Great policy. Heh. I love Bambi. And I agree: If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all! After all, different strokes for different folks. There are clouds in the sky and it's raining, but I actually like the rain (I like the sun too, but that's not germane to this conversation)!BuzzFeed will do book reviews, Fitzgerald said, but he hasn’t figured out yet what form they’ll take. It won’t do negative reviews: “Why waste breath talking smack about something?” he said. “You see it in so many old media-type places, the scathing takedown rip.” Fitzgerald said people in the online books community “understand that about books, that it is something that people have worked incredibly hard on, and they respect that. The overwhelming online books community is a positive place.”He will follow what he calls the “Bambi Rule” (though he acknowledges the quote in fact comes from Thumper): “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say nothing at all.”
Different people get different things out of different books. And so it's wrong to make anyone feel wrong about liking something. Authors work hard to create something that someone might like, and through my experience with writers, they really care a great deal about how that work is received. Golly Ned, if I cared one percent as much about what other people thought I'd be a white-hot supernova of optimism! Heh. But that's who writers are and how they see the world. They can't help that they care about others, any more than I can choose not to enjoy this wonderful rainstorm brewing outside! Splash splash. Heh. Thanks to Issac Fitzgerald, Buzzfeed Books is going to grasp this - isn't going to attack the rain for being rainy or the sun for being sunny.
There aren't any con-artists or layabouts in the literary world, so every book is made with equal care and efficacy and truth. Gee, my mom always used to say there's no such thing as book glue; the thing that holds a book together, rather, is a glue-shaped bond of love! Heh. And we all understand that, because it makes perfect sense. More sense than when I ate thirty pages of War and Peace hoping to internalize that love, before my mom told me it doesn't work like that! Look, Fitzgerald is absolutely right: the online community of books, as I see it, is quite sophisticated about how authors are. If they pay 16 bucks for a book that they don't end up enjoying, they get it. They get that an author worked really hard to write, compile from prior source material, argue, research, or think through a book. If there are some flaws in the sculpture of Platonic reasoning on which is formed an entire ideology in a 600-page tome, the smart consumer just sees the flaws as gaps into which they can place their personal gems of personal experience to patch it up. And then that's an even better statue! Heh.
Not only is every book made with equal amounts of love and craftsmanship, with an equal level of appeal - each book has someone willing to buy in, at least! - every edition of every book is fundamentally equal in quality, and equally wonderful. No one ever writes a book they don't want to or don't feel 100% about, so every book is an equally wonderful encapsulation of the sincerest human spirit. Even books written by flawed or imperfect characters generally only speak to the wonderful multitude of flaws and imperfections in the human condition. And we can all relate to that. For a book to make it to market, a publisher that's been doing this for years has to decide in its wonderful heart that the book is going to be interesting, informative, or dully entertaining to at least someone, and maybe that someone is you. That publisher's thoughtful acceptance and rejection patterns reflect its understanding of what people like. And if you don't agree, well, just know that you're in the minority!
Look, I can see you don't believe me. Maybe I'm just a cock-eyed optimist, but - and forgive the language here - get a fucking grip, if you don't see anything to like about what I'm saying. You don't have to agree with what I'm saying to accept that there's room in the world for different tastes. You keep trying to snarkily stratify the world into things you like and things the world (that's apparently beneath you) likes. Like you're some sort of friggin' authority on the human experience. Alex let me blog this but I see the cancerous irony beneath every syllable he writes. He can't just buy in. He's just too cool for school, I guess. Every blogger has opinions - and feels obligated to have those opinions - about everything they see, as if the world is a little art exhibition made entirely for the purpose of entertaining that one individual blogger who rates it out of 10 or whatever private quirky bullshit internal schema they've developed. But most of them never apply the same standards to themselves - Alex writes intensely personal and ridiculously limited-appeal content for a ridiculously limited audience. Somehow it's alright for him to write things that aren't meant to be broadcast on a major website or on television, but when he watched the British mini-series "Utopia," he was offended. Like, as if someone had aimed a slur at him. In Alex's world, it's intolerable to have a few hours spent suboptimally in the throes of a snappy-but-utterly-superficial thriller (that didn't apply enough scrutiny to its social message for his personal tastes). Get a grip, Alex. Damn.
Whoops, I got a little off-track there! Heh. Anyway, so I guess I should wrap this up with somewhat of a conclusion. Okay, here goes: All editions of all books are made equally well, rain is beautiful, books are bound with love, and there's no sense living if you're not living in the moment. When you let others in, they let you in. The cycle of intimacy is a beautiful thing. People are wonderful. Books are great; blogs are great, too, but could probably stand to be nicer! And what Buzzfeed Books is doing is great. All these things are great, but sincerity is the best. That's my "hot take" on the matter; be careful it doesn't burn you especially. Heh.
I'd like to close with a final thought: The community of readers and writers is just that - a community.- and the tie between a reader and a writer can span generations and continents. If we agree to take the most generous and constructive interpretation we can of everything we read, then and only then can we truly reject the cynical apparatus that makes positive and negative reviews based on what will generate the most hits. If everyone agrees to only write when they have something substantive, positive, and constructive to say, there will be a lot less writing, first of all. But what will be left will be so pure and sincere and beautiful that greed will stick out like a rain-cloud and be summarily vaporized. I'm sure there are some books and blogs out there that just want our money and undeserved adulation. Look, I'm a cop. There are some unsavory characters out there, and I'm sure the occasional publishing con-game has happened once or twice in the last several years. But when we all agree to effusively promote the good and refuse to acknowledge the bad, maybe the bad will simply rot away and die, or find itself desperately in search of other bad things to cling on to. And we will have found the good ourselves, and we will have passed it on to those we love. Maybe we can live in heaven on earth even with a few strands of hell - slow, visible, and extant.
Thanks for reading!
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