The Wild Girls (7 page)

There’s the trick: Expansion. The old publisher was quite happy if his supply and demand ran parallel, if he sold books steadily, “flatly.” But how is a publisher to keep up the 10–20% annual growth in profits expected by the holy stockholder? How do you get book sales to expand endlessly, like the American waistline?

Michael Pollan’s fascinating study in
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
explains how you do it with corn. When you’ve grown enough corn to fill every reasonable demand, you create unreasonable demands—artificial needs. So, having induced the government to declare corn-fed beef to be the standard, you feed corn to cattle, who cannot digest corn, tormenting and poisoning them in the process. And you use the fats and sweets of corn byproducts to make an ever more bewildering array of soft drinks and fast foods, addicting people to a fattening yet inadequate, even damaging, diet in the process. And you can’t stop the processes, because if you did profits might get “listless,” or even “flat.”

This system has worked only too well for corn, and indeed throughout American agriculture and manufacturing, which is why we increasingly eat junk and make junk while wondering why tomatoes in Europe taste like tomatoes and foreign cars are well engineered.

Hollywood bought into the system enthusiastically. The emphasis on “the Gross”—often the only thing you hear about a movie is how much money it grossed the first day, week, etc.—has enfeebled film-making to the point where there seem to be more remakes than anything else. A remake is supposed to be safe: it grossed before, so it will gross again. This is a predictably stupid way to do business involving an art form. Hollywood’s growth-directed sellout is exceeded only by the modern fine-art market, where the price of a painting constitutes its entire value, and the most valued artist is one willing to make endless replications of safely trendy work.

You can cover Iowa border to border with Corn #2 and New York wall to wall with Warhols, but with books, you run into problems. Standardization of the product and its production can take you only so far. Maybe it’s because there is some intellectual content to even the most brainless book. In reading, the mind is involved. People will buy interchangeable bestsellers, formula thrillers, romances, mysteries, pop biographies, hot-topic books—up to a point. But the product loyalty of readers is defective. Readers get bored. People who buy a canvas painted one solid color and entitled Blue #72 don’t get bored with it because when they look at it they principally see the thousands of dollars it cost, and the canvas certainly makes no demand on the aesthetic sense or even on consciousness. But a book has to be read. It takes time. It takes effort. You have to be awake. And so you want some reward. The loyal fans bought
Death at One O’Clock
and
Death at Two O’Clock
. . . but all of a sudden they won’t buy
Death at Eleven O’Clock
even though it’s got exactly the same formula as all the others. Why? They got bored.

What is a good growth-capitalist publisher to do? Where can he be safe?

He can find some safety in exploiting the social function of literature. That includes the educational, of course—schoolbooks and college texts, a favorite prey of corporations—and also the bestsellers and popular books of fiction and nonfiction that provide a common current topic and a bond among people at work and in book clubs. Beyond that, I think the corporations are very foolish to look for either safety or continual growth in publishing books.

Even in my “century of the book,” when it was taken for granted that many people read and enjoyed it, how many of them had or could make much time for reading once they were out of school? During those years most Americans worked hard and worked long hours. Weren’t there always many who never read a book at all, and never very many who read a lot of books? If there never have been all that many people who read much, why do we think there should be now, or ever will be? Certainly the odds are that there won’t be a 10–20% annual increase in their numbers.

If people made or make time to read, it’s because it’s part of their job, or because they have no access to other media—or because they enjoy reading. In all this lamenting and percentage-counting it’s too easy to forget the people who simply love to read.

It moves me to know that a hardbitten Wyoming cowboy carried a copy of
Ivanhoe
in his saddlebag for thirty years, or that the mill girls of New England had Browning Societies.

Certainly, reading for pure pleasure became rarer as leisure time got filled up with movies and radio, then TV, then the Web; books are now only one of the entertainment media. When it comes to delivering actual entertainment, actual pleasure, though, they’re not a minor one. The competition is dismal. Governmental hostility was emasculating public radio while Congress allowed a few corporations to buy out and debase private radio stations. TV has steadily lowered its standards of entertainment and art until most programs are either brain-numbing or actively nasty. Hollywood remakes remakes and tries to gross out, with an occasional breakthrough that reminds us what a movie can be when undertaken as art. And the Web offers everything to everybody, but perhaps because of that all-inclusion there is curiously little aesthetic satisfaction to be got from roaming on it. If you want the pleasure art gives, sure, you can look at pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer: but those artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring creativity to networking, but most blogs are merely self-indulgent, and the best I’ve seen function only as good journalism. Maybe they’ll develop aesthetic form, but they haven’t yet. Nothing in the media provides pleasure as reliably as books do—if you like reading.

And a good many people do. Not a majority, but a steady minority.

And readers recognize their pleasure as different from that of simply being entertained. Viewing is often totally passive, reading is always an act. Once you’ve pressed the On button, TV goes on and on and on . . . you don’t have to do anything but sit and stare. But you have to give a book your attention. You bring it alive. Unlike the other media, a book is silent. It won’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laughtracks or fire gunshots in your livingroom. You can hear it only in your head. A book won’t move your eyes for you like TV or a movie does. It won’t move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless you put your heart in it. It won’t do the work for you. To read a good novel well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it—everything short of writing it, in fact. Reading is a collaboration, an act of participation. No wonder not everybody is up to it.

Because they’ve put something of themselves into books, many people who read for pleasure have a particular, often passionate sense of connection to them. A book is a thing, an artifact, not showy in its technology but complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact, pleasant to look at and handle, which can last decades, even centuries. Unlike a video or CD it does not have to be activated or performed by a machine; all it needs to activate it is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is there. It is reliable. If a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you again when you’re fifty, though of course you may understand it so differently that it seems you’re reading a whole new book.

This is important, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there, durable, indefinitely re-usable, an article of value.

In the durability of the book lies a great deal of what we call civilization. History begins with literacy: before the written word there is only archeology. The great part of what we know about ourselves, our past, and our world has long been contained in books. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all center their faith in a book. The durability of books is a very great part of our continuity as an intelligent species. And so their willed destruction is seen as an ultimate barbarism. The burning of the Library of Alexandria has been remembered for two thousand years, as people may well remember the desecration and destruction of the great Library in Baghdad.

So to me one of the most despicable things about corporate publishing is their attitude that books are inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn’t “perform” within a few weeks, it gets the covers torn off or is pulped—trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not immediate. It wants a blockbuster a week, and this week’s blockbuster must eclipse last week’s, as if there wasn’t room for more than one book at a time. Hence the crass stupidity of corporate publishers in handling backlists.

Over the years, books kept in print may earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for their publisher and author. A few steady earners, even though the annual earnings are in what is now called “the midlist,” can keep publishers in business for years, and even allow them to take a risk or two on new authors. If I were a publisher, I’d far rather own Tolkien than Rowling.

But “over the years” doesn’t pay the holy stockholder’s quarterly share and doesn’t involve Growth. To get big quick money, the publisher must risk a multimillion-dollar advance to some author who’s supposed to provide this week’s bestseller. These multi-millions—often a dead loss—come out of funds that used to go to pay a normal advance to reliable midlist authors and pay the royalties on older books that kept selling. But the midlist authors have been dropped and the reliably selling older books remaindered, in order to feed Moloch.

Is that any way to run a business?

I keep hoping the corporations will realize that publishing is not, in fact, a sane or normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. The practices of literary publishing houses are, in almost every way, by normal business standards, impractical, exotic, abnormal, insane.

Parts of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. And how-to books and that kind of thing have good market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature: art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It is seldom a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.

So why don’t the corporations drop the literary publishing houses, or at least the literary departments of publishers they have bought, with amused contempt, as unprofitable? Why don’t they let them go back to muddling along making just enough, in a good year, to pay the printers, the editors, modest advances and crummy royalties, and plowing most profits back into taking chances on new writers? There’s no hope of creating new readers other than the kids coming up through the schools, who are no longer taught to read for pleasure and anyhow are distracted by electrons; not only is the relative number of readers unlikely to see any kind of useful increase, it may well keep shrinking. What’s in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don’t you just get out of it? Why don’t you dump the ungrateful little pikers and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?

Is it because you think if you own publishing you can control what’s printed, what’s written, what’s read? Well, lotsa luck, sir. It’s a common delusion of tyrants. Writers and readers, even as they suffer from it, regard it with amused contempt.

It will take place,

it will take time,

it will take life,

and waste them.

My friend, self, fool,

have you been standing

with a lighted candle

for five years

in the rain?

What for?

I guess to show

a candle can keep burning

in the rain.

Boys and girls, come out to play,

The moon doth shine as bright as day.

Leave your supper and leave your sleep

And leave your playfellows in the street,

follow the roads that part and meet

over the hills to daybreak.

The moon goes down and the stars go in,

it’s hard to see where your steps begin,

and dark behind lies the way you’ve been

over the hills to daybreak.

Long is the night and the journey far

down the roads where the lost towns are,

and there isn’t a horse or a bus or a car

over the hills to daybreak.

You have to walk on your own foot-soles

with never a coat against the cold

and hardly a penny to pay the tolls

on the way to the hills at daybreak.

Barefoot, bare back, and empty hand

is how you come to the farther land

and see that country, when you stand

on the hills of home at daybreak.

What can I make it a metaphor for? This is transgression made concrete and asphalt and 30-foot palms of

aluminum.

This is the Gonetoofar. The Great Slot. A 3-D spectacular, Moses meets Bambi in the technicolooliah desert yes Lord! where pyramids tangle with hiltons, 4/5-size towers of eiffel or possibly lego crouch under condos and blu-blu skies scraped clean of all cloud, except for the yellowish forestfire smoke from the mountains up yonder, actual mountains,

5/5-size,

burning (but nobody’s worried). Arable plains, or the lowlands, my Spanish dictionary says it means, but not to the lady

who crouches

hour after hour after hour in front of the videopokergame inhaling the yellowish smoke of her camels, burning (but nobody’s worried), not to the lady who poledances, not to the lady who lugs in the bucket and mops. No: maybe to her, once. Not any more though. Lasvegas are not any more in a language, is not what it says it is, has nothing to mean. After lasvegas you have to go into the desert for a long, for a long, for a long time. Years. Generations.