Staying awake: Notes on the alleged decline of reading By Ursula K. Le Guin

[getdown]

Staying awake:
Notes on the alleged decline of reading
By Ursula K. Le Guin
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081907

<snip>

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 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.

more at link
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/0081907

[classof56]

1. Thank you for posting this article by one of my favorite authors.

Her novels and poetry are literary wonders, and this article is right on the money. Proud to say she's an Oregonian, too.

[getdown]

2. you're welcome!

fierce writer, kickass essay. and funny!

[provis99]

3. well, she's factually wrong on the cow corn.

Cows can eat corn without any problems; in fact silage, which is good for cows, is made out of fermented corn stalks.

If she's wrong on this, I wouldn't trust her on any other opinion, either.

[getdown]

5. she didn't say they can't eat corn

she said they can't digest it

(referencing Pollan)

If you're not familiar with her work (sounds like you're not) check it out

[provis99]

10. Cows digest corn.

Corn is used to fatten cattle up before slaughter; in effect, it overdoses them with rich food that they like.

[getdown]

11. Have you read the Pollan book?

I haven't so don't know exactly what she was referring to. Sure it wasn't pulled out of nowhere.

[eilen]

18. cows are designed to eat grass

this is what happens with corn:


Cattle fed on a heavy diet of corn will eventually become sick and die. Via a transcript from Fresh Air with Terry Gross (emphasis added):

GROSS: Let’s get back to the cow’s stomach.

Mr. POLLAN: Yeah.

GROSS: So the cow now is eating corn instead of eating grass. Its stomach is made for digesting grass and turning it into protein. How does the cow’s digestive system handle corn?

Mr. POLLAN: Well, very poorly. It’ll go kablooey if it’s not done very gradually. And I talked to people who said that most cows, most beef cattle getting a heavy diet of corn–and again, they can tolerate some of it, but when you crank it up to 70, 80, 90 percent grain, their stomachs go haywire. They suffer from a range of different phenomenon, one of which is bloat.

You know, the rumen, this organ, is always producing copious amounts of gas, and these are expelled during rumination, you know, when the animal kind of chews its cud. It regurgitates this bolus of grass and in the process releases all this greenhouse gas, essentially methane and things because when you’re digesting grass much gas is produced. But when they’re eating corn, this layer of slime forms over the mass in the rumen, and it doesn’t allow the gas to escape. So what happens is the rumen begins to expand like a balloon until it’s pressing up against the lungs of the animal. And if nothing is done to release the pressure of that gas, the animal suffocates. It can’t breathe anymore. So what do they do? Well, if it gets to that point, they force a hose down the esophagus of the animal, and that releases the gas, and they very quickly put them back on hay for a little while.

So that’s one of the things that can go wrong. Well, perhaps the most dramatic. But a whole other range of problems are created because the corn acidifies the rumen. The rumen has basically a neutral pH when it’s healthy and getting grass, and that’s very significant for a lot of reasons. But you feed it corn and it gets a lot more acidic. And the rumen can’t deal with acids, and what happens is the acids gradually eat away at the wall of the rumen, creating little lesions or ulcers through which bacteria can pass. And the bacteria get into the bloodstream and travel down to the liver, which collects all such impurities, and infects the liver. And that is why more than 13 percent of the animals slaughtered in this country are found to have abscessed livers that have to be thrown away and is a sign of disease.

But this low-level sickness, acidosis or even subacute acidosis, as they call it, afflicts many, many–probably the majority–of feedlot calves, and it leaves them vulnerable to all sorts of other diseases. Their immune systems are compromised. So they get this, you know, horrifying list of feedlot diseases. You know, we have these diseases of civilization, you know, heart disease and such things. Well, they have their own diseases of civilization: feedlot polio, abscessed livers, rumenitis, all these kinds of things that cows in nature simply don’t get.


Then the cows are given loads of antibiotics... which condition bacteria to become resistant.

http://conservationreport.com/2009/11/30/industrial-farm-animal-production-the-cost-of-feeding-cattle-corn/

[Blue_Tires]

4. bookmarked for later

[getdown]

6. good read!

[Odin2005]

7. IMO Most "popular" novels are formulaic garbage.

Seriously, how can anyone think that Danielle Steele is a good author, for example?

[getdown]

8. yeah, have you read LeGuin?

thought provoking, opposite of cheesy

[Odin2005]

9. Yup.

[Fire Walk With Me]

12. LOVE Ursula. Thanks! nt

[getdown]

15. Yes!

[exboyfil]

13. I do find it curious that she entirely

skipped over the most important aspect of the introduction of widespread literacy to the Western world - the desire to access the Bible directly. Take a look at the literacy rates in New England in Colonial times to get a feel for how important that motivation was in making reading widely available. Many of the benefits which later accrued from that literate populace can be attributed to that fact.

Also I think that publishers are going to be very happy to maintain Harry Potter in their portfolio. Those books will be read by my grandchildren and great grandchildren of this I am certain.

[getdown]

14. "skipped over"?

It's definitely in there. She may assume the reader knows this history:

"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?”"


Re: Potter, she was making a point on the expectations of today's publishers and stating her preference if she were one. HP and Tolkien will both be read, eh?

"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."

She's also talking about the perceived value of books. I noticed the HP books show up in droves in thrift stores. People hung on to their Tolkien a bit longer -- many probably still have their childhood copies.



"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."

[JHB]

16. 4 years old, but so what? Still well worth reading...

...which is part of her point.

And there are many, many industries that have suffered because of this same Wall Street/beancounter view of what "successful business" means.

[getdown]

17. all 3 points are true

the piece is timely because it is an example of uncommon incisive writing, less common in commodified times, which she is commenting on.


(the replies here some seem bent on picking apart rather than A Good Read )