Surprise! I have
something good to say about digital technology.
In the past, a few weeks before sales conference, several reams
of manuscript pages would land on my doorstep. Ideally, I would read them before our meeting.
Don't get me wrong, I love the chance to delve into the actual forthcoming
books, since so much about selling them to indie booksellers depends on vouching
for writing quality, accessibility, and style.
But oh the trees consumed.
So this week I’ve been luxuriating in a dozen complete fall books
downloaded onto my tablet. My objections
to reading books on a screen still hold, but for manuscript pages it’s a new
day.
The presses I represent publish an eclectic mix of titles
each season. To the casual observer, the
list might seem scattershot, as if the books appear without rhyme or reason in
a particular seasonal catalog. Though
there is in fact an underlying method to the mash-up, the general trade book
portion of the list can indeed leap from subject to subject with dizzying lack of purpose.
But an interesting thing that happens every season as we
begin to get familiar with these new titles is that some of them begin to speak
to each other. I’m not referring to
titles with actual dueling theses about the same topic, though that sometimes
happens too. It’s more often something
about book A that turns up as an echo in book B, which is often on a completely
different subject. My friend Susan
Donnelly at Harvard often talks about books on a list being “in conversation
with” each other, a lovely idea.
Sometimes that conversation simply consists of the meaning
the individual reader brings to both books.
My personal bookshelves are loaded with matched pairs that have nothing
obvious in common, yet are mentally inseparable. Maybe I bought
them at the same time, perhaps in the same bookstore, or read them at the same
time, or read one during a love affair and one during the break-up. What connects two books except the meaning we
give them?
This is on my mind because two of the seemingly unrelated
titles on the new fall Yale list which I’ve just read seem to have profound
things to say to each other.
Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age by Alice E. Marwick, is a beautifully written
survey of the ways in which digital self-branding has taken hold. The chance to create an online self, to
manage and tend to a kind of alternate or enhanced personality, is something
not just available to celebrities but to drones like us. Do you have a “self-presentation strategy?” You need one to participate in the 21st
century consumer capitalist marketplace.
What do authenticity and “being yourself” mean in a social media world?
“Strategic online self-presentation”- what would that phrase
have meant to Susan Sontag? I wonder
because the manuscript I read after Marwick’s was Susan Sontag: The Complete Rolling Stone Interview, which Yale is publishing in its entirety for the first
time since appearing in 1978.
Sontag is a spectacular interviewee, responding to Jonathan
Cott’s questions- in person, pre-email!- in complete and brilliant
paragraphs. Her intellect roams over a
vast landscape, all of it interesting. But
when Cott asks about how she handles “the Sontag mystique,” her reputation, I
couldn’t help but imagine what she’d make of the internet age and digitally
mediated celebrityhood. Would Sontag
tweet?
“I think of myself as self-created,” she says, but adds that
she has a “persistent fantasy of tearing everything up and of starting all over
again under a pseudonym.” Would she be
surprised to see how easy that’s become?
Ultimately, to Sontag, the key thing is “to be present in
your own life- fully.” Is there a better
opening gambit for a conversation with a book about our contemporary, massively
distributed and branded selves?
It’s hard to find books in conversation by looking for them-
they tend to emerge on their own. But
when they happen it’s a special pleasure.
Sontag’s 8,000+ book library is now at UCLA, and I
wonder what sort of conversations those books might have had. I like to imagine the books on my own
bookshelves engaging in witty dialog and strident polemics long after I’ve gone
to bed.
Perhaps only at Type Books.
