The semester is ending. In the “Work” seminar today, we’re reading George Saunders. CivilWarLand in Bad Decline and this brilliant, heartbreak of a piece, “Chicago Christmas, 1984″:

The gambling began. One by one, the guys lost what they felt they could lose and drifted back to stand against the worktable and diddle with the soldering irons. Soon only John was left. Why was John left? Vic kept taunting. A whole autumn of such taunts now did their work. All belittled men dream of huge redemption. Here was John, dreaming. In response to John’s dreaming, Vic and Gary began to speak with mock-professorial diction.

“Look at this, kindly look at this,” Vic shouted. “John is not, after all, any more a gambler than he is a ergo roofer. That is, he is a equally sucky gambler as he is a suckass roofer.”

“Are you saying,” said Gary, “that his gambling, in terms of how much does it suck, sucks exactly as much as does suck his roofing?”

“Perzackly, yup, that is just what I am saying, doctor,” Vic burped.

John burned. They were going to see. They were going to see that the long years of wrongs done him had created a tremendous backlog of owed good luck, which was going to surge forward now, holy and personal.

And see they did. Soon John was down to his last hundred, and then he broke it, and then he was down to his last twenty. Then Vic cackled, and John threw his sole remaining five at Vic’s chest. Vic caught it, kissed it, added it to his tremendous wad.

A light went on in my head and has stayed on ever since: It was all about capital. Vic could lose and lose and never really lose. Once John dipped below four hundred, he was dead. He was dead now.

george-saunders-chicago-christmas

At the end of a long day doing other stuff, I came across an article in today’s NY Timesabout the shrinking pages for books:

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, meanwhile, has recently eliminated the job of its book editor, leading many fans to worry that book coverage will soon be provided mostly by wire services and reprints from national papers.

The decision in Atlanta — in which book reviews will now be overseen by one editor responsible for virtually all arts coverage — comes after a string of changes at book reviews across the country. The Los Angeles Times recently merged its once stand-alone book review into a new section combining the review with the paper’s Sunday opinion pages, effectively cutting the number of pages devoted to books to 10 from 12. Last year The San Francisco Chronicle’s book review went from six pages to four. All across the country, newspapers are cutting book sections or running more reprints of reviews from wire services or larger papers.

The reporter finds it necessary to yoke this sad empirical fact with the burgeoning of literary blogs. (Is this an attempt to attract thought? controversy? readers?) Whatever the reason, I’m delighted that the story mentions several of my favorite sites (and it was actually useful to read through the kinds of issues some of these bloggers have brought up in response to the piece–and oh, there’s also a petition to sign for a worthy cause):

In recent years, dozens of sites, including Bookslut.com, The Elegant Variation, maudnewton.com, Beatrice.com and the Syntax of Things, have been offering a mix of book news, debates, interviews and reviews, often on subjects not generally covered by newspaper book sections.

Image taken from Maud’s site.