Since The Religious Veto is on our minds at the moment, I was reminded of the last minute “wait let’s think about this some more” a week before Does God Hate Women? was published.
I wrote a quite furious post about it on May 25, 2009.
About this non-ecumenical book that Jeremy and I wrote, that is due out at the end of this week. Yes, what about it, you’re thinking, all agog. For reasons which I will explain another day, the publisher became nervous about it last Friday. The publisher phoned us on Friday, and talked of changes, or delays, or would we like to drop a chapters. We would not like to drop a chapter, and if we had liked to drop a chapter, the time to discuss that would have been several months ago, not now, a week before the book is supposed to appear. The publisher sent the can-we-drop-it chapter to an ecumenicist to get his opinion.
The publisher sent the chapter to an ecumenicist to get his opinion.
The ecumenicist will not like it. The ecumenicist will hate it. The ecumenicist specializes in Muslim-Christian relations. This book is not about Muslim-Christian relations, and it did not set out to improve Muslim-Christian relations, and it was not shaped in such a way as to improve Muslim-Christian relations. That means the ecumenicist is the wrong kind of person to be vetting our chapter. One might as well send a book on animal rights to a butcher for vetting. One might as well send a book on workers’ rights to someone at the American Enterprise Institute for vetting. One might as well send a book on wetlands preservation to a cement manufacturer for vetting. For that matter one might as well send our book to the pope for vetting. We did not write this book to please ecumenicists, or popes or mullahs or heads of bible colleges or ‘spiritual leaders’ of any kind. If the publisher wanted their imprimatur, the publisher should have turned the book down from the outset, in the same way that Verso did. Verso was interested at first, then decided that after all it wasn’t, because it was uneasy about the subject matter. Verso publishes the messages to the world of Osama bin Laden so naturally it’s uneasy about our subject matter – but it said so before we took the trouble to write the book, which was civil of it. Our publisher, on the other hand, let us write it, and make a few minor changes at their suggestion, and go on our way rejoicing, and did not get to the bit about being uneasy until, as mentioned, last Friday, a week before the book is supposed to come out.
A less furious post followed, regretting some of the fury of the first post.
Okay, now you know all. I said last week ‘For reasons which I will explain another day, the publisher became nervous’; now you know the reasons. I must say, given the way the article is worded, and given the headline, I understand the publisher’s reaction better, and I regret the slightly acid tone of my post.
The article is, frankly, worded in a rather peculiar way. There’s a very noticeable lack of attribution throughout – there are free-floating feelings and reactions with no actual people having them or expressing them or taking ownership of them. There are fears and concerns and suggestions, but the reader can’t tell whose fears and concerns and suggestions they are.
Well I can tell you. I have privileged information here, so I can tell you. No one’s. They are no one’s fears and concerns and suggestions. This is not altogether surprising, since the book is not out yet, and very few people have read it. I suppose it could be that some people could have read about the book, and developed fears and concerns, and told the journalist, Christine Toomey, about them – but it seems very unlikely, and the fears and concerns would have to be awfully vague and amorphous. The article makes it sound as if (without actually saying) there are real people who have real fears and concerns about the actual content of the actual book – but there can’t be any such people, because they can’t have read the book. You see what I mean? Of course you do. So that makes it odd to talk about fears and concerns and suggestions.
I’d forgotten all this. What happened is that Toomey wrote this piece citing fears and concerns but they were her fears and concerns. It was all laughably circular, except not really all that laughable, especially in light of what just happened to Salman Rushdie. It’s preemptive self-censorship, which is a really bad idea. The Taliban would love it, but no one else would.
Check out the comments. Kenan Malik is there, David of Mediawatchwatch is there, Sastra is there.
