What We Talk About When We Talk About Boycotts

Essays
January 18, 2017 | 3 books mentioned 35 6 min read

Related Books:

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 novel, The Evening Hero, is forthcoming with Simon & Schuster (May 2022). She teaches fiction at Columbia and shares a hometown with Bob Dylan.

● ● ●
Essays

A Travel Guide to American Hypocrisy

Essays
July 3, 2012 | 3 books mentioned 2 7 min read

1.
The park ranger wore a pannier. The side-hooped undergarment held her dress out about a half foot at each side at the hip, creating even wider girth for the already stoutish civil servant. Over the frock, she wore an apron, and over her flushed cheeks and damp curls, a white ruffled mob cap.

It was not regulation National Park Service issue, the olive uniform topped with a Smokey the Bear hat. But nor was it a dress code violation, for the date was July 8th, which all will immediately recognize as the anniversary of the first public reading of the Declaration of Independence.

Every year, Independence National Park celebrates the occasion with a dramatic re-enactment of the first reading, performed by park rangers in period costume on a bunting draped stage behind Independence Hall. The program begins with scene-setting – on this day in 1776, the mood would have been tense and uncertain. The Declaration was an act of treason for its writers and backers, a gamble that would result in either in the glory of a new country or a death warrant.

“But we’re here to encourage you to have some fun,” said the ranger at the microphone, straightening his wool brass-buttoned waist coat. “Think of this as an interactive event. Join in with cheers and with huzzahs!”

“Or join in with boos,” he added, wiping sweat from his brow. Among the thousands of people who attended the first reading, many were loyal to the British crown. He inquired whether anyone in the crowd was of British descent, (“or even Canadian”).  After a beat of dead silence, he dispatched a few costumed rangers into the crowd, to play the part of the dissenters.

Among them, the ranger in a pannier.

“Long live the King!” she shouted, over the cheers, whoops and dog whistles that came during the Declaration’s first reliable applause line, we-hold-these-truths-to-be-self-evident-that-all-men-are-created-equal.

“You all shall hang!”

2.
I should confess that I’m not a habitual attendee of historic re-enactment events. I’d only wedged myself into the crowd behind Independence Hall that day because Domestic Manners of the Americans had gotten into my head.

Domestic Manners was published in 1832, written by a British writer named Frances Trollope who had just spent four years traveling in the United States. She’d set sail enchanted with the egalitarian promise of the United States and left revolted not only by the poor state of American manners, morals, and lifestyle, but also by what she saw as American hypocrisy about equality. The book made its harsh assessments through a collection of finely observed and often hilarious sketches of everyday life, and a personal chronicle of  “the general feeling of irksomeness, and fatigue of spirits, which hangs upon the memory while recalling the hours passed in American society.”

The book was an instant sensation on both sides of the Atlantic.  Over here, Domestic Manners sparked popular outrage, making Trollope among the first authors that Americans loved to hate. In reviews and in conversation, she was described as a harridan and a troll, and as a vulgar, improper, and silly lady.

In Britain, the book became a best seller, and it launched her writing career which would eventually include five other travel books and 34 novels.

Domestic Manners appeared poised to stand the test of time. The book was admired by her peers — Charles Dickens consulted her work during his own travels in America. It was praised by writers that followed: Mark Twain took her book with him on his Mississippi journeys, and compared the clarity and accuracy of her writing to photography. In the mid-twentieth century, scholars credited Trollope with pioneering the now-familiar approach to travel literature, which relies on vivid scenes, lively dialogue, memorable characters and a strong authorial voice. “The most justifiably famous travel book of the century,” wrote scholar Helen Heineman, in her 1969 biography of Trollope.

And yet today, neither the author nor her debut book are well known or much discussed. Frances Trollope is best remembered for giving birth to her son, the novelist Anthony.

3.
I first read an excerpt of Domestic Manners in an out-of-print anthology of women’s travel writing. As soon as I finished, I downloaded the book. I was immediately captivated by her observations of early American behavior. There was the way men tended to sit with their legs propped up, “tossing their heels above their heads.” There were her thoughts on native eating habits: “They consume an enormous quantity of bacon.” And on table manners: “Their manner of devouring watermelon is extremely unpleasant; the huge fruit is cut into half a dozen sections, of about a foot long, and then, dripping as it is with water, applied to the mouth, from either side of which pour copious streams of the fluid, while, ever and anon, a mouthful of the hard black seeds are shot out in all directions, to the great annoyance of all within reach.”

I had to side with her inability to excuse the regular expulsion of saliva, especially when mixed with tobacco: “I hardly know any annoyance so deeply repugnant to English feelings, as the incessant, remorseless spitting of Americans.”  And while I don’t object to anyone using my first name, I knew exactly what she meant when she described this interaction: “I am sure she intended to be a very good neighbor, but her violent intimacy made me dread pass her door; my children, including my sons she always addressed by their Christian name, excepting when she substituted to the word ‘honey.’”

That was all good fun, but what kept me thinking about the book long after I’d finished it were her more serious observations, which centered on the wide gap between American rhetoric about equality and, well, reality.

For instance, she describes an incident that took place in the slave state of Virginia, where a young slave girl owned by a neighboring family had inadvertently ingested rat poison.

“As a matter of course I took the little sufferer into my lap,” Trollope writes. “I observed a general titter among the white members of the family, while the blacks stood aloof and looked stupefied. The youngest of the [white] family…after gazing at me for a few moments in utter astonishment, exclaimed ‘My! If Mrs. Trollope has not taken her into her lap and wiped her nasty mouth! Why I would not have touched her mouth for two hundred dollars!”’ When she inquired after the girl’s health later that day, the family “burst into uncontrollable laughter. The idea of really sympathizing with the sufferings of a slave appeared to them as absurd as weeping over a calf that had been slaughtered at the butcher.”

“You will see them with one hand hoisting up the cap of liberty, and with the other flogging their slaves,” Trollope wrote. “It is impossible for any mind of common honesty not to be revolted by the contradictions in their principles and in their practice.”

Although the specifics have changed since Trollope’s day, the spirit she described is still plainly evident in current events. The 2012 presidential election, for instance, has included debates over equal access to marriage and economic opportunity, and ongoing arguments over equality for immigrants and for people of color.

Centuries of struggle, and such slow progress, to make equality a self-evident truth and not just a line we recite, in period costume, on muggy days in national parks in early July.

4.
Before I joined the audience for the anniversary reading of the Declaration of Independence, I stopped at “The President’s House,” a new permanent exhibit in Independence Park. It was built on the footprint of the house where George Washington lived during his presidency, along with the men and women that he’d owned as slaves.

Now, it’s not exactly a secret that Washington owned slaves. But we generally think of him as “a man who fought for liberty and who came to recognize the evils of bondage, freeing his slaves in his will,” which is the description Laura Bush went with in her remarks at the recent groundbreaking ceremony for the new African American museum in D.C.

This elision glides over Washington’s personal devotion to the institution of slavery. During his presidency, he moved his enslaved servants back to Virginia several times a year so they would not achieve the greater freedom afforded by Pennsylvania state laws. And he doggedly pursued slaves that attempted escape.

“The President’s House” shares this historical counter-narrative history through recorded monologues, performed by costumed actors playing the role of African Americans in Washington’s household. These continuously play on flat screen TVs, mounted on partial brick walls marking the house’s perimeter.

While I was waiting for the reading of the Declaration to begin, I realized that every single person in the audience had to walk past the new monument – it’s directly across Market Street from the Visitor’s Center and directly in the flight path to Independence Hall. Even if they hadn’t stopped there, the walkway was close enough to hear at least a few unsettling phrases from the soundtrack: “They wouldn’t admit we were fully human… labor extracted at a terrible cost… we, too are founding fathers of the United States.”

It is a definite disruption to the patriotic, rah-rah, we-the-people vibe in Independence Park.

I thought of Frances Trollope.

I thought she would approve.

As I waited for the reading to begin, my Trollope-influenced mind began to wonder whether anyone in the audience would display any discomfort, demonstrate any recognition of irony, or even subtly squirm when “all men were created equal” was proclaimed a self-evident truth.

I knew that was highly unlikely. I mean, a well-delivered line about universal equality at a historic national park? That’s like a lead singer asking the stadium “how ya doing?”

And indeed, the only person in the crowd to indicate anything other than full approval of equality was the woman playing the role of a British loyalist – the park ranger wearing the pannier.

5.
This leads me to this one final, and reluctant observation about Domestic Manners: there’s a good reason why it’s generally excluded from the modern canon of classic travel literature.

For after her scathing indictments the hypocrisy of American inequality, she reached a conclusion that seems strange to a modern reader: since equality isn’t working, let’s just scrap it.

She forcefully argued that the world would be far better off without equality and instead with a class-based system, ruled benevolently by the 1%. “How greatly the advantage is on the side of those are governed by the few,” she wrote, “instead of the many.”

This argument was one reason why the book was successful in England. At the moment of its publication, the country was debating legislation that would expand the right to vote beyond a tiny, wealthy, portion of the population. Trollope’s anti-equality message pleased powerful conservatives who were opposed to reform — which gave the book a broader audience than a travelogue by a female writer would have otherwise found.

This marketing advantage would have been incredibly important to Trollope. For although she presents herself as an affluent traveler having a grand American adventure, she was actually in the United States to alleviate her family’s desperate financial straits. It was only after her various ventures failed that she noticed the success of Basil Hall’s Travels in North America, a book which also passed harsh judgment on the United States. She’d kept a journal up until that point with no specific purpose, but she realized her notes were a potential gold mine. Which, indeed, they turned out to be.

Still, a political argument that ensures success at the time of publication is often what consigns a book to historic obscurity. And an argument against the very idea of equality is so far outside the mainstream today that it’s only publicly expressed at historic re-enactments — or by people who are fond of other costumes, such as those that are accessorized with white pointy hoods. This is unfortunate for many reasons, including for the way it obscures what’s enduring about Domestic Manners – the way Trollope depicts the absurdities that occur in a country whose premise is equality, and where reality continually falls well short of the mark. Although her conclusion is itself absurd, Trollope’s observations still remain wincingly accurate.

Essays
| 3 books mentioned 2 7 min read
● ● ●
Essays

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

Essays
October 31, 2013 | 3 books mentioned 1 4 min read
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.
Essays
| 3 books mentioned 1 4 min read
● ●

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.

Add Your Comment:

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

● ●
● ● ●
● ● ●
Essays

The Genre Games

Essays
November 23, 2011 | 3 books mentioned 46 4 min read
I developed my own little highly-nonscientific experiment: I went to the local library and checked out three books in each of seven genres and devoted an entire weekend to looking for tropes or devices that separated one genre from another. I had some really weird dreams that weekend.
Essays
| 3 books mentioned 46 4 min read
● ● ●