Really, truly, when I think
of that bit about mistaking writers for other writers, if I think of the topic
at all, I realise I’ve misplaced a story. I believe, with the rabid fury of a
thousand frothing suns, that one writer wrote a tale penned by another
scribbler. Simple as that.
Then something awkward happens: a loose detail
floats over the horizon, staining the otherwise unsullied sky. Now the sky is
sullied by the fury of a thousand waxing moons. Wait a bit. This book was written a few years after the author’s
death. How can this be?!
It could be that the storyteller’s last
manuscript sat forgotten by daylight, beneath a massive pile of socks in a
holiday home untouched by time. Only now are we dimly hearing of this belated
publication.
Or maybe there was a bitter family dispute
over the eventual release of the last great work/collection of notes for a
story/a fragment little better than a receipt for dry-cleaning.
Maybe, though, just maybe, I’ve mismatched
the author to the wrong bit of scribble. And now I am on a (hopefully) short
trail to find who wrote what, when, and possibly where. Complicated as that.
Generally, I don’t think of the mystery
writer Josephine Tey being mistaken for the children’s author Eleanor Farjeon. It’s
never on my bingo card in any year, and won’t show up behind door number one on
the advent calendar of strangeness. Or any other door.
Except…
I was staring into the middle distance of
the internet, and squinting at a so-called picture of Eleanor Farjeon. My
response was surprising.
That’s
Josephine Tey.
Firstly, I was astonished that I knew this.
Somewhere along the line, the strands of the interwebs were muddled in the
weaving of it. And, from some polluted stream, from one slightly awkward
source, I suppose a miniature industry of mistaken identity poured forth.
Eleanor Farjeon wrote Morning has Broken. This religious ditty went to church in a
shotgun wedding with an old Scottish tune by the name of Bunessan. You may know it as a pop hit by the singer/songwriter
Yusuf. (Additional noodling provided by Rick Wakeman.)
What else to say of children’s author
Eleanor? She won a few literary awards in her day, and had one named after her.
And she’s not the mystery author Josephine Tey. Did these two women write in
the same area? No. Not even remotely.
Misattribution. Who wrote this one? Maybe
Ray Bradbury wrote that story. Or I thought he did. And it was someone else. Or
I believed someone else wrote Ray Bradbury’s story. But, then, watching the end
of DARK STAR by John Carpenter, I
fucking KNEW I’d read that bit of the story before. And it was absotively
posolutely by Ray Bradbury.
Turned out to be the case. Well. Damn.
So, yes, there’s plenty of scope for
confusion. William Shakespeare’s War of
the Worlds, or Much Ado About Martians, for example. Could’ve sworn he
wrote that. He didn’t pen a word. Christopher Marlowe was the author.
Marlowe famously faked his own death,
polished all of Shakespeare’s plays, entered into a Faustian pact with the
devil, became immortal, and passed his own stories off as those of H.G. Wells.
Legit. As legit as an award for Legitness
provided by the International Committee of Legititude™, based in Luxembourg.
That is a lie. The organisation flies a Panamanian flag when operating at sea.
A fiction was told there, surely.
No worse than supposing that Lord Byron was in
fact a vampire. Tom Holland appears to be the source of that story. Spider-Man
wrote about Lord Byron the vampire? Fuck it. Yes, yes, he did. No, no, he
didn’t. It’s an easy mistake to make. Is the writer Tom Holland not the same
person as the actor Tom Holland? Oh. Okay then.
Was Christopher Lee, the historian, also in
fact a vampire?
There is no real or unreal evidence of this.
My source is that I made it up. Anyway, I invented my source. Even that bit is
fabricated.
Also, concerning Lord Byron, there is no proof
that he was a werewolf, a herewolf, a therewolf, a mummified corpse, or a
creature from the black/blue/dried-up lagoon. Was he the Invisible Man? I just
don’t see it.
That’s The
Invisible Man written by Christopher Marlowe, naturally.
I myself am often mistaken for the
Venezuelan rocket scientist of the same name. It’s a light burden. Any
questions that come my way concerning rocket science and the laws of physics
are quickly farmed out to my scientific advisor: Doctor Google.
Doctor Google himself made a Faustian pact
with the devil to acquire that sort of knowledge. There is no direct record of
Doctor Faustus making a similar Googley pact to gain control of the interwebs.
Unless you count that play, The Tragical Search History of Doctor
Faustus. There’s some evidence that the work was scribbled on the back of a
hard drive by one Will Shaxberde, believed to be a French literary critic down
on his luck, in need of funds, and lacking wine. Except that he wasn’t
officially French. Just for reasons of beef tax.
Often, facts are at our fingertips just as
those facts slip from our grasp and bounce down the stairs into a million
fragments. Honestly, though, it might as well be a hundred fragments for all
the difference it makes to us.
I was once told that I knew that song by the
guy who was singing about the thing…
An attempt to get me to provide the name of
the singer, the song, and the subject matter. I DEFINITELY KNEW THE SONG.
Gradually, based on the sliver of a crumb of an atom of a detail, I worked out
the name of the song. And it was coincidence that I knew it.
YOU DEFINITELY KNOW IT. THE ONE ABOUT THE
THING THAT THE GUY SINGS AND THERE ARE WORDS WITH MUSIC AND STUFF. IT’S REALLY
CATCHY. YOU KNOW. THAT ONE.
You know it. It was that one-hit wonder. It
keeps popping up on the radio. And on the radio’s successor. Internet radio.
But you definitely know it. That song, about the thing. By the guy. Who sings
about that thing, very specifically without any detail handed over to tell you
what the fuck anyone is talking about whenever they raise a topic in so vague a
manner.
I typed that while listening to the song. It
was featured on the interwebs. All I had to do was type the guy’s name and
there he was. You definitely know, anyway.
All I had to do, when staring at a so-called
picture of Eleanor Farjeon, was to type the name of another author. And the
same photo popped up. A picture of Josephine Tey. OR IS IT?! Maybe the photo of
Josephine Tey is really the picture of Eleanor Farjeon, has been all along, and
the whole thing was messed up since BEFORE the beginning.
Despite the actors Anthony Quayle and
Anthony Quinn looking nothing like one another, they are often mistaken for
each other. That must be very confusing when they appear in the same movie
together.
I was about to include a photo showing both
of them together in a movie. But they are both on the right in the picture I
selected, and the temptation to type Anthony
is pictured on the right is really too much. I must let the weak joke die
where it stands.
Checking stuff is difficult. You face the
Dictionary Problem. What is that? To know what you are looking for in a
dictionary, first you must know what you are looking for. And if you know
already, then maybe you don’t need to look it up.
When I saw the picture of “Eleanor Farjeon”
I just knew she was Josephine Tey. So I went looking for Josephine Tey. And
there she was, in several images, looking like herself in all of them.
It’s a conspiracy. She replaced herself.
Like, y’know, that big unsinkable ship. The one that hit the iceberg. Or did
it?
RMS Titanic
was replaced in a last-ditch effort to pull the world’s supply of wool over
everyone’s eyes in order to…
(Checks notes in ever-rising levels of
disbelief.)
…swindle an insurance company.
According to Robin Gardiner, the sister ship
Olympic went to the bottom of the
ocean instead and the real Titanic
was in service until scrapped. The most remarkable thing about Gardiner’s
career is the legit profile of the White Star Line he somehow managed to write.
That appears, at least, to have been written by someone who was rational.
Doesn’t explain The Great Titanic Rock ’n’ Roll Insurance Swindle vibe that emerges
from his other writings. You see, if you measure the width of the sprocket
found on the ocean floor, and you compare that against the detailed blueprints
stored in the secret filing cabinet, you’ll realise it’s all a load of
nonsense.
Never Mind
the Bollocks. Here’s the Fruit Pastilles.
Friday, 1 December 2023
MISTAKING WRITERS FOR OTHER WRITERS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
Sunday, 4 April 2021
ON READING AN AUTHOR’S ENTIRE OUTPUT: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
What do I mean by entire output, exactly?
I thought this over as I hunted around for books to photograph. Last month’s blog post called for a few book covers.
Stevenson is represented in the margins of every blog post. No need to
re-photograph Weir of Hermiston for
that.
When it came to Raymond Chandler and Robert
B. Parker, I was quite specific in seeking out tomes. My talk on Sir John
Mortimer’s creation of the world-weary barrister, Rumpole, centred on a
particular tale.
There’s a shelf of le Carré books, minus A Legacy of Spies. That particular file
must be located in another part of the registry. Can’t see it anywhere.
Well,
hunting for a belated prequel/sequel set me to thinking about an author’s
output.
What is it? Output.
Essentially, it’s a collection of works
written by a dead person. Chandler, Parker, Mortimer, and le Carré have death in
common. Okay, we all have that. But this is a matter of putting certain writers
into the past tense. Any new books by those writers will be gently compiled, or
otherwise completed – flat-out written by other writers.
Yes, in the case of a living author you can
say I’ve read ’em all. In this loose category,
output, we must include the living as
well as the dead. But do we include all of the books? The short stories?
Essays? Collected shopping lists? Magazine articles? Non-fiction work? Letters
to the editor of a prominent national newspaper?
Is there such a thing as a prominent
national newspaper? How papery is the digital version of a newspaper? And how
national? If it is digital, it is international. Beamed out into the ether,
why, it is galactic whether received by aliens or not.
We
noticed that you are alien, and using an ad-blocker.
But that is a diversion. I’ve read one
Robert B. Parker book: the book started by Raymond Chandler. I don’t feel like
tackling the rest of Parker’s stories. The Parker output is put out, and pouts.
I read le Carré’s revisitation book, A Legacy of Spies, to see how he filled
in some obvious plot blanks. Not holes. Just things we weren’t told originally.
And I read it while le Carré was alive. There are a few of his books still to
tackle.
Will I read them all? I may get around to
all of his espionage-themed books once I buy them. But I vividly recall shutting
down very quickly as a reader when trying to wade through The Naïve and Sentimental Lover. It’s le Carré’s affair novel, his divorce book, and it shows.
I didn’t get far into the story. It takes a
lot, a LOT, for a book to stop me in its tracks. I quickly gained the
impression that I was reading a do-nothing book in which nasty characters
collide with each other, only to flop around on the floor.
Pudding, fallen from the hands of someone who
wanted fish and chips. You could save the pudding, so that it doesn’t flop
around on the floor. But what is the point of that? You wanted fish and chips.
That’s why you crossed the street to try the chip shop’s wares.
Reputation. You put out two murder mysteries
starring a genteel civil servant named George Smiley. This Smiley character has
a surname I suspect le Carré scubaconsciously lifted from a Colonel in the
Special Operations Executive. Real and fictional Smiley types share an OBE.
George Smiley the civil servant. Not a spy,
or a spymaster. He’d hesitate to admit to a fellow intelligence officer that
he, too, is an intelligence officer. In several books, le Carré seems hell-bent
on describing Smiley as every character from The Wind in the Willows.
The reputation of the author is cemented
with that third book: The Spy Who Came in
from the Cold. That’s it. He’s an espionage writer. This continues with
book four. And book five. Then it is time, once more, to head to the chip shop
for fish and chips. Ah, here’s the pudding. That’s no good.
Now that le Carré is gone, I have the
opporchancity to read his entire output. Catch up on the last few novels he
wrote. I’m dodging that earlier one. The
Naïve and Sentimental Lover. With the best will in the world, I think that
one should remain unread. The author quickly returned to proper intrigue with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. In doing so,
he went back to the reputation he cemented – and he painstakingly covered it in
gold leaf.
There is nothing proper about intrigue, and
you’ll still find nasty characters colliding with each other in his stories. So
I’ll buy the last few espionage tales I didn’t quite get around to. And I’ll
read them. Then I can say I’ve read all of his spy novels.
If
they are spy books. They are easy enough to describe as condition-of-England novels in which a vampiric English upper-class
cabal goes around selling out its more-dispensable people to shady notions of
ethics and morality that are neither ethical nor moral – merely shady and
notional under the thin blanket of being national.
Graham Greene writes about betrayal. Betrayal
as a theme runs through Greene’s work as clearly and consistently as the words Brighton Rock run through a stick of
Brighton Rock. Book after book, betrayal is Graham Greene’s thing. It is the
whole thing, cut in one piece, from a single sheet of literary cloth.
In le Carré’s case, he uses betrayal,
thematically, as a diffuse jumping-off point into examining a patchwork quilt of
hypocrisy, double-dealing, and the pettiness of grand aims backed by low ways
and means. Snobbery with violence. Cosh
and carry.
Where do you start, if you are going to read
the output? At the beginning. I’ll avoid the plotting here. A character puts in
an appearance in the first book, Call for
the Dead. We see several familiar characters return in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.
I had a question about this.
Eventually we reach Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, start of a loose trilogy within the
overall Wagnerian cycle. Events in this book force up a point concerning The Spy Who Came in from the Cold. I had
a question about that, too.
At a distance of many years, le Carré hands
us a prequelish sequelish revisitation of a book – A Legacy of Spies. He addresses plot-based questions from previous
works, and all is right with the cynicism in his world. If you are going to
start anywhere with the output, A Legacy
of Spies is absitively posolutely NOT the place to begin.
With certain authors, you can dive right in
and read the books in any old order. Not so with le Carré. His stories concerning
Smiley are in a set pattern. I’d go further. Even the non-Smiley stories should
be read in sequence. Tackle all the books in order of publication for a sense
of atmosphere, Smiley-based or not. (Omit one book entirely. There. I saved you
the bother.)
Order of publication? That’s trickier with
C.S. Lewis and the land of Narnia. After all this time, wars are still fought
on the plains of Narnia over the order in which to read the stories. My advice
on that score is to read them in the order that you found them in. I did.
Lewis wrote the prequel story, The Magician’s Nephew, close to the end
of the whole cycle – making it a prequel his initial audience couldn’t absorb
in any other way on first reading. I, too, read that book close to the end.
This was sheer coincidence, Jeeves. Never did me any harm. Lewis can be read
that way. The three volumes of The Lord
of the Rings can’t be.
Output. I’ve read Tolkien’s three tomes.
Never had an inclination to read The
Hobbit or that ill-advised Marillion
biography he churned out. I’d read Ian Fleming’s Bond books slightly out of sequence…
Those were ordered through a bookshop, and
the first to arrive was out of place. But I soon corrected that course. With
Adam Hall’s Quiller stories, I read
the first book first and the last book last – but everything else was a bit of
a jumble. I based my reading on whatever was on sale in charity shops, until
the last few missing tomes could only be located online.
Rumpole
I read in order. That doesn’t quite match the TV output. Usually, Sir John
Mortimer would sneak an extra little story into the books – one that wouldn’t
have made the running as a candidate for a one-hour TV slot.
So much for the collected books. As for
shopping lists, articles, and letters…
A billion years ago, le Carré arm-wrestled
Salman Rushdie into a froth when they exchanged different viewpoints across the
bows of a national newspaper. The area reserved for letters sat near the back
of the periodical, so, perhaps that should be the stern. And very stern they were, too.
I am in no great rush to read Rushdie. The
one-star reviews for The Satanic Verses
are all kinds of livid. This brings
up the point that I am wary of reviews in the sense that I may accidentally
discover how Anna Karenina ends. Fear
not. That was ruined for me by an introduction to a wildly different book that
warned of Tolstoy spoilers in the most half-arsed way possible.
No, I won’t tell you which one.
For some, the correct order of reading for
the tales about Narnia is…all of the books except for very near the end of The Last Battle. Wars are still fought
in Narnia’s far-flung reaches over whether or not Susan is still a friend of
Narnia, and what that all means at the very very very very last-gasp end of the
cycle.
What is the output? An author writes sixty
books in a series and everyone agrees book three was a let-down only redeemed
by the rapid fix of many mistakes in book fourteen. That was the master-plan
all along, right? Wrong. Everyone has off-days. Some writers have fuck-off days.
An author discovers success with a book,
and, gradually, the sap rises through the Writerly tree until there is a series
of books. A franchise. Eventually the author can’t cut it no more. People go to
read and re-read the work. That fabled output. But they stop short of the shaky
tome no one likes to mention.
Such a shame that there is only one movie
about The Matrix. What would a sequel
have looked like? Sadly, we’ll never know. As for Highlander, in cinematic terms…there
can be only one.
Who can forget the Rambo trilogy? First Blood,
Rambo, and Rambo: Last Blood.
That, inevitably, brings us to THE STAR
WARS. Let us draw a veil upon this scene. The film tie-in can throw up the
odd quirk…
If you want all of the output connected to a
story, can you, should you, pursue it? The movie CAPRICORN ONE, for example, has two novelisations – one for each
side of the Atlantic. Movie wheeling and movie dealing at its haziest.
Once you throw in movies and comic books,
you open Pandora’s Fridge and find
all the cool boxes. Tinker Tailor Soldier
Spy is available as the original book, the TV version with Bernard Hepton
in a supporting role, the radio version with Bernard Hepton as Smiley himself, a
second BBC radio production as part of an overall series about Smiley, the (condensed
and sterilised) movie version with Gary Oldman…I’m waiting for the opera, the
comic book, and the webisodes.
Is the author’s output limited to the books?
For simplicity, always. And for reasons of complexity, never. Of all the
authors I’ve read, how much of their output have I read? Can I point to a
writer and say I’ve read ’em all…
I’m forced to stop and think about
biographies with extracts from letters. But I’m not forced to stop too long.
There’s one place where you can pick up a copy of Emily Brontë’s second novel –
in the dream library of Neil Gaiman’s comic book series, The Sandman. Every story ever is there in the library, whether published
or not. Whether written in the author’s lifetime or not.
This is why Neil is such a furious
scribbler. He’s trying to keep as many of his own books off those dream shelves
as he can, by sending them out into the physical world instead.
I haven’t mentioned the impossible task of
reading all of an author’s books when that author goes by many different labels
– not a fraction of them known to the general public. For that way, madness
lies.
The simplest task is to read the book by the
author who only wrote one novel. Even so, what is the output? A few short
stories, besides. Scattered letters, collected by scholars. The fragment of a
second novel. A rough guide to the next one in a series.
Unpublished. Published. Destroyed. Saved.
Franz Kafka left his unpublished works in the hands of Max Brod, with the
instruction that these documents were to be destroyed on Kafka’s death. Brod
refused when the time came, and now we have Kafa’s “lost” output to stare at.
Yes. Output is hazy when it isn’t there at
all. I can reach out to my shelf and read of Jekyll and of Hyde, but I can’t
read the original version – not if we take Stevenson at his word that he threw
the manuscript into the fire. I, myself – quite rightly – shredded an entire
document, just to be shot of an appalling construction of a non-tale.
Not a file left. This was on a different
computer system, and would be hard to retrieve even if it still existed. So
what is an author’s output? Stories as-yet-unwritten? Adaptations. Fragments.
Ghostly volumes, sitting in Dream’s fanciful library?
Sir John Mortimer was tasked with stepping
in and “fixing” Ray Bradbury’s work on the script for Something Wicked This Way Comes. Unfathomable movie decision, but
there it is. Disney wanted a cute scary movie that wasn’t too cute and couldn’t
be too scary.
Does a movie adaptation by grand committee
destroy the original story? The original story is still there on the
bookshelves, after all. Turning to Ray Bradbury, we find in his work another
difficult area in trying to get at the output: transatlantic publishing.
It’s CAPRICORN
ONE all over again. That movie serves as The Martian Chronicles without – spoiler alert – actually going to
Mars. Spoiler spoiler alert – the
spoiler wasn’t much of a spoiler.
CAPRICORN
ONE spews up a great idea. What if the Mars landing is faked? Holes in the
plot? There are one or two hundred. The revelation that the movie spawned two
movie tie-ins, one by Ken Follett and the other by Ron Goulart, reminded me of
Ray Bradbury’s short story output. Ah, the output. Somewhere over the ocean, a
few stories fell into the mist-wreathed waters…
The
Illustrated Man is part of Ray’s output. I’ve read it. Seen the movie. I am
about to read the short stories again. For transatlantic reasons of the plot,
this book was and is published with different short stories in it – depending
where in the world you are.
I have a copy with yarn blah-de-blah missing and tale doodle-ee-doo
added. Yes, I’d characterise Ray as a writer of yarns and tales. Not
necessarily science fiction. Another
writer with transatlantic difficulties on the matter of output had a scathing
view of Science Fiction.
We return to Raymond Chandler for this one.
He had a go at the style, for laughs. “I cocked the timejector in secondary and
waded through the bright blue manda grass. My breath froze into pink pretzels.”
And so it goes.
Yes, I’ve read The Long Good-Bye. More than once. Chandler lost a little focus in
the writing of it, and accidentally changed the colour of a character’s hair
along the way. Editors on one side of the ocean caught this. They also excised
the miniature mystery over a very important suitcase.
But away from America, on this side of the
ocean, the suitcase mystery remains part of the book. It is a mystery that
isn’t followed. There’s no twist to it. Any clues inside the suitcase go
missing in the general plot. Chandler sets up part of a story and then abandons
it.
To this day, I still wonder what was in that
case. American readers don’t wonder at all.
The revolving door of stories featured in
different editions of The Illustrated
Man. A suitcase that may or may not appear in your copy of The Long Good-Bye. Are you prepared to
track down the comic book adaptation of the movie of the opera of the pizza of
the book?
Will you discover, many years later, that a
revised version of the sacred text was uncovered at an archaeological dig deep
in the forests of Pern? Are you keen on the Michelin
Restaurant Guide to the Inns and Taverns of Mordor…
What is the output? It is whatever you find
and in that inexact order. I’ve read ’em all, and then I’ve gone on to read
some more. Conclusion? Even I haven’t read all of my own work. Many of my
handwritten notes are illegible.
Saturday, 11 October 2014
THE TIRED IDEA OF DIGITAL PUBLISHING AS A GOLD RUSH: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
There's a tired idea concerning the definition of a tired idea, but we'll leave that for another time.
Digital publishing: the publication of work, factual or fictional, by electronic means - the material is readable on a variety of electrically-powered devices.
Electronic books may be published via print simultaneously or at a later date. It's possible to regain rights to a paper product long-vanished from shelves, and resurrect work digitally.
The publisher might be as huge as the largest conglomerate, or as small as one person. Height is not a factor.
Gold rush: dream-based migration to fresh fields and pastures new.
I must elaborate, lest I mislead readers into thinking I'm writing The Digital Devil's Dictionary.
Gold, or silver, lead, take your pick and mine a bit...
A commodity is discovered. (We may have problems with this word. Good.) Commodity. We'll go with gold, in this example. Toil is required to extract the material. Selling that stuff on at a profit, nugget by nugget, is the start of things.
Expertise is required to get at the good stuff. Finding gold on the surface, via panning, is laborious. Your panner lacks the resources to set up a full-blown mine.
The cry goes out. Money is lying around, waiting to be swept up. Gold for all. Hooray!
I'll repeat myself.
Toil is required to extract the material.
People rush in from all over. Small concerns sell out to larger ones, and industry steps in. Individuals make fortunes, it's true. A gold rush is a complex thing.
First, you have gold. Then there's a rush. After that, things are skewed.
I had to stop and think about the awkwardness of using a gold rush to describe digital publishing. It was pointed out to me, on the streets of San Francisco, that many old ships went to landfill.
Chunks of San Francisco teeter atop the bones of ancient hulks. How did that come about? Gold fever. Ships landed in the port and crews jumped ship to make easier fortunes. (Cough, splutter.)
Many a time I found myself on a street named for John Sutter. His agricultural empire was doomed when an employee found gold at Sutter's Mill.
James Wilson Marshall was mentioned a few times when I wandered the bay. He found the gold. Sutter wasn't happy. Gold fever is a rancid phase, turning minds to thoughts of panning, nuggets, and wealth.
Cynically, with a nod to Ambrose Bierce, the other phases of that game are just as rancid.
Sutter and Marshall didn't gain from the gold rush of 1848. Who did? Hoteliers. Laundries. Tool manufacturers. Bawdy houses. Legal eagles specialising in mine litigation.
A prospector's prospects weren't great.
Detour. Just to show you more of the same. Howard Hughes was a wealthy fellow. He studied law. The man knew the value of a patent. He filed patents for a two-cone rotary drill bit.
Then he leased the technology instead of selling outright. Hughes made a fortune out of the oil industry. Not by hunting for oil. And not by selling oil.
Hughes came in and made money out of the tools used for the job. Technically, he made money out of patent law. When he died, his son inherited most of the family business. A tangled tale. That Howard Hughes became a billionaire. This is not his story.
A commodity is discovered. The masses flock to the locale, to obtain that commodity through work. Prospectors hope to earn a fortune. The rush itself becomes as important as the gold.
Why? Laundry. Law. Tools. All the extra things that go with the industry. The drill bit that digs for oil has a great value to it.
Panning for gold?
You'll want lanterns and picks and all sorts of things. Tents. Enter Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss. Strauss sold the canvas. Davis provided the rivets and orange thread.
Their later work came out of the gold rush in the 1850s. The patent for a distinctive style of jeans went through in the 1870s when Davis filled a demand for railway workers.
Gold led Strauss to California so he could sell goods to prospectors. Davis ended up there and tailored. Their business association, forged in the gold rush years, created Levi's.
A gold rush goes through phases. Discovery of the gold. A cry in the night. Gold fever in all who hear the cry. True gold fever in those who heed the cry.
Side-businesses spring up. Gold seams are mined and mined out. Other metals are mined thereafter: silver, lead, or whatever is geologically associated with the location.
When truly mined out, what's left? Other industries may spring up down the decades. Hell, there's always tourism.
Discovery of the Comstock Lode, bearing silver, came a decade after California's famous gold rush. Cue silver rush. Same story. The men who discovered the find didn't benefit from it.
Ancient history? The Comstock Lode is still there. There are mining concerns. But it's the tourism that features heavily.
Same story, I was saying. I meant something by that. Gold in California. Silver in Nevada. Rush. Fortune. Small business turns to big business. Travel is the ultimate winner. People in Levi's jeans take the tour.
Digital publishing. You can pick and choose features of the gold rush and apply those to digital publishing. I see why people speak of a gold rush in publishing.
It's the rush that's being talked of. The movement of writers who turn to self-publishing an electronic book on Amazon, or wherever. A surge of a shift in behaviour, not just a shift in behaviour itself.
But it's not an electronic gold rush. For a number of reasons. Okay, there are people like Howard Hughes (Senior) and Jacob W. Davis and Levi Strauss who make money from side-businesses related to publishing electronically.
I'll give that much.
But gold is used very weakly in an attempt to describe a model that just isn't there with books. I see why people say authors turn to self-publishing in the hope that those writers strike gold.
It's a catchy image forced on the digital world. A prospecting author doesn't have the wherewithal to set up as a major publisher, so the prospector turns to panning gold - self-publishing - in the hope of hitting a major seam. An audience.
On a side-note, let us deal with that audience. Prospector discovers gold. Wants a team to help mine the seam. So he goes into a deal with big business and takes his cut.
That's a self-published author gaining an audience and attracting the attention of a major publisher. Big business buys up the small profitable claims that could lead to bigger bucks.
The big business that steps in cannot guarantee that outcome. If there is a gold rush in digital publishing, are loads of prospectors left by the wayside as big business comes in to do deals with the lucky few?
Fuck off.
I say that, as big business would have you believe it. The story of a self-published writer who makes it big and then signs a deal with an "authentic" publisher who is there to foster culture, and curate books, and promote talent...
Just. Fuck off.
Yes, that is the tone of my view. Damn if it ain't eloquent.
If there's a gold rush, the big professionals are left to muscle in and take over. Right?
Yes. But in digital publishing? Wrong. The model does not exist. It's the big publishers who are scrambling to deal with the digital world, even at this late stage.
And the stage is late. They should have adapted more, and more swiftly. There's no gold rush here. No grabbing of land. But I have veered off, and not in enough depth to satisfy the roots of any point.
My real problem with this whole thing is the product. A book is not a commodity. It is not universal in application. That's the main feature of a commodity.
At this point you may wish to investigate the word fungible. You might hold to the fervent belief that a commodity is simply a thing. Something to trade. And you may say that every product is a commodity. We part company on that point.
You are in the oil business, and produce barrels of oil. The customer wants oil. And the customer isn't in a position to reject the oil on the basis that the oil is cheese - that it's in the fiction category, instead of the biographical oil the customer was looking for.
The commodity has universal use. Gold is gold is gold. The most money I saw in one place was on display in a case of coins. The Brasher Doubloon seemed lost...
You can read about that in The High Window, by Raymond Chandler. The movie is called The Brasher Doubloon.
That expensive coin seemed a little lost in the same space as a Double Eagle. No change from $8 million if you are thinking of buying.
Look at that. Coins. The most money I've ever seen in one place.
Then I went downstairs to the gold vault and stared at billions of dollars. Undercover Treasury Agents are easy to spot outside New York's Federal Reserve Bank. They are, quite simply, everyone on the street. Including dogs and one or two hydrants.
Gold rush. The desirous end result of mining gold is gold. Just as the wished-for end result of drilling for oil is oil. Farming wheat most likely produces wheat. But writing, though it produces text, creates something that isn't a true commodity.
You may argue, and argue successfully, that there are aspects of the e-book business which make writing seem like a commodity. Okay, argue about seeming. Is seeming reality? No. It merely seems so.
At some basic level, you can say a fictional/non-fictional work provides a story. The story is the commodity. Only if you treat every story as being the same.
So, again. No. Stories aren't the same. Some of them don't even have beginnings, middles, or endings. Many are middling. Not all.
Processed gold sits in a vault. The purity is established. It matters not where the gold was mined. And it little matters where the gold is stored, bought, sold, or moved.
No apologies to bankers for that last sentence.
It's gold.
Processed oil is stored, waiting to be used as fuel. It matters not where the ancient creatures settled in the mud. In the end, their remains were converted into oil. Fuel is a commodity.
The reader of a book may turn his or her nose up at a western. Comedy. Horror. Tragedy. Romance. The book, fictional or non-fictional, isn't a commodity.
Though aspects of a gold rush model are often applied to digital publishing, there is no gold rush in the world of creating books. Yes, people may offer services related to book production.
Editing. Formatting. Cover design. Publicity. Legal advice. Let's throw in laundry and prostitution while we're here. Rent your drill bit from Howard Hughes. Buy a tent. Set up camp. Wear jeans.
But rush for gold? You have to write the book. Skill? Useful. Determination? Also useful. Talent, whatever the hell that is? Let's not deny it could come in handy.
You are creating a product, not a commodity. A peculiar product, that depends on taste. On liking, on leanings, on whims...
And on the language used. The book is not as universal as is metal. Gold requires no translator. It's a commodity.
Gold is gold is gold. We've given it a globally-accepted value. As far as a book goes, the sense of value is set up by the consumer. Was the book worth the time to read? And the financial cost, was that worth it?
Oil is oil is oil. You can use oil as fuel.
A book may serve to waste your time instead of serving to enrich it. It can't have universal gold-like interchangeability. And by hell, it shouldn't. Therein lies the fun.
Sadly, a book can be used as fuel.
Yes, you have to strike it lucky to find gold. But once you've found that fucker, it's GOLD.
Hell, you can write a book. But there isn't a trading price for it on the Exchange. You can get nothing for it. But you'll always get something for gold.
Oh, I hear you. Your story strikes it lucky and sells and THAT is the gold to you. But only to you. It isn't gold.
I wasn't going to publish this rambling chat about the non-fungibility of books. Fungible things? What are those?
(Go and write your own sci-fi dystopia in which this is the case. I'll read Ray Bradbury while I wait for you.)
By all means, gauge and denigrate my views based on your opinion of a number reflecting my book sales. I'll be over here laughing at you, because, if you'd do that, you'd do it if I wore a purple suit.
By using a very loose definition of commodity, you may say that a book as a product and as a thing is also a commodity. The word has moved on from earlier times and meanings.
Raw mined materials turned to processed materials, and agricultural products, are commodities these days. Those potato mines are damned busy.
To get through this blog post, I am saying all commodities are products - but not all products are commodities...I'm going to talk about the non-fungibility of books as a way of shooting down a tired idea of digital publishing as a gold rush, and I want the readers to get what I am saying when I use the word commodity.
Now you may add that a digital gold rush exists in publishing. But to accept a book as a commodity is to walk down the path of accepting that a book is fungible - exchangeable, tome for tome.
If you don't read Russian, is that Russian book of readable use to you? That exact tome? For the translated volume is a different book. It carries a different level of value and of use, at least, to me. Probably to you, too.
Books are not fungible. Not a commodity in the sense applied here. There is no gold, and no gold rush, in digital publishing. As with any business, there are aspects of business that carry from one to another. But I'm just not keen on this gold rush cliché, hence the blog post.
Also, there's the end. The seam is mined out. In digging for precious metal, that is the way of things. But with stories, different stories, non-fungible stories, fiction keeps on going - even over the same ground, in different ways.
Prospectors sell out to larger concerns and the small operator vanishes. Not in digital publishing. It's the large business that is struggling to continue, in digital publishing. No gold rush here.
There's only so much gold in them thar hills. But fiction's seam seems endless...
The day that seam runs out, our species is gone.
Did you get any of the rant splashed on your shoes? There's no commodity to mine. So what are you rushing to? Not gold. Our world is digital. Should there be special pleading for the world of writing?
(All businesses have their own peculiar tax arrangements. Let's leave it at that.)
Prospectors pan and sell out to mining conglomerates. Is this happening in publishing? No. Seams are tapped out, in the end. Is this happening in publishing? Only in the sense that all writers hang up their boots or die in them.
Monday, 11 February 2013
AN AUTHOR’S LIBRARY.
Monday, 16 July 2012
GIANT SPACE COCKROACH.
BABY SEAL: What about tall Kacey?