What IS it about these people?

And the early front-runner for the 2003 Kinsley Award for Outstanding Arrogance in Publishing is Deborah Treisman, current fiction editor of The New Yorker! There's a stimulating commentary by John Warner in the Dallas Morning News, where he discusses the recent statement by Treisman saying that they never read the slush pile anymore. She said, "Someone who’s submitting themselves directly to the fiction editor probably isn’t all that savvy about publishing and probably not about writing either."



Well...maybe. Warner calls the 32-year-old onto the carpet for this, saying that it is "complete and utter ignorant, elitist moose-shit". I cannot resist piling on--please set your Rant Shields on FULL.



Okay, first of all--literary agents, Treisman's stated bar for consideration--are fairly risk averse. They need to be, to make a living. Since the selling proposition is often, "New book X is just like previously successful book Y," there's a tremendous brake working on creativity out there. I speak as a person who had real difficulty getting an agent AFTER I had been in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Wall Street Journal--that's how difficult it can be. Thanks to several factors working against written humor, I have never had an agent that was 100% convinced of my ability to connect with an audience. Even now, with Barry Trotter's copies-in-print well over 250,000 and rising, I suspect that will still be the case, because the success of one book won't change conventional wisdom. But the conventional wisdom is often wrong, and that is precisely what things like the slush pile, or self-publishing, or whatever you call what the guys from South Park did, exist to address. Being unagented is the writing equivalent of a seat-of-the-pants magazine start-up, and those success stories are too numerous to list.



In her defense, Treisman is only stating what has surely been a tacit policy for years and years--does anybody truly think that there was much slush-diving going on at Tina Brown's New Yorker? And perhaps the problem is what the New Yorker is today--a sort of perpetual victory lap for a certain subset of people (think highbrow but not too brainy; widely-known but not downmarket; people who think they are very smart packaged for those who aspire to join them someday).At the same time, The New Yorker is truly the only game in town for certain types of writing, and for others it is the main gateway to success. A short story in Tne New Yorker can lead to fat book contracts, movie deals, academic positions--it's the "all" in winner take all. This has increased the submissions, while the other factors have been steadily decreasing the variety of what's printed.



None of this is Treisman's fault, but at 32 she's old enough to know (I'm roughly her contemporary, 33) that such a comment is needlessly cruel and hacks at the authority of the magazine as an impartial arbiter of quality. The New Yorker has always relied on Manhattan's publishing culture to funnel things its way; but what would be so bad about retaining a group of college students (unpaid, of course) to read its slush? That way you could discover "unsavvy" writers as well as the next generation of editors.



But the fact is, New Yorker editors don't come from rough-and-tumble processes like that; they usually come from snooty colleges--where they learned the virtue of never appearing stupid, or gauche, or naive, in a million different discussions. (I speak from experience, in case you care.) In other words, how to protect your ass, intellectually speaking; this, too, favors the conventional wisdom. Of course it's not totally Ivied up--if you're from Manhattan, and can live with your parents or somehow otherwise solve the Satanic equation that $750+ a month for rent and $17,000 a year to start creates, then you might last long enough in the magazine biz to get a shot at the New Yorker, too. Which might be the worst thing that could happen to you, in terms of becoming the next Ross or Shawn: when you add a stifling layer of cultural prestige atop an Ivy brainwashing and/or a more or less comfortable upbringing in the epicenter of American snobbery, is it any wonder that New Yorker editors now consider going through the slush, well, beneath them? If you're not a name brand or championed by one, forget it. And if that's the case, is it any wonder that the conventional wisdom has the freest, richest media culture in the world in a strangehold?



What we're looking at is the intellectual equivalent of the gated community, the kind of calcification that is noticeably absent in institutions of real vitality, and omnipresent in ones on the decline. Inevitably there is freedom--risk-taking--while the magazine, or TV show, or publishing house, or newspaper, is building its name. (Eustace Tilley, for example, was created to fill space left by unsold ads.) But once they achieve the pinnacle, the doors close and it's private club time; snobbery replaces judgment, politicking replaces craft. It's rampant in fields which trade relatively subjective judgments for large sums of money and/or celebrity. Twas ever thus--but the closing of back doors like the slush pile, reflects an ugly entitlement on the rise in our culture at large. "I don't know you--you must be Audience. Get lost--your job is to BUY the magazine, not write for it."



Perhaps it's political correctness, or relativism, or the triumph of marketing and demographics, or corporate control of media (rather than idiosyncratic individuals like, oh, picking a name at random here: Harold Ross), but the current generation of gatekeepers reads the credentials first ("He's on the faculty at Harvard; how was I supposed to know he was a fool?"), relationship to sales second ("Hey, I know it's B-grade Perelman, but Woody Allen on the flap sells magazines!"), and then, finally, if one is very lucky, the work itself. This isn't really about Deborah Treisman--it's about what makes so much of what we see and hear and read, so forgettable. If you ever think, "Jeez, SNL could hire anybody they want--why is the show so hit-or-miss?" or "Why are most magazines so similar (and awful)?" that's why. Rewarding talent or spotting real quality isn't Job #1; it's Job #3, if that--after covering your ass and making the profit target. Deborah Treisman is no worse than any of her colleagues, and I'd like to think she's a lot better. But she was just silly enough to be honest. And perhaps I'm silly to think that no institution--not even one as storied and worthwhile and intermittently excellent as The New Yorker--can depend on conventional wisdom forever. If you call yourself the best magazine in America, proving it never stops: and that, to me, means reading the damn slush pile.