Tag Archives: Journalism

I Bought a Bookstore

2 Replies
Interior of a bookstore with shelves in the background and a row of books in the foreground.

Technically, I bought a membership in my local bookstore’s co-op, thus becoming a co-owner of This House of Books along with many, many other bookstore patrons and regional writers, but that’s not as interesting a title.

I’ve been involved in the literary community for fourteen years. I’ve been writing for a while longer, but I only started submitting my work (and accruing submission fees) since 2012. I’ve seen presses go under and seen others grow into reliable institutions. I’ve volunteered for journals that have persisted at a steady pace and others that have tried and failed to act like ’80s business ventures.

I don’t know what the right model is for sustainable literary institutions, and submission fees remain especially touchy. What I do know is that good writing needs investment, of some form or another, by the people who value it. Not all investment is financial. It can be time (reading, volunteering) or interpersonal (sharing pieces online or with others, talking up authors whose work is good, requesting books at local libraries). But every garden needs a gardener.

The same is true of journalism. I rewatched All the President’s Men recently and felt deeply depressed by the end knowing that today, groundbreaking stories are inconsequential to the powerful because of elite capture and because sellouts who don’t believe in anything keep finding their way to the top.

But still, independent worker-owned publications are popping up, and I’m hoping they can carve out successful alternatives. Here in the West, High Country News successfully unionized. Leah Sottile co-founded The Western Edge to cover Northwest regional stories. Fellow UI alum Alexandra Duggan was on the ground in Spokane during last month’s wildfires for The Spokesman-Review. Food writers who were laid off after a recent media merger formed Ravenous, a worker-owned publication that has covered some of the most interesting food stories I’ve read in years, like the popularity of disgusting LLM-generated restaurant ads. Bolts has done some extraordinary work covering elections this year and Heatmap covers climate policy just as thoroughly. There are a lot of sellouts, but there are many more dedicated writers who are trying new ways of getting their work into the world without selling out.

If I shill out five dollars a month to a comedy podcast about funny mayors so I have something to listen to while working out on Thursday mornings, I can offer the same to Literary Hub and n+1, two venues I read often and sometimes use in teaching. I don’t have a good compromise to the costliness of running these institutions, but the institutions themselves are valuable enough that I’m determined to trust the writers and editors behind them to keep trying.

The bookstore I can now legally brag about owning is named for Ivan Doig’s This House of Sky, which I will read eventually (like all books). In another Ivan Doig book I read last month, The Bartender’s Tale, an exchange between two characters summed up why I care so much about literary institutions.

As he drove, he evidently was still bothered by the events competing with the Mudjacks Reunion. “What is this play that’s so vitally important?” he asked peevishly. “Something by someone local?”
“Oscar Wilde.”
Oh.”
I figured it was my turn. “What’s ‘bobbasheely’ mean?”
“Mmm, something like moseying along.”
“Then why not just say ‘moseying along’?”
“You wouldn’t want vanilla to be the only flavor of ice cream, would you?” He had me there (174).

Bookstores and libraries offer variety. New publications offer new perspectives shaped by new approaches to media and modality. Language is as dexterous and evolving and diverse as the people who use it, and the more robust literary institutions are, the better we are as readers. This is, of course, the opposite of the vanilla prose style that LLM-generated writing defaults to even when performing benign tasks like polishing prose for professional audiences.

Bookstores are valuable. Libraries are valuable. They both require different degrees of upkeep and both are under attack, though libraries are more vulnerable to the whims of wannabe tech leaders who want the world to be smaller and duller and more vanilla. Even the late Dolly Parton‘s Imagination Library was a target of such funding cuts.

I dislike the phrase nothing is sacred because these institutions, libraries and bookstores and archives, remain sacred even when people violate that sanctity. But it’s increasingly difficult to imagine pooling together the resources necessary to build a good, decent world that encourages imagination and compassion. There’s supposedly not enough money in the budget to give children books, but the money that goes toward dropping bombs on schoolchildren will apparently never run dry.

So I invested a fraction of my money into a bookstore, which is probably immaterial to their funding, but that’s not really the point. In the 2000s, post-9/11 culture had a sneering aversion to earnestness. It was ridiculous to care about anything, let alone other people. For a while that changed in the late 2010s, and perhaps the culture became too earnest in some regards, but that’s preferable to being treated like the punchline of an insult comic too insecure to ever direct his ridicule onto himself. That’s what these last few years have felt like: the commercialized, gratingly smug pessimism of the early aughts.

Unfortunately, I think that Neil Postman’s prediction has come true. In Amusing Ourselves to Death, he saw a more likely dystopia in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (a book I will also read eventually, like every book). “Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice,” writes Postman. “We watch him, by ours. There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth. When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk” (155-156). His critique is about TV from another era defined by its sneering pessimism and commercial sellouts, the 1980s, but it haunts this era just as much.

We are worse off without widely available, diverse books by numerous authors who have unique perspectives to offer. I’m tired of being told I’m better off being a sellout, that the world defaults to time-efficient vanilla stories and utilitarian, forgettable syntax that delivers the same message the same way in every sentence, otherwise known as “content.”

I’m not optimistic, but I am, I think, determined to keep trying. If anything, you should come visit my bookstore. They have a lot of good books, all of which I’ll get around to reading eventually.

Doig, Ivan. The Bartender’s Tale. Riverhead Books, 2012.

Postman, Neil. Amusing Ourselves to Death. Viking Penguin, 1985.

1917: War and Journalism

Leave a reply

Pravda

Russian newspaper Pravda, March 16, 1917.

The First World War was a global catastrophe. Because it was fought between colonial empires, it drew conscripts from Africa, Australia, India, the Arab World, Canada, and other regions. Outside the European theater, the Japanese Empire and China were involved in the war as well. In April of 1917, the United States joined the war. The war had high stakes for all involved across Asia, Africa, and Europe, so when Russia’s revolutionary factions debated pulling out of the war, other nations paid close attention. For most Russians, there were numerous uncertainties in 1917. For most journalists abroad, the primary question was about the war.

The lines between reportage, editorializing, and propaganda have always been messy, I think. The act of recording an event requires certain conscious decisions: what to include, what to leave out, the order of facts and events, what descriptions are useful for the reader. This is also the problem of historiography. These lines are increasingly blurred today, but in 1917, when war affected nearly every aspect of life from food rations to bonds to the draft, the press played a pertinent, easily abused role in swaying wartime opinions.

France, Britain, and the United States wanted to know if they would have an ally in the War, whereas Germany and Austria-Hungary wanted to know if they could move more forces to the Western Front to deal with the soon-to-arrive U.S. army. At the heart of Russia’s pacifist movement were the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, whose motivation for pulling out stemmed from their opposition to the connection between capitalism, imperialism, and war. As Lenin insisted, imperialism was the highest stage of capitalism. For British, American, and especially French soldiers, Russia’s withdrawal could become a death sentence. Newspapers recognized their readers’ interests and fears.

Many papers did not resort to “yellow journalism” in their editorializing, but were not above subjective writing. A New York Times article from September 5, 1917, by Harold Williams entitled “Extremists Sway Workman’s Council” is a prime example among many. Reporting on the Russian Provisional Government, Williams wrote that “The all-Russian executive proposed a resolution supporting the Government view of the necessity of the death penalty” (Williams).  According to Williams, The Menshevik politician Julius Martov “sat silent in a perpetual sneer. . . put his sneer into words, and with the help of Internationalists and Social Revolutionaries defeated” the pro-death penalty measure. He added that “The issue now is patriotism or internationalism.”

It was not uncommon for American newspapers at the time to refer to Mensheviks and Bolsheviks as “extremists” or “internationalists,” in contrast to Russian “patriots.” Pacifists and labor unions in general were seen as contrary to the war effort. Their demand for better wage and working conditions limited the production of weaponry and resources. Editorializing in 1917 was common, but strategically nuanced, in part because the Russian Revolution involved so many different players and interests.

Americans (who celebrate the day they declared independence from a tyrannical monarch) endorsed the sudden democratization in Russia and the end of the monarchy. The United States was quick to recognize the new, post-Tsar government. The New York Times reported on March 22 that America was “First to Recognize Freed Russia” and  The New York Tribune reported that the British politician David George Lloyd “believed the revolution in Russia was the greatest service the Russians had yet rendered to the Allied cause” (Tribune March 22, 1917). However, they could not endorse the striking workers and mutinying soldiers who were largely responsible for that democratization. Thus, Russia was influenced by “extremists” and “agitators” rather than citizens and soldiers.

The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph, in a slightly different nationalist gesture, included a poetic description of the Russian monarchy’s complete history on March 17, 1917, titled “Story of the Tsars” in which the author declares that the “story of the Tsars is like a conglomeration of the wild catastrophes of Elizabethan tragedy.” This story appeared next to others about the “Irish Question,” so that Telegraph readers saw Irish rebellions and descriptions of monarchical tragedies in the same document.

However, journalists had a diversity of perspectives, such as the American journalist John Reed. A reporter for Metropolitan Magazine, Reed was an adamant pacifist. He reported on the Great War in 1914 before the U.S. entered, and wrote editorials for the self-consciously socialist newspaper The Masses opposing the war. He lost work in 1917 because of his views, and traveled to Russia that year before the October Revolution. He died of typhus in Russia in 1920, in the midst of the Russian Civil War.

The majority of international journalists, pacifists and hawks alike, approached the Russian Revolution from a largely military-driven perspective. But the Great War was more a catalyst of the Russian Revolution. The 1905 rebellions sparked economic reforms as well as increased persecution. Poverty and oppression under Nicholas II had been a decades-long assault on numerous Russians and subjugated populations in Russia’s surrounding territories, so political involvement had increased in Russia. War was a crucial issue in the summer of 1917, but so too, clearly, were issues like the death penalty, press freedom, freedom of political dissidents, and wealth disparity, issues that the Tsar ignored and the Bolsheviks, in many cases, mishandled after the disastrous Civil War of 1917-1921.

What is clear is that there emerged competing narratives about the Revolution as it unfolded. Later Tribune articles, more neutral in tone, attest to the chaotic day-to-day changes that took place in Petrograd in October and November after the Bolsheviks seized power and counter-revolutionary forces attempted to retake the capital. The lived crisis in Petrograd appeared as a serialized daily drama for readers across the world, most of whom only wanted to know if their sons, fathers, or brothers would make it home alive. The Revolution’s far-reaching consequences had the potential to affect military families abroad and all workers within, but by summer, nobody knew what would come next.