Home is actually the best place for a writer be, in that it’s calm and quiet and you can get a little thinking in, you might hear yourself thinking, it might even be slightly interesting. What I’m thinking about lately is how important it is that I try to get a little work done around her.
Every writer, every figurative artist, I know has a problem with the Home & Away aspect of her or his artistic life. Each of us needs the world to pay attention to us, or rather, to this art of ours, in order that it find its audience. It’s part of the compact. We make the work, then we need — things being what they are — to promote our work. We want the world to invite us to come out. Our job, when invited, is to show up on time, as Jack says, and to not be a pain in the ass.
For a writer this means traveling as an Author on Tour, doing readings in towns where you may well know just about no one. All you can to is hope for some media stuff to do that will encourage folks to come to your reading. On my recent tour in the Pacific Northwest, I was lucky to have friends and family at every stop along the way — otherwise it can get a little lonely. And the crowds in different places are remarkably different and what is funny in one place isn’t funny at all the next. We are a really interesting species and I’m really just endlessly fascinated by the ways in which we do and do not communicate.
There’s a lot of gloom and doom in the book business lately, but it’s nothing compared to what’s happening to newspapers, in which the paper part is simply going away. Serious readers are lately watching in horrified fascination as newspapers stop printing hard copy, trim staffs and retreat to their online editions. Something about the Placeness of the transaction is lost when a newspaper goes on-line, in that the necessity of knowing the local idiom, who it is who’s receiving those bundles on Sunday morning is being irretrievably lost. As I’ve been traveling for my book, the Seattle Post Intelligencer and the Christian Science Monitor have stopped printing papers altogether. Both Detroit papers have gone to four days a week. The only stand-alone Sunday book section is now the New York Times, as the Boston Globe and the L.A.Times having folded their book sections into the rest of their every shorter papers. The Chronicle has recently laid off 125 workers, those remaining forced to take salary concessions. The Oregonian has just asked its workers to take a 10 percent pay cut, the New York Times a 5 percent pay cut, terms non negotiable.
What’s happened in that Americans no longer read a daily paper, whose fault this will be forever debated but it’s a fact. I reference the available sample: our kids, none of whom takes a local daily paper, having noticed that they don’t have time to read it and that it isn’t a particularly green thing to even do. They have grown up to prefer to get their news differently, more on-line and instantly. It was important during our recent election to be pluggede into what I think of as Ant Noise. Ant Noise is my term for the way we share the important news with our intimates with wild gesticulations of our antennae as we come upon one another. We text, we post, we blog, we Friend one another, we email links, we copy everyone who might be remotely interested.
But I’m a newspaper reader to the core of my soul, and mourn the lost of the paper in my hands. Jack and I still get two: the daily NY Times and the most local of local papers, the Contra Costa Times. I grew up on a great city paper, the L.A. Times. It was owned by the Chandler family– an identifiable family used to always own the town paper — in San Francisco it was famously the Hearsts and the DeYoung, Thierots. The Times was, by every estimation, a huge big deal: great columnists, great features, great reporting. It had the the usual Republican bias, which you’d be able to ignore because it was identifiable. The Times, editorially, came down always on the wrong side of causes and during the Vietnam War, there was a once-a-week “news story” that printed in the upper left side of the front page that used the purported body count of the Viet Cong to illustrate the myriad ways in which the U.S. was winning, except that folks were keeping track (and spreading word of that B.S. by Ant Noise) so it was obvious that these facts were not facts, since the body count meant that we’d already killed every man, woman and child two and three times over. Still you knew by its placement on the page, that the story was crap and specious.
Which is the trouble with getting your news online: if you’re used to understanding the importance of a story by its placement — first page or third? above or below the fold? — then the rapid fire rotation of news stories in an on-line edition as they make their way to prominence then just as quickly fade can be bewildering for the reader. Mark Danner’s recent piece on the American Red Cross’s torture findings is a case in point. The piece carefully documents and supports the argument that Bush, Cheney, John Yoo, the whole lot of them (six have just been indicted for war crimes in Spain) absolutely knew what was transpiring in Dark Ops as a matter of policy, appeared in its original length in the New York Review of Books, then, shortened, in the New York Times, but it was on page one, but by the time it was digested to appear in the Chronicle, it was on page five, and shortened almost to the point of insignificance.
But people began to immediately send the link to the NYRB article or the NYT around by email in order to be sure that the word gets out. See? it’s Ant Noise