“He’s the only person I know that will tell you an idea, and then will actually follow through.”

At a lecture in 2005 given by writer Michael Chabon (the talk might have been at Vassar; it might not have been Chabon at all), I recall the above remark made about Dave Eggers. The context was this: Eggers said to Chabon, “I want to start a new type of publishing house for our generation of writers.” To Chabon, the remark seemed to be a passing idea—probably like the familiar drivel common within the halls of UC Irvine where he received his MFA. Chabon forgot about the idea. Six months later, Chabon received a copy of the Eggers’ stunningly-different magazine—hard cover, gorgeous, and filled with the work of brilliant writers. Somewhere between Eggers’ passing comment and the publication date, McSweeny’s was created. When Eggers later said, “I’m going to start a writing center to encourage kids to write,” Chabon again passed the idea off as babble. “There are people who say things, and people who do them,” continued Chabon, “Dave is the latter.” 826 National—the writing and tutoring center Dave Eggers launched in 2002—now has locations in eight cities. The kicker—students don’t pay a dime to attend, while 95% of the teachers are unpaid volunteers! Now, what makes Eggers a successful entrepreneur is not that he executes with unbashful certainty. What I think makes him successful is the uncanny ability to not isolate himself in his work (what can be more solitary that writing?). Let me rephrase. He has followers (yes, it helps to be known). He has fans. Yet as any writer knows, sometimes making—pen to paper or keystrokes to screen—tends to be an act of selfishness, a concept that Eggers has completely overturned with his endeavors, perhaps garnering him a network of admirers and loyalists. Similarly, the increasing use of online social networks, I can only observe, has accelerated the growth of ideas: more startups, new technology, new behavioral models based on technology—we are the modern entrepreneurs. Success again comes down to execution, which like a story requires one to begin, to end, and then to go through multiple iterations/drafts.

About six months ago, Eggers challenged the newspaper industry, claiming that the bankruptcy and presumed end of numerous iconic print publications are not results of technological evolution—i.e. digital media winning over print media (actually, this is my wording, not his)—rather, the value of print is in the quality of the content, and the monetary value (fair market value) is determined by the quality of the entire package. I quote:

And paying for the physical paper begins with creating a physical object that doesn’t retreat, but instead luxuriates in the beauties of print. […] As long as newspapers offer less each day— less news, less great writing, less graphic innovation, fewer photos— then they’re giving readers few reasons to pay for the paper itself. (Source - Dave Egger’s open letter.)

Actually, Polish newspaper designer, Jacek Utko, makes a similar claim in this TED Talk (link to video).

Now, six months later Dave Eggers and the McSweeny’s crew have devised a prototype for the modern newspaper—a 112-page, broadside format genuine newspaper with magazine insert to be sold at newsstands around San Franscisco for $16. What will this mean? I have no idea. But if anything, it’s a honest attempt to challenge customers to place value—$16—on content and to rock the buckling knees of today’s print giants, as only gangily entrepreneurs can.

“Give people something to fight for, and they will fight for it. Give something to pay for, and they’ll pay for it.” Duly, noted. Examples that come to mind: Apple’s iTunes Store, Amazon’s Kindle Store, Etsy.com. To name a few, just.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Where to find McSweeney’s Panorama newspaper (francesdinkelspiel.blogspot.com)
• McSweeney’s “newspaper” issue on San Francisco will be 380 pages (francesdinkelspiel.blogspot.com)

flapjacksal:

In getting ready to apply for some fellowships, thinking about what to do after nyu, I came upon the “personal statement” that I wrote when applying to this phase of my life. Call me sentimental, but I still love this essay a lot. It makes me feel more firmly like myself just to read it:

The summer after I graduated from Vassar College, I moved to Maine and got a job with the Department of Parks and Recreation, driving a small tractor that, in the winter, was used to plow the snowy sidewalks. For the warmer months, this orange vehicle was outfitted with a 500 gallon water tank, its transmission rigged so that power could be diverted to fuel an internal pump. From this pump ran a hose, which coiled around a spool mounted on the front of the rig to end in a hollow metal spike of about three feet in length. My job was to visit all the newly planted saplings in the city, using a list of the trees’ addresses and their varietals (Tree Lilac, ‘Leprechaun’ Ash, Red Maple, ‘Rocky Mountain Glow’ Maple, Three Flower Maple, Flowering Crabapple, Hawthorne, and Zelkova Serrata were favorite cultivars, bred to attain no more than fifteen feet of height in order to avoid interfering with the power lines above.) When, with the help of a city map, I located my target, I would park my vehicle in neutral, engage the pump, uncoil the hose, drive the watering spike firmly into the soil below the root ball, and finally open a valve so that water would flow from the tip of the underground sprinkler, at a rate of approximately 50 gallons every ten minutes.

During the ten minute intervals for which I stood with each tree, I read books. I read Glyn Maxwell, I read Mario Luzi, I read Dante. I read the cannonical, the obscure, whatever I could find readily at the library and carry inconspicuously in my hardhat. At the time I thought I was doing it despite the world around me, despite the men in the garage who would casually go about their business in slow motion while I stood in the wide doorway, so that the sunlight might warm me while the industrial, high-pressure hose filled my small truck’s water reservoir. I suspect now that my understanding of purgatory would have differed without the greasy, half-lit vault of the garage at my back, the Sisyphean fifteen-mile-an-hour pace of my truck, the cold mornings turning without transition into hot noons and the longed-for, dark lunchroom which, once reached, bristled silently with rivalries between the men of the City Forestry Division, the head of which, it was rumored, had thrown a live chainsaw at a coworker in wrath (although he was always gentle to me, even lending me his safety harness once when the cherry-picker was parked on the Eastern Promenade, so that I could see what it was like to stand in the bucket with the metal arm of the truck fully extended, directly and invisibly beneath me, eighty feet above the highest point in the city.)

I mention these experiences to illustrate the “research method” I have held myself to these past years: not only looking at what can be found in books, which I consider an essential practice for a poet, who can always find something to learn from both the ideas of other writers and also their stylistic choices, but also extending the same involvement to the world at large and the people who inhabit it. My poems serve as crucibles to test my understanding of the ideas I encounter.

In the third canto of The Divine Comedy, Dante partially describes the indescribable Heaven by saying that only in Paradise can individuals know, and tell what they know. I would reverse the sense of this and say that to be able to know, and tell—comprehensively, elegantly, affectingly—what I know, this is the future I’m envisioning for my poetry, my aim, and my heaven.

She’s good.

CA 8 AD Ovid publishes his canonical account of the myth of the wax-winged Icarus, spurring generations of like-minded dare devils to fall to their deaths.

3RD CENTURY To ensure that the builder of one of his beloved towers would never replicate his work elsewhere, the Persian king Shapur I orders the architect to construct the tower’s roof without providing any means for his own descent. “The architect, in no position to reject the offer, requested only that he have enough wood to build a shack to protect himself form vultures,” writes Michael Abrams, author of the definitive history Birdmen, Batmen, and Skyflyers. “Once the tower was compete, the architect hewed himself a pair of wings with the wood and, with a little help from a strong wind, flew to his escape.”

6TH CENTURY In perhaps the earliest recorded attempt at human flight, the short-lived tyrannical Chinese emperor Kao Yang orders a group of condemned prisoners to attach bamboo wings to their backs and jump from the Tower of the Golden Phoenix. The emperor calls it a “liberation of living creatures.” In fact all the prisoners die upon striking the ground.

— MORE AT CABINET —

1901 With a film camera trained on him, Austian tailor Franz Reichelt steps off the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower wearing a combination overcoat-parachute garment of his own design. He expects onlookers will measure the duration of his flight. Instead, they measure the depth of his crater.

1972 Croatian terrorist blow up a DC-9 jet 22, 216 feet above Czechoslovakia, killing all twenty-nine passengers and crew, save one, a twenty-two-year-old Serbian stewardess names Vesna Vulovic, who free-falls for over three minutes without a parachute, before colliding with the side of a snow-covered mountain. Miraculously, she survives.

2001 Between 8:46 am and 10:26 am on September 11th, at least two hundred people jump to their deaths from the north tower of the New York City’s World Trade Center. According to USA Today, which systematically studied videos of the horrific day, “For those who jumped, the fall lasted 10 seconds. They struck the ground at just less than 150 miles per hour—not fast enough to cause unconsciousness while falling, but fast enough to ensure instant death on impact. … They jumped alone, in pairs and in groups.”