Reading levels, racism in publishing, a George Saunders example, common bookselling business principle

Wednesday 7/22/26

I posted something somewhere about how a part inside of me dies each time I see an "of" for "have." As in, "should of." Someone then commented very seriously and calmly--as if they were honestly trying to teach me something--that "should've" is produced from "should of."

And now you know.

If I post something that has an idea in it, far fewer people hit the like button.

If I post something sans idea, that is a simple statement, or what someone construes to be but a quote from a lyric, say, with no further meaning or implication, then that will get far more likes.

Anything I post that requires any reading comprehension won't be understood. For example, if I say, "Such and such is a contender for the best Grateful Dead show yet to gain official release," people will then comment that such and such other show--which did gain official release--is the best.

There is nothing you can write, no matter how simple, that people will understand now. I mean a statement of something. If you write something in the past tense, they won't pick up that it's the past tense. You adding that "ed" to "walk" means nothing to people. It won't register that this means the past.

The way people "read"--and this is virtually everyone, including the "best" readers, that is, the people who can sound out more words than the average person, which is what reading largely now is--isn't through a progression. It's not going from word to word, from bit of information that is conveyed to bit of information, and piecing those parts together (along with connecting dots, drawing the conclusion that "b" is a reality because we've progressed from a to d and we clearly see a c as well and so therefore...).

They alight on a word that stands out to them. They project whatever they want or feel onto that word. They're involved in a selection-based activity. Because of who they are and how they "read." Which isn't how reading works.

What they project with that word (which they happened to see), what they feel like taking away from that word, what they feel like doing with that word, is what they conclude is the meaning of what they read. That word is like a trigger of a free-for-all for anything they want to believe what they've "read" means, and anything they feel like saying or thinking.

Two examples from the other day. This was one thing I posted about the Red Sox:

Is that Vesuvius going off again or the molten hot Boston Red Sox winning their thirteenth in a row?! A flaming baker’s dozen!

and this was another:

The Red Sox’ Caleb Durbin: turnaround embodier.

The first post got far more likes. And no, this isn't about social media, if you're someone bent on being deliberately obtuse (or are perhaps actually that obtuse), except insofar as what goes on social media is what goes out in the world. They're not unrelated. Thematically. Fundamentally. The workings "out there" are the same workings on the screen.

People didn't and don't understand the Vesuvius reference. One out of, what, a thousand people walking around might get that? One out of 5000? Such a basic thing. Should hardly be obscure. But it's virtually an unknown thing in a world where people know next to nothing besides what they all know and that's a matter of what is hammered at in front of their faces.

It's a nice, smart, learned post. You get the twist/turn of language, too, in the second sentence. It's not just saying, "Socks have won 13 strait!" which is what most people would write, and, because of that, and because we are so stupid and illiterate, would get far more likes.

This is the principle upon which all success in our world is now built. A version of this. For internet following or for being Taylor Swift.

It's not built on greatness or even being good at anything or having anything of value to offer anyone. It's on being the same as everyone else and being seen as achievable, as in, "I could be that person," or "I think that way as well" or "I also talk that way." As for "Socks" and "strait"--very few people would even have a clue that either was incorrect. This is our world. And it's a world in which we do nothing about this. As we do nothing about it, we help to feed the forces that make it even worse.

But, one can look at that second post of mine and do the land-on-the-presumed-key-words thing and know that someone is saying, "Hooray Red Sox!" and hit that like button on that basis.

Whereas, in the first example, you'd need to know the word embody--which maybe one person in a thousand does, basic as that word is--and be able to stay with things well enough to understand the alteration made to that word; that is, understand it for what it is now that it's been put into this other form.

You're also asking people to do some thinking. I can't believe I'm even saying this. That I'm calling such a thing "thinking." But that's how dense we've become. We hardly ever think and most of us are losing the ability to think at all, which we are totally fine with, never mind that it makes the world worse for us, our children, their children. Because here you'd need to think and concatenate, "Oh, Durbin had big struggles earlier in the year, like the Sox team itself. His turnaround parallels their turnaround as a team. Good point."

I'm talking now about sports fans and Red Sox fans (forget anyone else, because they won't know the name Caleb Durbin when it's put out there without identifying information). With the latter, you'd likely (wrongly) assume that of course a Sox fan knows such a thing. But: there's a difference between knowing and having that thing within mental reaching distance such that it's available to you in a given moment, and this would make for a moment.

You're asking too much of people. Amazingly. But that's just the truth.

This isn't the great work of art showing the meaning of why we're all here and that kind of other level stuff. This is language at a very direct, very compact level. What you'd assume would be ground level. The ground-iest ground level.

I've said again and again, and I've lived this: If you write, "I had an orange for breakfast," many people, most people, who read that, won't fully understand it. They can be people who go on Reddit and post photos of the new stack of Dostoevsky novels they just bought.

Doesn't matter. In most cases, they bought those novels--and will grunt their way through reading them, understanding very little, and instead just seeing the words--for other reasons. To be able to post this very picture on Reddit, for example. To be able to be a part of a community (a books subreddit, a classic literature subreddit, a Russian lit subreddit, a Dostoevsky subreddit--all of 'em) in a lonely life. Never mind that it's not a real community.

This is a post-reality world. Hardly anyone is dealing in anything based in reality or truth or realness, hardly anyone has any degree of realness. People are oriented--and have been enabled--to think about themselves in a way they'd like to, whatever that may be, no matter how false it is. "I'm smart." "I am well read." "I'm an expert on the Beatles." "I'm one of the good ones."

One of the many overwhelming challenges of my life is writing what I write to try and have it be understood for what it is, so it can do what it has the power in this world to do, which means working on and in that world despite that world, despite these limitations of people. And all of that anyway is for if and when I get around the rest of the problems--the discrimination, the hate, the envy, etc.--of a system and a world at large, such that I could even get to any readers or people who could become readers or, more to the point, readers of what I create.

I can be enough to serve as your lifetime of reading, because of the frankly unbelievable-save-that-there-it-is range and variety of my work and its same level of quality in all those forms. But this is above all why I have a hard time getting through each day, and trying, fighting, because what's the point? There's no hope.

But when I'm working like I do, for as long as I do, as hard as I do, on "Mouse," or "Dead Thomas," thinking of things, accounting for things, taking things into consideration, that has never entered the mind of another writer, or another human for that matter, this is why. My writing can't just be writing. It can't be writing as writing is or ever has been. It has to be this other thing. Which itself houses all of these other things.

If people call it writing, fine. It's not really writing, though. If you read "Best Present Ever," it's apparent, I believe, that's it's not writing. The term writing doesn't really work. It doesn't do what writing otherwise does and is limited to. It's an entirely different experience. It isn't something you do, as in, read it, so much as it's something that happens to you and of which you are a part.

Something that is just writing has no fucking chance. Which could be a moot point as far as my own life goes, as, again, I don't believe I have a chance. But I still act, to some degree, as if I do. You could argue that's simply my way of not killing myself right now, a technique I've created. I'm not going to argue against you, frankly, here on this morning.

But with all of this being in place, you think people are out there loving the nonsense of Guggenheim/Booker Prize/National Book Award winner and MacArthur genius grant recipient George Saunders? I invite you to look again at the shining example of his writing in these pages as contrasted with mine.

There isn't a person in the world who seriously cares about what he writes any more than there is a single person who cares about something you've never written. There isn't a single person who actually reads George Saunders as this thing they like to do any more than there is a single person who actually reads something you'll never write, which is to say, something that doesn't exist.

All of that in publishing, the why behind everything, is just blood, classism, racism, sexism, cronyism, lunch table politics and popularity contests, water carrying, like attracting like. When there's an interest in actually selling books, it isn't to sell a book for that book to be read by anyone. You just want to sell it. In this scam-y, scummy way. The once. By hook or by crook. Not as reading for reading.

Unless you're counting on someone coming back to buy that person's next book just so they can once again tell themselves they're one of the good ones, or some such, and not read that book either, which has been enough--coupled with these other publishing things and anti-principles--to make a no-talent racist con artist like Ibram X. Kendri rich.

So, if some clueless, wealthy, disgusting, actually-racist, middle-aged, hypocritical house wife, who does nothing all day but sit around, boss the landscapers, get her nails done, etc., is told that she should buy a book by another racist who happens to have a different skin color about how to be an anti-racist, she's going to buy that book because she doesn't have a brain in her head, a jot of integrity, she doesn't read, she's not going to read that book, but owning that book (and/or displaying it prominently/telling everyone she's reading it) will make her feel like she's something special.

This is a primary business principle of book selling. It's disgusting. It's evil. It has fuck all to do with reading. It's self-defeating, not that most industry types can see that. It pisses away the future. This is how people are signed, repped, put forward, awarded, touted, backed. This is who gets the review space, the Guggenheim, the industry support, the big piece of the pie of the marketing budget. It has nothing to do with the 1. The writing 2. What anyone thinks that writing will mean to people and everything to do with the person and what they represent to those making these things happen.

I'm talking fiction. Because there could be someone who thinks some musical artist is great and deserves an insightful book and commits to making that happen with an author. But that's small grapes within a gated citadel that is itself in the extreme margins of society and culture--for that's what publishing is--where even the biggest grapes are very small grapes. There will be little behind that nonfiction book, in terms of resources. It'll just be a book that was. That existed and technically came out.

And the fewer ideas in that book and the more vanilla the language, the more interchangeable the writing is, as if it were just a series of linguistic "blanks" rather than language with a real charge to it, the more it just resembles a list of factoids and quotes, the better it will be, because the people who do buy that book usually will have no interest in a reading experience, in being immersed in something.

They will "read" in that manner I highlighted above, which is more like a very haphazard version of scanning. They just want to see a factoid or a quote from Ringo Starr. That quote can be, "It was great," nothing more, but that reader likes knowing that those quotation marks, if will, belong to Ringo.

Someone can say, "I wrote this book," it's a line on a CV, some fan of that musical artist may acquire that book--though chances are they won't read all of it--and that's that. If there was a (small) advance, there will be no additional money forthcoming. If there wasn't an advance, there might be a few hundred dollars.

This skin color example is one example. Just one. But everything that happens here is based on this archetype. It has nothing to do with reading, the quality of what was written, the potential appeal of a work or an author.

It's like with AI. You know who loves AI the most? Besides corporate types and fortune hoarders. Out in the world, I mean. It's people without a single creative cell in their bodies. People who have no talent. Lazy people. People who couldn't invent a single thing if they lived a trillion years. They wouldn't stumble into anything that wasn't hackneyed. People who have never had an original thought, and couldn't deliver on creating something from an original thought if they ever had one.

The publishing system is the same way. Same principle. You don't need to have a lick of talent. It's better, so far as the system is concerned, if you don't. You can be a terrible person. You don't have to try. You don't have to so much as work a single hour in good faith in your entire life at writing. And you can be hooked up. Based on other things. You're number still has to get picked, because there are an awful lot of people like this. But the requirements of that system are the bad things, not the good ones.

Your punched ticket can be a matter of skin color, gender, identity politics. Your monumental mediocrity. Who your dad was. No one combines the last two things better than Emma Straub. Or whatever happens to be the trending movement of the times. (The sole reason Kristen Roupenian had "Cat Person," that half-baked story she stole from someone else, printed in The New Yorker, and was given the huge book deal, despite, as per usual with these people, having no ability, and having written very little in her life, not even nearly enough to fill out a enough pages for a story collection, which is why there was such a large delay before the book came out--she had to write the shit, which she didn't have--and whom you will never hear from again, was because she was bland enough and in the right spot at the right time as the right kind of person before that part of the news cycle turned over and adjudicated that #MeToo was played out. You think David Remnick cared about that cause? Deborah Treisman with her fake love for the work of the misogynistic hack Junot Diaz before it became less permissible to hype him as before? Please.) Being awful at writing, which protects the ego of the agent, the editor, the publisher. Being like those other people in that citadel in the margins. Having money/coming from money, which means being seen as a member of a particular class. The old town/townie country club mentality. The inner circle Republican party mentality. How people feel about you personally.

Bad and limited people are more comfortable with bad and limited people, and that becomes truer by the day in this world. They gravitate towards them. They aren't jealous of them, they don't resent them. They don't look at them as embodying--there's that word--things they aren't and could never be. They're birds of a feather.

They reinforce each other's egos and sense of self by dint of the comparison. They help each other be comfortable in what they are and aren't. They're able to frame those bad things as good things, bolstered and emboldened by the chorus of their fellows.

Never underestimate the impact of the echo effect for people who wish to see things (and basically need to, because they can't cope with or do anything about the truth, including rallying and working to change, grow, improve with all the work, energy, humility, courage, time that takes) a certain way (or the echo effect generally, for that matter, in a society bereft of critical thinking/critical thinkers and overloaded with weak, cowardly, and broken people). They never challenge each other, hold each other accountable, or rise above.

If you're being put forward, awarded, hyped, etc., by these people of this system, you're a bad person and you're also doing unoriginal writing that isn't mean to last and, more importantly in the here and now, isn't even meant to be read, and certainly not read and remembered and ever revisited. As the system currently stands.

Because if you weren't, there'd be problems here. It'd be a no go. They'd have issues with you. They wouldn't "like" you. You wouldn't be deemed as one of them and as one of them doing what many others they can point to--who are also like them--have done and are doing. You wouldn't get one of them to do anything on your behalf, let alone hundreds or thousands united together.

Because that's what it takes. The twisted village. It's not one editor or publisher with a vision for you leading the way, blazing that trail, with others rallying to your cause and the cause of your work as you go.

It's the committees, the people like preview editor Sadie Stein at The New York Times pushing the glowing, AI-written review by someone deemed the latest chosen person by the people of the system, your Guggenheim Foundation liars, the Sigrid Rausings of the world, the people who do the book buying for bookstores, the people who do the window displays there, the influencers, the people who make "Best Books of the Year" and "Summer Must Reads" lists and have a personal reason for doing so with each and every entry.

You have all these people in on making it happen. They all have to be for you and working together, to some degree. That's how you get Tommy Orange. Wells Tower back when you got him. Yiyun Li. Joshua Cohen. Diane Williams. Ben Lerner, whom we'll get to here. You don't get them--and they don't get anything they are handed--because of the quality of their writing and the appeal of that writing.

You know how people say you need to be a terrible person to do what you have to do to be a billionaire? Same principle goes with publishing, without the billions. They have to see you as one of them. And if they do, it's not for good qualities. They might put it however they put it to themselves, and when they need to answer a question, but how they would put it is a long ways off from the reality.

But the very same reasons why wholly non-creative people like AI like are why the people who like the publishing system like it. The person who can't write anything gets to say they're a writer because they had AI write a book. The person who has no talent gets to say X, Y, Z about themselves because of the publishing industry.

The writing coming out of that industry now is either done by AI or is indistinguishable from writing done by AI, which makes it the same thing. It's AI. There isn't anyone with enough ability such that they write something and it could only be done by them and you categorically know it. Present company excluded, that is.

You don't think AI could write that George Saunders garbage in that earlier prose off as sourced from the fiction pages of The New Yorker? You don't think if you said, "Hey, chatGPT, write me some pretentious MFA bag of shit nonsense that dimwitted classists can pretend is awesome" that AI wouldn't produce the likes of what you can see here plain as plain?

So just as someone who doesn't have any ability, and could never create anything fresh, original, vital, full of life, wants AI and sings its praises and scolds, "If you aren't using AI, why, that's like riding in a horse-drawn carriage rather than a car" and all that pat bullshit, a person about whom the same could be said wants the current publishing system and are almost certainly in it or exactly the kind of person hitching on the side of the road--but not for long--and picked up by it. Because then you can have stuff, as such.

What does that mean? With AI, it means saying, "My latest book is about..." People want to be able to do the saying. The saying, the saying, the saying. To be able to say the thing. (Especially in a world where attention-seeking has replaced wellness, mental health, and any correlation between what a thing truly is and recognition, reward, and additional opportunities based on that alone.) Regardless if that thing means nothing. The saying is everything to them.

It's pathetic. In publishing, someone at an Upper West Side party is able to say, "Oh, yes, I believe The New York Times is doing a review of my book" as if they didn't know exactly how that came about, the levers that were pulled, the lunches had, the emails sent, the egos greased, or in the office of an English department colleague, "I have a short short in The Iowa Review," or "I have a book."

Those things don't mean anything in and of themselves. There's no correlation between those things and quality or value or appeal. That is, they're not indicative of great work, good work, work that could be liked or loved, or anyone thinking anything positive about the work. However lukewarm. And none of them happened because someone, let alone a group of people, or hundreds, honestly thought, "This is amazing, let's go with it, let's get behind it" or "People will really go for this" or "This can make a big mark in the world."

That has nothing to do with how this works. And look what you get as a result. Look what it's doing. Look at what it's not doing.