Cune Magazine
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Cune Press and Grassroots Publishing, An Ear to the Ground is the first large book project from Cune Press, a grassroots publishing enterprise. In 1997 when the book was first published the
essayists and I traveled across the United States and held nearly 70 public readings on behalf of the book. Sometimes we met in bookstores, more often in small theatres or in private homes. Also we published
the book on our website so that readers from all over the world would be free to read and to comment via email. As part of the conversation which is An Ear to the Ground I hoped to shed light on the need
for the public to support small publishing houses. The issue to me, is one of freedom of speech. Some who live in the Middle East will contradict my finding of intellectual freedom in the style of discourse
peculiar to this region. They will cite government censorship and restrictions on public speech and publishing that impede discourse in their own countries. They may have a point. On the other hand, look at the
United States. Here speech and expression are protected in the constitution. Here you can stand on a street corner wearing signboards that declare your beliefs. Or you can go to the local copy shop and produce
tracts or newspapers or books and can circulate these products or sell them—all without government review. Yet even in the United States subtle and dangerous forms of censorship filter most of the speech and
expression that actually reaches the public. And they do so in ways that are difficult to identify and nearly impossible to oppose. I am speaking of censorship brought on by major corporations and other business interests. And this censorship
is of two types. First, big business censors public expression by molding the mind of the populace so deeply and exploiting the icons of public culture so thoroughly that most potential speakers have nothing
original to say, little or nothing of their indigenous culture left with which to say it, and face a vast audience of people who have lost (or never developed) their taste for any speech that reaches deeper
than popular culture. I am talking here of the “dumbing down” of America—the delayed effects of advertisers spending billions of dollars year after year to mold a large population into an army of
consumers who desire standardized products produced en masse by large business enterprises. Second, big business has taken over the American book publishing industry. This means that a wide variety of
worthy books which are unlikely to make large profits are simply not published. Those that are published tend to be “televisionized”—designed in such a way that they will be highly promotable by
electronic media (which normally requires them to be lacking in verve, detail, and originality). The rise of conglomerate ownership of the major publishing houses also means that offerings by small presses and
self-publishers have great difficulty fighting their way onto bookstore shelves. Let me elaborate. The first type of censorship I have mentioned is the natural result when civic society is degraded. Speech that
is original and penetrating is like a plant that requires the proper soil and water and light in order to flourish. Contemporary society, dominated as it is by commercial interests, is poor soil. Censorship, or
more accurately the inability to sustain important speech, is an unintended outcome of the surging global economy and its penetration of local and personal life. Many major corporations provide good products at reasonable prices and thus benefit consumers. And some of them
advertise in a restrained way that informs the public. At their best these ads, aside from their utility, can bring humor, brightness, and good visual design to a drab world. Other major corporations, however, spend billions of dollars every year on national advertising, most of which
amounts to mental manipulation. This advertising molds human thought and shapes indigenous culture. It’s a little too easy to assert a cause-and-effect relationship between advertising and human behaviour.
Yet surely advertising must be a contributing factor. In our time media advertising and cross-promotions are more aggressive than ever before. Is it any accident that we have a population that works night and
day and at the same time spends heavily to purchase products that advertisers have linked to success and happiness? What happened to the idea of buying leisure with one’s money? What about the pleasures of
living on just a little and devoting time to establishing friendships and developing one’s mind? In modern media culture, brought to you free of charge by our sponsors, commodities that can not be sold are
simply not in vogue. In contemporary America people have barely enough time to raise their children and little or no time to keep
alive extended family relations and friendships, professional or personal. A couple of generations ago the United States had a thriving civic society. But now participation is down in organizations once
supported by volunteers: churches, social clubs, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts, lodges, parent-teacher associations. And national organizations have sprung up in a somewhat desperate attempt to try to revitalize
our waning civic life. Americans can still initiate expensive civic projects at a local level. But in this era of saturation
advertising these projects have changed. When I was a child growing up in the Seattle area, for example, Lake Washington was so heavily polluted that we could not swim in it during the summer. In response to
this problem, METRO was formed as a regional governing authority. And through the selfless volunteer work of several civic leaders the lake was cleaned and also a regional transit system was created. Today, the
big civic projects (the construction of stadiums for our pro-baseball and pro-football teams) have nothing to do with solving our region’s pressing needs, with education, the environment, or infrastructure.
Instead they are an example of heavily advertised commercial activities bending civic society to do their bidding. In some small but important ways American politics is reverting to mob rule. And the mob appears to be motivated
by the advertising that permeates their lives. Individuals put referendums before the voters that override the wisdom of legislators who have studied the issues and are aware of the subtleties involved. When
voted into law, these measures deprive local governments of the funds that they need to educate the young and to keep the air and water clean. The motive, apparently, is to enable consumers to save a few
dollars of personal income so that they will have more to spend on cosmetics, pickup trucks, beer, and designer jeans. In the United States major business interests shape who we are and what we want. They influence the way that we
spend our personal income and invest public monies. Major corporations mold our vocabulary, and in so doing tend to control what individuals are able to articulate and the kinds of things that the public is
capable of hearing. To soften the reach of commercial influence, Americans once could turn to an indigenous culture. Yet now
everything from children’s sports teams to car racing—even some school classrooms—carry advertising. And it is rare to sit through a family meal without the interruption of a telephone sales call on
behalf of a major corporation. Where is an individual to turn to escape the commercial assault? Nearly every emblem of American culture has been adopted by a business concern as a product name, a logo, or a
theme in an ad campaign. At one time Americans felt their lives to have value because they occupied positions in a pattern of personal
business relationships and in a social structure of family and friends. We may have felt restricted by these social ties. They may have forced us to seek concensus before forging ahead. Yet they improved our
prospects for success. We devoted ourselves to volunteer work, civic leadership, and to lobbying on behalf of thoughtful legislation. We expected to control our lives and our local communities. Now we seem to lack control. Have we become puppets, moving as our strings are pulled by big business? In their
darker moments, many Americans feel that they exist merely as workers and consumers for the economy—as cogs in an engine that understands only profits and losses and is beyond human control. In a world
dominated by vast commercial interests free speech is the freedom to speak about subjects of no value at all. Speech is free, but to a surprising extent it is no longer capable of any good purpose. The second type of corporate censorship that I have mentioned is an effect of consolidations in the American
book publishing industry. Censorship occurs when writing, in order to be commercially published and widely distributed, is required to serve as a money-making device for a conglomerate business entity.
Conglomerates are looking for large returns and shape their products to appeal to the largest number of potential purchasers. Unfortunately, conglomerate book publishers normally achieve universality by simply
riding on the wave of uniform consumer interest that other conglomerates have created in order to sell their products. Editors at major publishing houses remove specific content from books and replace it with
general content which is defined as anything that is current in the media: relationships, sex, diet, money, celebs. In this way certain kinds of speech are favored and other kinds are effectively banned. Of course the intrepid self-publisher can still sell his books on the street corner or give his pamphlets to
friends, but he will have a difficult time placing his work on bookstore shelves or fighting for media air time against the latest advertising-driven consumer craze. “You’ve got a finite number of seats on the plane. If you can double the amount of money you charge for each
seat, you double your income.” I was speaking with an independent book publisher, a man who kept his press alive by being quicker and more
sure-footed than the conglomerate-owned houses among whom he maneuvered. It was March 1994, we were sitting in a yuppie bistro in Manhattan’s Soho district, and this literary entrepreneur wasn’t referring to the airline
industry. He was talking about trade book publishing: poems, novels, stories, memoirs, histories—the life blood of secular culture. Like most literary writers, I was spending years finding publishers for my
work. Submitting manuscripts is expensive. I spent more on postage, phone calls, copying, and in time lost from work than it would have cost to print my books myself. “So the large shops,” my informant continued, “have decided to maximize their income. They aren’t
looking for good books, per se, but for books that sell.” I talked with other independent publishers: Shirley Cloyes at Lawrence Hill; Nick Lyons at Lyons & Burford;
John Oakes at Four Walls Eight Windows; André SchiVrin at The New Press; Philip Turner at Kodansha. I also talked to insiders at Knopf and Penguin, to literary agents, and to editors at Publishers Weekly
and The New York Times Book Review. These people were angry over the direction publishing was taking. They were embarrassed by the hundreds of poor
quality books that the conglomerate-owned presses were churning out. Those who worked at the large houses fantasized about escaping to Seattle or Taos to start presses of their own. Everyone agreed that the
current publishing machine had little or no need for manuscripts from the provinces. “If you write for the large presses,” said one Manhattan writer, “you write their book. They design it, you color
between the lines.” In April, back home in Seattle, I sifted through my notes. I began to see patterns. Then it struck me: the old
publishing system was dead. Since the acquisition of Knopf in 1960, American book publishing companies had been acquired by ever larger
corporate entities, and their lists had become more and more commercial. With the most recent wave of acquisitions, however, the trend had escalated. The yearly profit of 4% after taxes which was traditional in
the book publishing industry could not satisfy new owners who were accustomed to making 12% to 15% in the other arms of their corporations. To meet these goals, publishers were forced to remake their
businesses. And, although a few imprints would continue to publish thoughtful books, these exceptions proved the rule. In the first months of 1994 a thirty-year-old trend reached critical
mass. Our largest publishers, in an informal partnership with chain bookstores, completed their transformation into giant factories devoted to “bestsellers.” In Seattle in mid-April, the sun was out but I was broke. I am a building contractor when I am not writing and I
had no work. While I waited for my phone to ring, I wrote several articles about publishing. The new system, I realized, has two tracks: Conglomerate-owned presses publish whatever will sell in large
quantities; and grassroots presses are left to publish thoughtful, whimsical, insightful books, writing by new author, original work that stretches and revitalizes. Grassroots publishers include mid-sized independent presses, traditional small presses, and what I call
“grassroots presses”—new one-person and two-person publishing houses which rely on desktop technology and are formed by artists and writers themselves. This latter group is the most quickly growing branch
of the publishing industry and largely accounts for the enormous increase in the number of new publishers. The heroes of grassroots publishing are renaissance women and men who are writers, have market savvy,
typically know their way around the World Wide Web, and use their skills to bring their work before the public. These new author/publishers are not all that different from our literary pioneers—women and men who got ink on
their hands or, at the least, were deeply involved with financing, designing, distributing, and promoting their work. I am thinking of Walt Whitman, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Carl Sandburg, Ezra Pound, James
Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, Anaïs Nin. By now it was the end of May. I resented the effort of sending paper through the mail for harried editors to
praise but almost never to publish. No matter how good my writing, I knew it still would take years to find a publisher. I was spending my life in perpetual adolescence. I was ready to start my own press. Why not? I decided to establish an imprint, to use it for my own writing, and
to make it available to a few other writers in whom I believed. “I’m free,” I thought. “Now I can hold up my writing to the ‘clear Sophoclean light.’ No more contortions to satisfy the taste of a
particular editor who is herself guessing about public taste.” I was overcome by bliss. I recommended this therapy to friends. And now, seven years later, deep in debt, I still believe that I did the right
thing. To put it plainly: Cune Press and An Ear to the Ground are part of the grassroots publishing movement.
The “author” of this book consist of more than 200 people: essayists, profile writers, artists, and volunteer publicists and sales reps. An Ear to the Ground announces to
writers that it no longer is enough to send manuscripts to New York and wait for rejection. Now, those who are writing to be read need to select their very best unpublished work and find a way to bring it
before the public. Why? Because writing is not simply self-expression, it is public service. Like Middle Easterners, I believe that
life is a circle, and that literature is at the center. In these times of rapid change we should not be surprised that our families and communities are suffering. The symptoms of social fragmentation are
reported on the six o’clock news. We hear almost nothing, however, about the antidote. Imagination has the power to heal. Our ideas give us light. The stories we tell bring alive the spiritual maps
of previous generations, the routes that our forebears have devised to link everyday life to what is vital and true. Our literature—our imagination, ideas, stories—develops the elasticity of character that
makes it possible for us to live together. It brings forth our reason, our humanity. Literature is useful, even essential. But it is not the sort of thing that should be justified by its utility.
Our literature is the highest articulation of who we are as a people. It is what we have accomplished as a civilization. Several years ago, here in Seattle, I met a woman from Tunisia who paints and makes films and writes poetry. She
has lived here for many years, yet she still receives small checks from the country of her birth. “For my poetry,” she explained. Tunisia is very small, yet it has found a way to help its poets. The American economy is enormous. Why can’t
America be equally wise? Instead the American system abandons good books to the marketplace. We expect literary works to support their
author and their publishers by sales to individuals. Does any other “entertainment product” succeed in this approach? Pro sports could not survive on ticket sales to individuals. Neither could television,
movies, theatre, ballet, or the symphony. Why should thoughtful books? I have spoken about literature and read my essays before the public. And amidst the general devastation wrought
by corporate advertising and the power of lurid popular culture, I’ve been surprised to find a hunger for good writing and an eagerness to purchase books. A solid yet scattered minority is looking for crisp
ideas, variety, and flavor. Among this group the flame is alive and well, but the publicity and distribution apparatus has broken down. It’s difficult for readers to learn about books that they will enjoy.
It’s hard to purchase books. Public demand for literature is waiting to be cultivated. But up-to-date business arrangements will be necessary for sales to increase. At present, especially for our smallest
presses, the vast majority of literary books fail to break even. An Ear to the Ground speaks to those who care about the fate of human culture. Isn’t it clear that we need
a renaissance of imagination, thinking, and writing from all parts of the world and all levels of society? Such rebirth will not come from a centralized publishing system. It depends upon the spirit, insight,
and energy of women and men at the grassroots. If you like this article, post it on your favorite website or e-mail it to your friends.
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