Month: February 2020

So, imagine you’re a well-known black activist. One who is brave and principled enough to QUIT HIS JOB to make a point and become a full-time activist. Then imagine one of the biggest publishers in the land picked up your book of writings on your activism. Progress! Now imagine all the edits and design and sales meetings and everything that went through. All the discussion of this book’s purpose and positioning within the intellectual landscape. Now imagine receiving the printed book and finding the word “Black” stricken from the title. And finally, imagine your publisher blames this essentially on a typo. Are you a happy activist? No, no you’re not. And rightfully so. Doubleday blames “internal processes” which, unless they’re referring to internalized racism and white fragility, means someone in sales or marketing made an executive call because they thought the word “black” on the cover of a book might hurt sales. If I were working at Doubleday I would be wearing a deerhunter and walking around with a novelty-sized magnifying glass right now. The only pages in the book designed to sell the book are the covers, and there’s so much attention paid to covers that it seems hard to believe it is an accident. This blows, Doubleday, and you know it. Review your processes, train your decision-makers, and issue an actual apology instead of a flimsy excuse.

This author says that the way democracy works now is either “loudest message wins” or “confuse everything so much that truth and lie lose all meaning“. This is literally why I quit Bookninja back in 2011. All you have to do is yell louder, more often, longer, and in more confusing voices, than anyone else and the fatigue of others will propel your message to “truth”. And governments are on board. Democracy through truth confusion. Nice. I’m out.

People are fed an onslaught of information, misinformation and conspiracy theories until becomes almost impossible to separate fact from fiction, or trace an idea back to its source, he said. 

“Back in the Cold War, whether it was the Soviets or the [Ferdinand] Marcos regime in the Philippines, you know, it was pretty clear who were the agents of censorship and intimidation. It was the military police or the secret service,” he said.

“Now, it’s some sort of troll farm. You’ll never prove that it’s actually directly related to the government.”

America is a country built on several industrial complexes, of which “military” is the most famous. But the prison system down there is also a capitalist shitshow. And charging inmates to exist within the system is increasingly part of the monetization strategy, including accessing ereaders from the library. Can you still call it a library when people are charged (outside of taxes) to use it? (Please excuse USA Today link–I’ll try to not let it happen again lest we all get dumber. But it’s great that their readers are forced to pass their eyes over this as they turn the pages for Superbowl Halftime shots of JLo and Shakira.)

Last year, West Virginia contracted with a company, Global Tel Link (GTL), to provide free tablets to prisoners. These kinds of initiatives are rapidly becoming more popular, as states grapple with the legacy of four decades of tough-on-crime policies and renewed public calls for more rehabilitative prisons.

And it sounds great. Until inmates realize the company charges users every time they use the tablets, including 25 cents a page for emails and 3 cents a minute to read e-books. By that calculation, most inmates would end up paying about $15 for each novel or autobiography they attempt to read. To people who have little to no money, that’s not a benefit. That’s exploitation. The only beneficiary, aside from Global Tel Link, is West Virginia, which receives 5% of the profits.

GTL isn’t alone in profiting off of prisoners. Exploitation of prisoners for profit is cropping up more and more across the criminal justice landscape.

• RIP: George Steiner
• Regean Arthur (taking over at Knopf) interviewed
• Pamela Anderson, poetry (and selfie) aficionado
• Bestselling books that people don’t finish
• Patti Smith helps out small bookstore that got robbed of…. Patti Smith
• Marlon James to host podcast
• Orlando soul searches for its literary identity… Go ahead, make all the Mickey Mouse jokes you want, but in 2001, the Orlando newspaper published a poem of mine… THE NEWSPAPER

The Toronto Star has cut its books section down to a single page. The books section was the only reason I ever looked at the Star. Sad. Can’t link to the Globe because it’s paywalled, can’t like to the Post because it’s nazi’d, can’t link to the Star now because there’s nothing there. Even Quill is mostly paywalled. There’s no winning when it comes to open coverage in Canada. I get the whole “we have to pay people money” thing, I just don’t see how cutting coverage makes that more possible. I guess I’m just lamenting the good old days. And I’ll keep linking to the Guardian for whatever Canadian news ends up there, I suppose.

Is it just me, or does this feel like it’s going on forever? I suppose it’s all part of the great and necessary forced conversation white people never wanted to have but are now faced with being part of. Let’s hope things change based on this latesthahahahahhahahaha. Oh, that’s a good one. For an industry that fetishizes the new in its authors, designs, and markets, publishing isn’t known for its ready embrace of “change”.

• How are bookstores handling the controversy?
• Has publishing actually learned anything?
• What does McSweeney’s think of this? (said for the first time since 1999)

• Bookclub service connects authors with clubs
• RIP: Mary Higgins Clark
• Thom King’s first poetry book, at 77
• Stephen King quits Facebook with dire warning about false information (I was about to quit this morning for similarly urgent reasons: it wouldn’t autopost BN stories there… This is basically a human rights violation)
• Brideshead Revisited Revisited: Evelyn Waugh is rolling in his grave
• Happy Birthday, Gertrude Stein
• Harvard gets digital
• New Borealis Award for Yukon’s lit community
• Dave Matthews is “writing” a fantasy novel for middle grades… which is code for another author is writing a book and the publisher is using Dave Matthews to market it to Dave Matthews fan-parents

TIFA (new name, same poetry-hating event) announced in a stealth stunt (Globe got a behind-the-paywall exclusive story while all other books media only got the PR on Friday after that ran) they have hired a new artistic director. Not everyone is happy. Questions abound: why another white guy? why the secrecy? will he continue the IFOA tradition of being a snotty douchebag? will he wear pompous cravats? In fairness, I don’t know anything about this fellow and he might be the best. Let’s hope for it.