Saying More Than I Should About the BEA (but saying it briefly)

At the BEA yesterday, I met with people I love.  People I respect.  People whose integrity teaches me, whose books and blogs instruct me, whose hearts are true.  There are so many people like that.



But I also saw, in my travels, so much that unnerved, worried, further sickened me that I in fact fled the building early, hoping (futilely) to catch an early train home.  Books as commerce.  Self promotion as a form of public humiliation.  Personal needs on flagrant display.



I lost my rudder.  I felt overcome, and sad.



For example:



The man in the skin-tight devil suit, riding that escalator up and down, pimping a book with sheltered eyes, a slightly embarrassed impishness within his reddishness.  And what was it for?  I saw him three times; I still don't know what his skin-tightness advertised.



The long lines of people eager for free copies of books by authors whose on-stage conversations were sparsely attended.  Why should a free book trump an interesting, human conversation?  Why should product—the material thing that can be taken home—always rule?  Have we no time to give to the people who made the things we want?



The bare-chested (utterly bare chested) woman patrolling the streets just outside the Javits Convention Center—a black hat on her blonde head, a thin oily mustache drawn onto her lip.  Was this part of authorial self promotion, too?  Is this what we are coming to?  If it is, I have penned my last book.  (Note:  my dear sister-in-law, Donna, has cleared this one up.  It was not, apparently a BEA stunt.  It says something, though, that I assumed it was:  http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1...)



The surge of aspiring writers toward established authors, the questions, the requests.  The audience members wanting blurbs for their own books, wanting agent representation, wanting introductions to editors.  Please.  So many requests. Such insistence.  Should it be like this?



The perfect strangers who saw, on my badge, that I was at the BEA not as an author but as a reporter for Publishing Perspectives.  Suddenly I, too, was a perceived bridge—a person to be entrusted with self-published novels and raw manuscripts.  Please take my book, review my book, help me with my book, I was asked, more than once—questions that made me feel powerless, and raw.



Books are—or they can be—beautiful things.  They take years, patience, perseverance.  They are born of hope or courage, love or need, faith in stories and storytelling.  Book expos should be celebrations of the book, in the end, and of the people who make them.  I lost sight of that, for long parts of yesterday.  I found myself trapped in something more carnivalesque, more pressing and too bruising.



I'm not naive.  I'm not new to the BEA.  But something happened yesterday.  Some small hollow something went click.




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