Stewart Lee Takes on Modern Publishing
Posted by Joe | May 16th, 2009 | 7 Comments »
If you’re American, you likely have never heard of Stewart Lee. I hadn’t either until I ran into a quote about Dan Brown from him on the internet. The quote piqued my interest, especially so as the quote was derogatory, and I had to find its origin. Enter Mr. Lee. Stewart Lee is an English comedian with a long comedy history, a history which I will not reiterate here but instead send you to his Wikipedia entry, and was recently given his own six-run series called Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle on BBC2. The show is shot mainly in the stand-up format, with short sketches illustrating the comedy inserted when appropriate.
My search for the Dan Brown quote lead me, in particular, to the first installment of Lee’s new show. This episode is about the sad state of the modern publishing industry, where awful writers like Dan Brown become megastars, celebrities publish books just because they can, the tragic memoir is king, and adults fawn all over children’s books like Harry Potter. Now throughout the episode Lee, I admit, often comes off as a cranky old man screaming for the kids to get off his lawn. And some of his bits do seem meandering for this American viewer (particularly the “rapper” bit). But the crux of his argument (and it is more of an argument than just pure comedy) is something I myself lament; where have all the good books gone?
Sure, it can be argued that people can read whatever they like to read and that’s fine. But people can only read what is given to them, and what is given to them is crap. People are given crap because it’s not challenging to read crap, people do not wish to be challenged, and the publishers are just giving the people what they want. Fine. But being motivated solely by money, which seems to be the philosophy of the modern publishing giant, is not sustainable over time. The record industry is on its way out, yielding (though kicking and screaming while doing so) to a more populist way of doing business, and if you look to our current banking crisis in which quantity over quality was the norm, you can see that doing business only to get rich creates a bubble; all bubbles eventually pop.
Lee says near the end of his act in the first episode that “a man who read everything published today would be more stupid than a man who read nothing,” and I’m inclined to think that’s true. Isn’t much of this drivel published akin to fast food? Made for mass consumption, cheap and easy, but ultimately not healthy. Fast food will rot your body, bad books will rot your brain. Maybe this comparison is going too far. Maybe you could argue that people should be allowed to do whatever they want, that we shouldn’t care about what they do or how they do it. But I tend to believe that through mass media, through advertising, people are convinced to like certain things, a way of dumbing down a population, because people who are susceptible to advertising are very easy to sell anything to. So, sure, people can read Dan Brown because they saw an ad for him on television, or he’s displayed prominently at CostCo or the airport. But there’s something subversive below it all; the desire to sell you another Dan Brown book. Because if you digested the first one without question, that next BigMac will go down even easier. Keep eating.
For your pleasure, through the technology of YouTube, I’ve included this first episode (in three parts) of Stewart Lee’s Comedy Vehicle. Again, I caution, some of his humor and references may be lost on the American viewer (I laughed only a few times and I’ve actually lived in England). But I think he’s saying something that isn’t often said on the public stage and for that I think it’s important that people hear him out. What do you think?
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Tags: bbc2, bigmac, celebrity, comedy, costco, Culture, dan brown, england, harry potter, humor, literary, mass consumption, publishing, publishing industry, record industry, stewart lee, stewart lee's comedy vehicle, tragic memoir, video, wikipedia, youtube
May 16th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
I think one of the main problems with your (and Lee’s) argument is that history tends to blind us to what was actually popular in the past. The great novels, the deep, difficult and resounding ones, are remembered, but they didn’t necessarily make the bestsellers lists of their time. More likely, poorly crafted novels of romance and suspense, the Diane Steeles and Dan Browns, have always outnumbered the Joyces and the Hemingways.
The vast increase in “bad” literature since the beginning of the 20th century (or earlier) is more a symptom (if I can get a little Greenbergian on you) of the entrance of the working class into the realm of higher culture. There are more crappy books because a larger number of less-educated people are able to read books. This is actually a good thing. As a whole, we’re becoming smarter. It just looks like the opposite because the intellectual elite are no longer the only readers. Nor are they the only writers.
I also think that the trend in adults reading books meant for children, strange though it is, might be a result, to some extent of better-written children’s books. The Harry Potter series may not be high literature but it is a very well-told story and as such offers pretty much the same experience as a Dan Brown novel with the addition of a child-like imaginary world.
May 16th, 2009 at 5:40 pm
Mike Hubbard you beat me to it. I feel like it’s so easy to get down on everything and be negative about the direction of humanity but a simple google search will show you we’re actually getting a lot smarter, and everything is a million times better than how it was when our ancestors were near retarded illiterate peasants who drank more beer than water but Shakespear was writing. It’s good to critique things and certainly Dan Brown sucks and that new movie ugh…but for every 10 or 20 crappy books there’s probably 1 worth reading. Sometimes a writer, like BolaNo, has to die before a lot of people start to notice.
May 17th, 2009 at 9:30 am
I agree that good stuff is still being published, but I don’t think the argument that “bad stuff has always been published, we’re still a lot smarter than we were” is ultimately very sound; just because bad stuff has always been published and we’re a lot smarter than our ancestors, that doesn’t mean we should have to accept the bad publishing. I’m merely trying to critique the state of publishing, which is just what Stewart Lee is doing is well.
I understand that the “classics” we sometimes speak about weren’t very famous in their author’s lifetime, though Hemingway was pretty popular while he was living. I feel like writers who were trying to do something “literary” actually had a chance at popularity 100 years ago; now it’s much more difficult as publishing, along with television, has become more of an advertisement and money machine. Does anyone disagree that publishing has become more commercial than it was even 50 years ago? I know it’s always been about the money on a basic level, but I argue now that it’s mostly about the money. Otherwise, large publishing companies wouldn’t lay off scores of their employees with one hand and open a new reality television “celebrity” imprint with the other (HarperCollins).
I agree that things are a million times better in our modern lives than in the lives of our distant, and even recent, ancestors. We have a lot to be thankful for. But I don’t think an influx of bad books is something I’m thankful for. I also don’t think genre books are bad; they’re the pulp that has always been around, the romance, the sci-fi, the thriller, the detective novel. While I don’t read these kind of books, I do think that historically they offer something great to the whole of literature. What I don’t like is when something as poorly written as Dan Brown’s oeuvre, comes in and rips off books that have already been written (Holy Blood, Holy Grail and Foucault’s Pendulum), but purports itself as literature or as if it’s something great. Maybe it’s sour grapes because he became huge, but I just think people deserve better. Mediocre isn’t something anybody should strive for.
Ultimately, it’s all still words on a page and at least people are reading. I’m happy people read. But I see nothing wrong with decrying the state of publishing; something needs to be said.
May 18th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
check out this essay: http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html
May 19th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Where I agree, the answer lies more with the habits and practices of the publishing industry than it does with individual authors. I remember that a favorite singer of mine came out with a hardcover book of poetry, and it was wretched beyond reason. It made all the mistakes of someone writing poetry for the first time, and yet it lacked the fundamental honesty that is at the heart of most immature writing. I remember thinking with frustration that this book would probably sell more copies and make more money than anything anyone I knew was likely to publish.
That’s a limited agreement, though, and it has more to do with the profit-tending of big publishing houses. It is not the central issue of what is being written, and probably does not closely correlate with what will be remembered.
On the whole I have to agree with Mike and B’s argument above, and I want to go a step further and say that, while I haven’t read anything by Dan Brown or heard anything good about his writing, I *do* consider the Harry Potter books to be “high literature.” The prose is unsophisticated at best, and sometimes it falls short, but there is an ability to build suspense and hold a readers’ attention and imagination and, above all, a supple manipulation of theme. And that’s why those books have reached heights that even its successful competitors (Phillip Pullman, those Twilight books, et al) have not. I know this might seem like an isolated point, but I think it points to something more general that Lee’s sweeping statements have missed.
That is: The greatest literature is always going to come in under the radar. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of Vladimir Nabokov’s novels were artsy-fartsy games that a few academics related too, but that his two most read (and brilliant) books were artsy-fartsy games in the form of page-turning mysteries. And if a lot of adults are paying attention to reading childrens’ books, it is because that genre has provided greater versatility and innovation in our time than quote-literary writing. Who knows? Maybe the celebrity memoir will be the next playing field to go subversive.
I do agree that most of the books Lee cited sounded pretty awful, but his guns are pointed in the wrong direction. The big publishing houses are publishing crap. The literary crowd is not going to save the day. Just as with Shakespeare and Euripides, it will probably be a rag-tag bunch of canny and angry populists who somehow save the hearts and minds of the reading public.
May 20th, 2009 at 1:46 pm
Fuck you, Joe.
July 23rd, 2009 at 7:12 pm
Dan,
You’re an idiot. And if you are actually Dan Brown: you’re a plagiarist, atop the prior.
Others,
I despise modern publishing for reasons quiet similar to the initial author, there is no great modern work being released by these pulp houses because it is not in their interests. Most modern paperbacks (even though being originally released in hardback… we understand their true value being just of paper) are written at – according to American Education’s heyday – less than a 12th grade level. Although this presents itself as a complete disappointment to those who can read at their demographic level, through time this should be perceived as a great success speaking to the ability of the average ‘man’ to read at a notably higher level than his generational predecessors. Within that sentence lies the truly Yossarian-esque principal: average ‘man’.
The average person feels that so much is asked of them during daily routine that they lack the conviction, the motivation, or the energy to challenge themselves in the manner which a great work should. Atop this, the elevated status television – especially the true devil of our culture, being REALITY television – and films find themselves in (due to their simplicity as a medium, on average) and one has a world where the books being published are those which can be sold to over 30 million people. Thus it is a question of ratings and not talent, sadly.
Toilet paper (such as Brown, Evanovich, and Grisham) are given the green-light for several reasons all of which are directly attributed to money. They will and can be read by the masses; they are easily converted to simplistic, blithe films thus yielding a larger profit margin, ect…
The treatment of children’s books in the author’s original post should be taken with a grain of salt, as there – in the past – are great individuals behind the most commonly read children’s stories: Beatrix Potter; L. Frank Baum; J. M. Barrie; and, possibly the new rags-to-riches story of, J. K. Rowling.
The true and most burning problem is with the literary purist not being able to critically assess reality apart from the ideal, this includes myself. Crap has always been in print, from Tijuana Bibles to romance and detective stories. Many purists and literaries have picked up a Stephen King novel (though, hopefully, not one written since circa 1999); its just cheating on your diet, right? How many average Americans have (without prompt or assignment) ventured to read Ulysses or even Lolita (though, thanks to porn they can all use the name without recognizing its origins).
The intellectual’s lot will always be a lonely one as that’s how they (we) like it; but in a cyber-connected world full of Average Joes who are all pissed off they they are just that, you can’t expect to write a work which makes them feel small, ignorant or (god forbid) normal and then also expect these begrudging, grey-souled creatures to read AND THEN appropriate it. Opening the eyes of the idiot is never something you’ll get thanked for. In my opinion the greats of our times will not be the sell-out, no-talent Browns, nor the hyped-up Greenwich Villager who feels like writing over-poetic prose. The compromise will come in the form of Hunter S. Thompson, Chuck Palahniuk or Bret Easton Ellis.
(Just one man’s overly drawn-out opinion)