New Peterson offering puts booksellers in a tricky spot
Next month Jordan Peterson’s new book Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life goes on sale in New Zealand. It follows the Canadian psychologist’s successful and polarising 12 Rules for Life, which sold some five million copies worldwide, a kind of ‘‘takeyour-hands-out-of-your-pockets’’ and ‘‘stand-up-straight-when-I-talk-toyou’’ self-help guide. Compared with 2020’s calamitous events, the past controversy over Peterson – now ill with Covid – seems mountains and molehills.
To recap. Some overseas booksellers refused to stock Peterson’s first book and, in New Zealand, Whitcoulls briefly withdrew 12 Rules from sale because of the Christchurch mosque massacres. But he does court trouble. In Canada, when Peterson tried to speak publicly, protesters shouted him down as transphobic because he refused to use gender-neutral pronouns when teaching at the University of Toronto. He’s also accused of being a white supremacist and Islamophobic for a photograph taken alongside someone wearing a shirt sloganed ‘‘Proud to be Islamophobic’’, plus he’s allegedly anti-Communist and anti-Semitic.
Peterson denies the accusations and it’s hard to find him guilty as charged, though his writings weave between interesting and stupid.
Yet last November when Penguin Random House Canada announced Beyond Order to staff, the reaction was extraordinary. Some wept, concerned at the effect his book would have on them and their friends. The company was accused of being in it just for the money, and received more than 70 anonymous in-house complaints, but the publication has proceeded nevertheless.
Publishing companies need popular authors in these tough times – not the least to pay employees, weeping ones included – and bestselling authors like Peterson subsidise small print-runs by risky unknown writers, who one day may become international sensations.
New Zealand bookstores order books months in advance, and already there’s been debate over Peterson’s new book, with stores refusing to stock it because, like Good Books in Wellington, they feel displaying his books would not create
a safe space for customers. Good Books had publicly declared it would not be selling books by JK Rowling or a ‘‘wealthy well-known racist’’ because their company policy is to create a safe environment for staff and customers. In Australia and the USA, some bookshops pulled books by Rowling after she wrote tweets and a blog deemed transphobic.
There’s nothing wrong with this. Private retailers have the right to support or refuse stock for any reason, that’s how the capitalist market operates. Bookshops can be personal or irrational – sometimes both – when choosing books. Last year I boycotted a publication in which an author, a former friend, was gratuitously cruel towards close friends, my family and me.
Freedom of speech in the book trade doesn’t exist beyond the government censor; it occurs every day when thousands of unsolicited manuscripts get tossed in publishers’ slush piles.
But I think there’s a debate to be had when books are censored not for their content, but because of their writers’ personal values and lives. In my experience what might seem harmful today, in 50 years could be innocuous.
I started out in the thick of controversial publishing 46 years ago for the late Alister Taylor, proofreading Down Under The Plum Trees, a kids’ sex guide classified R18 by the Indecent Publications Tribunal, partly because it illegally described sodomy and abortion.
We published many writers in the 1970s whose personal lives and morals – according to the conservative majority who held sway back then – did not stand up to scrutiny: Sam Hunt, James K Baxter, Michael King, Tim Shadbolt, Tony Simpson, Dun Mihaka to name but a few. Now these authors are all respectably famous, some even awarded Queen’s Honours, but these reprobates were seen as ‘‘dirty hippy commie lefties’’ and capable of goodness knows what harm: Mihaka bared his buttocks at royalty and wrote Whakapohane, Shadbolt wrote Bullshit & Jellybeans. God-fearing folk needed to be kept safe.
More recently Sue Bradford,
radical activist and former Green MP probably set teeth on edge and caused the wealthy to increase their insurance with her ‘‘eat the rich’’ campaigns, but anyone who boycotted her excellent biography, Constant Radical (Fraser Books 2017) missed out on important New Zealand history.
Nobody, as far as I’m aware, was harmed browsing in shops displaying these books.
The difficulty in taking the moral high ground on authors’ personal values is where do you stop when bowdlerising the bookshelves? Peterson is seen as Islamophobic. So should we veto publications by Bangladeshi Taslima Nasrin, also labelled Islamophobic for her attacks on religions’ oppression of women? Or is she OK because she’s a feminist poet? Nasrin continues writing, like Rowling and Peterson, but has the added burden of a fatwa forcing her into exile.
What about the classics? Alice In Wonderland? Gone. Lewis Carroll had paedophiliac tendencies, apparently. Adventures of Tom Sawyer? Huck Finn? Mark Twain was racist. Closer to home we possibly should shun James K Baxter, judging by the dodgy stuff I witnessed at Jerusalem in the 1970s. There are New Zealand male writers still alive whose personal values probably wouldn’t pass the #metooNZ test, but should we as booksellers appoint ourselves guardians and ‘‘protect’’ our customers from their great writing?
In my opinion, books are about ideas, sometimes the contest of ideas; we welcome diversity, non-binary, trans – whatever makes people happy – and if my generation occasionally stumble over changing language and personal pronouns, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re transphobic. I’m also an author, with a controversial past, aware my former politics have pissed people off, so I’m in no position as a bookseller to pass judgment on the personal values of authors I’ve never met.
Fortunately for bibliophiles, New Zealand has a plethora of good bookshops providing an abundance of choice. Their book selections are neither ‘‘right’’ nor ‘‘wrong’’; merely, as they should be, a reflection of the individual business. Think how tedious Aotearoa would be if every bookstore forsook originality, and robbed browsers of the joys of surprise.
He doesn’t think she used to be a trinkets-onthe-bedside-table type of person. Her last bedroom – perhaps not her last bedroom, he doesn’t know, but the last bedroom of hers he visited – was, comparatively, spartan. He remembers art on the walls, and recognises some of it here, but she’d kept things pretty blank in terms of surfaces.
That’s why her necklace had been so striking. It was delicate, thin silver, a haphazard coil of a chain, and the implication of the ritual, of the fact that for it to have fallen, so she would have had to have climbed into bed and only then remembered to remove it, blew open an entire inner life he had known of but had not seriously considered.
She unfastened the link of that same necklace in this new room, not five minutes ago. ‘‘I’m going to take my makeup off,’’ she said. She placed the chain down in a little ceramic dish before she left. And now her bedside table is a packed affair, with that necklace, and the ceramic dish, and postcards of paintings and a photograph and candles and a lamp and two small, near-empty bottles of perfume.
And he’s sitting here, looking at it. Her hair is shorter, now. A blunt cut, just above her shoulders. He thinks she must have curled it before she left the house tonight, the way she used to when she wanted to look good for something. It can’t have been him, of course. She couldn’t have known they’d see each other. They hadn’t seen each other in five years.
The curls have almost all dropped out by this point; when she left for the bathroom, they’d been more implied than anything. He imagines her down the hall – ‘‘first door on the left,’’ as she pointed out. Her hair clipped back off her face, her wet eyelashes slicked together. There is a subtle vulnerability to her return, which he looks forward to: a comfort, something bare and lived in. He’s always wondered if she felt the same way he did, if they gave each other the same innate attention. One of her bedside postcards has been written on; he can see it addressed to ‘‘Darling Liv’’.
He wants to pick it up and read it. Perhaps it’s from her cousin, Jess. Jess, who liked karaoke, and had a baby just before Liv’s graduation. His graduation, too, of course. He remembers the scorching heat of it. The public festivities had extended until dusk. It was summertime, a mauve kind of evening, almost exactly 18 months after he and Liv slept together. They hadn’t talked about it much – not that he knew, not to anyone else – but he thought at the time that it must have informed the way they interacted with each other, a kind of charge, a kind of current, a pull, which made him want to make her laugh and led to confusion about what to do with his hands.
He’d walked back through the park and found her sitting at a bench there. ‘‘When are you off?’’ he asked, without introduction. ‘‘Tomorrow,’’ she said.
She seemed to have figured he meant more broadly. ‘‘My whole flat’s packed up – bare walls, dismantled shelving.’’ ‘‘Sounds organised,’’ he said. She gave a watery laugh. ‘‘It’s depressing. We pre-emptively boxed up my life and the place half hasn’t felt mine since.’’ She motioned for him to sit: ‘‘Are you headed somewhere?’’ ‘‘Not pressingly.’’ He settled in beside her.
Back on topic, she continued: ‘‘Funny how that stuff happens, y’know? When it should be at its zenith and it almost feels like borrowed time.’’ He nodded. ‘‘I get that.’’ A breeze rolled through, sending fallen twigs and stray leaves reeling. ‘‘Has anyone asked the dreaded question?’’ ‘‘Oh,’’ she said, ‘‘about what I’m gonna do with my degree?’’ ‘‘Yeah, y’know – have you touted out the five-year plan?’’ She shrugged. ‘‘Can’t say I have, actually. Things never work out the way you think they will.’’ ‘‘Is that – pessimism – ?’’ ‘‘No, I just – it can be happy, too. I just don’t think you can foresee things. So a five-year plan says more about the person at the start of the five years than about where you’ll be at the end of it.’’ ‘‘Right.’’ ‘‘I’d love to be able to plan my way to a gorgeous house with big windows and a garden and a job I like, and a partner who’s good at their job, and a small army of children, and a local we can go to with our mates on weekends – but I just don’t know that it works like that, or that it’ll happen as I currently imagine it to.’’ ‘‘I mean, that’s a lot in five years.’’
She leaned over, nudged his arm with her shoulder. ‘‘It’s the principle of the thing.’’ He nodded. Then he said: ‘‘I’m sure you’ll get everything you want.’’ ‘‘What do you want?’’ she asked. For a moment, he just looked at her. ‘‘Come on, this is a two-way street – ’’ ‘‘I’d like to pay off my parents’ mortgage,’’ he began. ‘‘Build a life with a girl I think is way too good for me – fill it with kids and nativity plays, Saturday morning sport.’’ She laughed. ‘‘Maybe our kids’ll be on the same team.’’ ‘‘I’ll have the orange slices; you’ll be arguing with the ref.’’ ‘‘You’ll also be the ref.’’ ‘‘But is that a conflict of interest if I’m coaching the team?’’ ‘‘Probably,’’ she said. ‘‘And your wife’ll be some gorgeous high achiever who does yoga and writes columns, and everyone loves her at parties, and she still looks glamorous when she shows up with wet hair on the school run.’’ He chuckled. ‘‘Right. Sure. And you’ll be with some, like, architect, who comes from money but is always giving it away. Opinionated but never offensive, probably drinks kombucha, but also jokes about people who drink kombucha. Likes dogs, all that.’’ ‘‘God, maybe our spouses should be together.’’ ‘‘They’d get a magazine spread about their engagement, all benevolent – I bet they go on runs together.’’ ‘‘With their dog.’’ She turned to him. ‘‘Josh, I think I want to punch them.’’ ‘‘But they’d also be too kind to properly hate,’’ he said. ‘‘Like, I’d try to start s... with your – ? Husband?’’ ‘‘He can be a husband for the purpose of this,’’ she said.
‘‘The couple we’re describing are definitely straight.’’ ‘‘Great–so I’d try to start s... with your husband and he’d just go, ‘oh, you’re doing so well with the kids, Josh.’’’
She laughed. ‘‘Your wife is absolutely one of those women who’d come up to me and go, ‘oh, Olivia, I don’t know how you’re doing it all’ – even though my kid has bedhead and two different shoes on and she’s just seen me wipe jam off their face with my own spit – meanwhile she is actually doing it all – ’’ ‘‘Don’t worry, she and I are sleeping in separate bedrooms and she’s secretly jealous of the fact you and I have history.’’ ‘‘But we shrug it off like it’s nothing,’’ she said, perhaps doing exactly that. ‘‘Oh, yeah, we’re like, ‘pfft – ancient history, we laugh at it now,’ but the sexual tension is actually – palpable.’’ ‘‘And your wife and my husband end up getting closer and closer, like in the romcom when the main characters’ objectively perfect but deeply two-dimensional secondary love interests meet in some mid-credit sequence after the two leads go off into the sunset.’’
He considered it. ‘‘Except they are both sets of characters.’’ ‘‘And they’re frustratingly easy to co-parent with.’’ ‘‘Oh, they’re so easy to co-parent with. They invite us on holiday and everything.’’ ‘‘Do we end up together?’’ she asked then. ‘‘After everything?’’
And something quiet seemed to settle in, a small feeling which could have been nothing and everything. He gave it a moment. It seemed important to take. ‘‘Feels like a waste of time to go through all that just to end up back here.’’ She eased herself into a nod. ‘‘Right.’’ ‘‘No – I mean – that’s two divorces, several fractured childhoods…’’ He turned to her, tried to wink in a way that didn’t make him seem like an estate agent. ‘‘Maybe I feel like we’d get it right before then.’’ She chuckled, and then her phone rang.
Jess. Some kind of dinner arrangement. She stood, and he did. ‘‘I guess this is it,’’ she said. ‘‘Yeah.’’ He opened his mouth to offer to walk her there, wherever there was, wherever she was going. But she kissed him before he could get the words out, and then she was on her way.
Five years ago, now. He should text Emily back. His phone is in his jacket, folded over the chair at Liv’s desk. It would be easy to do it now; he wouldn’t have to explain anything. Telling Liv he cancelled a date after running into her at a crossing seems to carry a weight he can’t quite face articulating. He can hear footsteps down the hall. He can see ‘‘Darling Liv’’ on the bedside table.
He opened his mouth to offer to walk her there, wherever there was, wherever she was going. But she kissed him before he could get the words out, and then she was on her way.
As a card-carrying member of the Illuminati, I feel I have both the right and the knowledge to comment on conspiracy theories, or, as we in the Illuminati call them, ‘‘true, factual, evidence-based secrets’’. Yes, as someone with connections to all those other people with connections, and having been on all those super secret Illuminati Zoom calls, I’m fairly sure my enlightenment will rain down on you, and shock you in to profoundly realising what’s really going on in this crazy world.
In the Illuminati the first rule is, ‘‘Don’t worry about talking about the Illuminati, because most poorlings don’t understand our magic’’.
Recently, a radio host tried to get the entirely reasonable and broadminded
Grant Robertson to comment on conspiracy theories. Grant was not having a bar of it. (Grant’s also in the Illuminati, and often brings homemade cookies to Wellington meetings.) Yes, a radio personality suddenly broke out of his ‘‘normal’’ and ‘‘reasoned’’ talk zone, and gallantly threw our minister of finance a giant conspiracy-laced curveball. I know that radio host.
Always been a great guy, but clearly miffed he wasn’t included in the last Illuminati intake. It sort of works like the NBA draft, but everyone wears golden capes. Clever move, Granty, pretending you didn’t buy in to the whole ‘‘Covid Conspiracy’’. Clearly Illuminati Bootcamp taught you a lot.
‘‘The truth? You can’t handle the truth!’’ But here it is anyway.
The earth is flat. When you fly around the world you are actually just flying around in a circle. Australia doesn’t exist, and there is no such thing as the Bermuda Triangle. Hapless boaties just fall over the lip of the earth platter. Pop off all the time. How careless.
The Royal Family are lizard people. One can see this quite obviously when watching the royal great-grandchildren poke out their tongues at the paparazzi. It’s not cheeky, it’s their unbridled reptilian nature.
JFK shot himself. I know, right? It makes so much sense when you think about it.
Elvis Presley, Jim Morrison and Princess Diana run a small dairy north of Ruakaka. They wear fake noses and wigs. Not cheap $2 shop wigs. Real human hair, so the disguises are flawless.
Covid is just a cold. No, wait, Covid was created by artificial intelligence as a way to freak the world into staying indoors so that the reptilian royal family could meet in secret with the Chinese, then figure out what to do about Donald Trump, Boris Johnson and Willie Nelson. Yes, ‘‘Willie Nelson’’. He’s been causing such havoc with his weed-smoking propaganda and poor dress sense.
Man didn’t land on the moon. They landed on Pluto. Some nosey scientists found out about the sham, and this is why Pluto got cast out of the planetary system. Bloody sneaky scientists.
Princess Diana (see above, Monday to Friday on the counter at the dairy) realised she couldn’t marry Dodi al Fayed, but didn’t know how to dump him, and so ghosted him. This is actually how the term ‘‘ghosting’’ came into the vernacular. See now? It makes sense.
The Twin Towers were not flown into. George Bush just wanted to take the attention off his poor popularity ratings, and so had a few guys his dad knew in demolition take on a big job.
I can’t talk about vaccinations. Even we Illuminati are vaccinated. I mean, although we know they are sent from the evil gods of modern medicine, we’d rather be safe than sorry.
And finally, Leonardo DiCaprio not Leonardo da Vinci spells out the secrets of Jesus Christ’s continuing bloodline through The Wolf of Wall Street. Leonardo ‘‘the artist’’ gave no clues in his paintings so you got well ripped off if you forked out money for the Da Vinci Codes.
Well done fellow Illuminati brother Grant Robertson, but those talkback braniacs are too smart for you and your evasive tactics.
‘‘Long Live Queen Elizabeth! Queen of the British Empire, and the reptile enclosure at Auckland Zoo!’’
Long Live Queen Elizabeth! Queen of the British Empire, and the reptile enclosure at Auckland Zoo!