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Richard Nash at Soft Skull saw my mention of Alex Cox's movie Walker and sent on a brief passage from Cox's upcoming book X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker, which Soft Skull/Counterpoint will be bringing out in a few months. Thanks to Richard for giving me permission to share this:

Walker is my best, my most expensive, and my least-seen film. It’s the bio-pic of William Walker -- an American mercenary who had himself made president of Nicaragua in the mid-19th century. In the US, Walker was an anti-slavery liberal; in Nicaragua he instituted slavery. He’s almost unknown in the US today, but in the 1850’s Walker was fantastically popular. The newspapers wrote more about him than they did about Presidents Pierce or Buchanan.

All the characters in the film existed, though they aren’t all accurate portraits, and there’s no evidence -- say -- that Walker and his financier, Vanderbilt, ever met. Most of what happens in the film is part of some historical record; but it’s a drama, and the bricks of truth are mortared with fiction.

I first went to Nicaragua in 1984, with Peter McCarthy -- on one of those leftist tours where you meet nuns and trade unionists and representatives of cooperatives. It was the week of the presidential election, which the FSLN -- the Sandinistas -- won. We were impressed by the revolution, by the beauty of the countryside, by the changes and the optimism in the air. In Leon, on election day, two young Sandinistas egged us on to bring a big, Hollywood movie to Nicaragua, which would communicate something about Nicaragua to the Americans, and spend dollars there.

Fair enough. Nicaragua was a poor country, under continuous terrorist attack. The Sandinistas were their elected representatives, who’d led the overthrow of the dictator, Somoza, in 1979. Not that this meant much in Hollywood. To get serious money for a Sandinista feature, it would need an American protagonist. Step forward, William Walker.

There's a very nice piece in Bookselling This Week about booksellers who blog, which features yours truly, among others: namely Chuck Robinson of Village Books in Washington, the staff of River City Books in Minnesota, the folks at Harry W. Schwartz in Wisconsin, Arsen Kashkashian of Boulder Bookstore in Colorado, and Megan Sullivan of Harvard Bookstore in Massachusetts. Megan I knew already, of course, and I'd heard of a couple of the others, but I'm really impressed with what store owners and staff are doing with store blogs. I think the blogging "model" Megan and I follow is a different one from what the others are doing, and I'm intrigued by the difference.

The Written Nerd is less a promotional tool than a means of personal expression and connection-making -- my own personal mutual-interest-based social networking site, in a way, and an outlet for talking about the topics that are spilling out of my own head. Bookstore blogs are that too -- just booklovers talking about stuff that gets them excited -- but as in indie bookstores themselves, that excitement is "value added" and ultimately an asset to the store. As indie booksellers we trade (in the best cases) on our knowledge and passion, our ability to put books in the right hands, craft events and displays that make books irresistible, and our real love for the books dovetails beautifully into our need to sell them.

Though I can imagine how you could think that was a conflict of interest of some kind, I think it's the best-case scenario to have people pay you to do the thing you love: like an actor who loves acting, a hairdresser who loves chatting and beautifying, a chef who gets paid to indulge his joy of cooking. When you'd be doing it anyway, and you find a way to make it pay, it's a beautiful day for economic and psychic well-being. Some bloggers take pride in the fact that they "can't be bought," that they're doing it purely for the love of it. And some booksellers (okay, very few) take pride in the fact that it's "just business," that no personal feelings are going to get in the way of making a profitable enterprise. While sometimes emotion and ethics must take precedence, and sometimes business concerns have to be foremost, it seems to me that in any industry, but especially in the book industry, the best work is done when the investment of passion is remunerated, and love translates into food on the table.

Which is why I think it makes so much sense for bookstores to get their employees involved in a store blog. One of the issues the Emerging Leaders project aims to combat is the sense among a lot of young bookstore employees they're retail workers, not professional booksellers: that their love of books is just personal, and they don't have a lot to offer their store and their industry beyond ringing sales and shelving books. Asking employees to write about the books they love for a blog, as for a staff picks display, is a way of making them invested in the bookstore, so that they make a connection between their passion and their paycheck. And there's a lot more to write about on a blog than just beloved books, and all of that content makes for a store that draws readers.

Two of my favorite examples, aside from the ones mentioned in the article, are the blogs of Powell's Books in Portland, OR, and Atomic Books, in Baltimore, MD. The two couldn't be more different: Powell's is as massive as an independent can get, with several stores in the Portland area and an e-commerce site which actually rivals Amazon's (I'm seeing it linked more and more by those who'd like to support independents but need to make their book available online). Their blog contains not only staff picks, but original essays and interviews, book news, celebrity guest bloggers, podcasts, and lots and lots of other content. Atomic Books is a small store with a comics emphasis, which does e-commerce but not on the scale of Powell's. Their blog has a lot of local Baltimore news and gossip, information about upcoming events in the store and in the neighborhood, and excited announcements about what's just in or on its way. Powell's has a full-time staff devoted to its website content; Atomic is written by its two owners in between running the shop. I love checking into both of them for the richness of the content and the investment of time and energy that they obviously represent. Visiting Powell's in Portland was made more special because I felt like I'd spent time there through the voices on the blog. And I cannot wait to visit Atomic when I'm in Baltimore for NAIBA-Con, and see the people and the place in real life.

And I can't wait until I have a bookstore, and employees, and I can bring their unique voices into the project by having a blog that everyone can post to. There will be no stigma against being on the internet during work hours (unless there's a customer needing immediate help, or you're sending your one millionth personal email, or the shelving is out of control), because good booksellers need to use the tools of the internet to stay informed, and to keep their customers informed, just as they need to read the books they're selling. A blog is a way not only to get employees invested in the store, but a way to get customers invested as well. As Toby at Three Lives describes, people who walk in to a beautiful bookstore, who take in the atmosphere of stories and ideas and curiosity and freedom, want to belong to it somehow, want it to be theirs. They want to get invested. And the way they do that is to buy a book. Blogs can be another tool for creating that atmosphere, and that desire for investment. And investment is what keeps our projects going.


What do you think? What are other ways that booksellers can feel invested in the store where they work, and in the book industry as a whole? What are ways that customers can be made to feel like a bookstore has something worth investing in? What's the relationship between emotional and economic investment? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Though I fear it has been too long in coming and will be a bit underwhelming, I'd like to try to articulate my own thoughts on the nature and evolution of book reviews: mainstream media, blogs, print, internet, etc.

And it turns out living read girl's Lady T (who ought to have a paying gig as a cultural critic) got there first. To put it in a nutshell, she writes

It's like public school funding, the arts are the first ones to take the hit, while the football team gets their new uniforms. It's all about money to the corporations who run the newspaper/magazine industry,not quality vs. quantity.

Essentially, we (that is, bloggers and professional book reviewers, the internet and the newspaper) are not each other's enemy.

I mentioned some time ago the Wall Street Journal article which observed that publishers' allocation of advertising funds -- that is, spending money to get stacks of bestsellers front and center in chain stores, rather than on advertising in book review pages -- was linked to the demise of the book review pages. I think that factor, and its implication about the increasing consolidation of media companies, has more to do with the struggles of newspaper book review sections than does the emergence of literary blogs. Both the NBCC's campaign to save book editors and the Litblog Co-Op are reactions against the same trend. As a recent author in our store asserted (Eric Klinkenberg, author of Fighting For Air), the trend toward homogenization leads to a counter-trend of fragmentation and uber-indie underground culture. What suffers is the middle ground, the culture that you don't have to be a bourgeois zombie or a hipster of the arcane to desire and consume.

With the blame out of the way, I'd love to talk about the strengths and weaknesses of blogs and print.

I tend to think of things in terms of bookstores. Both a newspaper book review and a blog review could be said to be more browsable, or more findable, as I've described methods of shelving books. If you're a newspaper subscriber, you might find yourself reading a book review just because it's there, physically in front of you. If you're a web surfer, you might find a literary blog linked from some semi-related site, or you might search for a review of one book and find reviews of another. But you might also find a blogger whose tastes correspond to yours, and read every review they write and buy books based on their recommendations. Or you might read the New York Times or your local paper every week and set your habits by what is recommended there.

As the responses to my question seem to indicate, many (if not most) readers find their reviews of books they want to read from a variety of sources, both print and online, professional and amateur and utterly accidental. They find information about books wherever they can. If print options are available and credible, they'll go there. If a blog is speaking their language, they'll listen.

I feel unfortunately the "conflict" between bloggers and professional print reviewers has been couched in terms of Elitist Snobs versus Uninformed Masses. That seems pretty stereotypical and unlikely to be true, and I squirm uncomfortably whenever an author or a blogger makes an assertion in such terms. Though the debate may fairly be described as Amateur vs. Professional, the perspective and talent of someone talking about books can really only be accurately discussed on a case-by-case basis. Right?

I read a review of a biography of Virginia Woolf in the New York Times where the famous author cutely admitted she had never read any works by Virginia Woolf. (Okay, disclosure: I wrote my undergrad thesis on Woolf, so I'm a little sensitive.) And I've read some impeccably written but sneering blog reviews that cast aspersions on the education and intelligence of an author, their editor, and any reviewer who would dare to praise them. So the Elitist Snob thing and the Uninformed Masses thing can obviously go both ways.

There is a difference between getting paid for something and doing it for free. The difference isn't always one of quality, but it is one of filtering. As Andy Laties points out, "because the individual litbloggers don't have the institutional structure within which to operate, their resistance to co-optation by publishers will be less dependable." Having an editor, a format, and a wage makes for a level of impartiality that leads to the "credibility factor" that many authors cited for print reviews. It doesn't always work – lots of writers and reviewers are friends or enemies, of course, on account of they're people who live in the world, and no institution can or should eliminate all personal interest from a book review.

Blogs, on the other hand, have the benefits that come from no filter: their passion for or against a book, or their complex thoughts about it, are subject to no one's editing but their own. Most of the litblogs whose reviews are worth reading know more or less what they like and don't tend to write reviews hoping for another free book or a mention in the publisher's catalog. There's no reason for them to write unless they want to, and there's no reason for anyone to read them unless they like what they're writing. That can make for some crazies or duds, but it can also make for some powerful and impassioned writing and some creative ways of talking about books that can't happen in the slower-moving systems of an institution.

Finally, I want to address the assertion I've heard, even within the book industry, that people who read blogs don't read newspapers, or even that they don't read books. (I have to try to be articulate and careful, because this statement strike me as so ignorant I can start to see red.) Some people who read blogs on non-book issues perhaps do not read books or newspapers. That is because they are not particularly interested in books, and would be unlikely to read a book review section even if they found it under their plate at a restaurant. But people who read book-related blogs tend to be people who like to read in general. They are unlikely to read blogs about books and then not read books. And they are very likely to read about books wherever they are able, because that's what they care about.

If Web 2.0 means anything, it means less creation of content and more facilitating of conversation, on whatever topic one wishes. The conversation about books on the web is growing louder and more powerful and refining itself and throwing out new branches daily, and it is undeniably having an effect on the world.

The strength of newspaper, print, and magazine reviews is not that they are "better" than amateur reviews, but that they take that conversation into another portion of the world. They make the cultural dialogue about books important enough to exist alongside the news and the sports page. They give us touchstones, as the booksellers who responded can attest, that cross demographics and genres and levels of technological comfort. They give legitimacy and structure to the rich thoughts and words about literature that are happening in people's minds and mouths and on their computer screens.

Both the existence of literary blogs created by amateurs and the existence of book reviews written by professionals are necessary to a rich literary culture. To put it simplistically, blogs build audiences; print builds credibility. Both would be the poorer without the other. The more we talk about it, the harder it will be for any corporation looking to their bottom line to ignore it. It's all part of the conversation.

It may seem a bit Pollyanna-ish of me, but my wish is that reviewers of all stripes would band together like booksellers of all stripes, hanging together so that we do not hang separately. The more we snark about who is more talented or professional and who is undermining who, the more we make book reviewing a vicious and ineffectual backwater in the larger culture, and the less it becomes about the books. If we build on each other to enrich the conversation about literature, we combine grassroots and institutional foundations to create a rich and growing world.

There's lots more to say, and I hope it will get said. Feel free to share your agreement, disagreement, or expansion on these thoughts in the comments.