Who Decides What We Read?

I've been in something of a frustration mode lately. I was recently fortunate enough to meet with a literary agent to discuss a book project I had been working on since the summer. At that meeting, we discussed the fact that a family member already had a book contract to write a biography of his long ago relative. "I don't think the market can support two books about X," the agent told me.

After having spent two seemingly futile days in archives in Washington, I was tired and vulnerable, and I caved without much of a struggle. My response was something along the lines of saying that I felt relieved.

The agent and I kicked around a few other potential book ideas, and I left his office with the promise to send him a proposal for one of them.

A few weeks after that meeting, I e-mailed a friend about what happened. Her response was interesting. She works in a library dedicated to people who have lived in the White House, and she observed how many multiple books there are in the library on the same subject. How, she wondered, could this agent determine that two books could not be written about the same person?

How indeed? Just who does determines what we read?

Because I still see myself as a struggling writer (my definition of no longer struggling is when my writing earns enough to cover the research trips and pay my bills), I am sensitive to books that get published and reviewed. In the last few years, I have spotted a very disturbing trend. Authors who know editors of influential and widely circulated, and widely respected, publications will have their work reviewed - everywhere! A good example is the latest work by Joan Didion, whom I hate to give any additional press to, because she has had more than enough. I've read about her in Vanity Fair. She was on the cover of New York Magazine. The New Yorker reviewed her book, as did the New York Times, the Washington Post, and goodness knows who else.

I am sorry for Ms. Didion's pain. I fully understand the need to emote and work through hurt and grief, and I definitely know that writing offers that outlet better than other media. But do I have to be inundated with the details of her life story and her daily habits? Isn't there a limit to the exposure?

It is difficult to break into the clique that arbitrates what we will have available to read. Only by getting beyond the more obvious suggestions of reading options and digging deeper into the great variety of what is published through university presses, small independent publishing firms, and the mid-list books of trade publishers that get little attention can we move beyond the books that are hyped and thrown at us.

Through one of my Twitter feeds, I happened upon an interesting article in the New York Daily News: "The Most Overrated Books of 2011." This blogpost says it all, and more succinctly than I just have, too. (http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/node/126739)

A Hodgepodge of Thoughts on Capitalism and its Oppressors

I was in New York the week before last - the week that included the Thursday when the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators planned to "act." Their actions, according to the paper that Thursday morning, included taking their message to the subways, and ultimately converging at the southern tip of Manhattan in and around Battery Park and the Brooklyn Bridge. Their appointed hour for gathering was 3 p.m. - which ended up being about exactly the time I was due back at Union Square from my museum jaunt further uptown.

I wondered if the demonstrators were going to converge on the station and put me in harm's way. I wondered if I would feel safe joining them for a short period just to relive my own days of protest in the early 1970s when I marched on behalf of Soviet Jewry in front of the Soviet embassy in Washington. And I wondered if I should get off the subway one stop sooner and just walk the rest of the way to Union Square.

I decided I would take my chances, and rode into the Union Square stop. All was quiet. No phalanx of police officers underground. No groups shouting slogans. Not even the nearly ubiquitous musicians who set up in the spaces where the yellow line and the green line meet and then go their separate ways.

On street level, I emerged just in time to see the protestors marching in an orderly fashion along the Square (see photo). But just a few blocks to the south, I could hear the police whistles, sirens, and louder chants. By 5:00 p.m., according to the local news, thousands were converged at Battery Park, and warned they would be arrested if they blocked traffic across the bridge. Photos showed lines of cars backed up for miles. I wanted the protestors to comply and not create problems; it would only diminish their message.

As I have learned from previous trips to New York when events in that city make national news, the "local take" is far more nuanced than what we in the rest of the nation hear. Those who live and work near Zuccotti Park are ready for the protestors to go home. A few were photographed holding signs that read, "Occupy a Desk." Workers were interviewed about how they were inconvenienced in trying to get into their office buildings. At Macy's a few days later, I heard someone tell a friend that her neighbors can't even walk their children to school because of the demonstrations.

I have been very sensitive to the original message of those who formed the movement. It is a reminder that extreme wealth in this country is concentrated in the hands of a very few, and that wealth gives a tiny minority access the rest of us don't get - regardless of what we are allegedly supposed to receive according to the idealism of our political documents. It makes me think of the message I tried to inculcate into my children - not to believe what I sometimes think is the Great American Lie - "liberty and justice for all." We do not have liberty and justice for all, but we have to find a way to fulfill the ideals on which we set up a republic. The "occupiers" are trying to remind us that there is still much work to be done.

But they have diminished their message by their refusal to focus on one or two key issues and persistently drive those points home. An acquaintance of mine attended some working sessions in the early days of the movement. He was impressed with the occupiers' dedication and their orderliness. What I'm hearing now is the adult version of elementary school "group work," which eschews leadership and tries to forge a watery consensus. The group needs definitive leaders to hone and drive home a message, or it will be drowned out by a nation with an incredibly short attention span.

One object lesson about the 1% versus the 99% comes from a story carried earlier this week by Yahoo! Finance and the Christian Science Monitor (see David vs. Goliath fight ) about a cease and desist letter that Chick-fil-A has sent to a Vermont kale grower who screen printed shirts reading "Eat More Kale."

Chick-fil-A's attorneys claim that grower Bo Muller-Moore has infringed on the chicken chain's intellectual property by using a phrase close to its "Eat Mor Chikin." Well, first off, Mr. Muller-Moore knows how to spell, and second, I'm hard pressed to see how people are going to confuse chicken with kale. Finally, I doubt that Mr. Muller-Moore is going to franchise his kale business nationwide.

Just for the heck of it, I checked on the Chick-fil-A web site to see how many locations they have in Vermont. ZERO! So, I wonder how the company can justify that a kale grower is going to dilute its brand. Actually, I wonder why the dairy industry hasn't gone after Chick-fil-A for using Holstein cattle in its advertising, thus diminishing the perception that cows give us milk.

Truett Cathy, the founder of Chick-fil-A, strongly espoused his Christian principles - to the level that he makes a big point of not being open on Sunday. One would like to think that the corollary to those views is not to oppress those who are [financially] weaker and less able to defend themselves. There is a whole lot more in Scripture about the powerful abusing the weak than there is about observing the Sabbath.

I fired off a letter to Chick-fil-A letting them know that if they persisted in demanding that Mr. Muller-Moore suspend his kale promotional campaign that they would lose a customer. I haven't heard back, other than to get the perfunctory auto-response.

That's okay. I can occupy a seat at Wendy's or Panera Bread instead.