LoobyLou – pen name of a woman concealing her identity for reasons all too well known by everyone – has written a cri de cœur directed to what she calls the ‘totalitarians’ in her beloved publishing industry. Lou’s language is measured, and we can imagine her typing as quietly as possible while glancing over her shoulder every so often, convinced her manifesto might bring sense to those steering a doomed ship.
Near the start of the essay, she mentions her run-ins with the English Society of Authors, whose ‘Chair fail(ed) to step up and speak out against authors being abused, hounded and cancelled for wrong-think.’ Such clean language, without a name mentioned, when what LoobyLou is talking about is people whose lives are being ruined in a series of public burnings, one after the other, some in secret, others flagrantly public. She elides the gritty details, the chilling on-line laughter after the attack on Salman Rushdie, the constant stream of death threats directed at a certain Scottish author who, as trans advocates are fond of saying, could have stayed home quietly and kept her mouth shut.
The five or six or six hundred readers who stumble on Looby’s essay through the welter of the web may find it darkly titillating : careers ended over a comment on-line, hit squads prowling the internet for Wrong Think before revealing the victim’s personal details, agents who know better than to propose ‘controversial’ books, publishers who are afraid to take a stand against the shaming. A chilling ambiance of fear has taken hold and Lou believes ‘we’re approaching the stage where what you publish – indeed, what you’re offered for publication – will be so anodyne that no-one will want to read it.’
An essay like this could mean that the iceberg inside corporate HQ is shifting. Maybe some sort of affective global warming is taking place in the offices of the Big Publishers. Or, it could mean that the Higher Ups are secretly tearing each other’s eyes out.
For what’s it worth, I’ve been there, too, although my take is necessarily different as I was not so tenacious as LoubyLou. Defenestrated, I was one of many pushed out for conduct unbecoming a cog in the Great Corporate Publishing Wheel.
Lou doesn’t shrink from the abundant contradictions as she goes about saying her piece. Totalitarians don’t give a much of a damn about nice guys, so Looby was either whistling to get their attention – presuming they read her piece for reasons other than finding out who she is – or she refuses to believe they are Orwellian at heart. Her essay is a valuable peek at Things As They Are, a survey which may come as news to some readers. But will they believe any of it ?
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Once upon a time, I too made my way floor to floor in the shiny towers where the New York bigs managed the book trade, slipping through the labyrinths of cubicle land where it was always so damn quiet, no roaring literary debates, no bustle of activity save for the clacking of a keyboard on the other side of a partition. The few people I encountered were always, 80 percent anyway, women. I wondered where the men were, had they become extinct ? In those days I imagined myself halfway in, but in any case, I was simply on the wrong floor, 12 in a skyscraper of 22. The men were tucked in in the higher suites. Women can be had for a far cheaper salary and tend, for a variety of reasons, to move on after a few years, either into another branch of the industry or just plain Out, like the sharp editor I met over the correction of a Latin American novel where the advance had gone up the first translator’s nose. She was halfway out, headed to law school in Alabama. The brightest don’t stick around to watch books becoming product on a conveyor belt.
‘It was tough enough to make a record when music was a business. It’s an industry now, so forget it.’ Those are (more or less) Janis Ian’s words about why she isn’t looking to record for a major label these days. One of the great singers of a previous generation, forgotten now.
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Everyone has the hang of How Things Work in the Sex Debacle of the ’20s, if only because Hollywood, the music industry and the screw-ups in the Trans Lobby make sure we hear the Contagion news on a daily basis.* Earlier this week (9/11/22) the English press carried the latest on Sam Smith, the weepy English singer who no one ever loves enough, one of the engines behind abolishing women’s categories in the UK music awards. (A decision he lived to regret.) Smith hired a Queer Diversity Supervisor for his current video, someone charged with enforcing pronouns – but only in relation to the star : Smith is to be referred to « they « or « them » while according to some press reports, « she » is permissible, presumably in the afternoon after a few pints. Few in our Brave New World sweat the presence of an interloper drawing up a list of anyone who won’t go along with the fiction, and in any case the whole game isn’t aimed at higher-ups. The production crew is the target, the grunts in the glossy media bubble, some of whom complained to the press about the chilly atmosphere. They didn’t give their names either.
The harmless Woody Allen is a child-abusing demon (although the aggressive DA folded before bringing a case), and the popular Nigerian writer Chinamanda Ngozi Adichie, who ceaselessly chanted the mantra Trans Women are Women but received death threats anyway for daring to suggest women and trans women have different experiences along the way… Old News, lost in last week’s rushes, hard for anyone to know how important it is anyway.
Trans folk are a maligned minority who just happen to have Big and Small Government, a wide assortment of NGOs plus Big Pharma, the medical establishment and a host of corporations waving their multi-color flag. Puberty is suddenly problematic for teens and surgery an option. As to pronouns, be sensitive and try harder. The dam looked like it might burst when mediocre men started to invade women’s sports or spectacularly ugly transvestites (surely a sin) began delivering Drag Queen Story Hours to the under-10 set at local schools but apart from JK Rowling and a tireless squad of pissed-off women, people have decided they have better things to worry about. As with #Me-Too, many shrug. A few unjustly accused and defenestrated is a small price to pay. Weird men sporting extreme delusions (when not criminal records) roaming women’s toilets just doesn’t happen, while many liberals find it hard to take an interest in women sharing a jail cell with a rapist.
I digress yet again.
Tough Times for Progressives
Always hard to choose sides when your benefits are on the line
Lou’s essay opens with a quote from one Eowyn, another anonymous mole, who protests the « sheer craven spinelessness from those at the top of our industry who have kowtowed to twitter mobs for far too long. » Here’s the war zone depicted in the essay :
Young Refuseniks splashed onto the social media landscape at the end of May this year. On Twitter they claimed to be ‘the first ever online support group for trans and non-binary publishing employees/hopefuls and authors.’ So far so good, LoobyLou hymns. Cynic that I am, I hear Groupthink rumbling on the horizon. Their first public act is to make available a seven page ‘block list of transphobic people in the publishing industry. It will probably need to be regularly updated but we hope it can provide more safety to the people who need it. DM if you’d like a copy.’
The group was quickly revealed to be young UK uni graduates on the margins of the publishing / blog / podcast business. Is this how hope comes dressed these days ? A list of people to be shunned ? All you needed do to get on the Refuseniks’ list was to like a tweet deemed transphobic. The file quickly spread far and wide and still burrows into the hard drives of agents and editors. Informed they might be violating UK law respecting freedom of opinion, the Refuseniks were banned from Twitter and fled to Discord where they, or someone very much like them, presumably spreads the word of safety and hope. (Refuseniks are young Israelis who won’t serve in their country’s military. The Twitter Niks thought nothing of borrowing the moniker. Sounds rad, doesn’t it ?)
Last month I engaged with another of these hopeful types with a Twitter account and Wordpress site, both dedicated to outing ‘Transphobes’ in the publishing industry and beyond. He too made his list available, no questions asked. This one was a nameless loner on the edge of town, claiming to operate out of Malaysia one minute, Brazil the next, where he was, naturally, surrounded by complaisant women. He answered my first inquiries so I proposed an interview, which didn’t get far beyond gloating over the reality that if Twitter canned him, other platforms beckoned. Do trans people really deserve a lifetime guarantee of criticism-free living ? Isn’t safety overrated ? Was he trans or merely a supporter ? The void yawned while I waited for a reply. His pages disappeared and he fled into the endless night of the snarky and unrepentant.
You feel for the young sots. They would have been better off with basket weaving. (A previous generation’s genial riposte to the poorly educated.) But now they come off the conveyor belt taught not to search for what it all means but to waste their twenties twisting logic in the defense of the imaginary oppressed. Cis hetero-normative is the enemy, the gender spectrum means whatever I need it to mean and inclusivity means exclusion. They know the importance of publishing, you have to give them that much.
It’s worth noting that at least one of Young Refuseniks is a woman just out of school, educated into a non-binary feminism that runs in circles gnawing its own tail, a feminism that labors for the rights of Trans Women. In California, Grace Lavery, formerly Joseph and a professor at UC Berkeley, is urging followers to burn Gender Critical books. Such is Higher Ed these days.
That brings us to Time to Think: The Inside Story of the Collapse of the Tavistock’s Gender Service for Children, a scandal unfamiliar to American readers but which concerns London’s preëminent gender clinic. Tavistock was a barely camouflaged surgery mill for teenagers suffering bouts of the seasickness known as puberty until it was closed this summer.
Time to Think, by award-winning journo Hannah Barnes of the BBC, details the scandal. No bidding war for the book, which hasn’t come out yet. LoobyLou says the Bigs were too scared to take it on. Swift Press, like Sky Horse in New York a small, aggressive house with a diverse list, smelled a best seller and signed it, announcing the news on social media.
Reaction was swift. A certain Nick Coveney pounced : « Corrected version: a tiny, Right Wing publisher buys book of misinformation and transphobic propaganda from angry bigot to publish their narrative which bears little to no semblance to fact. There, fixed it for you, @thebookseller. » So snarls the hitman as he fires all his tropes at once and explodes on Twitter.
So who is this Coveney ? A mad dog, freelance, a pesky ankle-biter ? Hardly. A professional chancer in the publishing world with half a dozen jobs in publishing over the last eight years, specializing in digital development across all platforms (‘Rakuten Kobo believes that consumers should have the freedom to read any book on any device’) and Diversity in HR. Well connected, knows everybody. That’s the Linked-In version anyway. Like Jekyll and Hyde, Nick has another life at night, when he turns into a slick enforcer capping the knees of anyone who strays from Gender Orthodoxy. Were you beginning to think something shady was going on at Tavistock ? Coveney is here to set you straight. In the media sex wars there are assassins like Coveney, kvetching dimwits like Katie Montgomery and untold vigilantes roaming the landscape threatening women who dare plead on behalf of biology, science and sense. Beyond that, haters from both sides spew the latest in aggressive incivility. Fixed that for you, Nick.
And like the rest of us, Coveney hasn’t read the book.
The book trade is notorious for its rough and tumble among competing authors and titles. For every book that gets published, two or three others don’t. But the Tweet above is libel and character assassination in broad daylight. Nick Coveney is untouchable and can slander anyone he chooses while his current boss squirms. Not hard to guess why.
The problem for LoobyLou is obvious : who’s going to believe things like this happen in the heart of the staid old book trade ? So this is what diversity and inclusion look like ? Much of the news and the ensuing debate appeared on Twitter, not a platform renowned for probity. And if they did happen, aren’t they the chattering trifles of the age, bound to be forgotten almost immediately ? That might be many people’s take. The Mail uses Sam Smith for a splash while the sensible, liberal press like the Guardian covers incidents like this at a polite remove. Yet Lavery, Coveney, Owen Jones and the swarms of Refuseniks out there diminish or end people’s careers.
Lou then moves on to her sit-down with the Totalitarians, who, presuming they give her the time of day, should follow her 7-point program for dredging the Titanic : make a pretty statement like Netflix did about workplace freedom of conscience, while praying the mobs cool off; force employees to sign statements to the effect their personal values will not affect their work; put an end to Sensitivity Readers, or failing that, order them to chill and not go after Every Little Thing that violates this month’s Wrong Think; spread the word that disagreement is not hate or ‘literal violence’; stop inserting morality clauses into contracts, and finally, stop kowtowing to Twitter mobs. « These activists are a tiny minority whose only enjoyment in life is finding offence and sucking the life out of everyone else, and yet they have the publishing world – in fact, most of the arts and entertainment worlds – bending over backwards to appease them. » Finally, a sentence with venom in its tail.
You see how laughable it is. We’re in the middle of a massive Social Contagion, a Cultural Revo where dissidents are being shipped out to the countryside to drive trucks or harvest potatoes. What Carl Jung called a Psychic Epidemic cunningly marches under the banner of progressive politics, pre-empting criticism and forcing your co-worker to stare blankly at the screen for today’s dose of Joy Juice. Here comes LoobyLou, who believes a petition from the floors below will bring executives to their senses. Lou lives and breathes hope, which is lousy food for radicals. She isn’t a rebel, she’s a plaintiff demanding justice. ‘Hope is a waking dream,’ to steal a phrase from a dead Greek.
What if the Big Corporate Publishing Molehill disappeared over night, bankrupted by too many underperforming sure sellers, folded into the portfolios of weapons manufacturers who decided that books were, finally, passé and a pain in the ass ?** What if the trusts were broken up, and the wealth redistributed to hundreds of small publishers and local papers ? Would life in Tribeca’s and the City’s deathly skyscrapers come to a halt, the empty shells on Midtown Sixth Avenue squatted by anarchist communes … ? Would publishing and writers be worse off ? What about the earnest graduates who know all about racism, what would they do with themselves ?
The English bien pensants, and the Americans who get their political attitudes from the old country, are always trying to reform the irredeemable. Democrats, the Labour Party, the Constitution, the FBI, which depending on your point of view has either destroyed every legitimate protest movement over the last fifty years or is the heroic defender of the sanctity of Classified Documents. Institutions conserve social energy and public approval like misers. Once set, they refuse to budge; they preserve their particular ‘culture’ against all attacks. The Society of Authors may be worth fighting for but so far the efforts of dues-paying members, J. K. Rowling among them, haven’t achieved the modest goal of prying the chair of the Management Committee from her perch, where she sits ignoring when not chortling over death threats.
To state my objections to Lou’s heartfelt essay as succinctly as I can: power goes both ways, from executive suites to editors, proofreaders and publicity departments and back in an endlessly sustaining loop. The bosses, Loo asserts, are terrified of the Twitter mobs. They are also terrified of their employees, who come from a different generation and take at least some Gender Woo to heart. Nothing is stable in the late-model, jiggy capitalism we inhabit, least of all executive positions. Imagine, if you will, the head of Harcourt Brace holding a press conference, leaning in to the micro to wheeze « Damn it all, people are being crushed by these fiends! » before signing on to Lou’s agenda. How long would Mr. Big Stuff last ? A few dozen outraged employees were enough to kill Allen’s memoir at Hachette.
The countries most affected by this social contagion are heirs to the Puritans. They’ve been here before : look no further than the McCarthyism of the 1950s. We are in the middle of another such Public Burning now, one fueled by vast amounts of elite funding. A complete diagram of the players would cover a wall. The cozy, profligate relationship between Big Pharma and modern medicine wields tremendous influence, while the beardy boys man the frontlines, demanding payback for every #MeToo accusation. They’re lucky to have their scalps.
All is this over most people’s heads. They’re busy with lives to lead. People in the Bubble know, but what can they do ? A bright young film producer from LA visited Paris recently. Wanting to gauge his reaction, I approached the issue gingerly. My friend quickly waved it off, not wanting to hear about teen surgeries, weird men in women’s bathrooms, the whole business… « You do you, » he said to close the book, and I believe he was sincere. Live and let live. It’s a modest ambition and a decent one but eventually one of his friends is going to be crucified for saying the wrong thing.
Another way of looking at the phenomenon is this : the Ruling Class is tearing itself apart. The 1% and their supporters are perennially shrinking, throwing out anyone who doesn’t Get With The Program. Among many other things, capitalism is a system of indoctrination and there are simply too many well-indoctrinated graduates coming out of the elite schools for whom there will never be position or advancement available. Hosting a blog is not career advancement. They may believe the same things about race and gender and transpeople, and all are careful to avoid saying whatever passes for Wrong Think but even so, many will be drummed out of the ranks. Hence the loyalty tests, the exotic religion which no one believes but the circumspect profess if they want to escape the pyre. As society becomes ever more hierarchical and rigid, people are endlessly divided into competing groups, each seeking to push someone else out the window. Hell is the others, said Sartre, an observation that could be posted over security turnstiles in the lobby.
LoobyLou has noble intentions and we wish her well. If you didn’t know what writers are going through these days, if you weren’t aware of the climate of fear that grips our do-gooding, big-time progressives or you imagined the book business still operates on old-time ethics, you’re in her debt. Keep the aspidistra flying !
Latest From The Other Side
It feels criminal to stop there, after a long whinge & cringe about How Bad Things Are. What would a different world look like, one where writers had agency, a touch of freedom and solidarity ? How can we go about getting those things ? What is to be done ?
Bewailing the behemoths is ultimately an exercise in frustration, while anyone without connections seeking entry at the smaller publishing houses will find they cater to specific, established tastes with a long line of writers who walked or were pushed out of the Bigs ahead of you. Writers should do it themselves, fight for readers and respect while offering aid and assistance to others in the trade.
To that end, I’m forming an association in the Petite Montagne (Jura) region of France with others of like mind, a group whose plan is to launch the Writer’s Exchange (WE, for short) in the new year. First up is my novel Rue de Cascades, le Plouc de Paris in French, in an edition illustrated by Jean-Marie Bec (aka Blick), with plenty more already on the boards. (When we aren’t tearing out an old ceiling before winter arrives.) The Jura branch is the first for WE, but the idea is based on a network of satellites, making platforms serve the writer in the battle to be seen and read. Forgive the scant details at this juncture.
(You can read a later chapter from Cascades on the KGB literary site and other fiction at the Baffler, if you care to. One of WE’s ambitions is to find other English-language writers living in Europe cut off from the publishing industrial complex. I’d like to imagine that there are dissenters all over the place, younger writers and artists who took one look at the Vicars of the Gender Church and split town.)
The history of artists and writers banding together to publish is a longer, crazier, more heroic tale than pressing Submit to cater to the whims of an unknown in a corporate tower, where publishing anything controversial is a career-ender. Liberties, civil and otherwise, are, by their nature, against the grain. Refusing to act, we reveal little more than our despair and incompetence. The holy contours of life (Allen Ginsberg’s phrase) are discovered when you take the risk and throw the dice. A leap of faith. Oui ? On verra ! Let’s see how it goes.
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Notes
*Debate is the wrong word to describe the endless sniping between parties on social media, while real, much-anticipated debates are typically cancelled at the last minute, usually by advocates who tremble at the chance of encountering ‘hate.’ For those brave enough to look closer, the current suit brought by the Mermaids against the LGB Alliance in the English courts is particularly revealing.
**Hachette France is owned by the Matra Group, better known for arms and vehicle manufacturing. They keep publishing on the ledger because, as a perennial money-loser, it lowers their taxes.
LoopyLou’s essay is here. Eowyn also writes from inside the publishing labyrinth here.
Many thanks to Ọyẹ́ Journal for editorial assistance. @Oye_Journal on Twitter, https://davedml.academia.edu/OyeJournal
…or some incendiary criticism, a piss-take, tell me I’m heartless or leave a few coins from your latest EuroMillions haul. You made it this far.
Hi James, LoobyLou here.
This is a really interesting piece - thank you very much for drawing my attention to it. Alas, I am not convinced my manifesto will bring sense to those steering the doomed ship, but I have to have to hope, otherwise what's the point? Without hope I might as well just turn my computer off for good and get a job in a supermarket. Saying that, while I have little faith, my hope has grown since I formed my Twitter account, more so since I published my first substack about the Society of Authors. The number of authors who've reached out to me privately via DM has been astounding. I honestly felt like I was alone in my bewilderment and anger at the madness of it all but there's an army of other authors out there feeling exactly the same way. Some have been far braver than me and are now speaking out openly.
One last thing before I toodle off to my current ms - Joanne Harris might still be atop her perch in the SoA but there's no guarantee she'll remain there in the long-term. All the formal complaints made about her behaviour means she's being investigated by the SoA for breaching its code of conduct. Whatever the outcome, I'm guessing her perch must be feeling a little bit wobbly.
This was so good I almost read the whole thing. Thanks! Here's the conclusion I've come to vis-a-vis the mythology of the publishing industry:
"In the last sixty years, my writing has been "rejected" in one way or another almost a million times. The more it's rejected, the better it gets. The only writing that gets published (with rare exceptions) is writing that an agent, editor and publisher all agree will make money. They call it, "Do well." If your work is published (and hyped) by a "reputable" publisher, you can be almost absolutely sure that it's vacuous, avaricious shit. Do you really want to write puerile, woke-ass, groveling crap and be "accepted" and get "glowing" reviews and win nonsensical "prizes" and make some money and die and rot and be forgot? I prefer to write things that don't make me want to barf, things I'm proud of, things worth reading...and writing...and watching...and listening to. Which kind of writer would you rather be? Nobody will know how good your stuff is because nobody will ever get to read it but so what? You'll know how good it is."