Stop lamenting — the printed word isn’t going anywhere
In a New York Times column titled “Lament on the Fading Culture of the Printed Word,” Susan Dominus joins the ranks of those bemoaning the state of today’s media landscape:
Over the years, how many people have read Joan Didion’s pointed, moody, celebrated essays and come to New York in the hope of writing some of their own? The path of those would-be writers is patently stubborn, given the tone Ms. Didion strikes in the essay so many name as their favorite, “Goodbye to All That.” It is a famous elegy for the passing of youth, but also a catalog of Manhattan’s enervating clichés, and, implicitly, a rejection of the New York literary scene she inhabited.
I went back and reread the essay the other day because the title, final and nostalgic, has been reverberating through my mind on a regular basis. I hear it, for example, every time I go to a party and run into a writer or editor I admire who has recently been laid off. So many people in the world of book and magazine publishing greet every such piece of news with a flash back to 12 or 20 years ago. Back then, if anyone with a flair for stringing sentences together lost a job, it was a given that he would land quickly on his feet at an online publication or a small publishing house. But now, goodbye to all that. I have the same thought when some 22-year-old wants help placing a 6,000-word article: Goodbye to all that. When old friends and colleagues from the industry meet up at some sort of gathering, we look at each other and laugh and shrug and marvel at the changing landscape. We mourn more seriously in private.
Here’s the thing. I don’t know anything about the New York literary scene, but I’ll tell you this: In small and mid-sized markets around the country, the printed word is alive and well.
Out here, we live in a different reality from the culture Ms. Dominus describes at places like Conde Nast: being encouraged to eat out and put the tab on your expense account; being reimbursed up to $15 for eating lunch at your desk. If you’re used to that kind of atmosphere, which Ms. Dominus accurately describes as “glittering, gluttonous self-indulgence,” then yes — you’ll probably be disappointed when it all comes crashing down.
But is the culture of the printed word fading? I don’t think so.
I have, sitting on my desk, a copy of a local lifestyle magazine we publish. The cover story is an interesting, well-crafted feature by Sue Van Fleet about two Dominican nuns who have built a reputation together as first-class designers of churches and other sacred spaces across the country. Would the topic impress the Manhattan cocktail set? Maybe not. But the care that went into crafting that story demonstrates nothing but reverence for the beauty of language, the nuances of words.
Looking to place that 6,000-word article? Well, if it’s 6,000 words worth of self-indulgence, I wouldn’t bet on your chances. But if that 6,000-word feature is well-written and relevant to a community’s life, you’ll find a market.
And maybe that market won’t be a Conde Nast publication. But it just might be one of the many small publications that cover the nation outside New York — there is a nation outside New York, you know! — and that in some cases are managing, even in a brutally punishing economy, to grow.
I agree with Jacqueline Carney when she writes:
To the wanton greed I say, with relief, “Goodbye to All That.” But unlike Dominus, who concludes that “even the most jaded among our ranks are not ready to say goodbye to all that,” I say I am. and I am ready to welcome the era of the internet that will hopefully put more commercial endeavors on an even plane so that the executives and the foot soldiers are equally rewarded. The essence of cars–transportation–will not disappear; and the essence of literary culture will be just fine. People, by their very nature, crave to tell and read stories, to fantasize, to learn and to opine. So while the paper industry and the bookshelf industry might suffer, the new scene–the internet and the electronic media–will enable literature to thrive on an equal, if not larger, scale and it will be possible to make a living providing it. We just won’t be able to gorge on the pocketbooks of the general public like we used to.
To the folks in those literary circles — please don’t think that the demise of the things you’re used to means the demise of literary culture or the end of valuing the written word. Sure, the future may not be what you’re used to. Maybe you can’t get paid handsomely to spend your evenings kibbitzing about literature over cocktails anymore — but that was never the reality outside of a tiny little circle anyway. The printed word is not dead, and if you spend more time looking at the possibilities of what’s new and less time complaining about what’s been lost, you might find yourself pleasantly surprised.