September 18th - Charlottesville, Virginia

I was staying with Jen R (Jen Rubenstein), an old Williams friend, and her husband Pete, both professors in political science and currently teaching at the University of Virginia. 

The following day, I spoke at New Dominion Bookstore at 12.15pm, this time with four people: Jen, me, and David and Sally from the bookstore. 

Here we pan to the audience, minus Sally.

David is an artist who also edits legal textbooks. Sally has an amazing knowledge of American Folk Art. And their space is beautiful.

I can't fault anyone for not going to readings.  I love books and I rarely go to bookstore events.  That said, I was determined to improve on publicity.

Sidebar: Speaking in bookstores is a curious lens into the economics and cultural norms of publishing.  New Dominion was one of the stores that charge reader fees, presumably not to major authors. I was asked to pay about $25 to speak there.  I was also asked to bring my own books, which they would sell on consignment.

Having the curious MBA-MFA background, I am often willfully uneconomic about art activities.  I believe in creativity in business, and on the other, bracket wholeheartedly any really reductive economic thinking with regard to art.  So, I was surprised to find that some of the people I dealt with in bookstores seemed vastly more concerned with money than anyone I have ever worked with in finance.  Maybe the fact finance is so obviously about money frees people to talk about other things.

Much as I think I understand the reasons some people in creative—artistic or literary—fields feel they have to be economic realists, I do really believe that economic success in the arts often follows as a byproduct of hard work and belief in the underlying merit of projects, much the way Plato's idea if happiness is a byproduct of productivity not an end in itself.

I think I sold a few books at New Dominion (thanks, Jen!), but the experience also ended with me handing over a physical check. As I handed it to Dave, the legal editor, he gave me his card, with an explicit invitation to enlist his paid services if I needed legal proofreading help.

I spent the afternoon with Mary Jo (MJ) Toms at the Batten Institute, an entrepreneurship think thank associated with Darden, the UVA business school, talking to a couple of students starting art-related ventures.  (I probably shouldn't discuss these in detail, since they are other people's new ideas.) I was alternately charmed and skeptical, but then MBAs teach you to be a skeptic, and entrepreneurship is about risk-taking -- being an exception to a rule or a new entity about which rules don't yet exist. 

We sat outside on benches for more than an hour, in late afternoon sun, a reception being set up on the adjacent lawn. UVA is a particularly cloistered campus, in that beautiful, grass-like-carpet, red-brick-quadrangle-buildings sort of way.  It made me want to be in academia, or to find that kind of ongoing conversation around ideas. Not to under-estimate all of the other parts of working in academia.

As I would next be reminded, there are people outside of academia with time for ideas -- in this case, my aunt's retired friends, none of whom I would be brave enough to wager against in bridge.