Doomed to be a Taker

And now, another episode in our continuing series: Logical Fallacies in Public Discourse. This week: false dichotomy.

I really must apologize to the whole of society, since evidently I am a “taker.” I am a leech, a parasite, a moocher. This was certainly not my intention, but I missed some sort of memo and now I find myself in a category of people responsible for moral decay and the downfall of American greatness. Honest, I had no idea. I’m sorry.

I’m not sure when society was officially divided into “makers” and “takers.” Apparently in the months leading up to the recent election, sometime before Mitt Romney’s infamous “47 percent” remark and before Paul Ryan began lamenting on the campaign trail that “we’re getting toward a society where we have a net majority of takers versus makers.” President Obama, in his inaugural address this week, argued that government entitlements do not make us “takers,” but free us to take risks. I appreciate that, but I think I’m still in trouble.

From what I can surmise, “makers” are entrepreneurs or CEOs of large corporations. They make wealth. They create jobs and grow the economy. These people are sometimes spoken of with a reverence due only to demi-gods, with the strong suggestion that the rest of us ought to grovel before them, perhaps appeasing them with sacrifices.

Meanwhile, “takers” are apparently people who receive government assistance, such as social security, medicare, and certainly welfare. From what I can tell, major government subsidies and tax breaks for certain powerfully lobbied-up corporations and industries do not count. That’s still making, I guess.

Since I’m currently paying taxes rather than receiving entitlements, you would think I might be OK, but I’m not so sure. In the conversations about higher education these days, it’s been tougher than usual to defend the humanities. Should smart students drop out and start businesses? Should smart students avoid the nonsense subjects and stick with math and engineering—online? I’m beginning to wonder if teaching English makes me a taker.

Here’s a chilling voice aimed at last spring’s college graduates:

You think you can do good by working for the government or a non-profit organization? Well, I’ve got news. You’ll be a parasite, just like the rest of them. A leech, sucking the life out of the real, productive economy. That’s another reason it’s so hard for you to find a job. The more people who fantasize about getting paid for doing good…for trying to make a better world…the worse the real world gets. Because that leaves fewer people actually doing the kind of real world work that makes the world richer and more prosperous…and better organized…safer and healthier.

So I guess it’s not just government entitlements. Any job or role in society that does not involve running a business counts as “taking.” I have to assume this includes medicine, the arts, education, ministry. God help you if you work for the government or—shudder—a non-profit. Get thee behind me, leech! Where the military fits into this, I really don’t know. It’s my understanding that the military technically works for the government, but I think we’re supposed to worship the military anyway. Maybe for different reasons.

As I try to understand my dubious role in this new society, a number of things leave me confused.

1) So, any business enterprise qualifies you as a maker? I understand how making furniture or craft beer counts as creating wealth and “making.” I understand how tradespeople like plumbers and builders, especially the ones who own their own businesses, count as makers. But what about businesses that make something pointless and vaguely bad for you, like soda pop or diet pills or badly scripted, R-rated movies? Even if you make something stupid, that’s still creating wealth, so I guess we still celebrate this—right?

What about businesses that don’t make anything at all, but mooch off other businesses and screw people, like say, Enron? Were the executives at Enron makers or takers?

2) If I provide a fairly harmless service, am I a taker or a maker? As I mentioned, I don’t receive government benefits right now, and I’ve never been on welfare. I think I work sort of hard. But I’m a teacher, writer, and amateur musician. I’m paid modestly for the first, exceedingly modestly on average for the second, and none at all for the third. I have no aspirations to great wealth, so it’s OK. But I still feel vaguely guilty.

Because none of these enterprises creates wealth; instead, I am dependent on those who do, and I’m beginning to realize that this makes me morally inferior to them. In fact, my two main fields of endeavor, education and the arts, have always depended heavily on rich patrons and probably always will. The most important community in my life, my church, routinely encourages people to suck wealth out of the market economy and give it away, deliberately, sometimes to poor people who don’t even live in this country. I guess in every dimension of my life I’m doomed to be a taker.

3) What ever happened to “follow your dreams”? I’ve learned from countless TV shows, movies, songs that the purpose of life is to follow your dreams and be true to yourself. Everyone is special in a special way. I never had a dream to work in business or start one. So I didn’t. I guess the Disney Channel wasn’t telling me the whole truth. Then again, Disney is a multi-billion-dollar corporation—a maker in every sense—so I can hardly question their wisdom.

4) What is wealth? I was under the mistaken impression that a society’s wealth includes things like knowledge, wisdom, philosophy; social bonds formed by families, friends, and groups that share goals and interests; and of course, music, art, and poetry. In fact, in grad school (surely a hideous nest of moochers if there ever was one) I learned that the Greek word for maker was poietes, from which we get the word poet. Goes to show you how useless grad school is.

5) What about grace? I’ve learned stuff at church about gifts in the body of Christ (“the eye shall not say to the hand…”), building the kingdom, mercy, justice, and grace. How that fits into this maker-taker business, I can’t imagine. I kind of thought that we were all takers before the great Maker. And that in a healthy society, everyone contributes and receives. Everyone makes and takes.

So I could write up a business plan and start contributing to society properly (“Shakespearean seeks venture capital”). Or we could just put this silly false dichotomy to rest.

House Blessing

My guess: 1971, when people placed family members in glaring sunlight to take a picture, resulting in a shadow of the photographer in the lower right..This week we had good news: a buyer for my parents’ home, after only thirty days on the market. A miracle. Mom signed the purchase agreement on Tuesday, and we’ll close by the end of the month.

So now I must say good-bye to my childhood home.

I’ve haven’t had to face this yet because, since my parents moved to assisted living six months ago, I’ve been in the house about every week for one reason or another. There’s nothing like emptying your parents’ home to deflate a swell of fond nostalgia. First you discover that Mom and Dad haven’t really been maintaining the place properly for about, say, ten years. Then you realize that this is not the place of your childhood memories anyway. It’s smaller, shabbier, more faded. The wallpaper is peeling and the carpet is worn. Everything is outdated and chipped, everything seems to sag. And every last problem with it is now your responsibility. Fix the chimney leak, get the closet door back on its track. When we do finally turn over the keys, I think I will feel more relief than grief.

Still, I’m oddly sensitive to place. I divide my life into stages based on where I lived. I dream in spaces. I often dream of my parents’ house as I used to know it, the view out my bedroom window, the morning brightness in the kitchen, the expanse of the yard. Practicing the piano in the living room, just around the corner from the kitchen where my mom was clanking pots and pans and running the microwave, preparing dinner. The chatter of the television from the family room and the way my dad perched on the couch, reading the newspaper.

No place has ever been so truly and securely mine. That house was literally built for me. When I was born in 1965—many years after my brothers—my family needed more space, so they built what was then quite a stylish new brick ranch on a big, sloping lot. It had an indoor grill and dark wood paneling in the “den,” a bath and walk-in closet in the master bedroom (both laughably small by today’s standards), tile bathrooms, a two-stall garage, and a cement patio. My parents had it paid off within a few years. Their depression-era childhoods had taught them that a paid-for home was the foundation of financial security. Debt was the abyss, the realm of all demons. It was not a tool or a strategy or even a misfortune. It was blasphemy.  

So that house was the embodiment of their dream, and of security and stability for me. This was the 1960s and 70s—Vietnam, Watergate, Civil Rights, inflation, the oil crisis, disco—yet I never worried about change or cultural slide. I had stability in my parents’ marriage, my church, my school, my religious community, and also in that house. I could always come home to the same rooms, the smell of mom’s cooking, the sigh of the furnace, the rustle of leaves in the pin oak.  

At the same time, it was never really my house. My mother believed in professional decorators, and their choices—remember velveteen-and-foil wallpaper?—were always fussier and more gaudy than I liked. My dad was so protective of the house that we had to keep our fingers off the woodwork and our feet off the furniture, and a pair of shoes left around was a misdemeanor offense. Naturally, there were tensions between my teenage self and my parents. When it was time to move out and go to college, I was ready. Even so, for many years, I was glad to come home for a few months between stages of early adulthood, glad that some things didn’t change.

I’ve lived in twelve different places since moving out of my parents’ home: two dorm rooms, three college apartments, two married apartments, two borrowed flats, and three homes I’ve owned. It wasn’t until three years ago that I finally moved into a home I felt was mine, one that suits me and doesn’t feel like a temporary place to camp until the next stage. Yet even this one isn’t mine. It was someone else’s dream home in 1983, the same year I was graduating from high school and moving out for the first time.

I’m grateful for the extraordinary stability and ease of my childhood, but I’ve been around long enough now to know that change is inescapable. My parents thought they would die in that house. They spent forty-six years caring for it and everything in it with a fierce energy. Now it’s gone. My brothers and I released all the familiar objects from their moorings and set them afloat: furniture and lamps and picture frames and vases floated off, either into our homes or through the sluice gate of an estate sale into strangers’ homes. A dish goes off to a cousin, a truckload of stuff to a thrift store, and a lot to the dump. With my own hands, I shoveled letters and photos and files into garbage bags, never to be seen again.  

Before they moved out, in a moment of exhaustion and resignation, my mom surprised me by looking around at the home she was about to leave and pronouncing: “They’re just things. We’ve enjoyed them.”

I don’t need the house anymore, either. I have another one, for the time being. And what I loved is not what I see now when I go there. What I loved is only in my memory. I’ve been saying good-bye to that house, when I think about it, for thirty years.

Now it will be someone else’s, and I’m glad. New people: may you be blessed there. Love it, redecorate it, maintain it, plant flowers in the yard, finish that basement—finally. Dig up the overgrown, woody shrubs and peel off all that 80s wallpaper. Enjoy the shade of the gigantic maple that, in my mind, is still slender and young.

Pious Petunia Solves Your Holiday Dilemmas

Today I’d like to introduce a guest blogger: advice columnist Pious Petunia. Miss Petunia has been receiving numerous letters of late concerning today’s most puzzling holiday problems. She will be responding here to a few recent letters with her trademark holy-but-practical advice.

Dear Miss Petunia: I have no idea what to serve these days at holiday parties. Some of my friends are vegetarians, some are vegans, then there are the gluten-free types, people with food allergies, and I even have an aunt who is diabetic. What should I do?

PP: Gone are the days when hosts could assemble a holiday party table with crackers and cheese (gluten, dairy), tasty little meatballs in a crockpot (meat, at least ostensibly), a molded jello salad (indeterminate), and a bowl of mixed nuts (are you kidding?). Today, you’re left with only a few options. 1) The Martha Stewart: devise a table with several food territories—gluten free, low-carb, vegan—fenced apart with long garlands of fresh holly and labeled with letters made of uncooked rice, spray-painted gold and glued to tent cards. Garnish with mint leaves. 2) The Samurai: everyone can eat raw vegetables, so get out your sharp knives and sculpt a spread made entirely of lettuce and celery. 3) The Waterloo: surrender and don’t serve any food at all. Advise guests to eat before they come over and amuse them when they arrive with board games. The advantage of option 3 is that next year, this will no longer be your problem. Finally, in the immortal words of Ricky Nelson, “You can’t please everyone, so you’ve got to please yourself.” Stock your own cupboards with cheeze doodles and Snickers bars, and after everyone leaves: indulge.

Dear Miss Petunia: How do I put up with my relatives? I try to be patient and show Christian charity, but it’s hard when we’re all stuck in the same house for days—or even hours.

PP: Holiday family get-togethers test the holiness of even the most advanced saints, I assure you. Why do you think the desert fathers lived in the desert? Lots of space—so they could avoid each other. You, however, are stuck with the spiritual challenge of dredged-up family dynamics in a three-bedroom ranch. I’m sure you already have the good sense to avoid certain volatile topics, such as politics, religion, and money. These days, I would add class warfare, homosexuality, human origins, and the college football playoff system to the list of conversational taboos. However, if religion does comes up, you might be able to save the day by steering everyone toward a rousing critique of the church service you all just attended—petty complaining creates family bonds. If things are still not going well, take heart. This is a challenge not only to Christian ideals; it’s an interfaith problem. Jews, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, Ayn Randians—we all depend on the same coping mechanisms to get through the holidays: elaborate meals and relatives-avoidance television. The elaborate meals give everyone something to bustle about and do, and when the dishes are finally washed and dried, cable TV gives you an excuse to retreat to the family room and digest quietly in front of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Dear Miss Petunia: I’m feeling a little guilty about skipping church on New Year’s Eve and then spending the first day of the year watching a bowl game. Should I be observing this holiday in a more pious fashion?

PP: Yes. If the Lord should decide to return at midnight, do you really want to be found slumped on the couch watching pop stars caterwauling to drunken crowds in Times Square? Or, should the Lord return the next afternoon, do you want to be found slumping once again on that same couch, watching large, healthy young men concuss their brains for the benefit of corporate profits? No you do not. So pray that the Lord tarries. That will give you time, meanwhile, to spend an hour making a list of reasons to be grateful for the year gone by and reasons for hope in the new year. Perhaps you should make a “reasons for repentance” list, too. If you’re brave, you might try all this as family activity, but be careful when you get to the part about repentance. Everyone will have pointed suggestions for everyone else.

Dear Miss Petunia: I’m worried that I won’t be able to keep my New Year’s Resolutions.

PP: You won’t. Own your grief and let it go. Don’t be bothering the Almighty with prayers to help you lose twenty pounds. The Almighty has bigger things to worry about. My advice is to stick with praying the Lord’s Prayer, which is essentially a list of suggested resolutions for God, who has been working on them for centuries anyway and is more likely to produce reliable results.

Speaking of suggesting resolutions for others to keep:

Pious Petunia’s Suggested New Year’s Resolutions for Selected Public Figures

For Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the NRA: Frolic in a meadow for several hours daily, wearing tie-die and Birkenstocks and crooning “Give Peace a Chance.”

For Congress: Play nice. You’re acting like a bunch of petulant four-year-olds. Time-outs and naps for everybody. Or maybe you’re more like bratty twelve-year-olds giving us the line, “But everyone’s doing it!” If everyone else jumped off a cliff, would you do that, too?

For Kate and Wills: Study baby names. Expand your list beyond the usual seven or eight possible names traditionally allowed for English royals. Just name the baby something you like. And tell Harry to keep his pants on and stay away from Vegas. You don’t need that kind of crazy uncle for the new miniature royal.

For Hollywood producers: Work on originality. Please. No one needs to see another Smurf movie, let alone in 3D.

For Michelle Obama: Establish a new First Lady Initiative: celebrating the right to bare arms. You go, girl!

Thanks to Steve Mathonet-VanderWell for giving Miss P her pen name.

Stars of Wonder

I would like to be writing a review of the new movie The Hobbit, but I haven’t seen it yet. (My daughter went to a midnight showing, and her report is: “epic-ly awesome!”) Instead, I will reflect on G. K. Chesterton’s remarkable essay “The Ethics of Elfland.” This is a central chapter in Chesterton’s 1908 book Orthodoxy, in which he attempts to explain why, after much searching, he had arrived back “home” in Christianity. The book isn’t read so much anymore, perhaps because Chesterton was an enthusiastic debater with the public intellectuals of his day, so that his many references to the philosophical quarrels of the early twentieth century now seem dated and even tedious. His writing style, characterized by a kind of mania for precision parallelism and antithesis, may also strike contemporary readers as too formal and epigrammatic.

Nevertheless, “The Ethics of Elfland” offers some relevant observations, and I thought of it when I read Jason Lief’s recent post on Santa Claus, along with the responding comments. Jason argues that allowing children to believe in Santa Claus is a way of shaping their minds for faith. In an earlier post, he had made a similar argument about reading The Hobbit to his kids. Here’s what he said in last week’s post, in response to those who disabuse children of the Santa myth in order to avoid setting them up for disappointment:

What sets them up for greater disappointment is to paint a picture of reality that's coldly mechanical. Our imagination is the source of meaning, and I believe it is also the place where we encounter the divine. Santa, fairies, and mermaids paint the world as magical, which prepares the way for thinking of the world as miraculous.

 “Exactly!” Chesterton would have affirmed. In fact, this is precisely what Chesterton argues in his essay. About his childhood, he writes:

The thing I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic.

Chesterton’s chapter attempts to outline exactly how fairy tales stretch the imagination. He begins by distinguishing “between the science of mental relations, in which there really are laws, and the science of physical facts, in which there are no laws, but only weird repetitions.” So in the fairy tale world, three beans plus two beans still equals five beans. But there’s no reason why certain beans shouldn’t grow into a gigantic, sky-scraping stalk. They generally don’t do that in the “real world,” but there’s no reason the world couldn’t have worked that way. After all, in the “real world,” eggs turn into chickens. Why?

[W]e cannot say why an egg can turn into a chicken any more than we can say why a bear could turn into a fairy prince; for no egg in itself suggests a chicken, whereas some princes do suggest bears.

There’s that precision antithesis for you.

The result of this for Chesterton was to see the whole world as astonishing, exactly because it might have been otherwise. Trees might have grown “tigers by the tail” instead of leaves. Eventually he gets to the idea that Someone made these choices about the world. But here he simply points out that fantasy stories remind us of the wondrous surprise of the world as it is. Everything is magic; everything is miracle.

As I reread “The Ethics of Elfland,” it struck me that this same disposition has been cultivated in me by … cheesy science fiction. Yes! You would think that being raised on Star Trek, for example, would make me a fan of science, which I am. But science fiction is only partly about science. Mostly it’s about wonder and possibility. Science fiction operates very much like fairy tales in Chesterton’s sense—sci-fi reminds us that things might be otherwise. We have one sun. Well, Delta Vega has two. We have smooth foreheads. Well, Klingons have bumpy ones (at least after 1987). Human blood is iron-based. Vulcans’ is copper-based and therefore green. Why couldn’t humanoids have blue or green skin—and antennae? And then there are the wonderfully speculative philosophical questions that sci-fi explores. What if nanites became sentient? Does the sanctity of life apply to silicon-based life forms? What is the “human” rights status of a sentient android? What if we could travel through time—what would the rules be? Could causality work backwards in time?

In many episodes of the Star Trek series, something bizarre happens (space anomaly! temporal disturbance! being of pure energy!) and eventually we may get a quasi-scientific explanation for it. But that does not diminish the wonder. Traveling with the Enterprise crew definitely teaches wonder—and its proper result, humility. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your materialist skepticism, Ensign Horatio. The universe is full of mystery; humans are feisty little creatures, but we are mighty small in the vast scope of things, and the way we think about reality is probably ignorant and limited.

As it turns out, this last observation is not merely a cheesy fiction. Those working at the highest levels of science tend also to approach the big questions with humility and wonder, recognizing how very little we actually know. In a recent interview with Krista Tippett, Marilynne Robinson talked with astrophysicist Marcelo Gleiser. Robinson distinguished at one point between describing, which is the central ambition of science, and explaining—which is a different, metaphysical matter. We can describe, in molecular detail, how certain kinds of eggs turn into chickens. But why this happens…. ?? 

Chesterton likewise recognized that fairy tales had made his epistemology humble. He writes:

I have explained that the fairy tales founded in me two convictions: first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness.

All this to say, science fiction has done for me what fairy tales seem to have done for Chesterton. Amid the queer limitations of the queer kindness of the way the world usually is, I am willing to accept a few miracles. Virgin birth? Sure, OK. Heavenly hosts? Why not? A guiding star? Sure, in some ancient Near Eastern-y way. A God/human born as a baby? It stretches the imagination, but my imagination is stretchy. After all, the Incarnation is only a little more miraculous than any birth. Or last night’s beautiful, purple-and-pink winter sunset. Or the Oratorio Society performing Messiah. Or Handel composing it. We only accept those sorts of miracles because they happen all the time.

Hubble telescope image of the Veil Nebula 2007I understand there is much at stake in one’s theology of miracles. Large questions in the field of human origins, say, and the doctrine of the resurrection. I do believe in miracles in the technical sense, though I agree we must accept them carefully; I don’t believe in just any old thing, and that’s certainly not what Chesterton was advocating. He was arguing against a modernist view that he felt was not only coldly mechanistic, but appallingly arrogant.

So where does this leave Santa? Well, that’s up to parents, of course. Ron and I never did teach our children that Santa was “real.” We wanted to be able to say, from the beginning, “Jesus is the real miracle of Christmas. Santa is a fun story, based on St. Nicholas, who lived … blah blah blah.” At some point, we figured, that will be a useful and necessary distinction and our kids will demand it. So we just started right out with it. And then we provided our children with lectures on the historical development of a consumer economy and the Coca-Cola company’s mid-century exploitation of the Santa figure as a consumerist icon. Just kidding! (Kind of.) Even so, we don’t mind Santa kitsch, and we generally pretend that the gifts under the tree are selected and delivered personally by the reindeer. (It’s only a matter of time before they each develop their own brands.)

At any rate, I’m all for feeding the imagination of kids with the rich stuff of fantasy fiction. My kids have read their share of dragon-based novels full of dwarves and elves and heroic quests. And we certainly raised them on science fiction. I hope we managed to cultivate in them flexible, playful imaginations, characterized by humility and wonder. In that spirit, Ron and I and the boys will hie ourselves hither to the new Peter Jackson movie as soon as we can. My daughter might come see it again.

Chesterton died in 1936, just one year before Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit was first published. Too bad, as I imagine he would have loved it.

Got A Book Idea? Good Luck With That

At the end of the semester in our creative writing classes at my college, we talk about the publication process and encourage our students to try it. “Seek a wider audience!” we urge them. “Send your stuff out!” Some of us even make a ritual out of the sending, marching as a class to a campus mailbox, each student clutching a manila envelope with a hard-won final manuscript inside—an essay or short story or a few poems. As the mailbox jaw clunks shut, we applaud each other for hard work and courage. At least that’s what we used to do. These days most journals and magazines are going digital. It’s harder to make a satisfying ritual out of hitting “send” on the electronic submission site.

The world of magazines and literary journals is a weird enough fantasyland to navigate, but when it comes to telling students about the book business, I hardly know where to begin. Publishing is changing so rapidly, even industry insiders are struggling to understand what’s happening. People outside the business—including aspiring writers—tend to imagine that it’s all very romantic. You labor in obscurity for years, honing your craft, sending out manuscripts. If you work hard and wait patiently, one day you’ll get that lucky break, and some wise and keen-eyed editor will discover you. After that, your career is simple. You concentrate on butt-to-chair, holing up in your chilly garret and tapping away at your laptop, producing brilliant profundity at regular intervals—and your publisher takes care of everything else. Editing, production, marketing, distribution, collecting the profits: don’t worry, dear author, we professionals will take care of all that for you. You just go back to your writing.

Alas, that narrative may have been possible in yon yesteryear, but it’s rare if not laughable today. These days, the author is a “brand” with a “platform.” Experts like my friend Jana Riess warn aspiring authors that they need to develop their own audience before even bothering to approach a publisher or an agent. Don’t tell a prospective publisher, “I’m happy to do interviews,” says Jana, because that reveals your diva fantasies and your ignorance of market realities.

Jana’s just delivering the bracing truth here. These days, writing is the easy part. Rev up your marketing and public relations savvy, authors, because you’re going to need it: to research the market, write a book proposal, make your own media contacts, set your own speaking and traveling schedule (on your dime), purchase your own books and resell them at your speaking gigs, blog daily to connect with your audience, and maintain a public persona into perpetuity. At least, if you want your books to sell. It’s up to you.

If an author has to do all that, you might be wondering, why even bother with a publisher? Good question, and lots of people are asking it. Promotion tasks have been thrust upon authors at an increasing rate in the last decade or two as publishers flounder to stay afloat against the tsunami waves of the digital revolution. “Legacy publishers” have merged into a few behemoths, swallowing and digesting small houses (and each other) like great whites in a shrinking shark tank. Meanwhile, more authors are becoming DIY-ers. Why bother with the big gatekeeper publishers when you can act as your own general contractor, outsourcing every task—editing, production, even distribution—and delivering your book directly to readers by your own marketing elbow grease?

On the one hand, this is terrific. As agent and digital book developer Jason Ashlock optimistically asserts, “The author’s all that matters now—the author and the reader. Everybody in the middle is in a period of redefinition.” For an author who knows what he or she is doing, it’s easier than ever to get “content” to readers, to interact with readers, to produce books nimbly. You don’t need to wait to be discovered by the fickle gatekeepers. You can produce your work and try it out directly on the public.  

On the other hand, especially for writers who don’t know exactly what they’re doing, there are landmines everywhere. The scam artists are on the prowl, offering to help authors with all those bothersome tasks beyond churning out a crappy first draft—everything for a fee. They prey on every author’s most tender weakness: vanity. “Getting published” and “seeing your work in print” is still an irresistible ego-thrill for would-be authors, and thus it is easily exploited. Check out this horrifying post by writer David Gaughran about Simon & Schuster’s recent deal with Author Solutions, a publishing “support” business that has apparently been busily ripping off writers for thousands of dollars a piece. Scroll down and read the comments if you are prepared to be rendered cynical about today’s publishing innovations.

Despite the ugly, I’m intrigued and energized by the possibilities of digital publishing. I can imagine splendid digital textbooks for literature classes, for example, with video clips of various Hamlets’ “to be or not to be” performances a click away from Shakespeare’s text and hyperlinked notes. I can imagine beautiful books of essays or poetry accompanied by art or photography—previously dismissed out of hand by a traditional publisher as too costly to print—delivered digitally and enjoyed on screen, no problem. And I wonder if e-publishing, e-readers, and print-on-demand might also be a great gift to academic and religious publishers. After all, academics and—help us—religious academics produce some esoteric stuff. I’m already amazed at the paperbacks that come across my desk. Somebody actually printed a couple thousand copies of Hark the Glad Sound: Lutheran Hymnody on the Great Plains, 1859-83 and sent it out for review?  (Not a real book, but it could be.) With e-books, we academics can burrow happily into our esoterica, make it available to fellow weirdos, and no publisher will have to pause at the thought of printing costs. Not that we academics ever worried much about trivial matters like costs and sales anyway.   

I’m not too worried about losing books in all this upheaval. We’ll still have hardcovers and paperbacks. The codex is just too handy to go away, and people naturally find physical objects appealing. We may see more and different formats, though, and that’s a good thing. Long essays, novellas, multi-author poetry collections, cross-genre things, general-reader-oriented anthologies. These will all be more feasible with e-books and print-on-demand. Nor am I worried that we’ll run out of good writers. My current writing students remind me that every generation will produce a new batch of talent, whatever the grim realities of the industry.

Our most urgent need, now and in the future, is for what Jason Ashlock calls “curating.” With big houses pressured to produce safely profitable book-like products and, meanwhile, a self-publishing frenzy akin to the California Gold Rush—how the heck are ordinary readers supposed to find the good writers among all the posers? Exactly. And what about serious writers’ perennial need for a trusted and experienced editorial eye? Good editors used to develop talent into greatness; and editors, reviewers, bookstore owners, and librarians used to vet authors for us. Some still do, but the traditional gatekeeping, development, and assessment functions are very much up for grabs.    

So individuals or entities who can establish themselves as reliable discerners of the Good—in fiction, poetry, in every genre and in academic work of all kinds—could potentially become powerful cultural players. What form will they take? I hope that the small publishing houses still surviving out there will consider this curating role their most solemn trust going forward. And I hope that other good discernment systems will arise. I wonder if I should be encouraging our undergraduate English majors to consider a career as Curator in the New Republic of Words?