Forgotten Books

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Would you rather never write a book or write a book that’s easily forgotten?  This question springs from a recent exercise of trying (unsuccessfully) to count the books I’ve read.  I mean going through and putting a finger on each one and counting, if I’d read it.  I encountered a surprising number of ordinals that evoked a blank stare—I don’t remember the book at all.   Or I remember having read it, but don’t recall what it was about.  (In one instance, the book was one my wife read, and not me.  That explained a lot!)  This got me thinking about what it takes to write a memorable book.  I’ve always been one to prefer either speculative fiction or the classics.  (I’m aware that “classics” are now being dismantled because they don’t represent all groups.  I’d call them “white men’s classics,” but a surprising number of them were written by women.)  If a book has a speculative element strong enough I will recall having read it.  I like weird stuff.

I’ve read books where parts of them, at least, have stayed with me for half-a-century.  I remember specific things I read as a child (and no, I’m not talking about Barney Beagle—although I do remember that too).  I like to believe that even the bits that are hazy indicate that the book isn’t truly lost, but buried somewhere.  The human mind has an amazing capacity to absorb things.  I’ve read at least three thousand books in my life—I have no idea how many, actually, but Goodreads has me at 1,000 and I started using it in 2013.  I’d been intentionally reading for about forty years already, at that point.  Three of them while working on my doctorate.

I recently (within easy memory) read a Doc Savage novel.  I’d read the entire series, or pretty near, as a junior high schooler.   Anyway, there were well over a hundred of them.  I remembered nothing in my recent re-read beyond Doc’s band of five companions.  The story was completely unfamiliar to me.  One of the more recent books I know I read but couldn’t remember the story at all was a New York Times bestseller.  I guess if I’ve forgotten the author he’ll still be okay on Mars in the future since many others must remember something about it.  I’ll be long gone by then, both on Mars and down here, I’m sure.  I do hope even by then something will remain of all the books I’ve read.

Price Drop

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Here’s a public service announcement for your Friday.  If you’ve been wanting to read Holy Horror but found the price too high, McFarland has now lowered the cover price to under $30.  Here’s the link: Holy Horror.  Of my non-academic books, this has been my “best seller.”  Since I’m currently shopping around another book, and since agents aren’t interested (at least not any more), I wondered whether McFarland might look at it.  The editor who handled Holy Horror had left, and the new editor responded to my concern about pricing by telling me that they lower prices after a couple of years.  She noticed, however, that Holy Horror had been overlooked in the price lowering process, so voila!  It’s now affordable.

This model, while not the same as trade publishing’s efforts to get primarily front-list sales, seems to make sense.  Too many publishers raise prices year after year, so if you don’t buy immediately you’ll pay more.  McFarland tends toward a paperback first model.  The first couple of years are aimed at library sales—and they do well at those—then they lower for individual purchase.  All I had to do was ask.  Two years ago I asked Lexington/Fortress Academic if they’d do a paperback of Nightmares with the Bible.  That poor book never had a chance.  The editor said they were considering it.  Instead they did the trick that publishers seem to like: decoupling the ebook price from the hardcover.  So you can buy some expensive electrons instead of holding a real book.  So it goes.  I’ve written a museum piece.

It’s a little too soon to say about The Wicker Man.  My experience has been that university presses, particularly British ones, like to raise prices rather than chasing sales.  If you’re reading this blog you know that I’ll market my books.  I even printed bookmarks for Holy Horror at my own expense.  Maybe it’s time to start distributing them again.  What a difference ten dollars can make!  I’m a book booster.  (You might not have noticed.)  I’m glad that McFarland understands that individuals will buy books, even if they’ve been out for a while.  The standard wisdom among academic publishers is “three years and then you’re done.”  If you’re inclined to help prove that business model wrong, you can now get Holy Horror without having to take out a second mortgage.  That’s cause for hope—any writer has the dream that her or his book will keep on selling.  Sharing this information will, it seems, make it wider known. Please pass it on.

Downtowns

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I recently wrote about the movie Peeping Tom.  I mentioned a scene, particularly creepy, where a news agent sells a girl a candy bar after selling an older man pornography.  Writing about this reminded me of my own youth.  After we’d moved to Rouseville, the nearest town with shops in western Pennsylvania was Oil City.  It had a reasonable downtown then—a couple of blocks with a Woolworth’s, Thrift Drugs, a movie theater (the lamented, lost Drake), stationary stores, and the like.  By the time I was in fifth grade I’d begun to discover books.  (Ours was not a reading family, being much more of the television crowd.)  Finding books in Oil City was a bit of a challenge.  There wasn’t a bookstore.  The nearest regular bookshop was all the way over in Meadville, and Mom didn’t want to drive that far too often.

I’ve noted before that I bought used books at the Goodwill up in Seneca (where we bought clothes and household items as well).  If you stayed downtown in Oil City, though, you could find books for less than a dollar in a bin at Woolworth’s.  (I still have a few of those cheaply printed and bound “Easy Eye” editions on my shelf.)  There was, however, just a door or two down, a mysterious shop where I’d spied a rotating wire rack of paperbacks.  I was curious and although Mom never forbade us to go in, she certainly didn’t encourage it.  I was a tween ravenous for new reading material.  This shop also sold magazines and tobacco products.  Some of the magazines had their covers obscured, and although on the cusp of puberty, I was really only after books.

One time I went in to give the wire rack a whirl.  I seem to recall that the owner gave a rather wry look when a minor, myopically focused on books, wandered in.  The fare there was not what I was used to.  There was a novel about Bigfoot, I recall.  I thought maybe that would be of interest, but I didn’t buy it.  When I walked out, I had that creepy feeling that seedy places seem to leave palpably on your skin.  I guess it might’ve been the feeling of that innocent little girl wandering into a shop selling nudie pictures to buy a candy bar—probably because it was the closest shop to home.  Such downtowns, and undoubtedly, such stores still exist.  They’ve become rare.  Downtown Oil City is no longer recognizable when I go there.  Now, it seems, there’s nowhere to buy books at all.

TV Zone

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An unenviable task, it must be, to try to sum up The Twilight Zone.  Barry Keith Grant, however, has done an admirable job in this TV Milestones volume.  He addresses in a forthright way one of the questions on my mind quite a bit as of late—what are the borders of genre?  For a creative species such as our own, with imaginations that range far and high, we blend unlikely ingredients.  The Twilight Zone had finished its initial run before I ever watched television, but I was around to catch early reruns.  Their focus on the weird, the unusual, the twist ending, informed my childhood love of the strange.  They also helped shape my imagination.  This little book helps to capture some of that.

I haven’t watched every episode of the series yet.  I’ve been making my way through it slowly since I really don’t have much time for watching, and I tend to give priority to movies.  Still, The Twilight Zone was one of the most influential television programs of all time, as Grant demonstrates.  Although he tries, it may be impossible to determine just why so many people use it as a frame of reference.  Even with my penchant for analyzing, I can’t work out what it was about those disparate, discrete episodes that so captured me.  Perhaps like most influences, it was specific episodes that hit very deep.  That showed new ways of thinking about things.  That opened up worlds of possibilities.

I was exposed to Serling’s stories not only through my own reading, but also through school.  I have no hope of remembering what grade it was in, but in one of my English classes we were assigned “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street.”  I was probably lost in the haze of puberty and adolescence at the time, but I remember well how that story made me feel.  And the teacher pointing out how people behaved when they were afraid.  Perhaps appropriately, Grant ends his book with a quote from that very episode.  Others, however, stayed with me as well.  Perhaps that’s the thing that’s so remarkable about the Zone—some episodes are not easily forgotten.  We’re accustomed to the flood of anodyne media that dowses us with entertainment of little consequence.  Some Twilight Zone episodes were that way as well.  But when we experience something significant, we tend to remember it and remember it well.  So many episodes did that kind of work on a mind too young to make lasting life decisions.  I guess I’m still waiting for Mr. Serling to step into frame and explain it.

Shadow Half

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Sometimes you just take a chance on a book you haven’t heard of.  You see, I keep a very active “to read” list.  The problem is that many books on it are a bit on the heavy side and it takes me a long time to get through lengthy books.  Every once in a while I go to a bookstore to browse for a book that’s short and speculative.  It seems that when I was growing up it wasn’t difficult to find fiction under 300 pages.  In any case, that’s how I found Sunny Moraine’s Your Shadow Half Remains.  It was in the “horror” section of a local bookstore.  (Even “horror” sections are now difficult to locate.)  It looked like it wouldn’t take me a month to read.  It was a good call.  It’s what I like in a scary story.

Not too gory and written with literary finesse, Your Shadow Half Remains is a pandemic story.  Well, not literally, but sort of literally.  It was published just this year and the story revolves around a pandemic in which people are infected by looking into each other’s eyes.  Nobody knows for sure how this happens, but people who are infected begin to act violently toward those around them before killing themselves.  Naturally, therefore, survivors begin to isolate themselves.  So Riley moves to a lake cabin where her grandparents got infected and died, but since there’s nobody else around the contagion can’t spread.  She lays in supplies and awaits, well, that’s just it—awaits what?  Her plan is interrupted, however, when she learns that she has a neighbor.  Maybe two.

One neighbor she starts to get to know, but they can’t look directly at one another and can’t really know each other’s motives.  Herein hangs the tale.  People are social creatures and the pandemic (in real life) caused much of its damage in the form of isolating ourselves from one another.  Other people, instead of being companions, were threats.  Especially in the early days when it wasn’t clear how the virus was spreading.  The safest thing was to stay home and avoid others.  It’s that aspect that Moraine really captures here.  A woman set to try to wait this thing out alone, but then, another person complicates things.  And how can you tell insanity from infection apart from insanity brought on by isolation?  Both seem to lead to the same results.  I took a chance on this unknown story, and it was a chance well taken.

Excess Ideas

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I sincerely hope that after I’m gone someone with more sense than me will look through my notebooks instead of just tossing them in the trash.  There are a ton of creative ideas there that I have no time to develop into stories.  I know that writers are frequently looking for new angles and ideas that haven’t been presented before.  I have them in spades.  Of course, unless someone is noticed at least by shortly after their passing, their stuff becomes detritus lost for all time.  I was thinking of family heirlooms recently.  I come from a poor family, not rich in stuff.  Indeed, most of what we still own is made of paper.  The rare family heirloom is something imbued with history.  One of my grandfather’s things (I have two of his books) that survived was a brief account of his life.  (Also paper.)

Members of his family—I’m still uncertain as to who—experimented with photography.  This was in the days of holding still while being shot, but there were some very interesting prints that made their way to me.  (Paper again.)  This was from the time that negatives were preserved on glass.  I imagine this led to storage issues over time.  And I also know that families have to move from time to time.  Things get lost during every move, from my experience.  In my grandfather’s very brief autobiography, he notes that these glass plates were kept under the floor of the barn and were forgotten at the time of a move.  I very much doubt that they’re still there.  Developers greedily come in with their backhoes and knock and dig and dump and pour.

I sometimes wonder what small, local history was lost on those glass plates.  Some families are erased from history—most of us are, in fact.  Generations on down the road there’s little evidence that we were even here.  For writers, a stab is being made at remembrance.  I tend to think of writing as being like a radio receiver for thoughts.  They may not originate with me.  Some of them are quite bizarre—trust me.  It makes me sad to think of them left rotting in some landfill.  My “Kilroy was here” is inscribed in notebooks.  If anybody’s interested, I’ll warn you in advance that my handwriting’s quite small.  And the ideas are uncensored.  There are so very many of them.  I don’t mind sharing, but I would appreciate the opportunity to try selling them myself, first.  If only I had the time to write them all out.  And I won’t be leaving them under the barn floor.

Wonderful Impossibility

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I used to tell my students that a semester break without reading a book that challenged your assumptions was wasted.  I tried to lead by example, but jobs are such fragile things.  Since I have no semester breaks I try to read books that push the limits more frequently.  I’d heard about Carlos Eire’s They Flew before the author had settled on a publisher.  (I don’t know him personally, but would be glad to.)  In case the title doesn’t do enough heavy lifting, the subtitle A History of the Impossible might help.  Yes, we’re stepping into the world of the post-secular here.  It’s a wonderful place.  Although much of the book deals with early modern cases of levitation, the study ranges wider than that.  Written by a respected historian, this is a very important book.  For many reasons.

I am glad to see Yale University Press joining with Chicago and some noted others (Rowman and Littlefield, for instance) in challenging a paradigm that is no longer upheld by science.  I can hear the howling already, but if you read carefully, with an open mind (which is required by science) you’ll quite possibly learn something here.  Our minds do influence our reality.  We haven’t figured out how because secularism ends the discussion with scorn.  That was true of the study of UFOs as well, until the U. S. Navy said, “Nope.  They’re real.”  (It only took about seven decades, so don’t expect instant results.)  We cut off our possibilities when we mock things out of habit.  I remember the Turok comic where one character said to another (give me a break—this has been five decades and I can’t recall all the names) “Fools scoff at what they don’t understand.”  Truer words have never been penned.

The impossible happens when scientists aren’t there to witness it.  It sometimes happens when they are.  Doubt that?  Read about the Pauli Effect.  Or call it gremlins, the choice is yours.  It’s real in either case.  Academics are often among the last, with the exception of Trump supporters, to see what’s been staring them in the face all along.  I’ll say more about this book on Goodreads, but let me float a hope here.  I want to go back to that indefinite article in Eire’s subtitle.  This is A History of the Impossible.  May more follow.  Others, such as Jeff Kripal, have been doing similar work for many years now.  We can ignore it, or scoff at it.  But I think that character in Turok got it right, even if I can’t remember his name.

Happy Beltane!

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They creep up on you, these holidays with no official recognition.  I’ve been so busy that it didn’t even occur to me that today was Beltane—May Day—until my wife mentioned it to me before I headed up to bed last night.  Why is that important?  It’s not a day off work, so why bother?  Well, for one thing it’s the fuel behind my book published in the summer of last year.  Or, according to the Celtic calendar, the fall (just before Lughnasadh).  In other words, this is the first May Day for The Wicker Man.  I should’ve been trying to drum up a little interest, but things have been busy.  Besides, my profile hasn’t grown since its publication.  Nobody even cites it on the Wikipedia page for the movie, although it takes a distinct angle.  So I’ve been busy with other things.

I’ve been trying to find a publisher for my next book.  A couple friends know what it’s about but mostly nobody else because it’s time-sensitive.  Agents haven’t nibbled.  Well, one did.  He had me rewrite the book and then decided he couldn’t sell it after all.  Back to square one.  Even presses that publish mostly non-PhDs weren’t even interested enough to respond to queries.  Nothing like writing a book to make you realize how insignificant you are.  Like Sgt. Howie, I’m caught on Summerisle.  Ironically, I didn’t even think of writing a post for my book today when I was jogging yesterday and a haze over the moon (I know the movie ends with the sun—I’ve seen it a time or two) made me think, “That sky looks like the ending of The Wicker Man.”  Well, when I get back from my jog I have to start right in to work.  And Beltane’s not a holiday in these parts.

May Day used to be celebrated, even in the United States.  Now it’s just disappeared into the haze of work days.  And we don’t have time even to watch movies on work days.  That’s a weekend activity.  Of course, my weekends are full of trying to find publishers.  Two are currently considering my unagented book.  Four have already rejected it.  I’m thinking that I could use a trip to the Green Man with Howie.  At least on Summerisle they know how to celebrate May Day.  Of course, it’s the ending that makes it horror.  And Beltane snuck up on me this year.  Without it, The Wicker Man wouldn’t even exist.

Springing

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Life, for everyone, has difficult times.  Katherine May has a reassuring, but not always cheerful way about her.  She calls troubled times Wintering.  The subtitle of her book explains that it’s about The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.  My wife and I read this one together.  It reminded me, in some ways, of Barbara Brown Taylor’s Learning to Walk in the Dark.  In a society vapidly preoccupied with an often shallow happiness, admitting, even pondering the things that are difficult is an act of courage.  May has a disarming way of writing, a humility and self-deprecation that are an antidote to the brazen self-assurance we too often see in the media.  She looks for lessons in her own experiences of pain and loss, and yes, surviving through winter. 

Winter is often a quiet time of reflection.  In our bright, loud, beeping, buzzing world we don’t take much time for such things.  Indeed, capitalism (which is generally not deep, although deeply engrained) doesn’t encourage it.  “The more you can work,” it whispers in your ear, even while sleeping, “the better you’ll feel.”  Winter slows things down.  Makes life a bit harder.  Think of all those days when you just don’t feel like going outside in the cold, snow, and sleet.  When the chill drives you next to the radiator, covered in lap blankets.  When it’s dark most of the time.  Such are good times to think.  As May shows, when you turn a difficult situation around and look at it from different angles, truths about yourself, about life, begin to emerge.  What is it we’re after that keeps us running all the time, dangerously overheating?  We need winter.

The anecdotes here are deeply personal.  This is particularly difficult for a writer because many of us face rejection frequently.  When you’ve poured yourself into a book, blithe casting aside by agents and publishers hurts.  I admire the bravery and the wisdom of writers like May.  She shows that wintering is possible, and that it is followed by spring.  Lives, she notes, are cyclical.  We can find quite a lot of meaning in that.  I often find myself fearing winter.  The heating bills.  The wearing of many layers of clothes for months at a time.  The dark and cloudy days.  Yet a good part of me welcomes the retreat.  I know that, in the cycle of the year with few days off from work, that if I can make it to Halloween, some rest—some wintering—awaits.  And that is a hopeful thought indeed.

Poe’s Novel

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Certain authors, some great among them, excel at short stories.  I know from personal experience that trying to publish a book of such stories is a very hard sell.  For a writer like Edgar Allan Poe, who was trying to live on his words, it often led to periods of poverty.  Thinking of him as a short-story author, I had never read his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.  Hailed by fellow brief-tale writer Jorge Luis Borges as Poe’s best, I figured I’d better give it a try.  I’m glad I did.  I had, however, no idea what to expect.  Those who write on Poe seldom pay it much mind.  He was famous for his poems and stories, and this gothic, sea-faring novel was, according to the introduction, suggested to him by those who felt his making a living as a writer might improve if he used long form.

Concerning the edition: the novel is in the public domain.  Penguin Classics, however, often contain nice introductions.  Indeed, the intro by Richard Kopley in this edition is excellent.  A few of his observations stood out to me—this novel was, in some measure, about Poe’s family.  Both the protagonist and the author have five-syllable names with the same cadence, ending on a three-letter surname beginning with P.  Also, as both the introduction and notes make clear, Poe was deeply steeped in the Bible.  You seldom read about Poe and religion.  Writers from America’s first generation, however, were uniquely brewed in it.  I’d never considered that about Poe before.  There are many editions of Pym available, but I recommend this one because of its introduction.

The story ends without resolution, just so you know.  Pym, talked into an adventure by a somewhat devil-may-care friend, goes out on the ocean on a boat after a night of drinking.  And herein hangs the tale.  Well, actually, the friend convinces the young man with a taste for the sea to stow away on a whaler that his father captains.  A mutiny, however, leaves Pym “buried alive” onboard.  A shipwreck leads to near starvation and a boon companion survivor.  Picked up by an explorer headed south, they discover a surprisingly temperate Antarctic circle where a native tribe turns treacherous because of their fear of the color white.  It does seem that there’s a race narrative taking place here too.  I enjoyed the story although the chapters about longitude and latitude don’t quite rise to the level of Melville’s maritime writing.  It’s a tale worth the read, however, but find one with a good introduction and it will be smoother sailing.

Monopoly by Statute

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The Bible is an odd book.  It is foundational for the modern world, no matter how much we might want to deny it.  Even so it’s a strange book.  The King James Version (KJV) of the Bible is a masterpiece of English literature.  There’s not one King James Version, however, as several variants exist.  Nevertheless, the KJV remains quite popular among some religious groups and it is still studied in English Departments as part of our cultural heritage.  It is also in the public domain, which means anyone can print and sell it.  Unless, of course, you wish to do so in the United Kingdom.  Here’s where the story gets interesting.

Because of England’s troubled religious history—remember the whole Catholic v. Protestant monarch thing?—the printing of religious books became a contentious issue shortly after the adoption of the printing press.  In 1577 a monopoly on Bible printing went to one man, Christopher Barker, the Royal Printer.  Ostensively to control the version of the Bible approved for use in the Church (of England), this royal privilege became law.  In perpetuity.  Now rights, as commodities, can be bought and sold.  And this happened from time to time.  Cambridge University, however, had been granted a royal charter earlier—also perpetual—to print “all manor of” books.  Since this arguably included the Bible (a lucrative business) it wasn’t prevented from printing them as well.  Oxford University was granted a similar charter some years later and so the two ancient universities and the Royal Printer were the only ones allowed to print the Bible for sale in the United Kingdom (except Scotland, but that’s a story for a different time).

Image credit: Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

This privilege, which still exists on the books, did not apply to later versions of the Bible.  The KJV became wildly popular and really wasn’t challenged much for over two centuries.  By the nineteenth century British lawmakers, presumably, had better things to do than argue about who could print the Bible.  Meanwhile other translations divided and conquered the profits coming in from the sale of what had been, in essence “the” English Bible.  As late as 1990 the Royal Printer status landed with Cambridge University, so the sale of rights continues.  A similar story accompanied the Book of Common Prayer, which has always been in the public domain but can only be printed in the UK by the two major university presses.  The story of the Bible is a fascinating one, and since it has shaped western civilization, it seems appropriate to give it the last word: “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”

Best King

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I suspect most people have read one or two at least.  Most reading folk, that is.  I mean Stephen King novels.  He’s sure written plenty.  By my count I’ve read nine: The Shining, Carrie, ‘Salem’s Lot, Pet Sematary, It, The Stand, The Tommyknockers, Revival, and Cujo.  I probably have one or two more in me.  The dilemma is that I like King’s writing—I’m not one of those nay-sayers who call it clap-trap.  There’s real literary merit to much of it (sometimes just too much of it), and he integrates religion into horror really well.  The thing is, not all of his books are made equal.  I suspect that’s true of any writer.  I’ve consulted some lists to see which are the best and I’ve watched some movies before reading the books, but I’m starting a ranking of my own here—it will probably be revisited from time to time, as events warrant.

What’s his best?  Well, such lists are supposed to start with the worst and work their way forward.  I’ll cave to convention this time.  So, The Tommyknockers and Cujo are tied for least favorite.  Each has a reason: The Tommyknockers is too long and lacks sympathetic characters and Cujo is just too nihilistic.  The premise is good but the bleakness got to me.  The Stand comes next primarily because of the length.  I like the way that one ended up, though.  Revival, my most recent read, comes here, about in the middle.  It was enjoyable to read, even with its length.  I think King has a little trouble writing convincing kids, but the story was good.  Next I would put ‘Salem’s Lot.  Who doesn’t like a good vampire story?

Not that kind of book.

My top three are, perhaps predictably, generally among the top ranked.  My order is perhaps a bit different than most, however.  I really, really enjoyed The Shining.  The movie, I believe, is better.  That may be heresy, I know.  Carrie has all the freshness of a novelist breaking through, and it’s effective.  Better than the movie.  That leaves Pet Sematary as my current favorite.  The story there caught me up and it’s the only one of my top three that I read before seeing the movie (both of them).  The book is way, way better than the movies.  Compared with Revival, which also deals with what happens after death, Pet Sematary offers a commentary on grief that doesn’t involve everyone dying by suicide.  It’s on a much more human level.  As I read more, I’m sure I’ll form other opinions, but for the time being, these three of the King’s early novels, are, in my standing, the most deserving of the crown.

Hopeful History

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We could all use a little hope.  Given the rate of change in the world it often feels impossible to catch your breath.  And not only that, but the change often feels decidedly negative.  Few would opine, for instance, that we live in the golden age of politics.  And while it has its supporters, AI seems bent on our destruction.  So why not eat, drink, and be merry?  Scott Edwin Williams, whose last book Lightbulb Moments in Human History I reviewed here, has been at it again.  His basic idea is that our “lightbulb moments” give us hope for a better future.  Lightbulb Moments in Human History II: from Peasants to Periwigs, keeps the same general idea afloat, but barely.  As history progresses it’s harder and harder to say that the lot of humanity, tout court, has improved.  True, we live in relative comfort in “the developed world,” but we still have looming Trumps and other nightmares in the wings.

This book tries to cover large swaths of history, and that’s a difficult task.  Williams tries to keep it lighthearted but even he struggles to do so when discussing the rise of big business.  The chapter “Takin’ Care of Business” really showcases the negative traits that humans are too often willing to display when they form companies.  Capitalism may have been a lightbulb moment, but the untold misery it has introduced into the world gives the reader pause.  For example, the East India Company’s business decision to addict as many Chinese to opium as possible, seems quite strange in the context of a “war on drugs” being used as a means of incarcerating “undesirables” because, well, drugs are bad.

There are some signs of hope, and some lighthearted moments in the book.  It does, at times, seem to work against its own thesis.  It makes me glad for living in an age of anesthesia, and of general agreement that people should respect each other’s boundaries (unless you live next to Russia).  Even the lightbulb moments of Mesoamerican/South American history demonstrate the kind of cruelty humans often perpetrate against “outsiders.”  Williams notes here that two more books are in the works (authors know that a series isn’t a bad thing) but it does make me wonder if light and dark don’t balance each other out.  I know from my own family history that some of my ancestors died of things quite curable today, and they lived not all that long ago.  And that I can write these words and publish them instantaneously (whether or not anyone reads them).  And I can buy most necessities of life (apart from toilet paper during a pandemic) fairly easily.  And I do appreciate books that give me hope.  But balance isn’t such a bad thing either.

Learning to Write

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It’s a reciprocal relationship.  Ideally a symbiosis.  The publisher has a reach, and know-how, that an author lacks.  An author provides content the publisher needs.  Yet publishing is a business in a capitalistic world and has to (unless subsidized) turn a profit.  As an author who works in publishing I’m skewered on the horns of this dilemma.  It’s heartbreaking to see the lengths some authors go to only to find out their book is priced the same as a week’s worth of groceries.  Or three tanks full of gas.  Who buys a $100 book?  Libraries.  Well, some libraries.  Occasionally a publisher will run sales, if you order direct, but by then interest in your book (which may be timely) has passed on.  You become just another name on the shelf in the Library of Congress.

I’m looking for a publisher for my sixth book.  This has to be someone who understands that even $45 is beyond the reach of most intelligent readers.  “What the market will bear” feels like the death sentence to the years of your life you’ve put into writing the thing.  A friend once asked me, “Why do you do it?”  For authors the real question is “How can you not do it?”  The need for the validation through publication runs very deeply in some people.  More deeply than our national love for Taylor Swift.  It has to do with meaning.  Purpose.  A sense of what we’re put on earth to do.  

Image credit: Codex Manesse, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

The standard “wisdom,” and practice, is to publish in hardcover, priced for the library market, and if it sells well at $100, perhaps offer a paperback.  Hopefully priced lower than $45, but don’t hold your breath.  “What the market will bear,” should be your mantra.  It’s a wonder that civilized people ever got educated.  I grew up on cheap books from Goodwill, which is all I could afford.  College, on borrowed money, taught me the price of reading seriously.  It was a lesson I never forgot.  I’d begun my faltering steps to writing books while in high school.  I started writing short stories even earlier than that.  It has been a life of writing.  Even series books, I’ve come to see, are too easily exploited in this way.  My shortest book is priced at $40.  At least I know that I’ve written some collectors’ items.  Take heart, my fellow writers trying to emerge from academe.  There are other ways of being in the world.  And some of them may even be symbiotic.

Tracing Writers

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Ratiocination.  Detection.  There’s something compelling about that clear, crystalline logic that leads to solid conclusions.  I was floored by Don Foster’s Author Unknown: Tales of a Literary Detective.  I found the book by following up a reference to “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” aka “’Twas the Night before Christmas.”  Like most Americans I credited the poem to Clement Clarke Moore, but he did not, in fact, write it.  If you trust anyone with literary detection, it should be Don Foster.  Although this cleverly written book is not an apologia for the author’s personal accomplishments, it nevertheless builds trust in his methods and his sense.  It begins as he discovers an unacknowledged text was written by Shakespeare.  The evidence is carefully laid out, and is convincing.  Then others began to ask him to “prove” who wrote other pieces.  It’s quite a ride.

While Foster takes great care not to claim the ideas as his own, he’s nevertheless drawn into the case of the Unabomber, and Monica Lewinsky, and Thomas Pynchon.  His methods of ratiocination demonstrate repeatedly what he explains in his excellent introduction—our writing is every bit as indicative as our DNA.  With an adequate writing sample size, a piece with an unknown or disputed author can, with a great degree of probability, be attributed to the correct author.  You don’t even need to know of the cases to find the outcomes fascinating.  And those who disagree, being human, are simply not convinced by his conclusions.  They’ve already made up their minds.  In this regard the case of Wanda Tinasky (I’d never heard of her) is utterly compelling.

The Santa Claus chapter, the final one in the book, is a real pay-off.  Henry Livingston Jr., of Poughkeepsie, wrote the famous poem that defined Santa Claus as we know him.  Considering Christmas’ importance in our capitalistic society, this attribution is an important one.  Clement Clarke Moore was a very wealthy professor of Bible at the newly formed General Seminary.  Foster demonstrates probable cause in his claiming, and keeping alive, the mythology that he wrote the famous poem.  The way that this chapter is laid out and presented is especially witty.  Those interested in getting at the truth behind who wrote what will find this a page-turner.  Although he wasn’t seeking out the attention that came (most of us, as academics, are surprised when anyone show any interest at all in what we write) Foster has given the world a real gift in this book.  It reminded me once again why research is the most intriguing thing on earth.  And learning can be like reading a good mystery.