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Miller: Good books are fighting for
their lives.
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"We're headed for a big collapse in publishing," Miller predicts.
The professor and chairman of the Hopkins
Writing Seminars believes that American publishing houses are in the hands of too
few--and the wrong--owners. He expects several independent
presses to fail before year's end, further reducing diversity and
competition. The superstore derby has, paradoxically, made life
tougher for publishers, as retail chains buy books in huge
numbers to stock their miles of new shelves, only to return them
in unprecedented numbers when nobody buys them. Bad books are
worse than ever, he says, and good books fight for their lives.
Of the media conglomerates that control book publishing, Miller
says, "They have engaged in an act of cultural pollution, and we
all breathe that air."
Miller recently published "The Crushing Power of Big Publishing"
in The Nation. With research assistance from Janine
Jaquet, he created a chart that shows how all but two major
American publishing houses are owned by just eight conglomerates.
Those conglomerates, he charges, have little or no interest in
book publishing per se; they are interested merely in how
publishing furthers their other ventures in broadcasting, cinema,
music, and politics.
For example, says Miller, if Rupert Murdoch wants to ingratiate
himself with the political right, he has a publishing arm that
can bring out (and pay royally for) books by Newt Gingrich,
Margaret Thatcher, and Oliver North. To further his broadcasting
ambitions in China, he can publish what was, by all accounts, an
awful book by Deng Xiaoping's daughter.
Though the conglomerates want publishing houses for "synergy"
with their other businesses, that hasn't stopped them from
demanding unrealistic profits, Miller says. Independent
publishers once thrived on an after-tax margin of about 4
percent; their new owners expect profits of 12 to 15 percent,
which the industry simply cannot produce, says Miller.
The drive for profits has led publishers to hunt for the next big
score, the next blockbuster, Miller says. Thus serious authors
who generate steady but unspectacular sales find themselves with
little or no marketing support, while editors chase celebrities
who can't even write their own books. Though he says publishers
have always turned out dreck, Miller believes the lowest common
denominator keeps getting lower. "There has been a definite
change in the attitude of people at the top of the cultural
chain," he says. "If you treat people as idiots, you will make
that the case. But I think it's reversible."
Miller advocates several steps. Congress should change the tax
laws regarding publishers' inventories, he says. Publishers used
to be able to maintain large backlists of titles that sold slowly
but steadily. Then Congress ruled that publishers would be taxed
on that back stock, to such an extent that it became cheaper to
pulp unsold books rather than warehouse them. Now publishers need
books that sell fast because they can't afford to keep them
around. That means too many good books have, in the words of
humorist Calvin Trillin, "a shelf-life like that of yogurt."
The government also needs to break up the media conglomerates,
Miller says: "Nobody should exert that much power over the
culture. I think there should be a national media reform movement
based on anti-trust."
Despite the gloominess of his analysis, Miller says he remains
hopeful, in the long run: "The audience is capable of sustaining
great work. It was true in Shakespeare's day, it was true in
Twain's day, and it was true in Hemingway's day. I'm always
heartened by people's indestructible capacity to embrace great
works." --Dale Keiger
Honors at the Oscars
It's not so rare for Johns Hopkins to appear in a movie, usually
as a reference in the script. What is probably unprecedented is
the essential involvement of three Hopkins alumni in movies that
were honored at the 69th Academy Awards earlier this year.
Caleb Deschanel '66 received a nomination for his cinematography
on Fly Away Home. Larry Meistrich '89 was executive
producer on Sling Blade, which copped a nomination for
best actor and an Oscar for best adapted screenplay. And Walter
Murch '65 scored an uncommon double win--Oscars for both sound
and picture editing for this year's big winner, The English
Patient. Murch already had an Academy Award for sound on
Apocalypse Now in 1980; he's been nominated five other
times.
Meistrich, who in 1990 had founded an independent studio in New
York, The Shooting Gallery, already knew an obscure writer and
actor named Billy Bob Thornton when Thornton created the central
character of Sling Blade, for a 34-minute film directed by
George Hickenlooper. "I brought up the idea of doing a longer
film," Meistrich says. He asked Thornton to write a longer
script. "What came out in the movie theaters was the first
draft," Meistrich says.
Meistrich raised $1.2 million from friends, family, and
investors--including several Hopkins alumni--who had made money
by backing previous Shooting Gallery projects. Budget in hand,
Thornton shot the movie in Arkansas, and Meistrich sold the
picture to Miramax, the distributor of independent films, for
nationwide release.
The Academy honored Murch and three colleagues for the sound on
The English Patient. Murch was the lead mixer,
responsible for blending the dialogue, sound effects, and music.
[The sound] "has to be artistically supportive of whatever the
film happens to be saying at the moment. The English
Patient was unique in that it had 40 transitions from one
time frame to another. Sound can help you a great deal in making
those transitions."
Murch recalls one night scene in which Hana, the English
patient's nurse, is playing hopscotch. The rhythm of her feet on
the pavement becomes the rhythm of Arab music that the lead
character had heard 10 years earlier, transporting him back in
his mind to that time. "One tiny thing like that will unlock a
whole universe," Murch says. --DK
Beyond the call of duty
Odds are you have not heard of Alice Lowe, but because of her
diligence, the final works of two Hopkins faculty members--both
of them her late husband's--are now in print. First she
shepherded the last book by art history scholar Christopher Gray,
Armand Guillaumin (Pequot Press, 1972). Then she saw to
the completion of philosophy professor Victor Lowe's final book,
the second and concluding volume of Alfred North Whitehead:
The Man and His Work (Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990).
Whitehead was edited by its author's literary executor,
Hopkins philosophy professor J. B. Schneewind. He says, "Allie
gets no credit for these two books, but without her they would
not have appeared."
Lowe was married to Chris Gray for more than three decades. He
had been born with spina bifida, and though surgery in the first
day of his life corrected the condition, he was in frail health
ever on. "They told me he wouldn't live but 10 or 15 years," Lowe
recalls. "I was married to him for 31."
While Gray was working on a book about Paul Gauguin, he
befriended a wealthy European collector, Oscar Ghez. Ghez had in
his collection several paintings by Guillaumin, an impoverished
close friend of Camille Pissarro, whose work had been part of the
first Impressionist show in 1874. Guillaumin's work had fallen
into relative obscurity in the 20th century. Gray decided to
write a book about him.
"The last eight years of Chris's life were a perfect delight. I
went around with him every place. As Chris became more ill, I
promised him I would get the book out. He died in the spring of
1970. There was quite a lot of work to be done. Hopkins Press
said it would not publish a dead art historian's work, so I had
to go find somebody who was going to do it.
"A group that did editing for Yale agreed to edit it and put it
in order, after I decided on all the color plates and
black-and-whites. I delivered it to them in the fall of 1970." A
year later, she and daughter Margaret took it to the printer in
Italy. "There were two people out of 400 in that outfit who spoke
English! By the time that book came out, I thought I had born
it!"
She subsequently met Victor Lowe at Hopkins, and the two married.
He was assembling the last volume of his biography of the
philosopher Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead's family had
granted Victor access to the letters Whitehead had sent to his
son in England, letters that were of significance because the
philosopher had burned his other papers.
"Victor really had his hands full," says Lowe. "I had the good
sense not to try to know too much about philosophy, but I did
know how to help Victor get through the day. I was really kind
of the extra-man Friday. He would talk to me at night about what
he had done. We had got to the last few months of Whitehead's
life when Victor died. Jerry [Schneewind] and I promised that we
would get that book out. And boy, we stuck by it."
Victor Lowe had essentially completed 11 of the book's 13
chapters. Schneewind says, "As far as it went, the book was
written out. And where it stopped, there wasn't anything--no
notes, no papers, no drafts." With the assistance of Alice and a
few others, Schneewind put together the two concluding chapters
and the book's appendices. "What Allie did was provide me with
every resource she had," he says. Hopkins Press published the
volume in 1990.
Lowe is 81, but continues to travel to California to fundraise
for her alma mater, Whittier College. She laughs heartily and
says, "For some reason, they like me." --DK
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