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.

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Essays

A Backward Glance at the ‘Brooklyn Renaissance’

Essays
November 28, 2012 | 5 books mentioned 16 7 min read

As I write this, my old neighbors in Brooklyn are still digging out from yet another brutal storm while I sit in our new home in Vancouver, British Columbia, the sun shining prettily outside our windows, gulls cawing as they swoop between the masts of the sailboats bobbing in the harbor half a minute’s walk from our front door. For a few days, it looked like we might never make it here. We had been planning our move to Canada for months, but our load-out day was October 30, the day Hurricane Sandy made landfall. Needless to say, we had to reschedule, but the movers arrived in Brooklyn at 10 o’clock the next morning, and somehow we managed to thread the needle between the complete shutdown of the subway and region-wide gas shortages to sneak our way to the airport and out of town.

A couple days after I arrived, a family friend asked me, half-joking, if I felt “survivor’s guilt” about my hairs-breadth escape from New York. I don’t. What I feel instead is a deep sense of loss mixed with a still deeper appreciation of the dumb luck that offered me a front row seat onto one of those rare collisions of time and place that creates the kind of literary scene that has existed for the past decade in Brooklyn.

Brooklyn, with its swarms of goateed hipsterati making artisanal cheeses and tapping out novels at corner coffee shops, is easy to mock, and in truth, the place is a little precious. But for every stay-at-home mom writing imaginary novels between trips to the yoga studio and every coffee house poseur stroking his beard over his battered Penguin edition of Crime & Punishment, there are three or four young, talented writers and editors hard at work on actual pages of actual novels. Mock all you want, but for the moment, if you want to write literary fiction or poetry, Brooklyn is still the place to be.

Longtime New Yorkers tend to get misty-eyed about the seedy old Lower East Side and pre-Giuliani Times Square, but this is mostly nostalgia talking. Times Square may have had its roguish charm when Kerouac and the Beats were trawling for kicks in the early 1950s and the Lower East Side may have possessed a genuine revolutionary spirit in the Hippie Era, but by the time I got there in the mid-80s, when I first came to New York for college, most of the Lower East Side was a crack-ridden pit and Times Square was worse.

Everywhere you looked there were junkies fixing in open doorways and hookers giving blow jobs in parked cars. The subways were unrideable late at night and everybody had a mugging story. One friend of mine got held up by a nine-year-old with a pistol. It all sounds so cool and edgy when you read about it in books like Eleanor Henderson’s Ten Thousand Saints and Patti Smith’s Just Kids, but the reality was ugly and depressing. And dangerous. In 1987, the year I graduated from NYU and left New York the first time, 2,016 people were murdered in the five boroughs; the year before, a gang of white kids from Howard Beach chased Michael Griffith, a Trinidadian immigrant, onto the Shore Parkway where he was run over by a speeding car, one of a series of racially motivated crimes that brought the city to the brink of full-scale riot.

You can argue, as many did back then, that the rigors of everyday life in New York tested the mettle of young writers, tossing out those either untalented or unserious enough to last. But this argument, I think, is based on a hopelessly romantic notion of what nurtures and grows good literary writing. Of course, no writer who has never known real suffering will ever create anything worth reading, but for the most part, books are survivors’ tales. Suffering and crisis are always central subjects of good books, but writers who themselves have descended into crisis, whether chased there by their own demons or by societal chaos, tend not to write good books. They’re too busy digging themselves out of their deep, dark hole.

This isn’t necessarily true of all art forms. For instance, popular music, whether it’s rock or hip-hop or the blues, is mostly the product of young kids finding new ways to use old instruments and is, almost by definition, an outsider art form. The Lower East Side of the 1970s, just like the South Bronx of the 1980s and working-class London and Liverpool in the early 1960s, produced some of the last century’s great popular music. Listen to the mad thunder of Keith Moon’s drumming on The Who’s early albums or the angry rhymes of early rappers like Public Enemy or Run-D.M.C., and you can hear, almost in real time, the rage of the streets outside the studio.

Good writing, on the other hand, requires distance, as well as a certain level of education and economic stability. Writers need time and space to work — that room of one’s own Virginia Woolf talked about — as well as a vibrant cultural scene to feed off of when they’re not writing. Like the Left Bank of Paris in the 1920s and New York’s Greenwich Village a few years later, today’s Brooklyn has hit that cultural sweet spot that makes it ripe for an outpouring of great writing: It is near a major center of culture, but its rents are still low enough to let younger writers cobble together a living out of a bunch of odd jobs, while crime and chaos are kept just far away enough to allow for quiet reflection.

Everybody knows the boldface names who grace the borough. Jennifer Egan, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Colson Whitehead live in Fort Greene; transplanted Brit Martin Amis lives in Cobble Hill; and you could stock a fair-sized bookstore with the novels of writers now living Park Slope. But while it’s always nice to have a few famous people around to invite to book festivals and hobnob with at parties, what drives the Brooklyn Renaissance, if you want to give it a name, is the lively mix of young writers and upstart indie magazines and publishing houses, all within shouting distance of one another. Throw in several first-rate small bookstores and access to the mainstream publishing industry, and you have the makings of a burgeoning cultural mecca.

I was blind to the literary ferment around me for the first three or four years I lived in Brooklyn after I moved back to New York with my wife in 2004. Twenty years earlier, when I was at NYU, Brooklyn was, to me, an industrial wasteland full of abandoned factories and grim housing projects. This was only partly true even then, but by 2004, even some of the borough’s roughest neighborhoods were on the mend and old factories in DUMBO and Williamsburg were filling up with indie presses and other arts organizations. But I didn’t see it. To me, Manhattan was where the culture was; Brooklyn was just a pleasant, less expensive place to live.

Then, in early 2008, I took a writing class at Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop. For me, the success of Sackett Street, which has grown from a handful of writers sitting around founder Julia Fierro’s kitchen table in 2002 to a program boasting 31 part-time instructors and hundreds of students, illustrates the true grassroots nature of Brooklyn’s literary culture. Unlike most other independent creative writing programs, which run the bulk of their classes online, Sackett Street is fully analog, the classes meeting in person, usually in small groups of seven or eight sitting around the workshop leader’s living room. As with any writing course, the quality of the writing in the workshop varies widely, but the discussion in the two classes I attended was always spirited and serious, and I ended up making a number of writer friends I keep up with to this day.

More importantly, though, the Sackett Street classes introduced me to the daily reality behind the cliché of literary Brooklyn. Fierro is a relentless Facebook poster, and I began to hear about readings by little-known writers I admire at Book Court and Greenlight Bookstore. After I attended a few of those, I began to run into indie publishers I only knew by reputation, like Hanna Tinti of One Story and Johnny Temple of Akashic Books. And faster than you can say “indie chic,” I felt a part of a genuine literary scene.

In an article I wrote earlier this year for Prospero, The Economist magazine’s arts and culture website, I called contemporary Brooklyn “a vertically integrated factory for literature.” I was promptly cyber-mocked by the good folks at The Awl, but I stand by my metaphor. Over and over in the past few years, I have watched a young writer come to Brooklyn and begin to climb the closest thing to a career ladder that exists in the literary world, first figuring out how to eke out a living in publishing or teaching, then testing the waters by publishing stories in local lit mags or reading at local reading series before breaking through with a first book. Some of these writers, like Emma Straub, author of Laura Lamont’s Life in Pictures, and Melissa Febos, author of Whip Smart, have already begun to make their mark in the public consciousness. Dozens of others, now finishing first books or just starting to write publishable stories, will break through in years to come.

To those who argue that a literary scene like Brooklyn’s breeds insularity, I would say: just wait a few years. Literary Brooklyn, like Greenwich Village and the Left Bank before it, won’t last much longer as an incubator of literary talent. Rents, already sky-high in Brownstone Brooklyn, are rising fast in newly gentrifying neighborhoods like Bushwick. For now, the economics works. Young, smart kids can still move to the outerborough neighborhoods, where if they’re willing to live in tight spaces and work long hours, they can serve their apprentice years among other young, smart readers and writers until they begin to have some success, by which time they can afford to trade up to fancier digs in Cobble Hill or Park Slope.

But other smart, young New Yorkers, especially those who work in media and finance, where money is more plentiful, have already begun to discover these one-time no-go neighborhoods, driving up rents and upsetting the delicate economic balance. If you ask me, the ideal moment for the Brooklyn Renaissance — the years just after the 2008 financial crisis — has already come and gone, and by the time Wall Street finds its footing again in a year or two, much of Brooklyn will be like the Lower East Side is now: too pricey for all but young bankers and trustafarians.

So maybe Hurricane Sandy was trying to tell me something and I got out just in time. Eric Obenauf, editor-in-chief at the indie press Two Dollar Radio, who fled Brooklyn’s high rents a few years ago, has written an essay, appearing on The Millions this morning, extolling the virtues of the literary life away from cultural hothouses like Brooklyn. Maybe he’s right, and in a few years I’ll be telling all my friends to ditch the 718 and join me north of the border. But I’m not ready to go there yet. Vancouver is one of the prettiest cities on earth, and from previous visits I know it has a healthy arts scene, bolstered by a growing movie industry, as well as great bookstores and local theater companies. But it’s not Brooklyn. Not for me. Not yet, anyway.

Image Credit: Wikipedia

Essays
| 5 books mentioned 16 7 min read
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Essays Lists

The Author Sends Her Regrets: J.K. Rowling and Other Writers with Second Thoughts

Essays Lists
February 18, 2014 | 5 books mentioned 4 8 min read
Is a writer allowed to have regrets? Certainly. Is she allowed to air them publicly? I mean, yeah, it’s a free internet, why not? Do I want to hear a single additional word about the world of Harry Potter from J. K. Rowling that is not in the form of another book? No, not particularly.
Essays Lists
| 5 books mentioned 4 8 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

The Author Wore Prada

Essays
September 27, 2016 | 5 books mentioned 10 4 min read

This July, I published my first novel, An Innocent Fashion, the story of a queer, biracial millennial who spirals into a depression after landing his dream job at a fashion magazine. The book was aptly pitched as “The Bell Jar meets The Devil Wears Prada” — with one foot firmly in each of both the “literary” and “commercial” realms. Yet the latter half of this equation proved the source of a major frustration. Specifically, I was self-conscious about other people’s biases against fashion, the commercial (read: “unserious”) theme on which my whole novel pivoted. In interviews I downplayed the fashion element over and over, explaining that despite being set in the office of a fashion magazine, the book was complex, using fashion to explore deeper societal issues.

Part of my preoccupation with “seriousness” came with the territory of being a first-time author; I yearned to be well-respected, considered “good enough” for one’s work to count as capital-L Literature. But the other part stemmed from a truth I’d been fighting from a young age: that fashion, which I had been passionate about from a young age, was not a very serious or important subject.

I grew up within a tight-knit Cuban family in Miami, surrounded by traditional values including the sharp distinction between male and female gender roles. As do many others, I learned that fashion was “for girls,” the subtext being that as it was somehow lesser — a frivolity. Personally, I didn’t see why fashion should be considered inherently more trivial than any other form of creative expression — writing, for instance, or fine art. I maintained that fashion’s unfair reputation was a reflection of my conservative environment. But even as an undergraduate at liberal-minded Yale, where intelligent peers sometimes expressed a heady disregard for the sartorial sphere, the effects of an entrenched bias were still evident. Others didn’t think as highly about fashion as I did; everywhere I went, fashion was considered frivolous.

Many books that embraced fashion as subject matter seemed to confirm and perpetuate this notion. As far as I could tell, fashion-oriented books fell primarily into the category of chick lit — juicy reads like Confessions of a Shopaholic and Bergdorf Blonds, in which “fashion” was a code word for the same kind of guilty pleasures afforded by junk food and reality TV. Of course, the biggest phenomenon in this league was The Devil Wears Prada.

Because like the author of Prada, I too had been a fashion assistant when I wrote my book, Prada had made for an inevitable comparison to An Innocent Fashion from the start. But unlike my book, however, in which even the least likable characters defy overarching stereotypes, Prada devotes 360 pages (and the film equivalent, two hours) to driving home the idea that fashion is not only frivolous, but also, inexplicably, “bad” — and that the people who love it are some inevitable combination of mean, superficial, and/or stupid. Aspiring to a career in”serious” journalism — the protagonist Andy Sachs paints an unanimously damning picture of her colleagues: nasty, brutish, and dagger-heeled.

The result of this reductive portrayal of the fashion industry is that pithy stereotypes remain unchallenged — a missed opportunity.

After all, it wasn’t always this way. If, in many realms, fashion has had an unfair reputation as a shallow womanly diversion, in literature it was put to use by some of our most important authors.

Consider Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, in which, after her husband’s death, she can’t bear to throw away his shoes, which she compares to vital organs: “How could he come back if they took away his organs, how could he come back if he had no shoes?” There’s Sylvia Plath, whose novel The Bell Jar paints a portrait of a woman on the verge of losing her sanity, while working for the fictional equivalent of Mademoiselle in the ’50s. While the superficial magazine goings-on provoke the main character’s despair as she realizes her powerlessness to resist her destiny as a wife/mother/homemaker, she is frequently transfixed in earnest by the beauty of clothes and shoes, and “a whole life of marvelous, elaborate decadence that attracted me like a magnet” — making her relationship to fashion complex and real. In Edith Wharton’s society novels, corsetry and ruffles help Wharton make elegant, searing criticisms of class and gender inequality (“If I were shabby no one would have me,” says Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, “a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself”) — while who could forget the meaningful implications of fashion in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, or The Great Gatsby, or Gone with the Wind?

Contemporary books touting fashion as subject matter rarely, if ever, offer such depth or complexity, while those that revolve around fashion magazines nearly always feature a cast made up exclusively of privileged white women. This perhaps more than anything is what I hoped would distinguish my novel. Given the precedent set by annals of homogeneously populated chick lit, the main character isn’t who you’d expect. He’s a person of color, queer, and the opposite of rich — an outsider named Ethan for whom the glamour of fashion represents the inaccessibility of the American dream. In the Prada-sphere, Ethan would surely be reduced to a stock character — most likely, a white woman’s sassy gay best friend.

The need for nuanced representations of fashion in fiction has never been greater. Fashion offers a unique lens to view some of the most important issues of our time: class, gender, race, and sexuality. Depictions of fashion in literature can and should reflect that, providing new ways to engage with the dialogue of human progress, challenging our ideas about society and personal identity. These goals, after all, are at the heart of literature and fashion alike.

See Also: Clothes in Books and Ways to go Wrong

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

 

Essays
| 5 books mentioned 10 4 min read
Essays

Miss You, SASE: On Postal Submissions

Essays
February 25, 2014 | 5 books mentioned 10 7 min read

1.
The Whippany River flooded my hometown post office in August 2011. Hurricane Sandy would cause far more damage statewide, but Irene pushed the river across Route 10 and through the front door. The post office has never reopened. Whippany now receives irregular delivery from the Morristown branch. Inquires from our congressman, Rodney P. Frelinghuysen, have received circuitous responses from the Postal Service.

I drive past the abandoned post office when I visit my parents, and can’t help but get nostalgic. The mail was a source of surprise during my youth: issues of Amazing Spider Man, Uncanny X-Men, and The Sporting News, letters from my French pen pal, or postcards from my sister in college. I would shoot baskets in my driveway so I could catch afternoon delivery. The low hum of the mail truck’s engine announced its arrival, and while it looped toward my mailbox, I envied the lives of those mail carriers. They delivered people’s hopes and disappointments, bound in rubber bands. There was a quiet dignity to the legion of men and women who delivered mail. It seemed like the entire town counted on this ritual.

That innocent perception has been tempered by our current reality. The United States Postal Service lost $334 million in the final quarter of 2013, for a total loss of $5 billion for the year. First-class mail revenue has plummeted. Postmaster General Patrick Donahoe has pushed to end Saturday mail delivery as a cost-saving measure, but Congress has blocked the attempt. Postal Service retail outlets are being opened in select Staples stores, and will be staffed by store employees, not members of the American Postal Workers Union.

In 2014, products are shipped to us. We are recipients of mail rather than creators of it. Bills are paid online. Invitations are sent on Facebook. Letters, handwritten or typed, are a rarity. We have chosen speed and convenience, and have redefined what it means to have a personal connection with another human.

2.
The current literary magazines that only accept postal submissions are some of the finest “little magazines” in the country: The Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, Epoch, The Southern Review, Zoetrope, The Yale Review, The Sewanee Review, Denver Quarterly, The Hudson Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Antioch Review, The Paris Review, Beloit Fiction Journal, River Styx, ZYZZYVA, and Image. Their reasons are both practical and philosophical. The Gettysburg Review’s explanation is tongue-in-cheek: “We’re not an e-journal or e-zine…Neither are we neo-Luddites. Several of us actually enjoy using computers; however, we, like many of you, understand that the computer is not necessarily a piece of labor-saving technology. E-submission, while possibly a convenience for writers, is definitely an inconvenience for us.”

Electronic submissions have evolved from direct e-mails to editors, to the Council of Literary Magazine and Presses’ Submission Manager, to the now industry-standard Submittable system. Since electronic submissions have become the norm, editors have complained about writers who submit new work immediately after a rejection is received, or, even worse, rescind a submission only to revise and resubmit the work. Electronic submissions have put the writer in the editor’s office, like some cinematic wordsmith tramping into Random House with a manuscript under his arm. I would never think of calling the editor of the Southwest Review to check on the status of my submission, but e-mailing that editor somehow feels less intrusive. It shouldn’t, and unfortunately results in some writers eschewing professional decorum. Until an unsolicited work is accepted for publication, there should be a comfortable distance between writer and editor.

At Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading page, Agni editor Sven Birkets recalls the “labor-intensive era before e-submissions, [when] going through the stack that was several days’ accumulation had certain assembly-line aspects: open, extract, examine to gauge general caliber, sort into one of several stacks. Return, return with note, look closer, pass to trusted readers.” While putting together the first issue of his editorship, Birkets received a snail mail submission from David Foster Wallace. The story was titled “The Soul is Not a Smithy.” This was 2003; Wallace could have placed the story anywhere. Birkets was excited: “I took myself away from the desk. I found a private place with decent light and no phone; I did whatever one does to narrow the beam of attention down from wide-angle receptivity to full-on focus.” Granted, Birkets knew Wallace, but the story was a surprise, and Wallace’s work and self were made new by the spontaneity of that silent submission.

T.C. Boyle has called literary magazines the “meat and potatoes” of American literature. His first collection, Descent of Man, was published in 1979, and although it included stories from “the slicks” — The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Esquire, Penthouse — it also included stories that originally appeared in The Paris Review, Epoch, TriQuarterly, The Transatlantic Review, Fiction, Quest 77, Quest 78 and the South Dakota Review. Those publications were not merely means toward the end of a book; they were small victories. As Ben Percy writes, even after acceptances have “become the rule rather than the exception,” he feels like a “lonely madman crumpling messages into bottles and sending them off into a midnight sea.” The responses from editors make for a distant but real community. Nowadays writers like myself have connected on social media with other writers and editors, and while those connections are often meaningful and sometimes enlightening, writers remain solitary artists. As Percy notes, we are all “hidden away, only occasionally showing our faces, but engaged in an intimate, sacred togetherness made possible by journals whose pages serve as ink-stained harbors.”

3.
My favorite bookstore is still D.J. Ernst Books in Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. The bookseller has an almost cult following since 1975 among undergraduate creative writing majors at Susquehanna University. I bought armfuls of books, but mostly talked with “Homer” about fishing for bass in Penns Creek, running, kayaking, and God. Like other great independent bookstores, it was a place that made me believe imagination mattered.

I bought the 1992 edition of Best American Short Stories from him. I’d loved Robert Stone’s Dog Soldiers, and he edited that year’s selections. It’s an incredible collection: “Days of Heaven” by Rick Bass, “A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain” by Robert Olen Butler, “Emergency” by Denis Johnson, “The Pugilist at Rest” by Thom Jones, “Carried Away” by Alice Munro, and my favorite of the lineup, “Forever Overhead” by David Foster Wallace. I had read novels and collections from those individual writers, but I liked seeing them collected in an original form, with the magazines of original publication listed below. It was a lesson: American literary culture is built through literary magazines.

I flipped to the back of the book: “Editorial Addresses of American and Canadian Magazines Publishing Short Stories.” This was 2000, so much of the information was outdated, but there were mailing addresses and names of editors. Puerto del Sol: PO Box 3E, Department of English, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM 88003. Edited by Kevin McIlvoy and Antonya Nelson. Virginia Quarterly Review: One West Range, Charlottesville, VA 22903. Edited by Staige D. Blackford. I would dip back between the stories and their original publications to find which magazines best fit my style. I say style and not substance: I was very much a young writer, and it would take a steady dose of sentence-to-sentence examinations of writers like James Alan McPherson, Joy Williams, and William Gass in order to understand fiction.

My fiction professor had a “Publish or Paris” cartoon on his office door, and the pun wasn’t lost on me. In order to be a writer, I also had to be a submitter. I printed some of my stories and followed the magazine’s guidelines. I typed and signed cover letters. I prepared SASEs, which felt like a strangely formal and unnecessary action to receive a response: folding an envelope and stuffing it into another envelope is the literary equivalent of matryoshka dolls. I soon understood that literary magazine editors and staff had to deal with cataloging, reading, and responding to thousands of submissions, as well as pleading for university or donor funding. They didn’t have the time or money to buy and provide stamps for responses.

I mailed stories to Cimarron Review, Artful Dodge, and Prairie Schooner. I thought about the submissions from time to time, but I was an undergraduate with more than enough distractions. The form rejections arrived on thick, cardboard stock cards, or on computer paper sliced into squares. There was the occasional “Thanks!” or a suggestion to subscribe. No meant no. There were no explanations. I needed to hear those cold, distant rejections. My writing mentors were constructive but caring: they would edit my stories down to the single sentence worth saving, but they would do so with guidance and interest. Editors owed me nothing: no words of encouragement, no line edits, and not a swift response. In order to impress them, I had to write better fiction. I knew that writing was a slow process on my end. I scribbled story and character ideas on napkins, in the margins of junk mail and newspapers, or in a series of notebooks. Those ideas became handwritten drafts, which were typed, printed, set aside, and then revised on the printed page. I typed those revisions, and then repeated the process. Ideas come in a flash, but stories must be built. I am the son of a carpenter who almost became a priest: planning and ritual are the modes of our lives.

Back then, I had no idea what happened to my submissions when they left the post office. Did editors really read my stories? I had an intimate connection with my own drafting, writing, and revising, but my submitting life was wrecked with unknowns. Submittable is a wonderful resource, but I long for those days when I don’t know whether a story is “received” or “in progress.” The method of write, submit, and resubmit has its real artistic perils. At the National Post, poet Michael Lista thinks the contemporary literary culture “encourages, for its own survival, a writer’s worst attributes: vanity, assuredness, sophistry, mutual flattery, imprecision, inefficiency and an unselfconscious fluency that is the surest sign of a minor writer. The qualities that contribute to producing great work — skepticism, deliberation, patience — are not in the system’s interest.” The ease of submission has cultivated a lack of self-discernment. Simply because a story can be submitted does not mean it should.

I miss having my envelope of stories weighed and mailed. I miss the handling of paper, the process of submission. The great, unlikely gift of postal submissions was the building of patience and discipline. Now we can publish at any and every moment: status updates, tweets, posts. There are benefits to tearing down those fences between our words and the world, but there is worth to relative silence, to communication between a single sender and recipient.

This is how I satiate my nostalgia for the old rituals. I go through my typical motions of drafting and revising, until a story feels ready to submit. I find a few potential markets and list them in an Excel spreadsheet. Then I print the story, fold it, and leave it in an unsealed envelope, tucked in a desk drawer. Weeks later, I take that story from the envelope and read it with new eyes: the eyes of an editor, a discerning reader who does not owe me anything. Those weeks of gestation are an abbreviation of the response time to a postal submission, but they are metaphorically enough. Postal submissions taught writers that this vocation is not a sprint. Writing is a series of marathons separated by long respites, where we regain breath and build strength. It is time for writers to slow down again, so that our performance in the next race can be better, more meaningful, and if we are lucky, closer to the eternal, mysterious rewards of art.

Image via paraflyer/Flickr

Essays
| 5 books mentioned 10 7 min read