Things That Happened When I Wasn’t Blogging – Part 5

Michael Wolf decided to make a complete asshat of himself.

I’ll let you ponder the following thesis:

HarperCollins does not really believe Sarah Palin has written a valuable book—or even that it is really a book, not in the way that HarperCollins has historically understood books, or in the way that people have counted on HarperCollins to have understood a book. But, these are desperate times and real books are an increasingly equivocal proposition anyway, so almost all publishers are willing to engage in the strategic mix-up between real books and fake books.

As an aside, I’ll give you one guess on who the other NY-Times bestselling “author” on whom Wolf applied his derision. . .

Let’s start with the idea of a “fake” book. That nasty conceit infects the entire article, and apparently Mr. Wolf’s whole worldview. In Wolf’s eyes, there are certain tell-tale markers that a particular printed, bound, book-like object is infected with “fakeness.” Apparently, the number one vector that can “fakeify” a book is this fact:

And they’re fake. A lie. So many are just simply not written by the people the publisher tells you they are written by. Somebody should sue.

Ok, so ghostwritten books are “fake.” Wow. It’s almost as if he just discovered that people really do this, and started crying because there ain’t no Santa. (Should someone tell him that sometimes people write under names other than their own?) But also note here that he says “so many,” which is not “all.” So the whole “they didn’t really write that all by themselves” complaint is not the sole criterion. These evil, lying, fake books have other identifiers that are, apparently, just as important as the credit.

Mr. Wolf, tell me more:

Books are a sales tool. They’re propaganda.

OMG!!!!! CAPITALISM! POLITICS! THE HORROR!

It’s a sleight of hand. A bait and switch. It’s not that there is anything wrong, or at least out of the ordinary, with salesmanship or promotional copy, or with even saying you wrote what your ghostwriter wrote. This is the stuff of speeches, advertising, and testimonials. What’s insidious here is that these forms, which are understood to be insincere and a confection, are now in the guise of a book, which is understood to be genuine and substantial.

Gotta love that passive voice, you can just here the condescension dripping from every word. You can almost choke on the snobbery. This is pretty much the very definition of bigotry; relying on a series of arbitrary external signifiers to indicate the worth of something. Saves you the trouble of actually reading.

It’s a preposterous image, someone actually sitting down and furrowing their brow over the Palin work.

But, it’s all good, we can slam it without soiling ourselves with those evil stupid words.

This really isn’t quibbling. We have created a giant system of national agitprop, in which books and the book business have become one of the most effective tools.

Literate people should boycott books.

ORLY? Has he thought this out, at all?  I mean that the entire article is written from the point of view of someone who has little idea of how the marketplace works, but even someone whose understanding of capitalism comes only from playing Monopoly twice when he was twelve should realize that this is a stupid idea as well as being logically inconsistent. If his suggestion was taken even halfway seriously, the obvious result would only be a decline in sales of the “real” books, after all, his definition of “literate people” are not going to be “furrowing their brow over the Palin work” anyway.

What we have here is the oft-repeated stupid argument that popular culture (translation: the stuff that actually sells) somehow contaminates, belittles or gives cooties to “real culture” (translation: stuff that I appreciate that makes me better than you, and doesn’t sell) mixed in with a heavy dose of “What? Conservative books are bestsellers? The system must be broken! Those hicks can’t read!“