“All writers are visitors in another land: they can “take only photographs and leave only footprints³, as the Yanks wisely put it, or they can come with prefab condos and multinational media empires and flat rate DSL and terraform the landscape.³

The whole thing unfortunately has to start with the premise that nobody s innocent. No writer can be excused her part in the machinations of an industry that places the essence of what is being offered, the writing, at a lower footing than the attractiveness of the author (see Beryl Bainbridge¹s complaints back in 2001 about the UK scene, specifically re: Zadie Smith). The book industry is a sick place, its rivers clogged with the dull and degenerate droolings of the Hornbys and Selfs and its continental spine broken by the abysmal weight of its Tolkiens and Jane Austens. No sun can penetrate the global smog of market-driven publishing decisions, and no growing cycle ­ that process which, in the past, enabled difficult, demanding works such as Paradise Lost and Tristram Shandy to grow in appreciation and popularity over many, many years, thus surviving oblivion ­ has a chance of establishing itself against the hyper-accelerated appetite of a readership increasingly trained to accept rather than demand. Because every level of the book industry is helplessly mutating; from the writer, through the publishing houses (gaudy colonial outposts of savage media empires) via the outlets (hardly an area which could still be described as “bookselling³) to the Pavlovian readers, conditioned by Harry Potter to behave towards books ­cultural items with which one needs to spend more than 3 and a half minutes to become acquainted ­ as they do towards pop singles (which aren¹t quite what they once were, either). None of which is to say that things used to be better: it¹s indeed unfortunate that Harry Potter, having allegedly (re-)introduced millions of children to the joys of reading and thereby using their minds in a truly interactive fashion, should be rooted in such conservative and, well, old-fashioned traditions of children¹s books (structure based around the school terms, good vs evil, Terminator-like unslayable Dark Lord of Ultimate Evil, etc etc etc). A few modern ideas are precisely what are missing in this whole messed-up landscape.

• New ideas in writing: and the unforgivable Will Self “reinterpreting³

Wilde into drug and porn fantasies does NOT count as “new ideas³, neither do the uncountable, and equally unforgivable Tolkien clones who flood the Fantasy genre. But this is an enormous topic.

• New ideas in marketing books, which must be done, just better than it¹s being done now, perpertated as it is by inarticulate (ever read a press release from Faber & Faber?) Zeitgeist-enslaved intellectual pygmies with the attention span of a 7 year old on a chocolate high and the discerning eyes of a Daily Mail reader.

• New ideas in manufacturing books, as the quality of paperbacks is insanely uneven and the production quality of hardback editions is a bad, expensive joke; but this is a minor quibble.

• New ideas in distributing books; because the stationary bookseller, quaint old beast, is no longer relevant in this new world.

It is a new world; books and the book trade are the victims of a teleportation prank, awakening on a new world, and what is needed now is a colonial science, an exploratory science, rather than the inhuman pragmatism of market forces, to help literature in general and the book form in particular survive in this new environment.

(End of entry no.) 49

by Patrick

Hm, does technology create a new state of mind which results in a new form of literary expression? Typing on a computer already changes the process of writing compared to the traditional handwriting where you couldn't easily edit yourself right away.

Hypertext was promoted as an artistic breakthrough liberating free thought and all of that, remember?