How many ways are there to relate to a piece of writing you care about?
Starting a small press last year offered an unexpected answer. But for a long time, I thought there were only two.
I could love a book fiercely and privately, claiming as close a fraternity with its author as I desired - a spiritual entanglement that played out across the chasm of time. This mode has the advantage of requiring no approval from others. It offers a certain fulfillment and a sense of bohemian nobility. Deep in this maze, the fantasy goes, you can even find your own writing: hidden fully formed in the work of those you admire. But little can be done to build a life around these attachments - at least a life that can be shared with the living.
The second option covers all the paths pitched to young people who like to read. These lead your farther from your initial excitement in exchange for a more basic sort of proximity - a permission to remain within the world of letters. You share the writing you care about as a teacher, shepherd it through the publishing industry in various clerical and editorial roles, or interpret and contextualize it as an academic. Farther out, the aggressive become lawyers, the manic journalists. None of these are the same as reading or writing fiction, but the mythology of transferable skills holds that they maintain a close relation.
For a few years after college I was thrust, less by choice than inaction, onto the former track. During the days I poured concrete and wrapped gifts for the wealthy. I patrolled the campus of a music school as a night watchman and held the same sequence of tutoring gigs that many do. Throughout it all I mediated a running hallucinated conversation between Mervyn Peake, M. John Harrison, Borges, Yoko Tawada, and Ray Bradbury. After shifts I'd pick up my friend William and we'd go stare at the ocean or watch Taiwanese films on his family projector surrounded by their boxes of anti-inflammatory powders and spiritual stickers. His mom called us something in Mandarin that he translated to "brothers in crisis". I became meaningfully detached from reality. I had trekked to some innermost frontier of introspection and found myself insufficient to withstand its conditions. An acceptance to grad school appeared like a medevac on the horizon.
Only once in grad school was I invited to submit to a conference. The Call for Papers asked us to consider the "myriad literary resonances of trash", although I imagine they'd also have considered essays on filth, excrement, waste, or bile. I was told I might write about late Shakespearean trash, perhaps uncovering proto-environmental sensibilities or a Heideggerian "object oriented ontology". At the time, I was helplessly enamored with the academic world - to which I had belonged only very briefly, and from which I could already feel myself rapidly sliding, down a trash chute all my own. I'd like to say that I refused on principle, but in reality, I was too busy lying on the roof of my dorm and staring at the foreign town that seemed to have been synthesized directly from childhood memories of PBS Masterpiece Mystery.
I'd met by then a few people for whom academic criticism was an honest relationship to literature, but I believe they are and should be rare. In my cohort, there was a guy who looked like Edna Mode who had devoted four years - and was looking down the barrel of a few decades more ahead - to figuring out the precise syllabus that Milton followed at school. I never doubted that he was born for this task, an olympian of its intellectual slopes. Granted omniscience, he would have turned it first and only toward the school rooms of the 1620s. But among the others there was rarely a tone of levity, more often one of spiritual devastation. The intellectual equipment offered by theory seminars seemed to function best on texts that the critic disliked - texts that could be held at an analytical distance, but which still leached energy from their life. Reports of antagonism by supervisors took on the tone of a gang stalking delusion. Advancing to postdoc or lecturer roles seemed simultaneously the most desired and dreaded outcome.
The works of literary criticism I like have always been digressive romps through the undergrowth of a text - few arguments as such, energetic to a fault, often disarmingly personal. I like when William Empson opens a paper by throwing a few haymakers at editors of A Midsummer Night's Dream shy about the play's bestiality, loses his thread, and begins frantic calculations of Puck's airspeed. Or when DH Lawrence benevolently reinstates Melville to the canon before ascending with Whitman to the onomatopoeic precipice of American democracy. It's no surprise that both, despite the enormous influence of their later years, formulated many of their best ideas while academic outsiders: Empson, ejected from Cambridge at 22 for the possession of condoms, and Lawrence, son of manual laborers, wrote while fleeing conflict in China or facing the "savage pilgrimage" of exile. Their writing is marked by an ornery, irreverent independence, the preference for ornate and original systems of their own. Good criticism, like good anything, is hard to summarize; unlike a homework assignment, it demands rather than accepts its own form; it brings about and then embodies the only form that could support its meaning.
Would many of us have been happier writing and thinking about literature outside of an academic context? Was academia really the only outlet for that set of skills and fixations? If those questions had been pinned by a provocateur over the library door, they would have floored me at 23. At the core of the confusion was a basic tenet of literary education: that to care about fiction is to care above all about its institutional transmission. The same tension might be present in other disciplines; I'm not sure. Maybe many aeronautical engineers would be happier as bush pilots. I do know a lot of academics who want to be authors and a lot of authors who want to be academics - all caught in the cultural web of the MFA, which has consolidated both roles into the same category alongside the dwindling economic viability of each.
So instead of writing about trash, a few friends and I started walking around saying we were adherents an alternative critical movement, New Appreciation. We explained that we alone - docile noncombatants in the grueling war between New Critics and New Historicists, conscientious objectors to the dour campaigns of the Critical Theorists and Deleuzers, all of whom kept finding new ways to do violence to texts - that we alone were the pacifists of the literary world, refusing to anything to a text at all except read it aloud in high spirits.
On that principle we founded the Late Night Late Plays Reading Group, which had a single glorious meeting. At 11pm three young women we’d never met answered the call of our sodden gnomic posters to arrive at my dorm, a medieval brothel on a crooked stone lane. We made it halfway through A Winter’s Tale before a final reader performed a dive roll through the window from some neighboring scaffolding, earning the condemnation of a German biologist a floor below. We hadn't yet put up posters for a second meeting when the city was placed under Covid era martial law and the frivolity of New Appreciation - completely antithetical to Zoom - was dealt in its infancy a fatal blow.
Henry James's story "The Jolly Corner" found me around then, at a time of my life when I was ripe for obsession and a new relationship with writing. It seemed to echo my own years of exile at home and then abroad, my own neuroses. It reminded me that good fiction was simply direct knowledge: the only point of entry into atmospheric and energetic conditions otherwise inaccessible. And yet as I sought out and read every ghost story James had written, I found that they argued in a surprisingly direct way against solipsism and retreat. I began to feel more like the figure in a Lovecraft story who glimpses some profane knowledge and becomes its devoted midwife. The only path forward was progenitive: birthing these stories somehow back out into the physical world.
For many, James's ghost stories will seem among the heaviest ever written - mired in their own grammatical bog, fixated from the first word to the last with death and regret. Yet somehow processing them into a manuscript put me into the lightest state I'd achieved in years. I started doing this before I even had the idea to publish them; it was simply a necessity of their scattered form - some extant in midcentury hardbacks, many in grainy PDFs or the flaking pages of Victorian periodicals. When I found a story I liked, I retyped every word, triangulating the best version from multiple editions, then read it aloud to myself four or five times, often falling into laughter so convulsive that I'd lose my place and have to start over again. I threw the duds out without hesitation. I could find the most horrifying story only as a print-on-demand Amazon title, scraped by a bot from a digitized 1900 issue of The Atlantic and marketed as a blandly reassuring romance, the description hallucinated entirely around the eponymous character's name.
James was a notorious self-editor, fixated with his own reception - a tendency indulged to its extreme in his 60s when he was given the rare opportunity to assemble his life's work in a monumental 24 volumes. He expelled most of the ghost stories and touched up all those he kept. Watching as he restlessly swapped around infinitives and gerunds or struggled with futile efforts to standardize punctuation, I felt like I was peering over his shoulder; I felt sorry for him at moments, in awe of his commitment at others. Confronted with more substantial changes, I selected the phrases and stories that worked better, opposing his final wishes as often as I assented. After all, whatever I was doing, it wasn't homework; it seemed vital to keep it personal.
(With surprising reliability, AI guys ask me if it wouldn't have been easier to automate that whole editing process - a question I still find almost too mystifying to answer, like asking someone if they wouldn't rather have fast-forwarded through some of their densest, strangest, happiest hours just to see the outcome.)
As I worked, I found that an argument arose naturally: that I was only selecting ghost stories written nearer the end of his life, works that displayed the loose, indulgent mastery of a "late style". After months of immersion, the introduction turned out to be the quickest thing I'd ever written - a few brief observations on how I thought the stories worked followed by an explanation of my own interest. Above all I thought I should simply write something quickly while the text was still the realest thing in my world.
At some point, I looked down and found the thing basically ready to publish - and thought for the first time in my life that it might be fun to be a publisher - which became itself a process buoyant with discovery, completely unlike the logistical terror I had always imagined.
I called friends and asked them what made physical books ecstatic objects. We spoke about the literal lightness of the Japanese "bunkobon" format - A6 paperbacks read across the Tokyo metro, folded in one hand - and about the slim anonymous volumes of 20th century Paris, Les Editions de Minuit. We spoke about how the design of some small presses like NYRB Classics made their books seem less novels in their own right than installments in one continuous series - the ore sent up from a shaft deep into another country's past.
Above all, I was drawn by the unique relation offered by these presses' work to other peoples' writing, making them less critics or editors than scavengers, gamblers, boosters: conduits and partisans of the new. I realized a press could be an offering on the twin altars of lightness and ecstasy. Nietzsche and Calvino's lightness that sends the soul up dancing past the rafters; the physical lightness of small books. Lightness as a form of sovereignty - the life you make for yourself in private that's free of so many things. A series of physically small books, then, light in all ways. Books that looked good on a shelf but invited energetic reading on the move. And then a hint of the darker ecstasy of Tom Waits, of intensely private modes of writing, any work so personal that it pierces only rarely through its own illegibility, with brief flashes of energy and meaning. Scavenging in the public domain seemed exactly the right way to start, the lightest first step away from the dour maturity of much literary fiction - which deals too readily in concepts and questions, making it hard to either criticize or enjoy - and toward a different fiction, one of ecstatic best guesses & fractious half-answers.
My friend Lauren indulged all these thoughts and distilled them into a mark and typographic system for the series. William made us a website. I found an affordable printer in Cornwall by checking the colophons of a few other small presses. At every stage, this taped-together rig offered immense freedom. When the manuscript proved too long, there was no pressure to cut stories; Lauren and I simply bumped up the dimensions last minute, still nearer our goal of A6 than a standard US "trade" format. When a few boxes of the first order faced minor water damage in transit, I was able to sell them for a reduced rate - something a distributor would never have allowed.
Although I'd dreaded the idea of selling something, talking to small bookstores turned out to be a highlight. The day I received the first batch, I sent short emails to a dozen of them and was surprised when most responded with orders. We engaged in basically no other online promotion. Wherever I travel now, I email any local bookstores in advance, then drop off their order when I'm in town. Being ushered into a back door of Shakespeare & Co in Paris, past a dawn crowd of tourists lined up ferocious with desire, was a more surreal and moving experience than I expected.
Factoring everything in, each book costs around $6. They sell for $18 at independent bookstores, which keep around half of that price. The $3 profit that results - $12 when a copy sells directly from our site - has so far, with only a few hundred copies sold, covered all the various up-front costs. I'm still surprised how painless it was to break even - that it was essentially free to get these stories back out into the world.
Where next for Dancing Star Press? I’m not really sure. I'd like to expand the series, publishing one or two books in the years when it seems urgent to do so, then lapsing in other years into silence. There's talk of a Hazlitt collection and the eternal hope of meeting a teenager on a bus who's writing something that nobody else would think to publish. We're open to solicitation. It’s a huge source of potential energy just to have a completely new way to relate to writing I find exciting, to occasionally pull a bent business card from my wallet and hand it to someone.
I'm more certain of the paths we won't take. I admire the ascension of once-small presses like Fitzcarraldo Editions but feel only anxiety when I imagine it. Moving to San Francisco has helped me realize that I have no interest in scale or "agency", no proclivity for analytics or management. Selling a few hundred copies of a paperback has resulted in immeasurably more contact and opportunity than I could have imagined - certainly more than times I've reached larger audiences online. I hope it might have inspired a few people to slough off stale ways of relating to the things they care about most: to create their own minor institutions; to work privately on things so esoteric that they could never scale; to accept no compromise and resist the professionalization of what they love. There’s great levity in being a bit sententious, giving your projects a funny name and pronouncing it carefully to strangers. The right few people are both electrified and terrified by whatever it is you'll do on your own.
If you’re interested in reading the stories, buy a pristine or lightly damaged copy - or head to any of the independent bookstores listed here. If you can't afford one, email me and I'll send you a dinged up copy for free. This is the first text to result from New Appreciation. It's best read in high spirits and aloud.
