Read Online The Wild Girls by Ursula K. Le Guin - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Ursula K. Le Guin
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business for years, and even allow them to take a risk or two on new authors. If I were a publisher, I’d far rather own Tolkien than Rowling.
But “over the years” doesn’t pay the holy stockholder’s quarterly share and doesn’t involve Growth. To get big quick money, the publisher must risk a multimillion-dollar advance to some author who’s supposed to provide this week’s bestseller. These multi-millions—often a dead loss—come out of funds that used to go to pay a normal advance to reliable midlist authors and pay the royalties on older books that kept selling. But the midlist authors have been dropped and the reliably selling older books remaindered, in order to feed Moloch.
Is that any way to run a business?
I keep hoping the corporations will realize that publishing is not, in fact, a sane or normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. The practices of literary publishing houses are, in almost every way, by normal business standards, impractical, exotic, abnormal, insane.
Parts of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. And how-to books and that kind of thing have good market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature: art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It is seldom a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.
So why don’t the corporations drop the literary publishing houses, or at least the literary departments of publishers they have bought, with amused contempt, as unprofitable? Why don’t they let them go back to muddling along making just enough, in a good year, to pay the printers, the editors, modest advances and crummy royalties, and plowing most profits back into taking chances on new writers? There’s no hope of creating new readers other than the kids coming up through the schools, who are no longer taught to read for pleasure and anyhow are distracted by electrons; not only is the relative number of readers unlikely to see any kind of useful increase, it may well keep shrinking. What’s in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don’t you just get out of it? Why don’t you dump the ungrateful little pikers and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?
Is it because you think if you own publishing you can control what’s printed, what’s written, what’s read? Well, lotsa luck, sir. It’s a common delusion of tyrants. Writers and readers, even as they suffer from it, regard it with amused contempt.
POEMS
The Next War
It will take place,
it will take time,
it will take life,
and waste them.
Peace Vigils
My friend, self, fool,
have you been standing
with a lighted candle
for five years
in the rain?
What for?
I guess to show
a candle can keep burning
in the rain.
Variations on an Old Theme
Boys and girls, come out to play,
The moon doth shine as bright as day.
Leave your supper and leave your sleep
And leave your playfellows in the street,
follow the roads that part and meet
over the hills to daybreak.
The moon goes down and the stars go in,
it’s hard to see where your steps begin,
and dark behind lies the way you’ve been
over the hills to daybreak.
Long is the night and the journey far
down the roads where the lost towns are,
and there isn’t a horse or a bus or a car
over the hills to daybreak.
You have to walk on your own foot-soles
with never a coat against the cold
and hardly a penny to pay the tolls
on the way to the hills at daybreak.
Barefoot, bare back, and empty hand
is how you come to the farther land
and see that country, when you stand
on the hills of home at daybreak.
The City of the Plain
What can I make it a metaphor for? This is transgression made concrete and asphalt and
But “over the years” doesn’t pay the holy stockholder’s quarterly share and doesn’t involve Growth. To get big quick money, the publisher must risk a multimillion-dollar advance to some author who’s supposed to provide this week’s bestseller. These multi-millions—often a dead loss—come out of funds that used to go to pay a normal advance to reliable midlist authors and pay the royalties on older books that kept selling. But the midlist authors have been dropped and the reliably selling older books remaindered, in order to feed Moloch.
Is that any way to run a business?
I keep hoping the corporations will realize that publishing is not, in fact, a sane or normal business with a nice healthy relationship to capitalism. The practices of literary publishing houses are, in almost every way, by normal business standards, impractical, exotic, abnormal, insane.
Parts of publishing are, or can be forced to be, successfully capitalistic: the textbook industry is all too clear a proof of that. And how-to books and that kind of thing have good market predictability. But inevitably some of what publishers publish is, or is partly, literature: art. And the relationship of art to capitalism is, to put it mildly, vexed. It is seldom a happy marriage. Amused contempt is about the pleasantest emotion either partner feels for the other. Their definitions of what profiteth a man are too different.
So why don’t the corporations drop the literary publishing houses, or at least the literary departments of publishers they have bought, with amused contempt, as unprofitable? Why don’t they let them go back to muddling along making just enough, in a good year, to pay the printers, the editors, modest advances and crummy royalties, and plowing most profits back into taking chances on new writers? There’s no hope of creating new readers other than the kids coming up through the schools, who are no longer taught to read for pleasure and anyhow are distracted by electrons; not only is the relative number of readers unlikely to see any kind of useful increase, it may well keep shrinking. What’s in this dismal scene for you, Mr. Corporate Executive? Why don’t you just get out of it? Why don’t you dump the ungrateful little pikers and get on with the real business of business, ruling the world?
Is it because you think if you own publishing you can control what’s printed, what’s written, what’s read? Well, lotsa luck, sir. It’s a common delusion of tyrants. Writers and readers, even as they suffer from it, regard it with amused contempt.
POEMS
The Next War
It will take place,
it will take time,
it will take life,
and waste them.
Peace Vigils
My friend, self, fool,
have you been standing
with a lighted candle
for five years
in the rain?
What for?
I guess to show
a candle can keep burning
in the rain.
Variations on an Old Theme
Boys and girls, come out to play,
The moon doth shine as bright as day.
Leave your supper and leave your sleep
And leave your playfellows in the street,
follow the roads that part and meet
over the hills to daybreak.
The moon goes down and the stars go in,
it’s hard to see where your steps begin,
and dark behind lies the way you’ve been
over the hills to daybreak.
Long is the night and the journey far
down the roads where the lost towns are,
and there isn’t a horse or a bus or a car
over the hills to daybreak.
You have to walk on your own foot-soles
with never a coat against the cold
and hardly a penny to pay the tolls
on the way to the hills at daybreak.
Barefoot, bare back, and empty hand
is how you come to the farther land
and see that country, when you stand
on the hills of home at daybreak.
The City of the Plain
What can I make it a metaphor for? This is transgression made concrete and asphalt and
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