Thursday News: Reader manifesto, platonic love, Marie Antoinette, and the best room ever
Publishing NewsDIY project / love letters / love stories / Marie Antoinette / readers19 Comments
A manifesto for readers – You know, I’m all about a reader’s manifesto. Mine would probably be short, and it might be along the lines of ‘readers don’t owe anyone anything’ but this one is more, uh, complex. And, maybe complicated in a somewhat troublesome way. There’s a catchy bit about shifting power bases and the reader not being a passive consumer (agitate against the status quo!), and I like the idea of thinking about how readers engage with books in more sophisticated ways (e.g. we are not passive consumers who can’t form an independent thought about a book). But I’m not sure what Sam Ruddock and Bianca Winter mean when they mention a “‘fair read’ agreement” and more “ethical buying and reading.” Do I hear an echo of the word “piracy” in the background there?
That’s why we are forming We Are Readers, a band of readers who promote a culture of reading broadly and connecting widely. We’ve been travelling the UK, meeting and interviewing readers, and will be sharing their reading lives stories. We’re thinking about reader-to-reader recommendations and distribution, challenging the algorithms that make unsophisticated connections and narrow what readers are exposed to and discover. And we’re exploring how a “fair read” agreement between readers might lead to more ethical buying and reading, in a similar way that fair trade has revolutionised the trade in bananas. – The Bookseller
Platonic, Until Death Do Us Part – So the NYT has this new series called “modern love,” which consists of reader-driven content. Could be an interesting source of inspiration for romance novelists. Or not. This piece is definitely not a paean to asexuality, but rather the chronicle of a gay man’s emotional journey with his straight female best friend. Initially both worried that their closeness was making it impossible for them to find romantic life partners, but after a series of unsatisfying or unworkable romantic relationships and interludes, the two are now co-habitating, and the essay’s author, Ephi Stempler, wonders if this is his most satisfying life relationship. Anyone else reading this series, and if so, what do you think?
After 16 years as best friends and occasional roommates, we have become something else, something that doesn’t seem to have a name. We joke that we are each other’s PLP’s — platonic life partners — and recall the promise we made in our 20s: “If neither of us finds a husband by 40, let’s get married. If only for the registry.”
We’re now both 41, the same age as Stephen Daldry when he married his best friend. And we’re both wondering: What if he had it right? After all, the couples that I consider the happiest — mostly gay men who opened up their relationships decades ago — are not lovers as much as best friends. – New York Times
Revealed: Marie Antoinette’s Scandalous Secret Letters to Her Lover – A new book is set to be released in March, and it concerns a series of letters, written in both code and invisible ink, from Marie Antoinette to Axel von Fersen, a Swedish count whose relationship with the queen was portrayed in Sophia Coppola’s film about the the young French monarch. A number of letters have been decoded and transcribed, both by France’s Research Center for the Conservation of Collections (CRCC) and historian Evelyn Farr, the upcoming book’s author. The letters have re-ignited debate about whether Marie Antoinette could have had a physical relationship with another man (there is even question about her children’s paternity), because the queen had a number of men around her, and with whom she enjoyed somewhat a somewhat cheeky correspondence.
“However, if you compare the letters she wrote to Valentin and the letters written to Fersen, you can see the difference in tone. With Valentin it was always, ‘my dear count,’ not ‘I love you madly.’ Would you write ‘I love you madly’ to a platonic friend?”
Well, maybe. According to Fanny Cosandey, a French historian and a professor at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris, while the count and the queen may have shared a love story, it likely only unfolded on the page, not in the bedroom. – Daily Beast
Dad Spends 18 Months Building Daughter Fairytale Bedroom (Complete With Giant Tree!) – First of all, check out these photos and tell me you don’t want this very same bedroom. And what an amazing way for a father to show his daughter how special she is to him. He even learned how to weld in order to make this thing!
Reddit user Raddamshome transformed his daughter’s bedroom into a fairy forest, complete with a giant tree that she can climb up or sit in. The project took 350 hours to complete over the course of 18 months, since he was working on weekends and weeknights between a demanding gig as a video game artist. – Yahoo!
I want that very same bedroom! I want it so badly.
I have no idea what the fair read thing means!
We Are Readers need to hire someone else to write their copy. That manifesto is so incomprehensible that, even after a couple of times reading it + checking out their site, I still have no idea what exactly their goals are and why we should feel as invested in them as they obviously do. I’d like to think that it’s got something to do with efforts to spread literacy initiatives everywhere, but I’m not sure that’s what they’re aiming for.
I also found their “join us because our intentions are great!” tone quite obnoxious.
I am absolutely boggled at the idea of a “Readers Manifesto”. Wouldn’t a real “reader” be busy, yanno, READING, rather than … er … trying to find a non-X-rated word here … philosophizing, blogging, *manifesting*, about reading?
A reader’s manifesto… I’m boggled. Also…the word ‘manifesto’ kinda scares me anymore. It’s usually connecting to scary dudes with guns these days.
The word manifesto is commonly used in the UK to mean what Americans call a party platform. So the Labour Party and the Tories, etc. each have a party manifesto, which is published before an election. No guns are involved, and the scary dudes … well, they’d be your standard politicians in suits.
I wasn’t sure what “fair read” meant but I initially interpreted this as a literacy campaign to promote the act of reading, and probably because of falling literacy rates in industrialized countries. I liked the stated that escapism is a troubling notion, as I’ve never bought into the act of read as an escape from reality.
@Sharon: C. S. Lewis on fantasy stories:
“Hence the uneasiness which they arouse in those who, for whatever reason, wish to keep us wholly imprisoned in the immediate conflict. That perhaps is why people are so ready with the charge of “escape.” I never fully understood it till my friend Professor Tolkien asked me the very simple question, “What class of men would you expect to be most preoccupied with, and hostile to, the idea of escape?” and gave the obvious answer: jailers.”
― C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
There are actually a number of manifestos from The Bookseller’s FutureBook: http://www.thebookseller.com/tags-futurebook/fbmanifesto2015.
One of the authors of the reader’s manifesto appears to be a writer, as well, and I think that bleeds into the “fair read” concept: http://wearereaders.co.uk/fairread/ (as well as other parts of the manifesto). To wit:
We believe in readers as change makers. One of the things we’re interested in exploring is how readers might be able to create a book industry that it is fairer for everyone. . . We hope it might be a step on the road towards ensuring authors can afford to write the books we love, . . .
@Janet:
“We hope it might be a step on the road towards ensuring authors can afford to write the books we love”
No self-interest there at *all*. I’m all for writers getting paid for their work (of course) but the needs of writers and the desires of readers are not entirely congruent on this subject, so pretending to be an advocate for the latter while actually being the former is a bit crap.
Hapax, my husband’s nephew’s wife – a mother of two, one child being mere weeks old – was diagnosed with a large, benign brain tumour after the birth of the second, and has been unable to look after either kid since then. She has neurosurgery today, and will spend a year in recovery. She wanted recs for ‘page turners’ earlier this week. Escaping from the awful anxiety about the surgery and debilitating symptoms of her condition could not possibly be the reason, could it. /sarcasm
@hapax: “C. S. Lewis on fantasy stories”
Good quote! I tend to view the concept of escapism as a retreat from wanting to deal with one’s reality, and a belief that entertainment is disconnected from social reality, none of which seems particularly helpful, much less true.
Everyone can use an escape every now and then. When I was in a quant-heavy grad school program, I’d stop at the bookstore on my way home from final exams and hoover up Harlequins. I’d bet most of the guys bought a six-pack or a bottle of whisky and turned on ESPN.
I think the character of “escapism” changes depending on whether people are referring to books or readers.
Sometimes “escapist” is applied to genre fiction as a way of diminishing its value (and, by extension, those who read it). However, sometimes readers turn to books because they want to put their minds into another world-space. In this sense, I don’t think escapism is a negative thing at all. Nor do I think it implies that readers are unengaged intellectually with books when they’re reading in an escapist mode. Because escape isn’t just about leaving one place — it can also be about going someplace else. So whenever escapist is used in a pejorative way – to diminish the value of books or the way readers engage with those books — I agree it’s a negative stereotype. But I still think the term has value, and can be used to open a discussion about the varied, complex reasons/ways people read and engage with books.
@Janet: “In this sense, I don’t think escapism is a negative thing at all. Nor do I think it implies that readers are unengaged intellectually with books when they’re reading in an escapist mode.”
This definition or popular assumption is my concern with the use of the word, which is that escapism is understood as a way for readers/viewers to disconnect from thinking critically about the content they are consuming. Also, it can embody a false view that some texts are “just for entertainment” and not meant to be scrutinized. It can in these assumptions create a problematic division between “high art” worth thinking about and written by artists that had Important Things to Say versus “low art,” which is just for fun and not about ideas at all.
@Sharon: Yeah, some people impose connotations on the term that are false, artificial, or pejorative. My response would be to push back on those impositions and reclaim the term, not to abandon a concept that has some real usefulness in describing how people sometimes experience reading. As SAO mentioned above, this idea that escapism is bad tends to apply only to the “female brain,” which is as ridiculous and insulting as the whole “women are impressionable and shouldn’t be reading certain books” argument.
@Janet: “My response would be to push back on those impositions and reclaim the term, not to abandon a concept that has some real usefulness in describing how people sometimes experience reading.”
I guess for me I don’t think of anything that I do for leisure as an “escape,” though many people do want to view entertainment as an escape from reality and all its problems. Marx call religion the opiate of the masses for that reason. Just about any escape is very temporary as we all are returned, but I can see the appeal of believing that we can escape from life briefly.
@Sharon: Except that Marx’s discussion of religion, including that infamous quote, are concerned with alienation and social/economic exploitation. It’s not so much that people are trying to “escape from reality and all it’s problems,” it’s that — for Marx — religion is itself another form of oppression because it provides an artificial sense of meaning and purpose to a world that degrades the “masses” by alienating them from their ‘true’ personhood. Your line of thinking reminds me more of a Kantian (e.g. aesthetics and morality) critique.
@Janet/Robin: I absolutely do agree Marx is primarily concerned with alienation and he is troubled by religion itself for the reason you mention; however, he is also troubled by ideologies that lead people to believe there are distracting avenues for coping that can distract people from changing reality, as in “realpolitick.” However, I think too that when we as a society use the word escapism, it resonates with a notion that escapism is desirable, and that for me is not really the word I associate with the complex pleasures derived from entertainment. Some of those desires are intertwined with wanting leisure time devoid of life’s worries, but some of those pleasure are intertwined with critical thinking about the product we consume, whether readers put a name like that to the act itself or not. I never really hear anyone refer to reading Tolstoy for Doestoevsky as escapism but I hear it often when in conjunction with cultural products that are viewed as less, such as action films or romance novels, etc.. So for me, it’s just not a word I would want to recuperate because it never really had a positive history or associations. I mention all this because it’s a word that crops up so frequently in my work and is a conversation I have nearly every few months.
@Sharon: he is also troubled by ideologies that lead people to believe there are distracting avenues for coping that can distract people from changing reality, as in “realpolitik.”
I would argue that there are some assumptions in your own interpretive phrasing here that are not actually Marxian. But I’m not sure that matters for the purpose of this discussion. I think the heart of your objection is here:
So for me, it’s just not a word I would want to recuperate because it never really had a positive history or associations.
I understand that this is *your* view of the word. Which is actually part of why I’m giving it pushback. Romance, in particular, is already so burdened by the moralities of its readers, and the extent to which readers police each other about what is and is not “good” and “proper” reading is pretty vast (e.g. the ‘X fantasy is bad because it might condition people to think X is okay in real life’ arguments). I actually know more than a few people who read literary classics for “escape.” And I know people who think books like Anna Karenina are as “pretentious” and uninteresting as some people think Romance is “trashy” and intellectually unchallenging. Because what counts as “entertainment” for different people is not a simple or single thing. We see that every time people debate the virtues of any single Romance novel. Sunita actually said a lot of what I’d argue here: https://dearauthor.com/features/letters-of-opinion/when-we-defend-romance-reading-as-escapism-the-critics-win/.