rat house on wiener street

The year is 2014. She has been given a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Awards. Neil Gaiman puts it on her neck in front of a crowd of booksellers who bankrolled the event, and it’s time to make a standard “thank you for this award, insert story here, something about diversity, blah blah blah” speech. She starts off doing just that, thanking her friends and fellow authors. All is well.

Then this old lady from Oregon looks her audience of executives dead in the eye, and says “Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

She rails against the reduction of her art to a commodity produced only for profit. She denounces publishers who overcharge libraries for their products and censor writers in favor of something “more profitable”. She specifically denounces Amazon and its business practices, knowing full well that her audience is filled with Amazon employees. And to cap it off, she warns them: “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.”

Dear Neil

Heroism isn’t exactly my thing, so please just look at me as your fellow writer, OK? Two grunts in the great war of Art against Insentience, or something.

Anyhow, yes, I did have a question:

I’m told I have 3 to 5 minutes to say thanks. Having sat through 5-minute thankyou speeches that seemed to last 3 hours, I thought I’d enliven the gratitude with some very brief remarks about (for one thing) the big publishers’ practice of grossly overcharging public libraries for ebooks, limiting access, etc. I know you’re a true library lion. So I wanted to check if you’d welcome this, & if so we could maybe kind of strike the same note – or at least tell you, so that if I do say some things that our publishers will perceive as ungrateful, subversive, unladylike, etc., it won’t take you by surprise.

very best wishes

Ursula

(And because I suppose some people might want to know what I replied, I said,

Dear Ursula,

I’m very happy to be a fellow grunt in the war.

I think that anything you want to say is going to be good, because you mean it. I don’t think chiding publishers etc is out of place from a public platform - it may even change things - and the world of five (or is it four?) monstrous huge international publishers us not the one either of us grew up with. (I’m with one giant in the UK, another in the US, in each case because they engulfed and devoured my original publisher.)

And we neither of us got where we are, or indeed, anywhere, by toeing any party line.

Love

1) Search for: watch TITLE OF WORK free online

2) Scroll to the bottom of results. Click any of the "Complaint" links

3) You will be taken to a long list of links that were removed for copyright infringement. Use the 'find' function to search for the name of the show/movie you were originally searching for. You will get something like this (specifics removed because if you love an illegal streaming site you don't post its url on social media)

4) each of these links is to a website where you can stream shit for free. go to the individual websites and search for your show/movie. you might have to copy-paste a few before you find exactly what you're looking, but the whole process only takes a minute. the speed/quality is usually the same as on netflix/whatever, and they even have subtitles! (make sure to use an adblocker though, these sites are funded by annoying popups)

At the end of their lives, we see Frank’s paintings everywhere, all over their house and town. Which means that he not only was able to get Bill to see the importance of maintaining art and beauty, but that Bill went out of his way to make sure Frank always had paint on hand.

That just goes to show the strength of their love and Bill’s character development. One of the most romantic queer media pieces I’ve ever watched. Beautiful, gutting, perfect.

Here are a few examples of their work:

And I say this with all appreciation for our Uncle Steve, one of my lifelong favorite authors. This encouragement is one that, if he had verbalized it even five years ago, I would simply nod along. Right on! Find your library and read the thing!

But this is not that time.

We're now in a time when what faces school libraries and their boards and administrators, public libraries, booksellers, authors, everyone who works in any way with the written word and published material that children might interact with are facing backlash on a scale too big for King's advice here. In 2018, I faced a single book challenge at the library that employs me. Cost us money to employ our procedures, time, mental health, but ultimately it was one person's complaint about ONE book.

What is now leveled at schools, libraries, booksellers, publishers, writers and more IS NOT THAT. What is happening now is:

*slates of dozens, even hundreds of simultaneous challenges

*organized and systematic protests designed to overwhelm even organizations with solid policies

*attacks designed to end-run established policies, including reporting librarians, teachers and workers to the police and endeavoring to pressure authority figures to overstep established rules to remove materials, all the way up to threatening to jail those who object to their censorship

*drastic efforts to remove materials at a legal level, including efforts to ban the sales and existence of these books in the first place with new redefinitions of obscenity.

And of course:

*a truly staggering focus on items being termed obscene or pornography or objectionable whose content is better simply described as "about BIPOC" or "about LGBTQIA+ folks".

Please understand, this is orders of magnitude bigger than you think. In my fifteen years in libraries, previous years showed (and I'm generalizing broadly) about 250-300 complaints about books nationwide. Total. Not necessarily different titles. If we just look at 2021, there were over a thousand different books under censorship fire, and entire libraries' worth of books in some cases being removed. This is happening to break public education and public libraries, not just remove one book - and it is meant to drive people out of public life who are not white and straight.

You can't just "read the book they don't want you to read", because in Texas alone that's like 800 books at a time. And you cannot count on public libraries and booksellers, because the efforts are happening to deny the ability to even PUBLISH some flavors of content. It is kind of funny in a not-ha-ha way that King is advising this on the very week that some group removed two of his books -- on a list of about two dozen others at one go.

North Dakota has introduced a bill that proposes to send Librarians to jail for 30 days if they fail to remove challenged titles, and would ban any book that depicts "gender or sexual identity."

I also advise a high school GSA. I get a ringside seat to the suicide attempts and a wide variety of threats I can only sort of shelter vulnerable kids from.

Lynda Carter performing "I Was Made For Lovin' You" in tv special