#OccupyDartmouth is about to go into its seventh week and everything about it has an air of genteel, if deliberately dilapidated, civility. The signs on the grass are polite (unlike the fellow student drunks who have been known to pull them down according to the Valley News November 20) and their Tweets are sparse and give no account of their daily experience or routine (There is however an archive of their discussions at http://www.archive.org/details/OccupyAmericaDiscussionatDartmouthCollege_).  Their messages have a discretion more akin to those of an Embassy than an Occupation which fits the bill rather well as, given the nature of Dartmouth College (‘Do they want to be a University or a Finishing School for Wall Street?’ as one wiseacre put it), it would seem the tent on the corner of Wheelock and Main at the steps of the Collis Center is just that – an Embassy from the 99% to the 1% that have a majority stake in any Ivy League College.

That only makes #OccupyDartmouth more important to us all. If the powers that be ignore this small occupation that may be better than the treatment meted out to other larger but no less peaceful #occupations.  One of their spokespersons recently pointed this out while commenting on the unprovoked pepper spraying of their #OccupyOakland colleagues.  But then, what with Thanksgiving and its particular folkloric mix of European and Native traditions and its peculiar resonance with the founding of Dartmouth (in pursuance of Eleazar Wheelock’s endeavors to educate Native Americans), perhaps this is a good time for those who have ignored the #occupy message to listen and hear it.

As we recover from the Thursday feast over the long weekend we could all reflect on the small waves this pebble, cast by a very few into the vast waters of conformity, is making. Could it be that more would join #occupyDartmouth if their fellow student thought (as Jeffrey Sachs puts it on the first page of his new book The Price of Civilization) that “without an ethos of social responsibility there can be no meaningful or sustained economic recovery”?  Without which, we might add, there will be no light at the end of the tunnel for anyone.

Might it be that the congregations of the various churches around the town could visit and support these student’s effort to highlight what in any Christian circles must be a scandal, namely that any one should live in poverty (latest US count : 30% of population) to support the rich? Might we see an outbreak of Christian compassion and charity perhaps mixed with a little righteous outrage?

Might #occupyDartmouth and the wider movement begun by #occupyWallStreet so little time ago succeed in making us all see through the self-serving and elitist mantras of mindless growth and profit-taking that are so often disguised with words like “excellence”, “success” and “competition” and by ideas like “too big to fail” or the “effect of market forces” ? Might it be that instead of ignoring the crisis we might all join together for a more equal, more cooperative, more inclusive and a much more humane and fruitful life than is currently on offer?

#OccupyDartmouth is perhaps the true Vox Clamantis in Deserto, the voice of one crying in the wilderness to which we should all listen.

Self-publishing, OccupyWallStreet , and what we have to do.

An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal is entitled, almost disingenuously, “Secret of Self-Publishing: Success”. The author, Jeffrey Trachtenberg, makes a number of valid points about electronic self-publishing, and indeed brings some interesting facts to the table, but his basic and rather obvious thesis goes something like “there’s nothing like success to breed success” (or “established authors have an easier time of it all”) which chimes well with the outlook of the WSJ, Mr. Rupert Murdoch’s American flagship.  Mr. Trachtenberg gives as his prime example, a certain Ms Nyree Belleville who purports to have “earned half a million dollars in the past 18 months selling direct rather than through a publisher”.  Which as Harry Baum in his Self Publishing Review had blogged earlier, is “Pretty awesome indeed for a writer whose publisher unceremoniously dumped her for lack of sales last October (2010)”.

 I was moved to tweet a bleat (on BHPanimalwatch and Bunkerhillpub) as I think there are at least two sides to this story.  I suggested that there was a time when bestselling authors were nurtured by publishers to support lesser known and new writers such as Mr Trachtenberg’s second example, a Ms Eve Yohalem who has so far reported a gross income of $100 against an outlay of some $3400 on her first self-published collection of short stories. This, as everyone knows, is now well nigh impossible as all Publishers’ capital (financial and moral) has been eroded continuously by first the chains, then the internet and now I think self-publishing.

I have long griped about the deleterious effect of the Harry Potter series and the accompanying circus on the future of publishing but lest anyone accuse me of pontificating let me repeat my own Mea Culpa in the matter of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. It must have been on the 8^th of July 1999, a Thursday, that I was shopping in the rather picturesque town of Tenterden in Kent; a Cinque Port no less. I had wandered in to the local branch of Waitrose, the rather up-market English supermarket chain.  There on the end of all and every one of the lavishly stacked food rows, were rack upon rack of Ms Rowling’s latest tome priced at an alluring discount of 50% off the then somewhat daunting price of twenty English pounds. What to do? My two sons had been badgering me for days to get over my prudish, and no doubt snobbish, distaste for the author’s poor style and worse grammar, and buy them the book. In that moment did I pause and think to withdraw to the local bookshop (not an independent but a Waterstone’s though none the less part of my world) and buy them one copy to share? No I bought two at half price and sheepishly dropped them into the trolley with the week’s groceries. And what was to be the ultimate humiliation (apart from the endless enthusiasm of my boys)?  Not the clear and subsequent knowledge that, as headlined in all the next Monday’s papers, the book had broken all sales records, but the small detail tucked in at the bottom of some of the articles stating that 70% of sales had been made in non-bookshop outlets. I had contributed four blue fivers to one of the most blatant examples of capital flight from my business ever. A paltry thirty percent of all those millions if that would stay in publishing and feed booksellers meager margins.

And now we have the same prospect with self-publishing.  This time it is the flight of traffic as well as capital that is at stake. If Amazon and other electronic outlets dominate bricks and mortar and paper and print, then no one will visit a bookshop and any customer selection will be reduced to a truncated, if carefully targeted, number of negative options (as books are in danger of becoming).  If publishers and booksellers can’t sell books it’s not a wonder that the likes of Ms Belleville take their wares elsewhere but they then leave publishing, which begs the question of why Ms Belleville would be writing in the first place. If it is only for money (and that’s hard to believe as writing is such a somatic as well as intellectual activity that even the hardest of hearts can hardly be indifferent to the pleasures it affords) then we should wish her and her kind Godspeed but if, as must I think be the case, that like Ms Rowling she enjoys everything that publishing a book means as a common endeavor of readers and writers and those who publish, the Commons of book-making if you will, than I believe they should reconsider the direction and find ways of working within a system that as I said elsewhere, needs #occupying not emptying.

But then I would say that now wouldn’t I? If writing becomes nothing but a vehicle for making money and publishing is found wanting in its ability to make that money then publishing becomes a circular firing squad and the community dies. If on the other hand judgment is exercised at all levels and content and meaning come before market and money then we will live in a richer world once again. That richer world will need building as without a market of course we cannot sell books. We have to create markets with and for what we do, not do things to fit a market, any market, much less an existing moribund one that has learned to sell nothing except the lowest common denominator of the latest fashion, and electronically at that.  

#Occupy and #reclaim independent thought?

Two book moments, small details that even registered with the idlest journalists covering the London Riots and the occupation of Zuccotti Park, gave me some small comfort that the barbarians may be held back at the gates. Despite the mayhem no bookshop was looted in London and, along with a computer center, the #occupywallstreet protesters set up a library.  A cynic might opine that the looters might not know a book from a hole in the wall or that books offer poor and cumbersome returns to the average looter, and furthermore that on closer inspection the books on the makeshift shelves in Zuccotti Park might not yet include the works of Marx and Engels or those of Freud and Aristotle. Still beggars can’t be choosers and if we must be optimistic it is at least somewhere to start.

Another recent observation gave me heart. Liberty Plaza Park, as it was known in the seventies and eighties was renamed in 2006 for one John E. Zuccotti (total declared “compensation” in 2008 $1,209,450.00) Chairman of the Real Estate Board of New York, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Brookfield Financial Properties (the owners of the 33000 sq ft in question and one of the world’s largest Property Companies), former First Deputy Mayor of the City of New York and former Chairman of the City Planning Commission. Which all sounds very grand, almost Golden Age, harking back to a time when we all had immense respect for the Great and the Good … until the Great Depression came along and quite tarnished the image of the American Grande Bourgeoisie. There is something of an echo here as we face this new Great Depression, and I have this slight smile on my face as I think of John Z and his now turbulent square. Who’d have thought back then that his name would be famous, dragged from being a footnote in the histories of city planning to an exalted, albeit involuntary, position as the name on the flag ship protest site of a burgeoning anti-property, anti-capitalist movement? Sic transit Gloria mundi.

And speaking of the fleeting and ephemeral, the latest and crowning title in what by now is a veritable pyramid of Steve Jobs/Apple panegyrics is out and selling like the hot black T-shirts that are now de rigueur for Apple folk. Without him they say no #Tahrir, no #occupywallstreet, but then no Wall Street or Shenzhen either and, closer to home, no big publishing and no small publishing, at least as we have known it these past couple of decades. If Marx wrote about surplus value, Jobs practically invented hyper-surplus value. His salesmanship often obscured the value of the product in favor of what Marx would have called its fetish value. He almost made one oblivious to failure. Success was the only outcome possible.  Will he too have a monument he did not expect?

The growth of electronic publishing is clearly not making up for the decline in traditional publishing. Worse it may be changing our ability to read independently. Books are being turned in prosthetic devices. A recent article in Publisher’s Weekly referred to “entrepreneurs” (note not publishers) who set out to “try and come up with a way to make reading a truly interactive experience.” As if reading has not been interactive for millennia! What this app and other similar “enhancing” “augmenting” devices are doing is simply turning books into texts to be read by rote with a preset framework of notes and comments, not works of the imagination to be explored by the individual reader. Independent thinking, independent understanding, original thought, and personal new horizons paradoxically may well be receding like a final outgoing tide maybe never to return. Or have we reached the tipping point here and further critical thought will encourage a serious backlash against what in the end will have been a colossal distraction? Time to reboot?

Call and Response

The call of #occupyWallStreet is infectious and irresistible, as has been, and is, the message of the #ArabSpring, the #indignados, the #acampados, the #tentcities  from Tunis to Cairo, through Athens and Madrid, Paris and London, Berlin and Rome, even Tel Aviv and Manama and now cities across America. Democracy has discovered space, has broken out of its ritualized boxes onto the street.  The police seem to think that a well ordered street should be a silent and empty one when they should be protecting it for democracy. The politicians seem to want a “demand”, as set of “reasonable” ideas that they can grasp, possibly debate but ultimately control and return to whatever shaped box they can fit them into. That will be as maybe but in the meantime the important thing is for the 99% to reoccupy the space from which they have been excluded by those who have replaced a more open democracy with a closed system of profit taking that has sucked the energy out of everything positive in life today;  this includes publishing I might add.

Publishing used to be a protected democratic space in which the call and response of ideas operated to the exclusion of those who would exploit education, enquiry and curiosity for money; those with a preference for a bottom line of profit for the few (1%) who backed the easy profiteering of asset stripping, conglomerate verticalization, chain operations and out of town Malls that have swamped us these past thirty years. There was a simple protection device called retail price maintenance which prevented the undercutting of bookshop space by higher margin but less useful products made cheaply on the backs of third world labor.  Publishing then gave way and tried to mimic the new idea but there was no way they could beat the heavy artillery of Gap, Starbucks, or Banana Republic with Waterstones, Borders or Barnes & Noble peashooters.

That was before word of mouth (our kind of “call and response”) was drowned out by outlandish advertising budgets, “coop” placement fees, deep enforced discounting  justified as “retail power” but actually nothing more nor less than capital flight, the bleeding of profits from the bookselling system into the hands of anonymous “shareholders”. It was something like the old enclosure system that dispossessed rural folk and forced them into wage labor in the factory farm or city sweatshop in the 18^th and 19^th century. Something like what’s going on in Africa today as land speculation precedes predicted food shortage – call it by its real name Famine.  It doesn’t feel like that in publishing because you can live without ideas for much longer than you can live without food or water. But dispossession it has been.  And that is why we need to #occupypublishing , to respond to the call of #occupywallstreet with a real debate about how we can sustain our imagination rather than corporate profits and bring back open independent bookselling.

The kids on the street are not poor or destitute but they have realized that you cannot live by bread alone, (though bread on the table is now becoming the main issue for a larger and larger portion of the 99%) and that is why the Whingers of Wall Street are sounding a lot like Marie Antoinette with her “Let them eat Cake” attitude that lost her head. Publishers should #occupy their book space again and resist the eviction of physical (codex) books from their polity by kindle & ipad-happy chains and conglomerates with their shuttered pay wall websites.

How we do this needs debate on the street with readers, thinkers, students,  workers, passengers, travelers, writers, teachers, firemen, even the police and publishers, real people, but let’s abandon that catch-all, and insulting moniker that has diminished us all and not talk to each other as ‘consumers’ any more. Let’s talk to each other as productive human beings instead. Consumers are slaves to the 1%.  The 99% should re-#occupypublishing!