Fifteen years ago, New York magazine published a piece called “Gawker and the Rage of the Creative Underclass.” (Alternative headline: “Everybody Sucks.”) The piece argued that Gawker, then still a niche publication beloved of insiders, was powered fundamentally by the resentment of those struggling in creative industries or who aspired to creative industries but had not made it.
Good point. I think also people analysing their own problems in structural ways has become very popular, and a lot of the time there's a latent assumption that others are somehow beatifically happy or there's some house on the hill in human contentment that you can reach if everyone else would just get out of the way.
"I think a lot of that anger and resentment is, consciously or not, people reacting to the realization that their life is disappointing in one way or another"
Perhaps we can instead instill in people a greater enjoyment of the 16ish hours a day they aren't working? To say, yeah, work sucks for 90% of us, but you can then go for walks in the park and drink beer with friends?
Here's a self-examination: I am doing the only thing I have ever wanted to do, as a profession, and for more than many doctors and lawyers make; I have maintained perspective enough to remember how lucky I am and how the economic system in which I live deprives so many people not only of meaning and satisfaction but of the basic necessities of life. And I would give up the former if I felt it could positively impact the latter. Those things being true... I can live with it.
"Starting tomorrow, there’s a new rule in place for commenting on this newsletter: any comments that do nothing other than to dismiss the relevance or importance of the topic of the given post will be deleted, and the commenter will be issued a one-month ban. I mean specifically comments of the type “this is worth talking about because?,” “why is this worth a post?,” “I don’t care about the phenomenon the post is describing,” etc. There’s not going to be any warnings - if your comment merely dismisses the relevance or worthiness of a post’s topic, you’re banned for a month.
A particularly annoying, self-aggrandizing version of the type of comment I’m talking about is the “this is just meaningless online stuff!” “This is just a Twitter phenomenon!” Etc. These comments are uniquely annoying and self-defeating. First, this newsletter is about many things, and one of those things is online culture and its influence on culture and politics. Many people, in the 21st century, spend a great deal of time online, so elements of online culture have natural and intrinsic interest. If you personally don’t see the interest in a given post, simply pass it by; no one will miss out on anything by not seeing your comment about your lack of interest. Another aggravating element of this tendency is that commenting on an internet newsletter is inherently a marker of being online. This tends to be so self-celebratory, even masturbatory - “you’re all so online, but not me! All of this online stuff is beneath me!” My friend, if you are online enough to launch a comment on a blog, you are not so offline that you get to strut around in that way.
If you routinely find yourself uninterested in what I write about here, you are of course free to take your readership and your money somewhere else. That’s an option you have. An option you no longer have is to peacock around in my comments section, bragging about how the topic of the day isn’t worth your interest. That ends now, and people who violate the rule will catch bans. You have been warned."
It's your board, and as far as I'm concerned, Internet boards are rarely over-regulated. I'm also unlikely to ever fall afoul.
However, as a newcomer without the benefit of seeing the history, and it being the first post to land in my inbox following subscription, I found it difficult to evaluate. Your examples within were appreciated, but it still was perceived as being uninterested in hearing feedback from readers on what doesn't interest them.
I am aware we haven't subscribed to have you to listen to us. From a business standpoint, while having a filter on feedback is good practice, this is rarely true if the filter blinds rather than clarifies.
I would argue that this isn't a filter on feedback as much as it is a filter on performing one's distaste. It would be very easy to judge what is or is not interesting to the readership by the overall response (or lack thereof); from a business standpoint that will shake itself out just fine on its own. Uninteresting things would drive less engagement, without needing someone to say it overtly and with a tone of performative contempt or dismissal.
I appreciate your comment CW. You are right, the filter is undoubtedly at least the latter, but the latter is a form of the former. Distaste is integral, degree of performance subjective. As a newcomer, I have no gauge of where Freddie's subjectivity will lead on this.
Honestly, I think that there is little value in comments from readers on what doesn't interest them. Not because that isn't valuable information but simply because there are far better ways to get that data.
The number of pageviews and posted links tells you how much the piece engaged with new audiences. Likes on the article can demonstrate whether a piece stood out. Raw number of comments suggests a piece that was heavily engaged with. Meaningful changes in subscriptions (I assume there's always a little churn) sharply demonstrates whether people want to pay money to read more of what was just published.
A commenter saying "less of this please" or "why talk about X when Y is going on" means basically nothing. It is the equivalent of the people who show up to public comment on a development and think they are the voice of the city even when opinion polls and elections disagree with them - just because you are willing to loudly state your opinion does not make the opinion more valuable.
Even the lowest quality (intelligible) text response has a quality and specificity that pageviews or message counts just can't hope to touch.
For example: "why talk about X when Y is going on" is a low quality response. It also describes a significant portion of every human discussion on import, and so clearly means more to humans than nothing. In contrast, incrementing a counter on one of these metrics is as close to meaningless as possible, even when it can avoid being misinterpreted.
The metrics you mention are what is used because they're readily available and nearly costless to tabulate. But an entire industry ascribes far more to them than they are capable of.
Consider: instead of the above, I could instead post "1". (Amusing myself with argumentum ad absurdum here).
>Even the lowest quality (intelligible) text response has a quality and specificity that pageviews or message counts just can't hope to touch.
I'm not sure this is true given that "wtaXwYigo" is less often about improving content relevancy and more often about "this contradicts my worldview and I don't feel good when I read it".
I seem to recall hearing a story about a frustrated Austrian artist channeling those negative feelings into a politics ... short guy, funny mustache ...
I'm glad you mentioned bullshit jobs, because I think that plays a huge role here. If these people built cars or something, they'd still want to be a star, but at least they'd have 40 hours of useful work to fill some of that void. Meanwhile, if you're a senior customer success specialist for a B2B software firm, you're going to wish you could do something that made a difference. Since the average white-collar worker can't imagine doing something blue-collar, that dream will naturally be something in the creative field. It's that sliver in the center of the Venn Diagram between "useful jobs" and "comfy, white-collar jobs," outside highly technical stuff like engineering.
I also think it explains some of the "wokeness" phenomena within the workplace. If your job is bullshit, you can kinda maybe convince yourself that you're doing something useful by working towards "diversity in digital marketing."
I speak from my own experience here, having spent years in bullshit jobs. I don't mind it, I agree with your positive assessment, but clearly other do mind it
I feel this. I genuinely like my job, but I still have so many days where I'm like, "Damn, I miss when I came into work and my only job was to turn a big pile of dirty dishes into a stack of clean dishes."
Same. I have a PhD and a fairly easy and well-compensated job, but there are definitely times when I nostalgically remember how much I actually liked working in coffee shops in my 20's and often miss it.
I run multiple organizations and can choose to work or not. I too sometimes wish I had a job where there was a sense of completion at the end of the day.
I should have no complaints, since if I truly wanted that enough, I could quit and go do something offering that. Instead, I work 10 hours a week, volunteer 60+ more, have 4 great kids at home, 22,000 acres out back.
Yet it's a very attractive notion, and very human to want what you don't have.
Have also sometimes felt (cautiously) nostalgic about my college dishwashing gig. The material satisfaction thing about dirty dishes -> clean dishes is real. Also, though, service jobs like that often have a rhythm or pattern that seems somehow more human: very busy and then almost dead depending on the time (so then you can sort of fuck off and take smoke breaks or read, or at least I did). Whereas in office jobs I always had to "look busy" and that's frankly miserable.
Yes! This is a big part of it. My ass has to be in the chair even when the project is in the “waiting for someone, anyone, to respond to an email” phase, and if someone sticks their head in the door and asks what I’m doing I have to have a better answer than “waiting for someone, anyone to respond to an email.”
Though I don’t mean to romanticize dishwashing - my perspective on it as a college-educated person making rent on my way to higher-paying work was a lot different than many of my coworkers, for whom it was the only way they were ever going to make rent. Few of them will ever have a job with paid vacation, and the stir-crazy days of office work are 100% worth that to me. But man, when I was losing my mind working from home in the pandemic……. I may not have always billed 40 hours, but my dishes were always clean.
I haven't had a bullshit job, but from my perch at the remote edge of the SFF writing universe, I've seen a tremendous lot of bullshit justifications for the kind of creative jobs Freddie is talking about. If I never read another article about 'how story will save us' or suchlike, I will be glad. I am tired beyond measure with people's attempts to turn their liking for comic books, fairy tales, video games or movies into social virtue or 'making a difference' -- a tendency which contributes to the toxicity surrounding those creative endeavors.
These jobs largely *don't* make a difference, and that is one reason there isn't enough demand for them to satisfy all the wannabes. More people want to write fantasy short stories than want to read them, for instance. If I hung my self-worth on my writing, I would be fooling myself -- and I would be miserable, and deserve to be.
So I say, absolutely get a day job. Get a day job and do it well and if it isn't making the kind of difference you want to make in the world, pick up some volunteering on the side. *Then,* when you've established your own sense of self-worth, go and do the stuff that you find enjoyable because you find it enjoyable, without having to make up excuses and always be on the prickly defensive about how it makes you important or virtuous.
Oh I one thousand percent agree with that. I am a book and movie fanatic, love music, and grew up in orchestra (both of my parents are professional musicians and public school music teachers) and theater, and I originally went to art school myself for college. I absolutely believe arts matter. But they are not ALL that matters, and I think too often those are the only things we place value on, particularly in terms of success or social capital. Lots of other things are also important, and noteworthy.
I think teaching is different in that you're sharing a defined skill with people who want to learn it. The stuff I read is more aimed at bolstering the morale of people who are not finding that audience, or who want to leverage their relationship with an art into something more prestigious or 'virtuous'. (That may be what I find so inauthentic about it. The person is doing something ostensibly because they love it, but justifying it as if loving it isn't enough -- it has to be Important for the Good of Society, or some such. Your feeling that a relationship with music is important in itself strikes me as a far better rationale for doing it.)
I'm dusting off memories of kids applying for things within the last ten years. It seems that there was a lot of "how will this allow you to have an important impact on society" in the applications.
Am I wrong, or isn't there a lot of encouragement and incentive to view everything you do as world changing in importance.
I remember rolling my eyes at these question. The real answer was, "I want the scholarship because we can't afford it otherwise."
Bingo. I think the increasingly competitive and zero-sum nature of our society is also partly to blame. Why do something for love and craft, when you can do something that also CREATES SO MUCH GOOD AND MAKES AN IMPACT??
I totally agree about the importance of the arts. There need to be more opportunities. I used to organize chamber music togethers with my kids and friends with music stands and pizza. It was fun. During COVID lockdowns there was a group of musicians who played every Sunday in the park.
However, if all you got was a conservatory education, you'd be a pretty undereducated person. No math, no science.
YES, I love this comment. Personally, I think most creative endeavors are bullshit, and even things that get published or seen won't last past a couple of years before they're forgotten. Even if it is kinda bullshit, making the world continue to run and work is laudable work, though on the flip side of that, a lot of very successful people with advanced degrees also work meaningless jobs (middle management in hospitals or universities, for instance, which may come with some prestige, but exist just to push papers around).
I work with a lot of people in my line of work that struggle with meaning in their lives, and for many of them it's because they see their job as pointless, or with no esteem. One of the things I tell people is to find something you care about and invest yourself in it in your personal life, whether it's animals, or the environment, or voting rights, or HIV activism, or local theater, or whatever, just do something you care about but don't do it for money. Do it as a way to give your life purpose (as you see it), feel like you're involved in something bigger than yourself, and that create social bonds. I'm afraid almost no one does this but I still think it's good advice. One of the biggest drawbacks our internet/social media has normalized is intense navel-gazing and narcissism that is now seen as enlightened and typical, and so many activities that aren't directly beneficial or esteem-raising to the participants are no longer seen as worthwhile for either secondary benefits, or just for the sake of doing them.
I once met an author who was selected for Oprah’s book club. Overnight best-selling millionaire. His name is Brett Lott. Who remembers him? Great writer, but not even Oprah can save everyone.
Whenever I see a mention of someone like this, I'm basically compelled to look them up. "What happened to that guy" is a question that must never go unanswered.
Anyway, he last published in 2013, a memoir on writing and Christianity I guess?
I largely agree with your assessment. But don’t forget the 1% of true freaks like myself, aka the ‘artists,’ those of us who’ve worked a million jobs and quit them all because writing always pulls me back with the force of Dante’s inferno. That being said: 99% of people should STFU and get a damn job, as you said. I think the problem today is: Everyone thinks there’re special and everyone thinks they’re a writer/expert/genius etc. We’re all too bored and privileged.
I'm honestly trying to figure out why people in white-collar jobs romanticize blue-collar jobs as if the majority of BC jobs involves saving the world with every spade of gravel shoveled. Many of my friends' parents in high school had blue collar jobs and they actively encouraged their kids to go to college in order to avoid working a blue-collar job. Perhaps it's the romanticized idea that BC work is honest work whereas being an insurance actuary is not honest?
Somewhere along the way, the idea about taking pride in your work (regardless of remuneration) as separate from finding that work spiritually rewarding was changed into you should find your job spiritually rewarding otherwise why bother taking pride in doing the job well.
I think there's a sense that a lot of white collar jobs are bullshit. The Atlantic ran an article years back that asked "If your job (and you) vanished would anybody even notice?" At least with blue collar employment there is a sense of tangible accomplishment because at the end of the day something objectively useful has been accomplished. That is not the case for white collar busywork.
Or, we *imagine* that there'd be a sense of tangible accomplishment at the end of the day. I look back fondly on my time as a Wendy's line cook. But when I try to think back about what I thought about the job at the time, I don't remember feeling this mythical sense of accomplishment. I remember my feet hurting, and having to wash the salt and sweat off my skin, and being yelled at by my manager for being too slow during the lunch rush. "Come on grandpa, we're burning!"
Reminds me about the scene at the end of Office Space where Hank seems to despise Peter for giving up his high paying software job to come and do manual labor.
I worked at a warehouse among many other manual labor jobs in my misspent youth (including a stint at fast food, although my tenure was at Arby's). Human beings are physical creatures so I don't think it's really surprising that building something, cleaning something, sorting something is inherently satisfying. Doc Rivers had a pretty strenuous job in the abstract realm. He insisted on ironing his own shirts because it calmed him down and gave him time to reflect. If I have put in some serious intellectual effort at work doing the dishes (or any other type of hands on labor that I can perform on autopilot) can be seriously relaxing.
Plus there is the endorphin rush that just comes with strenuous physical activity. I look back at those jobs I held when I was younger with fondness. At the end of the day you are tired but it's a good tired. My strongest memories of those jobs are of walking outside while the sun was setting and lighting up a ciggy with my co-workers and chatting while the smoke curled up around us. Good times.
This is true of blue collar jobs as well. At the end of the day, it's really about the type of work & tasks you're doing because there are plenty of blue collar jobs that don't result in tangible sense of accomplishment and that's also why many blue collar jobs get automated because rote / routine tasks aren't meaningful but menial in nature.
If your job is to take a bunch of crates and move them to the loading dock it's very difficult to be able to get to the end of the day and not be able to point to a tangible, physical result of your labor. That's not the case for a lot of white collar work.
Well the remunerative gulf that exists between an Amazon dock worker and the medical billing specialist is big enough for people to take the latter over the former. But to your point, there is satisfaction when doing some physical jobs but not every physical job is satisfying. I'd rather work carpentry than fast food / retail service having experienced them both in my past.
There's no question white collar jobs pay better. But look at the responses just here in the posts--people don't look back on their blue collar jobs with distaste. In fact I think I detect a considerable amount of nostalgia.
In some Scandinavian countries generous social welfare systems mean that the government pays people a salary to read novels to retirees. It is essentially busy work that is designed to put a gloss on welfare. I think that is very close to the sense that a lot of white collar workers have that if their job simply vanished nobody would care or even notice.
If the jobs blue collar workers do ceased to be done, civilization as we know it would end. Imagine a world without plumbers, carpenters, sanitation workers, auto mechanics, HVAC, fire sprinklerfitters, welders, steelworkers, etc. etc. Sadly, these trades are on the decline, despite usually being good union jobs, because of the false promise of university degrees as some kind of golden ticket.
I live in a rural area and finding contractors is almost impossible--partly because people here are self-reliant and partly because people just don't show up when you call them. Most of them are too busy to take on new projects. It's a problem and I've had to learn to do a lot of things myself. But where I can't do them, I quickly learn to appreciate those who can. I don't want more gender studies degrees in the world. I want more tradesmen.
I hear you! I am in awe of people with skills like that, and I could only aspire to a fraction of that kind of self-sufficiency. Some of my neighbors can put additions on their own houses, do their own roofing, plumbing, electric, repair their own cars and tractors, do their own excavation--not to mention grow food! I'm learning, but it's definitely humbling for me and puts my skills in perspective.
I too am in a rural area. I was helping a neighbor put in a hot water heater, and she was trying to convince me to become a handyman, as they're in short supply.
They are! I actually started taking woodworking classes because I'm so desperate! I have a bathroom I need to redo and I can't find anyone to help, so It's going to be me and youtube one of these days... :-|
The trades you mention (aside from sanitation workers) are high skilled trades that get romanticized whereas the garbage man does not. The ditch digger does not. The tomato picker does not. The fish gutter does not.
Society made a collective decision over the many decades (since the mid-70s) to devalue skilled trades while at the same time the very same tradespeople encouraged their kids to go into something else that wouldn't leave them physically broken and disabled at age 50.
Finding skilled contractors is hard regardless of where you live. But in rural areas is tougher because 1) they can find better paying jobs somewhere else and 2) they can find skilled laborers somewhere else. As for the glut of gender studies majors out there, I'm not sure where you're living but I have yet to stumble across one of those grads.
The local Community colleges in my state have plenty of training certification programs for industrial trades and the like where certs are necessary. But much of the construction trades people working these days get their skills on-site and they'll go where the work and $ are. Which means rural areas and small towns will still continue to suffer brain and skill drains.
The garbage man may not be romanticized, but his job is dirty and dangerous, and he deserves respect. Work and workers shouldn't be romanticized, they should be treated with appreciation and respect.
My experience with contractors, especially in rural areas, is that they don't need the work, so they can turn down jobs. Fewer young people are going into the trades and older veterans are retiring. The few who are working have their pick of jobs. This is true almost everywhere. It's not so much that tradesmen are leaving rural areas for cities, but that there were never that many here to begin with, and numbers are declining everywhere.
As for Gender Studies majors and the like, if you live within weekend travel distance of a major blue city, expect an influx of superior beings to bestow their benevolence upon your quaint little hick town and begin (re)educating you rubes about the true nature of the world. Also, expect them to wear wellies that have never seen mud.
It's not a matter of honest vs dishonest It's a matter of making a difference. If you build a car and someone drives it, you can see a clear connection between your work and results in your world. A lot of white collar work amounts to building a car that no one drives.
When people refer to blue collar work the phrase "an honest day's work" will come to mind which implies that someone doing excel spread sheets is not doing an honest day's work. And even the way highly skilled & technical blue-collar work is done today is vastly different than it was 30-40 years ago.
I think the point is that if the spread sheet gets sent out and exactly zero people read it--that's the car that no one drives. Yet those people still draw a salary.
Maybe so, but if we didn't have the man doing the spreadsheet then there would have been no inspiration for the Beatles to write the song 'Taxman', without which we wouldn't have the shortage of spreadsheet accountants we have today.
I guess my question is that if we're going to offer welfare thinly disguised as white collar "professional" labor why can't we spread the wealth around and see that some of that money filters down to the ditch diggers and tree trimmers?
I was gonna say something similar about the wokeness thing. There's a lot of well-educated people out there who are either unemployed or underemployed. They were told a degree would take them to the promised land, and it hasn't done that.
Bored, frustrated, and unhappy, they try to look elsewhere for meaning. And wokeness is one of the places they look.
David Graeber didn't create this problem, but the "Bullshit Jobs" article (then book) sprang from the same attitude and emotional commitments that created the environment Freddie's describing. The term is doing more harm than good at this point.
There's no objective criteria that define bullshit jobs, but I strongly suspect that most of our own bullshit jobs are really bullshit employers/co-workers and the jobs of others that we assume to be bullshit are often only so because they are illegible to outsiders.
(I realize that the phrase will retain its currency forever, because it is, among other things, a relatively sophisticated diss embedded in a visceral, obvious insult.)
So far as the "insult" bit goes keep in mind that a lot of the people who responded to Graeber were describing their own jobs as "bullshit" time wasters. Look at Klaus' posts here where he is very clear that he considers the work he does now (and has done for years) as legitimate bullshit. Just don't tell his boss.
Agreed: I (clumsily) tried to acknowledge that by contrasting "our own bullshit jobs" with "the bullshit jobs of others". Whatever its origins, however, I'd wager its pithy derision is the thing that will keep it alive in perpetuity.
David Graeber was very clear about the definition being that it's deemed as unnecessary by the person who has it. The person who has every incentive to describe it as necessary AND the person who knows a lot about what it entails. So that's a pretty tight test.
Well said Klaus. Especially about the Wokeism. Agree wholeheartedly. Self-righteous kids with meaningless jobs. Like working at Twitter, for example. I write stuff you might be into.
My first job out of college was “newspaper editor.” Sounded so cool. I even went to Express and bought slacks that were branded Editor Pants. I worked in an architecturally interesting old building downtown for a Pulitzer winning publication.
Salient details: it was a local newspaper in North Carolina; the building was dirty and not maintained very well; downtown was a semi hollowed out old tobacco town, which had not yet been fully revitalized; my parking spot was waaaay down a hill, next to the park where in the 80s a female editor was raped and murdered; and I was the “celebrations editor,” meaning I wrote wedding and anniversary announcements and had to deal with bride-mom-zillas and accusations of “ruining my parents’ 50th anniversary” because I couldn’t make out the spidery handwriting on the page they sent in (not filling out the actual form) and they left no contact information.
It was actually in many ways a great job. And now, 20 years later, I’m becoming a nurse. I write for fun. It’s better that way.
I think you're really right about "Why not me?" I also am seeing, both online but in IRL organizations from family to non-profits, an evolution of "Why Wasn't I Consulted?" Reading back on the Paul Ford essay on the topic of web as a medium for customer service is instructive: https://www.ftrain.com/wwic
We all have a ton of what are essentially customers with nowhere better or more useful to put their sense of knowing how to do it better, or their pride, or their disgust, or their sense of being left out.
There is a "fun" academic version of this where people with cushy tenure-track / tenured jobs at second-tier but still very good universities enjoy massive freedoms on how they spend their time, good salaries and benefits, and general respect from society. But they feel they should be at Harvard and have a public profile, and complain bitterly about those they feel don't deserve it.
Thanks for this insightful essay, all of your other nuanced perspectives, and the new comments rule. I stopped reading the comments section because of the nonsense and am glad you are implementing a zero tolerance policy.
Yeaterday, I was in a Seattle bookstore browsing through the new fiction and non-fiction front tables. I read bios and book descriptions and noticed that the word "marginalized" appeared quite a few times. And I thought, "Well, dear authors, your books are on the front table at this independent bookstore so that means your books are probably on the front tables at every independent bookstore. So what happens to the concept of marginalization in these circumstances?" But then I remembered, with my thirty years of being a successful author, that most of those writers will never again have a book prominently placed on a bookstore front table. Some of them might get their next book front-tabled. But only a very few will spend their entire careers on the fromt table. Yeah, those front tables are the source of generational resentment. One-hit wonders in music are still millionaires because of royalties. One-hit wonders in literature are usually adjunct professors in pursuit of tenure.
Like Clive James used to say, the average novel isn't good, bad, or mediocre: the average novel is unpublished (or, these days, published on Kindle Direct with zero copies sold).
Is the because the publishers believe only books about the "marginalized" should be published/promoted on said front table, OR because they think that their customers will be more likely to buy the promoted books if they write "marginalized" all over the if the bios and book descriptions repeatedly say the word "marginalized"? Both?
Both. I can't even count the number of literary agents I encountered when submitting my manuscript who specifically said, "I prefer/will give preference to manuscripts written by authors belonging to 'marginalized' groups." They made no bones about the fact that they were placing identity over all other selection criteria. It was completely about promoting an ideological agenda. Sure, there's an element of activism in this, but they also have to believe on the other end that readers are receptive to this message. They miscalculated. The fact that book sales have fallen off since publishers have taken this stance is blamed on video games, and Netflix, etc. I just think most readers resent social engineering and propaganda.
I agree. I think as readers we want to trust the judgement of publishers, and this sort of thing shakes that trust. But there are still lots of good books out there waiting to be read :-)
I wonder sometimes about all the great books that slip by under my radar because I've been distracted by some list or other. Most of my favorite things--books, music, etc--are not bestsellers...
To complicate this a bit, let's look at what is selling. I took a look at the NY Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction (an imperfect gauge to be sure, but hopefully at least something of a starting point). Here are the current top five books:
1) Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, which appears to center ways women are excluded and the work associated with them is devalued
2) Babel by R.F. Kuang, which is explicitly anticolonial with specific attention to the relationship between the British empire and China
3) Fairy Tale by Stephen King
4) Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, which according to its description "provides extraordinary perspective on the nature, process, and challenges associated with transgender individuals set within the context of a mystery"
5) Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, the description for which claims it "examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love"
After those, we get a Barbara Kingsolver book reimagining David Copperfield in Appalachia, which sure seems ripe for a focus on class as an identity, and a John Grisham novel about Croatian immigrants in Biloxi. And so on.
I'm sure there's other data out there to counter this, but it sure seems to me like a lot of the folks who are still buying books sure don't mind stories that come with an emphasis--or at least strong secondary focus--on identities that we could code as marginalized.
Good research. It occurs to me that all fiction is basically about the search for identity. Gatsby, Moby Dick. I think of Phillip Roth and his exploration of Jewish identity in his books. He didn’t write with the same kind of activist mindset. And his characters were morally complicated. I think we’re now in the Era of the Only Lightly-Flawed Hero.
I didn't say people weren't interested in reading stories about _characters_ with diverse identities. We've been doing that since the beginning of literature. I questioned whether it was appropriate to choose works for publication on the basis of the _author's_ identity. Do these works necessarily represent the BEST writing crossing agents' desks (some may, but all can't), or should the books that eventually reach readers speak for themselves, without needing to check the right identity boxes or deploy the right buzzwords?
Getting back to Freddy's point, I think it's these considerations that lead to the resentment of writers and journalists who are disappointed by their careers. We all want our writing to find a big audience but, despite all the buzzwords and identity boxes and promotion, books usually fail. And a failed writer can be a very angry writer looking to punish the more succesful.
I lurk on a lively SFF discussion board, and almost every time I go there I see readers asking for recommendations of books by authors from a particular identity, or saying that they only read books written by a particular identity, or (more rarely) mentioning that they google new authors to check their identities and see if they have done anything problematic. That board has lots of posters from outside the US, as well. So this could be an SFF thing, or an outside the US thing, or a general readers thing. But it is a thing.
I don't doubt it. I just doubt that it represents the majority of readers, who I don't think care either way about the identity of authors. And good luck finding artists who haven't done anything "problematic!" I think normal people would find the idea of turning away a book because the author's identity doesn't match their own to be pretty creepy. It's hardly a cause for self-congratulation or celebration.
As an aside, Demon Copperhead, the Barbara Kingsolver novel, is wonderful. It was one of my favorite books of 2023, perhaps my very favorite (and I read 73 books last year).
Well, it's sort of an amalgam. Like the PB (my gateway novel into eternal Kingsolver fandom), DC is a big-idea "history" novel, only the history it covers isn't that of the Congo under colonialism but that of the 2010s opiate epidemic in southern Appalachia. It's also a smart gloss on the Dickens classic, and it shares Dickens's outrage and empathy, I think.
Winter's Bone (another novel I loved) was written by Daniel Woodrell and set in the Ozarks (where Woodrell is from and still lives, I believe). But yes, both novels deal with intergenerational poverty, drug trafficking, and general rural ruin.
As a reader/listener, I'm turned off by the "marginalized" group pandering. I want interesting characters, good story and some literary beauty. Unfortunately, I now tend to reject stories from "marginalized" groups out of prejudice that didn't exist before. Prejudice, meaning pre-judge. I'm pre-judging the publishers as unimaginative idiots who are riding the current wave.
Sadly, I feel the same way. I'm skeptical of these books now where I would never have been before because it's clear they're selling some agenda. I just want good stories.
Yep. I had the exact same experience. In 2016 one agent wrote me a long email praising my novel...but then said (in softer coded language) that a story about a middle class white kid was not exactly exemplary today. It was sort of ‘the white guy story has been done. Time to move on.’ That’s why I write on Substack. I’ve written 12 novels--all unpublished.
Yup, I've had that debate on other forums where commenters (you know the ones) insisted that "we have had enough stories about x characters or y subjects." Who are they to decide what's "enough"? I feel the same about agents and publishers now. They clearly don't care what _I_ want to read, just what they think I _should_ want to read. Keep writing your stories. I will too :-) There are readers out there who haven't had "enough."
I think this is a real issue but I tend to think the reason there are so many terrible eat your vegetables moralistic books is that the publishing industry is still entirely white as far as who makes the decisions, so we get this posh white person's idea of the novel as written by a person of colour.
It's a shame how so much of the discourse around fiction focuses on your bookshelf or mine, and our moral responsibilities as readers, and then discusses writers and the challenges facing people from different backgrounds, but barely anybody ever discusses identity as regards agents and publishers. They're the ones with the power.
You make an interesting point, and I agree that publishing professionals generally are deeply out of touch. But I'm not totally convinced that the race of the publishing industry is really the issue, as even diversity hires entering the industry will be coming from the same warped educational institutions that produced the current occupants and will be ensconced in the same elitist literary culture. I'm not sure how much vastly changes other than the optics.
Plenty of attention is given to superficial markers like race and gender, etc. It seems like that's all we talk about anymore. But if by diversity you mean intellectual diversity, socioeconomic class, educational background, political preferences, and the like, then I agree not enough attention is given to those metrics of diversity--unless you count negative attention.
Book sales are UP--2021 sales highest since they started tracking; 2022 sales slightly less than 2021, but still high. I’m referring to traditionally published titles. Adult fiction sales are bananas (due to TikTok). Nonfic slightly down
The sales increase was a predictable anomaly due to covid lockdowns, but it was short-lived. It is now dropping off precipitously as many people 1) return to their previous routines and 2) reject the new gluten-free fiction being served, esp in the last few years.
Pretty much every book sales post after this documents this decline:
Colleen Hoover is THE bestselling author in America right now and she is not PC. She writes what her audience wants--escape, romance, sex. To get back to the original point of Freddie’s post, I’m a professional writer who has found success building an audience for my work on the internet over many years. I think “literary” writers prefer not to think about audience or marketing and would rather their publisher plug in the right buzz word
Yes, I've often written about feeling like Willy Loman as I hit the sales circuit year after year. But I've used my acting/debate training from high school and college to become a serious performer onstage and in media—an old-fashioned traveling storyteller, a bard with 2 million frequent flyer miles. When folks ask me for writing advice, I'll skip ahead and tell them to take a few acting classes alongside the literary workshops.
Hey, Leigh! Great to see your post. I'd assume the book boom is (was?) very top heavy, as books sales are. O, to have Colleen Hoover's sales! I imagine Taylor Jenkins Reid is also bringing up the overall sales numbers. And did the backlist sales of the constant bestsellers go up big? I contributed to that by re-buying and re-reading about 15 Michael Connelly crime novels. I'd be very surprised (and happy) to learn that a higher percentage of books sold more than the usual 10,000 copies. Or even 2,000 copies. Especially literary fiction. Speaking anecdotally, I have friends whose pandemic-era new books did not sell as well as their previous ones. And, again, I'd be delighted to be completely wrong about book sales, past, present, and future!
You're absolutely right that it's top authors out-performing everybody else! The growth isn't distributed equally... this is America. :)
Last year, the top 90 BookTok authors accounted for 73% of fiction sales growth (in first Q of 2022). BookTok authors sold 9 million units in 2020; 20 million in 2021.
I'm one of the lucky ones who released a book during the pandemic that actually sold; and I'm learning TikTok/BookTok as part of my strategy to sell my next book.
But there are also these weird outlier stories I get excited about (this is a literary novel from tiny Unnamed Press, about menopausal cannibalism, selling 500 copies a week because of TikTok)
Oh, that's great to hear about Chelsea Summer's book! The underdog rising from the small press. I lived that same story 31 years ago. But that was when book tours were busy with radio, TV, and print appearances. I'd be on local morning shows between the weather and sports news! Is #BookTok the new book tour?
It would seem the publishers' political/cultural motivations are antagonistic to their economic motivations. If for political-cultural purity you will only sell/promote books that a meaningful portion of your potential customer base has no interest in purchasing, then I'd say you are true to your political-cultural purity, because you are willing to forgo the lost economic gains. And, you set your industry back, since the would be customers give up on new books and find old ones to read instead. Something like that.
Wouldn't that be true even if you allowed a wider variety of author identities and story narratives? Didn't the big bestseller also subsidize all the other books back in the 1980s and 1990s (whenever was pre-woke publishing)?
I still read and love the classics and I love to read contemporary works as well. I do my best to read across the chronological, political, cultural, and economic spectrum.
Well I think that ties into part of this keenly-felt desire to "find" meaning or "be" meaningful in one's work (to the extent that it's not just marketing to PMC readers). I'm sure you could track the rise in the percentage of humanities professors who self-identify as "activist-scholars" rather than merely subject matter experts over the last, say, thirty years and the results wouldn't surprise anyone. So even perceived high-status jobs (like writer, professor, etc.) don't feel like enough without a "changing the world" veneer to them. It's apparently not just email-pushers who feel this way.
Another old person question. Embarrassment. I even tried looking it up and I got PubMed readers and in this context it doesn't work. What is PMC readers? I think I have an idea, but I'd like to know what the acronym stands for.
Back when I was in high school in the very late 90s/early aughts, a preview for Smoke Signals was on a VHS I watched all the time. Funnily I can't remember which VHS it was though I can remember the preview. Probably Apollo 13 or The American President. And now I'm replying to the screenwriter of Smoke Signals! Who would've thought.
True. It’s all about competition and incentives.
❤️❤️💯
Good point. I think also people analysing their own problems in structural ways has become very popular, and a lot of the time there's a latent assumption that others are somehow beatifically happy or there's some house on the hill in human contentment that you can reach if everyone else would just get out of the way.
"I think a lot of that anger and resentment is, consciously or not, people reacting to the realization that their life is disappointing in one way or another"
This is why Radiohead was (still is?) so popular.
Perhaps we can instead instill in people a greater enjoyment of the 16ish hours a day they aren't working? To say, yeah, work sucks for 90% of us, but you can then go for walks in the park and drink beer with friends?
Here's a self-examination: I am doing the only thing I have ever wanted to do, as a profession, and for more than many doctors and lawyers make; I have maintained perspective enough to remember how lucky I am and how the economic system in which I live deprives so many people not only of meaning and satisfaction but of the basic necessities of life. And I would give up the former if I felt it could positively impact the latter. Those things being true... I can live with it.
hardy har
Here's the commenting rule I posted yesterday.
"Starting tomorrow, there’s a new rule in place for commenting on this newsletter: any comments that do nothing other than to dismiss the relevance or importance of the topic of the given post will be deleted, and the commenter will be issued a one-month ban. I mean specifically comments of the type “this is worth talking about because?,” “why is this worth a post?,” “I don’t care about the phenomenon the post is describing,” etc. There’s not going to be any warnings - if your comment merely dismisses the relevance or worthiness of a post’s topic, you’re banned for a month.
A particularly annoying, self-aggrandizing version of the type of comment I’m talking about is the “this is just meaningless online stuff!” “This is just a Twitter phenomenon!” Etc. These comments are uniquely annoying and self-defeating. First, this newsletter is about many things, and one of those things is online culture and its influence on culture and politics. Many people, in the 21st century, spend a great deal of time online, so elements of online culture have natural and intrinsic interest. If you personally don’t see the interest in a given post, simply pass it by; no one will miss out on anything by not seeing your comment about your lack of interest. Another aggravating element of this tendency is that commenting on an internet newsletter is inherently a marker of being online. This tends to be so self-celebratory, even masturbatory - “you’re all so online, but not me! All of this online stuff is beneath me!” My friend, if you are online enough to launch a comment on a blog, you are not so offline that you get to strut around in that way.
If you routinely find yourself uninterested in what I write about here, you are of course free to take your readership and your money somewhere else. That’s an option you have. An option you no longer have is to peacock around in my comments section, bragging about how the topic of the day isn’t worth your interest. That ends now, and people who violate the rule will catch bans. You have been warned."
It's your board, and as far as I'm concerned, Internet boards are rarely over-regulated. I'm also unlikely to ever fall afoul.
However, as a newcomer without the benefit of seeing the history, and it being the first post to land in my inbox following subscription, I found it difficult to evaluate. Your examples within were appreciated, but it still was perceived as being uninterested in hearing feedback from readers on what doesn't interest them.
I am aware we haven't subscribed to have you to listen to us. From a business standpoint, while having a filter on feedback is good practice, this is rarely true if the filter blinds rather than clarifies.
I would argue that this isn't a filter on feedback as much as it is a filter on performing one's distaste. It would be very easy to judge what is or is not interesting to the readership by the overall response (or lack thereof); from a business standpoint that will shake itself out just fine on its own. Uninteresting things would drive less engagement, without needing someone to say it overtly and with a tone of performative contempt or dismissal.
I appreciate your comment CW. You are right, the filter is undoubtedly at least the latter, but the latter is a form of the former. Distaste is integral, degree of performance subjective. As a newcomer, I have no gauge of where Freddie's subjectivity will lead on this.
Honestly, I think that there is little value in comments from readers on what doesn't interest them. Not because that isn't valuable information but simply because there are far better ways to get that data.
The number of pageviews and posted links tells you how much the piece engaged with new audiences. Likes on the article can demonstrate whether a piece stood out. Raw number of comments suggests a piece that was heavily engaged with. Meaningful changes in subscriptions (I assume there's always a little churn) sharply demonstrates whether people want to pay money to read more of what was just published.
A commenter saying "less of this please" or "why talk about X when Y is going on" means basically nothing. It is the equivalent of the people who show up to public comment on a development and think they are the voice of the city even when opinion polls and elections disagree with them - just because you are willing to loudly state your opinion does not make the opinion more valuable.
I respectfully disagree.
Even the lowest quality (intelligible) text response has a quality and specificity that pageviews or message counts just can't hope to touch.
For example: "why talk about X when Y is going on" is a low quality response. It also describes a significant portion of every human discussion on import, and so clearly means more to humans than nothing. In contrast, incrementing a counter on one of these metrics is as close to meaningless as possible, even when it can avoid being misinterpreted.
The metrics you mention are what is used because they're readily available and nearly costless to tabulate. But an entire industry ascribes far more to them than they are capable of.
Consider: instead of the above, I could instead post "1". (Amusing myself with argumentum ad absurdum here).
>Even the lowest quality (intelligible) text response has a quality and specificity that pageviews or message counts just can't hope to touch.
I'm not sure this is true given that "wtaXwYigo" is less often about improving content relevancy and more often about "this contradicts my worldview and I don't feel good when I read it".
I seem to recall hearing a story about a frustrated Austrian artist channeling those negative feelings into a politics ... short guy, funny mustache ...
I'm glad you mentioned bullshit jobs, because I think that plays a huge role here. If these people built cars or something, they'd still want to be a star, but at least they'd have 40 hours of useful work to fill some of that void. Meanwhile, if you're a senior customer success specialist for a B2B software firm, you're going to wish you could do something that made a difference. Since the average white-collar worker can't imagine doing something blue-collar, that dream will naturally be something in the creative field. It's that sliver in the center of the Venn Diagram between "useful jobs" and "comfy, white-collar jobs," outside highly technical stuff like engineering.
I also think it explains some of the "wokeness" phenomena within the workplace. If your job is bullshit, you can kinda maybe convince yourself that you're doing something useful by working towards "diversity in digital marketing."
I speak from my own experience here, having spent years in bullshit jobs. I don't mind it, I agree with your positive assessment, but clearly other do mind it
I feel this. I genuinely like my job, but I still have so many days where I'm like, "Damn, I miss when I came into work and my only job was to turn a big pile of dirty dishes into a stack of clean dishes."
Same. I have a PhD and a fairly easy and well-compensated job, but there are definitely times when I nostalgically remember how much I actually liked working in coffee shops in my 20's and often miss it.
I run multiple organizations and can choose to work or not. I too sometimes wish I had a job where there was a sense of completion at the end of the day.
I should have no complaints, since if I truly wanted that enough, I could quit and go do something offering that. Instead, I work 10 hours a week, volunteer 60+ more, have 4 great kids at home, 22,000 acres out back.
Yet it's a very attractive notion, and very human to want what you don't have.
Have also sometimes felt (cautiously) nostalgic about my college dishwashing gig. The material satisfaction thing about dirty dishes -> clean dishes is real. Also, though, service jobs like that often have a rhythm or pattern that seems somehow more human: very busy and then almost dead depending on the time (so then you can sort of fuck off and take smoke breaks or read, or at least I did). Whereas in office jobs I always had to "look busy" and that's frankly miserable.
Yes! This is a big part of it. My ass has to be in the chair even when the project is in the “waiting for someone, anyone, to respond to an email” phase, and if someone sticks their head in the door and asks what I’m doing I have to have a better answer than “waiting for someone, anyone to respond to an email.”
Though I don’t mean to romanticize dishwashing - my perspective on it as a college-educated person making rent on my way to higher-paying work was a lot different than many of my coworkers, for whom it was the only way they were ever going to make rent. Few of them will ever have a job with paid vacation, and the stir-crazy days of office work are 100% worth that to me. But man, when I was losing my mind working from home in the pandemic……. I may not have always billed 40 hours, but my dishes were always clean.
True
I haven't had a bullshit job, but from my perch at the remote edge of the SFF writing universe, I've seen a tremendous lot of bullshit justifications for the kind of creative jobs Freddie is talking about. If I never read another article about 'how story will save us' or suchlike, I will be glad. I am tired beyond measure with people's attempts to turn their liking for comic books, fairy tales, video games or movies into social virtue or 'making a difference' -- a tendency which contributes to the toxicity surrounding those creative endeavors.
These jobs largely *don't* make a difference, and that is one reason there isn't enough demand for them to satisfy all the wannabes. More people want to write fantasy short stories than want to read them, for instance. If I hung my self-worth on my writing, I would be fooling myself -- and I would be miserable, and deserve to be.
So I say, absolutely get a day job. Get a day job and do it well and if it isn't making the kind of difference you want to make in the world, pick up some volunteering on the side. *Then,* when you've established your own sense of self-worth, go and do the stuff that you find enjoyable because you find it enjoyable, without having to make up excuses and always be on the prickly defensive about how it makes you important or virtuous.
Oh I one thousand percent agree with that. I am a book and movie fanatic, love music, and grew up in orchestra (both of my parents are professional musicians and public school music teachers) and theater, and I originally went to art school myself for college. I absolutely believe arts matter. But they are not ALL that matters, and I think too often those are the only things we place value on, particularly in terms of success or social capital. Lots of other things are also important, and noteworthy.
Arts do matter but they don't have to achieve something practical in order to matter. Like people
I think teaching is different in that you're sharing a defined skill with people who want to learn it. The stuff I read is more aimed at bolstering the morale of people who are not finding that audience, or who want to leverage their relationship with an art into something more prestigious or 'virtuous'. (That may be what I find so inauthentic about it. The person is doing something ostensibly because they love it, but justifying it as if loving it isn't enough -- it has to be Important for the Good of Society, or some such. Your feeling that a relationship with music is important in itself strikes me as a far better rationale for doing it.)
I'm dusting off memories of kids applying for things within the last ten years. It seems that there was a lot of "how will this allow you to have an important impact on society" in the applications.
Am I wrong, or isn't there a lot of encouragement and incentive to view everything you do as world changing in importance.
I remember rolling my eyes at these question. The real answer was, "I want the scholarship because we can't afford it otherwise."
Bingo. I think the increasingly competitive and zero-sum nature of our society is also partly to blame. Why do something for love and craft, when you can do something that also CREATES SO MUCH GOOD AND MAKES AN IMPACT??
I totally agree about the importance of the arts. There need to be more opportunities. I used to organize chamber music togethers with my kids and friends with music stands and pizza. It was fun. During COVID lockdowns there was a group of musicians who played every Sunday in the park.
However, if all you got was a conservatory education, you'd be a pretty undereducated person. No math, no science.
YES, I love this comment. Personally, I think most creative endeavors are bullshit, and even things that get published or seen won't last past a couple of years before they're forgotten. Even if it is kinda bullshit, making the world continue to run and work is laudable work, though on the flip side of that, a lot of very successful people with advanced degrees also work meaningless jobs (middle management in hospitals or universities, for instance, which may come with some prestige, but exist just to push papers around).
I work with a lot of people in my line of work that struggle with meaning in their lives, and for many of them it's because they see their job as pointless, or with no esteem. One of the things I tell people is to find something you care about and invest yourself in it in your personal life, whether it's animals, or the environment, or voting rights, or HIV activism, or local theater, or whatever, just do something you care about but don't do it for money. Do it as a way to give your life purpose (as you see it), feel like you're involved in something bigger than yourself, and that create social bonds. I'm afraid almost no one does this but I still think it's good advice. One of the biggest drawbacks our internet/social media has normalized is intense navel-gazing and narcissism that is now seen as enlightened and typical, and so many activities that aren't directly beneficial or esteem-raising to the participants are no longer seen as worthwhile for either secondary benefits, or just for the sake of doing them.
I once met an author who was selected for Oprah’s book club. Overnight best-selling millionaire. His name is Brett Lott. Who remembers him? Great writer, but not even Oprah can save everyone.
Whenever I see a mention of someone like this, I'm basically compelled to look them up. "What happened to that guy" is a question that must never go unanswered.
Anyway, he last published in 2013, a memoir on writing and Christianity I guess?
Oh shit “Brett” liked this comment!! brett is that you? I remember you!!! I have your autograph!!!!!!!!
Freddie attracts a wide circle; I just found out sherman lexie is a subscriber
I largely agree with your assessment. But don’t forget the 1% of true freaks like myself, aka the ‘artists,’ those of us who’ve worked a million jobs and quit them all because writing always pulls me back with the force of Dante’s inferno. That being said: 99% of people should STFU and get a damn job, as you said. I think the problem today is: Everyone thinks there’re special and everyone thinks they’re a writer/expert/genius etc. We’re all too bored and privileged.
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
I'm honestly trying to figure out why people in white-collar jobs romanticize blue-collar jobs as if the majority of BC jobs involves saving the world with every spade of gravel shoveled. Many of my friends' parents in high school had blue collar jobs and they actively encouraged their kids to go to college in order to avoid working a blue-collar job. Perhaps it's the romanticized idea that BC work is honest work whereas being an insurance actuary is not honest?
Somewhere along the way, the idea about taking pride in your work (regardless of remuneration) as separate from finding that work spiritually rewarding was changed into you should find your job spiritually rewarding otherwise why bother taking pride in doing the job well.
I think there's a sense that a lot of white collar jobs are bullshit. The Atlantic ran an article years back that asked "If your job (and you) vanished would anybody even notice?" At least with blue collar employment there is a sense of tangible accomplishment because at the end of the day something objectively useful has been accomplished. That is not the case for white collar busywork.
Or, we *imagine* that there'd be a sense of tangible accomplishment at the end of the day. I look back fondly on my time as a Wendy's line cook. But when I try to think back about what I thought about the job at the time, I don't remember feeling this mythical sense of accomplishment. I remember my feet hurting, and having to wash the salt and sweat off my skin, and being yelled at by my manager for being too slow during the lunch rush. "Come on grandpa, we're burning!"
Reminds me about the scene at the end of Office Space where Hank seems to despise Peter for giving up his high paying software job to come and do manual labor.
I worked at a warehouse among many other manual labor jobs in my misspent youth (including a stint at fast food, although my tenure was at Arby's). Human beings are physical creatures so I don't think it's really surprising that building something, cleaning something, sorting something is inherently satisfying. Doc Rivers had a pretty strenuous job in the abstract realm. He insisted on ironing his own shirts because it calmed him down and gave him time to reflect. If I have put in some serious intellectual effort at work doing the dishes (or any other type of hands on labor that I can perform on autopilot) can be seriously relaxing.
Plus there is the endorphin rush that just comes with strenuous physical activity. I look back at those jobs I held when I was younger with fondness. At the end of the day you are tired but it's a good tired. My strongest memories of those jobs are of walking outside while the sun was setting and lighting up a ciggy with my co-workers and chatting while the smoke curled up around us. Good times.
This is true of blue collar jobs as well. At the end of the day, it's really about the type of work & tasks you're doing because there are plenty of blue collar jobs that don't result in tangible sense of accomplishment and that's also why many blue collar jobs get automated because rote / routine tasks aren't meaningful but menial in nature.
If your job is to take a bunch of crates and move them to the loading dock it's very difficult to be able to get to the end of the day and not be able to point to a tangible, physical result of your labor. That's not the case for a lot of white collar work.
Well the remunerative gulf that exists between an Amazon dock worker and the medical billing specialist is big enough for people to take the latter over the former. But to your point, there is satisfaction when doing some physical jobs but not every physical job is satisfying. I'd rather work carpentry than fast food / retail service having experienced them both in my past.
There's no question white collar jobs pay better. But look at the responses just here in the posts--people don't look back on their blue collar jobs with distaste. In fact I think I detect a considerable amount of nostalgia.
In some Scandinavian countries generous social welfare systems mean that the government pays people a salary to read novels to retirees. It is essentially busy work that is designed to put a gloss on welfare. I think that is very close to the sense that a lot of white collar workers have that if their job simply vanished nobody would care or even notice.
When the plumber finds the action figure lodged in the S-bend of the toilet, he/she knows they've accomplished their good deed for the day.
🫰🫰🫰
If the jobs blue collar workers do ceased to be done, civilization as we know it would end. Imagine a world without plumbers, carpenters, sanitation workers, auto mechanics, HVAC, fire sprinklerfitters, welders, steelworkers, etc. etc. Sadly, these trades are on the decline, despite usually being good union jobs, because of the false promise of university degrees as some kind of golden ticket.
I live in a rural area and finding contractors is almost impossible--partly because people here are self-reliant and partly because people just don't show up when you call them. Most of them are too busy to take on new projects. It's a problem and I've had to learn to do a lot of things myself. But where I can't do them, I quickly learn to appreciate those who can. I don't want more gender studies degrees in the world. I want more tradesmen.
I hear you! I am in awe of people with skills like that, and I could only aspire to a fraction of that kind of self-sufficiency. Some of my neighbors can put additions on their own houses, do their own roofing, plumbing, electric, repair their own cars and tractors, do their own excavation--not to mention grow food! I'm learning, but it's definitely humbling for me and puts my skills in perspective.
Fingers crossed!
I too am in a rural area. I was helping a neighbor put in a hot water heater, and she was trying to convince me to become a handyman, as they're in short supply.
They are! I actually started taking woodworking classes because I'm so desperate! I have a bathroom I need to redo and I can't find anyone to help, so It's going to be me and youtube one of these days... :-|
The trades you mention (aside from sanitation workers) are high skilled trades that get romanticized whereas the garbage man does not. The ditch digger does not. The tomato picker does not. The fish gutter does not.
Society made a collective decision over the many decades (since the mid-70s) to devalue skilled trades while at the same time the very same tradespeople encouraged their kids to go into something else that wouldn't leave them physically broken and disabled at age 50.
Finding skilled contractors is hard regardless of where you live. But in rural areas is tougher because 1) they can find better paying jobs somewhere else and 2) they can find skilled laborers somewhere else. As for the glut of gender studies majors out there, I'm not sure where you're living but I have yet to stumble across one of those grads.
The local Community colleges in my state have plenty of training certification programs for industrial trades and the like where certs are necessary. But much of the construction trades people working these days get their skills on-site and they'll go where the work and $ are. Which means rural areas and small towns will still continue to suffer brain and skill drains.
https://stradaeducation.org/press-release/pomp-and-circumstances-new-study-finds-most-college-graduates-who-start-out-underemployed-stay-there/
https://studentloanhero.com/featured/college-grads-underemployed/
https://www.strifeblog.org/2021/06/29/the-screaming-twenties-how-elite-overproduction-may-lead-to-a-decade-of-discord-in-the-united-states/
The garbage man may not be romanticized, but his job is dirty and dangerous, and he deserves respect. Work and workers shouldn't be romanticized, they should be treated with appreciation and respect.
My experience with contractors, especially in rural areas, is that they don't need the work, so they can turn down jobs. Fewer young people are going into the trades and older veterans are retiring. The few who are working have their pick of jobs. This is true almost everywhere. It's not so much that tradesmen are leaving rural areas for cities, but that there were never that many here to begin with, and numbers are declining everywhere.
As for Gender Studies majors and the like, if you live within weekend travel distance of a major blue city, expect an influx of superior beings to bestow their benevolence upon your quaint little hick town and begin (re)educating you rubes about the true nature of the world. Also, expect them to wear wellies that have never seen mud.
It’s the truth. Which is ironic given that all the young rich white wokies hate the working class.
It's not a matter of honest vs dishonest It's a matter of making a difference. If you build a car and someone drives it, you can see a clear connection between your work and results in your world. A lot of white collar work amounts to building a car that no one drives.
When people refer to blue collar work the phrase "an honest day's work" will come to mind which implies that someone doing excel spread sheets is not doing an honest day's work. And even the way highly skilled & technical blue-collar work is done today is vastly different than it was 30-40 years ago.
I think the point is that if the spread sheet gets sent out and exactly zero people read it--that's the car that no one drives. Yet those people still draw a salary.
Maybe so, but if we didn't have the man doing the spreadsheet then there would have been no inspiration for the Beatles to write the song 'Taxman', without which we wouldn't have the shortage of spreadsheet accountants we have today.
I guess my question is that if we're going to offer welfare thinly disguised as white collar "professional" labor why can't we spread the wealth around and see that some of that money filters down to the ditch diggers and tree trimmers?
🔥
Good points.
I was gonna say something similar about the wokeness thing. There's a lot of well-educated people out there who are either unemployed or underemployed. They were told a degree would take them to the promised land, and it hasn't done that.
Bored, frustrated, and unhappy, they try to look elsewhere for meaning. And wokeness is one of the places they look.
If you read Turchin underemployed elites are one of the primary causes of Bad Things happening at the national/societal level.
Exactly who the Conquistadors were. Its much better to direct them in creating a colony than having them foment a revolution at home.
Onward to Mars then.
Prepare the B Ark!
I will be with the hairdressers and telephone sanitizers.
That describes every member of Congress right there.
Congress critters draw six figure salaries. Money takes a lot of the sting out of busywork.
In Turchin's framework, though, the overproduced elites that cause trouble would be those that can't get seats in Congress, CEO positions, etc.
David Graeber didn't create this problem, but the "Bullshit Jobs" article (then book) sprang from the same attitude and emotional commitments that created the environment Freddie's describing. The term is doing more harm than good at this point.
There's no objective criteria that define bullshit jobs, but I strongly suspect that most of our own bullshit jobs are really bullshit employers/co-workers and the jobs of others that we assume to be bullshit are often only so because they are illegible to outsiders.
(I realize that the phrase will retain its currency forever, because it is, among other things, a relatively sophisticated diss embedded in a visceral, obvious insult.)
So far as the "insult" bit goes keep in mind that a lot of the people who responded to Graeber were describing their own jobs as "bullshit" time wasters. Look at Klaus' posts here where he is very clear that he considers the work he does now (and has done for years) as legitimate bullshit. Just don't tell his boss.
Agreed: I (clumsily) tried to acknowledge that by contrasting "our own bullshit jobs" with "the bullshit jobs of others". Whatever its origins, however, I'd wager its pithy derision is the thing that will keep it alive in perpetuity.
David Graeber was very clear about the definition being that it's deemed as unnecessary by the person who has it. The person who has every incentive to describe it as necessary AND the person who knows a lot about what it entails. So that's a pretty tight test.
Well said Klaus. Especially about the Wokeism. Agree wholeheartedly. Self-righteous kids with meaningless jobs. Like working at Twitter, for example. I write stuff you might be into.
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
My first job out of college was “newspaper editor.” Sounded so cool. I even went to Express and bought slacks that were branded Editor Pants. I worked in an architecturally interesting old building downtown for a Pulitzer winning publication.
Salient details: it was a local newspaper in North Carolina; the building was dirty and not maintained very well; downtown was a semi hollowed out old tobacco town, which had not yet been fully revitalized; my parking spot was waaaay down a hill, next to the park where in the 80s a female editor was raped and murdered; and I was the “celebrations editor,” meaning I wrote wedding and anniversary announcements and had to deal with bride-mom-zillas and accusations of “ruining my parents’ 50th anniversary” because I couldn’t make out the spidery handwriting on the page they sent in (not filling out the actual form) and they left no contact information.
It was actually in many ways a great job. And now, 20 years later, I’m becoming a nurse. I write for fun. It’s better that way.
Do you still have the Editor Pants?
Dude those were three pant sizes back.
I was hoping you'd worked them into your Applebee's act.
The original tear-aways.
I remember feeling envy for those pants on the name alone! lol
Sounds like Nancy in Stranger Things! Sort of.
I haven't had any upside down creature encounters though.*
*that I'm willing to talk about
Nice perspective 🔥🔥❤️
Those pants had way too much cloth. You could have cut them by a third.
Lol, the art accompanying that New York mag piece
I think you're really right about "Why not me?" I also am seeing, both online but in IRL organizations from family to non-profits, an evolution of "Why Wasn't I Consulted?" Reading back on the Paul Ford essay on the topic of web as a medium for customer service is instructive: https://www.ftrain.com/wwic
Interestingly, he first start talking about this idea also in 2007 https://www.ftrain.com/SiteLaunch
We all have a ton of what are essentially customers with nowhere better or more useful to put their sense of knowing how to do it better, or their pride, or their disgust, or their sense of being left out.
Yep. Everyone’s special now; everyone’s a winner; everyone’s a genius,
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
There is a "fun" academic version of this where people with cushy tenure-track / tenured jobs at second-tier but still very good universities enjoy massive freedoms on how they spend their time, good salaries and benefits, and general respect from society. But they feel they should be at Harvard and have a public profile, and complain bitterly about those they feel don't deserve it.
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Thanks for this insightful essay, all of your other nuanced perspectives, and the new comments rule. I stopped reading the comments section because of the nonsense and am glad you are implementing a zero tolerance policy.
Yeaterday, I was in a Seattle bookstore browsing through the new fiction and non-fiction front tables. I read bios and book descriptions and noticed that the word "marginalized" appeared quite a few times. And I thought, "Well, dear authors, your books are on the front table at this independent bookstore so that means your books are probably on the front tables at every independent bookstore. So what happens to the concept of marginalization in these circumstances?" But then I remembered, with my thirty years of being a successful author, that most of those writers will never again have a book prominently placed on a bookstore front table. Some of them might get their next book front-tabled. But only a very few will spend their entire careers on the fromt table. Yeah, those front tables are the source of generational resentment. One-hit wonders in music are still millionaires because of royalties. One-hit wonders in literature are usually adjunct professors in pursuit of tenure.
Like Clive James used to say, the average novel isn't good, bad, or mediocre: the average novel is unpublished (or, these days, published on Kindle Direct with zero copies sold).
I've never read that James quote before. That is painfully accurate.
Yes
Is the because the publishers believe only books about the "marginalized" should be published/promoted on said front table, OR because they think that their customers will be more likely to buy the promoted books if they write "marginalized" all over the if the bios and book descriptions repeatedly say the word "marginalized"? Both?
(edited to add "only")
Both. I can't even count the number of literary agents I encountered when submitting my manuscript who specifically said, "I prefer/will give preference to manuscripts written by authors belonging to 'marginalized' groups." They made no bones about the fact that they were placing identity over all other selection criteria. It was completely about promoting an ideological agenda. Sure, there's an element of activism in this, but they also have to believe on the other end that readers are receptive to this message. They miscalculated. The fact that book sales have fallen off since publishers have taken this stance is blamed on video games, and Netflix, etc. I just think most readers resent social engineering and propaganda.
I think more bad books are published because of this publicity push. And bad books, in a fair world, don't sell.
I agree. I think as readers we want to trust the judgement of publishers, and this sort of thing shakes that trust. But there are still lots of good books out there waiting to be read :-)
Yes, there are great books. I'm reading a Sigrid Nunez novel from a decade ago that is wonderful. But I'd also bet it's sold less than 10,000 copies.
I wonder sometimes about all the great books that slip by under my radar because I've been distracted by some list or other. Most of my favorite things--books, music, etc--are not bestsellers...
Didn't give the customer what they wanted and the customer voted with their feet, imagine that.
To complicate this a bit, let's look at what is selling. I took a look at the NY Times bestseller list for hardcover fiction (an imperfect gauge to be sure, but hopefully at least something of a starting point). Here are the current top five books:
1) Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, which appears to center ways women are excluded and the work associated with them is devalued
2) Babel by R.F. Kuang, which is explicitly anticolonial with specific attention to the relationship between the British empire and China
3) Fairy Tale by Stephen King
4) Mad Honey by Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan, which according to its description "provides extraordinary perspective on the nature, process, and challenges associated with transgender individuals set within the context of a mystery"
5) Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, the description for which claims it "examines the multifarious nature of identity, disability, failure, the redemptive possibilities in play, and above all, our need to connect: to be loved and to love"
After those, we get a Barbara Kingsolver book reimagining David Copperfield in Appalachia, which sure seems ripe for a focus on class as an identity, and a John Grisham novel about Croatian immigrants in Biloxi. And so on.
I'm sure there's other data out there to counter this, but it sure seems to me like a lot of the folks who are still buying books sure don't mind stories that come with an emphasis--or at least strong secondary focus--on identities that we could code as marginalized.
Good research. It occurs to me that all fiction is basically about the search for identity. Gatsby, Moby Dick. I think of Phillip Roth and his exploration of Jewish identity in his books. He didn’t write with the same kind of activist mindset. And his characters were morally complicated. I think we’re now in the Era of the Only Lightly-Flawed Hero.
I didn't say people weren't interested in reading stories about _characters_ with diverse identities. We've been doing that since the beginning of literature. I questioned whether it was appropriate to choose works for publication on the basis of the _author's_ identity. Do these works necessarily represent the BEST writing crossing agents' desks (some may, but all can't), or should the books that eventually reach readers speak for themselves, without needing to check the right identity boxes or deploy the right buzzwords?
Getting back to Freddy's point, I think it's these considerations that lead to the resentment of writers and journalists who are disappointed by their careers. We all want our writing to find a big audience but, despite all the buzzwords and identity boxes and promotion, books usually fail. And a failed writer can be a very angry writer looking to punish the more succesful.
I lurk on a lively SFF discussion board, and almost every time I go there I see readers asking for recommendations of books by authors from a particular identity, or saying that they only read books written by a particular identity, or (more rarely) mentioning that they google new authors to check their identities and see if they have done anything problematic. That board has lots of posters from outside the US, as well. So this could be an SFF thing, or an outside the US thing, or a general readers thing. But it is a thing.
I don't doubt it. I just doubt that it represents the majority of readers, who I don't think care either way about the identity of authors. And good luck finding artists who haven't done anything "problematic!" I think normal people would find the idea of turning away a book because the author's identity doesn't match their own to be pretty creepy. It's hardly a cause for self-congratulation or celebration.
As an aside, Demon Copperhead, the Barbara Kingsolver novel, is wonderful. It was one of my favorite books of 2023, perhaps my very favorite (and I read 73 books last year).
noted.
can I ask if it's closer to the poisonwood bible (which I loved) or the bean trees (not so much)
Well, it's sort of an amalgam. Like the PB (my gateway novel into eternal Kingsolver fandom), DC is a big-idea "history" novel, only the history it covers isn't that of the Congo under colonialism but that of the 2010s opiate epidemic in southern Appalachia. It's also a smart gloss on the Dickens classic, and it shares Dickens's outrage and empathy, I think.
It sounds like Demon Copperhead is about the same marginalized group as Winter Bone, which I loved. Apologies, but I don't remember the author.
Winter's Bone (another novel I loved) was written by Daniel Woodrell and set in the Ozarks (where Woodrell is from and still lives, I believe). But yes, both novels deal with intergenerational poverty, drug trafficking, and general rural ruin.
As a reader/listener, I'm turned off by the "marginalized" group pandering. I want interesting characters, good story and some literary beauty. Unfortunately, I now tend to reject stories from "marginalized" groups out of prejudice that didn't exist before. Prejudice, meaning pre-judge. I'm pre-judging the publishers as unimaginative idiots who are riding the current wave.
Sadly, I feel the same way. I'm skeptical of these books now where I would never have been before because it's clear they're selling some agenda. I just want good stories.
Yep. I had the exact same experience. In 2016 one agent wrote me a long email praising my novel...but then said (in softer coded language) that a story about a middle class white kid was not exactly exemplary today. It was sort of ‘the white guy story has been done. Time to move on.’ That’s why I write on Substack. I’ve written 12 novels--all unpublished.
Michael Mohr
‘Sincere American Writing’
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/
Yup, I've had that debate on other forums where commenters (you know the ones) insisted that "we have had enough stories about x characters or y subjects." Who are they to decide what's "enough"? I feel the same about agents and publishers now. They clearly don't care what _I_ want to read, just what they think I _should_ want to read. Keep writing your stories. I will too :-) There are readers out there who haven't had "enough."
I think this is a real issue but I tend to think the reason there are so many terrible eat your vegetables moralistic books is that the publishing industry is still entirely white as far as who makes the decisions, so we get this posh white person's idea of the novel as written by a person of colour.
It's a shame how so much of the discourse around fiction focuses on your bookshelf or mine, and our moral responsibilities as readers, and then discusses writers and the challenges facing people from different backgrounds, but barely anybody ever discusses identity as regards agents and publishers. They're the ones with the power.
You make an interesting point, and I agree that publishing professionals generally are deeply out of touch. But I'm not totally convinced that the race of the publishing industry is really the issue, as even diversity hires entering the industry will be coming from the same warped educational institutions that produced the current occupants and will be ensconced in the same elitist literary culture. I'm not sure how much vastly changes other than the optics.
I mean is it a fait accompli that they'd come from the same institutions?
I guess either way it still seems wrong that little attention is given to diversity as regards the people who actually hold the power.
How that's remedied is a different subject I suppose.
Plenty of attention is given to superficial markers like race and gender, etc. It seems like that's all we talk about anymore. But if by diversity you mean intellectual diversity, socioeconomic class, educational background, political preferences, and the like, then I agree not enough attention is given to those metrics of diversity--unless you count negative attention.
Book sales are UP--2021 sales highest since they started tracking; 2022 sales slightly less than 2021, but still high. I’m referring to traditionally published titles. Adult fiction sales are bananas (due to TikTok). Nonfic slightly down
The sales increase was a predictable anomaly due to covid lockdowns, but it was short-lived. It is now dropping off precipitously as many people 1) return to their previous routines and 2) reject the new gluten-free fiction being served, esp in the last few years.
Pretty much every book sales post after this documents this decline:
https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/bookselling/article/89818-is-the-book-sales-boom-finally-over.html
Colleen Hoover is THE bestselling author in America right now and she is not PC. She writes what her audience wants--escape, romance, sex. To get back to the original point of Freddie’s post, I’m a professional writer who has found success building an audience for my work on the internet over many years. I think “literary” writers prefer not to think about audience or marketing and would rather their publisher plug in the right buzz word
Yes, I've often written about feeling like Willy Loman as I hit the sales circuit year after year. But I've used my acting/debate training from high school and college to become a serious performer onstage and in media—an old-fashioned traveling storyteller, a bard with 2 million frequent flyer miles. When folks ask me for writing advice, I'll skip ahead and tell them to take a few acting classes alongside the literary workshops.
Hey, Leigh! Great to see your post. I'd assume the book boom is (was?) very top heavy, as books sales are. O, to have Colleen Hoover's sales! I imagine Taylor Jenkins Reid is also bringing up the overall sales numbers. And did the backlist sales of the constant bestsellers go up big? I contributed to that by re-buying and re-reading about 15 Michael Connelly crime novels. I'd be very surprised (and happy) to learn that a higher percentage of books sold more than the usual 10,000 copies. Or even 2,000 copies. Especially literary fiction. Speaking anecdotally, I have friends whose pandemic-era new books did not sell as well as their previous ones. And, again, I'd be delighted to be completely wrong about book sales, past, present, and future!
You're absolutely right that it's top authors out-performing everybody else! The growth isn't distributed equally... this is America. :)
Last year, the top 90 BookTok authors accounted for 73% of fiction sales growth (in first Q of 2022). BookTok authors sold 9 million units in 2020; 20 million in 2021.
I'm one of the lucky ones who released a book during the pandemic that actually sold; and I'm learning TikTok/BookTok as part of my strategy to sell my next book.
But there are also these weird outlier stories I get excited about (this is a literary novel from tiny Unnamed Press, about menopausal cannibalism, selling 500 copies a week because of TikTok)
https://www.vulture.com/2022/11/big-on-booktok-on-embracing-an-unexpected-audience.html#_ga=2.193430765.1382420407.1673623161-1659374414.1673623160
Oh, that's great to hear about Chelsea Summer's book! The underdog rising from the small press. I lived that same story 31 years ago. But that was when book tours were busy with radio, TV, and print appearances. I'd be on local morning shows between the weather and sports news! Is #BookTok the new book tour?
I think the political, cultural, and economic motivations all blend.
It would seem the publishers' political/cultural motivations are antagonistic to their economic motivations. If for political-cultural purity you will only sell/promote books that a meaningful portion of your potential customer base has no interest in purchasing, then I'd say you are true to your political-cultural purity, because you are willing to forgo the lost economic gains. And, you set your industry back, since the would be customers give up on new books and find old ones to read instead. Something like that.
The big bestsellers subsidize all the other books.
Wouldn't that be true even if you allowed a wider variety of author identities and story narratives? Didn't the big bestseller also subsidize all the other books back in the 1980s and 1990s (whenever was pre-woke publishing)?
Yes, I think that's true.
Currently reading a book published in 1853, another published in 1953, and DH Lawrence.
I still read and love the classics and I love to read contemporary works as well. I do my best to read across the chronological, political, cultural, and economic spectrum.
It will probably depress me, but I am about to read "To Destroy You Is No Loss: The Odyssey of a Cambodian Family".
Oh, those kind of tales are always emotionally devastating.
Well I think that ties into part of this keenly-felt desire to "find" meaning or "be" meaningful in one's work (to the extent that it's not just marketing to PMC readers). I'm sure you could track the rise in the percentage of humanities professors who self-identify as "activist-scholars" rather than merely subject matter experts over the last, say, thirty years and the results wouldn't surprise anyone. So even perceived high-status jobs (like writer, professor, etc.) don't feel like enough without a "changing the world" veneer to them. It's apparently not just email-pushers who feel this way.
Great points. The messiah complex of the writer-activist! I certainly find myself falling into wannabe messiah mode.
Another old person question. Embarrassment. I even tried looking it up and I got PubMed readers and in this context it doesn't work. What is PMC readers? I think I have an idea, but I'd like to know what the acronym stands for.
Professional-managerial class
Yes. Absolutely.
Back when I was in high school in the very late 90s/early aughts, a preview for Smoke Signals was on a VHS I watched all the time. Funnily I can't remember which VHS it was though I can remember the preview. Probably Apollo 13 or The American President. And now I'm replying to the screenwriter of Smoke Signals! Who would've thought.
I'm delighted by the thought that a Smoke Signals preview might be an a VHS of The American President!
I know, right! I watched You've Got Mail a lot too, but that was also a '98 movie, so probably not. Let's just say it was American President.
previously-published as a new privilege axis?
❤️❤️❤️🙌
Don't the Buddhists say desire causes suffering?