Note: Ellen and Margo are in New York this week for the annual meeting of the National Book Critics Circle and to snoop around the country's publishing epicenter (more on that in upcoming columns). To write this week's exchange, instead of sending e-mails from one side of the continent to the other, they sat side by side — in the Barnes & Noble at Union Square — and passed the laptop back and forth. Here's their exchange.
Hey Ellen,
You know you've arrived when someone mounts a campaign to get rid of you. Have you seen the "Dump the Book Babes" petition? "I'm sure they're perfectly nice old ladies," Mark Sarvas writes, "but they are neither Bookish nor Babes." Well, being a "babe" might be in the eye of the beholder, I admit, but "not bookish"? Ouch. That really hurts.
Seriously, I think it may be time to explain to those who read this column why we did choose to call ourselves the Book Babes. When we started out, I braced myself for the adverse reactions to our name, but in the year since we began this column, only one person has voiced serious objection to the moniker, calling it a sexist throwback. Good, I thought, irony isn't dead after all.
The name, of course, is meant to jar a bit. By juxtaposing the term "babes," a term normally used in a sexist context, with the word "book," our aim, after all, was to inject a bit of levity into the discussion of literature.
It seems to me, literary conversation has been left too long in the hands of an elite whose approach is too stuffy for my taste. With the written word undergoing such a daily assault, I think journalists who specialize in book coverage need to find ways to act as a bridge between so-called high and low literature, between the more esoteric academic community and ordinary readers. Why can't a babe be bookish and a nerd be hip?
And, hey, why can't middle-aged women think of themselves as babes?
Margo,
You're talking to the converted, of course. The beauty of being a "babe" at this point in our lives and careers is that we chose it. It's not evidence of someone else's condescension.
As far as our purpose goes, what may surprise many people is the tenuous connection between the news business and book publishing, which is the gap we're trying to bridge. Book publishers rely on the news media to market their books by covering them as "news." But newspapers and magazines are not staffed nor do they allot the space to do anything but the most cursory job.
The explosion in newspaper-sponsored book clubs doesn't change the fact that the number of books published in this country each year (approximately 150,000) so dwarfs the number of book critics available to cover them that there is no reasonable way to vet what's coming down the pike. It's a question of economics and also priorities.
At one major newspaper, which shall remain nameless, there are three staffers covering movies to one person handling this flood of books. This says volumes (pardon the pun) about what the newspaper -- and perhaps the community -- values, but it doesn't deter us from our task: to advocate for book coverage because books are a critical vehicle for the ideas that animate our culture.
Reading is an elitist activity. OK, I said it — even though our shared goal is to make it seem less so. But reading has always been a pastime of the educated classes, from the time literacy rates were low until now, when TV is our mass medium. This is hard for newspapers to acknowledge, given their traditional roles as the voices of their communities. But by recognizing that their core audiences are now the college-educated and higher-income, newspapers might see more clearly how their interests and those in book publishing overlap. Both parties are pursuing the same target: people who are accustomed to learning about the world from the printed page.
Hey Ellen,
Yes, readers are a beleaguered minority, but that doesn't mean they have to be elitist. By an elitist I mean someone who belongs to a closed club that doesn't bother to recruit new members. The most exciting developments in books these days are happening at the margins, among people who never have had a crack at the market before. This is a golden opportunity for newspapers. By increasing their coverage of these new voices, they can appeal to a whole new group of readers.
Meanwhile, it is the "nice old ladies" who now are the primary book buyers in this country: middle-aged, college-educated women (you know, "book babes"). They are the ones who are fueling the book club boom and are single-handedly keeping literary fiction alive, no small task these days. It's important to track the trends of this group because they are so pivotal to the marketplace — not only to book publishers, but to newspapers. Neither group, after all, will survive without such avid readers.
[ Why can't a babe be bookish? ]
Ellen and Margo, Don't let the morons get you down....
