micropayment system for media outlets. This is fundamentally an a) antitrust and b) technological task. That former Solicitor General Theodore Olson is on the company’s board is a good sign regarding the former, but the finesse required for the latter may be underestimated by this crew.

Congratulations go out to:

• Daniel Alarcón, whose essay “You Do Not Represent the Government of the United States” has been selected for the 2009 edition of The Best American Travel Essays (Houghton Mifflin).
• John Ghazvinian, on being appointed a 2009 Carnegie Scholar by the Carnegie Foundation of New York.
• Dimiter Kenarov, whose essay “Game Over, Perseverance, All I Want Is Everything” has been selected for the 2009 edition of The Best American Travel Essays (Houghton Mifflin).
• Gregory Orr, whose essay “Return to Hayneville” in our Summer 2008 issue has been chosen for both the 2009 edition of The Best American Essays (Houghton Mifflin) and the new edition of The Best Creative Nonfiction (Norton, July 2009).
• Tom Sleigh, whose essay “The Deeds” has been selected for the 2009 edition of The Best American Travel Essays (Houghton Mifflin).
• Lisa Russ Spaar, recently chosen for a Guggenheim Fellowship by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

New books by recent contributors:

• Blake Bailey – Cheever: A Life (Knopf, March 2009).
• John Casteen – Free Union: Poems (Georgia, March 2009).
• Rita Dove – Sonata Mulattica (Norton, April 2009).
• Albert Goldbarth – To Be Read in 500 Years (Graywolf, April 2009).
• Jim Harrison – In Search of Small Gods (Copper Canyon, April 2009).
• Laleh Khadivi – The Age of Orphans (Bloomsbury, March 2009).
• Debra Nystrom – Bad River Road: Poems (Sarabande, April 2009).
• Gregory Orr - How Beautiful the Beloved (Copper Canyon, April 2009).
• Charles Simic – That Little Something: Poems (Mariner Books, April 2009) and The Renegade: Writings on Poetry and a Few Other Things (George Braziller, April 2009).
• Charles Wright – Sestets: Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2009).