Ladylike: woman riding sidesaddle (Journal des Dames, 1799)

I have a friend who is an avid reader and who also talks about the books he reads. But being a staunch conservative when it comes to reading habits, I just cannot consider him a true friend of literature. The reason: he only reads non-fiction books. To me, ‘being a reader’ means reading fiction and poetry.

But increasingly it seems that real literature is becoming more and more marginal, whereas non-fiction (self-help, history, travel guides, popular science, popular economics, cookbooks) is what sells and keeps the industry afloat. The recent Finnish ‘essay-boom’ is an example of this development, with young writers like Antti Nylén or Timo Hännikäinen gaining recognition as important contemporary authors solely through their work as essayists; Hännikäinen has also written poetry, but Nylén is strictly a non-fiction writer.

What is remarkable to me is that only twenty or thirty years ago such a thing would not have been possible: essayists were not ‘true’ authors. That honor was reserved, mostly, for novelists (and perhaps some poets). Nowadays it’s not even the lowest common denominator, membership of the Finnish Writers’ Union, which makes you an author. Now every biographer and cookbook-writer can claim that name for themselves, and it seems perfectly natural to everyone.

How and why do people’s reading habits change? The American writer and essayist Edgar Allan Poe once complained that ‘long poems’ were a flat contradiction in terms, since readers could not sustain for very long the excitement which true poetry demands. ‘After the lapse of half an hour, at the very utmost, it flags – fails – a revulsion ensues – and then the poem is, in effect and in fact, no longer such.’ Poe’s essay stands in the middle of a sea-change in our conceptions of what poetry and prose properly are. Before Poe, lyrics (short poems) were only a minor part of poetry, with the epic narrative poem regarded as the most accomplished and revered form; after Poe, lyrics – the short, intense lyrical moment – are what poetry is: ‘an elevating excitement of the Soul’.

I’ve always thought Poe’s idea was at the same time incredibly daft and remarkably ingenious. At first glance it seems crazy that poetry should be judged by the fickle attention spans of readers; if that were true, advertisers would be the best poets in the business. But the real question raised by Poe’s essay is not whether short or long poems are better. What he does is turn our presuppositions about art on their heads: the success of art is not dependent on the qualities of the work of art, but on our own personal experience of it. Before Poe, this was not the case.

Of course, he was not the only one advocating this kind of idea. But Poe was the first to connect the reader’s pleasure with the reader’s needs as a consumer of literature: literature is a commodity which must meet the demands of readers, and these demands are based on pleasure and entertainment. In the history of literature, this idea has provoked a change that is immense, and we are still in the middle of it. The changing status of non-fiction is only the most recent phase.
What we learn from this is that the nature of things is not fixed. History changes everything. There was a time when no decent lady would ride a horse, or let her daughters near one, because riding astride a horse was considered unbecoming for women. And although some women of status, even before the invention of the modern sidesaddle in the 1830s, did ride horses, horseback riding was more usually a sport for men: in war and at work soldiers, knights, cowboys, fox-hunting aristocrats and couriers rode horses. Women rode in carriages, far away from the brute animals. But after the invention of the sidesaddle things started to change drastically, and riding became the hobby of women as well – and today, at least in Finland, horseback riding is something that is mostly associated with teenage girls: no ice-hockey-playing, sausage-eating, weight-lifting man will ever go near a horse, because horses are for horse-crazy girls, not men.

Surely the invention of the sidesaddle is not the only reason why riding has become a girl’s sport. Another reason might be connected with the way in which developments in technology effect cultural norms. When there were no cars, controlling the wild nature of a horse was a masculine job; when cars were invented, the ‘power’ of the horse was transferred to the engines of these new vehicles, which then became a man’s job to handle. Women were left with the obsolete form of locomotion which, stripped of its utility and power, became a luxury hobby first for upper-class and later for middle-class girls.

What do horses and cars have to do with changes in reading habits? Well, for one, the fact is that fewer and less men seem to read, and literature is becoming more and more a women’s hobby. Is the same thing happening to literature as to horses? Surely not, you say: that is completely illogical. It must be a coincidence.

But history is illogical. Most people, it seems, believe that the things of this world have a fixed nature, and that any and all developments in things like society and the material world happen somehow ‘logically’: that things follow their nature, an order of things, such as up-down, down-up; hunger-nourishment; growing up organically like a plant from seed to flower; growing old; or whatever process our brains and biology and experience of the world has taught us to expect, such as the sun rising every day or the idea that all swans and all lambs are white.

Sometimes politics, markets, technological innovations, reading habits and social customs such as marriage and who rides the horse change in ways which seem illogical or counter-intuitive to those who believe in the fixed nature of things. Suddenly a black swan sails across the familiar pond. Gay marriage challenges the nature of wedlock. Hard work does not pay. The evolution of life on earth, or the creation of technological innovations, or the growth of markets, is found not to be steady growth after all, but a series of reactions to catastrophes, short bursts of creativity followed by long periods of stasis – ‘punctuated equilibrium, as the evolutionary theorist Steven Jay Gould was fond of saying.We cannot see these relationships and the causal structures which control the world, because they are outside our brain’s capacity, and contemplating their irrational nature causes us physical pain. We mostly find ourselves reacting to stimuli, or going the way of least resistance, trusting routine: human decision-making comes after the fact, no matter how well we believe we can predict the future. We live in a nice little fiction of safe roads and gentle horses. This is why the recent hubbub about ebooks changing our reading habits, something I’ve tried to contribute to, is just that: a fiction. Publishers and the industry are terrified of change and seek to control it by any means necessary, mostly by inventing fictions of economic catastrophe, of evil pirates preying on poor authors. On the positive side, consultants, journalists and essayists, like me, find an exciting subject to speculate on (I admit I’m doing this mostly for the fun of it), and gadget fans have new gadgets to fondle.

Ebooks, and ebook reading devices, won’t change anything in our reading habits, if we view them from the perspective of Poe’s theory. To wax a little cynical, books are not art but a pleasurable commodity for consumers with short attention spans. The growing volatility of the literary market, the intensity with fashions change, is testimony to this, but the change which has made our present book culture possible has already happened, long ago. In any case, most reading is already done online; there is already more text in the internet than in all the literature of the world.

What ebooks might change, apart from the economic model of publishing, is our understanding of literature: we might come to understand that literature is not bound to books. Electronic reading proves that literature can be produced, accessed and used in more ways than one – and by changing the technology of reading, ebooks might just be able to make men read again, because using gadgets and mastering technology is what men are supposed to enjoy. After all, ebooks make things easier and faster: like riding cars instead of horses.

This comment on new fiction could have been presented by anyone who’s been reading new Finnish novels or short stories. The commentator was, however, the 2010 British Orange Prize judge Daisy Goodwin, who in March complained about the miserabilist tendencies in new English-language women’s writing.

Jouni Avelin, editor of Kulttuurivihkot (‘Cultural notes’) magazine, said in this year’s first issue: ‘There are two themes in new Finnish fiction: men’s mid-life crises and young women’s erotic adventures – all Finnish literature is the literature of anxiety…. Sex is never nice, life stinks, shoes pinch….

‘The main character hates himself and his mother, who loathes her husband, who can’t stand his children or his parents, who hate everybody who enters the house, either through the door or the TV set. All suffer save suffering itself…. The novel is always the main character’s confessional: life is the same as life in other novels.’

It has to be admitted that playful, happy and sunlit fiction is slightly on the rare side, as we have cause to note, year after year, at the Books from Finland offices. Not surprisingly, as virtues are so much more boring than vices.

And the grimmest genre of all, crime literature, very popular in the Scandinavian countries – as well as in Finland – has been very exportable, as is proved by the best-selling lists of translated fiction all over the world. Stieg Larsson, Henning Mankell, Liza Marklund, Håkan Nesser…. Leena Lehtolainen and Matti Rönkä are two Finnish writers of crime literature who have recently become popular in Germany, in particular.

(It is somewhat puzzling why crime fiction, entertaiments dealing with death, murder and violence, is so abundant in these ‘welfare societies’ in the North. Can anyone explain? Has anyone tried?)

In the first issue of 2006 of Books from Finland the literary scholar Michel Ekman wrote under the title ‘Life is too short’, expressing a personal (and unusual) view: ‘What literary genre is more slavishly bound by the compulsion of plot than the detective and the thriller? (And consequently, more stereotyped in its particulars and its structure.) Opera, of course, and one can just imagine the joy of watching Tosca without music.’

In contemporary Finnish drama, the nuclear family is definitely a huge favourite; skeletons rattle in the cupboards as grim primary relationships are taken out for an airing, the traumas of the Winter War are omnipresent, lovelessness continues unto the third and fourth generation and the fear of a global ecological disaster paralyses the young.

The grim stories occasionally bring to mind those dark 19th-century fables of those German fabulists, the Grimm brothers: in them people are burnt alive, chopped to pieces and tortured: early crime literatur – for children!

It’s not that life isn’t sometimes grim and that fiction shouldn’t be written about it – it’s just that the weighty realism of fiction often falls on to the reader’s neck like a ton of bricks, as do the repeated patterns of this modern miserability. (Thanks, Mr Chekhov, for your philosophy – to quote you freely, art should depict life as we see it in our dreams, not only just as it is or as it should be.)

Coming up soon on this site is a fantastic story for you to read, set in a (sc-fi-ish) future, about the similarities between silicone and human flesh, by Tiina Raevaara; it may not be a very sunny story, rather a grim(m) fable, but we think it’s exciting, and not without humour. We’ll be introducing some new drama, too – Finnish drama has been enjoying renewed success at home in recent years and is now also getting exported – with themes other than devastating family life.

You’ll find samples of fiction on this page in which life is not ‘the same as life in other novels’, so stay with us!

Jarl Hellemann 1920–2010. Photo: Pertti Nisonen (2009)

One of the grand old men of Finnish publishing, Jarl Hellemann, wrote in one of his own books: ‘Book publishing is by nature personified, a personal activity.

‘Most of the world’s old publishing houses still bear their founders’ names: Bonnier, Collins, Heinemann, Harper, Knopf, Bertelsmann, Werner Söderström, Gummerus. Americans ignorant of the exceptions to this rule among Finnish publishers still occasionally begin their letters, “Dear Mr Otava” or “Dear Mr Tammi”.’ (From Kustantajan näkökulma, ‘A publisher’s point of view’, Otava, published in Books from Finland 3/1999)

Hellemann himself was Mr Tammi for a long time; he started as a publishing editor at Tammi Publishing Company in 1945 and retired as managing director in 1982.

In 1955 he founded Keltainen kirjasto, the ‘Yellow Library’, an imprint of novels published since the First World War by prominent writers from all over the world. The first was Too Late the Phalarope by Alan Paton, the latest – published in 2009 – was The Disappeared by Kim Echlin. The series now contains more than 400 works, among them novels by 24 Nobel prize-winners.

Among the books in Keltainen kirjasto (list, in Finnish), Hellemann’s favourite was James Joyce’s Ulysses, translated by the poet and author Pentti Saarikoski in 1964. Hellemann continued choosing books for Keltainen kirjasto long after he retired.

Born in Copenhagen, Hellemann moved with his family to his mother’s home country, Finland, in the 1930s. Well-travelled and fluent in many languages, Hellemann himself published a novel (at the age of 25), three books on publishing and, in 1996, his memoirs.

When we think of the future of publishing in these times of electronic reading devices, audiobooks, and the internet, when it seems as if the whole material being of literature is about to be transformed, we may ask how the marketing of books will change.

What happens when publishing goes online? How will authors cope with the new culture of the internet?

The internet is a place of fads: often silly, usually forgettable, but sometimes significant inventions and fashions which change the way we interact with each other on a daily basis. Many of these innovations have to do with communities: the much-touted ‘social media’ of forums, message boards, chat channels and the like, where news of bands, books and movies proliferate much faster than through traditional networks such as newspapers and television.

Because communication is faster, fashions are born and die much faster; the cycle of culture is speeding up. At the same time every dead fashion is piling up in some obscure niche of the web. Nothing ever really goes away on the internet. It has simply lost the attention of the general public. Online, it’s the attention that counts: how do you get it, and how do you keep it?

One has to ask how publishing will mutate in accordance with these new conditions. Will we find ourselves in the midst of a new kind of literary culture centered around digitally savvy writer-celebrities and their fan communities? Or will the internet become a vast graveyard of ghosts whispering about their 15 seconds of fame?

An example of the kind of authorial behavior that we may witness in the future is the up-and-coming generation of authors of ‘indie fiction’, such as the Americans Tao Lin, Blake Butler and Shane Jones. Indie fiction is not a literary school or even a set of stylistic similarities shared by a generation of writers, but rather is loosely attached to group blogs and internet literary magazines, such as HTML Giant (which is edited by Butler, the author of two well-received novels). It is an economic and material category: most, if not all, indie fiction is published and marketed by small presses such as Featherproof Books, Calamari Press, and Publishing Genius on or via the internet, sometimes not even in paper format at all.

But what is this ‘indie’, you might ask, and how does it herald the future of publishing? Well, it is, of course, a popular music term, deriving from ‘independent’, meaning independent of major labels, big money; an alternative to mainstream culture. ‘Indie fiction’ is therefore also a cultural category, and it is true that indie fiction has more in common with the mentality of so-called indie musicians and indie record labels than it has with traditional publishing houses and traditional literary culture – more with social media such as MySpace and Facebook than the institution of literary agents and venerable magazines like the Paris Review or the New Yorker.

As many indie fiction authors also seem to be alumni of creative writing programs, one could almost say: what art school has been for rock music, the MFA (or Master of Fine Arts, the degree awarded by creative writing programs in American universities) will be for literature (the list of significant musicians who went to art school and then changed the face of popular music is quite amazing: The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, REM, Radiohead…).

What this means is that indie authors are rooted – unlike mainstream authors, who do not cluster around any such institutions – in the same hotbeds of alternative, twentysomething student lifestyles from which new trends in fashion and music almost always emerge, or which, at least, trendsetters scrutinise in order to find the new ‘it’ phenomena. But what is important is that they emerge independently of mainstream institutions, which can hop on the train only when it is already moving.

‘Indie fiction’ therefore means the subculturisation of mainstream literature: ever smaller niches for ever smaller audiences. This does not mean that indie authors are afraid to ‘sell out’, or that they will not also jump aboard the traditional bandwagon when it comes around. One could even argue that the expertise in self-promotion which successful indie authors accrue is an important skill set for their future careers, since it means that such authors have measured the mental pulse of their demographics and can speak to them on their own terms and through their own channels.

Take the aforementioned Shane Jones, a 30-year-old author who explicitly set himself with the goal of using internet forums to promote his novel, Light Boxes. The novel was originally published by Publishing Genius, a tiny press, and Jones promoted it on the internet by putting up a website, giving interviews to internet magazines, and by sending ‘hundreds of personal emails’ to his readers on the site Goodreads.com, a kind of public bookshelf for people who want to list and review their books. Since the site can also be used to find new books through your friends on the forum, after Jones got himself noticed by more and more people on the site, more and more people recommended the book to their friends.

Ultimately Jones’s marketing campaign was successful, since it got him noticed by the venerable Penguin, who published his novel, and also by Spike Jonze, the Hollywood movie director, who optioned the film rights for his novel.

A more famous example is probably Tao Lin, the self-appointed ‘it boy’ of indie fiction. Lin, who has published two novels, a collection of stories and two collections of poetry, is famous for using the internet in order to get attention for his work. He has, for instance, used his blog to sell $2000 shares in an unpublished novel, each of which would entitle the owner to 10 per cent royalties. This gave him wide coverage by the press in the US and the UK.

Lin is also known for sending relentless amounts of ironically self-promotional e-mail to the editors of almost every major internet magazine having anything to do with literature or culture at large – these messages often detail even his most mundane chores. At one point, Lin and (perhaps, since they all may be Lin) four other authors used Craigslist, the hugely popular internet notice board for classified ads, to shop for interns to promote their books.

But perhaps most famously, he’s claimed to have subsisted on shoplifting and selling the stolen merchandise on eBay, the internet auction house. But since the stolen items were corporate products and Lin used the proceeds to buy, among other good things, organic food, he therefore claims that the thefts were ethically vindicated. He later wrote a book, called Shoplifting from American Apparel, which, to my surprise, I bought from the Academic Bookstore here in Helsinki.

Such antics only work, of course, if the writing is good. And judging by Jones’s, Butler’s and Lin’s novels and short stories, there is good reason to take them seriously. Whereas both Butler and Jones tend toward the surreal, referencing magical realists like Gabriel García Márquez and Julio Cortázar, Lin’s work brings to mind both Hemingway and Donald Barthelme, writers of surgically precise prose, the one realist, the other fabulist. Lin’s writing, especially in the 2007 novel Eeeee Eee Eeee, combines these two tones into a voice which, when the amalgam succeeds, is at once funny, serious and absurd, imaginative and deadpan, ironic and minimalist.

The voice of these new authors, at its best, uses humor and absurd imagination to isolate and foreground the existential angst of a generation brought up with the bodiless anonymity of digital life, with text messages, chatrooms and blogs. It is a voice depressed by the narrowed experience of modern networked life in the blue glow of computer monitors, but one that is still yearning for moments of imagination, happiness and meaning – even if such things seem to be only the nostalgic phantoms of their previous incarnations.

High-tech: the ultimate gadgets of the 15th century, parchment and pen. A portrait of Jean Miélot, the Burgundian author and scribe, by Jan Tavernier (ca. 1456)

The day will soon come when commuters sit on a bus or train with their noses buried in electronic reading devices instead  of books or newspapers. Teemu Manninen takes a look at the digital future

Most people interested in books are aware of the arrival of electronic reading devices such as the Amazon Kindle, a kind of iPod — the immensely popular portable music listening device made by the company Apple — for electronic books. For a literary geek like me, the Kindle and e-readers should be the ultimate gadget: a whole library in a small, paperback-sized device. However, I’ve been wondering why digital reading hasn’t become as popular as digital listening. I myself have not invested in an e-reader, although I ought to be exactly the desired kind of customer. After all, I read all the time. Even the mp3 player I have is mostly used for listening to audio books.

But the Kindle, and the other e-readers around today, don’t offer everything I want from a mobile reading device. A lot of what I’d like to read is still not available on them (say, digitized 16th-century books). The screen where the text appears isn’t as nice as it could be or doesn’t have as many functions as it could. Perhaps one of the up-and-coming devices like the Plastic Logic reader, a slim device with no buttons that turns pages by touch, will change that in the near future — but then again, my problems with e-readers aren’t exactly problems which the right kind of device will solve. They’re problems with a more fundamental level of the reading experience, about everything material about reading and literary culture.

These thoughts I’ve had about mobile reading are also related to the changes that are going on in the publishing world, where traditional paper media like newspapers and magazines are struggling, and print publishers are eager to come up with new business models. I find myself wondering what the implications are for authors and what they write — for literature itself.

One option is tenacious optimism. The science fiction and fantasy author Michael Stackpole recently argued that authors must take advantage of the new content delivery methods which digital publishing is providing them with. He is the first author to publish short stories through the iPhone App Store, the online store which sells applications, or ‘apps’, for Apple’s mobile phone, the iPhone. Apps are little programs that let you do all kinds of weird and wonderful things, like find restaurants and gas stations, log gym workouts, see where your friends are on digital map displays, and so on. According to Stackpole, digital publishing offers a chance for young writers to reach audiences and create markets for their work without relying on major publishers.

Of course, Stackpole doesn’t take the problem of quality control into account. After all, the ‘job’ of most publishers is not just to deliver content but to find the best writing out there; good publishers are also reliable critics. But he does intuit, and I believe correctly, that digital publishing is already having an impact on the nature of what we read. He cites the example of the ‘commuter market’: people who read one or two chapters on their way to work or home. This kind of reading, Stackpole surmises, could point the way to a return to 19th-century publishing models, such as serial fiction (think of Dickens, whose fame and wealth was based on serialised novels which appeared in literary magazines).

It is important to note that Stackpole is not talking about the death of the novel or some utopian future where we no longer have paper books. I think the dumbest approach would be to believe that digital reading can simply copy paper reading and thereby take over its functions.

Certainly, some new electronic publishing platforms like Issuu and Scribd try to mimic paper books by having animated, turnable pages, but I don’t think this kind of digital publishing will ever replace printed books, no matter how well they mimic paper on the screen. This is simply because they are already something else, a new kind of reading experience which is arranging itself around the idea of the book, but is also being interpreted through social networking media like blogs, Facebook or Twitter, where anyone can share their thoughts with a community of readers.

When reading becomes a part of a social network (just think of Harry Potter fans), reading and writing morphs from a solitary activity to a socially shared engagement: authors connect with readers on a much more immediate basis (through comments, for instance), readers share their reading experiences, write fan fiction, and may even play-act scenes from their favorite books.

So, there are all kinds of new possibilities for reading and publishing. But at the same time we are living in a world where traditional paper forms of publishing are dying. Some media ideologists, like Richard Eoin Nash, believe that this is a good thing. Nash points out that ‘reading increasingly is writing — readers are writing back in all sorts of ways, commenting on books, re-mixing books as in fan fiction, or creating from scratch, and publishers, rather than barring this activity, or hiding from it, need to embrace it and find ways to serve it.’

In a way, though bombastically overstating the case, Nash is right. Literary communities coming together and doing things seems to be the trend for many of the numerous book-related events and happenings on the net, from a community annotating Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook online to a joint effort to ‘map’ Thomas Pynchon’s Los Angeles, to a recent technology start-up offering a service for making your own newspapers.

With such community efforts we come to my central argument — it’s not (or at least not only) the well-designed device which will make digital reading popular, but everything it’s connected to. The computer company Apple is a good example. Most people know it makes computers, but in the last ten years it has been mobile devices like the iPod and the iPhone which have made it really popular. What makes the iPod and the iPhone so great? The fact that the iPod is easily connected to iTunes, the fancy-looking online music and video store, which also helps you catalog your music in visually appealing ways.

The iPhone, for its part, was certainly a fancy phone with its touchscreen and all, but what made it a hit product was the App Store, which gave the phone thousands of new uses in everyday life. As Richard Ziade, an American web consultant, has pointed out, ‘The iPod/iTunes ecosystem is testament to the fact that people are willing to pay for a quality experience, even if there are fringe alternatives out there for free… Content is part of the experience.’

Now think about it from this point of view: what makes books so great? Libraries and book stores, and beyond them, literary magazines and newspapers and publishers and critics and book fairs and book readings and everything that makes up literary culture. A book is never just a book, a mere platform or an interface; it’s a part of a reading experience which stretches out from the immediate moment to something more universal.

So what I’m arguing is that digital reading will become a success when the devices become not only screens that let you read, but extensions of digital libraries and bookstores and whole reading communities. The Kindle, made by the online department store Amazon, is certainly a step towards the right direction. It offers a constant wireless connection to Amazon’s virtual shelves, and its growing popularity is testament to my argument.

At this point one might ask why the ailing, traditional publishing companies haven’t embraced digital reading yet. One reason could be the fact that paper publishing is still tied down by its own material nature, the literary print culture that has developed around it. They cannot envision reading as anything other than paper reading, and therefore cannot grasp that digital reading is a different kind of experience, demanding a different approach.

As the author Seth Godin has argued, ‘the new business isn’t the same as the old business, just with computers’, and Richard Ziade makes the same point when he claims that in the digital realm, ‘the physical constraints of content’ which traditional media publishers still often cling to become a ‘nuisance’ for digital users.

To reiterate, in order for digital reading to become more popular doesn’t simply entail scanning books and making them digitally available on any device that can display them. It means that one needs to build a new way to interact with and experience content. As an example, digital music publishing has done away with the idea of the traditional album. People now buy individual songs, and make their own collections or ‘play lists’ as they are called. Here, digitality simply means the ability ‘to pick and choose’ what you want to listen to in a way which traditional, material forms of music publishing made difficult.

In conclusion, I’d like to come back to the idea proposed by Michael Stackpole: that we might see a resurgence of serial fiction in the future, because digital reading makes it easier to collect such ‘play lists’. Personally I agree. I’m constantly annoyed by the fact that there are so many good stories hidden in paper magazines which I either never see or don’t want to buy because the rest of the content is rubbish. A delivery system that would allow me to download stories by authors I like would be marvellous. If a similar service were to be implemented for poetry, I would be in reading heaven.

But I’d like to believe that the digital reading revolution will go even further in inventing new ways for literature to exist in the world; most simply I’d like to believe that digital reading will make literature more available, and make people read even more. Books are, after all, cumbersome, and we are becoming more and more mobile.

Again, this does not mean, as the designer and marketing guru Russell Davies has argued, that we’re in an age where books are about to disappear (although environmentally speaking that would be a good thing!). Paper and ink will never go away, but only change in function as they become embedded in new ways of being in the world. Paper books might once more become luxury artefacts, as they used to be in the age before printing began.

Fast food for thought? Culture meets business. – Illustration: Joonas Väänänen

Extracts from a collection of writings, Ulkona (‘Outside’, Siltala, 2008)

Literature – and ‘serious’ writing in particular, the kinds of texts we publish in Books from Finland – is often seen as lost, irrelevant, pushed out to the edge of mainstream popular culture. But, argues Hannu Raittila, the margin is actually the area of greatest freedom. Everything worthwhile happens there – and business would do well to imitate art, rather than the other way round

It is easy to see culture as a marginal part of society, if viewed from an economic perspective. It is easy to see literature, for its part, as a marginal phenomenon even when compared with other areas of culture – pop music, for example.

In the technical language of the printing trade, the margin is the empty space left between the positioned text and the edge of the page. The margin is the space left over on the page.

The concept of a margin has become a metaphor for being pushed to the edge and losing meaning. Because I am an author, I am constantly being marginalised in relation to mainstream culture and the turn towards popular entertainment. If my work is made up of short stories or essays, I am on the margin in terms of the literary mainstream, and, should I choose to write highbrow literary prose instead of a concept genre product, such as serial thrillers, I am on the margins of the novel format.

Economically speaking, a margin can refer to things like the margin between loan deposits and advances, or the relationship between inputs and outputs arising from business activities in general. The margin is what is left below the bottom line. The margin is the purpose of the economy, the profit zone. The margin is shareholder value. The margin is something that the world markets watch with bated breath hour by hour around the clock.

From a dynamic perspective, the margin should be thought of as a resource. In the practical equations underlying the economy or the use of military force, marginal details carry the day. When two powerful forces face off against each other, the one that wins is the one that has more reserves – a greater margin, in excess of the balance of force. This has also been taught to hockey players: in interviews during intermissions we hear the basic slang phrases of the sport over and over again, including an aphorism about the deciding significance of ‘small margins’.

Philosophically, the margin is the area of freedom. Everything significant happens at the margin. In the reality of the economy, gigantic supranational corporations maximise their use of strength in order to survive in an increasingly competitive environment and to optimise their profits. The profit is the margin created as the product of this exertion of strength. It is produced at the margin with marginal strength.

The extremum of marginal freedom is an ancient ideal: creative idleness. One of its applications and expressions is art. The marginal author operates in this area. In order to succeed, the economy has good reason to be interested in the methods and results of artistic creation – which are produced at the margin and marginally. What should be understood in particular is the ethics of the economy in relation to the production of art. For that ethics, the economic outcome is not a value in itself, but a means by which the main thing, left at the margin of the financial statement, is resourced: art. The economic purpose of the activity is the ability to continue the activity.

This idea can carry broader human implications beyond art and its relationship to the economy. In economic life, the important thing is the area left at the margin, i.e. life. Generally speaking one can say that the possibilities of life – freedom – are located at that margin that is left at the edges of economic accounting.

In a specialised area of the economy like publishing, the author operates at the margin, i.e. in an operationally viable space, the area of discretion, the zone of possibilities. The author is the marginal factor in the business equation of publishing, the reserve. The reserve always performs the decisive motions when the prevailing powers have reached a static equilibrium or otherwise motionless state. Also in publishing, and particularly in publishing, the long-term prerequisites for making a profit will arise at the margin, in the zone of freedom, where resources are not tied up.

In profitable publishing you need a free reserve, made up of free authors. Management principles borrowed from general business management are constantly used to standardise, conceptualise and control operations. This is also the case when they are applied to book publishing. Management requires predictability and measurability. Management is the operational direction of will and goal-orientedness at the unpredictability of life. Economic management principles are derived from the administration of martial and industrial processes; they have not been adapted for the experiential industry and the culture business, which deal with the immaterial forming of values, ultimately with art.

The production of art cannot be subordinated to manufacturing. It will never be predictable and standardised like industry, because creative individuality lies at the heart of art. Creativity and individuality are the conceptual opposites of conceptualising and standardising. Herein lies the internal contradiction of the culture business, which those in the field must constantly try to solve. Similarly, artists must always be able to reconcile professionalism and free self-expression – the seemingly contradictory sides of the creation of art.

Before long, industrial production, which neglects the beginning and foundation of the product development process, will lose the race. In the culture business, the role of basic industrial research and taking risks through experimentation brings about creativity committed solely to artistic principles – for example, the writing and publishing of literature with small print runs. In publishing it is possible to reap quick profits for one decade by pruning tentative runners and focusing on popular literary genres, such as serial novels, and on products that increase productive stability and sales predictability. However, ten years is a short time in the culture business.

The ambition to create predictability through standardisation results in a breakdown in the connection between art and business. All that is left are the general principles borrowed from marketing, such as having a customer orientation and seeking opportunities for tie-in products. These don’t work very long in publishing. A customer orientation leads you to commission books for the buyer in charge of bookbins at a Dullsville supermarket. A publisher who focuses on tie-ins can find himself emptying helium from the balloons next to the books left over after bad weather struck the children’s book event.

The artist is not indifferent to the economic results produced by his work, but he does not subordinate art to economics. In practice this often means that he gives up attempting to achieve maximum production in a short amount of time in order to achieve a more important objective. Very often the by-product of this sort of method is a better economic result than would have been achieved by focusing narrowly on economic considerations.

In its relationship with art, the economy would do well to begin following the principles of art rather than demanding that art follow its methods. And it is a question of ‘doing well’ in every sense of the expression. You have to in a culture business like publishing. For the publisher is ultimately dependent on the author whose work – when well done – profits the publisher’s business.

Translated by Owen Witesman

Mind-map: using the papernet to produce books just for you. - Photo: Brian Suda

Just as Books from Finland finally goes online, the brightest minds of the internet are forecasting a return to paper. In the first of a series of articles, the poet and scholar Teemu Manninen celebrates the second coming of the book

Last week I did something I’ve never done before. I uploaded the manuscript of my third book on to the website Books on Demand, an internet print-on-demand (‘pod’) service, chose the format (a large 19×22 cm size with a hard cover), selected a picture for my cover, copy-pasted a poem by Clark Ashton Smith – an American science fiction and fantasy writer – on the back flap and ordered a copy.

The project is a private one; no one else can order the book. You might ask why I would do something like this – however, a more interesting question, I think, is why it feels entirely natural and logical to do it.

These days everyone is talking about the way that traditional print media are dying because of the internet. But the internet itself has not stopped developing, and where it’s going in 2009 is surprising. The tech-wise and internet savvy are suddenly interested in plain old paper. What the most avid minds are talking about now is something called the ‘papernet’: the extension of the internet on to traditional paper media. But what would a papernet be like? Specifically, what would it mean for a Finnish poet working today?

Let me give you some examples. In 2005–2006, I became acquainted with some Finnish poets who were publishing their work on the web. Janne Nummela had been using search engines to trawl up bits of language from the internet to compose his imaginative, superbly funny surrealist collages. Karri Kokko had a project called ‘Varjofinlandia’ (‘Shadowfinland’), where he had been collecting sentences and bits of discourse concerning depression and anxiety to make a ‘confessional’ short novel. Inspired by these poets, I thought, could we go a step further and make the process of writing a poetry book ‘live’: an ongoing, public event available for comment?

My second poetry book, Lohikäärmeen poika (‘The dragon’s son’, 2008), evolved from a blog into a printed book published by Tammi, a traditional publishing house. In the process, many things changed; working with an editor, a graphic design department, and a publishing house with its own ways of doing things inevitably does that. I feel that the book lost some of its immediacy and resonance once it was taken off the net; it lost contact with the sustaining conversation that had produced it.

I do acknowledge the values of traditional methods of publishing. A good working relationship with an editor is integral for me, not to mention the resources for marketing and publicity, which the poetry scene, as a culture defined by an economy of scarcity, tends to want to downplay. Poetry is, after all, a bad investment for publishers. Then again, the amount of poetry this economy of scarcity makes available is only a tiny slice of what could be out there. Also, do we really want a handful of people (the editorial boards of publishing companies) deciding what’s worth publishing?

An answer to these questions came in 2007–2008, when the Finnish poetry publishing scene changed radically. First, the poetry organisation Nihil Interit began publishing poetry books with the pod publisher Kirja kerrallaan (‘A book at a time’), under the imprint poEsia. These books are available as downloadable ebooks or normal printed versions. Then the poet Leevi Lehto established his own pod publishing company, ntamo, with the aim of publishing more poetry than all the traditional publishing houses put together. The visual and conceptual poet Jukka-Pekka Kervinen’s Ankkuri is a similar company.

And then one day I saw Karri Kokko, who had made an experimental ‘version’ of his unpublished poems using the internet pod publisher Lulu. We talked about the possibilities inherent in pod publishing, some of these being rather practical, as in simply making a collection of everything you have written to take with you to readings.

But other ideas soon became apparent: what would ‘podism’, the DIY publishing revolution with its new forms of production, circulation and consumption of printed materials, really mean for literary culture?

Enter the papernet: the internet as a platform for producing, on demand, paper products (maps, organisers, notebooks, social travel guides and the like). Imagine, for instance, that your printer had its own email-address, and instead of your newspaper delivered to your door each morning, your printer would print it out for you. Depending on what kinds of feeds you are currently following, your morning paper could be a mix of the best of New York Times, Helsingin Sanomat and Le Monde, for instance. (And I’m not talking about the kind of printers we have now, but much better ones; ones that could print out not only newspapers, but paperback books or broadsheets or even glossy magazines.) Imagine, also, that books were no longer tied to the cost-heavy machinery of traditional publishing houses, which can only produce one book in one edition at one moment of time. If the audiovisual industry is already changing because of electronic distribution, imagine when the same thing happens to books.

Except that these things are not imaginary. They are already happening. Perhaps the most interesting is the current idea of the ‘unbook’. The concept was invented by Jay Cross, an internet consultant known for his work on informal learning and systems thinking, and Dave Gray, the founder and chairman of XPLANE, a ‘visual thinking company’, although both imply that they are only describing practices which already exist.

Whereas a traditional book is published in editions whenever it gets revised (or it has sold out), an unbook is released in versions (1.0, 1.13, 2.0 etc) which are never finished but always open to feedback from readers. Both Cross and Gray have written books by bringing the readers along into the process of editing their content even before publication. As Gray says, ‘the dialogue is critically important to the development of the ideas, and now that I have tried this approach I can’t imagine doing a book any other way.’

An unbook is, then, more like a community project between authors and their readers than the traditional one-way street of author->publisher->reader. Gray claims such a re-envisioning of the book-making process can change many things: ‘The author can engage readers earlier and respond to criticism faster. A publisher becomes an option rather than a necessity.’

It should be clear by now that my own unbook is not a self-publishing or vanity project. Rather, it is an un-book only in the sense that is un-done (I also happen to think that the name ‘unbook’ is a little too coy). What’s central to me is the idea of experimenting with the composition process, but also of taking more control over the material existence of what I write, of trying out ways of graphically representing my work in the best possible way. We writers aren’t usually very good at that; the history of the book trade is a history of outsourcing everything that’s material about writing to everyone else except the author. In the past, this has been necessary, because the technology simply could not be owned or mastered by one person. Now it can be, and you don’t even have to leave your house to be able to do it.

I don’t know if this experiment will lead me to new ways of making books. Poetry is, after all, very different from the kinds of things Cross and Gray are writing: books on visual culture and ‘e-learning’. Sometimes it seems to me that the most I might achieve is an understanding of how to design a book so that it can communicate something by its material form. But all this is so new. We don’t know where the papernet will go.

Sometimes I like to imagine that the papernet could represent a return to pre-print ideas of written communication, where important texts were compiled into ‘commonplace books’, or personal, annotated anthologies. They were singular objects made by their users to fit their personal needs. Text and authorship were malleable, pliant, and much more organic than in our time. What if the poetry books of the future were like that: ‘paper ipods’, or anthologies that readers could themselves compile and print?

Sometimes I’m simply reminded of the aura of singularity and originality surrounding authorial manuscripts as artefacts, something Walter Benjamin, one of the most important literary critics and philosophers of the early twentieth century, argued art lost when the age of mechanical reproduction began – but the manuscripts, I think, still retain that aura. Perhaps the unbook could be a way to let the printed book share some of the hand-written aura of manuscripts?

We must constantly invent new containers for books to burst out of, because they exceed their material form: books are never finished. And that’s a good thing for us readers.

Our idea of what it is to read, and to read literature, has always been – and for many of us remains – bound up with the invention that made the development of western literature possible, the Gutenberg printing press and its successors.

In making this website, we have tried hard to fashion it as a place of repose as well as excitement, a location where the spirit and the imagination, as well as the intellect, can engage with what in the old days was called the printed word.

But of course, we are part of the excitement of the internet, too. We appreciate that websites exist, definitively, in three dimensions – two of space, and one of time. In abandoning the old, printed format of Books from Finland, we regretfully relinquish its seasonality – the natural cycle of our four yearly issues appearing with the spring melt, the white nights of midsummer, the darkness of autumn and the snows of winter. But we quickly realised that our rhythm could easily be rearranged; Books from Finland can be, if not a daily companion, at least a weekly one, with new posts at least every seven or so days.

A journal stands or falls by its capacity to echo, prompt or stimulate conversations in the real world (or, which comes to the same thing, the imaginations of its readers). The internet offers us the opportunity, it seems to us, of connecting with you, our readers, naturally. Instead of a gaggle of writers, all struggling to make themselves heard, arriving through your letter-box every quarter, we can give each writer his or her own space to speak, one by one, as is customary when people really want to hear clearly – and, what’s more, you have the opportunity to join the debate.

So, just for example, our latest addition, in the third week of April: Moscow television correspondent Anna-Lena Laurén recounts her experience of learning how to give and receive in the Russian way. The following week, it is Jyrki Lehtola’s turn to be heard: he uses it to expose the myth of tolerance on the internet. Then, Claes Andersson’s tenderly engaged poetic observations about life at home and abroad will appear, and after them the poet Teemu Manninen’s meditations on the new internet and its most electrifying possibility – the return to paper. Meanwhile, too, our Reviews section features critical readings of the best of what’s currently being published in Finland, while In Brief offers a wider reflection of cultural news. And the continuing project of the digitisation of our own vast database: more than 40 years of the very best of Finnish literature in translation, most of it completely unavailable elsewhere. Everything, of course, remains on the site for future reference, reading and reflection. All in good time.

It feels as if we have come a long way since we published our last printed issue in December, but of course we have only just reached the starting point: Books from Finland’s life on line is only just beginning. You can keep in touch by making ours your start page, adding it to your bookmarks, subscribing to our RSS feed, signing up for e-mail updates, or just by visiting us regularly.

Stay with us – Books from Finland‘s new life is an adventure, and one that belongs to us all!