Bookworms like Flora, it seems, are dying out. Research by the National Literacy Trust in today’s Observer reveals that just over half (53%) of children read for pleasure in 2019, down from 59% in 2016. Only a quarter read daily, compared with 43% in 2015. The majority of children of all ages now prefer screens to books, another recent survey found.
So how do you raise a bookworm in 2020? Personally, I started by prioritising my own pleasure. While my husband didn’t mind reading Flora the same books each night, I found it too monotonous. So I scoured charity shops and school fairs and built up a large collection of picture books I genuinely wanted to read to her – a mix of current bestsellers and classics. And that’s when I started to notice a pattern.
All the picture books were heavily dominated by male characters. It was rare to meet a female heroine – rarer still to encounter a female enemy or predator. It didn’t seem to matter how recently the books had been published, most of the characters were male – especially if they were powerful. And the male characters spoke more often.
So, as noted over the weekend, Hachette listened to the protest of their employees and decided to cancel the Woody Allen memoir. Of course, as Ronan Farrow’s publisher, they shouldn’t have snuck around like a Marvel supervillain trying to find a way to profit off selling arms to both warring parties in the first place, but once the deed was done, it looked locked in until the employees went on a wildcat strike in protest. The problem is, this looks on the surface, to some (like Stephen King, who is generally a hero of mine, but is wrong on this), like censorship. It isn’t. It’s really just a business making a business decision. Make no mistake, if he takes it back out to auction, someone will publish Allen’s memoir, just not Hachette. Further, he could self-publish. So the book hasn’t been banned, but it has succumbed to market forces. Does it make me uneasy? Yes. But what makes me uneasier is the that publishing is a fully economic game, that sales drive editorial decisions into morally grey areas simply to please shareholders or meet bottom lines. Publishing is one of the last mass market industries to retain a veneer (real or false) of expressive independence, and it’s nice to see that people within the industry are still willing to take risks to ensure that doesn’t change as fast as it has everywhere else. I’m sure a lot of analysis of this decision will follow in the coming days.
The world seems currently divided into two camps: those who say this is going be a game-changing shitshow (scientists) and those who think the whole thing is overblown (couch jockey twitter eggs who read a Fox News article and are now experts). I’ll leave it to you to decide who to listen to. But if you are inclined to panic buying, might I suggest finally getting (re)acquainted with Canadian poetry? You’ll need something to keep your mind active during your quarantine. Also can be used as toilet paper when you’re done.
Conferences suffer (I saw a raft of photos from AWP that made it look like a Furry convention at which Ron Pearlman had cancelled and costumes were banned – empty);
Forest of Reading festival cancelled (more likely due to teacher’s strike in Ontario where the government is trying to ensure a crop of future Conservative voters by gutting the education system, but included here because it fit.);
Joyce Carol Oates award shortlist (I can’t imagine having an award named after you while you’re still alive…. it’s like they’re rushing you out the door);
You know, when I was running this damn thing from 2003 – 2011, posting about Oprah and her army of unblinking terracotta warriors (aka viewers/readers) at least weekly, I used to look wistfully to a future in which I’d be free of this nonsense. Sadly, children, life doesn’t always work out the way you dream.
Like it or not, she holds the delicate testicles of the publishing industry in the vice-grip of her lifestyle empire’s fist, so hopefully she does some repairing;
I am basically going to find a way to use this image as much as possible in the future.
As to borrowing one’s own words from oneself, rather than from one’s subjects – surely this cannot be accorded a great crime? My late friend the journalist and critic Elizabeth Young once said to me that what we jobbing journalists do (by which I mean those of us who have plied our trade being prepared to write about more or less anything, for just about anyone, and to any length) is to provide our readers with a form of “mental bubble wrap” that they can sit at home popping with their psychic digits. It’s a fair point, but it prompts the question: is it short-changing readers to offer them some re-inflated bubble wrap they just might have popped before?
It’s surely axiomatic that the greater the prolificacy of the writer, the greater his or her capacity for self-plagiarism. This has to be one of the principal reasons why we admire such productivity rather less than classical economics implies we should; another is embodied in Mark Twain’s witty cynicism: “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead”. At certain times during my freelance career, I have been filing anything up to a quarter of a million words a year (I include books in the estimate), so is it any wonder if I’ve repeated myself – and sometimes knowingly? For years, my rubric for self-plagiarism was this: in my fiction I tried to create new conceptual space, coin fresh metaphors, bend and warp language in surprising ways – the books had fewer readers than the newspaper and magazine work, so it seemed perfectly legitimate to transplant images, riffs and coinages from this sequestered word-garden into the brighter but more ephemeral light of the daily and weekly press.
Well, as noted yesterday while it was breaking, Hachette workers at imprint Little, Brown (publisher of Ronan Farrow’s #metoo book Catch and Kill) walked off the job in protest of another Hachette imprint buying his estranged father (and accused child molester) Woody Allen’s memoir. Before anyone cries censorship, I’d point out a few things: 1) protesting is not censorship, 2) it’s a publisher’s prerogative to publish or cancel what they wish based on market forces (both externally and internally) and these people who are invested in the success of their employer are illustrating what sort of response this book is going to get (ie, any given book or author has no “right” to be published), and 3) imagine working for a company that is so faceless and unconcerned about its authors that it can publish a book from the guy who allegedly abused one of their family members. And remember that part of the issue here is they did this secretly, hiding from Farrow that they were planning to acquire this title so he’d continue to publish and flog his bestseller with them. Underhanded. Writing is a solo endeavour; publishing, however, is a cooperative affair. The relationship between author, editor, and publisher is as messy and intense as any three-way (more like an orgy, given how many hands are involved — just hands), and having fun within it relies on trust and goodwill. Hachette has squandered that here.
(Photo by Brad Barket/Invision/AP)
The publisher said Monday that Allen’s book, titled “Apropos of Nothing,” would come out under its Grand Central imprint on April 7th. It described the book as “a comprehensive account of his life, both personal and professional,” that would cover “his relationship with family, friends and the loves of his life.”
But the announcement drew criticism because of the allegations that Allen molested his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow. He has denied the accusations and wasn’t charged after two investigations decades ago. A Hachette spokeswoman said in an email Thursday evening: “We respect and understand the perspective of our employees who have decided to express their concern over the publication of this book. We will engage our staff in a fuller discussion about this at the earliest opportunity.”
An employee at Hachette who participated in the walkout estimated that more than 100 protesters eventually gathered in Rockefeller Plaza, outside the publisher’s New York offices. The employee said that while the protesters were outside, others at Hachette met with Michael Pietsch, the company’s chief executive, to make three demands of him: to cancel the publication of Allen’s book; to publicly apologise; and to recognise that Hachette employees have the ability to speak up about books they disagree with without fear of reprisal.
Big news. Still happening. I’m sure there’ll be more to post tomorrow.
BREAKING: Employees at the Little, Brown imprint of Hachette Book Group have staged a walk-out in protest of the company’s acquisition of Woody Allen's forthcoming memoir. This story is developing.
Take the following passage, in which Buys leads his gang of outlaws into an attack “like a horde from Hell more abhorrent even than the fire and brimstone land of Christian Reckoning, skirling and shrieking, clothed in smoke like those phantoms in regions beyond certainty and sense where the eye wanders and the lip shudders and drools.”
Here: McCarthy, on a similar approach from a Comanche ambush: “Like a horde from a hell more horrible yet than the brimstone land of Christian reckoning, screeching and yammering and clothed in smoke like those vaporous beings in regions beyond right knowing where the eye wanders and the lip jerks and drools.”
To discuss the concept of plagiarism in art is to grasp for something very slippery. Most crucially, it should be noted that a wide range of intertextual manoeuvres are fundamental to creativity. Mark Twain famously wrote to Helen Keller – who stood accused of plagiarising a short story – that “substantially all ideas are secondhand”. Curiously, the application of these tactics to prose literature is frequently deemed worse than when applied to poetry, music or the visual arts. Literary genius is oddly considered sui generis. In answer, we can take Jonathan Lethem’s marvellous essay The Ecstasy of Influence, which deconstructs ideas about originality by forging an argument made almost entirely from fragments, taking to the very limit a line from Montaigne’s essays: “I have gathered a posy of other men’s flowers, and nothing but the thread that binds them is mine own.”
Bookninja 