Yesterday we linked to several articles on judging people by the background books in their Zoom meetings/interviews. Today rightwing Brit tabloid The Evening Standard (owned by a Russian, significantly) says, We shouldn’t be judging people by what’s on their shelves. What? How else should I judge people? I am so lost now.
Book that is judging you as you are judging it.
A squall over the contents of the Gove family’s bookshelves sent me reeling back to two formative experiences about free speech and its near cousin, freedom of reading. They hail from contrasting ends of the ideological spectrum. The first was studying in the old East Germany, where taking a work by Orwell or Nietzsche out of the university library became a complicated ritual of applications to the “Poison Cupboard”, where writers deemed too dangerous for general consumption were kept. Such applications were grudgingly granted and permissions were recorded, ensuring that the state could form its judgement on undesirable reading habits.
Again? Already? Wasn’t it just Tuesday last week? I am beginning to think The ‘Rona goes after Time as much as the lungs. When I was a teen, I used to write (mostly really bad) scifi stories, and I had one where a guy in a post-apocalyptic wasteland (gather round, young’uns: back in the 80s “post-apocalypse” meant “after the nuclear strikes”) was was in possession of the last timepiece with accurate time on it. He was transporting it across the wastes to a science compound. He kept thinking everyone was out to get him. But no one cared what time or day it was. They just wanted either human contact or his booze. Oh my god. I’m a prophet.
I am sort of stuck in the middle on this one. There has been much discussion on the subject, and a whole lot of name calling. Writing is a right. Everyone gets to do it. But publishing is a business. And not everyone does. I believe no one is ENTITLED to have a book. It’s not a right to have your story told. It’s a privilege, that becomes a business transaction. The publisher makes a decision based on market forces as to whether or not to go ahead with your work. So, I support the prerogative of any private enterprise (say, oh, I don’t know, Hachette) to decide in favour of, or against, publishing anything. They have an editorial department that makes artistic decisions, along with a legal team that vets those for liability, and a sales team that has input based on what people are buying. All three have to agree on a book to move forward with it successfully.
But what happens when an author is so repulsive to the staff working there that they go on strike to protest having to work with the man? Well, I think that’s all part of the same set of healthy rights the publishers have. Employees aren’t soldiers. They were hired presumably because they were smart, talented, creative people. So it behooves any good employer to listen to its workforce (if, you know, they want to keep them).
When the staff at Hachette/LB walked out to protest publishing accused-child-molester and confirmed-weirdo Woody Allen’s memoir, particularly in light of the fact that they’d all worked closely with one of his accusers on a previous book, I was in support of it.
Personally, I was never going to buy that douchebag’s book, and have walked out on several of his later movies, but that’s MY choice as reader. I vote with my wallet. The employees don’t really get that option, so they voted with their work. They said, we don’t want to be part of this. Besides strongly-worded-yet-ineffective-emails to the boss or quitting en masse, this is all they could do to express themselves.
I don’t think it’s censorship because it’s not like the book was banned — a private company just decided against it based on market forces (which INCLUDE THE WORKFORCE). Mister Allen, who allegedly has some darker moments around his woody, was welcome to take it elsewhere until he found a publisher whose calculated risk to publish it, which is exactly what he did. The book is available and being widely reviewed (though it appears to be taking a beating). But people, mostly Jordan Peterson-type trolls and Lionel Shriver, are freaking out that the book was censored. How is that censorship? It was a business decision, because in publishing, editorial concern is part of what informs the business.
On the other hand, there is this whole push-pull between taking accusers seriously and caring for their health while also doing the innocent-until-proven-guilty thing. So I defend Allen’s eventual publisher’s right to put out the book, but also defend Hachette’s decision to back out. And I most vehemently defend the right of the employees of Hachette to make their feelings known, even with work action when it is important enough and no one seems to be listening.
Make sense? I’m rambling a little at the start of a new week. Thoughts? Anyone want to freak out and yell at me like this is Twitter? Comments below.
Jenn Risko, publisher and co-founder of Shelf Awareness, the hugely popular indie bookstore newsletter, says local bookstores “have this tiny moment when Amazon has deprioritized books. We have a tiny moment to take over market share. And I hope to god they do.”
Risko says that COVID-19 has been “devastating” to bookstores industry-wide, because stay-at-home orders “hit indies in the places where they best distinguish themselves: offering a place to browse books, a third place to talk about books with people, get recommendations from real live booksellers, and hold events featuring authors—all what their biggest competitor can’t do.”
But now that that biggest competitor, Amazon, has announced that it is deprioritizing book orders so that they can focus on “household staples, medical supplies,” etc., indie bookstores have a chance to reassert themselves as the best and most efficient places to shop for books.
After all, if you have placed an order for a book with Amazon lately, it’s probably taking forever to show up. That has never been the case before.b
As bookstore owners begin asking people to return, Paz noted, they will face some difficult decisions. “It’s not likely that the business is going to snap back immediately to where it was before the pandemic, and so stores will not need as many employees—and those they do have may well have pared-back schedules. So the question facing owners is who to hire back.”
Here, Paz said, is where owners need to prioritize who is most vital and how many payroll hours the store will be able to cover. “These decisions are never taken lightly, and they are not going to be easy for anyone,” she added.
An even bigger question may be which booksellers are loyal, Paz said. Though the concept of loyalty can be ambiguous, it is perhaps easier to define by omission. “Everyone is anxious and emotions are raw when life is at risk,” she noted, but the key factor is how each employee has responded to the crisis. “Who has showed up? Who worked from home? Who brought ideas to the table? There is going to be a kind of bonding that will have happened among those who found a way to show up and work their way through the crisis. It’s only human nature.”
Bookshelves. Turns out more people have them than you might think. And it seems to be where everyone is setting up to give their video interviews. We have thousands of books around our house right now, all in no particular order, except that we tend to keep our friends’ books together in one case so we can find them easier to leave out on the table when they’re coming to to visit. If bookshelves are some measure of your intelligence/politics, it’s a wonder I became a writer at all. Growing up, my house had only one bookshelf with books on it (the others were chock full of chachkas and collectible plates with little cartoon naked people on them and some version of “Love Is…” at the top), and it was full of Stephen King and Dean Koontz (etc), as well as one row packed several layers deep with cheapo Harlequins. Would I want to conduct my BBC interview or Zoom meeting with a potential employer in front of those? Meh. I don’t really think about it. Maybe I should, though, because apparently curating your background has become quite the Covid-activity.
I wish it were Sunday, etc… So, May the Fourth be with you. I suppose we now know why Darth Vader always wore his mask and self-isolated with the Emporer… Sith wisdom.
Not without a sense of humor, Vader pretends to brush his mask for this photo.
This (remarkably decent) guy raps Fox in Sox. Given how many times I have read this book, to how many children, it has to be good if I have watched him rap it about a dozen times since Wednesday.
Well, you did it again. You made it to another meaningless weekend during which you can finally not feel guilty about wearing track pants all the time, AND can have that extra glass of wine. Yes, the world is both coming to life and crumbling around us, and you are alive to see it happen. It’s amazing times, people, even if they’re difficult ones (pro tip: all times are difficult for those in them). Think of it this way: you have permission to do whatever you want for two days while the Burger King drive-thru is open and you can order pot online. What a time to be alive.
That’s right, it’s Steven Beattie’s one-man crusade to honor short story month, which I think he might have created. Every year The Beats lays down a month of funky stories accompanied by his smart guy chatter on why they matter. You should basically show up at his site, That Shakespearean Rag, every day for a month. After that, I expect he’ll go back to his office to hibernate among his piles of books that he stored to see him through the long, harsh, non-short story seasons.
It’s a legitimate question. Why read short stories? Why write them? They don’t have a large audience (though the audience that is there tends to be ravenously dedicated to the form). Collections of short fiction barely outsell poetry, which is not operating anywhere near bestseller territory [ed comment: Ouch, Beattie. Ouch.]. Publishers are leery of short fiction and must be persuaded to put their weight behind what is sure to be a loss leader on any year-end P-and-L sheet. (The poet Jonathan Ball, who has a story collection due later this year with Book*hug Press, has said he finds it easier to get a book of poetry accepted by a publisher than a book of short fiction; to understand the irony, see above.)
It is true that a story with the ability and timing to tap into the popular zeitgeist may go viral online; this is certainly not the norm. (And not incidentally, many readers of “Cat Person” were so jolted by the emotional honesty in the piece that they mistook it for a memoir or work of creative non-fiction.) Story collections occasionally win national literary prizes and, even more occasionally, short-fiction writers are honoured with a Nobel Prize in Literature. But the form is largely ignored or derided by the majority of the reading public.
Bookninja 