If you’re hoping to be transformed into a “new you” by Nietzcche, might I suggest you take some academic training as well for context. Don’t want to end up like some of history’s worst people….
No, this is not about Stephen King. Though I do wish it were. I like those sorts of posts. No, this is a about a think-piece on the state of our literary/journalistic expression in a time of when free thought is threatened. Should writers be afraid to express what they truly think? There’s plenty to agree and disagree with here and around around this piece, but more importantly: lots of think about. Lots of Hitchens talk in here, for those of you feint enough of heart to be triggered by his douchier self.
At a moment when democracy is under siege around the world, these scenes from our literary life sound pretty trivial. But if writers are afraid of the sound of their own voice, then honest, clear, original work is not going to flourish, and without it, the politicians and tech moguls and TV demagogues have less to worry about. It doesn’t matter if you hold impeccable views, or which side of the political divide you’re on: Fear breeds self-censorship, and self-censorship is more insidious than the state-imposed kind, because it’s a surer way of killing the impulse to think, which requires an unfettered mind. A writer can still write while hiding from the thought police. But a writer who carries the thought police around in his head, who always feels compelled to ask: Can I say this? Do I have a right? Is my terminology correct? Will my allies get angry? Will it help my enemies? Could it get me ratioed on Twitter?—that writer’s words will soon become lifeless. A writer who’s afraid to tell people what they don’t want to hear has chosen the wrong trade.
What can stories do, how best might one tell them and sell them? These questions lie at the heart of Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different, the new memoir-cum-creative-writing-manual from Chuck Palahniuk. Best known to readers as the author of Fight Club, the cult novel which has become something of a bible to a generation of Angry Young Men, Palahniuk here swaps shock value for an odd sentimentalism.
It’s a sentimentalism which tinges reflections both on his own career (from a “kitchen-table MFA” to his latter-day successes) and those on the state of literature in general. As in this sentence: “Bret Easton Ellis tells me the novel is no longer even a blip in the culture.” Yikes. The line is an early red flag: if the novel is such an irrelevancy, why need he pen a book offering advice on creative writing? Nevertheless, he persists.
This guy thinks of himself as a business anthropologist. That’s a neat term, but I imagine “Guy Who Helps You Make More Money” would sell his services better. Anyway, he looks at why and how Indies are making a comeback and implies its a model we can apply to other sectors staring down the Amazon/etc. double barrels. The Three C’s part is the crux of it, I guess.
Even as indie bookstores continue to reinvent themselves, their growth over the past decade offers several lessons for other independent retailers, Raffaelli says. By leveraging community ties, local businesses can appeal to consumers’ desire for authenticity and connection in the internet age.
“In today’s digital world, consumers are turning to local retailers to help them engage and build deeper relationships in their neighborhood. It’s one way to successfully compete with Amazon,” Raffaelli says. “Indie bookstores offer a story of hope and symbolize the power of community as a source of competitive advantage.”
It’s the age of the Amazon/Yelp/Google/etc. review. Should everyone get a voice when it comes to criticism? Is it still criticism? Is it even reviewing at this point? I’m just glad there’s another literary genre going through the sort of soul searching we poets have had forced upon us since the rise of Instagram “poetry”.
Book reviewing is a form of journalism. More than a report on publishing industry news, book reviews situate literature in the here and now, and make it accessible to the public. People often focus on the commercial nature of book publishing: do people use reviews to buy books? How can reviews compete with algorithms that make recommendations based on your browsing history? They don’t have to do that.
Then there’s the idea that reviews are esoteric, long-winded, irrelevant essays. They don’t have to be. Reviews have an opportunity to explain how books connect to the world around us.
All this said, let me spin a tale of the joys of populism for you: I used to review for the Globe and Mail, back when it had a proper books section and was still a national newspaper (it doesn’t deliver to large parts of the country now, including much of the east coast), and I remember a turning point in my reviewing came when my father, who doesn’t really understand the whole ‘poetry’ thing (remember, this is a guy who mostly reads The Sun), would read my reviews because he counted newspaper publishing as “real writing” (an even more impressive publication was when I’d do a “Word Power” game in the back of Reader’s Digest….). One day he said to me, “I read your article in the Globe and Mail on the weekend…” and when I asked if he enjoyed it he said, “Yeah… I stopped reading when I came to the word ‘intertextuality’… I didn’t really know what it meant, so I just stopped reading.” It was a wake-up moment for me. Who was I writing reviews for? Other people like me? The Globe’s style guide said to write to a grade 11 level. So who was reading this stuff? I’d assumed mostly other writers. But if, just IF, there were others like my dad coming across, was I doing them a disservice by having my writing speak to others with specialized vocab and education? Was I doing the books I reviewed a disservice via the same? So, I separated the ideas of Review and Criticism in my head. Criticism furthers the literary conversation and advances our understanding of a work via close analysis. Review helps someone decide whether or not they want to spend $20 on a book of poems. So, now I write reviews like one might write a music capsule review: if you like Poet X, and Poet Q, you will like the work of Poet G. And the first trickles of fan mail I ever received for a review came after I started doing it that way. Bizarre. People don’t want to be talked down to.
I imagine Canadian poetry sales are probably pretty static, year after year. What’s down is the number of people buying pseudo-philosophical platitudes accompanied by 10 second line drawings. Why? Because, as this article notes, they all bought their copies of Moo Juice and Bee Shit back in 2018.
251,354.
That’s how many poetry volumes were sold in Canada in 2019. Actually, they’re “poetry category units” according to BookNet Canada, the organization that measures sales in this country; it’s about to release these numbers in its 2019 Canadian Book Market survey. And those quarter of a million sales were worth $5,829,054.38 to the overall books industry. That represents 1.9 per cent of the entire nonfiction category of books.
That sounds great until we look at the 2018 numbers, provided by BookNet in its Canadian Book Market survey for that year. In 2018, there were 483,675 poetry units sold, with a value of $11,110,395.66. Of the entire nonfiction category it accounted for 3.2 per cent.
Trigger warning: book snuff. See Tweet below. Would you? Could you? Are you capable of this sort of carnage? Is there a spot for you on a super low ring of Hell wherein you’ll be forced to cut 50 Shades of Grey in half and read it, ONLY TO HAVE IT REFORM EVERY MORNING FOR ALL ETERNITY? (Thanks, Dennis)
Bookninja 