Wednesday 5/1/24
Encountered someone saying that Lydia Davis's "stories" read like they were written by a 1990s version of AI but with over-educated-but-dumb middle-aged lady snobbishness and casual racism. Truth for the win as usual.
Publishing: No one likes the books you put out. No one could. Here's how it works. People in publishing try to hype someone based on things that have nothing to do with the quality of their writing, which is awful. These things can be skin color, sexual orientation, their "brand," their social media echo chamber, all of the people in the village dry-humping each other to try and make something happen for this "chosen one," and then their book is marketed up the ass. Pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed, no matter how bad it is. Pushed, pushed, pushed, pushed. Rave reviews! Which are all platitudes. Blurbs from the right people! More lies, more platitudes. Push, push, push, push, push. Advertise, hype, push push push push push on social media. Get the space on the front tables. Get the awards committee people involved. Have soulless organ grinders with their one-note fare like Deborah Treisman, Willing Davidson, Cressida Leyshon, and David Wallace at The New Yorker run an excerpt from the book. And on and on and on. Push push push. Have everyone in the sinecure get involved. They're not going to think for themselves anyway. Push push push push push push.
The result: You get a flavor of the month. That person will then disappear and no one will remember them or reading a single line by them, save the people who were duped by the planted-reviews in the likes of The New York Times and The Washington Post and who feel ripped off and deceived, or that they "don't get it," like the problem is with them.
It's akin to payola. Everyone is lying and shilling. The people who were conned into buying that book will hate it. They'll stop reading it shortly after beginning it. That will make them less likely to buy a book or read again. That's one way you're killing off readers and making them extinct. This is how awards work, too. How something like the Guggenheim works. It's all a backroom bullshit deal, done with no sincerity, no thinking that people will like something, that that thing will be a perennial seller. Could or would actually be loved.
The other book sales come from dead authors and things that people think they should get, or that they read once in school so they should get it for a kid. These books are 1984, The Catcher in the Rye, The Great Gatsby, Harry Potter, some Vonnegut twaddle, the wet-napkin bathos that is To Kill a Mockingbird.
Those kinds of titles. Notice how I said titles there. People are buying titles simply because they're so embedded as the only titles people typically know. They're usually not beloved. It's just buyers on autopilot. What are they going to do? Look into matters and eventually come across William Sloane's To Walk the Night, a great book they'd love, and be all about that process of searching and finding?
That's obviously not going to happen. If you ask someone to name twenty books, do you think they could do it? How many people in America do you think could do that? Less than one percent, right? Less than one percent of one percent. A lot less. How many do you think could name ten books? I just provided the names of the ones people are apt to say. And beyond that? Nothing, for the most part.
So that leaves everyone else with a book. Those books are going to sell like ten copies. Maybe. And that will be from that person's group. Their little circle. Or their bigger circle if they're immersed in the Brooklyn reach-around writer culture, with the MFAs and the brunches and all of the bullshit of a life that is not worth living because it's not an actual life at all. It's just being there, more like having your life rubber-stamped, in this faded, smudgy ink, somewhere in the appendix of existence, rather than being up and about and three-dimensional and living and creating works of life and dimensionality.
So none of these books--which is going to be almost all books--are going to make any money or sell twelve copies. If everyone read, that would still be the same, because they all suck. No one would want them because there's nothing to make a person want them. I've shown you "the best" writing there is, according to publishing, with these prose offs. And we all know how bad those examples of writing from those other people are.
Things have to have appeal, but no one in publishing thinks that way. No one cares. No one ever even thinks about it. It's a totally foreign concept. How insane is that?
If these books aren't going to sell, and there's no onus to making money, and no thought is given to their appeal, and they need not have any appeal, which is an irrelevant concept to these people of this system, then how do we determine what books get book deals and what books are put out and all of that in following? Things like getting Laura van den Berg an excerpt in Oprah's magazine or Paul Yoon on a list of "Ten must-reads this spring!" and all of that meaningless claptrap that is a version of a lie, because no one thinks Laura van den Berg or Paul Yoon doesn't suck at writing. (This is funny: Laura van den Berg and Paul Yoon are married. They were each awarded a Guggenheim on the same day, because the Guggenheim people honestly felt that this husband and this wife were totally deserving of that award, both of them, for real, legitimately, had to be them! Obviously I'm joking, because they both suck at writing, and the Guggenheim people did not honestly think they're each outstanding writers doing important work who are going to do outstanding work in the future that benefits culture and the world, because that's not how the Guggenheim works. There's nothing honest or legit about it. But yeah, same day, "Double Guggenheims for that home! They each deserve $40K at the same exact time--it's just a coincidence--for that brilliant writing they do!" Farcically fake.) Not the person at Oprah's magazine who hears from the agent and the publicist and puts it in because that's how it works, not for what it is, or that hipster wannabe writer himself who puts the Yoon book in the list of dross of so much dross like so much other dross.
It comes down to things that have nothing to do with the writing. It's a popularity contest and orgy of quid pro quo (both fulfilled quid pro quo and hoped-for quid pro quo) among the most broken, insecure, petty, entitled, ignorant, sheltered, scared, cowardly, weak, unimaginative, visionless, basic, arrogant, prejudiced, unappealing, lazy people who are indistinguishable from each other. They talk the same way, write the same way, think--as such--the same way, come from the same places, the same schools, the same writing programs.
Remember Jackson Howard at FSG? Go read that entry on here again. What do you think he's all about? Could you be more blatantly oriented to discrimination than Jackson Howard? He sent that to me as soon as he opened my email. Within seconds. Because I'm not like him. Because I'm not terrible at writing. Because I look how I look. Kind of an impressive letter from me, right? Do you think anyone else has a letter like that? Kind of a fascinating sounding project, right? And here's this guy, who does this, who does all that he does, and Jackson Howard was repulsed by the very concept of that guy and his existence. He could not have dismissed me faster. There was no consideration, no thought, just automatic, "Make him go away." We'll talk about some of the people he felt differently about. How do you think that is going to go? What do you think we'll see in their writing and in who they are? You know. But we'll put it out there.
And that's it. That's how it works. That is a wholly accurate summation of the system and what sells and the decisions that determine every other "business" decision. It's old money, or non-profit presses, or burning off a dead person's money, or a venue like The Paris Review--at the literary journal level--taking checks from blue-haired Brahmin types before they kick off. Have a tote bag, Gertrude, and we'll put your name in a list of donors so you can feel important before we come around again for another check, and maybe think about us in your will? It's never too late for a codicil!
Think of it this way. Publishing is like a ship that is going down. It's sinking. It's an inch above the water. But it's frozen an inch above the water. The sinking is in abeyance. The people on board are non-factors in life and culture. Because they're dead in all but name only. You have the people on board who are in denial, you have so many stupid people on board, you have so many narcissists on board who just want to get home from work to the expensive brownstone they inherited and check on the work the contractor did and that's the only kind of thing they care about and they could not give less of a fuck about writing (but they do love petty power and what they think is their right to be an asshole), and so many of these people rearranging those deck chairs.
That money I mentioned, that lack of a need to have good, new product that people might like--which is how it works in just about every actual business on earth, save this one--and the reliance on those sales of old books--the same old old books--and some mega-hyped book on occasion which is always just some surface, bland, unappealing bullshit so disposable that it might as well as not exist--results in this not-alive-not-dead holding pattern.
Cal Morgan--and we'll talk more about this bigoted, creepy, publisher-hack--is a good example of someone all about the other stuff. But almost all of them are about it. They want you to be like them, be in their circles. Like attracts like. These people are dumb. They're bad people. They're fake. They're uneducated, and spare me the Yale nonsense. That simply means you're more likely to be a moron. Where do you think all of these people I talk about in these pages went to school? You think they were at the community college? How stupid do you think all of them are?
Do you think, "Whoa, I'm so intimidated intellectually by that person whose work Fleming just showed me as he humiliated that person by putting their writing next to his." Of course you don't. Do you think J. Robert Lennon is really smart? Please. The water is up to their knees, but it stays there, and the scene plays out and repeats as if on a loop. These people and their industry are locked in that scene, neither disappearing--not yet--into the depths nor being out in the world with the rest of us. They're dead to just about everyone else out here.
Do you think they care? Do you think they actually care about writing? Do you think they give a toss about readers? Do you think anyone could have less respect for readers than most of the people of publishing? Think about that. It's like they have hate for the very concept of reading and there being readers. If you're a reader, they don't care about you. They're giving you the finger all the time, in effect. They also think you're below them. They wouldn't want you as a neighbor. They want people as insufferable as themselves. Human blanks. A friend of mine put this well when he was talking about what these people publish in a conversation about McSweeney's. He said it was like a row of mirrors facing another row of mirrors. And the people of this system are that way, too. There is nothing here. There's nothing of substance, goodness, value, depth, insight, humor, life.
There's that, and then there's me and what I do. It, and I, are the opposite of all of this.
We'll do a nice entry on here talking about Sigrid Rausing's book. It's a'comin'. What godawful writing and what an evil person.
I'm saying this so that there will be something different and better. I'm challenging people to be a part of that change. I'm challenging people not to just publish the same shit that no one wants. Stand up. Stand for something. You're an ally? Try being an ally to readers. Every single person here who makes some contribution to the good is doing something of value. I know there are some of you out there. Even in this system, I know there are some of you out there. It's always a good time, and the right time, to do our best, to do better than we have been doing. We can find our voice, make better choices, have a simple, adult conversation saying, "You know what, co-worker, we should put this forward because it moved the hell out of me and I think it would move the hell out of a lot people and I don't want to do another retread of a retread of a retread that I don't believe in and which no one will ever believe in."
When that starts happening, more people will also write more things of actual value. They won't just be these pod people writers doing this MFA trash. The empty fields will start to show signs of growth. It may take a while, but until then, you can have 5000 things, all different from each other, by me.
It's not even really that hard. What the worst that could happen? What's worse than how it stands right now? And you know what? Don't be an idiot. Don't fall for some puff piece saying, "Four bookstores opened in the city this year so that means publishing is doing great!" It means someone had some money. And they wanted to do this thing. It's like when someone has a baseball card store. That's not about making money. Not now. Back in the 1980s, sure, but not now. That guy wants to go to his store and be around cards and he has two regular people who come in and one guy is completing his 1957 Topps set and the other guy collects vintage wrappers and they hang and gossip about their world.
Those bookstores are similar. Someone had a dream as a kid to make enough money and open a bookstore because they loved to read as a kid. And people want to stand out, to be noticed. You know what almost always ends up happening in those new bookstores? The front tables are all for the flavors of the month, the sellers are 1984, To Kill a Mockingbird, etc., there's a display of Jodi Picoult blah-ness, and it's the same thing over and over again. Next time you're in a bookstore--or go to one as an experiment--try this out: Simply take a look around. Stand in one place, and turn in all directions. All of the books even look the same. Before you open them. The generic covers, the colors used. They're just sugar pills and there's nothing inside.
Like I said, rearranging the deck chairs.
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