Jeremy lassen ([info]jlassen) wrote,
@ 2007-06-28 00:36:00
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Matt Cheney lays the smack down!
Matthew Cheney goes the fuck off on Jason Sanford. Matt lays the pimp hand down. No shit. He does. And it's a really good read. Check it out.
"I'm sorry all you suffering science fiction readers don't get the respect you cherish from the elitists you scorn. Once my heart stops bleeding for Paris Hilton, maybe it will start bleeding for you."



Ouch!

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[info]sclerotic_rings
2007-06-28 03:20 pm UTC (link)
You ever notice how the arguments for preserving science fiction are exactly the same ones for preserving independent bookstores? "We're too busy patting ourselves on the back for setting up in obscure and unreachable places, we're blatantly hostile to newcomers who aren't 'part of our crowd', and we refuse to acknowledge that the reason why we're so marginal is because we've gone out of our way to make ourselves unprofitable and unresponsive to what potential customers might want. However, unless we're feted and worshipped as protectors of and heralds for civilization as we want it to be, we'll throw tantrums and cry in our rooms and shit on your car dashboards! Then, if we still don't get what we want, we'll blame you for our incompetence as we're evicted in favor of people who can pay their bills!" And people wonder why I have precious little patience for either these days.

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[info]infinitehotel
2007-06-28 05:09 pm UTC (link)
Er...no, I hadn't. At least not in those terms. Most of the independent bookstores I frequent are in high-traffic areas, keep a decent stock of books that I'd want to buy, are generally pretty friendly, and they still have to grind it out to turn a profit. And this is Boston which used to be awash in good bookstores. Nowadays the choices are pretty thin.

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[info]sclerotic_rings
2007-06-28 05:27 pm UTC (link)
From what I understand, Boston is particularly lucky in that regard, as you guys have bookstores run by people who understand that times have changed. In my case, I've just become sick and tired of hearing that general tirade just about everywhere else: here in Dallas, our last indie bookstore died at the beginning of January, and the sole newspaper coverage of the demise ran through the whole gamut of "Oh, Dallas doesn't appreciate bookstores" and "I don't understand why our longtime customers went to Amazon instead of us". Let us never mind that the store had a decades-long reputation for being unfriendly to casual browsers, employees that openly scoffed at both customers and their selections at the front counter, no advertising and no promotion, and a Web site that expected people to call a long-distance number to put in orders because they couldn't be bothered to update the site more than once every four years or so. Sadly, this isn't a lone example, and I suspect I'm going to be reading a lot more of this sort of story after the high hopes of the next Harry Potter book somehow saving bookselling do a charitable impersonation of a star-nosed mole.

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[info]cristalia
2007-06-28 05:46 pm UTC (link)
Ahhh...not exactly. The independent bookstores here are each filling a niche Chapters/Indigo isn't, each accessible by major transit lines, and more than happy to hunt through the back or call around the city to find that one thing you're looking for. They attend all the major literary and book-related events each year and do outreach (mystery conventions, SF conventions, international lit festivals, street-level lit festivals).

I'm not sure what's local to you, but...independent business is not some photocopy of High Fidelity here. They can't afford to be. :)

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[info]sclerotic_rings
2007-06-28 06:08 pm UTC (link)
Where are you living? I want to move there.

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[info]cristalia
2007-06-28 06:10 pm UTC (link)
Toronto. And indie bookstores are still closing here: we lost two this winter. It's just a hard kind of business, and yes, deserves support.

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[info]sclerotic_rings
2007-06-28 07:05 pm UTC (link)
Ah. There's the rub. I've heard nothing but good things about Toronto's bookstores, and I plan to come up that way one of these days just to ransack its stores. It's just that I'm far too used to indie bookstores that follow the lead of science fiction magazines in basing their entire business plan on too many viewings of The Producers (and, yes, High Fidelity), that turn right around and whine and whimper about how their failure was everybody's fault but theirs. The real irony is that the characters involved don't learn from their mistakes: instead, from my experience, they end up taking jobs at Borders so they "can stay in the publishing business", which helps explain why Borders is in such a world of hurt right now. I can understand that someone has to set up a workfare program for the multitudes of otherwise unemployable English majors that we aren't allowed to cull, but can't they get work in venues where they can cause less damage?

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[info]cristalia
2007-06-28 07:14 pm UTC (link)
I understand that your experience is your experience, and thus valid because it had to come from somewhere, but what I think what [info]infinitehotel and I are saying is that it's not the monolithic or even prevailing experience of independent booksellers. It sounds like you had a bad one along there, and I'm sorry for that.

I just think it's a stretch to extend those experiences to some general theory of independent bookstores being full of assholes and English majors being whining pieces of useless. If I can venture it, an unkind stretch, and an untrue one.

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[info]hangedwoman
2007-06-28 03:30 pm UTC (link)
Ehhhh. While I think Sanford's article looks like it deserves a good thrashing, I don't think the argument in general is completely without merit. Especially since Cheney's really going too far in the other direction, pretty much implying that publishers and critics and such don't treat genre fiction differently from mainstream fiction for any other reason than the quality of the writing.

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