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shadowkatBefore going to bed last night, earlier than usual due to the onset of a head cold, I read an interesting essay by Ursula K. Le Guin in this month's Harper's entitled: "Staying Awake, Notes on the alleged decline of reading." Not sure if anyone else has seen or read or commented on it yet? (Am woefully behind on the reading of flist, sorry.)
In the essay, she discusses two polls, one by the National Endowment of the Arts and one by The Associated Press - which both stated that readership of fictional works has been in a sharp decline. She does question the accuracy of the two polls, stating NEA polled 13,000 adults and stated only 46.7 percent read any book, yet oddly excluded "non-fiction" from "literature" in its polls, "so that you could have read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Voyage of the Beagle, Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte, and the entire Letters and Diaries of Virigina Woolf that year and yet be counted as not having read anything of literary value." Proof that polling remains an inaccurate science at best and doesn't tell us very much. But you already figured that out just by watching the New Hampshire primaries. Doesn't stop us from doing it though - that and list making, for some reason.
At any rate, in the AP poll - the AP correspondent, Alan Fram - quotes a telecommunications project manager in Dallas - who states: "I just get sleepy when I read." Fram comments:"a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify."
This statement intrigues Le Guin and she launches into a critique of the franchise bookselling and publishing industry in the US. Making some valid points. First she provides a little history on reading and book publishing - how reading and writing was never something everyone did - in fact at one time it was a practice done by only the elite or those in power, the vast majority were illiterate. Women at one time could not read and more importantly were not permitted to learn. This is still the case in some Muslim societies. "Reading," Le Quin states, "was considered an inappropriate activity for women, as in some Muslim societies today." In the 1960s there was an upsurge in reading - and in the 1800's people often talked about books on trains the way we talk about tv shows. They'd have conversations about the Old Curiousity Shop by Charles Dickens, wondering if Little Nell was going to cop it, much the same way we might discuss whether Buffy would end up with Spike, or if Sawyer would get killed on Lost. Back then, Le Quin states - "A man might be less likely to boast about falling asleep at the sight of Dickens novel than to feel left out of things by not having read it." "The social quality of literature," Le Quinn goes on to state, "is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere P.R. because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them. (Not sure I completely agree with her on this - everyone I know has finished the bestsellers they've read such as Harry Potter, whether they remember them that well after having done so is whole other issue.) "The Potter boom," she states in the next paragraph, "was a genuine social phenomenon, like the worship of rock stars and the whole subculture of popular music, which offer adolescents and young adults both an exclusive in-group and shared social experience."
"Books," Le Quinn writes, "are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidy of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities."
And here she launches her critique: "Moneymaking entities controlled by obscenely rich executives and their anonymous accountants have acquired most previously independent publishing houses with the notion of making quick profit by selling works of art and information. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that such people get sleepy when they read. Within the corporate whales are many luckless Jonahs who were swallowed alive with their old publishing house - editors and such anachronisms - people who read wide awake. Some of them are so alert they can scent out promising new writers. Some of them have their eyes so open they can even proofread. But it doesn't do them much good. For years now, most editors have had to waste most of their time on an unlevel playing field, fighting Sales and Accounting.
In those departments, beloved by the CEO's, a "good book" means a high gross and a "good writer" is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don't comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. Their interest in books is self-interest, the profit that can be made out of them - or occassionally for top executives, the Murdochs and other Merdles, the political power they can wield through them; but that is merely self-interest again, personal profit.
And not only profit but growth. If there are stockholders, their holdings must increase yearly, daily, hourly. The AP article ascribed "listlessness" and "flat" book sales to the limited opportunity for expansion. But until corporate takeovers, publishers did not expect expansion; they were quite happy if their supply and demand ran parallel, if their books sold steadily, flatly. How can you make book sales expand endlessly, like the American waistline?"
I remember when I first came to NYC in 1995 and did informational interviews with all the publishing houses hunting a job in sub-rights. This was just a year before the big corporate mergers and acquisitions - before - Viacome acquired Simon & Schuster, Time Warner grabbed Random House (at least I think it was Time Warner). I met with the old school editors and rights associates, who mostly told me the same thing over and over again: "you don't get rich in publishing. You don't do it for the money. You do it for the love. Salaries start low and stay low. Authors drive you crazy, but you love them anyway. And, you will pick up the John Grisham's and Tom Clancy's so you can publish smaller more literary titles by the Emily Praegers and Nancy Kay Shapiros." Then Simon & Schuster got bought by Viacom. And it all became about cross-marketing and branding. James Patterson was a hot commodity as was the Harry Potter books. Why - because you can sell multiple products across the board. Viacom can sell a video game, a movie, a tv show, a board game, and own rights to the brand - for James Patterson's "Women's Murder Club" or his Alex Cross series. Patterson writes like a marketing guy - short pithy prose, that you forget moments after you read it. His books are interchangable. I've read one or two. Can't remember either of them. But he sells like hot-cakes and makes Viacom a profit. Used to be editors were the cool job, the guy who worked with author, much like Gordon Lish worked with Raymond Carver to finesse a book. Now - the job to have in publishing is Aquisitions Editor or Literary Agent such as top dogs who do movie deals(not the smaller agents) - especially if you can land a hot commodity like James Patterson or JK Rowling who can marketed across the board, with multiple products. You aren't an editor, you don't help make the book better, you make it sellable, you are a salesman.
Michael Pollan explains in The Omnivore's Dilemma how do you do it with corn. When you've grown enough corn to fill every reasonable demand, you create unreasonable demands - artificial needs. So, having induced the government to declare corn-fed beef to be the standard, you feed corn to cattle, who cannot digest corn, tormenting and poisoning them in the process. And you use the fats and sweets of the corn by-products to make an endless array of soft drinks and fast foods, addicting people to a fattening yet inadequate diet in the process. And you can't stop the processes, because if you did profits might become listless, even flat. This system worked only too well for corn, and indeed through American agriculture and manufacturing, which is why we increasingly eat junk and make junk while wondering why tomatoes in Europe taste like tomatoes and foreign cars are well engineered.
She may be over-stating that one. Heirloom tomatoes are actually quite good - but also organic and locally grown. Current trend is locally grown by the way. We've moved away from organic, because the big food corporations got hold of it and started trying to sell things that aren't organic as organic.
Standardization of the product and its production can only take you so far - because there is some intellectual content to even the most brainless book. People will buy interchangeable bestsellers, formula thrillers, romances, mysteries, pop biographies, and hot-topic books up to a point, but their product loyalty is defective. A book has to be read, it takes time, effort - you have to be awake to do it. And so you want some reward. The loyal fans bought Death at One O'Clock and Death at Two O'Clock...yet all of a sudden they won't buy Death at Eleven O'Clock even though it follows exactly the same surefire formula as the others. The readers got bored.
True. I've bought the Janet Evanovich books - got bored by the fifth one. The plot became more or less predictable. The only suspense was which guy she'd go with and finally, I just stopped caring. The author didn't appear to have anything to say. And that, I learned years ago, was the only reason one should write. If you have something to say.
Even during what I have called the "century of the book", when it was taken for granted that many people read and enjoyed fiction and poetry, how many people in fact had or could make time for reading once they were out of school? During those years most Americans worked hard and worked long hours. Weren't there always many who never read a book at all, and never very many who read a lot of books? We don't know how many, because we didn't have polls to worry us about it.
If people make time to read, it's because it's part of their jobs, or other media aren't readily available, or they aren't much interested in them - or because they enjoy reading. Lamenting over percentage counts induces a moralizing tone: It is bad that we don't read; we should read more; we must read more. Concentrating on the drowsy fellow in Dallas, perhaps we forget our own people, the hedonists who read because they want to. Were such people ever in the majority?
LOL! Too true. I'm one of the hedonists who read because I want to. Well fiction at any rate.
I am required to read non-fictional things. And until I moved to NY, I didn't know many people who liked to read. Even here - at my workplace, few people read. I came from a family that devoured books, collected books, and decorated their walls and homes with books. So it is in my blood. In my family, the most important entertainment medium is books - bound books that you can hold in your hands, printed on paper. TV is disposable. Radio is interesting.
Film - when you find the time. But books a necessity. That was how I was raised. I feel guilty when I watch too much tv and considers my DVD's a guilty pleasure that I don't talk about very much. But books? That's something I am proud of. But I know, I am in the minority.
I've lost count of the number of apartments and homes I've ventured into that do not have any books on their shelves or visible. And on the subway and train, few people have books open - mostly magazines or listening to i-pods.
Here - Le Quin attacks the competition: "Governmental hostility was emasculating public radio while Congress allowed a few corporations to buy out and debase private radio stations. Television has steadily lowered its standards of what is entertaining until most programs are either brain-numbing or actively nasty." (Not sure I agree with the bit on tv. Le Quin reminds me of a lot of literary types of a certain generation who wax nostalgic about the Golden Years of TV. Please. Charlies Angels was not that good. Nor was Little House on The Prairie or My Show of Shows, or the Honeymooners. There are some innovative and interesting shows on television that are not necessarily nasty. ) "Hollywood remakes remakes and tries to gross out, with an occasional breakthrough that reminds us what a movie can be when undertaken as art." (Uh, again I think she exaggerates a bit here. Sure there the big money making films are repetitive but I can think of at least ten films that I've seen this year that were innovative and interesting.) "And the Internet offers everything to everybody: but perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from Web-surfing. You can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or book on your computer, but these artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps bloggin is an effort to bring creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop aesthetic form, but they certainly haven't done it yet." (Uh, don't know. Depends on the blog you read, I suppose. Some people have written books on blogs complete with artwork. It's just another medium is all. Personally I don't see blogging as an attempt to do anything more than communicate with a bunch of people at the same time - and as diverse a group as possible. I seriously doubt most bloggers think about being creative or creating art when they blog.)
I do however love her take on reading, it explains why I adore reading so much and always will - reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness - not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. I won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it - everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everyone is up to it.
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you are fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
I think Le Quin is right. Publishers are trying to turn books into commodities. Art into something that makes millions of dollars and will continue to do so quickly. And I don't think you can do that. It's no coincidence, I think, that the literary greats never made much money writing. James Joyce died penniless. Fitzgerald struggled - doing scripts. The ones who did live well, either came from money, had other jobs, or married into it. Sure there are exceptions - Stephen King, JK Rowling, possibly Faulkner and Hemingway. Same deal with publishing - it's not a moneymaking venture. As Le Quin points out in another section - "the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other."
"To me," Le Quin states, "one of the most despicable things about corporate publishers and chain booksellers is their assumption that books are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn't 'perform' within a few weeks, it gets its covers torn off - it is trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate. This week's blockbuster must eclipse last week's, as if there weren't room for more than one book at a time. Hence the crass stupidity of most publishers (and again, chain booksellers) in handling backlists."
Agreed. It is a shame that I can find hundreds of copies of Laurell K. Hamilton or Dragonquest series, but can't find say a copy of Whiskey & Water by Elizabeth Bear or a copy of Catherine Valente's Orphane Tales on my local booksellers shelves. Example of Captialism gone insane. Same deal with the local movie house - although that's better, where you see twenty showings of the latest JErry Bruckheimer Action Flick or say Disney's Enchanted, but only one showing of Before The Devil Knows You're There or Away From Her.
"Over the years, books kept in print may earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for their publisher and author. A few steady earners, even though the annual earnings are in what is now dismissively called "the midlist", can keep publishers in business for years, and even allow them to take a risk or two on new authors." (I remember Ed Loomis, Senior Editor at Random House telling me back in 1995 how every John Grisham made it possible for him to take a risk on a new untried author.) "But captialists count weeks not years. To get big quick money, the publisher must risk a multimillion-dollar advance on a hot author who's supposed to provide this week's bestseller. These millions - often a dead loss- come out of funds that used to go to pay normal advances to reliable midlist authors and royalties on older books that kept selling. Many midlist authors have been dropped, many reliably selling books remaindered....Is that any way to run a business?"
She ends her essay wondering why the corporations don't just drop the literary publishing houses, much like I suspect Saatchi dropped the management compensation consulting business that my Dad was a partner in, in the 90's - realizing finally that ad men knew zip about the biz of compensation and organizational consulting and the two could not be run the same way.
"Is it," Le Quin wonders, "because you think if you own publishing you can control what's printed, what's written, what's read? Well lotsa luck sir. It's a common delusion of tyrants. Writers and readers, even as they suffer from it, regard it with amused contempt."
I have to admit, I've been wondering when we'll all wake up from our captialistic wet dream of obtaining so much money and things, and well smell the ozone layer. I think we are starting to now. The strikes going on now or looming on the horizon, the recession we fear to speak of, the lay-offs, etc may be our wake up call. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against capitalism, and I'm no socialist, I see problems in both systems. What I struggle with is the extreme. Captialism has gone insane the last few years. And we are paying the price.
I don't think art is a commodity to be bought and sold on a stock market. To be traded.
I think it is a personal thing. And those who create it do it because they are driven to create it, and most would probably create it regardless of whether they got paid or at the very least create something. I'm not saying one shouldn't get paid for it. Just that I think it is difficult to put a price tag on art. Or determine accessibility or whether it should be published or seen based on marketability or how well fast it will sell. Marketing and Sales and Accounting should not be running the show here. They should take a back seat. They should not decide which books get published. Just because James Patterson sells does not mean the person who copies his formula will. Instead of looking for the next JK Rowling, perhaps the acquisition editors should look for the next book that turns them on. That makes them happy.
That is different. Even if it's not a book than can easily be made into a movie or interactive video game.
There is no way of knowing what will grab people's interest. No formula, no recipe. If we could predict it - life would be less interesting I suspect and people more robotic in nature.
I agree with Le Quin, I don't think a poll can tell us much about how people read or why they aren't. I don't think we can say no one is writing good books based on what someone decides to publish. These are easy assumptions based on poor information and source data. I also don't think reading has ever been all that popular. I know I spent a good portion of my high school years curled up in corners reading books as opposed to going to prom or out to lunch. I liked the companionship of my books more...which made me a bit odd. The other portion? Writing stories in notebooks and on a typewriter. Or telling them to myself outside orally when no one was around. But few of the people I've met in my life share that passion. Wales does, the one's I've met online, CW, and my family. A handful at most. And most of the writers I've met, professional, working writers, are not rich. They are barely scraping by.
If they have money it is not from novel writing, it is from other sources be advertising, teaching, journalism, etc.
In the essay, she discusses two polls, one by the National Endowment of the Arts and one by The Associated Press - which both stated that readership of fictional works has been in a sharp decline. She does question the accuracy of the two polls, stating NEA polled 13,000 adults and stated only 46.7 percent read any book, yet oddly excluded "non-fiction" from "literature" in its polls, "so that you could have read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Voyage of the Beagle, Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte, and the entire Letters and Diaries of Virigina Woolf that year and yet be counted as not having read anything of literary value." Proof that polling remains an inaccurate science at best and doesn't tell us very much. But you already figured that out just by watching the New Hampshire primaries. Doesn't stop us from doing it though - that and list making, for some reason.
At any rate, in the AP poll - the AP correspondent, Alan Fram - quotes a telecommunications project manager in Dallas - who states: "I just get sleepy when I read." Fram comments:"a habit with which millions of Americans can doubtless identify."
This statement intrigues Le Guin and she launches into a critique of the franchise bookselling and publishing industry in the US. Making some valid points. First she provides a little history on reading and book publishing - how reading and writing was never something everyone did - in fact at one time it was a practice done by only the elite or those in power, the vast majority were illiterate. Women at one time could not read and more importantly were not permitted to learn. This is still the case in some Muslim societies. "Reading," Le Quin states, "was considered an inappropriate activity for women, as in some Muslim societies today." In the 1960s there was an upsurge in reading - and in the 1800's people often talked about books on trains the way we talk about tv shows. They'd have conversations about the Old Curiousity Shop by Charles Dickens, wondering if Little Nell was going to cop it, much the same way we might discuss whether Buffy would end up with Spike, or if Sawyer would get killed on Lost. Back then, Le Quin states - "A man might be less likely to boast about falling asleep at the sight of Dickens novel than to feel left out of things by not having read it." "The social quality of literature," Le Quinn goes on to state, "is still visible in the popularity of bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels into bestsellers via mere P.R. because people need bestsellers. It is not a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading (and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them. (Not sure I completely agree with her on this - everyone I know has finished the bestsellers they've read such as Harry Potter, whether they remember them that well after having done so is whole other issue.) "The Potter boom," she states in the next paragraph, "was a genuine social phenomenon, like the worship of rock stars and the whole subculture of popular music, which offer adolescents and young adults both an exclusive in-group and shared social experience."
"Books," Le Quinn writes, "are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the stupidy of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities."
And here she launches her critique: "Moneymaking entities controlled by obscenely rich executives and their anonymous accountants have acquired most previously independent publishing houses with the notion of making quick profit by selling works of art and information. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that such people get sleepy when they read. Within the corporate whales are many luckless Jonahs who were swallowed alive with their old publishing house - editors and such anachronisms - people who read wide awake. Some of them are so alert they can scent out promising new writers. Some of them have their eyes so open they can even proofread. But it doesn't do them much good. For years now, most editors have had to waste most of their time on an unlevel playing field, fighting Sales and Accounting.
In those departments, beloved by the CEO's, a "good book" means a high gross and a "good writer" is one whose next book can be guaranteed to sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no matter to the corporationeers, who don't comprehend fiction even if they run their lives by it. Their interest in books is self-interest, the profit that can be made out of them - or occassionally for top executives, the Murdochs and other Merdles, the political power they can wield through them; but that is merely self-interest again, personal profit.
And not only profit but growth. If there are stockholders, their holdings must increase yearly, daily, hourly. The AP article ascribed "listlessness" and "flat" book sales to the limited opportunity for expansion. But until corporate takeovers, publishers did not expect expansion; they were quite happy if their supply and demand ran parallel, if their books sold steadily, flatly. How can you make book sales expand endlessly, like the American waistline?"
I remember when I first came to NYC in 1995 and did informational interviews with all the publishing houses hunting a job in sub-rights. This was just a year before the big corporate mergers and acquisitions - before - Viacome acquired Simon & Schuster, Time Warner grabbed Random House (at least I think it was Time Warner). I met with the old school editors and rights associates, who mostly told me the same thing over and over again: "you don't get rich in publishing. You don't do it for the money. You do it for the love. Salaries start low and stay low. Authors drive you crazy, but you love them anyway. And, you will pick up the John Grisham's and Tom Clancy's so you can publish smaller more literary titles by the Emily Praegers and Nancy Kay Shapiros." Then Simon & Schuster got bought by Viacom. And it all became about cross-marketing and branding. James Patterson was a hot commodity as was the Harry Potter books. Why - because you can sell multiple products across the board. Viacom can sell a video game, a movie, a tv show, a board game, and own rights to the brand - for James Patterson's "Women's Murder Club" or his Alex Cross series. Patterson writes like a marketing guy - short pithy prose, that you forget moments after you read it. His books are interchangable. I've read one or two. Can't remember either of them. But he sells like hot-cakes and makes Viacom a profit. Used to be editors were the cool job, the guy who worked with author, much like Gordon Lish worked with Raymond Carver to finesse a book. Now - the job to have in publishing is Aquisitions Editor or Literary Agent such as top dogs who do movie deals(not the smaller agents) - especially if you can land a hot commodity like James Patterson or JK Rowling who can marketed across the board, with multiple products. You aren't an editor, you don't help make the book better, you make it sellable, you are a salesman.
Michael Pollan explains in The Omnivore's Dilemma how do you do it with corn. When you've grown enough corn to fill every reasonable demand, you create unreasonable demands - artificial needs. So, having induced the government to declare corn-fed beef to be the standard, you feed corn to cattle, who cannot digest corn, tormenting and poisoning them in the process. And you use the fats and sweets of the corn by-products to make an endless array of soft drinks and fast foods, addicting people to a fattening yet inadequate diet in the process. And you can't stop the processes, because if you did profits might become listless, even flat. This system worked only too well for corn, and indeed through American agriculture and manufacturing, which is why we increasingly eat junk and make junk while wondering why tomatoes in Europe taste like tomatoes and foreign cars are well engineered.
She may be over-stating that one. Heirloom tomatoes are actually quite good - but also organic and locally grown. Current trend is locally grown by the way. We've moved away from organic, because the big food corporations got hold of it and started trying to sell things that aren't organic as organic.
Standardization of the product and its production can only take you so far - because there is some intellectual content to even the most brainless book. People will buy interchangeable bestsellers, formula thrillers, romances, mysteries, pop biographies, and hot-topic books up to a point, but their product loyalty is defective. A book has to be read, it takes time, effort - you have to be awake to do it. And so you want some reward. The loyal fans bought Death at One O'Clock and Death at Two O'Clock...yet all of a sudden they won't buy Death at Eleven O'Clock even though it follows exactly the same surefire formula as the others. The readers got bored.
True. I've bought the Janet Evanovich books - got bored by the fifth one. The plot became more or less predictable. The only suspense was which guy she'd go with and finally, I just stopped caring. The author didn't appear to have anything to say. And that, I learned years ago, was the only reason one should write. If you have something to say.
Even during what I have called the "century of the book", when it was taken for granted that many people read and enjoyed fiction and poetry, how many people in fact had or could make time for reading once they were out of school? During those years most Americans worked hard and worked long hours. Weren't there always many who never read a book at all, and never very many who read a lot of books? We don't know how many, because we didn't have polls to worry us about it.
If people make time to read, it's because it's part of their jobs, or other media aren't readily available, or they aren't much interested in them - or because they enjoy reading. Lamenting over percentage counts induces a moralizing tone: It is bad that we don't read; we should read more; we must read more. Concentrating on the drowsy fellow in Dallas, perhaps we forget our own people, the hedonists who read because they want to. Were such people ever in the majority?
LOL! Too true. I'm one of the hedonists who read because I want to. Well fiction at any rate.
I am required to read non-fictional things. And until I moved to NY, I didn't know many people who liked to read. Even here - at my workplace, few people read. I came from a family that devoured books, collected books, and decorated their walls and homes with books. So it is in my blood. In my family, the most important entertainment medium is books - bound books that you can hold in your hands, printed on paper. TV is disposable. Radio is interesting.
Film - when you find the time. But books a necessity. That was how I was raised. I feel guilty when I watch too much tv and considers my DVD's a guilty pleasure that I don't talk about very much. But books? That's something I am proud of. But I know, I am in the minority.
I've lost count of the number of apartments and homes I've ventured into that do not have any books on their shelves or visible. And on the subway and train, few people have books open - mostly magazines or listening to i-pods.
Here - Le Quin attacks the competition: "Governmental hostility was emasculating public radio while Congress allowed a few corporations to buy out and debase private radio stations. Television has steadily lowered its standards of what is entertaining until most programs are either brain-numbing or actively nasty." (Not sure I agree with the bit on tv. Le Quin reminds me of a lot of literary types of a certain generation who wax nostalgic about the Golden Years of TV. Please. Charlies Angels was not that good. Nor was Little House on The Prairie or My Show of Shows, or the Honeymooners. There are some innovative and interesting shows on television that are not necessarily nasty. ) "Hollywood remakes remakes and tries to gross out, with an occasional breakthrough that reminds us what a movie can be when undertaken as art." (Uh, again I think she exaggerates a bit here. Sure there the big money making films are repetitive but I can think of at least ten films that I've seen this year that were innovative and interesting.) "And the Internet offers everything to everybody: but perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from Web-surfing. You can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or book on your computer, but these artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps bloggin is an effort to bring creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop aesthetic form, but they certainly haven't done it yet." (Uh, don't know. Depends on the blog you read, I suppose. Some people have written books on blogs complete with artwork. It's just another medium is all. Personally I don't see blogging as an attempt to do anything more than communicate with a bunch of people at the same time - and as diverse a group as possible. I seriously doubt most bloggers think about being creative or creating art when they blog.)
I do however love her take on reading, it explains why I adore reading so much and always will - reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness - not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. I won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it - everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the writer's mind. No wonder not everyone is up to it.
The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you are fifty, though you may understand it so differently that it seems you're reading a whole new book.
I think Le Quin is right. Publishers are trying to turn books into commodities. Art into something that makes millions of dollars and will continue to do so quickly. And I don't think you can do that. It's no coincidence, I think, that the literary greats never made much money writing. James Joyce died penniless. Fitzgerald struggled - doing scripts. The ones who did live well, either came from money, had other jobs, or married into it. Sure there are exceptions - Stephen King, JK Rowling, possibly Faulkner and Hemingway. Same deal with publishing - it's not a moneymaking venture. As Le Quin points out in another section - "the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other."
"To me," Le Quin states, "one of the most despicable things about corporate publishers and chain booksellers is their assumption that books are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn't 'perform' within a few weeks, it gets its covers torn off - it is trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate. This week's blockbuster must eclipse last week's, as if there weren't room for more than one book at a time. Hence the crass stupidity of most publishers (and again, chain booksellers) in handling backlists."
Agreed. It is a shame that I can find hundreds of copies of Laurell K. Hamilton or Dragonquest series, but can't find say a copy of Whiskey & Water by Elizabeth Bear or a copy of Catherine Valente's Orphane Tales on my local booksellers shelves. Example of Captialism gone insane. Same deal with the local movie house - although that's better, where you see twenty showings of the latest JErry Bruckheimer Action Flick or say Disney's Enchanted, but only one showing of Before The Devil Knows You're There or Away From Her.
"Over the years, books kept in print may earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for their publisher and author. A few steady earners, even though the annual earnings are in what is now dismissively called "the midlist", can keep publishers in business for years, and even allow them to take a risk or two on new authors." (I remember Ed Loomis, Senior Editor at Random House telling me back in 1995 how every John Grisham made it possible for him to take a risk on a new untried author.) "But captialists count weeks not years. To get big quick money, the publisher must risk a multimillion-dollar advance on a hot author who's supposed to provide this week's bestseller. These millions - often a dead loss- come out of funds that used to go to pay normal advances to reliable midlist authors and royalties on older books that kept selling. Many midlist authors have been dropped, many reliably selling books remaindered....Is that any way to run a business?"
She ends her essay wondering why the corporations don't just drop the literary publishing houses, much like I suspect Saatchi dropped the management compensation consulting business that my Dad was a partner in, in the 90's - realizing finally that ad men knew zip about the biz of compensation and organizational consulting and the two could not be run the same way.
"Is it," Le Quin wonders, "because you think if you own publishing you can control what's printed, what's written, what's read? Well lotsa luck sir. It's a common delusion of tyrants. Writers and readers, even as they suffer from it, regard it with amused contempt."
I have to admit, I've been wondering when we'll all wake up from our captialistic wet dream of obtaining so much money and things, and well smell the ozone layer. I think we are starting to now. The strikes going on now or looming on the horizon, the recession we fear to speak of, the lay-offs, etc may be our wake up call. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against capitalism, and I'm no socialist, I see problems in both systems. What I struggle with is the extreme. Captialism has gone insane the last few years. And we are paying the price.
I don't think art is a commodity to be bought and sold on a stock market. To be traded.
I think it is a personal thing. And those who create it do it because they are driven to create it, and most would probably create it regardless of whether they got paid or at the very least create something. I'm not saying one shouldn't get paid for it. Just that I think it is difficult to put a price tag on art. Or determine accessibility or whether it should be published or seen based on marketability or how well fast it will sell. Marketing and Sales and Accounting should not be running the show here. They should take a back seat. They should not decide which books get published. Just because James Patterson sells does not mean the person who copies his formula will. Instead of looking for the next JK Rowling, perhaps the acquisition editors should look for the next book that turns them on. That makes them happy.
That is different. Even if it's not a book than can easily be made into a movie or interactive video game.
There is no way of knowing what will grab people's interest. No formula, no recipe. If we could predict it - life would be less interesting I suspect and people more robotic in nature.
I agree with Le Quin, I don't think a poll can tell us much about how people read or why they aren't. I don't think we can say no one is writing good books based on what someone decides to publish. These are easy assumptions based on poor information and source data. I also don't think reading has ever been all that popular. I know I spent a good portion of my high school years curled up in corners reading books as opposed to going to prom or out to lunch. I liked the companionship of my books more...which made me a bit odd. The other portion? Writing stories in notebooks and on a typewriter. Or telling them to myself outside orally when no one was around. But few of the people I've met in my life share that passion. Wales does, the one's I've met online, CW, and my family. A handful at most. And most of the writers I've met, professional, working writers, are not rich. They are barely scraping by.
If they have money it is not from novel writing, it is from other sources be advertising, teaching, journalism, etc.
