Local author Renée Rosen discussed her most recent book Let’s Call Her Barbie in a conversation with another local author Shelby Van Pelt at the Harold Washington Library Center last week.
Rosen was personable, and shared interesting information that would appeal to anyone who read her book. Van Pelt was well-prepared with a list of open-ended questions that encouraged elaboration and allowed for responses.
I just couldn’t understand why I was there, and left before the Q&A could start.
I should have expected from the event description that the “conversation” would center upon Rosen’s new book. I just don’t know why these conversations appeal to anyone, and why the library would continue to sponsor these.
These events reflect a cult of celebrity that fetishizes authors and writing as ends rather than means. As such, book tours are marketing campaigns — come for the celebrity, leave with a purchase — that seem more concerned with increasing sales than promoting ideas.
Contemporary society is already too saturated with advertising for me to donate an hour to endure even more, especially when I leave with little more than I could have gotten from consuming the content on my own.
I realize that I’m the minority on author events. I actually overheard someone praise this specific event at one of my book clubs this past weekend.
I certainly am not advocating for the decontextualization of ideas, and believe in the need for historical and conceptual contexts. I’m just less interested in authors, and seen enough to know that production processes are idiosyncratic.
I am also sympathetic to the forces felt by my librarian friends, who might have mixed motivations, and have to make compromises for the greater good, including the relevance of libraries. I just wonder whether they might be limiting efforts to reimagine libraries in contemporary democratic societies.
A better event would be one that asked Rosen to use her research and experience for something more than the book she already wrote. For example, she could have been asked to elaborate on the effects of Barbie upon the cultural zeitgeist or to consider the ways that toys reflect the politics of their creators.
Anything that involved an argument, or offered a position or a perspective that couldn’t have been obtained from her book, would have been worth the forty-five minutes I sat in the sparse audience on that cold February night.
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