An Introduction, Encompassing Various
Embittered Ramblings on the Book Industry, and a General Attempt to
Explain What is Required of You
I am
somewhat obsessive in nature, in unproductive and bizarre ways. As a
teenager, while others fled into strobe-lit nightclubs to uncover
their latent sexualities and the moreish properties of alcopops, I
was cocooned in my room engaged in various multimedia projects. The
first was a violent comic strip, Comics of Death, rendered in
black biro featuring various stickmen superheroes whose stick-limbs I
took pleasure in removing with floods of comic blood and manic pen
strokes: channelling the loner’s pain through the medium of
sub-toddler-calibre revenge fantasies. Later, I took to compiling a
series of cut-and-paste cassette experiments named Head Radio,
splicing together snippets of radio broadcasts, choice songs from ten
CDs, using low-tech cassette equipment to seamlessly weave these
elements together. I also ran my own TV channel, studying TV
listings and cueing up a week-long viewing schedule post-homework
(6pm) onwards, taking in live broadcast shows, films, comedies, and
sports recorded in the middle of the night, until bedtime (one
special broadcast lasted until 7am). I moved on to more sophisticated
fare in the form of a weekly surrealist magazine, entitled with no
logic Cadbury’s Overrated Flamethrower (xeroxed issues still
available for 20p each). In between these activities, I also nursed a
video game addiction, where I would collect emeralds, sapphires, and
other useless gemstones again and ditto for hours at a stretch.
Anything to avoid the outside world.
I
accepted a begrudging stint at the university where, in lieu of
studying or having sex, I became a keen cataloguer of records,
latching on to post-punk bands and devouring their oeuvres. Not
content with flash-in-the-pan affairs, I would scrape the B-side
barrel, collecting rare tracks, dregs, and songs I would never listen
to twice, compiling shelffuls of discs in catalogued cases. I
assembled thematic compilations to present to future lovers who never
appeared. These obsessive actions were borne, of course, of
loneliness, and a burning need to eat up time, to repel the mind from
bothersome thoughts of having to survive in the real world. This
behaviour blossomed well into adult life, taking the form of a new
obsession: books. Reading habits proved to be similar—authors to
whom I took a liking were devoured with impatient pleasure. I read
five Ali Smith books within a week and sprinted through the canon of
Dickens in under two months. Ulysses was blitzed in four days.
I write this not for the bragging rights, more to highlight the sort
of antisocial mania that makes your life better than mine (unless you
are someone who yearns to read canons at record speeds).
This
poses the puzzle: what sort of reader am I, and why, precisely,
should you be reading a blog on books by me, when top scholars,
refined minds, and cunning critics have their how-to manuals,
close-reading primers, and re-de-constructed hoohas to peep? If I
wade through tomes with the rompacious lust of a sex addict mounting
a new conquest, never seeking emotional sustenance or stratagems for
living, can I be trusted to pull the reader through a blogful of
forgotten treasures? I am at best a shallow reader,
leaping into books and sucking up the nutrients—the language, weave
of the words, the humour, the pleasure—and skirting the moral
instruction or savage emotional attacks. I linger on succulent
sentences, those rich in lexical honies, verbilicious passages, and
vocalorific treats, but rarely do I linger on the plights of the
characters, or learn lessons from their sufferings, absorb their
pains, and the other business in which more “emotional” readers
revel.
I am,
above all else, a drooling fanboy. I considered a career taking a
hermeneutical approach to mimetic tropes in the novels of Donald
Barthelme, then I unconsidered that career. I wanted more, more,
more, and for afters, more, more, and more please. I wanted no nine
to five. I sought nothing less than life-as-reader, never having to
write features or critical pieces for magazines, and hence, be paid.
I wanted excessive and uninterrupted reading with no pressures from
the capitalist world. I wanted full-on readerly utopia and I pursued this
because there was no rational argument against. My stubbornness has won me a minor victory.
*
This
latest obsession of mine is the out-of-print book. In an age when most
titles can be searched and found in an instant—blurb located,
broadsheet reviews archived, reader opinions listed from oldest to
most recent—there remains none of the pre-internet mystery of
chancing upon books in libraries, imagining oneself to be the first
to ever finger a particular hardback sleeve, and no more selfish
satisfaction at being the one person in the universe to have stumbled
upon this pearl. An equivalent pleasure in the internet age is to
arrive at a book about which there is scarce information to solicit
from Jeeves—no blurb, no archived reviews, no reader opinions, no
cover image—nothing except phantom bibliographical information and
perhaps a few lines on an unread blog (like this one!). And there is pleasure to be
taken too in freeing oneself from the tedious consumerist routine
where:
a) the new book is
teased on the publisher’s website with an ecstatic blurb (i.e.
sales pitch), and advance praise from friends of the author, each as
cronyistically vomitous as the next;
b) the new book is
released to reviewers with a press release outlining in detail All
That is Unique and Special about the new title, to prevent them
having to read in-depth;
c) the new book
receives either a unanimous anointing from the broadsheet
creamcroppers on high, a confusing mix of loves and hates, or a
universal panning—each leading to the book being shunned for being
overpraised, underpraised, or neither nor;
d) the new book
either performs well enough to permit an anointed sequel and the
author into the contemp canon through somehow snagging the
zeitgeist, or drops from view, forcing them to write book after book
until their ‘time’ comes.
The popular and
the brilliant are rare bedfellows. It is accepted that popular books
(popular in terms of literary fiction—bestsellers we can be dismiss
as terrible without having to read them) are not as challenging or
original as those that vanish into the remainder bin after two weeks.
The rise of middlebrow fiction has been unstoppable, with most of the
book promoters and festivals in the UK concentrating on mainstream
hardbacks published from Penguin or Random House, or their divisions,
with the odd bone tossed to the least far-out of the small presses.
These small presses might receive council awards if their output is
the sort of middlebrow literary fiction or translation that is likely
to break even, while smaller presses publishing challenging books
will flounder unsupported if their output is not immediately
accessible or requires a little background engagement from the
reader.
Every so often, an
‘experimental’ novel is permitted lavish praise. A recent example
is Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing. This
novel was anointed purely because of its easily categorisable
stylistic approach (Joycean internal monologue), and its content
(traumatic abusive relationships) plundered an emotional topos in a
new manner, from a female perspective. The novel could not have
achieved this success had it not been (intentional or not) tailored
towards a certain market and pushed strong emotional buttons in the
reader. The writer, long before setting out on their masterpiece,
must spend time plotting and planning the target market of their
novel, hoping that their stylistic and formal approaches (which are
probably compromised or toned down for the market) meets the target
when pitching to the agent. Most writers of middlebrow fiction will
care not a whit about this—most writers wish to play the game,
because most writers wish to be paid to write fiction, and most
writers have little to no interest in the buried innovators that
precede them.*
The middlebrow, in
Scotland at least, is the dominant mode. The Edinburgh International
Book Festival caters to those novels elected for broadcast on Radio
4, or for those The Guardian hypes with whatever level of wry
amusement as the latest thing (at the time of writing, Harper Lee’s
Go Set a Watchman is being previewed with much ado—a novel
that is the epitome of desperate opportunism and that the publishers
have excavated from a drawer to reap enormous dividends). There is no question that
publishers and broadsheets are in cahoots. The Edinburgh
International Book Festival is held in a commercial stranglehold and
despite the organisers’ best intentions, one or two events are home
to European or experimental writers (most often white male Americans
passing from small to large press publication).
There
is, from the middlebrow media, an impression propagated that all
books are the same, that if someone reads one book, any book at all,
this is somehow to be applauded, as if picking up The Fault in Our
Stars or The Girl With
the Dragon Tattoo is the same as
reading David Copperfield
or The Recognitions.
This smirking call of “books!” creates a false egalitarianism,
where reading trash is permissible provided one wrestles with a
classic from time to time, where John Green can share a bill with
William Gaddis, and that we are all one loving community of readers.
This is bollocks. Creating this false egalitarianism permits people
to devote themselves to trash or middlebrow fiction, never to stray
far from their comfort zones, and keeps trash in the bestseller lists
until Christendom, because all dissent from this view is dismissed as
snobbishness. Even for those readers not willing to spend £16.99
on a book, or even £8.99 on a paperback (and with the e-book
torrents, this number is increasing), challenging literature can be
procured for reasonable prices used. It is surprising how few readers
will take the risk of reading a book that might be “above” them,
but in other areas of their lives, be the most adventurous
mountain-climbing superheroes. Promoting “books!” is fine. But we
need to move towards “good books!”, and defining what these are
is a simple matter of increasing the reader’s reliance on
well-written prose, not inculcating them with poor English. The “I
can read what I want, screw you” approach absolves the reader of
responsibility. Readers, as consumers, parents, citizens, have the
same responsibilities. Because reading is a leisure activity does not
mean they should shut down their minds.
*
One kind of
freedom is a retreat into the past. I try to support small presses
involved in producing exciting work (a partial list on this blog), through reading and reviewing their work on online and
print channels (for free), since I refuse to believe innovation is
moribund or out cold on the operating table. However, for the
purposes of this blog, as an act of defiance in the face of the
corporatisation of the book world, I have located a plethora of out-of-print
books and written short vignettes on each. These vignettes are a mix
of précis, rapturous appreciation, baffled attempts to engage with
the content, and personal reflection. I made no attempt at
cod-scholarly analysis, since any attempt to introduce these into a
canon is futile, and I have no particular talent
for taking talk on texts into philosophy, linguistics, or
anthropology. This book is poised more at a general audience, which
is a cruel irony, since the audience for this book is most likely
academics or über-literate
readers. C’est la vie.
— M.J. Nicholls
* Writers are, first and foremost, self-promoting entities, self-run
businesses, whose decisions are made to advance their careers, whose
end aim is to escape the nightmare of capitalist enslavement through
being paid to write their books. There is no writer alive, in this
age, who is motivated one hundred percent by the need to communicate
a message, impart a story burning in their minds, keen to change the
world, and whatnot. Writing can be published on a blog. One can
communicate on Facebook or Twitter. One can self-publish. The writer
seeks above all else to be acknowledged and published so their ego
can be stroked and their mortgage paid off, regardless how sincere
in intent their work might be. This being the case, few writers have
time to care about festering tomes in libraries: why drudge up
competition, draw attention to someone who developed their ideas
first, and more intelligently? Show me a writer willing to admit
their cribbed influences (before the book deal) and I will show you
a waltzing hedgehog. (I am not blaming writers for this behaviour.
It is a normal symptom of a civilisation that refuses to value its
literature).
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