Shakespeare, Establishment Poet?

Bardolatry has been the default attitude toward Shakespeare in the English-speaking world for centuries. Even people who have never read or seen Shakespeare's work--or who have read and seen it and didn't think much of it--seem to regard themselves obliged to exalt him as not a Bard, but the Bard, the greatest poet who has ever written in the English language, and perhaps any other language that has ever existed as well.

Still, the ranks of the Bardoclasts have not been wholly undistinguished--including as they do such figures as Lev Tolstoy, George Bernard Shaw, Upton Sinclair and Graham Greene. They do not all make the same charges, but it is notable that all four criticized Shakespeare for being, as Greene put it in his classic "The Virtue of Disloyalty," "the supreme poet of conservatism, of what we now call the Establishment." Tolstoy was particularly explicit on this point, declaring that for Shakespeare "the fundamental principle" was "the absence of all idealism," "the conservation of the forms of life once established," and that "the end justifies the means," with all this capped off by a "Chauvinist English patriotism . . . according to which the English throne is something sacred." The translator of Tolstoy's essay on the matter, Ernest Crosby (a significant figure in his own right), was to address in particular the question of Shakespeare's attitude toward questions of authority and class, presenting in "Shakespeare's Attitude Toward the Working Classes" a formidable case founded on close reading of an abundance of Shakespeare's material from across the whole body of his plays, testifying to Shakespeare's worship of authority and those who yielded it, and more specifically his combination of an exaltation of kings and nobles with utter contempt for the lower orders.

Of course, those critics were all far too intelligent to overlook the reality that Shakespeare was writing in an earlier period. Even in Tolstoy's time (and certainly today) one gets much further being congenial to those in power than challenging them--and there was much less room to offer such a challenge in Shakespeare's time. Formal, statutory censorship was immense, every play having to be approved before it could be presented on the stage, and the sanctions for those who met with the disapproval of the authorities severe. (One may recall Ben Jonson's being imprisoned for having written The Isle of Dogs--a play that, not coincidentally, we no longer have.) And aristocratic patronage was still indispensable to an artistic career.

Accordingly the more politically-minded critics take pains to demonstrate that rather than a man who felt differently but worked within the space allotted him Shakespeare's profuseness in his celebration of the powerful, the abundance and sheer gratuitousness and vehemence of his displays of contempt for the lowborn (no one required him to present Coriolanus as a hero!), testifies to a man thoroughly at home in the Establishment poet role, with the fact the clearer because of comparison with other literary figures of the era. If risking the fate of a Jonson was an unreasonable thing to ask of him, where, Crosby asks, can we find a single man of the people to compare with that creation by that writer coming from a culture the English endlessly flatter themselves is so much more reactionary and unfree than their own, Miguel de Cervantes' Sancho Panza?

I have to admit that in the end I find the case these figures make compelling--far more than the contrary one, however congenial that would be for admirers of at least slightly progressive inclinations, or simply humane ones, who would, to paraphrase Greene, be better able to "love as a man" the same figure they love as "the greatest of poets."

The Mysterious Disappearance of the Comment Thread

You probably noticed it before I did--the vanishing of comment threads from about the web. News sites, Youtube videos--places where you once took it for granted that there would have been a space for public feedback since foreclosing the possibility.

This seems to have happened quietly for the most part, the press not talking about it very much, and such discussion as I can find generally appearing not in the major mainstream media outlets but smaller, more specialized web sites (Techdirt, for instance, having long had its eye on the matter).

The standard explanation is that this was a response to the reality that such threads so often contained more spam, trolling and abuse than real dialogue about the item at hand. However, another more critical view is that this was a matter of heading off reaction to the extreme views and content the media promulgates, which the media know full well would offend many, but "shove down their throat" anyway. (Some of those espousing this view, for example, hold that the reason for, for example, turning off comments in response to "woke" content is that they do not want to deal with the inevitable criticism.)

I suspect that both are right, not least because each in its way confirms the other (the woke content, of course, bringing on a reaction not always civil). Yet it also seems to me that while the media, strictly speaking, has no obligation to make a space available for comment its withdrawing that space after users had become accustomed to the opportunity to "talk back" to the press has a whiff of repression about it--the more in as the press organ is recognizably powerful and influential, and in as this has at least in part because of the political content of that comment. I can hardly deny that spammers and trolls befouled many a scene--but it is not only the spammers and trolls who get shut out this way, with all that implies for even the pretense of there being a conversation in this society.

Is There Such a Thing as Being "Oversensitive?"

The word "oversensitive" strikes me as one of those about which a person should display some circumspection. The accusation of oversensitivity, after all, is one that abusers and bullies make to delegitimize others' reactions to their behavior.

"What, can't take a joke?"

"Don't you have any sense of humor?"

Any right-thinking person has to find this kind of thing disgusting.

Still, it seems to me that there are at least two occasions when one can reasonably think of a reaction to a perceived offense to be excessive.

1. When the Offense is Just Unsatisfied Narcissism.
Encountering the word "narcissism" one may ask what I mean by it. I think one can usefully speak of it not as some supposedly excessive self-love, but as the kind of demand one makes on others. They demand that everyone else think of them, first, last and always, while thinking of no one else ever--and react to anything else as an offense. The burden they place on others to satisfy their wants, the complete lack of reciprocity on their part--and their response when their unreasonable demand is unmet--seem to me to qualify as excessive.

2. When People are Offended Because They (Perversely) Want to Be Offended.
H.G. Wells once offered rather a useful definition of hatred as something more than extreme dislike. Rather he called it a "chronic condition of vindictive disapproval" toward someone, or something. This leaves people looking for occasions to be offended, and find satisfaction in being offended, because it validates their feeling, and gives them a chance to act on it.

I think that, put that way in the abstract, few would find what I said objectionable. But trying to assert it in a particular case is another thing. After all, accusations of narcissism and hatred are made all the time in bad faith, while in a society where people worship at the altar of their own subjectivity they are hardly inclined to take a fair-minded, nuanced view of people they dislike, or question their own prejudices. (Indeed, a great many people, demonstrating their hatefulness, set impossible standards for others--demanding nothing less than moral perfection in them--so that they can take satisfaction in seeing them fall short of the mark morally, and then bashg them for it). Still, it would probably be uncontroversial to say that there really is plenty of narcissism and hatred about, often in the same toxic package--generally making the world a worse place.

On Quotation

It is a standard rhetorical device to quote famous figures. Indeed, teachers of rhetoric in their various forms--forensics, composition, etc.--often enjoins their students to begin a work with such a quotation.

Like much else in the standard teaching I must admit that this advice has never sat well with me (hence, that book I wrote--devoted to aspects of content rather than form, but coming from the same experience).

After all, the art and craft of writing are about expressing one's own thoughts--and it seems to me ever more the case that this is best done in one's own words, with borrowing someone else's words much more likely than not to confuse matters.

There is, too, the intent so often behind such quotation--the logical fallacy of an "appeal to authority," and that for the unfortunate purpose of making something that may be quite banal sound impressive by linking it to some Great Man or Great Woman. It also seems to me smarmily manipulative, the act of quoting itself intended to make the speaker look like an Authority themselves by creating an illusion of their having a greater literacy than they actually possess. This is especially the case as so many know nothing more of the words they quote, or the source, than the quote itself--something once upon a time picked out of a book and now plucked out of a web site and shoehorned in without regard to origin or context. (Consider, for example, what has become of "To thine own self be true.")

My advice: if you must quote, quote only what you actually know well, preferably very well--and do it only when you are sure it will actually improve what you have to say rather than an attempt to show off all too likely to leave you looking yet another fool who thinks the world will take him for an emperor because of the purple patches he has shabbily sown onto his rags.

On "Narcissism"

The words "narcissism," and "narcissist," seems to have been unused until the nineteenth century--the late nineteenth century in the case of narcissist. Since that time their usage has trended upward, and really exploded from the early 1970s on. As late as 1973 the Ngram score for narcissism was 0.000037 percent, but in 2016 it stood at 0.000134%, a near quadrupling in incidence. In 1973 the score for narcissist was just under 0.000002%. But in 2016 it was 0.000035 percent—indicating a nearly eightfold increase in usage over the forty-three years in between.

This seems to me significant--and not for the conventional reason that supposedly those living today are the most narcissistic people who ever were (something said in every generation, and I suspect not really true about this one).

Rather it is because of how words like these tend to be used.

In considering this term let us, for the moment, forget its associations with self-love, which I think confuse more than they reveal. (It is generally thought that people are supposed to love themselves, after all. In the Bible the Great Commandment is that "You shall love your neighbor as yourself"--not instead of yourself, or even more than yourself--while it is to be presumed that one should love others greatly, and love oneself no less.) Rather let us think of how the narcissist actually expects others to treat them. The narcissist must be the center of the attention of everyone else, always. They must be praised--flattered--by others, all the time. There can be nothing for anyone else in their presence. Everything has to be about them.

Putting it another way it isn't that a person thinks of themselves first sometimes (or even all the time) that makes them a narcissist. It's when they demand that everyone else do so always--and takes anything else as an affront.

As usual, it is those who have no power who are most likely to be accused of this failing, even though they are unlikely to have ever been guilty of it (it's very hard to be narcissistic for long if no one cooperates)--while those who have the most power are far, far more likely to be guilty and far, far less likely to be accused. Think, for example, of how royalty is treated--its elevation to national symbol, the national anthems that sing its place in its people's hearts and its supposed virtues constantly, the protocols and ceremonies that presume it to be always in the thoughts of its nation, which is supposed to cheer and weep at its purely private glories and purely private tragedies.

Of course, those born into a royal household generally did not create all this--all these things instead organized by their parasite hangers-on to further their own agendas, and indeed I imagine that any royal of intelligence or feeling at all can only regard such nonsense sardonically. But even they tend to go along with it. The result is that even when not narcissists, they certainly play the part in the grandest of narcissistic spectacles.

However, those who moralize at others are likely to look at anyone who says the obvious about this as having done something in bad taste--and snarl at the put-upon nobody who asks for a little human consideration as a "narcissist" instead.

In short, like "self-pity," it is a word they use to browbeat nobodies when they ask for what may be no more and often much less than what may be their due, and defend what those who have been fortunate see as their complete lack of obligation to anyone else. And whatever one may say about the up-and-coming generation's alleged narcissism, that has certainly grown more common these past few decades-—testifying to nothing so much as the deep, genuine narcissism of the accusers.

When it Comes to Making Us Feel Bad When We're Online Social Media isn't the Half of It--Media Media is the Problem

It has become a commonplace to remark the tendency of our subjection of ourselves to others' narcissism on social media makes people feel more lonely and depressed.

The conclusion seems to me plausible enough. But in emphasizing the braggadocio of nobodies on Facebook and Twitter in discussion of the psychologically negative effects of media exposure seems to me the all too familiar matter of thundering against small-time offenders while looking the other way on the really big offenders.

If someone is in social media very much they are also likely to be that much more in contact with the media generally, which causes the same problem in at least two ways, with consequences likely to be far more severe than seeing some random nitwit brag on their account:

1. Relentless subjection to an advertising culture that ceaselessly cultivates and exploits fear and inadequacy on the part of the onlooker.

You, they tell you, are fat, tired, slow, aging badly, uneducated, financially insecure and everything else you might prefer to not be. Give us all your money, and all the money you don't have but can lay your hands on--take out a loan on any terms you can get!--to fix that for you.

Disgusting in any quantity, it is ever more pervasive, relentless (Thought you were going to turn on that Adblock, huh? Not so fast!) and finely, sociopathically individualized as they invade and hoover up your personal information (for such are the glories of Big Data that had so many of the mainstream media's idiot sycophants incontinent with excitement at some bold new age of commerce).

2. Similarly pervasive, relentless, finely, sociopathically individualized subjection to the media's glorification of the few who have great wealth, status, power, celebrity (the media's courtiers treat billionaires as gods, in their abilities and wisdom and worth), and denigration of those who lack these things (e.g., you), in a way that makes me picture Ludwig Von Mises screeching his hatred for working people through a megaphone directly in your face every second that you are in contact with it.

It does not seem too strong to say that if either of these things (never mind both) was being done by one person to another they would call it a campaign of harassment and even terror, and have no problem whatsoever getting a restraining order against the offender. Their overlooking that advertising culture, overlooking the raging elitism of the general tone of the media from journalism to pop culture, to focus on the more obnoxious behavior of "the little people" has me remembering a silly remark by a Hollywood actress about people being on social media because they have some need to be "validated" by people they don't know of which she seemed implicitly critical.

The actress in question at about that time was, while still in her twenties', well on her way to a superstardom which was to very soon make her the highest-paid actress in Hollywood; with a list of awards nominations and wins (soon to include an Oscar) that was lengthening to the point that it now has its own Wikipedia page; and a Revlon contract that had her commercial on TV constantly in those days before "woke capitalism," "Body Positivity" and the rest made the meaning of such things far more ambiguous. For a person to whom life had given so much to criticize others for wanting validation betrayed an astonishing lack of self-awareness--or just plain narcissism.

So it goes with our commentariat generally on this matter--as it does on so many others, when they are not cheerfully and venally complicit.

Another (Equally Inevitable) Johnny Depp-Amber Heard Trial Piece

Not long ago I remarked the way the '90s seemed packed with tabloidish media events that (supposedly) transfixed the nation (when in fact boring and annoying much of it), and thought that these days we had moved past such nonsense--not because the public had more intelligent or the media more responsible, but as a result of sheer fragmentation. There is simply so much going on that you can miss it--especially if you would prefer to miss it.

The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial has persuaded me that I was wrong.

Of course, there are times when I am happy to be proven wrong.

This is not one of them.

Still, it is the case that this is an unusual spectacle, which leads me to ask: What makes this one so different from so many prior celebrity trials?

I can think of some possible factors.

One is the particularly high stature--and "glamour"--of the figures involved. There has undeniably been enormous regard out there for Depp, even before The Pirates of the Caribbean (2003) made him one of the biggest stars in the world. Heard has her own portion of A-lister fame, as an Atlantean Princess in the Justice League franchise, no less. Meanwhile even the minor figures in the drama are quite capable of commanding considerable attention in their own right, even while doing nothing really newsworthy at all. (Heard--allegedly while "on the rebound"--was with that exceedingly tiresome figure the media insists not only on deifying but compelling everyone to worship as well. I'm sure you know the one.)

There is the sensationalism of the details, many of which are so distasteful that I will neither cite them nor link to pages that do cite them (those who are really interested can easily find them elsewhere)--details perhaps particularly intriguing to the kind of person who is fascinated by stories of beautiful people (again, an Atlantean Princess!) doing ugly things.

And, of course, as with so many of the high-profile '90s affairs there is the identity politics element, after a quarter of a century of its near-constant escalation, exemplified by the #MeToo movement, for which the mainstream media has made this out to be some sort of defining moment. I'm doubtful that the course of a movement like that can really be altered so much by a single trial. But the thought that it could does make its contribution to keeping the web churning with this stuff--and helping line the pockets of those who find this kind of show profitable.

Top Gun 2's Opening Weekend

I have to admit that I was dubious about the commercial prospects of a Top Gun 2 when I first heard that this project was finally and really moving out of the "development hell" in which it has been so long mired and into actual production.

After all (as we might be forgetting amid the rapturous critical reception and the boffo B.O.) the original movie was very much of its moment, a movie its own fans regard as fairly described as a 2-hour Navy recruiting ad of and for the blatantly jingoistic, pop militarism-soaked mid-'80s. (Top Gun hit the screen about a year after Rambo: First Blood Part II.) And of course, the current state of the box office has not been helpful. (Certainly some recent movies did as well as they would have been likely to pre-pandemic, as with Spider-man: No Way Home. But earnings remain less predictable than usual, and often enough weaker than they might have at other times, with this underlined by the haste to hail The Batman as a hit it seems movies' commercial performances are still being graded on a curve, all as the pandemic's resurgence yet again likely affording new grounds for that.)

The result is that a Top Gun 2 seemed a piece of '80s nostalgia coming in a moment in which this kind of nostalgia is on the receiving end of a fairly vicious backlash (remember the sheer vehemence of the reaction against Steven Spielberg's Ready Player One?); after what seem like two decades of intensive mining '80s nostalgia, love it or hate it, has been pretty well played out; after nearly four decades of virtually zero follow-up to this particular piece of such nostalgia, which appeared before half the country was born--while, by the way, the older audience that one might expect to disproportionately account for ticket sales remains leerier than others of the theater. One may also wonder whether a public generally recognized as sick of war, and much of which seems aloof from, and perhaps alienated by, the media's hawkish line on the war in Ukraine, is up for a second edition of what Top Gun had to sell. (Indeed, there was a time when star Tom Cruise himself had deemed the idea of the very movie he is offering "irresponsible.") And as if all that were not enough there is the reality that Cruise is not the draw he once was (in fairness, no one is in these post-star system days), while action movies have moved on, enough so that anything remotely like what the original offered four decades ago would probably not satisfy the "need for speed" of today's audience.

Nevertheless, in spite of all that Top Gun: Maverick has proven a colossal hit, with a $124 million day 3-day haul, and an even stronger $156 million when one takes into account the whole of the Memorial Day weekend. Where this is concerned the media certainly did its part, being very much pro-Maverick. (Indeed, thinking about what I have seen of the reviews I find myself much reminded of the way it seemed critics seemed to cast aside whatever critical faculties and artistic standards they had to cheer-lead for the first Iron Man.) However, it seems undeniable that, on whatever terms it took it (whether totally buying into it, or just enjoying it as a piece of flashy superficial nostalgia irrelevant to how they see things now), the public was receptive to the film--enough so that it is virtually certain to prove a solid blockbuster by any reasonable measure.

The Inevitable Johnny Depp-Amber Heard Trial Piece

An infographic at the Axios news site recently showed that the "number of social media interactions per published article" regarding the Johnny Depp-Amber Heard trial was, on average, over three times that for a piece on abortion, five times that for pieces on the war in Ukraine, seven times for that items on inflation, and eleven times that for items on COVID.

The data is presented with little analysis or comment. But the implication many will take from this is that the American public is a pack of Idiocracy-come-to-life idiots who care more about a tabloid-type story about celebrities than they do about their own basic rights, the cost of living in a time in which so many are struggling to make ends meet, the mass death in a recent epidemic that is terrifyingly normalizing that death, and what may be Europe's bloodiest interstate conflict since World War II as it potentially escalates into a far, far worse World War III.

Of course, a more charitable view is possible, and I do think I should set it forth here. This is that the press has done a lousy job of reporting on the more important stories, with the result that few of them tell anyone very much that helps them understand the issue--instead subjecting the reader and viewer to a hard rain of minutiae, and where what to think about it is concerned, "Establishment" opinions that reliably make anyone who holds Establishment opinion in contempt feel vindicated in short order. This would seem especially the case with stories about events that have at this point been ongoing for a long time, stories where the details require a contextualization the mainstream media consistently fails to supply, and stories where the media's combination of methodology and blatant bias makes its competency and honesty suspect in the extreme not to "conspiracy theorist" lunatics, but any human being with a faculty for critical thought (all of which applies to abortion, Ukraine, inflation and COVID).

But the public can, looking at the proceedings of the Depp-Heard trial, make some sense of what is going on with that, in spite of the media's characteristically disgusting job of covering the matter.

The result is that what is at issue here is not the stupidity of the public, but the failure of the mainstream media to do its job properly in regard to the largest and most important problems, events and controversies of our time. And while speaking of that media's failures let us not forget that the tabloid stuff would not command the attention that it does were it not so vehement about forcing it on the public's attention at the expense of what attention it does give the life-and-death issues--after doing which it lamely excuses itself as only "giving the people what they want," and excoriating anyone who tries to do a better job as a purveyor of "fake news" to tinfoil hat wearers and worse, and screaming for the search engines and social media sites to impose censorship as they self-importantly speak of "free speech."

"To Thine Own Self Be True": Reflections on a Famous Phrase

Recently writing about the advice "Be yourself" I was told by a reader that quite a few people take the line in Hamlet, "To thine own self be true," to mean this very thing.

This struck me as odd, "Be yourself" being such a modern, Romantic notion, reflecting a view of the world stressing "authenticity," individuality and self-expression--all of which is rather alien to Shakespeare's thought-world. (As Ian Watt reminds us, Shakespeare was a Medieval, not a modern, in most of the ways that count.)

Considering this I went back to the relevant portion of the play--Act I, Scene III, in which over at Polonius' house we see him giving fatherly advice to his son Laertes before he heads off for France. "Laying his hand on Laertes' head" Polonius tells him to keep "these few precepts in thy memory," very prominent among them "Give thy thoughts no tongue," "Give every man they ear, but few thy voice," and "reserve thy judgment." It is a counsel of reserve, restraint, circumspection, extending to that matter of which people make so much when talking about "being themselves," clothing ("Costly thy habit as they purse can buy/But not expressed in fancy; rich, not gaudy/For the apparel oft proclaims the man")--befitting what comes "above all," that Laertes be loyal ("true") to his own self-interest ("thine own self").

Indeed, far from meaning "Be yourself" in the contemporary sense it would seem that Polonius not only advises his son something very different, but instructs him to, in not giving his thoughts tongue, giving few his voice, reserving his judgment, etc. for the sake of hard, practical self-interest, do the complete opposite should this be the appropriate course, which it may or may not be because what Laertes' "self" happens to be is not something Polonius or Shakespeare or anyone else regards as being at issue.

Of course, many encountering this may wonder how to take it. After all, literary critics (as Ian Watt again pointed out in the very same book I reference above--it really is a treasure) can be prone to see irony in the works they study when it suits their prejudices, attributing to writers of past eras they have been persuaded are "great" virtues and views they do not have and cannot have simply because they were in a different world from ours (and because insisting that everything means what it doesn't passes for wisdom and profundity with simpletons). Given the well-known inclinations of Bardolators in this case--to make of Shakespeare a perfect "moral teacher" for all times, by which they happen to mainly mean this one--the practicality, even crassness, of what Polonius really seems to mean (exactly the kind of thing such critics love to dismiss, as Watt's example makes clear), and Shakespeare's less than respectful attitude toward Polonius, may lead them to conclude that Shakespeare must mean the opposite of what he says. Alas, I see no grounds for thinking that here--while even if there were it would not change the literal meaning of the words on the page, which, I repeat, does not have Polonius telling Laertes "Be yourself!"

On "Self-Pity"

Among those words whose usage has seemed to me sloppy and suspect in a nasty sign-of-the-times way, "self-pity" is right up there with "deserve" and "entitlement."

This is not because I deny that a person might feel sorry for themselves to a degree that is somehow excessive. (Indeed, while I think that great caution is in order when we speak of others' subjectivity, I will offer a possible standard myself--that if one's pity for themselves makes them hurt themselves or others it is likely to have become unreasonable.)

Rather my problem with the word's use is that we hear the word employed less as a descriptor of an emotional state than a judgment on a person for being in that emotional state; a judgment not on what they have done, or plausibly might do, but rather for feeling a certain way--or, more precisely, for what the person making the judgment thinks they may be feeling, and why they think the other person is feeling it, with the excess on the other person's part a matter of their deeming that feeling "too much" on grounds to which they probably have not given much, or even any, thought, before inflicting their opinion on them.

Usually this says much, much more about their lack of empathy, sympathy, concern for the other person (and their own lack of humility about their ability and right to assess a situation of which they may know nothing and for which they take no responsibility) than it does about anything else, the legitimacy of the other person's feelings included (just as is the case with our use of "deserve" and "entitlement").

In short, it is that all too familiar matter of sanctimoniousness-in-defense-of-callousness which seems to me ever on the increase, with the Ngram score for "self-pity" seeming yet another piece of evidence in support of that suspicion--its incidence doubling between 1973 and 2013.

Austin Powers' 25th Anniversary

This month was the 25th anniversary of the release of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery in theaters. That anniversary hasn't been a major pop cultural event, but some noticed, with one write-up appearing over at Paste.

In remembering Austin Powers one is likely to recall the character as a James Bond parody, part of a revival of that form in the '90s, but the character was more broadly a piece of '60s pop culture parody, playing off of Swinging London, the counterculture, and much else. The result is that the conception showed the '60s looking at the '90s, at times not only parodically but satirically.

Particularly memorable here was the way that Dr. Evil's brand of scheming had become passè in the end-of-history, Lexuses-over-Olive-Trees vision of life as the end of the century approached. (As his subordinate Number Two tells him, "[Y]ou, like an idiot, wanted to take over the world. And you don't realize there is no world anymore. It's only corporations.")

Another bit, more conspicuous, was the sense of the '90s as a period of sexual repression next to the era he came from. Treated gently, even obliquely, behind it all was the miserable failure to contain the AIDS epidemic, the post-Anita Hill outrage over sexual harassment, and what has come to be known as "political correctness."

This seemed fairly common at the time. Still, now I wonder--in the age of COVID, #MeToo, "wokeness," does the '90s seem as unsexy as it did to many then? Or is it possible that in this period of '90s nostalgia people are looking back at the '90s in some degree the way the '90s looked back at the '60s--in this way, and perhaps others as well?

On the Words "Be Yourself"

Once upon a time I was teaching a survey course on American Literature from the Civil War to today. As part of a "unit" on naturalism I included Stephen Crane's classic Maggie, a Girl of the Streets.

One of my students, who had elected to complete a required short paper assignment by writing about that particular work, had for her thesis that Maggie needed to "be herself" and find a "lifestyle" consistent with that.

I was flabbergasted by this "analysis"--the more in as the paper actually indicated familiarity with the content of the novella (it would have been less appalling if they were completely ignorant of it when they made their claim); and I might add, as more than a few other students offered similar thoughts in their own papers.

(Lest the reader respond with a snide remark about community college students or some such they should know that I was teaching this course at a selective private research university which has ranked among the nation's top fifty in noted surveys of the matter, for what that is worth. My experience is that even the most prestigious institutions are no shorter on idiots--among students and faculty--than any others in the academic world, or the world generally, but the point is that this sort of cheap, common elitism explains nothing here. Now back to the story.)

Let us, for the moment, set aside the great many, many things wrong with what she (and the others) wrote, and focus simply on that particular choice of words she used, "Be yourself." Previously I had associated the words "be yourself" with the sort of lame, meaningless advice that unbelievably naive and oblivious parents give to children entering a far tougher world than the one they remember. (I find my mind often returning to Julie Hagerty singing "Be yourself!" to Ryan Reynolds as he gets in his car in Just Friends.)

But since that time the phrase has seemed increasingly pernicious. What does it really mean to "be yourself?" More precisely, how do we know if we are doing that? And how do others know it? A prerequisite to this would seem to be some basis for identifying a real "self" to which our "being" might or might not conform, but that raises yet another question, namely: Just who decides what your "self" is? Do you determine that, after which others defer to your conception of self? One might ask, too--is this self constant, or does it change? Should we want to do so, can we change ourselves?

We live in a society that speaks incessantly and self-importantly about "freedom," "liberty," "equality" and the rest. The reality it lives, of course, is very different. Ours is an extremely unequal, hierarchical order, in which very specific ideas about how people generally and people of particular types ought to behave are very strongly held by a very great many people, not least by those who have power and privilege--and because society is so far from the accepting, tolerant, inclusive thing it pretends to be, plenty of incentive to be something other than "yourself," however defined, and certainly as defined by those others. Others reserve the right to determine for themselves and for everyone else, you included, just what your self is; let you know it; and get very nasty about it--while not taking too kindly to people who change themselves from what they conceive them to be (even as they demand that people "fit in," with the square peg told that it had better learn to accommodate itself to the round hole).

The result is that "Be yourself," while sounding like the namby-pamby, nurturing-gone-mad that makes right-wingers snarl about "political correctness" often is no more than the age-old snarl of those on top to those beneath them to "KNOW YOUR PLACE!"--a place you don't decide for yourself, that others decide for you, that is likely to be a matter of what class you were born into, what ethnicity your ancestors were, and so forth--and, in spite of the fact that that place is likely an unpleasant one in which to be and which one might quite reasonably prefer to escape, keep that place forever, with doing anything else a matter of "putting on airs," and those who somehow manage to materially alter their circumstances, change their "place," if they cannot be wholly denied, sneered at as "upstarts," "parvenus" and the rest.

In that we have an all too common story--how what is presented to us as overgentle, "p.c." and the rest so often comes from a place even more right-wing than the avowed right-wingers, as we are easily reminded when we stop tossing around the word "postmodernism" and look at what it really means, a creed that is the heir not to Marx (indeed, it is hard to think of anything more antithetical to a genuine Marxist) but to Maistre.

Such cluelessness prevailing, I am not sure very many on the scene are capable of being "themselves" politically--precisely because they have no idea who, or what, they actually are.

Self-Publishing in the Early 21st Century: The Publishing Revolution That Wasn't

Self-publishing is no new practice, but about a decade ago it looked as if the advent of e-book readers, Print-On-Demand services, online book retail and other technological and commercial developments were laying the groundwork for a revolution in publishing--a radical expansion of the possibilities writers had for reaching readers, without going through a publishing Establishment that has ever more seemed able to say only "No" to anyone approaching it with just a manuscript. Indeed, the press seemed to thrill to a spate of success stories, with young Amanda Hocking's selling a million copies of her work merely the beginning!

A decade on the excitement is long gone--so long gone, in fact, that it is hard to remember that it was ever there.

What happened? One possibility, of course, is that the revolution did indeed triumph--that this change proceeded so fully and completely that we now take an utterly different world for granted.

However, another possibility is that the revolution was simply snuffed out--and to go by what I see of publishing it is the latter that seems to me to have really happened. Of course, here and there one may find someone who has sold a few 99-cent e-books. But look at the bestseller lists. These are as much as ever dominated by the same old authors publishing the same old material in the same old ways through the same old houses. Look at the high-profile review pages--and you find much the same story. (Indeed, a self-published author is only likely to become a real success when their work catches the eye of a traditional publisher who picks them up--after which they are no longer a self-published author.) Look at such discussion of self-publishing as we can find in the media--and see that it is overwhelmingly a matter of representatives of Big Publishing snarling at those who refused to let the form rejection letter-printing machines of Park Avenue crush their dreams of authorship. Look at the endless promotion of self-publishing services--the ads barraging you online when you look up the subject, the commercials on TV, and even cold calls you may have personally got at home from self-publishing companies if you have ever published a book through this means, all of it testifying to the reality that making money off of people who are self-publishing is a more plausible prospect than making money through self-publishing.

Looking back it seems that any other prospect was extremely improbable, for at least three reasons--beyond, of course, the virulently hate-filled propaganda against the self-published.

1. The Self-Publishing Technological Revolution Was Incomplete.
Services like Amazon's KDP can fairly be regarded as miraculous. Anyone can come in, upload a book for free, and have both e-book and print versions of that book on sale at innumerable retailers around the whole world within mere days. However, remarkable as this simplification--and cheapening--of the physical production and distribution of books is, the rest of book production remains as laborious as ever. KDP did not diminish the burden of editing, copyediting, physically designing books one iota--all of which has remained extremely time- and skill-intensive craft labor that is best done by a big, established team rather than an impromptu one an amateur had to hire, or a single individual carrying the whole burden themselves. And then, as if all that were not enough, there is the matter of publicizing the book, which gets to be the bane of many a self-published writer's existence.

The result is that a self-published writer is apt to find themselves more publisher than writer, doing it all alone on the basis of slighter resources. As the self-published book-bashers never cease to remind us this can and does take its toll on the quality of the product. However, even where the quality is all that can be hoped for--and yes, contrary to the propaganda, there are self-published books as good and polished as anything the major houses produce, better even where they offer something trad-publishing does not dare to--it is deeply draining for the author. (If one goes about it at all seriously editing one's own work is a very different and far more painful thing than editing someone else's.) Altogether, as is generally the case with small enterprise, they work rather harder, often for rather less, than their trad-published counterparts do. This can mean lower output, in a market in which a high volume of output seems ever more important to commercial viability. It can also mean that more writers who might, with time, have built up a body of work and an audience quit before realizing what potential they may have because the going was so much rougher. All that means that much less success not only for individual writers, but the self-publishing scene as a whole.

2. The Means of Publicity Available to Self-Published Writers Have Become Less Satisfactory Over Time.
Self-published authors have from the start had little access to the conventional means of publicizing books. They had little prospect of appearing on Oprah, or getting written up in the New York Times, for example. They relied instead on humbler means, three in particular--namely book review blogs; sites hosting fiction which allow readers to see some or all of the book for free; and social media. None of these options were ever as strong as advertised, and all have got less satisfactory over time.

No matter what anyone tells you, the blog is in decline as a part of our online life--for many reasons.

The sites hosting fiction, always much more useful for promoting certain kinds of fiction than others (Wattpad, for example, skews young), have become increasingly crowded, and are dominated by non-commercial fan fiction, which has its built-in audience, and which, just as with franchise movies at the box office, leaves much less of an audience for everything else.

And social media, which, again, was never as promising as some made it out to be (even here, nothing ever goes viral), has become increasingly inhospitable to book promotion. While the sites happily take the money of anyone who pays to advertise them and bombard their users with such ads, their algorithms block non-payers from attempting to promote themselves, with all that implies for anyone thinking they can use it to create public awareness of their book on a budget. (Meanwhile, the frequency with which the self-published have tried to publicize their books on social media would seem to have interacted with the stigma against their work to make their attempts notorious—and, to go by casual remarks I have seen, the butt of cruel jokes, with all that implies for the effectiveness of the approach.)

3. People Are Reading Less.
It was a technological revolution that made self-publishing's prospects look as bright as they did in the late '00s and early '10s--but the same technological revolution had other, less toward consequences. It meant that pretty much the entire potential audience for such work was carrying around at all times and in all places a smart phone giving them access to the entire range of entertainment options round-the-clock--from perusing social media, to streaming video, to playing video games. With all those alternatives--for many, far more enticing alternatives--there was that much less reading going on, with this underlined by what's on the bestseller lists. Certainly going by the appearances of such books on it in recent years as The Fault in Our Stars, Me Before You, The Duke and I, and many, many others, it seems that a bestseller is a book people read after they see the movie or TV adaptation of the story, the flow between media increasingly going only this one way--to the disadvantage of any newcomer to the market.

Moreover, such changes probably had their biggest impact on the young. While all other things being equal they might have been more open to new writers working in new ways than their elders, growing up with smart phones and so much more accessible to audiovisual media than before they have been much less prone to read for entertainment purposes--and certainly less prone to develop the habit of doing so. Indeed, I suspect that this generation's coming of age has played a significant part in the fact that the writers on the bestseller list are in the main the same people who were already there in the '90s (Grisham, Patterson, Evanovich, etc.)--the same writers catering to that older readership they picked up then rather than anyone winning over the younger crowd; while the same suspicion would also seem affirmed by the softening of the Young Adult book market, the Young Adults of today just that much less up for books of whatever type (as compared with the kids who read Harry Potter and Twilight, products of a different media world). Simply put, there was much less of an audience for them to chase generally, while the most likely audience was especially uninterested--which may be the most bitterly ironic of all of the aspects of the situation for those who had hoped it would all mean more than it has.

In short, what we had was an extremely incomplete technological revolution that solved only part of the self-published writer's problem, not all of it; a most dubious set of avenues for publicizing a book that has got only less promising with time; and, as if all that were not enough, an audience likely shrinking, with this especially going for that younger audience that may have been most up for grabs.

On Publishing: Movies vs. Reality

Recently I had occasion to remark how authors' biographical blurbs tend to cut out the less glamorous details of authors' pasts--while the very people who do the cutting whine endlessly that the public has an overglamorized image of authorship, as if they were not personally, directly part of all that.

Fiction, of course, also plays its part in this overglamorization--and in ways besides its depicting what authors do as mainly sitting about in bookshops autographing copies of their latest for starstruck fans. There is also how it skips over the little matter of publishing the thing. We hear about people writing (hear, rather than see, generally), and then, bam, there they are in the bookshop autographing away, even if, so far as we know, they are first-time writers who have no agent, editor, etc. lined up.

It gives the impression that all you have to do is finish the book, and then there is someone to take it off your hands--when, as the reality of authorship for the great majority shows, the hardest writing process is likely to be infinitely easier than getting a publisher to even look at the thing, never mind take it; that point the one at which the real struggle begins. The writing, after all, is up to the writer; but publishing is where other people get a say. If someone is a celebrity, or connected; if they are an "insider"; they can do deals. But what a director who had had an experience of being both outsider and insider in Hollywood once told me, while "insiders can do deals . . . outsiders can get lost," with Park Avenue no less unfriendly a place that way than Tinseltown.

The big publishers generally won't do deals with someone who doesn't have an agent, and tell anyone who would approach them "Get an agent" as if it were as simple as getting a plumber--but agents won't take on people who aren't published, because it's their job to represent people with careers, not create those careers for them. There are slush piles here and there, but the priority accorded them is low, the task of going through them entrusted to unpaid interns who might occasionally find something--but at best an agent getting five or ten thousand submissions this way might pick one up for their list. The rest get silence--or form rejection letters, often after months or even years of waiting for an answer.

In short, there just aren't that many opportunities even to have your work seriously looked at--while it is worth remembering that those who do the looking can always find a reason to say "No," even if they bother to give any reason at all (the silence, or the form rejection letter, sparing them even the obligation to offer flimsy excuses for a brush-off).

The result is that the slush pile just isn't a serious way in--and unless you have connections there aren't likely any others, meaning that for the great majority, no matter what the quality of the manuscript they have in hand, there is no way in at all. And many beat their heads against the wall for years, even decades, either ignorant of that reality, or desperately denying it.

But you'd never know it from the movies--or for that matter, from the vehement denunciation by Big Publishing's trolls of those who, realizing that their choice is either to not be published at all, or to publish themselves (often, publish themselves on a zero-budget, wholly DIY basis), opt for the latter with all its disadvantages and its hardships and its risks. The trolls, vehement that publishing should be the monopoly of a professional elite; vehement that if that elite's selection is less than perfectly open and meritocratic and fair, that one may be denied their chance simply because "they didn't pick their parents well" this is just too bad for them; vehement that anyone whom the gatekeepers refuse to admit into the charmed circle of professionals, turning the outsider who can get lost into the insider who can do deals, should resign their dreams of authorship; are of course outraged by what they see as Defiance of Authority by the Unwashed.

But the self-publishers persist anyway.

So far little would seem to have come of the fact--so much so that those desperately hoping for the victory of all those writers chasing their dreams over the elite that sneered in their faces for so long have probably felt something of the heartbreak all too familiar to the supporters of defeated revolutions. But to say that this will never change is another thing, "never" being a very long time indeed.