Keillor paraphrases The Incredibles, saying
if everyone is a writer, no one is. He tells us about hanging with publishing celebs at a rooftop party, with "wall-to-wall authors and agents and editors and elegant young women in little black dresses" (the last being either call girls or the assistants from the publishing house). And, you know what?
[T]his book party in Tribeca feels like a Historic Moment, like a 1982 convention of typewriter salesmen or the hunting party of Kaiser Wilhelm II with his coterie of plumed barons in the fall of 1913 before the Great War sent their world spinning off the precipice.
That is bold, sir. And at fault? Drum roll please...oh, it's self-publishing, the whipping boy of traditional publishing everywhere!
Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions, and it's all free, and you read freely, you're not committed to anything the way you are when you shell out $30 for a book, you're like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers.
I choose not to articulate my thoughts on this, sirs and madams, for the sake of my sanity. Oy.
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Yes, it is truly a terrible age we live in that people who can't shell out $30 for a book have other options. I guess the free music provided by street performers precipitated the decline of the music industry.
ReplyDeleteDreadful.
Ha! Oh, Laurel, I heart heart heart you.
ReplyDelete"people who can't shell out $30 for a book have other options."
ReplyDeleteYeah, they can shell out $300 for an eReader then they'll be able to read all the self published garbage they can cram into the thing.