From Brennan

 I enjoyed listening to Susan Harris and Chad Post discuss their work. Susan Harris said something that seriously moved me: "We hear about the world through a purely political prism." It sums up for me the importance of all kinds of literary transmission; not just translation and international publishing. It is also something of a two-sided coin. The one side: even within states and languages, there is enough diversity that some people will always view others as "purely political", if they only learn about each other through the news media. Their works do not need to be translated, just transmitted. The other side: there are certainly nations that Americans already appreciate as not "purely political". French, German, Italian, Korean and Japanese influences are present in our culture, not just through translation but through art, music, cuisine, and technology.

In his talk and in a previous interview, Chad Post mentioned speculative fiction as a kind of financial driver that he publishes in order to fun other work. I asked him about whether he would publish speculative fiction for its own sake, and I wasn't sure what to make of his answer. I didn't feel he could break down the mental dichotomy between speculative works and "important" works. He understands on an economic level that a press can't survive just publishing Proust & Co., but I couldn't help but feel he would rather do just that.

Another gem from Susan Post was when she said "there is no such thing as reading for pleasure because we're always looking [as editors look]". I hope for her sake that this is an exaggeration, because it would be awful to think that anyone would lose pleasure in such a large part of their life. I hope never to reach that point in my career.

As to the reading, I was unsure what to make of some of the poetry. As prose, it was moving and deeply emotive, but I had a hard time getting my head around the form of the poem as poetry. My education in poetry has been primarily in Shakespeare, Milton, and Vergil, so I feel a bit lost outside of iambic pentameter or dactylic hexameter. I understood the introductions to the poems intellectually, but I had a hard time feeling the poetry as I read.