Introduction to Focus: Europeana, &c.

American Heview introduction to focus: Europeana, &CAndrew Ervin, Focus Editor Aneon sign in a downtown Philadelphia storefront , not far from where I grew up, summarized thousands of years of Western thought and that single, bright red utterance taught me as much as four years—okay, four and a half—in the salt mines of an undergraduate philosophy department. It said: LOGOS COPIES. For the full effect, I want you to open and close youreyes afew times. See ifyou can make this newsprint blink offand on. There. Thank you. I'm writing this intro in mid-July though am told it will run in the November/December issue, so I'm going to pretend that I watched Monday Night Football last week. I mean, I almost certainly did watch it. Didn't you? And I'm certain that I was astounded and dismayed by the number of insignias and logos on display at every moment. They were unavoidable (except of course for those willing to take the subversive step of switching off the television entirely) and stood in for dozens of corporate entities, many with patriotic names: the American Broadcast Co., the National Football League, Budweiser, the Philadelphia Eagles, the Ford Motor Co. In my future-memory the list seems endless. The corporate logos and, yes, corporate Logos were omnipresent. As a viewer, I was more marketed to than entertained; that made me wonder if most network TV-watching people enjoy being marketed to and if, oh shit, I do too? My fear, as you've no doubt figured out all on your own, is that our logos and our Logos have become indistinguishable, that whoever controls the logos controls the Logos. (And please don't think it amiss ifI use the capital L to represent the Greek Logos as defined so eloquently by James Harkness in the introduction to his translation of Foucault's This Is Nota Pipe (1983): "For the Greeks, Logos connoted both reality and knowledge (hence expressibility) of reality.") We are no longer viewers, only demographics , and the language that binds us together as a culture—our Logos—has become essentially visual in nature. It's an arrangement that both allows and necessitates advertisers and corporate interests to speak to us in a new high-speed visual vernacular in which language as we know it has lost its intellectual currency. Our logos and our Logos have become indistinguishable. In preparing this Focus it was my intention not only to entertain and delight but to remind the viewing masses, the part of which that reads ABR, that by forsaking the written tradition for the corporate -visual we have unwittingly accepted the role of something less than human. Now, I'm going to resist the temptation to turn this essay into yet another requiem for fiction in translation, about how foreign literature in particular has withered in the immense heat of television's blue glow. Yeah, yeah. Instead, let me say a few words about this focus, "Europeana, &c." First off, the cover illustration, Sugar and Spice, is by Regina Allen. Because I don't know where else her bio would go in this issue, I'll tell you that she is a professional artist and college instructor living in Austin, Texas, with her husband and young son. You can see more of her work at www.vingallery.com. Need I remind you that not all visual culture is evil? I didn't think so. For the reviews themselves I tracked down seven of my favorite young fiction writers working today and asked them to share their thoughts on some translated , more or less Eastern European literature. All ofthese contributors have published books that have shaken me in different ways; you'll see the titles in their respective bios, and I'd urge you to read a few of them. Like these reviews, they will take you in different directions and expose new vistas. My hope, finally, was to commission a series ofreviews capable ofbeginning a new conversation, of inspiring you to read not only the books under discussion (or some of them) but also books by those discussing them. One great text begets another. Logos copies. Andrew Ervin is...