So ... you may know I wrote a book about my dad. "Don't Give Up the Ship." Twenty years ago. I thought it was a loving book, but after it was published, he didn't talk to me for six months. Maybe closer to a year.
It was not my intent to hurt my dad. I love my dad, and was glad we went on our adventure together.
But hurt he was.
And I had begged him, "Don't be too dumb to be proud, dad. Can't you say 'My son wrote a book about me. He took me to Venice. He put me up in the Gritti Palace'? Do you have to focus on me calling you a prick on page 203?"
And the answer was yes, in fact, he did.
That is the downside of being a writer who isn't simply rhapsodizing birds or explaining the Treaty of Ghent, but regularly shares his own interior life, such as it is. Sometimes you string your wet laundry out to dry and other people run into it and get tangled. You dampen their spirits, even deliver injuries, when you don't mean to.
I thought Sunday's blog post was about an obscure, neurotic writer, aka me, at the American Organization of Historians conference, reeling from booth to booth, publisher to publisher, trying to be noticed. I did not consider what I wrote a misogynistic screed mocking powerless publishing employees, nor a sincere complaint about any particular organization.
Particularly hurtful, I am told, were some reader comments which, honestly, I hadn't read, but waved in because they were from regular contributors. Had I read them — and I should have — I would never have posted them.
I don't have many writing rules, but one important rule is: don't shit where you live. Which I have done here, big time. So I have deleted the offending comments, and. trimmed the original post to excise elements that the prudent man — not me, obviously —would have never included in the first place.
Plus, I'd like to apologize to all university press employees everywhere who were hurt by my words. This is a difficult business in the best of years, and now, with ignorance triumphant and a carnival of cruelty being played out globally, it is even more so. We who care about words and meanings and facts and knowledge ought to stick together, not claw at one another. I know how painful life can be on the sunniest day, and don't want to be the cause of anyone feeling badly about themselves or what we do. Academic publishing has been good to me, and I did not mean to seem either critical or ungrateful. I always thought I was too careful to stumble into one of these pits. Clearly I was mistaken.
I cannot speak for your loyal readers, but I come here because you are honest and upfront, a person with flaws, Gasp! I wish you'd stop beating yourself up. We are flawed, all of us. We definitely need to be united in these dark days.
ReplyDeleteAww, sorry about your dad. It's been awhile since I read the book, but seem to recall the uncomfortable moments with him.
Need to track down that book, Mr. S.
DeletePerhaps in one of the local libraries...maybe in Berea?
Even though my old man died 22 years ago, some of the things he said (and did) still live on in my cabeza. What a piece of...work...he truly was.
As Charles so movingly told Hawkeye on MASH:
"Where I have a father, you have a dad..."
Yes, stop beating yourself up, brother. You write from the heart and that's what makes you such a good writer. Like Mencken, I don't always agree with what you write but always admire how you write. Don't change.
ReplyDeleteI'm not beating myself up — others are doing that for me. I'm just trying to fix things best I can and move on.
DeleteI agree
DeleteHey, you're a Jew. We've got it built in.
Deletecontinued to take personal inventory and when we were wrong promptly admitted it
ReplyDeleteDon't expect that from Neil Steinberg I don't think he pays any attention to that s***
DeleteI didn't think of your story as offensive. In hindsight it rang as " poor me." In AA we learn that making amends works in some instances but not in all. I think it works here. In AA parlance, let go.
ReplyDeleteI walk around with an exceptionally thick skin. It takes something truly bad or outrageous to catch my attention. I found nothing offensive about anything you wrote in that piece. You were perfectly appropriate. And funny.
ReplyDeleteAre you sure it’s’ ‘feeling badly about themselves?’ I think it’s just bad?
ReplyDeleteI'm with Romberg. Maybe I'm stupid or something, but I honestly didn't see anything offensive about what you had written. It came across to me as just more of your trademark self- deprecation.
ReplyDeleteNeil: Go and sin some more -- your apologies are always worth it!
ReplyDeletejohn
Romberg is right. I read your post and thought it was honest and well delivered. I probably didn’t read the comments. But you didn’t write those. You may have failed to protect others from the spew but it is not you who spewed. Keep up the excellent work.
ReplyDeleteto err is human, to forgive is divine.
ReplyDeletewhere we truly find ourselves is somewhere straddled in the middle.
I err too often, and i forgive far to rarely. I wonder, if that is me being hard or easy on myself...
I didn’t read the comments either. I read what you’d written as an honest account of feelings.Even experienced and talented people feel ever-smaller in a big world turning as fast as this one. I can also see how others attuned to their own work (and vulnerability) might have taken offense. That’s today’s lessons to add to the original: Words matter, be curious, listen carefully, folks are more sensitive than you’d ever dream, when we sense, or know, someone’s hurt, apologize without regard to “who’s right” and we are all the better off.
ReplyDeleteI suppose a bit of the original column was a little unkind (worth reflecting on), but was any if it untrue?
ReplyDeleteNo. I didn't even consider it unkind, or a criticism. But it was taken as such.
DeleteIt is very kind of you to make amends when you see how your wit could be unkind.
ReplyDeleteMaybe I have no business commenting today because I missed Sunday's post and now I've read an edited version. But here I go anyway. Unless the post was originally a completely different essay, I'm just not seeing the problem much less misogyny. I can only assume the university press representatives are unhappy that their wares weren't characterized as scintillating. Yet nobody is surprised that the university presses often churn out a lot of useless nonsense along with the useless Ph Ds from the universities themselves. That doesn't change--only the specific nature of the nonsense mutates over time. Anyone outside that bubble knows it. I bet a lot of people inside the bubble are well aware of it too. The majority of the post, Neil uses himself as the butt of nearly every joke and observation. Comments, as someone else already observed, are not part of the post. Neil isn't obligated to edit or censor them. People who can't handle comments should not read them. I hope Neil takes some solace in reader responses here and remembers that the world of university presses is exceptionally small, often entirely unrelated to the real world outside.
ReplyDeleteIf anyone wrote a misogynistic and prejudiced screed mocking publishing employees, Mr. S, it was me. Hence its removal, which puzzled me at first. But it all makes sense now. The vitriol I spewed was neither vetted nor approved before its posting. Allowed and passed through the gate, unseen, because it came from a regular.
ReplyDeleteHad I taken a few deep breaths, and reconsidered how hurtful those words might be to those at whom they were aimed, I never would have typed them...let alone posted them.
Worse still, it never even occurred to me that their targets might actually see them. Truly a blunder on my part...and a very big one. I deeply apologize for that short-sighted stupidity.
That offensive comment of mine should have never seen the light of day. The imprudent one here was me. And an apology is also in order to the university press employees who were maligned....despite my never having met them. I am heartily sorry for my offensive words.
Looks like you hit a rough patch this past week, Mr. S. The conference downtown, and then Saturday's Andy Shaw hoo-ha, and finally the unfortunate occurrences on Sunday. Stuff happened. Mistakes were made. But not only by you. Don't beat yourself up so much. Other folks messed up, too.
I imagine that he just wants the small world of publishing overall to consider his future work
ReplyDeleteI didn't see the original posting, but how different could it have been? There's certainly nothing in the edited version that would bleat "controversy", at least not to anyone that is sane.
ReplyDeleteI did enjoy the publisher's synopsis of "Food Autonomy in Chicago". It read like something out of an episode of South Park.
I read the piece on Saturday and can't remember what might have prompted any legit offense. As a long-ago wannabe academic, it all rang very true
ReplyDeleteWell done, Neil
ReplyDeleteI read the original piece on Saturday and was struck by the obliviousness of youth and reminded of my own mindset in those days. I was impressed with how you revisited and modified your initial reaction. While I only read a smattering of the initial comments I gather that some were over the top which is a shame.
ReplyDeleteMy dear Neil, You have confirmed that you are human. You made mistakes. What makes you an uncommon human is that you have owned your mistakes with empathy, compassion and responsibility. You did not set out to hurt or diminish others. Now let it go and move forward albeit carefully. Lrw
ReplyDeleteCan someone please publish the original? I want to see how Neil was a prick.
ReplyDeleteI wasn't a prick. I blunder up to the U of C Press booth, introduce myself, and one of the people there says, in a manner that struck me as weary, "We know." That's it. Grizz left a semi-rant that I didn't read before posting — and honestly barely read as I was wiping it away, just enough to see that he was being sexist, etc. I think that was mainly what drew the ire directed at me. We're moving on now.
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