THE FUTURE (of books) (Oh.)

I have a really great joke I’ve been telling lately, when someone asks me what I’m studying in school. First I say, “Oh, I’m getting my masters in Book Publishing,” and he or she pretends to be impressed, and then I say, “It’s really too bad that the entire industry is folding.”

I tell pretty much the same joke about a lot of things. I like to talk, for example, about Portland “folding”; about the United States “folding”; about the ozone layer, “folding.” There’s a lot of weird stuff going on, and I spend way too much time on the internet, trying to figure out how to make beef tallow candles or construct a tepee out of tall grass. The reality of the impending apocalypse is something that my generation in particular is pretty comfortable with; it informs our skill sets, our political opinions, and, most importantly, our fashion sense. So when I start to wonder about the future of publishing, the first thing I have to consider is whether or not we’ll have salt to put on our radio-active cockroaches in 2038, let alone anything to read.

But, even when my outlook is a little more grounded, it still seems clear to me that whatever’s going to happen to the book trade in 20 years will be something of a mystery. I like to imagine that, despite all these weird new Kindles and kids who only have the attention span to read graphic novels (count me into that group, by the way), people will always be cranking out amazing writing, and there will always be an audience for it. The word “book” might evolve, its definition might do some major expanding, but the basic concepts will remain the same. I don’t see a lot of point in speculating about eReaders and web 3.0 and the depleted rain forests. I’m learning this business because I love words, not because I love books.

Seth Tobacman Changed My Life

My best friend in middle school had radical lesbian moms. They took huge multi-vitamins that smelled like sulfur, and they held hands and thanked the Universe before dinner. Her biological mom had been an actress, and she had huge, expressive eyes and did makeovers with all of us at slumber parties. Her other mom was a photographer. She gave me her old darkroom equipment, and she took my best friend and I to San Francisco when we were 13. She brought us to an anarchist book store, and, without really understanding why, I bought a copy of Seth Tobacman’s You Don’t Have to Fuck People Over to Survive.

The book made me crazy. It was my first “graphic novel,” and, more importantly, it was the first really dissident text I’d ever read. I’d learned from feminist-lite magazines like New Moon that Barbie was evil, and I’d been taught at my alternative charter school not to judge someone by the color of their skin, but Seth Tobacman made me political. His beef was with a system that went way, way beyond the cold-hearted advertising execs at Matel or the cops using fire hoses to knock down protesters in the South. The oppression, the way he Tobacman drew it, was pervasive. All-encompassing. Faceless.

Obviously, I related to this in a big way because I was on the verge of becoming an extremely angsty teenager, and it seemed to mirror the “oppression” I was beginning to experience from the adult world in general. Rules, which had gone largely unnoticed by me in the past and which I had followed intuitively, had begun to become tools of mindless cruelty. Social norms, also a former non-issue, were suddenly being called into major question. This is not at all to say that that Tobacman’s concerns were juvenile, but there is something that appeals to the adolescent mind in his desperate, heart-breaking drawings and, for want of a better description, poetry. 

From “I SAW A MAN BLEED TO DEATH”:

I once saw a man bleed to death. That night people walked to the movies over his blood. I thought that because I did not throw up I was not upset. But later I found that the dead man was living inside my body.In face I was full of the things I saw on the street and could not control myself.I was not the only one. I saw that all my friends were eating each other. I had to do something.