• An Open Letter to LARB Supporters from William Giraldi

    giraldi

    IN AN INSPIRED ESSAY on Baudelaire, the great critic James Huneker made an assertion I’ve never succeeded in shaking free, even when I’ve felt most unworthy of its substance: when literature is done well, Huneker said, when it is executed with the torque and pitch of true art, “there is no mental toil comparable to it.”

    We writers require and deserve to be paid for that mental toil; I for one have always been glacial when it comes to subscribing to magazines or providing donations to worthy literary venues — glacial as in slow, indeed, but also glacial as in maintaining the frigid rationale that it is I who should receive money from magazines, not the inverse. I’ve recently become quicker to donate and subscribe to worthy outfits because the real estate for serious, sustained literary comment has been eroded by a lobotomized marketplace, elbowed away in favor of book reviews no better than book reports polluted by knee-jerk emotions, or else replaced by the pop-culture pabulum that belongs jailed inside People magazine.

    What LARB has accomplished in so short a span often strikes me as outright miraculous: a respected venue for serious, sustained literary comment in a cultural milieu which should have shunned its existence, retarded its every development directly from gestation. You know the value of LARB not only because it has survived against every odd, or provided a conduit for your own work, but because you have spent time there with the work of others who have earned your regard. Now an uncommon opportunity is upon us (and we contributors, if we have pledged our lives to serious reading, have a moral imperative to employ that pronoun, us, never them). In five days LARB will receive the tremendous gift of $50,000 if we can match the funds.

    If every contributor would join me in a one-time donation of $100, we’d go a long way in securing this generous match — in helping to secure the health and punch of a literary outfit which in turn helps to transmit our fought-for ideas to a discerning readership. Recalling Dr. Johnson’s most notorious quip, about the mercenary motive of every writer, let’s bear in mind that this grant also augments the ongoing mission of LARB to pay contributors a fee equal to their abilities.

    We writers are poor by some standards, and especially during this holiday blitzkrieg upon our pocketbooks, I realize. But we are poorer still if LARB diminishes or disappears from a dearth of support, if this venue which helps to buttress our mental toil fails to be buttressed in return. Please do click here, and may you and your work thrive in 2014.

    Sincerely Yours,
    William Giraldi