where books sell

Mine at least, in the last month:

1. New York
2. Los Angeles
3. Minneapolis/St. Paul
4. Chicago
5. Philadelphia

It’s a great feature from Amazon Author Central, and I’ve learned a lot from following it about where in the U.S. people read the sorts of books I write.

Everything below #1 is in flux from month to month. But New York is not only always #1, but always obliterating the competition (more than double Los Angeles this month, for example). We really depend on that city.

Greenberg on the emergence of New York

This is from a 1967 interview. Up through the mid-1940’s, it’s striking how down he always was on American art, and how insistent he was that Paris was still the only place to be. That changed in around 1947/48, though it took a few years to register with the public.

Q: Mr. Greenberg, you are known as one of the earliest champions of advanced American art. What were some of the factors that contributed to its breakthrough during and after World War II?

A: One thing I do know is that artists in New York during the latter 1930’s tried harder, informed themselves more about what was going on elsewhere –especially in Paris– than artists in Paris itself did in those years. I was in Paris for the first time in the spring of 1939 and was somewhat startled by how unknowing the few younger artists I met there were by comparison with their counterparts in New York. In New York at that time the younger artists on 8th Street –especially those who had some contact with Hans Hofmann, even if they weren’t his students– were looking at everything and at the same time bearing down on themselves. They knew Matisse better than he was known in Europe and, as I think, valued him more. They knew Klee, they knew Miró, they knew Mondrian. In Paris –even though Miró and Mondrian were then living there– these artists seemed to have less status, less authority, as precedents than in New York. On top of that, for some mysterious reason, proficiency in painting –if you can call it that– prowess in painting, did seem to cross the ocean back in those years; I mean that the general level of ambitious painting became higher over here than in France. I realized that only in the 1950’s and was as much surprised as anyone, even though I was registering something that had already been true for some dozen years…

Paris was the unrivaled center in art in the 150 years before 1950. If you weren’t in Paris or in touch with Paris you were condemned to be a more or less provincial or minor artist.

graveyard, Cathedral of St. John

I went there this morning; it’s just up the street.

Both Lovecraft and Poe spent large amounts of time there. Many of the gravestones are old enough for Poe to have seen them personally.

“sugar-coated Satan sandwich”

“Rep. Emanuel Cleaver, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said early reports of the new deal appeared to be ‘a sugar-coated Satan sandwich.’ The Missouri Democrat said the CBC hadn’t yet made a formal declaration that the group would oppose it, ‘but this is a shady bill.'”

Within the limits of my knowledge of the details, I think I’ve been largely persuaded that this was a time for high-spending jobs programs, not for debt austerity.