Einstein's Tongue
Each issue, our associate editor Don Sedgwick--author, former publisher, and literary agent--will offer his thoughts on writing, publishing, and life in general, in his column "Tongue In Cheek".
Bird Books
You can see turkey vultures circling overhead when you look out the massive windows of the Salòn de Ùltima Espera at the Cayo Coco Airport in Cuba. Local officials have translated the name of the departure lounge as “The Last Waiting Room.” I wondered aloud whether a better translation might be “Room of Ultimate Hope.” For someone who works in the word business, it offers more comfort. And the circling raptors overhead would seem less ominous.
We had just spent a week in the province of Cayo Coco, whose name has nothing to do with coffee or chocolate and everything to do with the exotic white ibis. This is a stork-like bird who sometimes graces the shallow goldfish pools around the hotel’s grounds. It quietly lands on a lily pad and then uses its long pointed beak to spear unsuspecting fish. Beauty and pain never seem very distant in the world of nature. Nor in the world of books these days.
Earlier called the gentleman’s profession, book publishing now has fewer of the former and apparently less promise of the latter. My colleague in the nineties, Peter Olson, has just been replaced at the publishing helm of Random House by someone who has no previous book experience. Elsewhere, publishers are looking to “extend the value chain,” whatever that means. A new imprint at HarperCollins run by veteran publisher Robert Miller is going to offer no advances to authors, but instead create a “profit-sharing arrangement” that will supposedly increase authors’ shares of book sales revenues. And if you haven’t at least tried a new portable reading device, well, you’re just a book pterodactyl.
Shaun and I are at the bottom of the avian food chain as literary agents. My wife and I look more like the crows and ravens of the beloved corvid family. They scour the earth for bright shiny objects, which they collect like sultans for all to admire. But beads and bobbles are matters of peculiar taste. So the rewards are small and sometimes infrequent. We did not see any of our literary gems in the hands of oceanfront readers on this last trip to Cuba. Lots of predictable mass market bestsellers by millionaire authors, but not anything to divert our attention from the graceful diving terns along the shore.
Later, everyone’s attention wavered from the salsa lessons to a raptor perched on a trellis over the poolside bar. There, in full splendour, was a Cuban crab hawk – looking expectantly at the bartender. The young man disappeared into a back room and emerged with (surprise!) a large crab. This he offered to his avian guest, who grabbed it not with his enormous, long, hooked beak, but with his talons. Soon there was a crowd mingling about, anxious to take the bird’s picture. And he (she?) seemed happy to oblige.
Sadly, one of the English-speaking guests referred to this rare and magnificent creature as a turkey vulture. I suddenly felt sorry for our feathered friend. Turkey vultures have an ugly red head, and they usually only eat roadkill, not a tasty crab offered by a svelte Caribbean bartender. I know some of these arcane facts because I am one of the many people who owns a book by David Sibley. He wrote a little bird-watching guide for Knopf a few years ago. Much to everyone’s surprise (and the publisher’s delight), the book and its spinoffs have sold more than a million copies.
Normally we think of Sonny Mehta’s prestigious imprint as the home of exquisitely fine literature. But maybe we just have to think of them as the home of really good books. Or books that give you a new perspective on something glorious in the world. I’m told that bird-watching is “the fastest-growing sport in America,” but that does not make me happy. It suggests that I will soon see a hall of fame for this franchise, or a reality show dedicated to competitions for most sightings. Please, just let us enjoy our small pleasures.
I’ll be happy just knowing that good books are still being published. That the hummingbird who has visited our rural home for five years has just returned again this week (late May). And that I can find the same pleasure in a newly-discovered short story writer as I can in seeing an exotic indigo bunting for the first time. Or a handsome bonaparte’s gull on the shores of a distant Caribbean island. I want to live in the departure room, in the room of ultimate hope. It’s where I find the best reading material for fellow travelers.
Don Sedgwick