A Look Back at Franzen v. Oprah

Emily Gould had a depressing but fascinating piece about the state of fiction and novelists today. It’s realistic, it’s absurd and it’s bad for the culture. I think she and I agree there;s a lot of great stuff being written these days that is not finding an audience and that a broken industry is not able to provide livelihoods for writers, especially as the side gigs in journalism and academia have come under such pressure.

It’s frightening to think, but hard to escape feeling like society has finally looked back at long-form narrative storytellers on both stage and plays and said, “We don’t really care.” I should add “the screen” to that, as well, as art house theatres continue to disappear and we increasingly choose to stream our corporate-approved entertainment at home.

Stll, people who like to read (thank you, women!) really like to read. So everybody has a chance in what Gould describes as a high stakes casino game. You can probably still hit it big with the right art film, too. Not so sure about a non-musical stage play, partricularly if it isn’t based on a previously successful property.

One issue Gould mentioned was the Oprah book clubn controversey:

“Most people who care think that Franzen refused to appear on Oprah to promote The Corrections, but what actually happened was worse. The novel was anointed a book club pick (an honor that, when the show was on network television, could conservatively increase book sales by a factor of 10), and preparatory B-roll was shot in Franzen’s hometown of St. Louis. Then, in a preceding Fresh Air interview, he said, “I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience, and I’ve heard more than one reader in signing lines now at bookstores say, ‘If I hadn’t heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it.’ Those are male readers speaking.” Oprah’s response: “Jonathan Franzen will not be on the Oprah Winfrey show because he is seemingly uncomfortable and conflicted about being chosen as a book club selection. It is never my intention to make anyone uncomfortable or cause anyone conflict. No one has ever been told to fuck off and die more politely.”

Truly, Franzen did exhibit snobbery regarding Oprah and he lacked appreciation for women readers of fiction at a time where they would carry the entire industry for decades. But, I worked in a chain bookstore during the Oprah years and he’s not wrong about how that label used to grab customers. Men flocked to the towers of John Grisham and Tom Clancy books we were required to erect and place at the front of the store. Men and women both flocked to the Steven King and Dean Koontz book temples that we built. Only women went to the Oprah Book Club display.

The author and book I most remember from those years was “She’s Come Undone” by Wally Lamb. Lamb’s been a working writer and teacher since 1981 but owes his widespread notoriety to that first Oprah pick. But he hasn’t had a career like Franzen’s, has he? It seems that Franzen’s old kerfuffle with Oprah has aged badly from the perspective of social criticism but that his desire to set his work apart from the Lambs of the world was the right one, if judged by his subsequent successes.

Authory – A Service Every Working Writer Needs

More dissapears from the Internet than a writer might expect. I started writing for publication in the 1990s and some newspapers like The Albuquerque Tribune, a former Knight Ridder stalwart, are no longer with us. Some alternative papers I worked for like Crosswinds never archived online and then there were all of the do-it-yourself zines that exist only on the Way Back Machine. I also worked for 10 years at Forbes, which has changed a lot since I joined their staff in 1999. I wrote hundreds of articles there for its print and online publications and have lost many over various redesigns and iterations of their business model. I was also, for a good run, an op-ed columnist for The Daily, a News Corp publication, intended for tablets only, that launched in 2010 and folded two years later. Its entire online archive is gone. I have only some of the drafts I submitted.

I was never the kind of writer who kept scrapbooks full of clips. As business has moved online I’ve assumed anybody wanting to do business with me would just Google me anyway and I’d have to be comfortable with the results, whether they were investigative features, comedy pieces or salty comments I’d left over on Gawker.

Then I found out about Authory. With just a few clicks, you can aggregate all of your online writing into one website, and organize them by type, date or publication. My page is here and I love it. The interface is easy to use and its aggregation features are thorough. Any working writer, especially these days, will find themselves impressed by the breadth of work it uncovers — we’re all writing a bit for money and a bit for passion and occassionally for both, after all. Just seeing my work in one place as reignited my interest in writing book reviews, which was something I’d allow to trail off in recent years.

Authory also makes it easy for me to direct potential employers and collaborators to specific types of work that I do while still allowing me to showcase a broad range of interests. I can see integarting Authory into almost every part of my professional development — and it really takes a lot of the strain out of pitching work. Most of us write because we enjoy writing, not because we like selling products or ourselves.

It may seem as if Authory will breed its own reliance but they have a cool feature where you can download your entire archive from them at any time, so you’ll never lose the work they’ve done for you if you cancel for any reason. That a high-touch, personal clippings service like Authory is a bargain at current prices.

Publisher with History of Defying Censorship picks up Woody Allen’s Memoir

Arcade Publishing, the press that brought out Woody Allen’s memoir Apropos of Nothing in a surprise drop today, has a venerable record of fighting censorship and prudery. Its founder, the late Richard Seaver, brought D.H. Lawrence’s suppressed novel Lady Chatterly’s Lover to the public in the 1950s.

Suppressed book finds a home!

From the 2009 New York Times obituary:

“Richard Seaver, an editor, translator and publisher who defied censorship, societal prudishness and conventional literary standards to bring works by rabble-rousing authors like Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, William Burroughs and the Marquis de Sade to American readers, died Tuesday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82.”

As editor in chief of Grove, he also published The Story of O as well as work by William Burroughs, Henry Miller and the Marquis de Sade. Arcade, the publisher he founded and grew into one of the most important independent publishers in the U.S. has an impressive backlist that includes the memoir of director Ingmar Bergman, for which Allen provided an introduction.

How appropriate that this daring publisher has stepped up to douse the flames of 2020’s virtual book burning.

Red Shirts is Free From Tor

Through March 21st, you can download John Scalzi’s Red Shirts from Tor, for free. It’s a great deal because, in my opinion, this 2013 science fiction comedy about those poor starship crew members who always die on away missions is worth actual money.

This book is very free through March 21st

It’s a great way to kill some quarantine hours. Enjoy!

The Ongoing Censorship of Woody Allen

Today’s contribution is a link to my opinion commentary at MovieMaker magazine, a publication that has supported the independent film industry and the visions of thousands of artists, since 1992.

Please read about it here.

New Rules for Cultural Criticism

I don’t know what it was that had me reaching for my Voltaire a few months ago — probably something in the cultural air portending a dissolution of standards and, yes, a Closing of the American Mind that must be dealt with.

Forget Joe Biden, we need Voltaire.

New Rules for Cultural Criticism:

  1. Don’t speculate about real people’s personal lives, you’ll never get it right.
  2. Never wish a creative work out of existence. Criticize it all you want, denounce it if you must, but never seek to destroy it or isolate it from other people’s attention.
  3. “De-platforming,” or whatever the scolds are calling it these days, has more in common with red baiting, blacklisting, book burning and Victorian shaming than it does to liberation or empowerment.
  4. The first amendment is a subset, and a damned small one, of free speech and expression. It does not define the concept.
  5. It’s fine not to work on creative projects that offend you morally, but it’s bankrupt to try to hinder them if the creators wish to move on without you.
  6. While you can reassess works you liked in the past, you shouldn’t ignore what initially attracted you to the art.  While you don’t have to laugh at the same joke over and over, you can’t unlaugh at something.
  7. Everybody has standing to create anything and to comment on anything.  This is the essential human right from which all others derive.
  8. Don’t make lists of ten, they’re too predictable.

Readers Are the Resistance

Wandering through the Tribeca Barnes & Noble today, I came upon something surprising in these repressed cultural times. The publishers of the maligned and protested American Dirt have stuck by their author, as has Oprah’s book club.

Not only that, but a store employee who likes the book is not afraid to say so.

Of course I’m not saying anybody should like this novel or buy it. But imagine letting readers decide, rather than giving into pressure from activists who are out for nothing more than to silence the people they dislike and the points of view they’re afraid to contend with.

Power to the readers.

The Persistence of Hardcover Books

I like books as objects and books as art and so I love a good hardcover book, even when they’re heavy, bulky and hard to carry around. I’ve also worked in book stores and I know that fans prefer hardcovers as keepsakes and that people prefer to give hard cover books as gifts.

But I wasn’t aware of the economics, spelled out here at Mentalfloss. Hardcover book buyers like me are giving publishers better margins. So now I can feel good about hoarding them, too.

Books! by Chris Lawton

Of course, you can sometimes save money by buying them remaindered. As I recall from my book shop days, a lot of unsold hard covers are torn apart and remade as trade paperbacks, that hybrid form that separates literature from trashy reading.

Like a lot of people, I’m reading more on apps lately. I do like being able to make notations and to share them on Goodreads. But I miss the feel of a hardcover book when I read that way. Also, and this is the worst, nobody has figured out a way to get your first edition ebook signed, and you can’t loan an ebook to friends.

Long live the hardcover.

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