When I was in high school I, like many teens, believed myself to be a misfit, the only alienated person in the room. I found respite in Frank McCourt’s English classes at Stuyvesant High.We knew him as Frank, among the circle of protégés of which I was proud to consider myself a part. English class with Frank involved him sitting on his desk telling us stories about his Irish childhood; then, he passed out purple mimeograph sheets and led us in Irish drinking songs: Nancy Nancy, Nancy whiskey, Whiskey whiskey, Nancy-o.

Everything about Frank was a snub of the establishment. It was not just his voluminous charms and wisdom, but this insouciant, even reckless, posture against authority that made us embrace him as ally and advocate—no matter he sometimes snubbed us as well. He was a fierce mentor, complicated, loveable, moody, and occasionally mean. It can’t be fun interacting for seven hours a day, year upon year, with self-important, brash sixteen year olds convinced that they are destined for Harvard or M.I.T. and are therefore smarter than anyone with a station so lowly as teacher.

My senior year, on the last day of Frank’s Irish literature course, he came in and held up a stack of our papers, our “senior theses.” Mine was on Edna O’Brien, and I recall having labored on it heartily. Even today I find this author’s work difficult, so it’s plausible I’d made no sense at all in my attempt to say something pithy or intelligent about her. As I did not save my own copy, however, I never got the chance to have a second look. Frank waved the stack in the air while abusing us all as callow and short-sighted. Then, with dramatic flourish, he tore our papers into tiny bits and deposited the whole mess in the trash can. It was unclear he’d actually read them, and he certainly hadn’t bothered to grade them. That was that. How he arrived at our final grades for the course remained a mystery—though I recall he was an easy grader. This, no doubt, contributed to his popularity.

Another time, he sat on his desk and opened the class, as usual, with a comforting phrase we’d grown accustomed to hearing, that always came as a relief during schooldays punctuated with threats and taunts from other teachers who felt it their duty to work us dry. “Sit back. I’m going to tell you a story,” Frank said in his brogue, dangling his feet and looking off into a middle distance, as if transitioning into the special mind space of the Homerian, oral epic-tellers. This day, he went on to deliver a finely crafted short story, with a neat arc rising between a polished beginning and ending. This was unlike his usual tales, more often freewheeling episodes from the grand narrative that we would later read in print in 1996, as Angela’s Ashes; I don’t remember ever reading this story among his published work. In this tale, an old man is living parasitically with his grown daughter and son-in-law. One day he falls asleep on the couch, only to leave a kettle boiling on the stove. The daughter comes home and discovers it poker-hot and gleaming, setting off an argument that results in the father’s getting booted from the apartment. When Frank finished, he got quiet and stared at us for a long time. “That is my story,” he finally hissed. “Don’t you ever dare steal it.” I felt the red hot burn of that kettle in his gaze.

That didn’t faze me, or his other defenders. I started waiting for the appearance of that story. Instead, a classmate of mine published a short story in The New Yorker that fall of our graduation, which was soon chosen by Raymond Carver for the year’s Best American Short Stories, and subsequently for the best of the decade.

I nevertheless left Stuyvesant bragging to everyone I knew about my association with this legendary teacher, despite his utter lack of fame among anyone who hadn’t been his student or one of their parents. No one had the faintest idea what I was talking about. He hadn’t published a word as a writer; the public wouldn’t hear of Frank McCourt for another decade and a half, when he finally surprised none of us with the brilliant literary success of that first memoir.

His lessons, not to mention the inspirational tale of his life and career, remain important reminders to me about living an authentic life, pursuing what really matters. How odd it is for me today to have to admit I learned that lesson at Stuyvesant High School. The world of our school was competitive and cruel, at least as I saw it in adolescence. This was the mid-1980s, at the renowned prep school for the city’s working class. Not a day went by a teacher didn’t browbeat us about the responsibility inherent in our status as the city’s “intellectual elite”—bound for M.I.T., CalTech, Harvard, or Stanford. One time a less sympathetic teacher held up my physics exam in front of the class to announce I’d received the lowest grade in the room. “Eighty fi–” he bellowed, before looking it over a second time and realizing I’d mustered through with a 93—yes, still a bad grade at Stuy.

I believe grade grubbing was invented at my high school. Ninety-nine-and-a-half was never enough. Teachers often left time at the end of class sessions to barter with students over that extra quarter point. The one time my classmates got political—shutting down the Brooklyn Bridge after a staged walkout from school—it was over the issue of whether teachers should be compensated for time spent writing college recommendation letters (we won that battle). The other time my class made the news was for stealing (using a brilliant ruse, of course) the answers to the state Regents exams.

I liked to believe Frank’s sympathies those days resided with me in judging this atmosphere cruel and soulless.

Since Frank’s death July 19, readers by now are familiar with the lasting admiration among his former students at Stuy. The Times created a blog space for recollections, and some four hundred remote and close acquaintances replied—not all of them alumni, but many, like me, participants and bystanders in his fifteen-year stint as teacher at Stuy. Many of my classmates went on to elite schools, became top scientists, won Nobels in physics and math, or, if not that, succeeded at least as lawyers. Ours was a class of immigrants and children of immigrants, strivers, people for whom the 80s’ promise of wild wealth felt real, and necessary, and just far enough from reach to make it worth the gambit.

Some of us pursued different paths—writers and artists who felt our passions squelched in that grim factory of math formulas memorized by rote and public taunting for grades below ninety-five. We hung out smoking pot in the tenement vestibules across from school, on East 15th Street, an old immigrant neighborhood around the corner from where I live today.

Reading those recollections from Frank’s former students has been an eye-opening and startling experience. It appears I was not alone in my youthful disaffection. Of course everyone wants to claim Frank McCourt today, and perhaps I am no different. It is nonetheless fascinating to see high school refracted through the disparate memories of students from every social set—the nerds, the soc’s, the stoners. Frank, I see now, provided that kind of welcoming reassurance to all kinds of people surviving the miseries of teenhood, as ally and advocate. Perhaps it was simply an Irish warmth that lay behind the genius and grace of his ambivalent mentoring.

The Brothers McCourt

Frank broke down the wall between teacher and student, and that, too, explained the fierce loyalty among his followers. He never told us to call him Frank; it somehow became inevitable after he invited us to hear him perform at the annual Bloomsday celebration at the Symphony Space auditorium, where Irish actors and writers from across the city spent twenty-four hours reciting every word of Joyce’s Ulysses. In the 1980s, Frank’s brother Malachy, his co-host at this event, was the greater celebrity, and Frank sometimes seemed to visibly bristle in his shadow. Malachy was a big, booming stage actor. He was more American, more loud and charismatic, bigger in every sense than Frank. He filled up that stage. The first time I attended Bloomsday, I learned that even with one’s mentors there can be a give-and-take, and this seemed an important lesson, too—about how to be human and kind in spite of the seeming configurations of power. When we sat in the audience, our approval seemed as important to Frank, and as hard won, as his was for us.

Early in this decade, I had the opportunity to see another side of Frank’s humanity. I was back in New York, now an author myself; I bumped into Frank from time to time at literary events, where he would squint at me and utter phrases reminiscent of what he wrote in my high school yearbook: “How delightful it was (is) knowing you. I will miss your warmth, charm and beauty. Come back and see me and bring tales of the outside world. Adios and love, Frank McCourt.”

“Ye don’t look a day older than seventeen now yee-self,” he teased me at an event at the National Arts Club in 2002. Around that time people used to whisper that Frank’s brogue was getting heavier, not lighter, the longer he lived in New York. He’d discovered the nameless power of his own exotic-ness. It made me sad to see this kind of sniping, de rigueur in the New York literary world, extended even to someone so willing to be seen as flawed.

Elizabeth Kadetsky

One day recently, I saw him in Central Park walking his dog. He looked thinner, his skin whiter and more papery than ever before. He was shrunken, but he still had his rapscallion’s bemused grin, still seemed delighted to pass the time wryly making fun of himself and all the passersby and me. I hadn’t seen him out of the way of his celebrity in a long time, and it brought back the younger, less self-possessed Frank I remembered from the 80s. There was a humility that he somehow communicated in his desire to linger that day, chatting on about nothing, about his dog, the irony that he was famous. Now, I think that humility had something to do with his own sense of impending death. Yet just a month or two later, when I heard the news he was ill—just two months before his death, at a too-young 78—it came as a complete surprise.

This week I am re-reading Angela’s Ashes and trying to recall the lessons I took from Frank McCourt as my first teacher of creative writing. But oddly, I don’t think his important lessons to me reside in his work, which seems the exemplar of the spoken form, the kind of writing you want to burst out and read aloud when you sit in your easy chair reading it to your lonely self. Now that I’ve studied John Gardner and E.M. Forster on what comprise the elements of great plot, now that I teach this stuff for a living myself, I understand technically what Frank was doing those days in the structuring of his tales. But I don’t think he made me understand these fine points then, nor was that ever his intention. I would never have stolen his story of the teapot, even if I’d had the pluck. It wasn’t my kind of story—it was his kind of story, an organic emanation of his particular, epic voice. Frank helped me become a writer because he taught me about the humilities, the grim, dark moments, of a writer’s life, and also about the paradoxical glory one feels believing, deeply, in the value of that life.

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by Terese Svoboda

Nurse Ratched faced us—okay, let her remain nameless, this American CARE official with the power to educate the quarter million Somalian refugees trapped in Dadaab, the largest and oldest camp in the world. In her early thirties, she had been on the job for a year. Whether she was burned out or involved in some NGO power struggle we could not fathom did not matter—she would not accept the free server containing 60,000 books we had in our bags. It required only a plug. She wasn’t interested.

Her face immobile, she said, as if in her defense, that they had already tried a bookmobile.

Chris Merrill, head of the University of Iowa’s International Writers Program, his assistant Kelly Bedeian, poet Tom Sleigh, translator/essayist Eliot Weinberger, and I had just spent a week in Nairobi on behalf of the U.S. State Department discussing writing with Kenyans. Editors of literary magazines, university professors from a school closed by student violence, writers-in-exile working in the Somalian section of Nairobi, librarians, and one ebullient group of thirty-somethings reimagining education for the Agha Khan University, a branch of which was opening in the middle of nowhere in ten years with unimaginable funding. All discussions ended in the same place: What could we do for them. We told them the publishing industry in America is collapsing. We suggested that, like their adoption of the cell phone in lieu of landlines, they might consider skipping our flawed model and explore what technology offers, for example, publication on iPods and downloads.

They complained about copyright, their markets overflowed with pirated CDs. We told them we did not make a living from writing, that very few did in America, that we too were watching what happened with the music industry’s copyright battles. They said it was hard to get audiences—their children were watching videos. We sympathized. The Agha Khan group wanted good editors—like the editors of The New Yorker. We told them few editors worked like that, even when they had jobs. Most of the time we have to hone our work ourselves—and read, read, read. They said it was hard to get books, that customs charged far too much. We handed over the few boxes we had with us.

But when we flew to Dadaab, the administrative center for the three camps that make up the refugee settlement, a more desperate story unfolded. Founded nearly twenty years ago, Dadaab takes in another five thousand refugees a month. It is not an oasis in the middle of the Kenyan desert. There is no water, no food except what is rationed by the NGOs. In July, food rations are expected to be cut back to 1000 calories a day. Since Kenyans refuse to allot any more resources or space beyond the initial arrangements for 90,000 refugees two decades ago, housing has become unbearably overcrowded. The camps are short 38,000 latrines. If the refugees leave, they risk deportation. With over fifty percent of the population under eighteen, Dadaab is full of restless youths who are susceptible to al-Qaeda infiltrators who also cross the Somalian border sixty miles away.

But in the three days we spent talking to the students, we found that their hunger for education surpassed even their hunger for food. I sat across from a teenager whose hair was going grey from malnutrition who was admitted to the camp writing club only after submitting pieces in three categories: feature, sport, and politics. His command of English was better than my private-schooled teenager’s. And his motivation was acute: Every year only twenty students from the entire camp escape to university, the only legitimate way out.

In 1854 the British explorer Sir Richard Burton declared Somalia “a nation of poets.” Oral poetry, promulgated now by CD, cassette, and radio, has traditionally been a powerful literary form with political implications. In 1992, Somalian women recited their poems before two warring sub-clans in Burao and ultimately brokered a ceasefire. When it was clear that we didn’t want five-point essays, the students instantly composed poems about female genital mutilation, politics, love, and—over and over again—the importance of education.

On our last day in Dadaab, we took an armed convoy to the settlement area for new arrivals. They had been given saplings at admissions and told to hoop them into domes, then cover the structure with scavenged plastic bags or flattened tins. Not everyone managed. Out of the hundreds of makeshift, unfinished houses rowed far into the distance, fifty bedraggled refugees and their children confronted us. Although we were visiting during the most pleasant time of the year, the noon heat was considerable, the blowing red sand stung. Immediately one of the women insisted we tell the world about their plight, that we do something for them.

A student translated for us. He had just come from our class where, after hearing that the NGOs had discontinued the student journalism program, we had suggested the students hand-write broadsides and post them at a central area in the camp. We had told them stories from the gulag, about how prisoners had written masterpieces on cigarette paper. The poetry and prose the Somali students produced showed they had the skill and the drive, they only lacked practice and books to emulate, not unlike many neophyte writers in America. After class, students gave us their email addresses—clandestine cybercafés flourished deep in the refugee settlements, despite Nurse Ratched’s refusal to commit to anything electronic. Now, our student translator faced the woman who wanted us to do something, who was demanding an answer from us. He told her—and then us—that he would do something for her, he would tell the world.

Love Out of Hand

The apple of my eyes,
I love you as a Masaii man
loves cattle and believes they are his.

I saved you in my computer.
My love for you is as sweet
as chicken my mother cooks
for our guests. Trust me
as I trust in you.

Bear in your mind that true love
will be fruitful in the future.
Love knows no colour, no religion,
no beautiness or ugliness.

Be my shirt and
I will be your skirt too.

by Abraham Abdullahi Aden, from Dagahaley, one of the three Dadaab refugee camps

**

Dadaab, Kenya. Somali refugee camp. June 17, 2009.

**

Terese Svoboda’s fifth collection of poetry, Weapons Grade, and the paperback of her third book of prose, Trailer Girl and Other Stories, will be published this fall.

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by Joshua Mohr

Lately people have been asking me why I decided to publish my novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, with a small press. Instinctively, my gut wants to lie, stammer some kind of self-justification: “Well, uh, I felt that a boutique house (note that I didn’t say “small press”) would give me more attention (i.e. answer my emails) and nurture the book in a way true to my artistic vision (i.e. not perform fellatio on the marketing department)

in a manner a larger house might not be willing to do (e.g. my book dies on the vine while they hype their latest cookbook or tell-all memoir by a fallen debutante who smoked crystal meth and wrecked her Bentley but lived to tell the tale…).”

When people ask me about my “decision,” I want to say something that makes me sound too enlightened to peddle my subversive and cerebral material to the fatcats who run the major publishing houses. But I’m not that enlightened person at all. I am the very guy who tried desperately to peddle his subversive (Really?) and cerebral (Didn’t you go to a state college?) material to the fatcats. They shunned me, not vice versa.

I finished my first novel and got a swanky agent in New York. She did her very best to sell the book (I have no idea if she did her very best, though I assume so), but the fatcats told her, “This book is too grim. It’s not viable in the market place.” They weren’t looking for cerebral and subversive—they were looking for the Next Bestselling Voice!, someone like Jonathan Safran Foer. (I’m sure he’s a nice guy.)

This is by no means a criticism of authors who have published with major houses. I’m not insinuating that they’ve sacrificed their integrity. Far from it—some of my favorite books have had the stamp of the fatcat. This is an indictment of the major publishing houses’ attempts to superimpose templates of success onto literary fiction, judging the marketability of next year’s titles on the successes and failures of last year’s.

As my novel made its way around Manhattan, more than one editor said she liked the book, but had to “pitch it to the marketing people.” These pitches never seemed to go my way. Eighteen houses shot the book down. The swanky Manhattan agent basically fired me: “Why don’t you write a second book and we’ll try again?” she said.

I was back in square one, except now square one had the stink of failure. And I had no idea what to do.

Good times (not good times)…

I got a new agent, and she sent the book to Two Dollar Radio, an independent publishing house that saw promise and merit in the story I was trying to tell. They are the subversive and cerebral ones, the brave souls who publish literary fiction and only literary fiction. There are no cookbooks or debutante tell-alls on their list. It’s literature for the love of language and story, rather than commercial viability.

My experience finding a publisher was horrible and gut-wrenching. (Whiskey helped.) It was also incredibly confusing because I didn’t know whose opinion to trust. I began referring to it as my “faithful grope in the dark.” I knew I needed a publisher. I knew an agent acted as a liaison between writer and publisher. What I didn’t know was what editors were looking for. Only later did it occur to me that maybe agents and editors are faithfully groping themselves.

I talked with an agent and an editor to hear whether my suspicion was right: Is the whole shebang run on hunches, “informed” inferences, projections based on ambiguous past experiences?

“How do you know what will sell?” I asked one prominent agent.

“You find a book you believe in, make an educated guess, and hope for the best.”

I tried to sound calm, professional, but I think my voice cracked: “Hope for the best?”

“There are too many variables to predict with any kind of accuracy,” she said. “There are editors, acquisition boards, marketing and sales teams, the art department, then the buyers. And that isn’t even factoring in trends or positive reviews or competition. Anyone who thinks they have an answer is lying.”

I then spoke with a former editor at several major publishing houses and asked how she knew what would sell.

“It’s a crapshoot,” she said. Her tone wasn’t smug or ambivalent; the calm way she conveyed this sentiment made it feel honest.

Turns out, chance is a brutal part of the publishing trade. Good books sometimes vanish without a trace, and obvious, dumbed-down books with clever marketing tricks often become successful. It’s a savage reality of the business, one writers need to be aware of.

What I heard from these publishing insiders confirms my suspicion that writers and agents and editors are all faithfully groping in the dark. There’s no such thing as a template of success. It’s impossible. There are too many stodgy people in publishing who look to replicate past successes rather than find new and unexpected ones, to capitalize on trends rather than create them. There’s an almost singular reliance on authors who have already sold well, shoving their new work down consumers’ throats regardless of its quality. What’s left for first-time or mid-list writers with better books but no reputation?

Again, I asked the swanky agent and editor.

“There’s a diaspora of emerging writers to the smaller houses,” the agent said. “The money just isn’t there for unknowns in the current market. There are exceptions, of course. But overall…”

My ulcer tapped-dance as I phoned the editor.

She said independent houses might be better for first-time or mid-list authors, because in a smaller catalog their book will get more attention. Indie houses may have better guerilla marketing strategies for 21^st century technologies. Maybe most importantly, the sales projections at smaller houses are more modest, and a book won’t be considered a failure if it sells 6,000 copies.

“Will this be good for literature?” the editor asked. “It’s too soon to tell.”

Joshua Mohr - the Faithful Groper

Fair enough. It probably is too soon. But for me, this information is all I need to solidify a couple things, make a couple decisions. One, since they’ve corroborated that the publishing business is run on chance, I need only concern myself with one thing: the quality of my writing. That isn’t chance at all. I can’t control marketing trends or debutantes, but I can control the amount of energy I put into my revision process. I can take my time and make sure to write the best book I can.

Two, I’ve decided to publish my second novel, From a Fragile Galaxy, with Two Dollar Radio as well, next year. Assuming the “crapshoot” model is true, I see no reason to leave. I don’t want to be a free agent out to make as much money as I can, I want to publish my books somewhere that editors, not marketing people, make the decisions. 2DR has proven itself interested in my aesthetic. They’ve built me a website and booked a reading tour. They’re receptive to my ideas. They—not to sound sentimental—care. Books aren’t just commodities to them. Books are art.

At least I know that when my editors think a section of my writing needs tinkering, it isn’t because the marketers deem it “too grim.” I know that the problem is with me, the words I’ve chosen, the scenes I’ve constructed—and that’s a freedom every writer should enjoy, the freedom of knowing that their editor is more concerned with publishing the best possible novel than selling the most books. If you happen to sell a lot of books, that’s wonderful. We all want an audience. But for me the audience is only worth having if they’re reading the book I intended to write.

**

Joshua Mohr’s first novel, Some Things that Meant the World to Me, comes out next week.

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Not long ago a writer friend emailed me in distress. She had gotten an Amazon customer review for her new novel, which I’d read in manuscript and admired. The one-star review panned the work as sentimental and derivative. What made the review so damning was that it was intelligent and well-written, therefore hard to dismiss. Worse, it was the only review she’d gotten so far.

Feeling terrible for my friend, I wrote my own review, in part to relieve my own distress. It worked—until a more disturbing thought crossed my mind. What might such unprofessional critics have to say about the novels that I’d loved as a younger man? I hesitated to find out, yet I couldn’t resist.

I started with The Man With the Golden Arm, Nelson Algren’s 1948 novel about a heroin junkie set in Chicago’s seedy, neon-lit Division Street. I discovered the book when I was thirteen, while alphabetizing the basement library of a parsimonious neighbor who lived alone in a modest shingled house. Mr. Boyd’s books were all cheap paperbacks. As I pulled them off the shelves their spines snapped and their brittle pages fluttered to the floor. The first page of Algren’s novel begins:

“The captain never drank. Yet, toward nightfall in that smoke-colored season between Indian summer and December’s first true snow, he would sometimes feel half drunken. He would hang his coat neatly over the back of his chair in the leaden station house twilight, say he was beat from lack of sleep and lay his head across his arms upon the query room desk.”

I took Algren’s novel home and, over the next week, gulped it down. It was the first novel that ever gripped me from beginning to end. Now, thirty years later, what would Amazon’s customers have to say about it?

There were fewer than a dozen customer reviews posted, with the average rating a respectable four-and-a-half out of five possible stars. Most were laudatory—no wonder: the book did win the first National Book Award. Still, as I scrolled through the reviews a sinking feeling came over me, a sense that the positive reviews were not representative of contemporary tastes, a suspicion reinforced when I came upon this review by “mojo navigator”:

“[The Man With The Golden Arm] is ponderous, turgid and lacks any sense of urgency and desperation that its central theme—heroin addiction—should necessitate. Situations and relationships are one-dimensional and cardboard-cutout-like rendering them thoroughly implausible. However, the real failure of this novel is in its dreadfully antiquated ‘hip speech,’ a failed attempt on the part of Algren to capture the street lingo of the time… Bottom Line: If you’re looking for an accurate depiction of drug addiction in ‘50s America, you won’t find it here.”

Ouch! The worst thing about “mojo’s” review is that he (or she?) is right: Algren’s novel has aged badly. It was as if I’d been shown a photo of my first heartthrob only to realize that she had crossed eyes, pimples, and big ears.

Okay, so The Man With the Golden Arm was a great book in its time, and remains a good one, but eccentric and hardly for the ages. I tried another favorite, one that, for my generation, certainly qualifies as a “classic.” I typed the title into the Amazon search field and then, with breath held, scrolled down to the reviews.

Of 562 reviews of On the Road, the first dozen or so aren’t all favorable, but they aren’t so bad. A Matt Martin of Fort Collins, CO damns Kerouac’s masterpiece with faint praise, then distills the book’s main problem down to its “fusillade style” which “preemptively fore[goes] . . . real character complexity or narrative development.” Matt dismisses On the Road as a “personal travelogue” and gives it a paltry two stars.

But Matt’s review is relatively generous. Having coughed up a single star for the book that sent me and thousands of others hitchhiking across America, “manwithnoname” of Melrose, California, opens his review with a typographic snooze, “ZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz……” Having proclaimed On the Road utterly plotless, he excuses himself and goes back to sleep. Richmond “Spider” of Florida, after casting his own “death star,” describes On the Road as a “disjointed story” about a “dude with no background being led around by a pseudo-intellectual jerk [Dean Moriarity, a.k.a. Neal Cassady] with no respect for anyone but himself.”

Even when first published, On the Road was a controversial book that got mixed reviews. So maybe it’s not the best example of an unassailable classic. How about that other monument to youthful rebellion, The Catcher in the Rye? Surely this classic coming-of-age novel would suffer a kinder fate among Amazon’s loyal customers.

Indeed, Salinger’s book still has its fans, as indicated by the four- star average. But the bad reviews come fast and furious, with Linda “Ayeldee” warning potential readers that, though funny in parts, Catcher will make you “want to kill yourself,” and pitying those forced, like her, to read it in school since “you can’t throw it out the window and get rid of it.” Two reviews down, another involuntary reader, “Cher630” of the Bronx, calls the novel’s protagonist a “whiney, immature, angst ridden teenager who need[s] a smack in the head.” Cher goes on to brand Salinger’s hero “a phony.” Holden Caulfield, a phony? Say it ain’t so!

If this is what contemporary readers thought of Kerouac and Salinger, I hesitated to imagine what they’d say about my other hero, Henry Miller.

“Sex belongs in the bedroom, NOT the library!!!!” writes Jon Deepcreek in his review of Tropic of Cancer, and goes on to say, “This book is filthy. I had to take a shower after I read it. Why doesn’t [Miller’s narrator] get a job? Why does he have to live in France? Why doesn’t he save his money instead of investing it in alcohol and hookers?”

These are practical questions to ask of Miller’s alterego, but also ones that fail to take into account the spirit of rebellion in which Miller’s book was written, and which, aside from its notorious (yet surprisingly infrequent) sex, is its chief virtue. Though the counterculture wholeheartedly embraced work like Miller’s, the next generation has apparently taken to wagging their fingers at their parents’ favorite authors, blaming them for the less-than-enlightened world they’ve been born into, explaining why vast majority of Tropic’s customer reviews boil down to three words: “Get a job.”

So much for rebellion.

By now I was all but convinced that there is no such thing as an unassailable classic. Two final tests remained. To perform them, I’d have to find books that had been both popular and critical successes, bestsellers beloved by millions—not just for a decade or two, but for at least, say, forty years.

To Kill A Mockingbird, Harper Lee’s perennial bestseller about murder and racial injustice in the deep South, has its flaws, including Atticus Finch, that stick-in-the-mud emblem of paternal righteousness, and also its child narrator’s tendency to favor words like “assuaged.” Still, what’s to hate, right? Indeed, of a whopping 1,529 customer reviews, most gushed, with “AWESOME CLASSIC!!!” a typical response, down to its orgy of exclamation points.

I had to scroll through seven pages to find the first dissenter: “It seems like a book with no clear objective to convey,” Yoo Win writes. “It might be the greatest literature book as is claimed, it is just not my kind of book.”

Not a knockout punch, but no love-tap, either. But the decisive blows were yet to come. Like this one from “Kid,” whose staccato caption delivers its verdict like a judge pounding a gavel: “Worst. Book. Ever.” Kid continues: “Let me just say this: the book is boring. It starts out with Scout talking about how her brother once broke his arm. Who cares? The book’s most exciting part [the trial?] is extremely confusing, and don’t tell me I’m stupid; I have an IQ of 140.” But even this genius’ may be counted a fan compared with Nadia of Wisconsin, who writes, “This book is very nasty. It depicts scenes I would not care to see if I was being PAID. It’s just a sick book. Don’t read it, kids.”

So much for To Kill a Masterpiece—er, Mockingbird.

I’d try one more book, this one bringing with it critical adoration spanning more than a century. What nasty things would Amazon’s customers say about Jane Austen’s greatest novel?

This time I had to scroll through seventy out of 715 reviews to get to one even mildly excoriating. “Read this,” writes Ikaro Silva, “if the sole goal of your life is to get married.” Ikaro goes on to reduce Pride and Prejudice to “just a new version of Cinderella” and one that “portray[s] all women as conformists.” Take that, Jane!

But even Silva gave the book two stars. The single one-star review I found was by Juan Camarillo of San Antonio, who writes: “From a fan of IMMANUEL KANT, this was too boring.” Juan continues: “I had to study the Diamond Sutra and the Book of Job to get the vapid feeling out of my head.” Juan then quotes another reviewer who had written, “as Blake saw the world in a grain of sand, so did Austen see the world in a drawing room.” To which Jake appends, “There is a vast difference in seeing the world in a drawing room and thinking that the world IS a drawing room.”

What strikes me about even the most outrageous of these reviews is that they all hold some truth—if only the truth of one reader’s experience. Novels are meant to be experienced intimately, by individuals, not en masse, and just because the views expressed are those of a minority doesn’t make them less valid. Nor can they be written off as the opinions of amateurs, since novels are written for amateurs, not for professional critics. That said, there’s something deeply upsetting about having your favorite books flogged in public, even if the flogging is administered by a few cranky dissenters amid a mob of rabid devotees.

Still, ours is a democracy where, so far, people are still free to say what they think. Which leaves works of fiction not only open to interpretation, but subject to opinion. Then again, though a novel may be subject to opinion, its greatness isn’t. That masterpieces exist is all the evidence we have against the artistic relativism suggested by customer reviews, but it’s solid evidence. These books’ quality is no more a matter of opinion than the shape of a snowflake, or the smell of rotten eggs: it just is. Like those who so freely voice them, opinions come and go. But masterpieces endure. The only stars that matter in the end are those cast by time.

Meanwhile, since we have no choice, we should welcome the opinions of others, even if we must take them with a Taj Mahal-sized grain of salt. In so doing we might take comfort in the immortal words of G. C. Lichtenburg: “A book is a mirror. If an ass looks into it, you can’t expect an apostle to look out.”

**

Peter Selgin’s first book of stories, Drowning Lessons, won the 2007 Flannery O’Connor Award. His novel, Life Goes to the Movies, has just been published by Dzanc Books. His work has appeared in Salon, The Sun, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Missouri Review, Poets & Writers, Colorado Review, and Best American Essays 2006. He is also the author of By Cunning & Craft: Sound Advice and Practical Wisdom for Fiction Writers, and the forthcoming Fiction Matters.

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by Rose Garrett

I recently read that revenge, in addition to sex and food, stimulates the pleasure centers of the brain, which explains why the settling of scores is often pursued with as much unbounded enthusiasm as philandering and doughnut holes. To that short list I would add book-reading, which might appear more high-minded than the rest, but which has revealed itself to me to be as base, vulgar, and fucking incredible as any of the seven sins.

Children are encouraged to believe that reading is good for them, like community service, flossing and green beans—and as with these things, that implication is often enough to turn them off completely. But when I began reading as a child, books were less about exploring the human condition than they were about the pulse-quickening, mind-reeling pleasures of suspense, imagination, and assured gratification. Reading was an immoderate, late-night indulgence of sweaty palmed, pupil-dilating gluttony. No matter if the prose was workmanlike and the themes well-trodden. No matter that J. R. R. Tolkien’s characters were static archetypes, C. S. Lewis’s plots were exasperatingly moralistic, and J. K. Rowling’s books became stultifyingly popular. Books were a drug, and civilized society was the pusher. And I got really really high.

Freud’s concept of the “pleasure principle” maintains that to some extent our actions are governed not by reason, but by an abiding pursuit of pleasure and avoidance of discomfort and pain. Food, drugs, sex, and video games are the pleasure incentives of choice for many adults, and each of these can become addictive to the exclusion of exterior reality. My personal history of pleasure-reading-abuse confirms that it shares features with all of the above: foregoing social opportunities to hole up alone; bingeing to the point of delirium; losing myself in an illusory world; waking up blearily the next morning, catching sight of my book, and wondering, “What the fuck happened last night?”

Not all books lend themselves to literary benders. Or maybe it’s that not all readers feel the effects. As a young reader, not surprisingly, fantasy books with an abundance of wizards, swords, and talking animals was my catnip. I craved the comforting, structured pleasure of stories where virtue is rewarded, ordinariness is surmountable, and the forces of good and evil are etched in unsubtle diametric opposition. If a character skulks, looms, or sports a black cloak, you can be damn well sure he’s an agent of evil. If the protagonist is thrown into company with an attractive but prickly member of the opposite sex, you can pretty much bet they’ll be getting it on by book’s end. These books are predictable in their rewards, but varied enough in their plots to keep readers wriggling expectantly on the hook. They tamp down anxieties by simultaneously introducing conflict and guaranteeing resolution, pairing “What’s going to happen?” with “Whatever it is, I’m going to like it.”

Easy pleasure, however, leaves little room for growth, and maturing adolescents and educated adults are encouraged to venture past the safety of snug plots and simplistic ideologies. Postponing gratification for hard-earned gains isn’t easy, whether it’s in intellectual growth and emotional depth or a steady paycheck. But with maturity, according to Freud, comes the “reality principle,” pleasure’s grim repo man, where the exigencies of life take center stage and personal pleasures must regularly take a rain check.

The transition to literary novels, like adolescence itself, was a strange and uncomfortable process. After exhausting library shelves of fantasy trilogies, cat mysteries, and low-hanging YA fruit, I moved on to the adult section’s more high-minded fiction. This proved to be thematically and structurally jarring, especially since I had no concept of my own preferences, and chose books mostly by their cover art. More importantly, these books were work—and I wasn’t used to having to invest before seeing dividends.

But what about reading? Bruegel's "The Seven Deadly Sins"

Literary novels, which I still sometimes think of as “grown-up books,” tend to require more commitment, focus, and willingness to set aside easy pleasures than your typical swashbuckler. In these books, characters are often unlikable, plots stunted, romances ill-fated, short-lived, or absent altogether. Protagonists are untrustworthy or fatally flawed. The facile dichotomy of good and evil is supplanted by a set of self-interested entities, led by personal incentives along convergent or divergent paths. The drama is psychological, emotional, aesthetic, or all of these.

The alienation, violence, trickery and weird sex that I encountered in these books made me leery, at times, of the whole sorry necessity of growing up. If literary novels set out to more closely approximate reality, I wasn’t so sure reality was for me. But although Freud stated that “an ego thus educated has become reasonable; it no longer lets itself be governed by the pleasure principle, but obeys the reality principle,” he lets on that the reality principle “also at bottom seeks to obtain pleasure, but pleasure which is assured through taking account of reality, even though it is pleasure postponed.”*

Gradually, I found the pleasures, and there are many, in more demanding literature, which offers great rewards to readers and is not always so arduous as it seemed when I was fourteen. Well-honed, drum-tight sentences that twang like a bowstring provide more adventuresome reading than many conventional tales of derring-do. And there are no better moments in reading than encountering an idea or feeling one has had, but never really recognized until the moment when it suddenly hums in counterpoint to the written word.

Back to reality?

By the time I entered college, I was primed and ready to take on the knotty questions behind life, literature, and the uniquely human urge to write and read. I majored in Comparative Literature, an interdisciplinary catchall of literary theory, literature in translation, foreign language, and literature and the other arts. I took classes with names like “European Modernism and the World” and “Itineraries of Postmodernism.” I wrote papers, with only a pinch of irony, about hypertext, “the unpresentable,” the death of the author, and the subaltern. I read books that drove me bonkers, like de Chirico’s Hebdomeros, and others, like To the Lighthouse, that blew my mind to pieces and put it back together, better.

After graduation, however, I felt suddenly adrift in a non-academic world where my interests and talents were meaningless, and my intellectual investments in default. My shelves were full of Duras and Dazai, Kafka and Soyinka. But I felt drained and weak-willed. I felt the pull of easy pleasure. I picked up a book, Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander, about a young WWII nurse who falls through a Scottish circle of stones, travels back in time 200 years, and falls in love with an unusually tall and virile highlander. Yes. Not really Harlequin grade material, but closer to it than, say, Infinite Jest. I quickly fell off the wagon and went back to my old ways. Freud might have called it, returning to the pleasure principle.

The kind of books that thrilled me as a child now operated as a kind of literary security blanket, which I clung to through apartment stress, job hunting, and a breakup. As I read, I worried that I might be regressing emotionally to a pre-pubescent state, and wondered if I was betraying some sort of intellectual obligation to elevated literature. Could rereading Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban at age 23 do damage to my brain? As these anxieties grew, I self-medicated: I read more books.

Rose's guilty pleasure

But while easy reading, my substance abuse of choice, shares the pleasures of other good-to-be-bad activities like drugs and overeating, it really doesn’t carry a price. No physical dependencies form, no diseases are transmitted, arteries don’t clog and livers don’t fail. My reading compulsion doesn’t hurt others. And the distinction between pleasure and reality, high-minded literary novels and page-turners, is much more porous than I had allowed myself to see. Just because a book is pleasurable to read doesn’t mean it lacks depth, just as a book that demands extra reader effort doesn’t always deserve it. Books, like people, are all different, and what I read does less to define me than it does the changing moods and circumstances of any life. I’m a person who likes different kinds of books at different times, for different reasons—and that’s okay.

These days, I feel ready to work harder for the returns I get out of good books. After all, some things are more important than quick pleasure. I’ve got a whole list of books I want to read, and I’m excited to tackle the stack. I just need to get through Twilight, and then I’ll get started.

**

[* Freud is quoted from his Introductory Lectures on Psychology, translated by James Strachey]

Rose Garrett is a writer living in San Francisco. She has worked as a barista, literary agency intern, ESL tutor, and caterer at wealthy children’s parties. She currently works as a staff writer and editor at Education.com.

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by Marianne Rogoff

We’re distracted, our attention is shot, we are under surveillance, and we don’t care! We like being linked and friended by strangers who may or may not be who they say they are. It is so easy to Google everything, highlight and paste any vaguely intelligible sentences into our research, copy and paste the Web address, and call it a citation from a reliable source. Easier still, purchase the whole essay! Or make shit up. Who cares?

Freedom of speech. Democratic rule. Power to the people. Wisdom of the crowd. Cult of the amateur.

Have you walked down the street lately? Does anyone even go outdoors, or are we all online? [Like now.] How dangerous is driving or walking city streets when most every person is under headphones and/or head down pushing at keypads? Pedestrians and drivers pay no attention as they careen around corners or jump into crosswalks, music blasting in their earbuds, tapping a text to someone in another time zone. Mindfulness practice teaches that this habit of always being elsewhere than wherever we are is counter to the primary goal, the path to enlightenment: be present, be here.

But do we need another tirade against the way technology is taking over our minds, brains, and time?

To survive the techno-future perhaps it is better to model ourselves on college students and little kids, who approach the world head-on and greet new ways-of-being with excitement rather than trepidation. Better to embrace new devices and thrive on the vast unwieldy Web. Text grows smaller as the opposable thumb grows agile and large, enabling us to type messages on teeny keypads while driving, while eating, while looking you in the eye, talking, thinking about something else entirely.

Not everyone will agree with the premise of Andrew Keen’s book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube, and the Rest of Today’s User-generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values, recently out in paperback. Are you a throwback if you do? Are you a cultist if you don’t? Which is worse?

Don’t take the scary tone personally, Amateurs. Keen means all of us, and even he knows there is no going back. In the words of the olden days: The horse is out of the barn. We are living in the New Wild West, “in the midst of the greatest paradigm shift in information and communications history,” according to Christopher M. Schroeder, former CEO and publisher of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive.

Keen has been called a Luddite by techno-utopians everywhere, “The Anti-Christ of Silicon Valley” by the French newspaper Liberación, and an elitist by Internet critic John Colbert. With no gatekeepers, no standard-bearers, no editors, no fact-checkers, Keen says we’re out on a flimsy limb: on the Net without a net. “In the ideology of the collective Wikipedia experiment, the voice of a high school kid has equal value to that of an Ivy League scholar or a trained professional.”

Upper division students in my Writing for Artists class at California College of the Arts are not worried. Michael Wong says, “I think that the classic idea of ‘cultural gatekeepers’ is a racist and exclusionary idea. I think it is great that those who have historically never been able to express themselves can do that now.” Daniel McGrath says, “Experts are full of way more bullshit than the average person. I don’t need an expert to interpret for me.”

Why be afraid? It has always been a jungle out there. We trust ourselves to find our way. We don’t need no stinkin’ gatekeepers. Havana Davidson asks, “Who decides our standards? Talk about Big Brother!” Grant Squires seconds her skepticism: “We are constantly bombarded with corporate opinion in the form of ads in the real world.”

How apt is the Big Brother reference? Keen takes the reader behind the computer screen and shows us all the algorithms briskly sweeping our data, trailing behind us as we surf, pause, purchase, subscribe, connect. Invisible machinery compiles our buying habits, our lusts, our interests, and sends us, in return, links to anything we could possibly want, and so so much that we don’t. But isn’t this just the new dawn of old advertising methods like Nielsen ratings and focus groups? Isn’t it all for us, to cater to us?

“Search engines like Google know more about our habits, our interests, our desires than our friends, our loved ones, and our shrink combined,” says Keen. “But unlike in George Orwell’s 1984, this Big Brother is for real.”

CCA student Noah Brezel agrees, “Google is a little creepy. I use Gmail and the fact that the ads change based on what I’m typing weirds me out. But this is run by a computer program, not a person, and I don’t really care. Nothing that I email about or search for on the Internet is all that interesting or that private.”

In reviewing Jonathan Zittrain’s book The Future of the Internet (and How to Stop It) for The New Republic Online, Tim Wu offers a bit of history. “Both radio and film were, in their early days, much like the Internet is today: new, unreliable, and full of content that was not ready for prime time. These were easy industries to get into, like dot-coms in the 1990s or Web 2.0 in the 2000s.” Zittrain describes how the wild freedom of these media was soon usurped by corporate control. Wu says, “In the early 1920s, AT&T invented the ancestor of what we now know as CBS, Fox, and the rest…. Both NBC on radio and Paramount in film took advantage of the same economic principles: massive scale, integration, and centralization. They borrowed the industrial methods of Standard Oil, Ford, and other great corporations of the day, and applied them to the new media. The result was a system stable enough to last from the late 1920s until the 1990s, and in the case of Hollywood, a system that is still roughly in place today.”

The issue today isn’t consolidation, Keen argues, but the degradation of expertise. “MySpace and Facebook are creating a youth culture of digital narcissism; open-source knowledge-sharing sites like Wikipedia are undermining the authority of teachers in the classroom; the YouTube generation are more interested in self-expression than in learning about the outside world; the cacophony of anonymous blogs and user-generated content are deafening today’s youth [sic] to the voice of informed experts and professional journalists; today’s kids are so busy self-broadcasting on social networks that they no longer consume the creative work of professional musicians, novelists, or filmmakers.”

Harry Haller, the suicidal bourgeois protagonist of Hermann Hesse’s novel Steppenwolf (set in the 1920s), was in mourning over the state of the world; he hated war and industrialization, and suffered over the coming of radio and what it implied for a cultured man like himself who appreciated the classical pleasures of live music. As with radio, CCA student Kolle Kahle-Riggs understands that YouTube does not represent the end of the civilized world either: “The Baby Boomer generation survived ‘rock and roll music.’ This generation will survive the Internet… Successful artists will transcend the digital world. We can use the Internet as a tool and still succeed in the real world. YouTube is a way to see if we like an artist or not but it is not a replacement for live music. YouTube is not high quality and is obviously not a substitute for the real thing.”

Andrew Keen

The danger to intellectual property rights is another of Keen’s concerns. “In addition to stealing music or movies, they are stealing articles, photographs, letters, research, videos, jingles, characters, and just about anything else that can be digitized and copied electronically… The digital revolution is creating a generation of cut-and-paste burglars who view all content on the Internet as common property… The widespread acceptance of such behavior threatens to undermine a society that has been built upon hard work, innovation, and the intellectual achievement of our writers, scientists, artists, composers, musicians, journalists, pundits, and moviemakers.” [Editor’s note: I stole every image on this page.]

Appropriation is what we call this in art school. “Have you ever heard the term ‘remix’? This means responding to art by borrowing from it and changing it. It’s legal – or should be!” claims CCA student Daniel McGrath. In this, he agrees with a number of prominent figures, including Lawrence Lessig, who sees “legal sharing” and “re-use” of intellectual property as a social benefit.

“In a twisted kind of Alice in Wonderland, down-the-rabbit-hole logic, Silicon Valley visionaries such as Stanford law professor and Creative Commons founder Lawrence Lessig and cyberpunk William Gibson laud the appropriation of intellectual property,” Keen writes.

Lawrence Lessig

Yes, it is a new paradigm and everyone is excited because we are creating it! CCA student Lain Kay says, “A generation growing up on the Internet sees it as an open and free way to usurp authority, which is often a natural inclination for teens. The Internet allows us to declare ourselves with pretty much no oversight.”

“Every opinion counts, every account should be heard,” says Lauren Scott. “If it is immature or unreliable, the educated and/or intelligent individuals will know… Many times experts cannot see with fresh eyes. Expert or not, everyone is biased and can be accused of promoting a selfish agenda. (It’s called politics.)”

This is our medium! Don’t kill the messenger! It is a tool. We’ll just have to figure out how to control it as we go along—like the wheel, or nuclear power. There is a dark side to everything. The moon. The day.

And there is no going back. Train’s left the station. All aboard! We trust that we will find our way blindly through the maze. Guided by our friends: Hey, check out this musician. Check it out: a lion hugging a man. Instead of being told what to listen to, read, pay for, and do by some anonymous corporate entity, now we listen to each other.

And we talk to each other, we say anything to each other. But should we? There’s a reason why girls’ diaries came with a lock and key: some things are private. “What happens when all our queries and postings and casual comments become open to public consumption, and the Web becomes a permanent repository of the details of our lives?” Keen asks.

To which CCA student Kevin Whiteley says, “I never post my personal life on the Internet. Fools will be fools.”

The Millennials have no fear. They trust themselves. Trust collective wisdom. Facebook visits are like phone calls were in the old days. Or a visit to a neighbor. Instead of sitting on the porch in rockers, we are walking and texting on iPhones, listening to MP3s, being elsewhere and being in touch. There have always been dangers, always will be. We are negotiating new territory. New Pioneers! Brave New Worlders. Evolving. Becoming our machines? Becoming silicon chips? So what? Fine with me! Silicon is part of nature. Cyberspace may appear to be just like the real world but most of us know the difference.

Keen wonders where it goes. “How can we channel the Web 2.0 revolution constructively so that it enriches our economy, culture, and values?”

CCA student Philip Frank answers, “By not taking the Internet so seriously and remembering what remains important to the human spirit and soul of our society: relationships, food, love, joy, sadness, and staying present. Technology may make some things harder but people still have ethics and love.”

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We’d like to introduce you to The Blurb, the Rumpus Books blog. Check this space for frequent posts about the state of our writing culture, our literary community, and the writer’s life, written by authors, editors, writing teachers, and readers. If there’s a topic you’d like us to discuss, drop us an email at books@therumpus.net.

2008 was kind of a rough year for American publishers, culminating in the bloodbaths of November and December which saw hundreds of firings, major restructuring at Random House, and a crisis at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt which may yet prove fatal. Industry professionals are understandably looking for a silver bullet to reverse the trend: a new blockbuster from Dan Brown? A trilogy of teen sorcerer novels from Jhumpa Lahiri? Saddam Hussein’s memoir, written from beyond the grave?

But what if the answer lies not in finding the right book to publish but in finding the right book not to publish?

That book just might be the memoir-in-progress by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

We all know the drill: disgraced Bush insider-cum-war-criminal licks his wounds for a year or two, then publishes a “tell-all” that either tells us what we already knew (cf. Scott McClellan’s What Happened, which shocked the world by revealing that the White House had lied about its justifications for invading Iraq) or blames everyone else for what happened (cf. George Tenet’s At the Center of the Storm, which excuses its author for his “slam dunk” comment by writing off its context as a mere “marketing meeting”). Prurient readers, believing mistakenly that they’ve breached the wall of executive secrecy, buy truckloads of the slimy documents, and the morally deficient scoundrel makes a ton of money and hits the lecture-and-talk-show circuit to make a ton more.

The list is disgracefully long: Paul Bremer, David Frum, Ari Fleischer, Karen Hughes, Paul O’Neill, John Yoo, a parade of mediocres, ideologues, and dupes cashing in on their blindness and cowardice. In many cases the author has been applauded, and handsomely remunerated, for the “scathing indictment” of the administration and for the candor he has so courageously displayed now that he’s out of the administration and has absolutely nothing to lose (the main exception being Hughes, who still seems to see her former boss as a cross between John Wayne and Paddington Bear). We roll out the red carpet and fluff the seat cushions on Larry King, rather than measuring the writer for an orange jumpsuit and sending him off to a CIA black site for processing.

And the trend is likely to continue after Inauguration Day, as more brave souls decide to blow the whistle now that the whistle has retired comfortably to Crawford. Donald Rumsfeld’s book is on its way, and Laura Bush is auditioning editors in the East Wing.

Here’s the publishing industry’s chance to regain some dignity and credibility by refusing to give a platform to one of the administration’s most ardent bootlickers, a man who helped justify torture, undermined the Geneva Conventions, defended spying on American citizens, fired U.S. attorneys who wouldn’t toe the Bush line, presided over a thorough politicizing of the Justice Department, and repeatedly lied under oath to Congress. Gonzales has been a major player not only in an eight-year subversion of the American judicial and political systems, but in a war that has claimed the lives of 4,000 U.S. soldiers and half a million Iraqis, and led to the dislocation of several million and the detention without Habeas Corpus of thousands of others.

And he has the gall to tell The Wall St. Journal, “I consider myself a casualty, one of the many casualties of the war on terror.”

Leaving aside the question of what punishment is deserved by this man, we can all agree that what he does not deserve is a book deal. Whether to point fingers at others or defend his own rectitude, anything Alberto Gonzales has to say now can and should be said under oath.

Now, I understand this is a tough pill for the publishing industry to swallow. Though some might believe that the industry’s mission is to produce and disseminate works of literary and/or historical merit, the truth is of course that its real purpose, like that of any industry, is to make money. Publishers can’t be expected to be guardians of the nation’s morality or taste any more than, say, pornographers or auto executives can. Why else would there be rumors of a $7 million advance for the memoirs of Sarah Palin, a woman whose every utterance is a calamity of both syntax and rational thought, and whose only true achievement has been to spend $150,000 on clothes? Why else is there already a book by Samuel J. Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. “Joe the Plumber,” a man whose keen insight into American values was honed while practicing a trade for which he was not licensed?

The unpleasant truth is that there’s a market for this crap. People will buy just about anything that smells of controversy, and if the public wants to believe they’re learning something new or valuable or even remotely connected to the truth, it’s hard to begrudge publishers for reaping the profit.

Still, there are limits, as when HarperCollins cancelled the publication of If I Did It, O.J. Simpson’s quasi-psychotic volume of filth about how he “hypothetically” could have murdered two people he probably did murder. Even Rupert Murdoch, never one to put ethics before profit, balked at this steaming turd; a month later Judith Regan, who bought the book, was out of a job.

As horrific as O.J.’s deeds were, as nauseating as his public behavior in the years since, he can’t hold a candle to Fredo, as the President calls him, who has aided and abetted the torture of thousands and the murder of hundreds of thousands and can still ask, in apparent indignation, “What is it that I did that is so fundamentally wrong?”

Then there are the liars, the list of recent “memoirs” cancelled in the eleventh hour when they turned out to be hoaxes. Say what you will about Margaret B. Jones or Herman Rosenblat, at least they were never sworn in before Congress.

So there’s precedent, and what I’m asking is that publishers stick to their guns (at the moment, no one has bid on Gonzales’s scribbles) and resist the cynical sirens in Sales and Marketing. In fact, how about a moratorium on memoirs by Bush insiders not currently residing in the Hague? The temptation is enormous, as the industry tries to find a parachute to stop its current freefall, and any potentially high-profile book looks like a ripcord. It’s counterintuitive to walk away from a potential goldmine. But every industry has to draw a line, and the publishing industry’s line should be drawn at mass murderers.

Which brings me back to saving the publishing industry. Frankly, it’s a longshot. Publishers are in deep trouble, and it’s going to take a while to dig their way out. Dan Brown ain’t gonna do it, and neither are the hordes of reprobates scurrying off the decks of the U.S.S. George W. Bush. Focusing on blockbusters, to the detriment of America’s public discourse and literary traditions, is part of what got publishers into this mess. By racing to sign the author with the juiciest gossip, the dirtiest secrets, the most fantastic life story, without regard for the truth or for the consequences of validating the actions of criminals, the industry has cheapened its brand and endangered the loyalties of intelligent readers. Rebuilding their image as serious curators and promoters of our culture seems like a worthwhile way to spend their time in the wilderness. When they get out, they’ll be able to claim not just the public’s money, but its respect.

- Andrew Altschul, Books Editor, The Rumpus

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