Daily, Deadly, Duh
I’m super glad to see some push back and asswhupping from Ronan Farrow. He broke ties with his publisher after it was announced that his estranged father (father? but he looks so much like some sort of, oh, I don’t know, mobster crooner from the 50s? Not a great set of dads to choose from, I admit) Woody Allen was taken on for an autobiography by Hachette, the very same publishing empire that produced Farrow’s seminal (ovarian?) #metoo book Catch and Kill. “Imagine if it was your sister,” he said. I would, and I imagine he would too if he wasn’t trying to make a specific point, go further and say, “Imagine if it was anyone.”
Dylan Farrow released a statement Monday after the announcement, saying, “Hachette’s publishing of Woody Allen’s memoir is deeply upsetting to me personally and an utter betrayal of my brother whose brave reporting, capitalized on by Hachette, gave voice to numerous survivors of sexual assault by powerful men. For the record, I was never contacted by any fact checkers to verify the information in this ‘memoir.’ “
Ronan Farrow said in his statement that Hachette had been “wildly unprofessional” and had shown “a lack of ethics and compassion” for victims of sexual abuse.
He also said he had urged Hachette to conduct a fact check on Allen’s account and added, “I’ve also told Hachette that a publisher that would conduct itself in this way is one I can’t work with in good conscience.”
I’m hoping some of you can get some travel insurance money back now from your London plans. The fact that AWP hasn’t cancelled is sort of remarkable. What’s the point of going? Paris, Leipzig, and Bologna have all cut and run as well to protect people, presumably at some cost. Why is AWP still holding on? It’s going to be a ghost town. Board members are quitting over it. Seems irresponsible.
“Walking through the main hall to see none of the big five publishers’ stands would be like being inside some dystopian future where most things have been wiped out by a killer bug,” wrote novelist Stuart Evers on Twitter.
Many in the industry were angry that Reed had not taken the decision earlier, forcing publishers and agencies to take matters into their own hands. Small publishers worried about the loss of hundreds of pounds in hotel and transport fees, while critics pointed out that other book industry events, including the Salon du Livre in Paris and the Leipzig book fair, had been cancelled. Both had been due to take place later this month.
“Reed is an enormous and very profitable company. I understand that if they cancelled last week they would have taken a financial hit, but that would have been the responsible thing to do. They’ve been citing government advice but it’s really irresponsible in the current climate to have a mass gathering of international publishers,” said one senior publishing figure. “It’s a very ugly cat and mouse game they’re playing. It’s purely financial and makes them look money-grabbing. It’s making a lot of publishers wonder how much they need London book fair. We have Frankf
I am loathe to give more attention to this book, but it does raise interesting questions around who is “allowed” to tell what story. Does the author have to have experienced what happened in the book to write about it? Are they obligated to reveal these experiences when someone questions their authenticity? I realize these are side questions for this particular book, but they are probably central to many writers working out there and this is the sort of thing Bookninja would have convened a panel of authors on to discuss back in the day, so just pretend there were some smart people here saying smart things and leave your opinion.
Our world, more than at any time in history, is all about stories. Snapchat feeds capture your entire day, Instagram users meticulously curate their pages and stories, and detailed Twitter threads recount what happened on the morning commute. We are storytellers, narrators, transmitters of tales – occasionally those of others but mostly our own. We’ve been assured we all have a story and what we need is the courage and space to tell it. But these days it’s not enough just to have an experience, or even just to share it. People feel compelled to claim stories, to plant a flag and proclaim: “This is mine.” Instinctively, some people privilege their own experience over any other; that their story is always the “authentic” one.
When that story is rooted in trauma, a whole host of ethical implications suddenly come into play. How do we tell the story of such experiences? Why should we? To what extent does it desensitise the audience to future stories? And perhaps the most pertinent question, at least in this Era of Authenticity, is: who gets to tell it?
Terrible news out of the long-suffering province that drew the short straw for being next to Alberta. Local small press publisher Coteau has entered bankruptcy protection and laid off all its staff. Someone rich please step in an Anansi this vital literary vessel up!
She particularly noted the difficulty of getting their books into stores with the dwindling number of local, independent sellers and the rise of national bookstore chains. Coteau Books also struggled to transition toward electronic publishing on top of paper publishing — a struggle Skidmore said publishing houses across the country have been experiencing.
Skidmore said it has been “extremely difficult” to watch Coteau Books head toward bankruptcy. She said the former board of directors did everything it could to save the company before accepting it could not continue.
“These problems are complex,” she said. “We deeply regret having had to come to this point, but we tried everything we could and it didn’t work.”
With very few literary presses left in the province, Skidmore said Coteau Books’ closure will leave a hole for local creative writers. While she is optimistic authors will continue to find ways to have their works published, Skidmore said nothing can replace a local publishing house promoting local writers.
After the, frankly planned, erosion of the liberal arts foundation at institutions of higher education, we seem to be facing a crisis of students graduating without critical thinking skills… Huh. I wonder what you could point to to illustrate this viscerally for the public… Will have to give that some thought. (You have to love how IHE tiptoes around the issue because the Russian eggbots and maga hats are out there, hovering, even in the education field.)
We have certainly made progress in critical-thinking education over the last five decades. Courses dedicated to the subject can be found in the catalogs of many colleges and universities, while the latest generation of K-12 academic standards emphasize not just content but also the skills necessary to think critically about content taught in English, math, science and social studies classes.
Despite this progress, 75 percent of employers claim the students they hire after 12, 16 or more years of formal education lack the ability to think critically and solve problems — despite the fact that nearly all educators claim to prioritize helping students develop those very skills. Those statistics were included in Academically Adrift, the 2011 book by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, which caused a stir when the authors asserted that students made little to no progress in critical-thinking ability during their college years.
With perils mounting, many of them attributable to too little critical thinking about the subjects that matter most, we clearly must do more to ensure today’s students become tomorrow’s skilled thinkers. Fortunately, we are in a position to do so without having to overturn the current higher education system or break the bank.
You know, I was just talking about this a couple weeks ago and was wondering: will we get a new Gen X out of this generation of kids growing up with fear of the world ending? I was 12 when Reagan took control of the button. I knew what DEFCON 5 meant before I’d kissed someone. I had a whole plan for how to rise to the top of my Red Dawn/Mad Max ragtag-crew-of-survivors so that I might lead them strongly, but fairly, into a new life in the radioactive wastelands of the 905. To this day I have a secret fetish for survivalist equipment. Seriously, I have a cupboard with those carbon filter straws, foil blankets, and other survival crap in it. That said, no one tried to torture me at bedtime with colourful books about it. They just left me alone to read the Dungeon Master’s Guide over and over at night, falling asleep wondering if I was going to wake up to the ground shaking and a bright light that melted my face. I don’t know. We couldn’t do anything as kids in 1982. But these books seem to be telling kids today that they CAN do something, and that’s positive, I suppose. But also perhaps a bit daunting. “What do you mean I can do something? I’m 8. Why the fuck didn’t you do something, Dad?” Anyway, maybe we’ll get some grandkids we can relate to out of this.
Mangan fears that the moral instruction in environmental non-fiction is too obvious, not least because “there is only one stance that 99% of scientists and writers would want to take so there’s not much room for doing anything with it”. She says: “Children’s literature began with a desire to instruct but if it had stuck to its guns we wouldn’t still be reading it.” The “golden age” of children’s literature only arrived when authors such as J M Barrie to Edith Nesbit cast off Victorian moralising and wrote from a children’s point of view. “Moralising doesn’t get you very far,” argues Mangan.
Environmental fiction for children aged 10 and above and dystopian novels for young adults are also proliferating in this age of anxiety. At BookTrust, Coleman has particularly enjoyed The Dog Runner by Australian author Bren MacDibble (who lost her home in a wildfire) and Run Wild by Gill Lewis, a vet who tackles complex wildlife themes in her books, from the persecution of birds of prey as well as bear-bile farming and endangered gorillas.
Can this outpouring of environmentalism capture children’s imagination without terrifying them? I test some books on my eight-year-olds. We read Pankhurst’s worthy-sounding Fantastically Great Women Who Saved The Planet. To my surprise, Milly and Esme love it, and I do too: it is funny and interesting, telling stories not just of westerners such as Jane Goodall but also Wangari Maathai, from Kenya, and Isatou Ceesay, from the Gambia. A few days later, Milly tells me they’ve discussed Pankhurst’s story of the Chipko movement in the Indian Himalayas with their teacher. “In the Chipko movement it starts off with one person and then they all protect a whole range of trees from being cut down,” says Milly. “Even a tiny difference makes something big.”
Do you read Anne Enright? She’s genius. It’s time for me to shut up, because she’s speaking.
More seriously, she wanted the novel “to reclaim ideas of agency in desire”, something she has been doing throughout her fiction, along with other female Irish writers from Edna O’Brien to Rooney. “To push back against the idea that sex is a terrible thing, horrible and rapine and always somehow disappointing and wrong. It’s an idea from the misogynistic patriarchy that returns and returns in more modern iterations. A lot of bad things happen to women in books. Really a lot.”
Having written about adultery in The Forgotten Waltz, she also wanted this novel “to be a conversation about marriage”, to make a monogamous long-term relationship interesting. “The truth of my life has been that I must now announce myself to myself as having been happily married, whatever that is,” Enright says. “Why does no one write that?” She is at her merciless best on the daily intimacies and irritations of married life. “I liked the shifting sense of difficulty and accommodation and attachment. And that inescapability of it all,” she explains. “There’s an amount that is written about love and sex that seems to me somehow partial. So I wanted to give a more complete picture.”
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