Friday Finds

A few of my favorite things from the inter-webs I happened upon this week:

Russell Smith responds to the controversy around David Davidar's termination from Penguin Canada in "The Truth About Publishing: It's Full of Hotties". Don't let the title fool you. Smith is one of those guys who actually gets it: "But I have never in my whole career made a real pass at one of my colleagues or, I think, been flirtatious to the point of making someone seriously worried about my attention. Even when I was single. Perhaps I’m getting old, but believe it or not, I actually value my colleagues’ professional abilities more than their beauty. " How refreshing.

A big thank you goes to Carolyn Kellogg for writing such a great response to Lee Siegel's claim that fiction is dead. This article is full of solid arguments and witty responses; a must read. She picks apart Siegel's claims sentence by sentence. "Siegel: It is only when an artistic genre becomes small and static enough to scrutinize that a compensating abundance of commentary on that genre springs into existence." If writing critically about an art form indicates that it is in its decline, that means there hasn't been a rock song worth listening to since critic Lester Bangs died in 1982, and that filmmaking ended with the 1965 publication of Pauline Kael's "I Lost It At the Movies."

If you've ever had an intimate relationship with the slush pile (those of you who have know what I'm talking about) you will love Slush Pile Hell, where a literary agent posts the funniest bits of inquires and comments on them. My favorite so far:

Do you ever get the feeling that we are all machines being controlled by someone or something beyond our control?

Katie Holmes, I’m just a literary agent. I can’t help you with your husband issues.

Friday Finds is hosted by MizB at Should Be Reading.

My Thoughts On "What It's Like For A Girl"

A couple of days ago I mentioned David Davidar's termination from Penguin Canada as a result of a sexual harassment case brought on by one of his coworkers. Well, the story just got juicier, and a tad more depressing.


This week, an "anonymous" blogger from Canada who worked in the publishing industry up until her recent termination discusses "What It's Like For A Girl" within the world of publishing, and it's not pretty: "I flirted back, when he'd flirt, and I'm ashamed. But I blame him. I blame the way he manipulated us into thinking it was all part of the job, the "culture" of the office. We were often told to "entertain" people at our parties, like we were geisha. Dress sexy, be the first ones on the dance floor, get drinks. Looking back, I feel like we were supposed to represent not the brains and talent of our office, but the tits and ass. Lucky for him, we were a smart, hard-working bunch of people, and we managed to make that place work. That made him look good too. You know, I'm still not sure really what he does, other than take buyers to lunch. His tales of business trips always involved a lot of drinking, eating, and weed-smoking. At Book Expo, he'd point out all the women he'd slept with. " And yes, the him she is referring to is her boss.


I'm not going to get into how painfully obvious it is that this girl worked under a man who may or may not have been recently let go from a major publishing house in Canada because of sexual harassment accusations, but I will say that as a girl whose career aspirations revolve around the publishing world, this woman's post gave me a slap on the face. I'm sure (and hope) these office dynamics aren't synonymous to every publishing office, but knowing to what extent this woman was harassed in an industry that is supposed to represent brainy, well-read intellectual women is depressing. That this blogger believes she was meant to represent the "tits and ass" is heartbreaking to me. Utterly heartbreaking.

Oh, Snap!

"The truth is that a former colleague accused me of sexual harassment and Penguin terminated my employment." - David Davidar, former president of Penguin Canada, revealing that he did not in fact leave Penguin to pursue writing, as he claimed last week. Read more here.