Spoiler Alert: Publishing and The Artist

I saw The Artist this weekend, just in time for the Oscars. It really is a great movie; it's remarkable how much the actors are able to communicate nonverbally, and how secondary a role dialogue can actually play. But mostly what I took from The Artist is a question: What does this have to do with me?

I had the same reaction to Moneyball when I saw it on the plane, which may be an indication that I've become hopelessly self-absorbed. But I think mainly it's an indication of how much anxiety surrounds my industry--book publishing--right now; everybody's looking everywhere for hints at what the way forward might be. We are, to hear people tell it, fast approaching a time where books are not manufactured products but stored bits of data that are eventually either downloaded onto someone's system or printed on demand for the quaint and nostalgic. Meanwhile, and partly as a consequence, it's becoming dramatically simpler for anyone to publish a book, and there are less hurdles to sales success than there were in a more concrete, brick-mortar/paperback world. It seems, to the morose among us, that every publisher's anxious cry "What will become of me?" is met by its customers' cold response: "Frankly, I don't give a damn."

A similar futility faces the silent film actor George Valentin in The Artist. He's at the top of his game, an American treasure, when he bumps into a young, starry-eyed girl (Peppy Miller) looking to make her break in the business. They feel a spark but don't act on it; he's married and, while not particularly happy, he's noble and responsible. But he does her a couple of big favors and she's on her way to the top--just as "talkies" are about to make their break.

George is initially incredulous about the dawn of the nonsilent film, but in the best scene of the movie we see the fear of his own obsolescence come into stark relief. We see him pass through the stages of grief as the film progresses--through that initial denial, to anger at the industry that is so quickly and gleefully leaving him behind (including a sad moment when Peppy mocks him while he listens on), to bargaining with the American people to continue to trust him for their entertainment, to a prolonged and devastating depression, and finally to acceptance--a point that has its own sense of tragedy. Like any experience of grief, the path is not clean, and we see each stage reassert itself at various points. But it's a classic passage, one that many of us face in ways large and small. It's why the movie works so well despite not having spoken dialogue; it's why the movie feels fresh and progressive even as it uses a long-outdated form.

What's most interesting to me--and what I hope will be encouraging to my friends in my industry--is that The Artist adds a sixth stage to grief. Beyond acceptance comes, surprisingly even to George himself, a new wave of creativity. No sooner has the talkie killed the silent film star than the silent film star has innovated the talkie, revitalizing his industry before it even realized that innovation is necessarily part of its mission.

We are reminded in The Artist that there was no Cambrian explosion in cinema, before which all films were silent and fundamentally the same, and after which all films were talkies and fundamentally the same. Cinema, like all art--like publishing if we're smart about it--is never static but always growing, and major changes are never the final page of the story, only the turning of a chapter. The rise of the ebook, the democratization of the publishing process, the advances of on-demand printing are to publishing what talkies were to silent films: they are challenges, most definitely, but they are not terminal diseases, not death sentences. They are challenges to our creativity, and it would be a shame if we settled for mere acceptance.

Send This Book to Congress: My GoodReads Review of Fixing the Moral Deficit

Fixing the Moral Deficit: A Balanced Way to Balance the Budget by Ronald J. Sider
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Earlier this year I included in my Year of Overdue Books (books I should have read by now) the recently released Back to Work by President Bill Clinton. I justified its inclusion rather flimsily by deciding that getting the United States (and the world) back on its financial footing was an urgency and that those charged with the task were taking far too long. Whatever--I really just wanted to read the book. Anyway, I finished it and moved on, and a few weeks later pilfered a copy of Ron Sider's brand-new Fixing the Moral Deficit: A Balanced Way to Balance the Budget. Published by my employer (full disclosure), it wasn't even officially a book yet; it arrived a few weeks early from the printer and hadn't yet been received into stock. I begged my colleague to let me have one of his review copies and took it with me on my cruise vacation.

I like reading books like this on a cruise ship. Given the obvious excess and self-indulgence that I and the other vacationers are enthusiastically indulging in, reading about budgets as moral documents seemed patently absurd, and I'm entertained by absurdity. (I read Andy Crouch's delightful Culture Making on a cruise as well, sitting just outside the ship's casino as I read about the human vocation of creating culture, not simply consuming or critiquing it.) But I also wanted to read up on the budget crisis and a solid, evangelical, ethical take on how the U.S. budget affects "the least of these" (to borrow language from Jesus) and how the budget might be reshaped to re-establish justice, promote the general welfare and re-form a more perfect union.

Ron Sider is the right person to write such a book. Author of the provocative Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger and founder of Evangelicals for Social Action, Sider has made economic justice his central vocation for decades. During that same time, the U.S. budget has become increasingly unwieldy, while politics have simultaneously become increasingly cutthroat. Our fiscal situation seems intractably disordered, quite honestly, and those charged with crafting a responsible budget seem too close and too compromised (by their electability, by their donors, by the heated rhetoric of their colleagues) to break through the morass and come up with something creative, just and sustainable. It takes people like Sider, like you and me, who are invested in the results of budget negotiations but who can keep enough critical distance to ask the right questions and commit to the best answers, and who have enough political clout (through the vote, through petitioning, through other collaborative ventures) to influence the decision-makers in a responsible direction.

Sider was one of the drafters of the 2011 Circle of Protection statement, which called for a budget that took debt seriously but also took the government's responsibility to its suffering citizens (and, it should be noted, to the least of these throughout the world). This book is in many ways an expansion of that statement, with specific suggestions and honest critique and a fair bit of attention to "generational justice," or an acknowledgment that spending beyond our means now is effectively the exploitation of the generations that come after us. I'm not sure I buy that; every investment is, effectively, a debt carried forward, and so some of the debt we incur today will actually benefit the people who come after us. That's not the only thing that I don't totally buy into in this book (figure 3.1 on the "different levels of Christian responsibility," for example, made me flinch a bit, as it seems to ignore Jesus' response to the question "Who is my neighbor?"); and it sometimes seems that the more specific Sider's recommendations get, the less likely they are to be implemented (the progressive surcharge on federal income tax to be applied to the debt strikes me as something that will never ever pass Congress ever). But quite honestly, no one tells it like it is quite like Ron Sider, and as moral documents go, this book is hard to dismiss. I'm going to send a copy to my congressional representative, my senators and my president, and I wouldn't mind it if you did the same. Fixing the moral deficit in the U.S. budget is overdue by decades, and the clock is running down for a responsible response. Sider may not have hit the bullseye with Fixing the Moral Deficit, but he's absolutely aiming in the right direction.

View all my reviews

The New Prodigal Age: My GoodReads Review of The Long Tail

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm a fan of Chris Anderson, author of The Long Tail--even though, to my knowledge, he's never gotten a penny of my money. I read occasional issues of Wired magazine, where he's editor in chief, when I see it on the magazine rack in our office library. I downloaded his super-interesting Free as an ebook when he was giving it away, for free. And while I've been talking with coworkers and other publishing industry people for years about Anderson's ideas in The Long Tail (c. 2006), I didn't actually stop to read it till it showed up this month on the free table where I work. What can I say--I'm a moocher, and it's easy to not have to pay Chris Anderson for his stuff.

Anyway, The Long Tail is in many ways the perfect book for me to read in this, my Year of Overdue Books. It has direct bearing on the work I do, acquiring and developing books in the publishing industry, which is as much as if not more in flux than it was when Anderson was writing this book. It's also horribly dated--MySpace has eight index page entries, while Facebook has none; and ebooks for Anderson circa 2006 are a non-thing, whereas now, just six years later, they're the thing that will either save us or destroy us. And yet it's still an important book to read for a couple of reasons:

1. It challenges the deep-seated and self-reinforcing assumption that hits drive the economy, and so all resources must be mustered perpetually for the next big hit (say, Lady Gaga), to the sacrifice of the "misses" or "losers" or "also-rans" or whatever derogatory term we assign to the nonhits among us.

2. It points to (although it doesn't deliver entirely) a strategy for capitalizing on the abundance of nonhits that in reality buttress the economy and, in the new prodigal age, have the potential to be the main drivers of any business success.

Anderson argues that the Internet age has caused a shift in the economy from scarcity (cut-throat competition for limited time, money and other resources) to abundance. Today the cost of manufacturing pretty much anything is being perpetually shrunk (although that's as much to do with exploitation of workers in a global economy as it is to technological improvements). Meanwhile, everyone with Internet access has the world at their fingertips, and in the post-2006 development of the smartphone, in their pockets. I use the Shazam app, for example, pretty much every day to identify a song on the radio or the Internet that was never a hit but is clearly appealing; as a result I've been able to discover b-side and album cuts from classic artists like David Bowie and John Lennon, as well as new songs by artists who haven't been given the hit-nod by the old-school mainstream music industry, such as Half-Handed Cloud and the Avett Brothers.

Of course, I'm hearing these songs, which means that they're getting played, which seems to refute Anderson's thesis. But remember that this is six years down the road from publication of The Long Tail and eleven years since the launch of iTunes, which Anderson writes has sold every song it carries at least once. Industries are already acting on the premise of the Long Tail; indeed, we had long tails long before Anderson pointed them out to us. What's principally different is the rise of bits and the decline of atoms--the shift to digital content and products and corresponding abandonment of the necessarily limited capacity of brick-and-mortar stores, three-shift factories and human consumption. All these have been solved (or, maybe better, problematized) by digital technologies. We can buy things from virtual stores; in increasing cases they come to us not as physical products off a truck but as pieces of data instantly transmitted; and human consumers can effortlessly translate every curiosity, every impulse, into an instant purchase. Toward the end of the book Anderson describes a printer you can buy that pulls data from the Internet and "prints" it as a physical product. That doesn't sound novel now (though it most certainly did way back in 2006), but think of the implications: as Anderson puts it, "Today you print your own photographs at home; tomorrow you may print the frame, too" (p. 226).

The Long Tail feels to me a bit long in the tooth. Anderson repeats himself here and there throughout; his book Free is a much more systematic presentation of some overlapping content about the declining costs of production and the implications thereof for selling. But the main thing here is hope: in the transition from scarcity to abundance in the global economy, the power is shifting from the supplier to the consumer, and the supplier's role is shifting as well, from baronic doler of content and materials to wise guide and creative bandleader. In an economy of abundance, producers and sellers have the responsibility and opportunity to do more, not less.



View all my reviews

The Year of Overdue Books: My GoodReads Review of The Writing Life, by Annie Dillard

The Writing Life by Annie Dillard
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My Year of Overdue Books--books I honestly should have read by this time in my life--continues with The Writing Life by Annie Dillard. I rescued this book from the free table at work a few years ago; as an editor and a writer myself, I thought it was certainly worth giving some time to. Then it sat on my shelf for years. Probably my coworker who left it on the free table has seen it sitting there and silently judged me on more than one occasion.

Annie Dillard published The Writing Life in 1989, well into her writing career. She could legitimately claim, at age forty-four and with multiple publications to her credit, the writing life she claims in the title. She had already won a Pulitzer Prize for her Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and had written quite a lot besides. Any writer could write a book about writing; Annie Dillard is the kind of writer whose book on writing people want to read.

At 111 pages you'd think this book would be barely a walk in a park. But it takes a long time to read. That's the nature of Dillard's writing, which is slow-cooked and well-crafted. You can almost make out the beads of sweat in between the lines that bore the prose from draft to draft. "Writing a book, full time," she claims, "takes between two and ten years" (p. 14). That's funny, because I've written two books and a booklet, all part time, and the time between contract and publication for each was never longer than fifteen months (and a good chunk of that time was taken up by the publisher's work). There is, I'm left to understand, a difference between the avocational writer, such as myself, knocking out prose in the cracks of the day, and a Pulitzer-level writer who gives her life to the work.

So, all props to Annie Dillard. That being said, I had a hard time reading the book. There's something about writing about writing, honestly; we're curious about how great writers do what they do, but we go into it knowing that their experience is distantly removed from our own, and so we take their counsel with a grain of salt. Annie Dillard writes in a converted toolshed in late winter because she likes a bleak space with nothing to distract her; I'm writing this review on my laptop in my family room with an episode of Kevin Smith's television show Comic Book Men playing in the background. Annie Dillard is trusted with a key to the local university library so she can work in dark solitude in the wee hours of New Year's Eve; I write when I can't think of anything better to do. I simply can't relate.

I'm glad I read the book. It's good for me to read up to such writers. I learn from their style, from their craftsmanship, and I also learn to recognize the distinctions of my own style. I'm not holding my breath for a Pulitzer, but I do hope to continue to write. I got very good advice once, on a first draft, from a friend who's much closer to Dillard's aptitude than I am; he told me to go through the manuscript paragraph by paragraph and drill down deeper at every point. I thanked him and set about revising, but I'm sure I didn't get as deep as he would have wanted me to. And I'm sure Annie Dillard would have read the finished product and sighed in frustration at what weekend writers such as myself are doing to her craft. But every draft--even the last--is in a larger respect a work in progress. We archive moments in time by what we write, but we don't cease to think and reflect and evolve and erode once the publisher presses "Print." Whether vocationally or avocationally, we write for our lives--which is as it should be. Dillard's advice on page 68 I will take to heart, albeit half-heartedly: "Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?"

Well, when you put it like that . . .

View all my reviews

The Year of Overdue Books: My GoodReads Review of How the Irish Saved Civilization

How The Irish Saved Civilization by Thomas Cahill
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I'm Irish. Don't let my last name (Zimmerman) fool you. I'm the proud son of a guy whose surname unfortunately obscures the fact that my mother (of whom I'm also a proud son) is 100 percent Irish, so assuming my dad has a little Irish in him (who doesn't?) I'm at least 50 percent.

Not sure why that's so important to me, but it is. There's a mystique to Irishness that simply isn't there with other countries of distant origins. Ireland is ever green, it's charmed and charming, thick with thin space. So you would think that by now I would have made my pilgrimage there. But I haven't; Ireland remains a place of fanciful imagination for me. You would also think that by now a proud wannabe Irishman would have read the 1995 national bestseller How the Irish Saved Civilization, but again you would be wrong. It's been on my shelf for at least fifteen years, waiting for me to finally crack the spine and dig into it. I'm not sure what kept me otherwise occupied; it might be that my copy has a very distracting manufacturing error on the cover (the spot gloss over the title is offset by about an inch, or it might be that I have so much time-sensitive reading to do that I just left this one slow-cooking on the back burner, or it may be that I know that calling myself Irish is absurd and vaguely insulting to people who actually are from Ireland, so I felt guilty and avoided the uncomfortable feeling. Whatever: 2012 is the Year of Overdue Books, so I swallowed my pride and indulged my self-perception and dug in.

How the Irish Saved Civilization is popular history at its apex. Part of a series of audacious arguments from Thomas Cahill ("The Hinges of History"), this one observes that the fall of the Roman Empire, and the corresponding neglect of the archives of Western Civilization, was paralleled by the Christianization of Ireland, whose nascent monks saw their calling as twofold: with no real opportunity to experience the "Red Martyrdom" of persecution unto death for their faith, the Irish took first to "Green Martyrdom," or the cloistered life of studying the Scriptures and the works of the early church. The prodigality of the Irish mind (from p. 131: "In Patrick's world all beings and events come from the hand of a good God, who loves human beings and wishes them success. And though that success is of an ultimate kind--and, therefore, does not preclude suffering--all nature, indeed the whole of the created universe, conspires to mankind's good, teaching, succoring, and saving") was such that enthusiasm for these early works extended to pagan classics and other ancient culture. Irish monks became archivists for the ancient West at a time when Roman civilization could no longer be bothered by its own history, its own legacy.

Simply archiving history wouldn't save civilization, of course. And the Irish historically were not known for sitting around all day. Irish folk history, told compellingly by Cahill, is lusty and brazen, sometimes violent and always earthy, painting a portrait of a culture consumed with life. Such virility informs monasticism in unique ways, and the Green Martyrs eventually created an outlet for Irish wanderlust with "White Martyrdom," self-surrender that involved taking to sea and going where the waves took you. White Martyrs went everywhere--some undoubtedly to their death--and some of them wound up in Europe, where they reintroduced Europe's classics to itself. Not only Western civilization's culture was restored but a culture of being cultured was introduced: the love of learning and the life of the mind, and ethical responsibility that flows from it, can be traced back to the missionary efforts of these White Martyrs.

Thomas Cahill made me want to be more Irish, not less. His writing is elegant and exhilarating; you assume the truth of his absurdist claim--that a tiny island in the North Atlantic known mostly for famine, fantasy and fatalism gave Western civilization its life and soul back. I'm struck by the lessons from Cahill's take on European history for people today invested in the mission of the church. There are plenty of parallels between late antiquity and the modern day, from the comparable dominance and moral vulnerability of ancient Rome and the contemporary United States to the increasing cultural irrelevance of the Christian church. Cahill does a great job of noting the different worldviews of the two great Confessors of the era--Bishop Augustine of Hippo and Patrick of Ireland--one who developed an intricate and complex theology that over time proved oppressive and confining, the other whose theology was informed by and responsive to the people who surrounded it. Patrick's Christianity, focused as it is on God's good desire for his creation, is more welcoming than Augustine's, which emphasized the fall from grace and led to an emphasis on human depravity and eternal conscious punishment. If the church wants to "win some," it could stand to learn from Patrick's winsome approach. From the last paragraph of Cahill's book:

"Perhaps history is divided into Romans and Catholics--or, better, catholics. The Romans are the rich and powerful who run things their way and must always accrue more because they instinctively believe that there will never be enough to go around; the catholics, as their name implies, . . . instinctively believe that all humanity makes one family, that every human being is an equal child of God, and that God will provide. . . . If our civilization is to be saved--forget about our civilization, which, as Patrick would say, may pass 'in a moment like a cloud or smoke that is scattered by the wind'--if we are to be saved, it will not be by Romans but by saints."

View all my reviews

On Editing as Leadership

This is going to sound obnoxious and self-important. I've been thinking a lot lately about editing as leadership.

It sounds obnoxious because I'm an editor, and so it sounds as though I'm making some audacious claim to being a leader, which itself is a bit obnoxious because people (especially evangelicals, of which I am also one) talk far too much about leadership. You'd think "evangelical" and "leadership" were synonymous; but then you'd get to know some of us and realize that they can't possibly be.

Nevertheless, I, an evangelical editor, am feeling more and more convinced that the work I do is in many ways an act of leadership. Max De Pree, author of Leadership Is an Art, suggests that the first responsibility of a leader is to "define reality." And part of the task of an editor is to winnow and prune the assertions and assumptions of an author until the truth of it is clearly revealed. That sounds Quixotic when you think about it--what if, ultimately, there's no truth to be revealed in it, or the editor's biases and assumptions simply add to the murk rather than bring clarity? But that's the task; whether we're up to it or not is another question entirely.

I supervise editorial interns where I work, which is a self-serving way of saying that I show them around and help them do their work and try to explain why they're doing what they're doing. I don't get paid any extra for it, and I haven't received any training for it, so I make it up as I go. (Don't tell my boss.) But as I go about my business with interns I find that I regularly resort to language of leadership--taking initiative, challenging error, encouraging and empowering authors, noticing what's missing, anticipating what will or won't work, making tough cuts, solving thorny problems, all that sort of stuff. Introduce the role of acquisitions and you open a whole new vista for leadership values: in acquiring authors and their books, editors define the reality of a publishing program, giving it coherence and consistency in style, language and content. Editors function as ambassadors for their publishers to critics and reactionaries, defending the occasional provocative or controversial book or author by asserting the value of a marketplace of ideas. Editors look for new terrain to cover, new ideas to exploit. Editors effectively establish what's important, what merits 208 or 352 pages of ink on paper to be disseminated to the masses. Editors, with the acquisition of each author and in the development of each manuscript, help to define reality.

See what I mean? Obnoxious. Self-important. But I need to remember this every once in a while so I don't just roll over and take whatever gets thrown at me, so I don't give in to the temptation of expediency at the expense of quality. I need to remember this so I take my work seriously when so often it starts to orbit absurdity. And to be frank, the rest of you need to remember that editors offer leadership as well, because the temptation for authors is to bypass editing in the pursuit of quick publication, or even publication at all; and the temptation for readers is to accept the end result. The reader is, after all, the ultimate editor, editing with his or her pocketbook and defining the reality of what writing (and the research and craftsmanship behind it, and by extension, the pool of knowledge we all swim in and drink from) becomes.

Back in the Future Business: My GoodReads Review of Bill Clinton's Back to Work

Back To Work: Why We Need Smart Government For A Strong Economy by Bill Clinton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

In 1992 I voted in a presidential election for the second time. My candidate was Ross H. Perot; having graduated from college into a fumbling economy in which I couldn't find gainful employment, I remember telling people that I thought a president with good business sense would be worth four years of disregard for civil rights.

Based at least partly on the sway of weird voters like myself toward Perot, Bill Clinton was elected to his first of two presidential terms, and the United States enjoyed an eight year run of a pretty good economy, which President Clinton spends a great deal of ink reminding us in the early part of his book Back to Work. He does so in that slick, casual, ole buddy way that he always has, which translates into print pretty well and manages to demonstrate his superiority over those who preceded and followed him in office without directly insulting them. It's pretty brilliant, actually.

With the benefit of time, and with his own freedom post-presidency to speak relatively freely, it's easy to see what made President Clinton a good president, and to actually get a little excited about the proposals he's putting forward in Back to Work--excited in the face of a still-limping economy, oddly enough. Clinton's premise here is that modern malaise is a result, in large part, of an anti-governmentism that ushered in Ronald Reagan's two-term presidency and, to be fair, yielded its own economic resurgence. "Government isn't the answer to your problems," Reagan famously declared; "Government is the problem." With that he deregulated industries, marginalized the work of many government programs, and generally subverted the legitimacy of federal government as an institution.

Clinton doesn't quite offer the opposite premise, but he rightly confronts the absurdity inherent in the claim: a world in which democratically elected representatives whose mandate is for the well-being "into remotest futurity" (my new favorite phrase, from Thomas Jefferson, I believe) are inherently dangerous to taxpaying people trying to get by in a free economy managed by unchecked giant multinational companies with obligations only essentially to shareholders and an inherent responsibility to exploit natural resources to their fullest extent and to get as much energy out of employees for as little cost as possible . . . I guess I'm a little worked up. As Clinton puts it, "Big corporations don't get hurt by the current system. They just put plants in other places, create good jobs there, and leave their earnings there" (p. 133). Governments are like family: they have to love you. Corporations are like, well, corporations: everything is negotiable.

Clinton confronts the premise of anti-governmentalism in a winsome way, making a brief positive case for government (in reality, anti-governmentalism doesn't merit a long response) before getting down to how government, collaborating creatively with business, can create environments where truly amazing things can happen.

There are as many problems with Clinton's worldview as there are with Reagan's, of course: government collusion with megabusiness has as many pitfalls as government subservience to megabusiness, if the larger vision of what makes for a good society isn't kept in place. But it is actually pretty energizing to see the curtain pulled back on a creative approach to governmental economic policy, which this book effectively is. Clinton offers forty-six preliminary ideas for getting people working again, dealing with bank jitters, and revitalizing American innovation. They all sound both good and plausible, based again largely on Clinton's unique delivery: he makes the novel seem normal and the normal seem novel. The Secretary of State, for example, is praised for her ongoing work in "commercial diplomacy," which strikes me as a task more appropriately managed by the Commerce Secretary and which seems like it would distract from the State Department's important work in cultivating democracy and human rights overseas. Meanwhile, many of the examples of corporate innovation for the public good held up by Clinton have a long history, and some seem to be pretty widely accepted business models. Clinton showers such relatively mainstreamed business-government collaboration with praise; their practitioners are Edison and Einstein and Mother Teresa rolled into one. You forget that they've been doing what they're doing for twenty or thirty years now, throughout the Era of Anti-Government. Again, this is part of Clinton's leadership genius, why some call him beloved and others call him slick. To affirm one, I'd suggest, is not to deny the other.

I would have greatly appreciated some endnotes in this book; the claims Clinton makes about his and others' presidencies, as well as the outcomes of his proposed best practices, are rosily enough presented that my "He's a politician" skepticism did occasionally kick in. And yet, I found myself inspired--much more confident than I had been in alternative sources of energy (wind and solar, in particular), in the potential contained in government-corporate collaboration, and ultimately more knowledgable about the role of government in both navigating economic downturn and, more importantly, stimulating innovation and prosperity. The reality is that government isn't a problem; government simply is, and it is what we the people make of it. Clinton's vision for the short term is undergirded by his strong faith in the possibility of creative governance; that faith and vision is actually quite contagious.

This book continues, for me, the Year of Overdue Books. It's an odd inclusion, since the idea for what I'm reading this year is "books I should have read long ago," and Back to Work only came out a few months ago. But resolution to the current economic troubles is long overdue, as is a cogent confrontation of the "Government is bad for you" bias of too many people. President Clinton provides both effectively here. As he puts it, America needs to get back in the future business. If we accept his premises and pursue his recommendations, to quote a song of my childhood from the great Timbuk 3, "the future's so bright, I gotta wear shades."

View all my reviews

The Year of Overdue Books: My GoodReads Review of the Autobiography of Malcolm X

The Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I started reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X in December 2010, during my Year of Biography, when I was reading only books dealing with history surrounding specific people. I finished reading it in January 2011, during what I'm calling my Year of Overdue Books, or books (or topics) that I should have read already by now. That seems appropriate to me; I bought my copy of Malcolm X's autobiography about nine years ago at a conference and it's been sitting around since then, but more to the point, it's a seminal book for a particular historical moment that's always been of interest to me. I guess I was a little scared (I'm a white man, and the bulk of the book makes a pretty compelling case that the white man is the devil--although Malcolm X steps back from that sweeping claim after he meets some white people of good will on his pilgrimage to Mecca). But I finally stepped up and took the book on, and I'm glad I did.

Having grown up in the post-Civil-Rights-Movement North, living (as I did) in a relatively cloistered small city in the midwest, I didn't have much direct exposure to racial tensions. That's not to say that there wasn't racial tension present; it's just that my town, like most in the Northern United States, had figured out how to keep different ethnicities from confronting one another on a day-to-day basis. As such, much of what's described in X's early-twentieth-century Michigan, Boston and New York was exotic and surreal to me: his father's death at the hands of whites has a chilling casualness to it, as did the removal of X and his siblings from his mother's home. The bizarre predictability of whites coming to Harlem to indulge their hedonism and curiosity about African American culture, and the accommodation of their indulgences by black business owners and customers alike, was startling. I've come to imagine a wall of separation, of sorts, that divided black from white prior to (and even since) the Civil Rights Movement akin to the Apartheid policy in twentieth-century South Africa; that wall is certainly there, but from X's account it's much more porous than I assumed, and the points of connection X draws our attention to did little to elevate human dignity on either side of the wall.

Through X's account we come to understand the logic of subsistence; in a culture that is horribly unbalanced in fundamentally unjust ways, hustling and otherwise working outside the established economy simply makes sense. It's not sustainable, of course; the Powers That Be never stop being, and despite X's sensibility, intelligence and creativity, the law caught up to him and sent him to prison. Doing so, it turns out, was effectively like locking him in a library, because time and solitude channeled his intellect toward more systematic, conceptual thinking. I'm reminded of a line from Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from a Birmingham jail: "What else can one do when he is alone in a narrow jail cell, other than write long letters, think long thoughts and pray long prayers?" That's what occupied X's time, and that's what ultimately set him on the course of the Nation of Islam and his later conversion.

I'm infinitely more familiar with King than with X. King gets taught in white classrooms and preached in white churches; King gets a national holiday and a national monument. I would take none of those things from him; I'm a great admirer of Dr. King and regard him as a national treasure and a great figure for the ages. It's also important to realize that, X's critiques notwithstanding, King's movement in the 1950s and 1960s met powerful and malevolent resistance from the white Powers That Be. King and his colleagues were certainly speaking truth to power, and they paid for it in a multitude of ways including martyrdom. But there was another side to the Civil Rights Movement that coalesced for a time in Malcolm X, and it tragically gets underplayed even, I think, today. For example, the controversy that erupted over President Obama's Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright, centered around a video of him preaching shortly after the terrorist attacks of 2001, when he said something to the effect of the destruction of the World Trade Center was a case of "the chickens coming home to roost." Conservatives cried foul and openly worried about the influence of such anti-Americanism on a potential president. None of the reports I read observed Rev. Wright's allusion (intentional, I'm certain) to Malcolm X's improvised response to a reporter asking his opinion about the assassination of President Kennedy:

"Without a second thought, I said what I honestly felt--that it was, as I saw it, a case of "the chickens coming home to roost." I said that the hate in white men had not stopped with the killing of defenseless black people, but that hate, allowed to spread unchecked, finally had struck down this country's Chief of State. I said it was the same thing as had happened with Medgar Evers, with Patrice Lumumba, with Madame Nhu's husband. . . .

"It makes me feel weary to think of it all now. All over America, all over the world, some of the world's most important personages were saying in various ways, and in far stronger ways than I did, that America's climate of hate had ben responsible for the President's death. But when Malcolm X said the same thing, it was ominous."

This was X's great gift, I think: he was an incisive cultural critic in the truest sense of the word: he cut into the culture right where the wound was, and was unapologetic in doing so. He spares no one his honest appraisal, which is undoubtedly why he got into trouble so much. But who can fault honesty? And who can ignore his appraisals without becoming complicit in maintaining unjust status quos? In my first book, Comic Book Character, I likened Martin Luther King to the X-Men's leader, Professor X, and his nemesis, Magneto, to Malcolm X. I'm sure I wasn't the first to do so; in fact I'm confident that this was in the mind of the characters' creators from the beginning. Professor X wanted the world to accept and live with and enjoy the fruit of equal association with the persecuted class he represented; Magneto wanted to shake off the bonds of the oppressors and establish a new world order "by any means necessary." At the time of his origins, Magneto was the leader of the "Brotherhood of Evil Mutants," but he's since dropped the word evil from the description because he wasn't evil, he was angry, and legitimately so. And the tension that perpetuated between Professor X's reconciliation vision and Magneto's battle against oppression gave the ethical challenges of different people cobbled together real shape and even real hope. That's also the case with King and X: the two challenges they presented to white hegemony in the United States, while seemingly irreconcilable, have worked together now over decades to reshape our understanding of racial reconciliation and racial justice. Again from King's letter: "I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth."

Tucked away in the Autobiography of Malcolm X is a moment of reflection about how he would be judged by history: "Sometimes, I have dared to dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice--which disturbed the white man's smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency--that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe." I daresay that in this and many ways, Malcolm X seems to have proved himself right.

***

I finished reading this book on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s birth. I didn't want to take away from King's day, however, so I delayed my review till now. I'm sensitive like that.

View all my reviews

Primary Fever: Conversion Stories Trump All

I forget, in the years between presidential elections, how enthralled I tend to get with the electoral process. My wife forgets too, until she comes home (or back from the bathroom) to find that I've turned on MSNBC to catch the latest poll numbers or when she sees that I've stored more than one debate to our DVR. It's primary fever, and it's goonie and nerdy, I get it.

This year, at least at this point in the process, all my mania goes to the Republicans, since President Obama is running unchallenged by members of his party. Most of the attention has gone to the "anyone but Mitt Romney" effect--all but one major Republican candidate (the decidedly Romney-esque John Huntsman) enjoyed a brief surge as the candidate who might unseat the front-runner and heir apparent. But as an evangelical, one of the traditionally heavily-courted voting blocs in Republican politics, I'm interested in how religion is (or, more to the point, is not) playing a significant role in the selection of a candidate and, potentially, our next president.

Since the late 1970s and the emergence of the "Moral Majority" of politically savvy conservative evangelicals, the Republican party has actively (sometimes slavishly) courted the evangelical vote. President Reagan was a darling of the movement; television celebrity Pat Robertson and political activist Gary Bauer each mounted significant campaigns of their own; George W. Bush took all the momentum in 2000 when, in response to a question likely designed to make him look stupid ("What political philosopher do you most admire?"), he responded "Christ, because he changed my heart." Baptist minister and former governor Mike Huckabee put up a surprising fight for the 2008 nomination, and fellow evangelical and governor Sarah Palin galvanized voters and has changed multiple elections since her pick as John McCain's running mate.

This year, however, conservative evangelicals seem to be at a loss. The professing evangelicals in the field (including Texas governor Rick Perry and Minnesota representative Michelle Bachmann) performed poorly and dropped out early. Two Mormon candidates (including powerhouse Mitt Romney) have forced awkward statements from evangelicals either coldly rejecting him as part of "a cult" or granting him religious bona fides that papered over more than a century of evangelical suspicion. National evangelical leaders rallied around former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum as their candidate thanks to his ideological purity, but Santorum got no bump in the polls. Meanwhile South Carolina evangelicals (according to exit polls) threw their support to former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. Both Santorum and Gingrich are Roman Catholic, another faith tradition with a complicated relationship to evangelicalism. And then there are the lots and lots of Obama evangelicals who are waiting till the fall to get in the mix. There is, effectively, no evangelical consensus.

I find that striking. Evangelicals have long trumpeted their lack of power; persecution and marginalization are key themes in an evangelical mystique. We like to think of ourselves as inheritors of the mantle of the martyrs and keepers of a pure, countercultural Christian trust that regularly leaves us on the outs with the powers that be. And yet that's been largely a myth; evangelicals have been in many ways kingmakers in American politics for decades now.

Suddenly, that's no longer the case. Part of the reason, I'm convinced, is the bifurcation of the evangelical movement into two camps: the movement of the mind and the movement of the heart.

The evangelical brain--the folks who prioritize worldview and the principles and values that flow out of it--fall in line behind Rick Santorum. Santorum wrote the foreword to a book my evangelical employer published, a profile of the figurehead of the Intelligent Design movement, which challenges the hegemony of Darwinian evolutionary theory. Santorum's rhetoric (race-baiting comments notwithstanding) is integrationist, making the case that the origins of the universe, along with tax policy and foreign policy and gay marriage and abortion and gun rights and everything else, all flow from a common center. Faith informs every idea, for the Santorum crowd that includes Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. Santorum is purpose-driven; he answers the classic evangelical question "How then shall we live?" He gets the vote of the evangelical mind.

Newt Gingrich also makes a case from ideology. He calls himself a historian and lays claim to the title of Republican Party intellectual. But his case for the candidacy isn't one based on the brain; it's based on the heart.

No one talks about Ronald Reagan more than Newt, evoking for nostalgic evangelicals a time when the Moral Majority and its worldview orientation was in its cultural and political ascendancy. His rhetoric suggests an ideological divide that reinforces the martyrdom mystique; Newt can't wait to debate President Obama and chase his Saul Alinsky-loving, food-stamp-doling, Israel-hating booty out of office so we can get back to family values. Meanwhile, Newt's personal history has been filtered through the lens of life-change: his two failed marriages, based on his adulterous relationships, are part of a past he's repented of; his personal failings turned him to a ruthless personal inventory and an encounter with God; his life now is one of classic goodiness--he's a loving husband, father and grandfather who wants to serve his country and restore our exceptionalism by bringing us back to our roots. Newt alone among the Republican candidates owns the conversion story, and evangelicals eat that sort of thing up. While Santorum won the evangelical mind, Newt has won the heart.

At least that's my take on it. I'm a bit too feverish to fully trust my conclusions, so I welcome your feedback and critique. But I do expect that if Gingrich wins the Republican nomination, there will be a battle in the fall, alongside the ideological arguments, between Gingrich and Obama (who has his own conversion story to point people to) to prove which is the better master of the evangelical language and mystique, and so which candidate will win the heart and the vote of evangelicals--and, ultimately, whether that win will make any difference.

On Writing, Part Two of Two

When I was a kid, there was a candy bar (I forget the name) whose ad campaign was a jingle that went "________: It's too good for kids! _______ is made for grownups!" That (besides the "too good" part) is what I determined to be the case about a recent presentation I was giving. In the moment I looked at my notes on why we write and how we write better, and then looked at my audience of third-graders. I decided that they would pelt me with crayons if I shared what I had prepared, so I ditched the notes and just made conversation.

Their gain is your loss; instead of subjecting them to my random thoughts, I'm posting them here. This is the second and final post. I should note that the teacher's primary goal was to get the kids to "capitalize the first word in a sentence." So, this might sound a bit basic at points. But basic isn't bad; it is, in fact, foundational.

***

How we become good writers
First off, notice what you like when you read. If you read a story or a book that you just love, tell people you love it, and tell them why you love it. And then read it again, but this time pay attention to why you love it. You really like a particular character: Why? What did the writer do to help you connect so strongly to that character? You have a clear mental picture of a place: Why? How did the language and structure of what’s written help you imagine the place so effectively? You have a crystal-clear understanding of a thing or an idea—how a car works, for example, or why RBIs are important in baseball. Find examples in what you read that really connected the dots for you.

The first step in becoming a good writer is figuring out what good writing is, which involves paying close attention to the tricks and habits of the writers you really like. Every writer is different; sports writers write differently and use different tricks than novelists or poets. But every writer has access to the same toolkit. J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit is a very different kind of fantasy story than J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter & the Sorcerer’s Stone; both of them are good because the authors do what they do uniquely well, but also because they mastered the mechanics of good writing that are common to all writers.

So, as boring as it might seem, it’s worth really practicing the basics in your toolkit. Take spelling seriously; when you’re texting, take the time to make sure you spelled everything correctly. It’ll slow you down, but good writing is generally slow. While you’re taking spelling seriously, you’ll unconsciously write more seriously, more compellingly, both because the things you’ve written seem worth the time it took to spell right but also because you’ve slowed yourself down and thought through each word. E. B. White, author of Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little and a variety of other classic stories, told his writing students, “Let every word tell.” By that he meant that, when you write (or more to the point, when you revise), make sure that every word on the page is there for a reason. Paying attention to spelling is one way of training your mind to do that.

So is playing by the rules of grammar. Capitalize the first word of every sentence because it’s a new sentence, and that’s what you do. Check in every once in a while on blogs like The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks or Apostrophe Abuse.com to see why bad punctuation makes writers look silly. Look for errors in stuff you read; show people—your teachers, your parents, your writer-friends—when you find errors, and reflect on why it’s so hard to find errors. The main reason is that good writers make the rules of spelling, grammar and punctuation instinctive so they can focus on making their writing style more unique, more compelling.

Last thing: If something is important enough for you to write about, it should also be enough for you to talk about and act on. If you’re passionate about an issue—say, famine in Africa or homelessness in Lombard—write about it, sure, but also do something about it: raise money, volunteer, write your senators and the president, that sort of thing. The most important thing for writers is to not get lost in their writing, not to make their writing something they do simply to amuse or otherwise indulge themselves, but to actually have an impact on their world. Commit yourself to that, and your writing will get better because you’ll care more about what you’re writing, and so will your reader, because you’ve shown them how to care.

On Writing, Part One of Two

Last week I had the opportunity to speak to a class of kids about writing and publishing. I'm a writer and editor, so I think about this stuff a lot, and I enjoy the opportunity to opine when it comes along. So I wrote up a bunch of notes and tromped on over there, only to realize immediately upon entering the classroom that what I had prepared was not going to play in a room full of third-graders. So I improvised, and we (or I, I should say; ask teacher Tony Melton what the kids thought) had a good time.

I still liked what I had put together, though, and I'm still suffering a fair bit of blogger's block for the new year. So here's the first of two posts on why we write, how we write, and how we get better at it.

***

Why we write
We write because something about what language does compels us. We notice the impact of sentences, of paragraphs, of stories, on the people around us and on ourselves. We notice that we think better about an idea when we can look at it on screen or on paper. We notice that much of what we know about the universe, about the past, about ourselves, about our neighbors, we know because we read it, which means that someone wrote it. We write because we can and because we should.

Sit down in a quiet, calm place and write down what comes to mind. Then read what came to mind and think about it some more and write what you find yourself thinking about. Maybe you’re thinking about a person—a friend or your mom or the president. The more you write about that person, the fuller a picture you gain for yourself of that person. That sort of thing.

What we write
We write what we know or want to know, what we see or wish we saw, what we dreamt or what gave us nightmares. We write about people who inspire us, places that impress us, things that intrigue us. We write about things we feel special connection to and things that we think we can explain or illuminate in ways that other people can’t. If you’re a fan of baseball, write about baseball.

If you have a favorite singer, write about that singer’s music or imagine what life as a professional singer might be like.

How we write
There’s writing, and then there’s revising. Writing is what we do when we first sit down. Revising is what we do once we’ve finished writing and want to make our writing better. No writing is what it could be without committing to revising.

As you review what you’ve written, ask yourself questions: What more would I like to know about this person, place or thing? What details have I left out that are important to what I’m writing about? What will make this story more interesting? More realistic? Funnier? What more do I need to know about this subject to do justice to it?

How we publish
Publishing is a tricky business. It takes far more than one person to get something published. There’s the writer, of course, but there’s also the editor—the person who reads what the writer has written and helps him or her revise. There’s the person who imagines what the text should look like on the page, and if there are pictures that should go alongside it, what those pictures should look like. There’s the person who manages the technology so people can read what’s written—whether in print or on the computer. There’s the people who let the world know that this new thing is out there and should be read, and the people who get it from the box into their hands. The writer has a responsibility to all those people to give them something good to work with.

Why we read
We read because a writer has captured our imagination. We read because someone has convinced us we need to know more about something. We read because we’re bored or because the TV’s on the fritz. We read because it’s one of those things that human beings have discovered can make us happy and make our lives better. We read, generally, as an act of faith that keeps getting rewarded with a good experience. And we write because we’ve seen the power in writing by what we’ve read.