Black Wednesday

I love nothing more than a project, a little challenge that requires list making and plotting out, and that can conclude with a pleasant sense of accomplishment. I have been looking at the Recession as this, as a challenge to me and to publishing that can inspire an almost pleasant hunkering-down and working-through. But I began to realize this week that this might be a goal with no neat conclusion. Not a sort of puzzle or a list of conditions to be worked through, but a blank, impenetrable wall destroying what comes against it and blocking further progress. There is no way, with the frightening depth of the layoffs and ill-boding changes in publishing on Wednesday, to equivocate about what is happening and what will continue to happen to that industry. In what led up to Wednesday and in the response to it some very gloomy realities are visible. What struck me most was the anger of posters and commentors: there was a sense that, in many ways, publishing had brought this on itself. I'm not in a good position to determine what kind of impact corporate structure has on the big presses, or how entrenched the seemingly slow-moving, reactionary nature of the business is. Many on the inside seem to think these are serious problems, though. Even without them publishing is facing all sorts of road blocks, and it is pretty easy to be intensely pessimisstic at a time like this.

I have always thought of the Great Depression as the worst possible period to live in: I would rather live during a war, during a time of great oppression, anything, than that time. In my mind it has such a suffocating claustrophobia, like the sense I would get in elementary school when we studied biomes and came to the desert: if you were there and you were thirsty or in trouble, there was nothing you could do. Nothing but sand for miles. What seems so horrible to me about the depression is not so much the horrible deprivation--though that, of course--but the sense that there was nothing to be done about it. I see the stretch of years during which there just weren't any jobs to be had, no desperate measures to be taken, no lows to unwillingly stoop to. Just nothing. I have been separating this sense from my feelings about our current downturn, because I don't think anyone really believes their times will be like history in either its highs or lows. And I know we're not at that point yet. But there is some of that creeping in, the jobs being lost, with no new created, and the jobs that will be lost in the future, unpreventably. Especially within publishing's sphere, a Depression-Era hopelessness seems more and more logical. This is very bleak talk, I know. I still don't entirely believe it, and I feel sure that we'll come out of it more easily and less scathed than those before--not for any rational reasons, again, but because of my sense of relative immunity--because I am young, because I can't help my progressivist mindset. I will still hunker down, and I hope publishing will too. Maybe we will get somewhere.