Bye-bye Gutenberg

The good, the bad and the raving mad of 2024, Vol. 1

One of the books that I’m reading at the moment is Jeff Jarvis’ The Gutenberg Parenthesis (2023).

It offers a theory of what ails us that brings a lot of seemingly disparate developments into one framework. It’s a theory, it also must be said, that’s quite painful. It does make sense, and it’s hard to take. This is exactly it! And: if this is it, we are screwed.

The Gutenberg Era, argue the three professors in Denmark who first proposed the idea which Jarvis explores in this book, is an exceptional period of history. It started with the invention of movable type. It proceeded to rock the world, create new mainstream culture, dominate several centuries of human activity, and is now, only three decades after the introduction of the internet, there is no denying the signs, on the wane. It took a couple of centuries for the world to settle into the print era and to know what to do with it. The novel could only emerge in the age of print. Mass media too were part of the spiel: the communication expected and presumed a gatekept kind of expertise, and the audience was a mass which consumed it or not. In the internet age, we are not a mass anymore and we produce our own comms; on the other hand, the old school journalistic guild protocols and etiquette are also on the wane, their value declining. The number of takes on “why no one trusts the mainstream media any more” produced daily is in the hundreds, feels like it.

Institutions that developed in the Gutenberg era, I am quoting this list verbatim from Jarvis but could add more, are media, journalism, copyright, education, privacy, authority, expertise, law, policing, the public, the nation. Print, to use just one example, was crucial for the standardization of one dominant dialect as the official national language and proliferated stories in a shared vernacular for different and often remote people to partake in as common heritage. Education, and obtaining a degree, came with procedures, testing and grading protocols, and a canon of works to immerse yourself in. One of the most frequent topics of conversation among academics on social media these days is the decline in reading habits among students, as well as the impossibility of testing knowledge in the age of internet and, especially, AI. There are many calls now to return to in-person testing as the only way out of the conundrum.

I’ll leave it to you recall the number of times you’ve heard from people who see no value in either the sciences (remember the pandemic) or the humanities these days. Some of them run or will be running governments around the world. The value of telling the truth, and I mean this is the plain, non-metaphysical sense about easily verifiable events, is not doing great these days either. You can count on there always being someone on the internet who will believe a guru over their own eyes, let alone over a double-blind peer reviewed trial, or “the media”, and this goes both for the left and the right. The notions of expertise and knowledge are disappearing in the online mist.

There are real, technological, economical reasons why, when Trump trolled Canadians on social media with a meme using the Swiss Matterhorn (without knowing or caring that it’s a European mountain peak), followed by ‘offers’ to annex the country, a certain number of Canadian of the chattering classes went, “Listen. This wouldn’t be a bad deal!” Reasons other than individual stupidity, greed and lack of honour, that is. There are not an negligible number of people online, and what’s left of traditional media echo-report what’s going on online, discussing this seriously.

And what of the book? The book is shaken but standing… though the book reading is showing signs of distress. Fahrenheit 451 frequently comes to my mind, the novel which predicted a world in which books died a natural death: what was being published was being put through sensitivity and politics filters and people forgot what it was like to read a challenging text that doesn’t give easy answers and stopped reading all of it, the pablum and the complex books that made it through. Fahrenheit predicts a video-based entertainment which fills up people’s limited leisure time and mega-screens in every home.

The past called. It is not amused.

It’s how books became garbage to be incinerated, stuff that collects dust in otherwise high-tech homes.

I frequently explore the catalogues and back lists and look for trends in the output of the big publishing houses and not infrequently close the tabs, or the books themselves, dejected. This is what you thought is the cream of the crop on this particular topic?

Has the MFA swallowed literature? Are the Big Five killing literary fiction? It’s already hard to argue counterpoints in either case. The Big Five are part-redeemed by their back lists, but the back list, the ever diminishing canon, won’t save the book.

And what of social media? Publishing has long been influenced by extraneous factors; what’s perhaps unprecedented is that we can observe the sausage that is the book contract being made - borne out of a viral tweet, or a popular Instagram account, or the right kind of political noises made on right occasion, or celebrity, always celebrity. As Ken Whyte writes in his latest Shush, Taylor Swift sidestepping the entire publishing world to publish her own book and distribute it in hand-picked outlets probably signals a major shift for publishing. That particular expertise and pseudo-expertise too may be disappearing behind the closing door of the Guttenberg Parenthesis.

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What will 2025 bring?

Large arts organizations! If you hire people who want to ‘decolonize’ institutions, schooling, law, the country’s culture, what do you expect will happen? What do you think they will post on their social media when, say, another war in the Middle East breaks out, or another Indigenous protest erupts in this country?

I am of course sub-tweeting the AGO which has had a bit of a contretemps with one of its prominent hires specifically recruited to “criticize”. For background, just look at this embarrassing hagiography of its “visionary” decolonizing curator Wanda Nanibush in the Walrus (the Globe’s coverage was similarly oleaginous) who left her job, presumably after it became impossible. The AGO, as the expiatory WASP media have it, “balked” at its own decolonization. Well, well, well. I’d never.

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Will Canadian arts and literary world continue to treat “Canadian” and “Indigenous” as two distinct categories? The duality started to appear everywhere a few years back, almost overnight, as if everyone attended the same DEI training session. Is there a way to walk it back, or is this now our permanent lot? A two-state solution, culturally, but both being funded by one of the two states? Dr Jekyll and Mr. Hyde culture? No wonder people are volunteering to be annexed by the US.

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Will the Toronto History Museum guides stop reciting Land Acknowledgments? Will they stay open for longer than 5 hours a day, five days a week? The suspense is killing me (not). In better developments, Spadina will now allow you to stroll through the house on your own and unsupervised. On Sundays only, however, and the website indicates that this practice will stop January 5. The THMs continue to be run by one of the most inscrutable group of museum managers ever. I recently walked past the Spadina House at night and noted that it doesn’t have any kind of external lighting. You know, the facade lighting that public institutions invest in so they don’t look shabby at night? Nothing. It’s an unloved museum. My wish for 2025 is for the Toronto History Museums to be better loved.

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Paul Gross and Martha Burns, with another real life couple, Hailey Gillis and Mac Fyfe, will appear in Canadian Stage’s new Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. Get this straight into my veins. I’m not a huge fan of the play, but I can’t wait to see how the text lives and breathes in 2025 and most of all the acting legends Gross and Burns tearing into each other for two hours.

There’s an excellent episode of a theatre pod called The Play Podcast with the lads of Backlisted dissecting the Albee classic, which I just might listen to again.

Also to look forward to: Marco Bellocchio retrospective at Tiff Lightbox in January. Our Evenings by Alan Hollinghurst out in paperback (some of you have been reading the hardback, how’s the novel?), as well as Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake. Eimear McBride will have a new novel out next year (The City Changes Its Face) as will Sarah Moss (Ripeness, set atypically in the 1960s).

In nonfiction, Jesse Singal’s book on youth gender medicine is sure to make an impact next year, as will this book about Spotify. The music streaming behemoth, known for paying musicians nickels and dimes, has developed a fake artist habit. In order to avoid paying any artist anything, Spotify has been populating playlists with AI generated ‘music’ that vaguely sounds like ambient music that a human could have made. “No one will notice,” was the reasoning. As Ted Gioia writes in that linked piece, no media outlet picked up or was willing to put resources into the story so the independent journalist Liz Pelly did it on her own, and sold the book idea to Simon & Schuster.

Further in nonfiction, neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan, known for her work on psychosomatic conditions, looks at the over-diagnosis (the keen cultural embrace?) of disorders like ADHD, autism, allergies and long Covid, in The Age of Diagnosis: Sickness, Health and Why Medicine Has Gone Too Far.

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What new career awaits Justin Trudeau in 2025? He likes a good costume, so maybe he can found a styling consultancy and work as a brand advisor? Or, given his love of outdoors spots (he’s currently in BC on a skiing holiday), something to do with that? On the spectrum from earnest to crass, I can’t imagine him taking the earnest grunt work road and founding a non-profit for a pet cause. (What ARE his pet causes, does he have any?) The speaker circuit awaits, yes, but not as the permanent solution. After the LPC loses the election, will Trudeau Jr embark on a life of international playboying? I can’t imagine him teaching at any university, but stranger things have happened (was it the Massey College that temporarily takes in orphan politicians after crushing electoral defeats?). Best idea will get a copy of my most recent book.

Okay, back one last time this year for the books and culture roundup.