Sounds & Fury

Gift

[Note: This post has been edited as of 11:56 AM Eastern on 11 Nov to correct a number of small errors and infelicities of expression.]

As I grow older, I find myself reading less and less fiction preferring instead to spend my book-reading time with non-fiction works in the fields of music, theoretical physics, and cosmology, the latter two in works written for laypersons. In fact, since my early thirties, I think the number of works of serious fiction I've read could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and, aside from the Harry Potter books, of genre fiction, none at all (an exception to this last is noted in passing below).

That said, although I've spent much of the past two decades off The Street, so to speak, I've not been living in a cave entirely, and so was aware of the huge publishing success of Dan Brown's 2003 mega-bestseller mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code. Unlike with the mega-bestseller Harry Potter books, however, I wasn't curious or provoked enough to read the thing just to see what all the fuss was about, nor did I bother to see the 2006 Ron Howard movie made from the book.

This past week, TNT telecast the movie, and so I took the opportunity to give it a look-see just to get an idea of what the book was all about. The plot premise was intriguing if a bit farfetched, but the movie, a crashing bore its Hollywood car chases notwithstanding, and that was enough to provoke me into getting hold of the book itself to see just what it was that made it a runaway bestseller, for if the movie was any indication of the book, there was nothing there (as I later discovered, the movie in fact missed or merely brushed past just about everything that made the book even marginally worth reading).

My first — and last — attempt at writing a novel-length work of mystery fiction (the S&F posts recounting the 13-years-ago genesis of which experiment and the recounting of my subsequent years-later experiment at self-publishing are collected here) taught me two things subsequent to the passing away of my first delusional flush of triumph wherein I was convinced I'd written a niche-market hit: 1) writing a work of genre fiction requires an intimate knowledge of and "feel" for the genre in which one is writing which knowledge and feel I foolishly, not to say arrogantly, wrongly imagined I could gain by reading some ten-gazillion novels of the genre within the space of a few months just to get the "formula"; and 2) that I've zero gift for the writing of fiction. In fact, the work I'd written was not so much written as manufactured to formula; the formula I'd wrongly imagined I learned from the reading of those ten-gazillion mystery novels. Excluding a mere handful of exceptions, those ten-gazillion mystery novels also shared one other thing in common beyond their adherence to the conventions of the genre (i.e., the "formula"): their prose writing was, shall we say, less than stellar. And so when I began reading The Da Vinci Code, I was prepared for less than stellar prose writing notwithstanding that the novel was a runaway bestseller. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for what I found.

There's hardly a page of The Da Vinci Code that does not induce multiple cringes at the execrable prose writing; writing so execrable it's almost beyond tolerance. Excluding from consideration the efforts of my own good self, I don't believe I've ever read a work of fiction, even mystery fiction, that could equal or surpass it in badness. And yet — and this, for me, is the real mystery — I kept on turning the pages!

Why? The characters are two-dimensional jokes; the incidents, contrived; and the plot, while inherently intriguing, is not much more so than the plots of a number of mystery novels I'd read previously in my above noted several-months mystery novel reading marathon. True, the expansion and embellishment of the quasi- or pseudo-historical basis of the inherently intriguing plot of The Da Vinci Code gave that plot a certain frisson not otherwise attainable. But still....

So, what's the answer; the explanation of the mystery of what it was that made me continue to turn the pages of this execrably written work of mystery fiction? I confess, I'm not really sure. What I'm certain of, however, is that no matter how deficient a writer of prose Dan Brown may be (or, rather, clearly is), he possesses a gift — i.e., that which cannot be acquired, but must be inborn — for the spinning out of a mystery narrative absent which gift even the best of fiction prose stylists would be helpless to write an effective novel of the genre. Further proof, if any were still needed, that writers and artists of all sorts, like idiots, are born, not made.

Students (and instructors) engaged in so-called "creative writing" courses, take note.

It's The Text, Stupid!

In his collection of essays on criticism and art, The Sacred Wood (1920), T.S. Eliot wrote in the essay titled, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", "[T]he more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." We suspect author P.D. Smith, writing for the blog, 3 Quarks Daily, would agree.

There is something about Kafka’s writing that gets under your skin. Perhaps that’s because he was always so uneasy in his own skin. Kafka described it as “a garment but also a straitjacket and fate”, suggesting that he saw skin as both clothing, something you choose to wear for a day before shedding, but also as a tightly bound involucre, restricting and suffocating the self — a biological fait accompli and a life sentence. Only Kafka could react so ambivalently and with such psychological acuity towards something most people take for granted and indeed scarcely think about.

[...]

Reading Kafka is the literary equivalent of an earthquake: as you read, you can feel the walls of reality begin to tremble and shake until eventually they come tumbling down around your ears. At the end, you find yourself wandering in an unfamiliar wasteland. All around are scattered the jumbled fragments of what you once recognised as normal life. Now you, the reader, have to begin putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

[...]

Unlike Leonardo da Vinci and Newton who used mirror writing or coded language in their notebooks to obscure their words, Kafka wanted to tell us something important. He didn’t set out to create a series of coded autobiographical puzzles in order to keep future literary historians in a job. The Germanist Martin Swales argues convincingly that the obsession with Kafka’s private life does not help us to understand Kafka’s writing: “an unremitting interest in the personality behind the utterance suggests that the utterance has in some way broken down”.

In a recent article, Zadie Smith has suggested that Kafka is “a writer sullied by our attempts to define him”. Novelist James Hawes, author of a new book called Excavating Kafka (or in the US, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life), seems to agree: “The myth of Kafka's life so overshadows what he wrote that millions who have never read a word of his know, or think they know, something about the middle-European Nostradamus, almost unknown in his own lifetime, trapped in a dead-end job, whose mysterious, endlessly interpretable works somehow foresaw the Holocaust (and so on).”

[...]

Biographical interpretations are an excuse for lazy reading. Using an author’s life to crack the code of his texts is just too easy. There are no shortcuts to interpretation.

And, we might add, not only "just too easy," but too easily misleading.

RTWT here.

16 June 1904

 

A Little Depression Never Hurt Anyone

Here's something for y'all to think — and think hard — about.

North Carolina writer Eric Wilson thinks America's current addiction to happiness threatens the arts.

[...]

Wilson writes about it in his new book, Against Happiness ($20, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which paints a disturbing portrait of what happens to art in a world filled with "happy types."

He predicts an America of vacant smiles and bland sameness. It's a place where poetry is a Hallmark card and where music is, well, Muzak.

"I fear we're creating a country where no one would aspire to write a novel like Moby-Dick again," said Wilson.... No one would even want to read it, because who needs Moby-Dick when you've got Dr. Phil?"

[...]

Dr. Thomas Svolos, an adjunct professor and the vice chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Creighton University School of Medicine, thinks Wilson may be on to something.

It's especially true because the psychiatric community has long known about the link between artistic genius and manic-depressive disorder. History is full of examples.

Composer Ludwig van Beethoven, painter Vincent van Gogh and writer Sylvia Plath all were famous depressives. And Springsteen was purportedly in a deep malaise when he entered a lonely room in Colts Neck, N.J., in 1981 to record "Nebraska."

"When you're melancholy, you tend to step back and examine your life," Svolos said. "That kind of questioning is essential for creativity."

But for happy types, life's deeper meaning may not be an active question. Wilson makes that point in his book, and Svolos thinks it points to an even broader cultural concern.

Before the 1950s, clinical depression was considered an extremely rare mental illness, affecting less than 5 percent of the population.

Now, Svolos said, depression is a catchall term.

"It applies to everything from a life-threatening mental illness to ordinary sadness or disappointment," he said. "It's all the same and often receives the same treatment."

And that treatment often involves the use of antidepressant drugs, which have been readily available since the 1990s.

[...]

"This overemphasis on drugs has become a knee-jerk reaction that's thrown our whole concept of happiness out of whack," Svolos said. "Happiness is now seen as a lack of suffering as opposed to accomplishing important societal goals, like creating art."

Sadly, all too true — except, that is, that last imbecile bit about the creation of art being an accomplishing of an "important societal goa[l]."

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

A Must-Read

The following are the opening grafs of a spot-on essay by Brian Boyd in The American Scholar. While it concerns literature and the academic literary world in particular, it’s a damning indictment of post-sixties, postmodern thinking in general, the thinking in the post-sixties, postmodern world of music very much included.

Stories can offer so much pleasure that studying them hardly seems like work. Literary scholars have often sought to allay unease at being paid to enjoy the frissons of fiction by investigating literature as a form of history or moral education. And since the late 1960s, academic literature departments have tried especially to stress criticism as critique, as an agent of social transformation.

For the last few decades, indeed, scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art — with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it — as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.

Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naïve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science, but like others in the humanities and social sciences, they have also denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.

I and others want literature to return to the artfulness of literary art and to reach out to science, now that science has at last found ways to explore human nature and human minds. Since these are, respectively, the subject and the object of literature, it would be fatal for literary study to continue to cut itself off from science, from the power of discovery possible through submitting ideas to the rule of evidence.

Word!

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

Doing What Needs To Be Done

In October of last year, I wrote a post titled “Dead In The Water” which gave a brief account of the end of my brief POD self-publishing adventure involving my “cozy” mystery novel, A Deed of Dreadful Note. What it said, in short, was that I was unwilling to do what I finally saw needs to be done in order to give the novel even a chance of commercial success.

In today’s Boston Globe there’s a story about one, Brunonia Barry, an author who took a similar POD self-publishing route for her first mystery novel, The Lace Reader, who was willing to do what needs to be done in order to give her novel a chance of commercial success, and ended up by having her self-published novel sold to a mainstream publisher, William Morrow, in a literary auction which netted Ms. Barry a $2M advance for the novel and for an additional one in future.

And what had to be done by Ms. Barry in order to achieve this admittedly singular result? Here’s a sampling:

Barry and [Gary] Ward [Barry’s husband] were willing to do all [that needed to be done], and spen[t] freely in the process — more than $50,000 before they were finished....

[...]

By early last year, they were ready to test the market. The manager of The Spirit of '76 Bookstore in Marblehead put them in touch with store-based book clubs, whose members said they would be willing to test-read the manuscript.

"I would go to the meetings and take notes," Barry said. "I asked them to be brutally honest: 'Where did you stop reading? Did you identify with this character? What did you think of the mother?'" With the feedback, she made some minor changes.

They incorporated their company as Flap Jacket Press and planned to release The Lace Reader last September. They set up a website and hired a copy editor, jacket designer, and book publicist, Kelley & Hall of Marblehead. They attended bookseller conventions, handing out advance copies and buttonholing booksellers. Kelley & Hall sent copies to book bloggers and trade magazines such as Publishers Weekly and promotional announcements to 700 independent bookstores.

Then last summer came two big breaks: First, Kelley & Hall helped lan[d] a deal with a Tennessee distributor, Blu Sky Media Group; second, a rave review appeared in Publishers Weekly. The Lace Reader was hailed as "a captivating debut."

Still, the couple had to close the deal with booksellers. They ordered a first printing of 2,500, then began to visit stores, trying to get them to stock the book. Among the first was Salem's Cornerstone Books.

"Sandy [Ms. Barry’s nickname] dropped her book off," said Beth Simpson, events coordinator of Cornerstone Books in Salem. "I didn't know her. I like to do an author appearance to generate interest; otherwise the book will just sit on the shelf." She arranged to have Barry do a reading, then called Salem and Marblehead newspapers, which ran stories about the reading.

"That generated incredible interest," Simpson said. "We had a handful of people a day coming in, asking if we had the book. At the appearance, we had about 40 people, which was a big crowd for an unknown author. We sold out in a blink — probably 80 to 100 books. We don't sell 80 to 100 books of Stephen King or Dennis Lehane."

Word spread. Several teachers read the book, and both Swampscott and Marblehead high schools added it to the literature curriculum.

That’s what needs to be done, all right, not to mention that the novel itself has to be worth the time, effort, and money involved.

In writing this post I don’t for an instant mean to even imply that had I done the same for my novel that it would have achieved even a small fraction of the success now enjoyed by Ms. Barry’s novel. She’s apparently a genuine writer who wrote a genuine novel, not some dilettante who turned out a tiny-niche-market genre novel on a whim; a genre novel that was more manufactured to formula than written. In writing this post it’s my intention to point out that in today’s world self-publishing need no longer be a mere exercise in vanity as it has been since forever, but is today a commercially viable publishing route for an author to follow in order to get his work out to the public and make money from the enterprise into the bargain. Perhaps not the kind of money made by Ms. Barry — in that respect, her case is quite exceptional — but enough for a genuine writer to make writing and marketing his own work a profitable fulltime occupation.

It’s a brave new publishing world out there.

Sonofagun!

Despite an almost total lack of promotion and publicity, my adventure in POD publishing — the “cozy” mystery novel, A Deed of Dreadful Note — is now listed by and available for purchase from booksellers Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Borders.

Sonofagun! Makes one feel like a real author, it does, even though the listings do need some corrections (being handled now by the publisher, Lulupress).

A Sad If Sobering Bit Of Reading For The New Year

Bryan Appleyard of The Sunday Times provides us a sad if sobering bit of reading to launch the new year:

Something happened in 2007, something ended. Old gods stumbled and fell. New ones sprang up. But they sprang up in their thousands. That’s the point these days.

Technology, hype and the sheer profligacy of the arts when confronted with a large, hungry and wealthy audience have created a climate of excess — just too many artists, too much money, too many works and too much noise. Who knows who, now, is great? Even if greatness existed, how would we find it? Do we want greatness, or would we simply prefer choice?

RTWT here.

Happy New Year!, everyone.

A Delicious Halloween Scare Of The Literary Sort

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:16 PM Eastern on 31 Oct. See below.]

There are ghost stories of the Stephen King sort (The Shining, for example) and there are ghost stories of the Poe sort (The Fall of the House of Usher, for example). And then there is The Turn of the Screw, the 1898 Henry James long short story or novella; a ghost story nonpareil and sui generis. Is the young governess narrator (she’s not identified by name) reliable and her chronicle of the demon ghosts, Quint and Miss Jessel, and their evil purpose a record of events real and true? Or is she a love-struck, sexually repressed, flaming neurotic whose narrative requires a Freudian reading in order to even begin to rightly comprehend? Or is she simply a flat-out loony; an early-stage paranoid schizophrenic complete with hallucinations and lunatic delusions whose chilling narrative is the product of a disordered mind (so perfect a portrait of the clinical type does James draw that up until the very last page of the tale I was convinced of this even though I’ve never seen a critique that so much as touches on this possibility as an explanation of the tale)? After more than 100 years, hundreds of articles and theses, and hundreds of thousands of words, the members of the jury are still out on the answers to those questions, and I along with them.

And then there’s the writing itself. James’s prose and his sentence structure are maddeningly 19th-century tortuous and ornamented, and a 21st-century reader has first to mentally prepare himself for that before even beginning to read. Or is it rather that the governess’s prose and sentence structure are such (the narrative is a recitation of her written record)? As TTotS is the only James I’ve ever read, I’m in no position to make any judgment concerning that. (Note: See Update below.)

Its prose style and sentence structure notwithstanding, the text is ordered in such a tight, organic manner that my plan to include here a coherent, stand-alone representative excerpt from that text for those of you who’ve never read this tale was defeated utterly. Taken out of context, no part of the text makes any real impact. The genuinely chilling impact of both the individual events and of the tale itself is rather a product of the cumulative effect of the text of the telling, and it’s perhaps precisely that which makes TTotS the nonpareil and sui generis thing that it is.

If you’re looking for a delicious literary scare this Halloween, put down whatever it is you might be reading, and pick up this paragon of a literary ghost story. You can’t get from the movie (The Innocents) or even from the opera (Britten’s, The Turn of the Screw) based on the tale, brilliant though the latter may be, even a modicum of the sinisterly chilling effect produced by James’s text itself.

Trust me.

---

Update (5:16 PM Eastern on 31 Oct): How thoroughly stupid of me to write as I did above:

And then there’s the writing itself. James’s prose and his sentence structure are maddeningly 19th-century tortuous and ornamented, and a 21st-century reader has first to mentally prepare himself for that before even beginning to read. Or is it rather that the governess’s prose and sentence structure are such (the narrative is a recitation of her written record)? As TTotS is the only James I’ve ever read, I’m in no position to make any judgment concerning that.

The entire Prologue of TTotS is written by James in propria persona, and the style and sentence structure of that text bears little resemblance to the style and sentence structure of the text of the tale itself which, as the tale has it, was written by the young governess herself. And so the answer to this question was all the while quite literally staring me in the face.

Jeez!

Dead In The Water

And that’s even before actually jumping in. I’m talking about the promotion phase of my POD self-publishing experiment of course. During this period of enforced waiting until the book has made it through the distribution process and shows up (or, rather, is made available to show up) on booksellers’ online lists and on their brick-&-mortar-store bookshelves (about 8-10 weeks from now), I’ve been investigating what’s available to me promotion-wise, and just what needs to be done in order to promote the book after it’s finally made it through that distribution process, and just an investigatory dipping of my toes into those promotional waters has already overwhelmed me by the impossibility of the demands I now see clearly will be made on me if the promotion is to be even marginally successful.

I’d naively imagined that a satisfactory promotion campaign could be waged for very little money and right from my own living room utilizing the Net almost exclusively. While the Net is an important part of promoting a book today, I now see its use is mostly supplementary. The core of any successful promotion, I discovered very quickly, involves two central elements: 1) getting the book reviewed by established reviewers in established venues; and 2) getting one’s ass out of that comfortable chair in front of one’s computer, and onto The Street to Greet 'n Meet and Press The Flesh of both booksellers and the reading public. Both those elements are sine qua non — quite literally — in any successful book promotion today.

The first is, in practical terms, quite literally impossible for a POD self-published title by an unknown author, and the second, for me personally, is a virtual impossibility. Me, go out on The Street again? Me, Greet 'n Meet and Press The Flesh of actual, real-world, real-live humans?

Not in this life.

To begin with, such a situation would prove an embarrassment for everyone concerned as in short order it would be discovered that I, the author of a mystery fiction novel, never read mystery fiction, and in fact know absolutely nothing about the genre beyond what I was forced to learn before writing A Deed of Dreadful Note by reading ten-gazillion best-selling mystery fiction titles, past and present, over a three-month period — the absolutely longest three months I’ve ever spent — in order to get a grasp of the genre “formula(s)” involved. Never in my life have I been exposed to so much utter literary trash. I confess, however, that it served to encourage me to write Deed, and bolstered my confidence in its future commercial success. I mean, if that utter literary trash saw commercial publication, Deed would be a shoe-in.

Uh-huh. Right.

Further, I’m just not a people-person kind of guy. Not my thing, generally speaking, and most especially so when my sole purpose would be to sell people something. I lack entirely the “Salesman Gene”, and cringe physically at the very thought of having to sell anything to anybody. During my younger days I had the infamous (but secretly cherished by me) reputation of not being able to sell a glass of cool water to a thirst-tortured man in the middle of the Sahara.

All too true, I’m afraid.

So, it seems I’m dead in the water even before jumping in. Too bad, actually. The experiment’s an excellent idea. Just not with me as the experimenter.

Of Elephants And Literary Agents

It's been said that elephants have long memories. Perhaps they do, but an elephant's memory is as nothing compared with the memory of a literary agent.

A Deed of Dreadful Note, the book I just POD self-published and began flogging in my last post is, as I've indicated, an old ms; some 12 years old, to be more exact. At that time, the ms made the standard lit agent and small-press publisher rounds (major houses were out of the question for direct submission by me as they all required that submissions come from established lit agents only), and was actually picked up for representation by a series of three lit agents — one after the other, not at the same time, of course — who then attempted to find a publisher for it, but met with no success.

A fourth, who chose not to represent the ms, was bluntly truthful about why she declined. She liked the ms, but held out little hope of its ever being sold. It was, she told me straightforwardly, simply out of synch and out of sympathy with the times, book-market-wise. Worse, it was a small-niche genre piece that didn't really fit its declared genre; didn't meet the genre "specs," so to speak, its worst crime being that it had a male protagonist. It in fact didn't really fit any genre, but sort of fell between the genre "cracks" with the result that she couldn't quite make out just who the finished book's audience would be. That's a virtual Kiss of Death for any work of genre fiction.

Part of my flogging of the current POD self-published A Deed of Dreadful Note involved posts on several writers forums. Lo and behold, who should contact me by eMail in response to one of those posts but that very same agent. Her entire message, which was sans salutation:

Persistent little devil, aren't you. Good for you!

Amazing.

It's A Whole New Publishing World Out There — Maybe, Pt. 2

In the initial installment of this saga (which can be read here), I related how I discovered the new publishing phenomenon of POD self-publishing when, by happy accident, I stumbled across the online POD self-publisher Lulu.com, and subsequently "published" a trade paperback of an old ms of mine. I was so impressed by the ease with which one could self-publish a book, and even more impressed by the physical product produced by that process, that I determined right then to investigate the matter more thoroughly to see whether an author — specifically an author of fiction — could overcome the strictly-for-losers stigma attached to self-publishing, and actually make real money by self-publishing his own work. Toward that end, I embarked on an informal research project to attempt to discover just what it is that's required to accomplish both.

The first thing I learned is that if one wants to see one's book for sale in markets other than Lulu's own Marketplace, one has to get one's physical book into the proper shape to meet industry standards, and then get that book entered into the book distribution system so that it's available for purchase by booksellers — both the online and brick & mortar sort — worldwide.

Turns out that latter, which sounds dauntingly formidable, is actually a piece of cake with Lulu. One simply buys one of the two distribution packages offered: Published By You (cost: $50), or Published By Lulu (cost: $100).

With the former, you are the publisher; with the latter, Lulu is the publisher. In both cases you as the author retain all rights to your work, and with each you make the same amount of money from sales of your book. The only significant difference between the two distribution packages is that with the former you must first register yourself as the publisher and apply for an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for your book, an absolute necessity as nothing can be done with a book in the book marketplace absent its assignment of an ISBN.

Well, that's a royal pain in the ass, and a two- to three-week wait before the ISBN — which you will then own for that one book — is assigned. With the latter distribution package you don't have to do anything, and there's no wait involved. Lulu is the publisher, and the ISBN for your book is assigned instantly but is owned by Lulu as the publisher, not you, which is a mere technicality.

With both distribution packages, once the ISBN is assigned Lulu will then,

1: Place a scannable Bookland-EAN bar code on the back cover of the book.
2: Feed the bibliographic data on the book to the major international bibliographic databases so that the book will be findable by booksellers worldwide.
3: Convert your retail price (which you set yourself) into five currencies (US dollars, British pounds, Australian dollars, Euros, and Canadian dollars) to facilitate global availability and purchasing.
4: Ensure a listing of the book in the catalog of the major US wholesaler which gives access to the book for purchase by all US booksellers including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Needless to say, I purchased the Published By Lulu distribution package.

So far, so great.

Now, about getting that book into physical shape to meet industry standards, there are two areas of concern: the book's cover (back, front, and spine), and the book's interior (the "inner matter"). In my case, the cover was a no-brainer as I simply used one of Lulu's standard templates which is guaranteed to meet industry standards (and not so incidentally, in terms of the physical materials used, exceeds them; the perfect-bound Lulu trade (6x9 format) paperback, both cover and interior, is simply gorgeous). I merely customized the cover with the background color (I use no images on my cover), text typefaces, font sizes and font colors of my choice (the text being my own, of course).

The inner matter required no work at all as my original formatting met industry standards. The only iffy part is that I created the required PDF file directly from Word by using Word's own PDF file generator which sounds like it might be something complicated but is another no-brainer as one simply clicks on SAVE AS PDF instead of the normal SAVE which latter saves the file as a regular Word document (. doc or .docx file). The iffy part is that while the resulting PDF file generated in that way is perfectly OK for printing a book for the Lulu Marketplace, Lulu tells us that to meet industry standards (i.e., to comply with the requirements of industry-standard print converters) the PDF file must be "distilled" using the Adobe Distiller which would mean purchasing from Adobe (the inventor of PDF) an almost $400 piece of software for which I've no other use, or uploading my .docx file to Lulu (instead of a PDF file) who will then do the PDF distilling for me.

I'm fairly certain, however, that I won't need that pricey piece of software or need Lulu to do the distilling as Word's PDF file generator generates a PDF file that's in compliance with a PDF standard called PDF/A which is a PDF standard set by the digital printing industry itself. I'll know within two weeks whether I'm right about that or not. (The printer for the book wholesaler — not the same printer Lulu uses for printing books for its own Marketplace which books, as I've already noted, exceed the physical standards of the books printed for the wholesaler — will examine the PDF file to make certain it's OK for their use, and if not report back what needs to be changed.)

Well, I just uploaded my final-proofed inner matter PDF file of that old ms to Lulu (the cover is generated by Lulu themselves), approved all the things that Lulu requires one to approve (a matter of a simple button click, actually), and within seconds got this eMail back from Lulu:

Thank you for approving "A Deed of Dreadful Note" [the book's title].

You have completed your portion of the Published By Lulu process.

Your book information will be sent to Bowker's Books In Print [the publishing industry's "bible" of bibliographic data] and once approved by Bowker, Lulu will upload your title to our distribution network. Should there be any problems with your title in Books In Print, we will contact you. This process is generally completed within 2-3 weeks. You can expect to see your book listed on Amazon and other online retailers within the next 6 to 8 weeks.

Regards,

Lulu Support

Assuming everything goes well with that, then the truly daunting, positively scary, but sine qua non business begins: the promotion of the book.

What's that I hear you saying? How am I going to go about doing that?

Not a clue — yet. Except to give you all a link to the web page I've set up for A Deed of Dreadful Note which provides a general description of the book, permits you to read Chapter 1 complete, and contains the link to A Deed of Dreadful Note's Lulu Marketplace page where you can purchase the trade paperback. A Deed of Dreadful Note's web page can be accessed here.

It's A Whole New Publishing World Out There — Maybe

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:33 AM Eastern on 12 Oct. See below.]

The thing began innocently enough. I'd just purchased a copy of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 ($125 from Amazon) mainly to get a copy of Word at the lowest possible price. I've been using Word as my word processor since it's inception and this 2007 incarnation is the first major redesign of the product in almost a decade, and all the changes looked just spectacular and the right way to go. Now all I needed was a project that would allow me to put it through all its paces, but had none in the works that would permit that.

Shortly thereafter, I was doing some small research on Berg's Lulu, and by mistake entered into Google the keywords, lulu opera book, instead of entering the correct keywords, lulu berg opera book. And the very first item on the list that came up was, Browse Books - Lulu.com. Aha! A site devoted exclusively to books on Lulu. Perfect! And so I clicked over.

Needless to say, Lulu.com is nothing of the sort, but is instead a Print On Demand (POD) publisher. I'd of course heard of POD publishing, but only in a very general way, and I didn't pay a lot of attention to it as it seemed to be something of interest mainly to book publishers and sellers for the most part. But Lulu is not set up for book publishers and sellers. Quite the contrary. It's set up for authors themselves as a way to self-publish, but not to be confused with that justly vilified self-publishing entity, the so-called vanity presses, most of which are largely scams, and hugely expensive ones at that.

Well, this seemed to offer a perfect way for me to wring out my new toy. I'd take an old ms typescript and massively reformat it as a POD paperback in my new Office Word 2007.

But on first investigation, Lulu simply looked far too good a deal, which of course made me instantly suspicious: No fees involved, up-front or otherwise, except as a small commission on your sales; the offering of valuable distribution and marketing packages the purchase of which are entirely voluntary and at prices that are almost too reasonable; and an online physical publishing process that's so fast and simple even a trained chimp could manage it (well, not quite, but you get my meaning, I'm sure).

After the matter of fees, the very next thing I thought suspect was the quality of the physical product that would be produced by this amazingly simple online publishing process. No way could this process produce a physical book that could pass as the same product from a major publishing house. I mean, c'mon!, give me a break.

And so I took that old ms, reformatted the typescript in my new toy, saved it as a PDF file (a technical requirement of this publishing process), and "published" it. It took me all of two hours to reformat the thing (Word performed like the champion application it's always been, only easier to navigate and operate than with former incarnations), and exactly nine minutes to "publish" it as a 6x9 trade paperback (for the cover art, I simply used a standard Lulu template as I have neither the software nor the expertise necessary to do my own cover art).

Oh yeah. This is going to work. When pigs fly, maybe.

I then ordered a copy of the 178pp book (cost: $8) to see what I and Lulu had wrought.

I received the book a week later (shipped UPS). When I opened the Amazon-style package, I simply couldn't believe what I was looking at. The physical book was absolutely, and in every way, indistinguishable from any trade paperback put out by any of the best major houses in the country.

Astonishing.

I'm now investigating more deeply this whole POD self-publishing phenomenon to see whether it can possibly overcome the justified stigma attached to vanity publishing (which POD self-publishing can be, but is not necessarily), and actually make real money for authors. If it can do both, it's a whole new publishing world out there, and one I want to be a part of.

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Update (7:33 AM Eastern on 12 Oct): Part 2 of this saga can be read here.

On Kierkegaard

Here's an incisive, informative, and beautifully written post on Kierkegaard by musicologist, composer, music critic, and blogger Kyle Gann of PostClassic. Makes us rather wish he confined himself to writing about philosophy and philosophers rather than "postclassic" music about which latter we can find no point of either interest or agreement.

Two Items Of Note

We're still on an instructive blogging-break odyssey of discovery in another online domain (again, more on that here when it's completed), but here are two more items of note.

First, this it-was-inevitable article on the late Luciano Pavarotti by Philip Gossett for The New Republic:

How do you judge a life, especially a life played out so completely in the public eye? You begin, of course, by identifying what was so extraordinary about the figure, and in this case everyone is agreed: that voice, that sound, that ability to match syllables and notes. Unmistakable. Unbelievable. When Pavarotti first appeared on operatic stages during the 1960s, he seemed a revelation. There were other great tenors, to be sure, but this voice that joined the most sensitive lyricism with extraordinary power, this artistry in which word and tone were a single unit, this singer had a presence that seemed unique. Here was a tenor who could finally show us what Donizetti and Bellini had in mind.

[...]

And yet ... and yet ... This most beautiful tenor voice in living memory seemed gradually to lose its bearings. It was not just the circus show of the "Three Tenors"; it was not just the "Pavarotti & Friends" extravaganzas with pop stars and television personalities; it was not just the fluttering white handkerchief. Before his death, he said repeatedly that he wanted to be remembered as an opera singer, but that was the profession he seemed to have betrayed.

Ah yes. Quite so. All of it.

RTWT here.

And then there's this on his first-time reading of George Orwell's 1984 from off-off-Broadway theater director and blogger Isaac Butler of Parabasis which gets our vote for Bon Mot Of (at least) The Month:

Jesus Christ, this thing was supposed to be a cautionary tale, not an instruction manual!

Isaac has further thoughts on 1984 here.

And So It Goes

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 7:08 AM Eastern on 24 Jul. See below.]

Without going into any detail at all at this point in time for reasons which should be obvious, I confess that I found Year 7 of the Potter saga, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final volume of the series, to be largely a major disappointment. For the most part the book plays out like a Hollywood bubble-gum action flick with loads of effects without sufficient cause; several deus ex machina, a never acceptable device; characters — even well-known and beloved characters — drawn as if by rote; and throughout, prose and imaginative plotting and situations a whole order of magnitude inferior to the previous volumes in this series. It's not until the last 150 pages or so of this 759-page volume that Ms. Rowling once again comes into her own and displays the narrative and imaginative gifts that have made this series the worldwide phenomenon that it is.

Too bad.

And so it goes.

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Update (7:08 AM Eastern on 24 Jul): On the evidence of more than a few eMail responses to my above comments, I see that some clarification of one of my remarks is in order.

By my saying that, "It's not until the last 150 pages or so of this 759-page volume that Ms. Rowling once again comes into her own, and displays the narrative and imaginative gifts that have made this series the worldwide phenomenon that it is," I meant to say only what I said. I did not mean to say, or even so much as imply, that I thought Ms. Rowling handled the ultimate dénouement of this series in a satisfactory or satisfying way. I in fact think just the contrary. To my way of thinking, Ms. Rowling, in bringing this epic saga to its close in the way she did, displayed a colossal failure of nerve that was most egregious, and more than just a little surprising. But given that my saying any more at this point in time would constitute a spoiler for those who've still not read the book to its conclusion, for the nonce, that's as much as I can or am willing to say.

Unforgivable

[Note: This post has been updated (3) as of 5:47 AM Eastern on 21 Jul. See below.]

Michiko Kakutani, chief book reviewer for The New York Times, somehow got her hot little hands on a prerelease copy of Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows ("purchased at a New York City store yesterday," she informs us), the seventh and final installment of the Harry Potter series, and ... reviewed it in the pages of today's New York Times book section. She avoided including spoilers directly, but hinted at enough to spoil it nevertheless for Potter fans everywhere, not to mention blunt the magic (N.P.I.) of perhaps the most singular event in fiction publishing history: the simultaneous reading on 21 July (the book's release date) of this avidly- and long-awaited final installment and dénouement of this beloved series by millions upon millions of Potter fans worldwide.

A crass and callous, not to mention unforgivably thoughtless, act.

Ms. Kakutani has much to answer for as does The Times.

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Update (9:36 AM Eastern on 19 Jul): Lindesay Irvine of the Guardian Unlimited posts his thoughts on Ms. Kakutani's piece here.

Update 2 (12:12 PM Eastern on 19 Jul): Author J.K. Rowling comments on the publication of Ms. Kakutani's piece:

I am staggered that American newspapers have decided to publish purported spoilers in the form of reviews in complete disregard of the wishes of literally millions of readers, particularly children, who wanted to reach Harry’s final destination by themselves, in their own time. I am incredibly grateful to all those newspapers, booksellers and others who have chosen not to attempt to spoil Harry’s last adventure for fans.

Read more here.

Update 3 (5:47 AM Eastern on 21 Jul): Clark Hoyt, Public Editor (ombudsman) of The New York Times, responds to the furious storm of dismay and outrage consequent Ms. Kakutani's pre-release review, and a more choice bit of sophistry it would be difficult to find. Sample:

Rick Lyman, the books and theatre editor, said, "Our feeling is that once a book is offered up for sale at any public, retail outlet, and we purchase a copy legally and openly, we are free to review it."

[...]

I think it’s important to remember that there was never a contract or an agreement between The Times and Rowling or her publisher. The publisher set the release date unilaterally as part of the brilliant marketing campaign that has propelled the entire Harry Potter phenomenon. Neither The Times nor any other newspaper had an obligation to help enforce the release date.

If anything, Kakutani’s favorable review and the controversy around its timing has just created more buzz and anticipation – if more is possible – on the eve of the launch of what is sure to be this year’s best seller.

Curious, If Not Outright Astonishing

It's a curious, if not outright astonishing, fact that the man whose writings — clinical, theoretical, and speculative — have impacted the arts of the Western world more than any other writings in history was himself largely dismissive of artists and the arts even as he took enormous pleasure in their experiencing, and was strangely impervious to the affective power of what is perhaps the greatest and most affecting art of all: music. I speak, of course, of Sigmund Freud.

"[T]he creative artist, that most cherished of human creatures, appeared in some psychoanalytic treatments [i.e., written treatments both by Freud and by other psychoanalysts] as nothing better than an adroit and articulate neurotic duping a gullible world with his clever inventions," writes Freud biographer Peter Gay — director of the Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, Sterling Professor Emeritus of History at Yale University, and, in addition to securing his M.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Columbia, a graduate of Western New England Institute for Psychoanalysis — in his brilliant 1988 biography of Freud, Freud: A Life for Our Time.

Dr. Gay continues,

Freud did not merely dispute the "creativeness" of creative artists, he also circumscribed their cultural role. Shouting out society's secrets, they are little better than necessary licensed gossips, fit only to reduce the tensions that have accumulated in the public's mind. Freud saw the making of art and literature, as well as their consumption, as human pursuits much like others, enjoying no special status. [...] To his mind, aesthetic work, much like the making of love or war, of laws or constitutions, is a way of mastering the world, or of disguising one's failure to master it. The difference is that novels and paintings veil their ultimately utilitarian purposes behind skillfully crafted, often irresistible decorations.

[...]

Appearances to the contrary, Freud did not take his view of the arts in order to discredit them wholly. Whether it is made of wit or suspense, of dazzling color or persuasive composition, the aesthetic mask hiding primitive passions provides pleasure. It helps to make life tolerable to maker and audience alike. Thus, for Freud, the arts are a cultural narcotic, but without the long-range costs that other drugs exact. The task of the psychoanalytic critic, then, is to trace the various ways in which reading and listening and seeing actually generate aesthetic pleasure, without presuming to judge the value of the work, its author, or its reception. Freud needed no one to tell him that the fruit need not resemble the root and that the garden's loveliest flowers lose none of their beauty because we are made aware that they grow from malodorous manure. But Freud was professionally committed to the study of roots. At the same time, if Freud chose to read The Merchant of Venice and King Lear as meditations on love and death, Shakespeare did not therefore become a matter of purely clinical interest to him. [...] Goethe did not lose stature as a Dichter [poet or artist] in Freud's eyes even after he had psychoanalyzed a passage from Goethe's autobiography, Poetry and Truth. But the fact remains that with all his affection for literature, Freud was all his life more interested in truth than in poetry.

Indeed he was — as befits any scientist or scientific investigator.

And as to Freud's strange imperviousness to the affective power of music, I suspect that, personally and unconsciously at least, he found it too difficult, too inexplicable, and perhaps more than anything else, simply too dangerous.

Explains Just About Everything

Regular readers of this blog over the years are more than passingly aware of our numerous, um, criticisms of the quality of the arts coverage of the mainstream media, particularly the daily mainstream media, in terms of its content, its writers, and the makeup of its pages, our most frequent target being the arts pages of The New York Times. We most frequently target The Times because it's our "native" newspaper, so to speak (although not a native New Yorker, we've been reading the arts pages of The Times since our junior high school days); a newspaper that's often, and for good reason, referred to as America's "National Newspaper of Record"; and because of the precipitous descent in the quality and content of those pages over the past couple years or so in particular.

Well, the man most responsible for that descent — New York Times culture editor, Sam Sifton, who was appointed culture editor of The Times in 2005 — is holding court and fielding reader questions this week in The Times's Talk to the Newsroom section of the newspaper, and so we thought we might ask a question or ten of Mr. Sifton. But all we could think of to ask was the simple question:

What specially qualifies you to "overse[e] the daily Arts pages ... and [the] Arts & Leisure [section]" of any major broadsheet, much less The New York Times, our "National Newspaper of Record"?

Needless to say, and as expected, our question wasn't published, and no answer was otherwise forthcoming.

We don't blame Mr. Sifton for that, actually, as the question was both unseemly and exceedingly rudely put, and aggressive in the extreme into the bargain. And so we went a-Googling for an answer. And what did we find? This, from the 2005 Times press release announcing Mr. Sifton's appointment as the culture editor of The Times:

Mr. Sifton, 38, has been deputy culture editor at The Times since 2004. He joined The Times in 2001 as deputy Dining editor, and became Dining editor later that year. Previously he was a founding editor of Talk magazine where he worked until 1998. Before joining Talk he held a number of positions at the New York Press from 1990 to 1998, including managing editor, media critic, senior editor, contributing editor and restaurant critic. Before joining the New York Press he taught social studies in New York City public schools from 1990 to 1994. Before that, he was an assistant editor at American Heritage from 1988 to 1990.

Mr. Sifton graduated magna cum laude from Harvard College with a B.A. degree in history and literature in 1988. He is author of A Field Guide to the Yettie (Talk Miramax Books, 2000).

Pretty much explains just about everything, doesn't it.

Gioia Tells It Straight And In Your Face

Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana Gioia, may not be a celebrity or otherwise famous, nor any great shakes as a poet, but as a university commencement speaker and pitchman for high culture and the arts he rocks.

[Today,] almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment or altogether eliminated. The loss of recognition for artists, thinkers, and scientists has impoverished our culture in innumerable ways, but let me mention one. When virtually all of a culture's celebrated figures are in sports or entertainment, how few possible role models we offer the young. There are so many other ways to lead a successful and meaningful life that are not denominated by money or fame. Adult life begins in a child's imagination, and we've relinquished that imagination to the marketplace.

[...]

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.

I have a recurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo's incomparable fresco of the "Creation of Man." I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam's finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.

[...]

Don't get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent fifteen years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.

But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing — it puts a price on everything.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)