[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Staying Awake

[Bill Totten]

Notes on the alleged decline of reading

by Ursula K Le Guin

Harper's Magazine (February 2008)


Some people lament the disappearance of the spotted owl from our
forests; others sport bumper stickers boasting that they eat fried
spotted owls. It appears that books, too, are a threatened species, and
reactions to the news are similarly various. In 2004 a National
Endowment for the Arts survey revealed that 43 percent of Americans
polled hadn't read a book all year, and last November, in its report "To
Read or Not to Read", the NEA lamented the decline of reading, warning
that non-readers do less well in the job market and are less useful
citizens in general. This moved Motoko Rich of the New York Times to
write a Sunday feature in which she inquired of various bookish people
why anyone should read at all. The Associated Press ran their own poll
and announced last August that 27 percent of their respondents had spent
the year bookless, a better figure than the NEA's, but the tone of the
AP piece was remarkable for its complacency. Quoting a project manager
for a telecommunications company in Dallas who said, "I just get sleepy
when I read", the AP correspondent, Alan Fram, commented, "a habit with
which millions of Americans can doubtless identify". {1}

Self-satisfaction with the inability to remain conscious when faced with
printed matter seems questionable. But I also want to question the
assumption - whether gloomy or faintly gloating - that books are on the
way out. I think they're here to stay. It's just that not all that many
people ever did read them. Why should we think everybody ought to now?

For most of human history, most people could not read at all. Literacy
was not only a demarcator between the powerful and the powerless; it was
power itself. Pleasure was not an issue. The ability to maintain and
understand commercial records, the ability to communicate across
distance and in code, the ability to keep the word of God to yourself
and transmit it only at your own will and in your own time - these are
formidable means of control over others and aggrandizement of self.
Every literate society began with literacy as a constitutive prerogative
of the (male) ruling class.

Writing and reading very gradually filtered downward, becoming less
sacred as it became less secret, less directly potent as it became more
popular. The Romans ended up letting slaves, women, and such rabble read
and write, but they got their comeuppance from the religion-based
society that succeeded them. In the Dark Ages, a Christian priest could
read at least a little, but most laymen didn't, and many women couldn't
- not only didn't but couldn't: reading was considered an inappropriate
activity for women, as in some Muslim societies today.

In Europe, one can perceive through the Middle Ages a slow broadening of
the light of the written word, which brightens into the Renaissance and
shines out with Gutenberg. Then, before you know it, slaves are reading,
and revolutions are made with pieces of paper called Declarations of
this and that, and schoolmarms replace gunslingers all across the Wild
West, and people are mobbing the steamer delivering the latest
installment of a new novel to New York, crying, "Is Little Nell dead? Is
she dead?"

I see a high point of reading in the United States from around 1850 to
about 1950 - call it the century of the book - the high point from which
the doomsayers see us declining. As the public school came to be
considered fundamental to democracy, and as libraries went public and
flourished, reading was assumed to be something we shared in common.
Teaching from first grade up centered on "English", not only because
immigrants wanted their children fluent in it but because literature -
fiction, scientific works, history, poetry - was a major form of social
currency.

To look at schoolbooks from 1890 or 1910 can be scary; the level of
literacy and general cultural knowledge expected of a ten-year-old is
rather awesome. Such texts, and lists of the novels kids were expected
to read in high school up to the 1960s, lead one to believe that
Americans really wanted and expected their children not only to be able
to read but to do it, and not to fall asleep doing it.

Literacy was not only the front door to any kind of individual economic
and class advancement; it was an important social activity. The shared
experience of books was a genuine bond. A person reading seems to be cut
off from everything around them, almost as much as someone shouting
banalities into a cell phone as they ram their car into your car -
that's the private aspect of reading. But there is a large public
element, too, which consists in what you and others have read.

As people these days can maintain nonthreatening, unloaded, sociable
conversation by talking about who murdered whom on the latest hit TV
police procedural or mafia show, so strangers on the train or coworkers
on the job in 1841 could talk perfectly unaffectedly together about The
Old Curiosity Shop (1841) and whether poor Little Nell was going to cop
it. Since public school education was strong on poetry and various
literary classics, a lot of people would recognize and enjoy a reference
to Tennyson, or Scott, or Shakespeare - shared properties, a social
meeting ground. A man might be less likely to boast about falling asleep
at the sight of a Dickens novel than to feel left out of things by not
having read it.

The social quality of literature is still visible in the popularity of
bestsellers. Publishers get away with making boring, baloney-mill novels
into bestsellers via mere PR because people need bestsellers. It is not
a literary need. It is a social need. We want books everybody is reading
(and nobody finishes) so we can talk about them.

If we brought books over from England by ship these days, crowds would
have swarmed on the docks of New York to greet the final volume of Harry
Potter, crying, "Did she kill him? Is he dead?" The Potter boom was a
genuine social phenomenon, like the worship of rock stars and the whole
subculture of popular music, which offer adolescents and young adults
both an exclusive in-group and a shared social experience.


Books are social vectors, but publishers have been slow to see it. They
barely even noticed book clubs until Oprah goosed them. But then the
stupidity of the contemporary, corporation-owned publishing company is
fathomless: they think they can sell books as commodities.

Moneymaking entities controlled by obscenely rich executives and their
anonymous accountants have acquired most previously independent
publishing houses with the notion of making quick profit by selling
works of art and information. I wouldn't be surprised to learn that such
people get sleepy when they read. Within the corporate whales are many
luckless Jonahs who were swallowed alive with their old publishing house
- editors and such anachronisms - people who read wide awake. Some of
them are so alert they can scent out promising new writers. Some of them
have their eyes so wide open they can even proofread. But it doesn't do
them much good. For years now, most editors have had to waste most of
their time on an unlevel playing field, fighting Sales and Accounting.

In those departments, beloved by the CEOs, a "good book" means a high
gross and a "good writer" is one whose next book can be guaranteed to
sell better than the last one. That there are no such writers is of no
matter to the corporationeers, who don't comprehend fiction even if they
run their lives by it. Their interest in books is self-interest, the
profit that can be made out of them - or occasionally, for the top
executives, the Murdochs and other Merdles, the political power they can
wield through them; but that is merely self-interest again, personal profit.

And not only profit but growth. If there are stockholders, their
holdings must increase yearly, daily, hourly. The AP article ascribed
"listlessness" and "flat" book sales to the limited opportunity for
expansion. But until the corporate takeovers, publishers did not expect
expansion; they were quite happy if their supply and demand ran
parallel, if their books sold steadily, flatly. How can you make book
sales expand endlessly, like the American waistline?

Michael Pollan explains in The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006) how you do it
with corn. When you've grown enough corn to fill every reasonable
demand, you create unreasonable demands - artificial needs. So, having
induced the government to declare corn-fed beef to be the standard, you
feed corn to cattle, who cannot digest corn, tormenting and poisoning
them in the process. And you use the fats and sweets of corn by-products
to make an endless array of soft drinks and fast foods, addicting people
to a fattening yet inadequate diet in the process. And you can't stop
these processes, because if you did profits might become listless, even
flat.

This system has worked only too well for corn, and indeed throughout
American agriculture and manufacturing, which is why we increasingly eat
junk and make junk while wondering why tomatoes in Europe taste like
tomatoes and foreign cars are well engineered.

You can cover Iowa border to border with Yellow Corn #2, but with books
you run into problems. Standardization of the product and its production
can take you only so far - because there is some intellectual content to
even the most brainless book. People will buy interchangeable
bestsellers, formula thrillers, romances, mysteries, pop biographies,
and hot topic books up to a point, but their product loyalty is
defective. A book has to be read, it takes time, effort - you have to be
awake to do it. And so you want some reward. The loyal fans bought Death
at One O'Clock and Death at Two O'Clock ... yet all of a sudden they
won't buy Death at Eleven O'Clock even though it follows exactly the
same surefire formula as all the others. The readers got bored. What is
a good growth-capitalist publisher to do? Where can he be safe?

He can find some safety in exploiting the social function of literature.
That includes the educational, of course - schoolbooks and college
texts, favorite-prey of corporations - as well as the bestsellers and
popular books of fiction and nonfiction that provide a common current
topic and a bond among people at work and in book clubs. Beyond that, I
think corporations have been foolish to look for safety or reliable
growth in publishing.

Even during what I have called the "century of the book", when it was
taken for granted that many people read and enjoyed fiction and poetry,
how many people in fact had or could make much time for reading once
they were out of school? During those years most Americans worked hard
and worked long hours. Weren't there always many who never read a book
at all, and never very many who read a lot of books? We don't know how
many, because we didn't have polls to worry us about it.

If people make time to read, it's because it's part of their jobs, or
other media aren't readily available, or they aren't much interested in
them - or because they enjoy reading. Lamenting over, percentage counts
induces a moralizing tone: It is bad that we don't read; we should read
more; we must read more. Concentrating on the drowsy fellow in Dallas,
perhaps we forget our own people, the hedonists who read because they
want to. Were such people ever in the majority?

I like knowing that a hard-bitten Wyoming cowboy carried a copy of
Ivanhoe in his saddlebag for thirty years, and that the mill girls of
New England had Browning Societies. There are readers like that still.
Our schools are no longer serving them (or anybody else) well, on the
whole; yet some kids come out of even the worst schools clutching a book
to their heart.

Of course books are now only one of the "entertainment media", but when
it comes to delivering actual pleasure, they're not a minor one. Look at
the competition. Governmental hostility was emasculating public radio
while Congress allowed a few corporations to buy out and debase private
radio stations. Television has steadily lowered its standards of what is
entertaining until most programs are either brain-numbing or actively
nasty. Hollywood remakes remakes and tries to gross out, with an
occasional breakthrough that reminds us what a movie can be when
undertaken as art. And the Internet offers everything to everybody; but
perhaps because of that all-inclusiveness there is curiously little
aesthetic satisfaction to be got from Web-surfing. You can look at
pictures or listen to music or read a poem or a book on your computer,
but these artifacts are made accessible by the Web, not created by it
and not intrinsic to it. Perhaps blogging is an effort to bring
creativity to networking, and perhaps blogs will develop, aesthetic
form, but they certainly haven't done it yet.

Besides, readers aren't viewers; they recognize their pleasure as
different from that of being entertained. Once you've pressed the ON
button, the TV goes on, and on, and on, and all you have to do is sit
and stare. But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed
alertness - not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from
gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can't lull you with
surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire
gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head. A
book won't move your eyes for you the way images on a screen do. It
won't move your mind unless you give it your mind, or your heart unless
you put your heart in it. It won't do the work for you. To read a story
well is to follow it, to act it, to feel it, to become it - everything
short of writing it, in fact. Reading is not "interactive" with a set of
rules or options, as games are; reading is actual collaboration with the
writer's mind. No wonder not everybody is up to it.


The book itself is a curious artifact, not showy in its technology but
complex and extremely efficient: a really neat little device, compact,
often very pleasant to look at and handle, that can last decades, even
centuries. It doesn't have to be plugged in, activated, or performed by
a machine; all it needs is light, a human eye, and a human mind. It is
not one of a kind, and it is not ephemeral. It lasts. It is reliable. If
a book told you something when you were fifteen, it will tell it to you
again when you're fifty, though you may understand it so differently
that it seems you're reading a whole new book.

This is crucial, the fact that a book is a thing, physically there,
durable, indefinitely reusable, an object of value.

I am far from dismissing the vast usefulness of electronic publication,
but my guess is that print-on-demand will become and remain essential.
Electrons are as evanescent as thoughts. History begins with the written
word. Much of civilization now relies on the durability of the bound
book - its capacity for keeping memory in solid, physical form. The
continuous existence of books is a great part of our continuity as an
intelligent species. We know it: we see their willed destruction as an
ultimate barbarism. The burning of the Library of Alexandria has been
mourned for two thousand years, as people may well remember the
desecration and destruction of the great Library in Baghdad.

To me, then, one of the most despicable things about corporate
publishers and chain booksellers is their assumption that books are
inherently worthless. If a title that was supposed to sell a lot doesn't
"perform" within a few weeks, it gets its covers torn off - it is
trashed. The corporate mentality recognizes no success that is not
immediate. This week's blockbuster must eclipse last week's, as if there
weren't room for more than one book at a time. Hence the crass stupidity
of most publishers (and, again, chain booksellers ) in handling backlists.

Over the years, books kept in print may earn hundreds of thousands of
dollars for their publisher and author. A few steady earners, even
though the annual earnings are in what is now dismissively called "the
midlist", can keep publishers in business for years, and even allow them
to take a risk or two on new authors. If I were a publisher, I'd rather
own J R R Tolkien than J K Rowling.

But capitalists count weeks, not years. To get big quick money, the
publisher must risk a multimillion- dollar advance on a hot author who's
supposed to provide this week's bestseller. These millions - often a
dead loss - come out of funds that used to go to pay normal advances to
reliable midlist authors and the royalties on older books that kept
selling. Many midlist authors have been dropped, many reliably selling
books remaindered, in order to feed Moloch. Is that any way to run a
business?


I keep hoping the corporations will wake up and realize that publishing
is not, in fact, a normal business with a nice healthy relationship' to
capitalism. Elements of publishing are, or can be forced to be,
successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a
proof of that. How-to books and the like have some market
predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is
partly, literature - art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is,
to put it mildly, vexed. It has not been a happy marriage. Amused
contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the
other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.

So why don't the corporations drop the literary publishing houses, or at
least the literary departments of the publishers they bought, with
amused contempt, as unprofitable? Why don't they let them go back to
muddling along making just enough, in a good year, to pay binders and
editors, modest advances and crummy royalties, while plowing most
profits back into taking chances on new writers? Since kids coming up
through the schools are seldom taught to read for pleasure and anyhow
are distracted by electrons, the relative number of book-readers is
unlikely to see any kind of useful increase and may well shrink further.
What's in this dismal scene for you, Mr Corporate Executive? Why don't
you just get out of it, dump the ungrateful little pikers, and get on
with the real business of business, ruling the world?

Is it because you think if you own publishing you can control what's
printed, what's written, what's read? Well, lotsa luck, sir. It's a
common delusion of tyrants. Writers and readers, even as they suffer
from it, regard it with amused contempt.

Note {1}:

The Associated Press polled 1,003 adult Americans. The NEA's "Reading at
Risk" survey of 2002 announced dire declines in the number of
book-headers. Their 1992 poll of 13,000 adults showed that 60.9 percent
had read any book, but in 2002, only 56.6 percent had; in 1992, 54
percent of adult Americans admitted to having read a work of literature
that year; ten years later only 46.7 percent did. Strangely, the NEA
excludes nonfiction from "literature" in its polls, so that you could
have read The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, The Voyage of the
Beagle, Elizabeth Gaskell's biography of Charlotte Bronte, and the
entire Letters and Diaries of Virginia Woolf that year and yet be
counted as not having read anything of literary value.

_____

Ursula K Le Guin lives in Portland, Oregon, and has been publishing
prose and verse since 1959; her most recent books are a novel, Voices
(2006), and a volume of poems, Incredible Good Fortune (2007).

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