THE WHETSTONE

(On Moving Towards the Mean)

I don’t know when, exactly, our industry became so dull – if it happened slowly, over time, or if there was a specific prompt that made it so (the rise of conglomerate publishing, the subsequent muzzling of personnel, the cubing of office life, the ballooning of assessment culture, the cessation of smoking, Kaplan’s “salmon-pink” Observer going kaput, Bret quitting the Felt Building for LA, Jay marrying a Hearst, the quieting of publisher versus publisher narratives, the slow, sad expiration of BEA, the tombstoning of PGW’s annual bacchanal, the death of sales conference, the shelving of company holiday parties, Bosman moving to the Midwest, Cognac closing, everyone being sent home to die, the Riggios departure from bookselling, business reporters’ sheepish adoption of Daunt’s “blonde wood” narrative, Twitter being coopted by an alien, spend being handcuffed, the demise of office trust, people fearful for their jobs, the policing of language, the advent of sensitivity reads, the exponential growth of meetings and the fact that you are reading this while in one because you are bored out of your fucking mind, our lives of doom scrolling, the monotony of it all, generational sleeplessness, guideline raises, really shitty office coffee, the saturation of Zoom and Teams, the culling of newspapers and magazines, Streitfeld jettisoning literature for tech, the demise of humor, or everyone’s concern that the world is going to end tomorrow).

Maybe dulling was inevitable, given the freedoms and excesses of earlier eras, the booze, the coke, the permissiveness, the clubs (Area, Studio, Limelight, Palladium, Tunnel), the agents and authors and editors who frequented them (Ed, Tana, Jay, Sarah, Andrew, Candace, Bret, Gary, Morgan, Terry, Graydon, Erroll, P.J., George, Shelley, Chip, Ingrid, Michael, Andy, Tony, Will), the pliant Ivy-league assistants sent to fetch them at Odeon, the commingling that would sometimes result - in the office, on the desk, early in the morning, the rest of the world asleep. There wasn’t anything good about any of it, but, in the moment, under the lights, on the dance floor, in the john doing blow, remembering this was part of their job, they of the Illuminati, well, it felt kinetic, most of it, and the aftermath did make for interesting column fodder in the New York Post.

It is hard to conceive of those freedoms and excesses in publishing today. Times have changed. There are new norms. Behavior has been codified. Blow in the bathroom is no longer a thing. Safe spaces are. The sharp knives of earlier eras have been blunted by our march towards a sensitive mean.