The publisher drinks wine from the author’s skull

I am indebted, once again, to Justin Isis, for sending me the link to this blog article, written in two parts, here and here. The blog is his vorpal sword, by Hart Williams, more power to his elbow. The entry in question concerns the death by suicide of the writer Thomas Disch, and the utterly disgraceful treatment he received on a radio talk show prior to this event, which Williams says was probably not the cause of that suicide, but merely indicative of the current world climate that probably was the cause.

I realise that no one reads anymore, and that this blog entry (divided into two) is very long, however, I would urge anyone reading this to also read that. It is the kind of entry that makes blogging wothwhile. Of course, I am partisan here, in as much as I am also a writer, and I know exactly the climate about which Williams is writing. I don't think that those who are not writers can really quite grasp just how shockingly poorly writers are treated. The very fact that people think that we (writers) are exaggerating here, and should shut up (as they often seem to) is symptomatic of the unquestioned attitude that writers somehow deserve to die in poverty and misery with talk-show hosts and publishers by turns pissing on and digging up their grave for trinkets. Do YOU believe that's what we deserve? Do YOU believe that's what I deserve? Because, you know, I really, really would not be at all surprised if that's what I get.

Anyway, for those who can't be bothered to read the whole article, here are some extracts:

In an age that really doesn’t have much use for poetry, Disch was a poet. In an age in which Science Fiction has resoundingly triumphed — it seems incredible now to realize that in the 1950s, SF writers were referred to as “lunatics” and openly mocked for their silly ideas that anyone could go into space, or — folly of follies! — go to the MOON — SF is marginalized, a caboose on the train that is marked “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” and represents, fundamentally, concepts in Science Fiction that were outmoded by the 1930s.

It was the zeitgeist, finally, that did Disch in.

Think about it, the publisher actually SPENT TIME with the writer. It’s almost as though … writing MEANT something. As if the words of a gifted poet and writer were WORTH something, had VALUE, and were worthy of cultivation. If that sounds normal to you, you are sadly off the beaten track. You see, in the 1970s and 1980s, all those book companies were bought up by conglomerates, usually with a movie studio and a record company attached, BOTH of which made so much more money than the publishing arm, that landing as the corporate manager of the poor print arm of Engulf & Devour, Inc. was the corporate equivalent of being sent to an Alaskan Arctic Radar station, or in the old USSR, being sent to Siberia.

And, understandably, those sub-managers, often with very little experience in books, spent their days in corporate exile plotting their return, ultimately contemptuous of their low station, and the denizens thereof.

And, as the despised “crop” of the despised arm of the mega-conglomerate, the writer has been reduced to a cheap vaudeville act, driving his beat-up tin lizzy from city to city, “performing” on the radio, at book store “signings” and “readings,” occasionally picking up honoraria for speaking to a college or university, none of which is either facilitated nor promoted by the publisher.

The author is now responsible for his own bookings, he is his own theatrical agent, and often — as I watched ACLU President Nadine Strossen at the World Pornography Conference at the Universal Sheraton in Hollywood in 1999 — with an icy and desultury ennui, opposed by their very publisher! The publisher was to have shipped a box of books for Strossen to sign/sell, and either forgot or shipped on a slow boat to China, as the books never appeared throughout the Conference.

Given that her peers in the area of First Amendment law were all present, her publisher didn’t merely inconvenience the author, but actively FUCKED her – metaphorically, of course.

And if the President of the ACLU is treated thus by publishers, what chances have you, newbie authors? It is an obscenity that has robbed our society of thought, and our civilization of its very civility. The contempt of the subliterate for our literacy has actively promoted subliteracy — TV and movies by writers who aren’t really writers, who haven’t really, actually read.

Of all the horrors of media concentration, this is the subtlest, but the one with the most far-reaching consequences.

It has been established time and time again that both ends of the Bell Curve suffer from the same socialization problems: cut off from the Great Middle of the Bell. And yet, while we are happy to invest in programs, homes, special bathrooms, ramps, and the rest for our disabled and, yes, retarded, NO ONE has a moment to spare for the brilliant.

(We will throw truckloads of self-congratulatory charity at the disabled, but we will not invest in our equally ostracized brilliant? What the hell is wrong with us?)

If there were any investment that a society could make, it would be to simply wring a few more years of production out of our Tom Dischs, our Philip K. Dicks, our authors and our artists and our musicians, who NOW LIVE in a society that has turned them into Financial Untouchables, and, as with Tom Disch, lovers without survivorship benefits, to be evicted in old age from their homes because their dead partner, and not they themselves, had signed the lease.

Compared to the expense of one day’s misbegotten war in the Middle East, it would be such a cheap investment, and yet, churls like the New York Magazine commenter will always value the theoretical expense to their abstract wallet (rent control, therefore no compassion for him!) over the real suffering of real genius.

Our failure of decency is a fundamental betrayal of our very civilization. If it were just us that paid the price for that blindness, perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, but it is, in fact, our children and our children’s children who will pay the price. Is there such a thing as generational Child Abuse? Hopefully not, because we would be adjudged guilty for stealing their culture, their resources, their health and saddling them with our debts.

Is it too much to ask that the publisher stop by occasionally and bring Chinese take-out? If that were the difference between a few more years and the Hemingway/Thompson/Disch exit strategy, is it really so much?