dark ages
Emberly and I were having our weekly Grace conversation and I found myself admitting some things about how bad things really seem at the bookstore. People are writing books, they just are not getting very published. Maybe the 20th century was sort of this high point. It feels like the dark ages are settling back in very, very fast. My biggest hope is that Oprah will start her own publishing company, and put serious editors and scholars in place to get these books out there. They are backlogging in desks everywhere and there is a Jimmy Buffett novel by the checkout counter. I have to go get a passable xmas present at a big ass bookstore today in the burbs (somehow I think the larger floor space will make this less awful than that apocalyptic midtown borders I was in last week) and I am thinking about how well some kind of sugary latte also available there will help get me through it.
Notice: the coincidence of the rise of formulaic shitty movies and books with HUGE amounts of sugar available at the sales point of same. I sort of think they are making the bad movies precisely so that we will all buy a giant box of Kit Kat nubbins or a ten-dollar soda the size of an arm to chemically assist ourselves through the experience. Sort of like how it's not the printer but the ink cartridges that make you the cash.
Edward Abbey agrees with Kurt Vonnegut that the dark ages never ended. That this interview is dated 1982 is somehow a little bit heartening. I don't know why.
Emb and I were talking about how much worse publishing has become in the 5 or so years since we left graduate school. I am pissed off when I really look at this, and I am really worried about people going into MFA programs. What is going to happen to you, lovelies? My own students who are applying I am not so worried about, because I feel like I will have generated enough--something--to create enough of a nook for their work later on if all mainstream publishing has space for at ALL from women by then is novels about fake tits--putting them in, taking them out, how big is too big? Saline or silicone? (Remember circa 1998 when Allure magazine focusing so much on plastic surgery seemed super disgusting? Now it's like Bryn Mawr or something. It's like Emily Dickinson compared to the rest of the crap hurled at us all day long. Edna fucking O'Brien wrote an article for them last year.) But what about people who are just looking at a model of a writer's life from ten or twenty years ago: go to MFA school, write book, survive, maintain soul and possibly have health insurance through some sort of teaching job. I'm not sure that model is going to work. Maybe there is hope in a legion of stressed out angry writers? Oh jeez. But maybe.
I am thinking more about abbeys, about how the Christians so violently took over the stories and the money of local cultures who had sexier, useful, well-loved, and gender-balanced myths, spirituality, and economics. When the Christians changed the slutty goddesses into saints and removed the right of women to own property, the women sometimes took off for abbeys not because they were so in love with JC but to protect their families' assets--they could protect themselves and not have to turn everything over to the state, oops, I mean church silly me. Small businesses--the new abbeys maybe. But without nuns.
Right now those same fucking good old boys are making a desperate grab for all the stories, wanting to maintain their hold on the stories, the money, the sex lives and intuition of the whole planet.
The true stories sort of disappear as people get addicted to porn and sugar and whatever, crystal meth (can you tell I watched tv last night?). But the need for those stories that sustain us never disappears, and not everyone will go crazy and destroy themselves, and those people need stories passed down, and new stories created, that breathe the life back into life.
Start working on your unicorn tapestries, girls, and merry fucking christmas.