Beautiful Reality

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Although it is central to understanding all human experience, we are far from comprehending consciousness.  It’s clear to me, based on the fact that our senses are limited, that rationality alone can’t provide us with all the answers.  And brilliance often comes at a cost.  These were my thoughts after watching A Beautiful Mind.  Having hung around Princeton quite a bit when living in New Jersey, it was nice to see it in a film.  The movie is, of course, a somewhat fictionalized account of the mathematician John Nash’s life.  Although extraordinary in his grasp of math, Nash suffered from mental illness as well.  A Beautiful Mind takes liberties, but then, most biopics do.  The film is well done from a cinematic point of view, and for those of us without any real knowledge of Nash (although we only lived about 15 miles away) it effectively fools you into mistaking reality.

I wanted to see the movie because it’s often cited as an example of dark academia.  Clearly the mental illness—called schizophrenia here—is the source of the darkness.  Academia is obvious.  This biopic genre of dark academia includes a number of films and many of them explore the disjunction between deep thinkers and social life.  It seems that we may be only in the early stages of mapping the intricacies of the human mind.  I was recently reading that psychology is still, after all these years, struggling to be considered a “real” science.  The human mind is a slippery place and emotion and intuition play into making someone really stand out from the rest of us.  And also, their stories have to be noticed by someone.  In Nash’s case, a book that was later made into a movie.

Academics in general aren’t given much notice.  Many operate in the rarified world of extended study.  Those who, like myself, are expelled, often have difficulty fitting in to other lines of work.  Thinkers often have trouble not thinking.  That can get you into trouble on the job.  Movies like A Beautiful Mind have some triggers for me because I often question what reality is.  I always have.  Please don’t take it personally, dear reader, when I say I’m not sure you’re real.  (You may think the same of me.) It’s just the way I look at the world.  I’m no mathematician, though, nor a scientist.  Not even a philosopher, according to the guild.  Academia, however, was my home and seems to have been what my mind was made to do.  At this point, I’ll settle for watching movies about dark academia.

Luddism

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There are books you really want to read, and books you feel you should read.  There are authors who delight in telling you what’s going on, and there are authors whose writing obfuscates.  I’ve always preferred the former in both scenarios, but I felt I should read William Gibson’s Neuromancer.  I guess I’ve grown apart from science fiction.  (It’s not you, it’s me.)  Or at least some of it.  And I encounter too much jargony writing among academics.  I’m a simple guy with simple tastes.  Also, noir has never been my favorite.  Case, the protagonist, is difficult to like.  As a literary achievement there’s no doubt that Neuromancer is amazing.  And highly influential.  It’s the story of a thief/conman (Case) who’s hired for a mission that he doesn’t understand.  Along the way he falls in love (sort of), but, well, noir.  Dames.  The imaginative elements are pretty stunning, and some of them have come true.  AI being one of them.  And maybe that didn’t help sway me to liking it too much.  I’m no fan of AI.

I didn’t read the novel to critique it.  Admittedly, I’m a Neo-Luddite.  I use tech, and even enjoy it sometimes, but I prefer print books, movies (on celluloid) in theaters, and music, if recorded, on vinyl.  Old fashioned.  I do like some of the convenience, however.  Who isn’t addicted to getting tedious things done quickly?  Well, some of them.  In any case, I found the Molly character intriguing.  I couldn’t help but think of Blade Runner the whole way through.  William Gibson claimed that his novel didn’t copy the gritty texture of the movie, and  I believe him.  I’ve written books after thoroughly researching a topic only to discover, too late, that someone else had largely done the same thing already.  It happens.

The plot itself is quite good. Still, there’s an ethical element involved.  I wonder how much AI optimism comes from guys who read such novels as teens.  I have trouble thinking of any way that generative “artificial intelligence” can end well.  It seems a misguided and oversold idea.  Now commercials tell us how much we need Al, and he appears in new devices, wanted or not.  He’s not welcome in my home.  I’m slowly getting used to the idea of having a phone near me most of the time.  I use it seldom, but when I do I’m glad for it.  I don’t watch movies or read books on it.  My favorite times are when it’s sitting there, being quiet.  Some of us are dinosaurs in a cyberpunk world that’s become reality.  And dinosaurs, well, we prefer the world before the electronic revolution.  Maybe even before the rise of the primates.

Trying to Write

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Realizations dawn slowly sometimes.  From childhood on I wanted to be a writer.  Teachers encouraged me because I seemed to have some talent, but in a small town they didn’t really know how to break through.  Besides, terrified of Hell, I was very Bible and church focused—not really conducive to the worldliness needed to be a writer.  The realization that recently dawned is that I’m competing with people who can put full-time into writing.  I’m trying to squeeze it into a couple hours before dawn every day because 9-2-5.  9-2-5.  9-2-5.  It’s exhausting.  I often read about writers, wondering how they get noticed.  Even the people I try to get to publish my fiction read stuff others likely have more time to write than I do.  Why do I keep at it?  Sometimes it’s just impossible to keep ideas inside.

I’ve got ideas.  Some of them would make fascinating movies.  I even had an editor of an online journal that published one of my stories say that.  I’ve got a cinematic imagination trapped in the aging body of a day-worker.  Oh, I’ve got a professional job, of course.  What I really want to do is “produce content.”  I know others in publishing with the same dream.  One of my colleagues has managed to break out and she’s now publishing novels that are getting noticed.  I’m still writing for academic presses because I know how to get published by them.  My fiction has been suffering from neglect.  To stay sharp you have to keep at it.  I’m a self-taught writer.  I’ve not taken a course in it my entire life, and it probably shows.  Not even Comp 101.

Fairness is a human construct and ideal.  Reality lies with Fortuna (cue Carl Orff).  I’m better off than most people in the long human struggle with equity, I realize.  For that I’m grateful.  I do have to wonder, however, if struggle isn’t essential to making us what we need to be.  The writers whose work endures often had to struggle to get noticed.  Many died in obscurity.  I wonder if they ever realized that they were leaving a legacy.  You see, writing is a strange blend of arrogance and self-doubt.  Many of us go through intensely self-critical times when even our published books seem to mock us from their shelves.  The realization, now fully day, that I will always have to struggle to do what I know I’m meant to do sheds light.  Even in the world of privilege, the struggle inside is real.

Seeing Seagulls

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It was a seventies thing.  Even though I lived in a small town, even I had heard about Jonathan Livingston Seagull.  At first I didn’t know it was a book.  (A similar thing happened to me in the nineties with a character named Harry Potter.)  It was probably in college that I learned this was a book I should read.  I did, and I followed it up with Illusions, also by Richard Bach.  Now, this was unorthodox stuff.  These novels consider what some would call superhumanities and others self-deification.  The two are related.  In any case, Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a story about a seagull that overcomes limitations.  An inspirational book.  The publisher had no great expectations for it but it ended up becoming a number-one bestseller without any real marketing support, largely through word of mouth.  You’d have had to have been living in a cave in the seventies not to have heard people mentioning Jonathan Livingston Seagull, whether bird or book.

I got a hankering to read it again but alas, it was one of the books destroyed in the flood.  I went to a local bookstore and was disappointed to see that it was out in a new edition—larger, and, of course, more expensive.  Longing eventually overcame reluctance and I bit the bullet.  I’m glad I did.  The story is still as empowering as I remembered it, but the fourth part, the new one, strikes me as very necessary.  In it, rumors of the disappeared Jonathan Livingston Seagull have turned him into a god.  A god, moreover, whose followers are more interested in the orthodoxy of ritual than what he taught.  This was published before Trump’s first election, but it accurately describes what “Christianity” has become under his two-pronged reign of terror.

The idea of Christianity itself has become deified to the point that Jesus—what he did and taught—have become completely irrelevant.  Now, you don’t have to walk all the way with Richard Bach (I read the two books after Illusions as well, The Bridge Across Forever and One), but this book has a message that still rings true after all these years.  The book is over half-a-century old now and I am glad that it’s having a small resurgence.  The message, when the book ended at part three, was perhaps a little lighter.  We still, however, have to learn to overcome limitations.  And there’s a fair amount of wisdom in this little book.  Even though it was a seventies thing, it remains a good thing.

In Praise of DVDs

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Streaming has made movies very widely available, which makes my life easier.  Since I’ve been writing books about horror movies and such, being able to see them now that video rental stores have disappeared, helps.  (At least when they’re available.)  But I’m not ready to stop singing the praises of the DVD just yet.  (Or Blu-ray, if you roll that way.)  They definitely have their advantages, at least until the disc goes bad.  When you watch a movie as a form of research, and you haven’t been taking adequate notes, you might need to stop afterwards and watch a scene again.  What I’ve noticed with streaming services that include commercials is that if you rewatch you have to be subjected to two minutes of commercials first.  And if you only vaguely remember where the scene was you may need to sit through four or six minutes of advertising.  Maybe more.

The humble DVD had the chapter menu.  And no commercials that you couldn’t skip.  My books have involved using DVDs whenever possible for that reason.  Quite a few of the movies discussed in Sleepy Hollow as American Myth had to be viewed via streaming.  Going back and finding that exact scene where the question mark lingers can be quite time consuming.  There’s a reason you can only write a limited number of such books!  The DVD was, naturally, an improvement over the VHS tape with its endless rewinding.  Of course, streaming has reintroduced having to scan back through a movie to find a spot instead of picking a chapter close to where you remember the scene.  First world problems, I know, but no less annoying for being so.  It’s the world in which I live.

Then there’s the bonus of extras.  I know some streaming services offer side menus with additional information, but those of us who are focus-challenged need to watch the story.  Extras were for afterwards.  Does anybody else feel old for having grown up with the only way to see movies being either the theater or a grainy black-and-white small rendition on television several years later?  Now movies are whipping past me through the ether all the time.  Landing on devices and beginning to play if your cursor hovers too long on the spot.  I used to avoid going to movies alone—they were a social occasion as well as an entertainment one.  Now I stream alone, often at the price of commercials, and during those interludes I’m thinking of DVDs, and how they were made for research.  A strange thing to say for a guy who used to trust only books.

Literalism

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I struggle with literalism.  It may be naïveté.  I’m not sure there’s a difference.  I grew up being unsure of anything.  This isn’t unusual among those in an alcoholic family.  It’s probably the reason I spent my teenage years, praying as fervently as John Wesley for certainty with my faith.  My gray matter simply wouldn’t allow it.  I’m skeptical, with advanced training in critical thinking, but still terribly naive.  A family member recently told me something that sent me into a mini-panic.  It was only when I realized that he was being ironic that my ruffled feathers began to smooth out into flight readiness.  And that’s just one instance.  I used to tell my students, when we pick up something to read the first question in our minds is one of genre.  What is this?  Is it fact or fiction?  Serious or satire?  With interpersonal interactions it’s not always so clear.

People are natural actors.  They have to be.  Family time is quite different from alone time.  At least it is for me.  I try to shelter those I love from the darkness, but sometimes it surfaces.  I literally don’t know who I am.  There’s a certain continuity to the “Steveness” of my everyday existence, and that essence, for lack of a better word, accepts many things literally.  I trust people I know.  For the most part, I trust those I meet in their professional capacities—the store clerk, the mechanic, the professor.  I realize that they have inner lives as well, and they may or may not be unfurling the banner for all to see.  We all have filters.  Some use them more regularly than others.

My knee-jerk literalism generally lasts only a second or two.  My brain catches up and says, “this is where your critical thinking should kick in.”  Often that works, but it’s tied in with emotion as well.  The human thought process is certainly not all logic or reason.  Even the most Spock-like among us have emotion constantly feeding into our thoughts.  That’s one reason that artificial intelligence isn’t possible.  Those who think they can logic their way through falling in love are sadly mistaken.  We can’t explain it because we don’t understand it.  And we’re nowhere near being able to.  For business dealings we expect literalism.  But then there’s always the fine print.  I’m not that naive.  I do struggle with my literalism.  It’s set me on the wrong path before.  But certainty still eludes me.

Can’t Read?

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Andrew Laties has lived a remarkable life.  He runs Book & Puppet, a local bookstore in Easton, Pennsylvania.  He’s run other bookstores before this one, but now that he’s in the Lehigh Valley he started the Easton Book Festival.  I’ve blogged about his previous books here and here.  In addition to running a bookstore and book festival, he’s also a musician and puppeteer.  In the current climate of book banning, things aren’t exactly easy for those who live literature.  My wife and I just finished reading his latest book You’re Telling My Kids They Can’t Read this Book?  These are the thoughts of a book seller about book banning.  Beyond the many other hats he wears, Andrew is also an activist.  It makes me tired just thinking about all of this.

I remember when the US government promoted reading.  I grew up when we were concerned about Russia and the arms race.  I was alive for (but don’t remember) the Cuban Missile Crisis.  The response, from both parties, was that Americans needed to be educated.  And that meant reading.  Reading is fundamental, so the saying went.  Since 2016, and especially 2024, we’ve taken a 180.  Book banning is in vogue although anyone who reads knows it doesn’t work.  Still, those who sell books can either sit back and worry or choose to do something about it.  Andrew is one of those who is doing something.  Reading is the way we improve human lives.  Daily I read about how some people are preferring books “written” by AI—which has never been and never can be human.  And right-wingers around the country are carrying out their war on books.

Andrew and I talk about publishing whenever I visit Book & Puppet.  His first book got picked up by Seven Stories Press, but he, like the rest of us who have jobs for a living, hasn’t found sympathetic agents or publishers, as he describes in this book.  That hasn’t stopped him from writing or from achieving remarkable things.  I was fortunate enough to be involved in the first Easton Book Festival, and a few after that.  It is wonderful to walk around a town where book events are going on all over the place.  Like much that is good, the event took a hit during Covid, but it still goes on.  And it does so because of something that reader and writers have: vision.  Part memoir and part a call to action, You’re Telling My Kids They Can’t Read this Book? deserves to be widely read.

Winter Jogging

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Keeping healthy can be hazardous to your health.  We recently had a rainstorm, followed by a snowstorm with several days not getting above freezing.  All of this made my usual jogging route impassible—ice under snow all on top of pea-gravel is a recipe for twisted ankles or broken arms.  I’ve had my fair share of spills while jogging but I’m at an age where my doctor asks me if I’ve had any falls in the past year, so I guessing it’s a bit more serious now.  But getting out to jog is difficult in such conditions.  A treadmill might be a solution.  We used to have one and I pretty much ran it into the ground.  I used it in inclement weather, but it was too much to move from New Jersey and besides, there’s nowhere in our house to put it.  Our basement ceiling is so low you have to stoop, and that doesn’t work for jogging.

After a few days of feeling dumpy, and when the weather got back up into the twenties, I decided to jog on the streets.  That’s one of the advantages to living in a smaller municipality.  There are a few cars out at first light, but not many.  And the streets are (mostly) cleared off.  I wasn’t sure this was the smartest thing to do, but when I greeted another jogger out doing the same thing, I felt validated.  The weather is still in charge.  I’ve been interested in the way the weather affects just about everything.  For example, this past summer I wanted to do a couple outdoors projects.  It rained nearly every weekend and then turned so hot that people my age were warned off of outdoor activity.  So much for mortal plans.

When autumn rolled around it turned cold rather quickly, forestalling any bigger projects beyond a massive amount of weeding.  And this is just on a personal level.  Deliveries are slowed.  Sometimes transportation hubs are shut down.  Bad weather for crops necessitates cooperative trading between nations (ahem).  We are at the mercy of the weather.  Tech giants are planning to go to Mars but they can only launch their rockets if the weather cooperates.  We’ve been messing with it because of global warming, and pretty much anyone who’s non-delusional knows climate change is real.  The sky is, after all, bigger than the earth.  So little problems, such as having to jog in the streets, seem less of an issue.  As long as it keeps us healthy.

Keep Remembering

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Books used to be, and often still are, works of art.  I can’t imagine my life without them.  I read Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse back in 2023.  A psychiatrist that’s a friend of mine recommended it.  Mackesy’s next book of wisdom, Always Remember: The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, the Horse and the Storm just came out in 2025.  It was a stormy year and I can’t help but think this book was one of the antidotes that the world seems to hide next to the poisons it contains.  The book is a work of art.  Like its predecessor, it builds on the importance of love, friendship, and hope.  These are the kinds of things we need in difficult times.  Indeed, we are in the midst of a four year storm that threatens to tear apart 250 years of progress.  We need this book.

I wanted to save this book to be the first I finished in 2026.  To start the year off in a good way.  I’m not a maker of resolutions since I try to self-correct as soon as I become aware of a problem.  But reading a positive book at the start of the year seems like something that is smart to do.  It’s so easy to get drawn into negativity.  Doomscrolling invites itself to be shared with others.  Pretty soon we’re all mired down.  But the horse is fond of reminding the boy, mole, and fox, “The blue sky above never leaves.”  It is there waiting for us, after our self-inflicted storm ends.  As I’ve noted before, writing books is a hopeful exercise.  Reading them can be too.

Charlie Mackesy is my age.  He seems to have distilled more wisdom from our time on this planet than I have.  Reading his observations is the very definition of nepenthe.  When the headlines foreground hate, we must respond with love.  When everyone tells us the storm will never end, we must beg to disagree.  Humans are problematic creatures.  We create our own ills much of the time.  There are those among us, however, who are wise.  And we can improve our state if we choose to listen to them instead of those who loudly proclaim their own praises.  Wisdom is often in short supply in this world we’ve created for ourselves.  It is not, however, completely absent.  Do yourself a favor and find Always Remember.  No need to save it for a rainy day.

Welcome 2026

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I put great stock in holidays, but I’ve never felt a deep connection to New Year’s Day.  I’m more of a morning person than the stay up late sort, and the New Year also seems cold after the coziness of Christmas.  But here we are in 2026 nevertheless.  We’re encouraged to look ahead.  I’m not much of a corporate person and I don’t see much wisdom in devising five year plans in an unpredictable world or any such nonsense.  The way things have been going in the news, it’s hard to have a five-day plan that bears any resemblance to reality.  But New Year’s Day does seem an appropriate season for optimism.  Hope stands here, anticipating better days ahead.  I am, despite appearances, an optimist.  I do believe in progress and the calendar keeps on ticking over regardless.  What will 2026 hold?  Who knows.  Best to take it one day at a time.

For me personally, I’ve got a couple books nearly complete and I do hope to find publishers this year.  And I’ve got many others started as well.  Writing is an act of optimism.  I’m always touched when someone lets me know they’ve found my work interesting, or even helpful.  Someone once contacted me to let me know Holy Horror had helped them through a difficult time.  This made me happy; writing books is a form of connection.  When I read books—a major planned activity for 2026—I’m connecting with people I don’t know (usually).  Writing to me feels like giving back.  The funny thing about it is the tension of having little time to do it seems to make it better.  I always look forward to the break at the end of the year but I find myself using the time to recover rather than for the intensive writing I always plan to do.

I have spent the last several days doing a lot of reading.  That too is a coping technique.  I’ve got some good books that I’m looking forward to finishing in 2026.  And the blog bibliography continues to grow.  Looking ahead I see reading and writing.  That to me is a vision of hope.  I didn’t stay up to midnight last night—that only makes me start out the new year grumpy.  No, instead I woke up early to start the year by writing.  And reading.  What does 2026 hold?  I have no idea.  I’d rather not speculate.  I do believe that as time stretches on some improvements will begin to take place.  I do believe holidays are important, both looking back and looking ahead.

Dreamscape

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I remember them but imperfectly, my dreams.   This can be frustrating when, for example, I dream up a story, complete with an ideal ending, then wake up with only fragments left.  I suppose I’m like most people in that I go through phases when I remember dreams and other periods when I don’t.  Lately my sleep patterns have me recollecting much of the strangeness in my sleeping head, but not enough to get it all written down into the story that was playing out so perfectly upstairs.  Dreams are one reason that we don’t understand consciousness.  We’re not 100% rational creatures.  And we know that other animals dream.  Our minds stay active when we’re asleep and they seem to have no limitations.  The stories we tell ourselves when our eyes are closed!

I have some recurring dreams.  The details always differ, but I regularly dream that I’m teaching once again.  The offending institution apologizes for having dismissed me.  Would I please come back?  Of course, one-off dreams are more common.  Sometimes I have the presence of mind to write them down, but I’m at an age when waking up is often in the service of finding the bathroom and that really breaks the mood and sometimes makes me forget.  From my childhood I’ve been told that you don’t die in your dreams, and indeed, usually you wake up before you hit the ground, or whatever.  I have, like Maggie Evans in Dark Shadows, dreamed of myself as dead.  That’s generally not one of the more pleasant of the species, but the mind ranges widely across the dreamscape.  I have a deep sense that we should pay attention to dreams, but being a 9-2-5 worker, getting the morning routine underway has to take precedence.

Lately my dreams seem to be working out fictional stories deliberately.  It’s as if my subconscious is saying, “You have unpublished stories sitting on your hard disc, why aren’t you doing something about it?”  I sometimes wake up feeling guilty that I’ve been writing nonfiction books when I have several weird stories scrawled out that could use a little more attention.  And some other writers I’ve met on social media have been encouraging me to self-publish those stories.  So far I’ve resisted, but the temptation is growing.  I work in publishing and I can say that the industry is quite difficult to navigate and finding an editor who “gets you” is almost impossible.  Maybe I should be basing more of my stories on dreams.  At least in the dream world, they’d find a publisher.

Booking Time

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Some time back I mentioned that I was compiling a bibliography of this blog.  (It should eventually appear as a separate page on this website.)  I’m in the thick of it and it makes me think that it’s a good exercise to go back over older writings now and again.  For one thing, I’m reminding myself of books I may have forgotten after reading.  And it may actually give me ideas for new writing projects.  One of the problems, however, with blogging about books is that it creates a reluctance to rereading.  I’m guessing that most blog readers are looking for something new, and discussing something you’ve already talked about may not fit the bill.  Besides, my stack of books to read is already rivaling Babel’s tower for height.  I’ve always been a catch as catch can reader, especially since no longer having university libraries to use.

One of the lessons along the way is just how eclectic my reading tends to be.  (And eccentric, as long as we’re using e-words.)  I’ve read some strange stuff, and I’m still only in the first three years or so of this aging blog.  The real issue is the desire to re-read.  The world is full of interesting books.  I’ve read a few thousand of them, and many of them I’d like to read again.  This bibliography exercise underscores just how precious reading time is.  Those I talk to, apart from the retired, never have enough time to read.  I’ve learned to cram it into small spaces in the day, but even as I’m doing so I’m realizing that I’m shortchanging the experience.  And this is from someone who works in the publishing industry.  

I’ve posted about four books in the past week—on those rare days when I don’t have to work and winter prevents outdoor chores (beyond shoveling snow), I read.  It’s always pleasant to finish up books I’ve been dabbling in for a while.  In a couple more days I’ll be doing my annual review of the year in books.  Again, it’s an opportunity to look back and see what I’ve been up to thinking over the past twelve months.  Since this blog has being going for over a decade and a half, there are many books behind it.  I don’t know how many, at least not yet.  As I say elsewhere on this website, I believe the books we read define us, make us who we are.  Making a bibliography is a way to keep them in order.  And I’m one of those people who actually enjoys making them.  Time thinking about books is time well spent.

Death Trip

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My own personal Wisconsin Death Trip resulted in the end of my chosen career.  I’d never heard of Michael Lesy, or his book, while I lived in the state, however.  In fact, I’ve been racking my brain to remember how or where I’d heard of this strange book.  I do know that it was suggested to me, likely by another written source, many years ago.  My impetus to pick it up at this time was watching Return to Oz and learning that the writer/director used this book to find inspiration.  Having gone through it, I suspect the reason was that this most unusual dissertation was addressing the question of rural versus urban living conditions, but in a way out seventies way.  The book is a combination of photographs from about 1890 through the turn of the century from Black River Falls, Wisconsin, and snippets from the local newspaper.  But also some bits from the intake records of the state hospital at Mendota.  And also some bits from novels.  And further, some summaries apparently by Lesy.

What I found frustrating is the lack of clear explanations of what the sources were.  Nowhere in the introduction or conclusion is it spelled out that, for example, italic sections are summaries of sources by the author.  Nor is it clear why the parts of novels are used, other than adding flavor; were they written by people familiar with Black River Falls?  And the “word clouds” that begin the separate years—why are some words capitalized and others not?  Is this table of contents only to give a taste or it to spell out in detail what will be covered?  The lack of any narrative, apart from the introduction and conclusion compounds the confusion.  In other words, this is an impressionistic book for a work of history.

At the same time, it is creative and informative.  The final chapter discusses how certain recurring themes—suicide, insanity, arson, for example—demonstrate the hardships among the poor.  As Lesy puts it, they came to realize the lie of hard work (meritocracy) and had to face children dying of disease and their inability to get ahead when those who are wealthy control all the assets, and they snapped.  To me that’s the real value of this book.  I noticed while reading through it that of the notices of admission to the asylum, all but one were described as poor, often desperately so.  And we continue to allow this to happen, not just in Wisconsin, but across the country.  Maybe even more people need to read this odd history and consider its implications.

About Books

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I have tried my hand at fiction writing at least since I was ten.  My first attempted novel was at about fourteen.  Fiction has always been a large part of my life.  Now I work in publishing and still struggle to get my fiction published.  I picked up Big Fiction by Dan Sinykin because of another blogger praising his work.  Subtitled How Conglomeration Changed the Publishing Industry and American Literature,  it is an ambitious book.  I learned a lot by reading it but also found myself putting the book down in a huff.  Not because of the author, but because of the subject.  I grew up in the sixties and seventies, before conglomeration took over big fiction.  Conglomeration is simply the practice of companies buying out other companies.  Even I know that diversifying your portfolio is considered good business practice.  So companies buy one another out.  Thing is, that makes a difference as to what is available to read for the general public.

I’m old enough to idealize elements of the past.  I’ve worked in the corporate world for nearly a decade and a half now and I miss the time prior.  Still, this is fascinating history to read.  Currently there are five major fiction publishers (all of which also publish nonfiction).  They are Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan.  How did there come to be only five?  Sinykin will answer that question for you.  He also explores the smaller nonprofit publishers and the independents.  There’s one big independent publisher left, Norton.  Reading through this book I realized how woefully inadequate my knowledge of fiction authors is.  I read a lot, but there were many, many names I didn’t recognize.  Sinykin tells the stories of many people whose individual tastes may very well have decided which authors you’ve read.

Publishing is a vast and sprawling world, but a very small industry.  In these days when self-publishing is widely practiced, and some authors make a living writing, publishing, and promoting their own books, it may seem that big fiction is less relevant.  Still, these publishers stock the shelves of Barnes & Noble as well as your favorite indie bookstore.  A few things stand out for me: all of this development is recent.  Most of it happened during my lifetime.  There are still powerful editors, but they don’t have the power they used to.  And business-speak has become the language of publishers instead of the countercultural impulse that drives many writers.  This book is an education in itself, even for those of us who work in the book business.

Half-Way Through

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Here’s a writing phenomenon.  Maybe it only happens to me (I am self-taught), but when I’m writing a book a strange thing happens.  When I’m doing my rewrites, and there are usually several, about halfway through I’ll have an epiphany.  Something I should’ve been doing from the beginning.  Then you’re left standing at a crossroads: should I go back to the beginning again now?  But still need to address a basic rewrite as well as the new approach in the second half, so should I just carry on and then start rewriting from the beginning, catching up with the second half?  That may sound like a trivial question, but I assure you it’s not.  You see, right now I have two books in a complete stage.  “Complete” here means done in draft form.  When I write a book it gets rewritten several times before I consider finding a publisher, but when an important point comes to you halfway through, you’re between worlds.

Now, I work alone.  I am part of a local writers’ group and I’m only now starting to get to know others who’re willing to talk about writing.  I know several writers who don’t talk about it.  They’re still friends, but for me, there are few topics I’d rather discuss.  That’s how I learn.  You see, I have no idea what’s normal.  Do other writers labor over multiple rewrites?  I know some do, but I suspect some don’t.  I know that when I write a short story sometimes the first version seems best to me, but try to get such a thing published.  No, you need to rewrite.  Polish.  Make it shine.  But what if one half is shinier than the other?  This is starting to be a regular occurrence.

Inspiration is fickle.  That’s something we can all agree on.  But when you’ve been scrawling on a topic for weeks, or months, and then a realization dawns, you’ve just added yourself additional weeks or months of revision.  I’m sure a great deal of it is due to my own psychology.  Another part is due to writing under the constraint of a 9-2-5 job.  There are only so many productive hours in a day, and since mine come early they necessarily end when the work day begins.  I’ve tried writing after work but my brain and body feel like a CPR dummy when work’s through with me.  The next morning I start at it again, but the question is still should I finish this up with my new insight, or should I go back to the beginning?