What We Talk About When We Talk About Boycotts

Essays
January 18, 2017 | 5 books mentioned 35 6 min read

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With the news of Simon & Schuster’s conservative Threshold imprint acquiring — via $250,000 advance — a memoir by “that person” (whom I’m declining to name, or even describe, because why give him more free publicity?), the outcry was swift, accusing Simon & Schuster of cynically capitalizing on and rewarding hate speech and normalizing white supremacy.

I don’t disagree with those sentiments, but I didn’t jump into the fray because, quite honestly, I didn’t know how I felt. There are a lot of issues at play: hate, misogyny, capitalism (i.e., publishing as a business), coexisting with my reality as a writer fortunate enough to have a supportive publisher. And that publisher is Simon & Schuster.

I had an 800-page manuscript that I had taken 10 years to finish; literary fiction is never a clear moneymaker, long novels are problematic from, if anything, a production point of view (all that paper, all that ink, the increased shipping costs), and yet my editor took me on for a nice five, not six-figure, advance. Even better, she had also just taken on a prizewinning Korean American author whom I admired, whose first book had also come out with an independent press. My editing process at Beacon Press was fairly straightforward because the novel was ready to go. With the current novel, there are structural issues, and a team of editors have rolled up their sleeves, put the tome on a metaphorical lift, and gotten just as sweaty and dirty tinkering with its guts as I have. I’m relieved that, even as the years slide by, they talk only about getting the book right, rather than pushing out “product.” In short, I’m living a dream I’d had as a child banging out stories on my hand-me-down typewriter and selling them — to my parents.

Like many, I was horrified that a person who Twitter had deemed so odious/dangerous it banned him from the platform was being given another platform, a paid one, in short order.

coverProtest is often the only way to get a company’s attention. And it can have results. But it’s not always the results that were intended, or wanted. For instance, after the outcry over the “sadistic contents” of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, three months before the book’s publication, it was dropped by the publishing house….Simon & Schuster. CEO Richard Snyder explained, “It was an error of judgment to put our name on a book of such questionable taste.”

But the book was just as quickly picked up by esteemed editor Sonny Mehta and published by Random House’s prestigious Vintage imprint.

Irrespective of the nature and quality of these two books, it’s instructive to examine these unintended consequences. Books are indeed published by corporations, which need to sell to stay in business. But as much was we like to treat books as “widgets,” they aren’t interchangeable goods or services. Each one is written by an author or co-author.

In an overcrowded publishing market, bad attention can be just as valuable, perhaps more so, as good attention. The brouhaha over American Psycho certainly branded it into America’s cultural consciousness; the book is still robustly with us, it recently turned 25 and just appeared on Broadway as a musical (!), i.e., trying to kill it with bad publicity may have done exactly the opposite.

coverThe second thing to consider is unintended collateral damage. Many people objected to the content of Fifty Shades of Grey, but it not only helped keep Random House (now Penguin Random House) in the black, it brought in so much revenue that every employee, from “top editors to warehouse workers,” received a $5,000 bonus.

So what’s the opposite of a rising tide?

When I heard the calls to boycott Simon & Schuster, that reviewers were going to refuse to review, authors were vowing not to blurb S&S authors’ books, a bookstore tweeted that it wasn’t even going to stock any S&S books, I felt a bit of a chill. I had no urge to write my editors, because they had zero to do with the decision to acquire that book. Publishing firms are “houses” with huge family trees, divided into specialized groups called imprints. While imprints are not wholly autonomous, they each have their own eco-systems. I write literary fiction and publish with the Simon & Schuster imprint. Simon & Schuster also has several other general interest imprints, specialized imprints, and several children’s book imprints, as well as Howard Books, which publishes for the Christian marketplace. Should its Folger Shakespeare Library imprint be penalized for an acquisition by Threshold Editions, a conservative writers’ imprint (that has also published Donald Trump and bona fide war criminal Dick Cheney — with no outcry)?

The calls to boycott are continuing after Simon & Schuster (the company) has stated it intends to go ahead and publish the book in question.  So what, then, is the endgame?

coverProfessor Matthew Garcia, who wrote From the Jaws of Victory: The Triumph and Tragedy of Cesar Chavez and the Farm Worker Movement and who has studied boycotts for years told me that “The boycott of S&S will be tricky. It requires a campaign and a set of goals. First, is there an organization willing to put the time in to organize and pursue the campaign the way the United Farm Workers did?”

Good question. I personally feel that protecting healthcare, especially Medicaid and Medicare, is one of the most important things we need to do right now.

“Second, that organization needs to do what UFW did with grapes — identify what percentage of the product’s delivery to market they need to effect in order to have S&S respond,” Garcia said. “In the UFW case, they did not hit all sellers of grapes equally.  They targeted the biggest sellers, and set as their goal to reduce sales by 10 percent in 10 of the top markets.  They did that by knowing what amount would hurt their bottom line, and produce the biggest seller’s capitulation.  I imagine the organization that pursues a boycott of S&S would have to identify the same profit margins for the company and what it would take to tip them in order to identify effective goals.”

Books, though, aren’t an undifferentiated product like grapes. There’s a lot of untethered anger that’s much more than about one guy, one book deal, one company. People are mad as hell (rightly so) about the rise of the so-called “alt-right” (a.k.a. white supremacists). But how do we try to harness this anger productively? Successfully boycotting S&S is not going achieve what many of us really want — which is to boycott 2016.

covercoverBut if we’re going to try to get Simon & Schuster (and CBS, its parent company) to listen, what books should boycotters target to get to the United Farmworkers’ 10 percent threshold? Probably the big ones like…the Bruce Springsteen memoir. Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer-winning novel,  All the Light We Cannot See.  Maybe Shonda Rhimes’s bestselling memoir, Stephen King’s latest? How about Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything — cited as one of the “Seven Books You Need to Understand (and Fight) the Age of Trump“?

Even if such a boycott was successful in harming the bottom line of a publisher, how do we know in a capitalist society that the publisher wouldn’t then make up the difference by publishing even worse things or being less inclined to take risks? S&S started Salaam Reads, a imprint for Muslim-themed children’s books. Why not starve “that person’s book” financially and publicity-wise, and instead buy two books from Salaam Reads?

Bookstore owners and buyers, who are the most direct link in all of this, are starting to formulate statements and implementing plans. Kathy Crowley, co-owner of Belmont Books, a Boston-area store set to open this spring, is a writer herself, and she told me that she and her husband have decided “Belmont Books won’t sell this book.” She adds, “Though I do want S&S to feel the heat for this decision, boycotting all S&S authors seems neither fair nor likely to be effective. More likely, the boycott generates lots of publicity for the book, raises the hackles of the anti-PC, pro-[‘that person’], pro-Trump crowd, and, in the end, rewards S&S and [‘that person’].”

On the other coast, Christin Evans, owner of The Booksmith, a 40-year-old institution, which is, she said “specifically located in the historic Haight Ashbury” section of San Francisco will skip over “that person’s” book (and anything from the Threshold Editions imprint), cut the number of S&S books, and, of the remainder, donate any profits from S&S books to the ACLU “for the foreseeable future.”

The extremity of what’s coming requires we actually lay out on the table what we stand for. If we stand for a free exchange of ideas, we have to support publishing. Can we instead reject this person’s ideas and collectively stop giving him a platform? If publishing is a business, can we vote with our dollars and our attention (cultural capital)? Store owners can decide whether to stock this title or not, reviewers can review or not. But a blanket boycott of any publisher’s books makes no sense. It’s burning down the house because you saw a spider.

is a staff writer for The Millions. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, The Nation, Slate, Salon, Guernica, Poets & Writers, and The Guardian. Her next novel is forthcoming with Simon & Schuster (when she finally finishes it). She teaches fiction at Columbia and shares a hometown with Bob Dylan.

Essays

Competitive Aesthetics

Essays
May 6, 2008 | 5 books mentioned 1 4 min read

Reading our recent graduate’s response to our book question #59 post, I’ve been thinking about taste and literature. Why is it, with bookish people especially, that taste (in books and film, and music, and other variables like visual art, food, wine, beer, architecture, interior design), is such a sensitive matter?Our reader seemed somewhat aghast at having his reading list exposed – as aghast as I might have been, some time ago, had someone inventoried in public the contents of my kitchen while I was studying for my university orals (gin, red wine, coffee, Equal, macaroni and cheese, chocolate pudding, soy burritos, cigarettes, Xanax, multivitamins), or my video rental history from the summer I took my qualifying exam (Mandy Moore’s A Walk to Remember – oh, how I wept – Britney Spears’ Crossroads, Blue Crush, How High, The Skulls). Granted, my response to the culture of aesthetic oneupsmanship in which I live is to wallow in what many of my peers would call – with a slight grimace of distaste or a shiver of disquiet – mass culture. I think it’s alright, myself. Some of it. (There’s plenty of shit too.) And I think a diet of only “great books” and auteurs – Wagner, Goddard, von Trier, Proust, Marx… pick your poison… leaves one a bit milquetoast-y.I’ve read Theodor Adorno’s Minima Moralia, subtitled “Notes from Damaged Life”, in which he, a German Marxist intellectual living, at the time, in Los Angeles, reflects with pungent horror on modern popular culture and the deceptive comforts and conveniences of modern life. Adorno’s fragmentary pensées are one of the most visceral, moving portraits of alienation you’ll ever encounter. I look at the book sparingly and seldom because its sense of horror and melancholy is infectious. It’s also insane: how could anyone so full of despair and repulsion not have shot himself four or five fragments in? The wonder of the book is that the consciousness that produced it was able to survive itself for several hundred pages. While the book moves me, it is also a cautionary tale about psychic price of absolutist snobbism.Since Milton’s epic invocation to the muse in Paradise LostOf Man’s first disobedience, and the FruitOf that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tasteBrought Death into the World, and all our woe,With loss of EdenTaste has come to mean much more to us than what we like to eat. For Milton, salvation hangs in the balance. As Denise Gigante, the author of Taste: A Literary History (and my advisor), has written, Milton’s sense of “taste is more than a physical sensation or appetite (though that is critically implicated too): it is a highly freighted philosophical concept with serious consequences for the creation of selves in society.” Eve’s eating of the apple was more than metaphor, and since her – or at least since Milton’s description of her – we have all been a little uneasy about what we consume. What if we are what we eat – and what we read? What if my watching all of the “O.C.” (not the fourth season – I do have some standards) has had moral – and mortal – effects? And has it just had its way with my aesthetic soul or my immortal one as well?An 18th century moral philosopher whom I’m quite fond of – Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury – believed that our capacity for morality is like aesthetic taste, and that beauty in nature and art is aligned with goodness. He believed that goodness is beauty of a moral sort, and that in the same way we recognize beauty in the proportions of a statue, or harmony in the colors of a painting, we recognize moral goodness in human actions. While he claimed that this faculty was innate in human beings, he hedged his bets a bit in insisting on the need for a good education. And the troubling suggestion he leaves us with is that those who aren’t properly educated in art and the classics and history, might be a little morally iffy as well.If you’re around people with babies, it’s sometimes easier to notice this conflation of food for the body and food for the mind and soul. Only organic home-made baby food, no TV, carefully selected books and toys. The underlying idea is that the care the parents take in maintaining the quality of what the baby consumes will ultimately make it a better person. Smarter, stronger, more coordinated. Sadly, David Shipler’s The Working Poor suggests that this caution is well-founded. The lack of micro-nutrients in the diets of children raised in poverty often affects cognitive development. A child who starts life malnourished can become a child who’s behind in math and reading several years later; just as a child who suffers from emotional neglect in infancy is more likely to suffer from emotional and behavioral problems in later life.I am far afield from my original point, I fear. Having meant to soothe our reader with a meditation on the universality of his anxiety about taste, I find myself in baby food, by way of Milton and Adorno. My own feeling is that the game of competitive aesthetics is a wicked one. One I have played – one I will likely play again – I cannot help myself – but an unwholesome one nonetheless. It can give an electrifying surge of self-satisfaction, when you know the good things better than anyone else. But it won’t save your soul:A now-lost friend of mine, when he visited San Francisco a few years ago, went straight for my CDs. “You’ve got some good stuff here,” he said (pointing specifically to some Cat Power and Chet Baker), and he seemed to relax once he’d seen that, taste-wise, I hadn’t “lapsed.” His attitude towards people had always seemed to suggest that the people worth knowing were exquisite objets, and I was still up to snuff. (I’m not exempting myself – It takes a snob to know a snob: Or, at least, when you’ve known one too many aesthetic moralists, you, if not become one, often develop an inner one and don’t mind praise from an outer one.) The thing that made this visit more interesting as a case study for an aesthetics vs. morals debate is that my friend had just been excruciating rude to my roommates (one of whom was letting him sleep on her couch; the other of whom had just offered him a glass of whiskey). My visitor, while my roommates were watching “Will and Grace” had described its stupidity in detail: The word “crap” was used a lot and there was a sort of sneer employed in his disquisition on its crappiness. Many people, I think, would keep their mouth shut in such a situation: So, “Will and Grace” is dreadful: these people are putting me up for the night, I can keep my opinions to myself. But he couldn’t – as though there was, in the religious sense of the word, a moral imperative to condemn the damnable.A bigger lie was never written than this: De gustibus non est disputandem.
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Essays
| 5 books mentioned 1 4 min read
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35 comments:

  1. Should “not giving him a platform” extend to “not writing thinkpieces about his controversial, shitty memoir and a possible boycott?” I don’t ask this snarkily, I truly don’t know the answer here. But I guess I wonder how much better it would be if we simply gave these aspects of far right culture the equivalent of the silent treatment, or putting a tantrum-y toddler in the corner.

    A large part of what helped get Donald Trump traction was his ability to exploit an endless cycle of outrage on social media, and left-leaning news coverage. As the woman says in this, the boycott will at the very least succeed in raising Yiannapolous’s profile (sorry, don’t see the point of not printing his name) among non-reading conservatives, who will then spite-order ten copies from Amazon, since the one reliable motivation among conservatives is pissing off liberals (again, witness our new president). What if we all expressed a collective yawn at this stuff? What if we acted like discussing it was beneath us, since it is. I feel like a Donald Trump in Edward R. Murrow’s day would have gotten a ten second clip, a disgusted shake of the head, and little else.

    I truly do not know the answer here, but I do know we have more important things to focus on, and maybe a good reaction to The Twitter President would be to get off Twitter.

  2. By the way, I should have said in that first comment, I thought this was a good piece.

  3. Censorship never works. And hurting innocent bystanders is immoral. Today’s book deal for He Who Shall Not Be Named may lead to a future book deal for one of this site’s writers.. Quit whining and start winning. If you really want to make a difference, start organizing now and win the vote in 2018 and 2020.

  4. Just to understand the level of censorship in our culture, the level of small-mindedness, and the totalitarian impulses that govern the minnow-sized overton window of the contemporary left and publishing:

    The Millions won’t EVEN post comments with Milo’s full name. Just had two taken down or not posted.

  6. No comments have been deleted from this post; perhaps this is a case of user error. You are very free to say Milo Yiannopoulos if you like.

  7. “a memoir by “that person” (whom I’m declining to name, or even describe, because why give him more free publicity?),”

    “That person”? This is getting extremely silly. First, “the n-word”… now “He who shall remain nameless” (as applied to various boogeymen).

    But when is summer camp over…?

  9. It’s funny, in the 70s liberals would have marched in the street over free speech, right to protest/assemble, etc for groups like neo-nazis, KKK, etc. Now, in the age of President I Can’t Even, it’s come full circle to boycotts and censorship. What a world.

  10. To be clear, the author is opposed to a boycott. And I don’t see anyone practicing censorship here. I think most progressives still strenuously advocate on behalf of free speech (of which, btw, boycotts are a form), though of course it’s a bit easier when neonazis are a fringe group rather than the president’s advisers and propaganda wing.

    A question: why does The Millions, a site focusing on intelligent takes on mainstream literature, seem to attract such a hostile, aggrieved, PC Police Police commentariat? Seems weird. Or is that just the internet these days?

  11. “So what, then, is the endgame?”

    Are we talking about Milo Yiannopoulos or Darth Vader? Why not sic one of the highly-lauded “geniuses” of 2016 on him? Yiannopoulos has an IQ of 105 (and three of those IQ points are contributed by his British accent)… simply hire Paul “The New Swift” Beatty to write a series of devastatingly witty, evisceratingly-precise satires. Or arrange a public debate between Yiannopoulos and Roxane “I Dare You To Critique Me” Gay… it’ll be better than Vidal vs Buckley (or Lefty Hitchens vs Righty Hitchens) ! Imagine the rhetorical firepower unleashed! The Wildean barbs! The Nabokovian slights!

    Ha! Just kidding.

    The real joke being that Yiannopoulos isn’t even a genuine creature of the Right… he’s no more ideologically committed to the Right Wing than any of the vast majority of (successful) American politicians are ideologically committed to Israel… they just do what they “gotta” do. That is to say, Yiannopoulos is a run of the mill, power-hungry, self-interested airhead-Capitalist at heart and if this were twenty years ago, he’d be Ariana Huffington (née Arianna Stassinopoulus), realizing that there was more influence/money to be had in wrapping a conservative core with a smiley facade and fleecing softer soccer mom sheep (aka The Clinton Maneuver).

    All these years later, though, the “Liberals” are no longer sexy (have you seen what’s happening to the Clinton Foundation? Yipes!)… so Yiannopoulos is milking the “Alt Right” for what it’s worth. But what is he milking? (npi)

    He makes comments and speeches we disagree with…. and? What kind of shelf-life do you think a Gay British Pretty Boy Nazi-Lite Shock-Jock Nitwit will actually have as a meme in America? Simply printing his name won’t give him any extra “power”, but treating him like 10x the threat he actually is is precisely what grants him visibility.

    Will we even be talking about Milo Yiannopoulos in 2018…? If he’s smart, he’ll switch polarities in time to cash in on the inevitable backlash of 2024. Yes, that’s right, kids: the pendulum will keep swinging. And just like the proverbial broken clocks you’ll all get to…. and so on.

    ” why does The Millions, a site focusing on intelligent takes on mainstream literature, seem to attract such a hostile, aggrieved, PC Police Police commentariat?”

    Probably owing to all the political editorials being sneaked in with the Lit Chat, I’d wager.

  14. Ed, of course the author is against a boycott – a viewpoint she finds unique enough to devote an entire essay to. And as far as censorship the author refuses to print the name of the subject of her piece, which is of course a political statement in and of itself. Why you are baffled that political statements about political figures elicits politically-tinged comments is, er, baffling. Unless you just don’t like hearing views you don’t agree with, which is a pretty accurate description of the Internet these days.

  15. Toad,

    First, electing not to print someone’s name, while possibly silly, is not censorship, though leave it to the geniuses here to immediately assume they’re not allowed to print Milo Yiannapolous’s name just because their stubby little fingers stabbed submit wrong twice.

    And baffled is a funny word, and dismissive, but yeah okay, color me baffled by the reflexive hostility and defensiveness in the comment section of this website. And it isn’t just in the political tinged columns–it is in reviews, thinkpieces, you name it. Anywhere that people can detect anything to be offended by, most often by perceived over-PCness. Which is odd, considering 1) The Millions isn’t an especially leftist site, unless you have been living in a cave and find ideas like white privilege new and shocking, and 2) that said, it is clear that there’s a progressive bent to the editorial direction here, so why people don’t find another place to go is beyond me, though people enjoy being offended, so I guess I’m not baffled after all.

  16. Ed – “censorship” is probably a bit strong, I agree. I think the “hostility” you are picking up on is a reflection of our society as a whole right now – people are mad/proud/scared etc. But if you don’t think the Millions – or American literary culture as a whole – is leftist, man, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not saying that as a condemnation, necessarily, and I’m a proud lefty myself, but it’s interesting, for how vocal the lit community is about diversity in terms of race, gender, sexual identification, etc, there is zero clamor for diversity of opinion (political or otherwise). The way to counter voices like this Yannanopolis clown is to ignore them. The reason your race-baiting hate-spewing uncle doesn’t have a $250k book deal is that no one takes him seriously, no one writes think pieces about him or boycotts his employer. Yanni is a fictional character, like Bill O’Reilly or pre-CBS Colbert. He’s a wrestling heel. He subsists on boos; without them he dies. So just quit booing. Go write a book instead.

  17. Illuminating article. Thanks for this essay. Much to think about. Don’t buy the book, and say no to censorship seems obvious. The idea of boycotting S&S was/is a knee jerk reaction. It becomes tricky, however, when a nonfiction book crosses the border of free speech to hate speech. Quite troubling.

  18. “while the lit community is about diversity in terms of race, gender, sexual identification, etc, there is zero clamor for diversity of opinion (political or otherwise)”

    There’s also extremely little diversity of people in terms of socioeconomic class. MFAs that you (read: parents) have to drop 150K for are the norm.

  19. “But if you don’t think the Millions – or American literary culture as a whole – is leftist, man, I don’t know what to tell you.”

    Leftist? Not even remotely. Liberal and/or “Liberal”, sure.

  20. My MFA cost me nothing and gave me time to finish two books. My agent is shopping them around at the moment. We wouldn’t turn down a deal with S&S.

  21. Toad,

    I know the publishing/lit world, including this website, are liberal. I’m saying I don’t think The Millions is an especially liberal operation, and yet it seems to consistently attract a certain brand of vitriolic comment in response to what, to my mind, are pretty standard PCisms. But again, maybe this is just the internet in 2017. On the rest, we totally agree. Feel like social media has a lot to answer for, in terms of creating the kind of constant outrage that elevates clowns like Yiannapolous. Gamergate wouldn’t even have been a thing as a recently as ten years ago.

    Gargoyle,

    MFAs–the top 50 or so anyway–mostly don’t cost anything, and usually provide a stipend. The trust fund MFA baby is a total canard. It’s kind of impressive how authoritatively wrong you are in this thread.

  23. “I wonder how much better it would be if we simply gave these aspects of far right culture the equivalent of the silent treatment, or putting a tantrum-y toddler in the corner.”

    I understand the impulse, but the sad truth is that this just doesn’t work. In fact, this is exactly what they want, because it allows them to grow their odious little networks without anyone paying them any mind, and then when they finally force us to pay attention to them, it’s too late.

  24. “It’s funny, in the 70s liberals would have marched in the street over free speech”

    “Free speech” does not include the right to get a quarter-million dollar advance from a Big Five publisher. Milo is free to write and publish whatever he wants. Liberals are free to let his enablers know that his views are not okay, and that we object to funding any infrastructure that supports the dissemination of those ideas.

    Nobody is stopping him or S&S from doing it without us, so I don’t know what your “free speech / censorship” beef is. Perhaps you should think a bit harder about what those things actually are.

  25. “MFAs–the top 50 or so anyway–mostly don’t cost anything, and usually provide a stipend. The trust fund MFA baby is a total canard.”

    I missed Ed’s fumbling point. As you say, there are only around 50 MFAs that fully pay for tuition and provide (some sort) of stipend. The vast majority don’t do either (there are over 300 residency MFA programs). So just already, looks like MFAs are for people who can take out a lot of debt, unless you get into one of the 50.

    Now, let’s look at those stipends. All of them are below poverty level. Some incredibly slim number are at poverty level. Now, I know that, Ed, as someone with a mommy and daddy who pays for their car, rent, and cellphone bill, it may be confusing to realize that most people can’t live at poverty level. Let alone supporting a family!!!! I’ve never met an MFA student who didn’t a) have an ton of debt or b) rich parents, and I’ve met plenty of MFA students. It’s a rich kids game.

  26. Ed, you also need to look up on wikipedia something called opportunity cost. They don’t teach about it in an MFA, but it is covered in books which can be read, if you do that sort of thing.

  27. Gargoyle,

    You obviously thought MFAs cost 150k and were wrong about that. I’ve seen this bit of misinformation before time and agin, from people who have a personal stake for whatever reason in hating MFAs, and I think it’s because Columbia costs that much. The rest of the good ones, i.e. the ones worth going to, as we’ve established, are tuition-waived and usually provide stipends.

    Lol at “you’ve never met an MFA student who didn’t have a ton of debt or rich parents.” First, from your complete lack of knowledge or authority on the subject, my suspicion is you haven’t met an MFA student, and they exist in your mind as a anger-inducing strawman. As someone who has actually met MFA students, lots of them, I can say they run the gamut in terms of socioeconomic class, age, circumstance, etc. Also, signally, in your zealous taxonomy of Made Up Privileged People, you left out c), which is having a job.

  28. @Ed

    Wow. I mean I know critical thinking is at an all time low… but you didn’t address my points at all! I’ll help you again: 1.) poverty-wage living and 2.) the significant majority of programs don’t pay for tuition and 3.) opportunity-cost.

    The only thing your response said was to make up that I believe all MFAs cost 150K… which I never said. Please post comments that actually respond to things, not rants that make you feel good, cause it’s just a waste of time.

  29. Garg,

    I did adress it. Literally all the programs worth going to besides Columbia are tuition free. I’m sure there are ones that charge an arm and a leg, but I don’t know about them. And most MFA students have jobs. is that clear enough?

    Idk what you mean by opportunity cost. Yeah, people have to give stuff up to do MFAs, have to quit jobs and move, as is the case with most ventures. Why this particular one has a hair so far up your ass, I’m not sure. But feel free to continue imagining the average MFAer to be a certain kind of person if it makes you feel good, I really don’t care.

  30. @Ed

    Sometimes I wonder what it’s like to scramble through life, lacking so in logic.

    “Literally all the programs worth going to besides Columbia are tuition free.”

    You can’t redefine all MFA goers as just the people who go to the (minority of) free ones. You. Dumbass. That’s called the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. I’d suggest you look it up on wikipedia, but since you already failed to do that for opportunity cost, I’m not holding my breath.

  31. Gargoyle,

    You seem angry. Is it because of the vicious censorship you endured upthread, or the fact that you thought the average MFA cost 150k? Lol. Again, 1) Any of the ones worth discussing or attending cost nothing, and 2) In either case (tuition remitted or not) most people either work or take loans out. It is not, as you say, a rich kid’s game. Rich kids have better things to do than attend MFA programs and work at coffeeshops for three years. Like moving to Manhattan and interning at a publisher.

  32. As a follow up, and to be clearer (since you seem like the worst kind of dense person, i.e. a dense person who thinks they’re smart), I was confining my response to what most people who know anything about it consider to be real MFA programs worth attending, which are definitionally the programs with tuition remitted. Expanding the conversation to every shitty program in the country though, it still seems the average tuition may be 30k, which is far far less than the 150k you believed people to be dropping as a norm, a number I assume you picked to support your fanciful notion of MFAs a country club for rich white layabouts.

  33. @Ed

    I never said the tuition was 150K. I understand why that was confusing though, you aren’t exactly detail focused. As usual, your responses don’t address any of my 3 points tho… quit rambling!

  34. Gargoyle,

    Enough. Calling people stupid on the internet is the height of stupidity. I apologize to you, and to anyone with the misfortune to have read this comments tangent.

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Essays

Mary, Je T’Aime: Literary Portraits

Essays
February 18, 2009 | 5 books mentioned 12 4 min read

Like more conventional forms of romance, the first great literary love of my life began with a look. Young readers of Playboy have similar experiences, I believe, with centerfolds: a precise moment – the turning of a page to reveal a face (more likely a body) that haunts the young man for the rest of his days. In bars too, at high school dances, in college dining halls, in lecture classes and seminars such infatuations begin: a single glimpse of an unknown stranger prompts the festerings of fascination and desire. My literary romance began in the pages of A Book of Days for the Literary Year, between June 22nd and June 23rd:This picture, which still hangs above my desk, is Mary McCarthy’s Vassar senior portrait and from the first moment I saw it, I was in love. She was all the things I wanted to be: a writer, beautiful and serious, but also – or so she seemed to me – bright, frank, fearless, alluring. And she was also what I was then: a bit childlike and clean-scrubbed and, perhaps, a bit mischievous (I sense that still in the shadowed corner of her mouth). I have since discovered that McCarthy’s looks were a bit sharper than this picture reveals, and became more so in her 20s and 30s. There are also some ghastly pictures of her in later life (one of her on a panel with W.H. Auden comes to mind – the two look like finalists in a World’s Least Well-Preserved Person contest, and I think I remember McCarthy to be missing a tooth in this one). But in the Vassar portrait she is stunning. I gather from the number of men who fell under her spell (Edmund Wilson, Clement Greenburg, and Philip Rahv among them) that the beauty that won me was real.Is this strange? Or inappropriate? This enthralling first look, this discovery of one of the great literary loves of my life through a visceral, physical attraction to her? My affair ended in an intellectual and aesthetic admiration of McCarthy’s bracing, clean, meticulously observed prose and her total, sometimes aggressive, frankness about sex and everything else in How I Grew, The Group, The Groves of Academe, Cast a Cold Eye, The Company She Keeps, and Intellectual Memoirs. Her bravery (or was it brazenness?) held me rapt and abject even after the original power of the Vassar picture had been diluted somewhat by other, less flattering visions of her. The most famous McCarthy line of all time is one she tossed out about Lillian Hellman on The Dick Cavett Show in 1979. McCarthy had described Hellman as a dishonest writer and Cavett pressed her, “What is dishonest about Lillian Hellman?” McCarthy responded: “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.” (Hellman responded with a $2.5 million libel suit.) Not until I found Lord Rochester, Leopold von Sacher Masoch, and the Marquis de Sade some years later would someone seem so awe-inspiringly self-assured and terrifyingly bold in thought and word.But the question of beauty remains. Susan Sontag, whom one might have expected to rise above the average woman’s hyper-consciousness of beauty, was by her own account, one of us: “Physical beauty is enormously, almost morbidly, important to me.” In Paradise Lost, the newly-created, unfallen Eve is more taken with her own reflection in a lake than she is with Adam. He is, by her own account,”less fair,/ less winning… than that smooth wat’ry image” of herself. When I started reading McCarthy, I didn’t just want to be able to write like she did, I wanted to be her. I wanted to be what she had been: beautiful, dazzlingly bright and self-certain. Her books were sacred how-to guides that might transform me (however silly or sinister the ladies at jezebel.com may have found the idea of intellectual memoirs as how-to books in Anne’s post last week). But it is laughable: Jon Stewart had a joke about the increasing sexiness and femaleness of cable news anchors – a segment called “News I’d Like to F#@k” and this approach to news-watching was, regrettably, similar to the way (in my too earnest and hopeful teendom) I approached McCarthy – with a confusion of hungers – for beauty, for intellectual acuity. I cannot tell which is which sometimes. I cannot subtract the beauty of the person (beauty I admire; a beauty I covet) from the disembodied voices of the written world. The materiality of the person clings to the writing, gives the words a captivating timbre that the plodding and mousy can never achieve.I remember reading reviews of Marisha Pessl’s novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics (2006) and none of the reviewers seemed capable of talking about the book itself (The Secret History, Redux? – I guess, I have not read it) without first invoking Pessl’s beauty, or other reviewers’ fascination with her beauty, which was the same thing. I do not think that I am alone in my weakness – “partial, prejudiced, & ignorant” I may be – dilettantish, even (as you already know) – but not alone. Perhaps there are earnest and just readers out there who are not drawn in and repulsed so erratically as I am: people who plod dutifully and methodically through expansive reading lists of canonized authors (perhaps they go further – and read chronologically and boy-girl-boy-girl as well!), immune to the charms of such as these. But to belittle the powers of beauty and charm – and the irrational more generally – is not to escape it, and I do not try.Patricia HighsmithAnna Akhmatova, 1924.Sylvia Plath, Yorkshire, 1956, Smith College Mortimer Rare Book Room.Assia Wevill, poet and second wife of Ted Hughes. She committed suicide in 1969, as Plath had before her, but killed her daughter by Hughes as well as herself.

Essays
| 5 books mentioned 12 4 min read
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Essays

All Happy Meals Are the Same; Every Unhappy Meal Is Unhappy in Its Own Way

Essays
October 31, 2013 | 5 books mentioned 1 4 min read

Ad Age recently revealed that McDonald’s is getting into the publishing business. For the first two weeks of November, children’s books with a nutritional theme will replace the toys in Happy Meals. With titles like The Goat Who Ate Everything and Dodi the Dodo Goes to Orlando, the books are processed products through and through, created by the ad agency Leo Burnett, intended to create good press for the fast-food company by signaling its commitment to literacy and nutrition. McDonald’s ran a similar campaign earlier this year in the U.K., which inspired a list of satirical book titles (e.g., Harry Potter and the Deathly Swallows) under a #mcbooks hashtag on Twitter.The hashtag has been revived with the announcement of the new campaign.

This is not, however, the first time McDonald’s has distributed children’s books.  In 1979, when I was five years old, living in Wilmington, DE, my family took one of our painfully rare trips to McDonald’s to get Happy Meals for my sisters and me. There were few things more exciting at the time than opening up that iconic box to see what sort of toy was inside. On this visit, however, there was no toy. The counterperson handed over a little paperback with a drawing on the cover of a boy whitewashing a fence.

McDonald’s introduced me — and I would venture thousands of other kids — not only to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer but also to the notion of a classic. In 1977 and again in 1979, the fast food chain paired up with the publisher I. Waldman & Son to distribute Illustrated Classics Editions in their restaurants. Waldman had published children’s versions of classic literature, such as The Three Musketeers, Robinson Crusoe, and Moby-Dick, in 1977 under the brand name Moby Books and, in 1979, the publisher paired with Playmore, Inc. to distribute the series in supermarkets, drugstores, and other retail sites. They released 12 titles that year and another dozen in 1983. The books measured 5.5 by 4 inches and were typically 238 pages long, with each page of text facing an illustration.

Over the next few years, I collected a half dozen Illustrated Classics books, but that first encounter with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was the moment when I discovered literature.

Granted, Deidre S. Laiken’s adaptation of Twain’s novel might not count for everyone as literature.  Here is Twain’s opening:

“TOM!”
No answer.
“TOM!”
No answer.
“What’s gone with that boy, I wonder? You TOM!”
No answer.

Here is Laiken:

Tom Sawyer was always getting into trouble. He was the kind of boy who just could not resist adventure.

In this textbook example of the difference between writing that shows versus writing that tells, Twain gives us an immediate sense of what Laiken can only report to us. Tom Sawyer in the original is such a miscreant that he does not even bother to show up for the start of the novel that bears his name, while the Illustrated Classics version frames Tom’s character and the entire narrative for its readers, wary of letting us interpret too much on our own.

What really mattered to me in the long term, however, was not the quality of the text but the authority behind it. There were few institutions I respected more than McDonald’s, so when I saw that it had endorsed a line of books grouped under this mysterious rubric “classic,” I knew that this was a work worth reading. More significantly, I learned from McDonald’s that there was a whole class of books out there that were especially worth reading. I read a lot of junk as a kid — loads of books about movie monsters, World War II, and science fiction, plus a mountain of comics — but I took special pride in reading classics and presidential biographies and was thrilled when adults complimented me on my taste and sophistication.

All this reading and complimenting eventually led to a PhD in English from the University of California, Berkeley, where I learned that what McDonald’s had introduced me to at the age of five was the concept of cultural capital. The term comes from the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, and it refers to “forms of knowledge, skills, education, and advantages that a person has, which give them a higher status in society.” Speaking Standard English, knowing how to order and eat at a four-star restaurant, and being able to discuss art and music are all forms of cultural capital. They are ways of signaling one’s membership in a class and even of advancing within and beyond it. My primary motive for reading Illustrated Classics, to be sure, was pleasure (as is the case with my reading of literature today), but I was aware early on that some of that enjoyment derived from the sense of distinction I felt in doing so.

I used to enjoy the irony that I have held onto the taste for literature that I picked up at McDonald’s much longer than I did the taste for its food. Nowadays, I feel more wistful for a moment in time when a fast food company thought it could promote itself by providing kids with editions of Twain, Dumas, and Dickens. I am not naïve enough to think McDonald’s did so on account of its pure love of literature. The company entered into this promotion with the same sense of self-interest and desire for synergy that it did when it embarked on it first cross-promotion of a film with the Star Trek Happy Meal in 1979, the year the Happy Meal debuted. And in much the same way that this upcoming publishing endeavor is likely intended to wash away some of the association of the McDonald’s name with junk food and childhood obesity, the Illustrated Classics scheme was probably meant to raise the brow of a company whose main contribution to culture was a mountain of advertising featuring a creepy clown and his oddly shaped friends.

What seems unbelievable now — and even sweet — is that McDonald’s ever cared about its brow enough to try raising it. McDonald’s and I had that in common: we wanted to elevate ourselves by association with the classics, only I held onto that desire long after the fast food chain did. I went to grad school for a lot of reasons, but McDonald’s Illustrated Classics played their own little part in that decision. It’s not a choice I regret, but, in this deeply pessimistic moment for English departments, I cannot help but feel nostalgic for a time when literature’s cultural stock was so high that even McDonald’s wanted to invest in it.

Essays
| 5 books mentioned 1 4 min read
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