From the President
Spring 2010
By Roy Blount Jr.
In 1921, when I took office as presid—no, that’s not right.
I mean to say that in 1921, after serving for six months in India as Private Secretary to His Honorable Sir Tukoji Rao III, a maharajah of some sort, E. M. Forster wrote: “I was not clear what I was to do, nor when I came away was I clear what I had done.”
In this my final column as president of the Guild, I have reason to feel somewhat the same way. In my first presidential column, four years ago, I declared my intention to regard the office as a ceremonial post, like the Maypole. Little did I imagine that the most notable ceremony of my tenure would be blind people in the street outside the Guild offices chanting:
We would get access sooner
If it weren’t for Roy Blount Jooner.
There was something sort of literary about that. We so seldom anymore, if ever we did, hear demonstrators chanting in the subjunctive mood. At the time, I was just glad that no part of my name rhymed with Satan.
In due time the Guild and the American Federation of the Blind became allies, in no small part because Paul Aiken, our executive director, interacted with the blind folks so directly and well that he and their dogs came to be on a first-name basis. I wish I could say the same for myself. I mean, of course Paul and I were on a first-name basis—I mean I never got to know the blind people or their seeing-eye dogs. Paul and his staff are the ones who do everything. I have been proud to work with them to the extent that I have, and happy to know that they were working without me when I was off doing something like writing for a living.
Ah. Speaking of which. If I were running for re-election, I would not be quick to ask, “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Neither, to be sure, would anybody else—anywhere in the world—who was running for re-election, to anything, be likely to raise such a question. But it’s not just the economy that is pinching authors today, it is the re-mediation (maybe I’ll come up with a better term) of the written word.
Let me say to Martha Fay, my editor here at the Bulletin: I’m sorry not to have gotten this column in on time. One reason is that I don’t really feel like an author until what I’m writing is overdue. But another reason I’m late is that I keep holding off for something to happen. The court’s approval of the Google settlement maybe? I don’t know. Something final. One thing being Guild president has reinforced in me is an unhappy tendency (my father rose from hard-scrabble to community-pillar in trying times, and then died young of the stress involved) to acknowledge the difficulty of getting anything done. On TV I watch talking heads going on and on about how obvious and simple and right is what needs to be done, and I know it is good that they put all that on the record, but they sound to me a little bit childish. Okay, childlike. Let me just say, without in any way equating the two of us, that I am envious of President Obama for getting a health plan done. For getting anything positive done. Telling the truth is a fine, courageous and unlikely thing. It is what good writers do. Getting things done takes longer.
The Guild during the last four years has been robustly pro-active in its efforts to get things done for authors. Before I came on board, in the Nick Taylor era, the Guild sued Google for scanning copyrighted books without permission. Then I did come on board, and the next thing I knew, untold complexities were ensuing. Oh, man. I learned that wordsmith is unblinkingly used, in big-money negotiation, as a verb. That was nowhere near the half of it. The interlocking and inter-conflicting interests of authors, Google, publishers, libraries, and smugly tenured academics . . . were, and are, complex. I come away almost willing to believe that lawyers deserve to make as much money as they do.
My own concerns, by no means academic, were to sustain the off-chance that an author of good books might make a living, and to ensure that books not be turned into a digital blogpuddle. I have weighed in on those issues’ behalf. And today—I told you I was waiting for something to happen—I received from the Guild an iPad. I downloaded a couple of books onto it. Whew: I’m not necessarily a Luddite old crank. I’ve never liked the Kindle, nor the way Amazon treats authors. Books downloaded onto the iPad feel like books.
But we’ll see. The price of preventing authors from being screwed by new forms of publication is eternal vigilance. I’ve learned to expect that the Guild will be duly vigilant. I hope the Google settlement is approved, but even if it isn’t, it has broken ground for the translation of books into a sustainable digital future.
Now I salute my friend and successor, Scott Turow, about whom I know these things:
• That he can sing better than I can. Which in itself is like saying that he smells better than a wet dog, but the truth is that Scott can function, in public, as a singer. I’ve seen it done.
• That he is not only an author but also a lawyer. So he doesn’t need to get rich off of this gig.
• That he is from a city (Chicago) whose most famous twentieth-century mayor once said the greatest book ever written was Robert’s Rules of Order. To be sure, that same mayor once said, “The policeman is not there to create disorder. The policeman is there to preserve disorder.” But never mind that.
In closing, I feel I should pass on some wisdom. The bits that come to mind are this from Warren Buffett: “Never ask a barber whether you need a haircut.” This from Chico Marx: “Never shoot dice on a blanket.” And this from Edgar, in King Lear: “Ripeness is all. Come on.” ✦
“Let me just say, without in any way equating the two of us, that I am envious of President Obama for getting a health plan done. For getting anything done.”
- Roy Blount Jr.
