Transit and T-shirt weather at Womb House Books, Temescal, Saturday

The bay area has adapted to the cold during what easterners call summer, and, Saturday at the Transit Books Fundraiser, people in short sleeves and shorts hung on even after the sun abandoned us. I was going to painfully belabor this image of the sun going down on a bullshit bay area non-summer day and turn it into a clever metaphor about how NEA funding has always sucked, compared to what other places get. I was going to do some hackish, back-of-the-hand math: if Norway underwrites the translation and publication of Norwegian books outside of Norway, for example (such that the funds provided by NORLA to defray the cost of a translation of Jon Fosse is, I dunno, like half of a the fifteen grand or so that goes to the translator for the job), then is it a Big Deal that a press like Transit (that publishes approximately “a bunch” of translations each year) has had forty measly grand stripped away from its NEA funding? A child in a sweater shivered in her mother’s jacketed arms, while I chatted with her comfortably shorted, T-shirted father: If it already wasn’t warm, how big a deal is it to get a little colder?

I wasn’t exactly wrong when I suggested exactly this to the dapperly brown-cravatted and long-pants wearing Adam Levy—one half of Transit’s husband-wife publishing duo—and cleverly offered that the NEA’s budget only demonstrates the long-running and glaring sidelining of culture among our national priorities, which arts and culture people have long learned to live with. Of course it does. US art funding sucks and always has; it’s bad that Trump is axing all of it, but still, that forty thousand was a surprisingly small fraction of Transit’s current budget. They were already mostly out in the cold. (What a clever observation! Remember, it’s sunset in May, the wind is coming up and you’re cold.)

Adam had just begun to politely explain that I was kind of wrong to say that, when he was interrupted by Alexis Madrigal and Lauren Markham, hosting the fundraiser popup whose 170 RSVPed guests (a shockingly high number of whom came) were spilling out from Womb House Books into the courtyard its proprietress shares with ice cream, coffee, vintage clothes, and wine. Having explained that, for example, a book from Tamil is going to have no subventions at all, Adam was probably about to point out that Fitzcarraldo had already hoovered up that NORLA oil money, when we all hushed, obediently, and the microphoned program began: Womb House's own Jessica Ferri talked about the community made out of books, Mac Barnett got the crowd roaring with his reading of Ashimpa—deploying a stage-laughing child to incredible effect—Soleil Ho started the revolution with Poetics of Work, and Tomas Moniz read from Lauren Markham’s Immemorial. Book event stuff. We all shivered through the sun going down, like goddamn heroes, because that's what Books mean to us.

But Adam was right, of course; this morning, I rifled through my own magnificent pile of Transit paperbacks and confirmed that most of their books—with only a couple of exceptions—don’t carry this kind of note:

Of course, all the funds add up for a little arts and culture nonprofit like Transit, and that NEA forty grand was real money. But Transit has had to survive, and has, and will, on doing the basic business thing of selling enough books to pay for their production. And really, if no one buys your books then no one is reading them, and then what’s the point of all that paper? The $40k which Elon Musk is stealing from Transit to give to other billionaires hurts Transit but the wild thing to me is that it’s only a slim single digit percentage of their budget. With the help of good editorial judgment and risks that paid off—such as a Norwegian author who subsequently got the Nobel and a weird little feminist science fiction novel from the ‘90s that blew up on booktok—they have actually been selling enough books to pay for all the books they produce, even the many that are absolute gems that somehow, annoyingly, not everyone has read.

(Have you, for example, read Axiomatic? (in stock right now at EBB!) Have you read The Wilderness, about being bitten by a bear and becoming a bear, and also postpartumness? (also on the shelves!) Have you read Kintu, a novel I was raving about a decade ago? Womb House carries a lot of Transit books, so buy them there too. But of course you don’t need to; you’re part of the Transit book club, like a legend. You already know about all the incredible books about parenting in the end of the world, for example, that Transit is pushing out in its Undelivered Lectures series. You know this because Elon Musk seethes every time he thinks about your support for the arts. Go ahead, make him cry some more. Elon hates it when you read María Sonia Cristoff's False Calm, a nonfictional exploration of Patagonian ghost towns and what's left behind when the oil runs out.)

When Ashley Levy addressed the crowd, talking about the NEA money, she recalled their first NEA grant and what getting it meant to them; she remembered counting down the three years until they had existed long enough to be eligible to apply for it, and how, when they got it, they danced with wine around their little Adams Point apartment, on whose fold-out couch visiting authors slept, in those days (“After 5 pm,” she clarified, “because we never drink on the job.”). The story she told was about money, yes, but mostly about recognition, about validation, about arrival. Adam and Ashley had been two volunteer book publishers who built a press while working their day jobs, and they had not only made something, but it was being recognized. It was real. That’s what that NEA grant meant to them, then.

But when she talked about losing that $40k, yesterday, Ashley wasn’t sad or hurt, she was furious. She didn’t talk very much about what losing that money meant to Transit Books, and she didn’t make a hard sell (“We’ll be ok”). She talked about what we’re all losing as the absolute shit-pieces in the current government attack trans healthcare and medical research and science funding and education and everything else that the US ever did that was good and worth doing. She didn’t do the insular books world thing of talking about literary fiction as the only thing that mattered; she was furious that along with her thing that matters, so much other pain is being distributed to the people we all love. And so she asked us to give Transit money, and they passed out pledge cards, because that’s what we were all there for, and I hope they raised some money—and they do need money, give them some, you coward—but the way they threw what felt more like a party, with free pizza and wine, than a fundraiser, it really just summed up, for me, the good kind of eggs that they are, and the quiet, ego-less way that Transit has always gone about doing the work that they do. And as Alexis observed in the last speech of the evening—after unveiling the risograph print he had made with Robin Sloan—the real support for the arts and community and culture isn’t at the NEA, and never was; it’s here, and it was there, last night, in the cold that maybe didn’t feel so cold.