There’s an awful lot of tripe talked around digital products. They will change the world, and the way we read, but not to the extent their protagonists believe. The degree to which they are creating their own self-absorbed world is indicated by the blurb for an upcoming  ‘transmedia’ conference this coming autumn in San Francisco. Read on:

‘Transmedia development takes a robust intellectual property and organically fragments it across territories, timelines and platforms to reach mass audiences, optimizing the rights holder’s revenue potential.’

‘In today’s era of media convergence, publishers, filmmakers, producers, directors, broadcasters, writers and gamers are seeing – and profiting from – creative collaboration with the ‘story’ at the center. Transmedia development takes the intellectual property or ‘story’ and moves it across myriad platforms to reach mass audiences, optimizing the value of the content, and creating a ‘world’ in which the story lives, morphs, and expands.’

How can I wonder the story’s integrity survive such fragmentation? And will the audience really be there to pick up on all these pieces. Might not they just want to go back to the original, to the unfragmented story, to the novel even, and might not that be what many authors will want? Not all of course. There are those who see marketing as branch of authorship of course, others who write to established formulae that they know work with their public.

Writing is so much more than  story, and authorship so much more than holding rights.My optimism about the survival of good writing and integrity is authorship is I think well-founded, but we do still have to be very careful that the fragmenters and the rights-exploiters do not take over. That is their intent.

(The Bookseller, 8 February 2011)

‘Bloomsbury is adopting a global, internal structure designed to allow it to function better alongside worldwide operations like Google, Apple and Amazon, and react to increasingly globalised and homogenised consumer tastes.’

Inspired by Bloomsbury, my small business, Collier International, is also going global. If it could find a way to do so. It already is global, comes to think of it. But reorganising would give its director a good feeling, and I could put an announcement in the Bookseller….

I will be looking at all functions, from contracts to coffee breaks, but I’m not optimistic. I can come to terms with globalised consumer tastes …but homogenised – well, great if you like milk.

Do I detect delusions of grandeur here? Or maybe a cavalier override of local culture and taste? Tastes may be increasingly globalised, but not, my Bloomsbury friends, to that extent. My travel experience indicates that the taste of milk differs remarkably from culture to culture.

Sometime between 3 and 4 this afternoon the stream came back. No sign at 2.30, just the same damp muddy earth. Now there’s maybe two inches. My first thought: it’s run-off from the fields. But this is clear water. It’s moving so slowly past the window, but where there’s a little dip beyond the bridge it’s faster, the surface is rippled. Not only is there water outside the window, there is movement.

The wonder of it all. The sense of revelation. How out of nothing water appears. Yes, it’s a spring, so there’s an explanation, and the wonder is how below the surface up in the hills the aquifer rises and falls, cuts off the water flow in a moment and restores it in a moment. There’s always an explanation, but the wonder remains.

There’d been a warning yesterday that water had been seen at Lambourn. How could it not have reached us I wondered? It had simply been moving very slowly, curling round and overflowing the stones and flint and lumps of earth.

Rivers should flow through winter and dry up in summer if they dry up at all. But winterbournes need the winter rains, and flow again almost as harbingers of spring. As come the snowdrops and the crocuses so comes the stream.

Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford never ceases to amaze with the sheer range of titles on display. (On sale as well, but it’s the display that’s extraordinary.) But even here we have the two-for-the-price- of-one offer, just like WH Smith’s or any supermarket. For me the trouble is that I don’t usually want two but, more than that, a seed of doubt has been sown in my mind about the value I’ll be getting when I just buy one. One of its own is poor value, so I buy neither the one nor the two. Happily it is often a characteristic of the two for one that they’re products I don’t want. But if I might have wanted them, I don’t now.

If I want a good new novel, I want a novel that is singular in every sense, not a reading programme. The second novel should I buy may rot on my shelves as the second M&S or Tesco packet of sausages will rot in my fridge.  True, come a rainy day or an empty larder I may well consume that second novel or sausage packet but it will only because there’s nothing else, and existing on nothing else is not the way I wish to live my life.

I hear someone call out ‘value’ but I will be my own judge on what is value.

One step at a time is the way to go. Try and take two steps at a time… well, that’s just foolish.

As a starting-point, check out Philip Pullman on the Oxfordshire projected library closures. He brings a bit of passion (and reality) into a cold world of numbers and council leaders: http://falseeconomy.org.uk/blog/save-oxfordshire-libraries-speech-philip-pullman

Then read on…

We need Pullman’s passion, and his capacity to embarrass, to hammer the leader of Oxford county council, to make us realise just what it is we’re in danger of losing.

What he doesn’t quite get over is the once and forever nature of the cuts. Once the libraries have gone, they’ve gone. Built up over a hundred years and more, part of the great legacy of Victorian civic duty and philanthropy. Much of the red brick is still with us, often looking rundown, but there, at the core of the old communities. New communities have more modern spaces, but it’s all the same tradition.

We can wipe it out in a blink of an eye. 

We’ll find new uses for the buildings. Like old chapels they might make bijou residences for the likes of Mr Mitchell (the council leader).

The government merits as  much opprobrium as councils. I’m pro the big society but government is obsessed with the notion of volunteers taking over what should be legitimate functions of the state, not least libraries. Volunteers are never likely to be equipped to run such institutions, and certainly not in those run-down areas where libraries need to be revived, not shuttered.  

Much better to focus the big society on civic duty, an old and unpopular (these days) and indeed Victorian term.  Volunteers can help in all sorts of ways, but not in running the show.

I know what Philip Pullman means about book publishing, but he’s wrong. The same goes for booksellers. It’s market forces driving them, not moral turpitude. Some of the books he anathematises are the stuff that people borrow from libraries. The great thing is people are reading. And new publishers come along all the time and take risks, explore new areas. It was ever thus. 

Mr Pullman doesn’t like the profit motive. He even mentions Mr Marx which is a little unwise as he’s stir up the ire of the market fundamentalists. We do want to win this case. And it won’t be easy. The fundamentalists carry clout.

Council leaders and fundamentalists like to trot out e-books and the internet as arguments against libraries in their present form. Pullman doesn’t mention them. It’s enough to say that the huge majority of us still read the old-fashioned way – and I suspect will continue to do so.

But Pullman is right on the bidding culture. That needs to be chucked out immediately. The clever arguers and smartly educated guys get the money, all of it. Those with equally good causes but who fall down on the smooth argument get nowt. We need money spread around in a common-sense, even-handed way.

Where, Mr Mitchell will ask, can we make the cuts if we don’t cut libraries? By paring back across the board, I’d argue. Maybe for now buying in fewer new books, even laying off staff, here as everywhere. What you don’t do is wipe out an institution which if you do you wipe out forever.

There’s nothing wrong with redbrick landscapes whether out there on the high street – or as landscapes of the mind.

The child is father to the man… how far can we take this idea?

A child from the moment he gives a name to item, human or otherwise, gives it an identity, is bringing in associations, emotional and physical, which determine how he will view that item for the rest of his life.  Whatever happens in all the years that follow the associations from childhood will be the deepest-rooted and hardest to break.

So far, nothing new.  We know how critical the early years are. And yet, in our own adult lives, we pay little attention to how are our views and opinions were formed. They help us identify ourselves, with a point of view, or family, or a wider group, be it a gang or a political party. Once that identification is established we don’t challenge it. We’re a Daily Telegraph or we’re a Guardian reader. We accept their prejudices as our own, even subtly (or not so subtly) adjust ours as they adjust theirs. What’s more, we associate opinion with attitude and emotion. We’re a naturally angry (not suffering fools) person, or we’re naturally proud (pompous) or assertive (aggressive). 

Phone-ins and live audiences, and shock-jock programmes, feed on this behaviour. It makes for good radio, or good TV. At the same time it demonstrates how little we have by way of self-awareness. How sure we are, how sure the other person is, how much we love or we hate, we follow or we oppose.  We’re in a world of opposites, and we’re not comfortable without them.

An awareness of who we really are, and how we came to be the people we think we are, or with the views we hold, is almost impossible in this world of ours. There’s much talk of mindfulness these days but we’re talking here of mindfulness not just of now but of how we came to be where we are now.

We don’t necessarily have to change the views we hold. But we do need to know where they’ve come from before we put them out into the world, and seek to lay them down for others.

Of course you may enjoy all the adrenalin, the confrontation and the anger, and even the hatred. In which case, stay as you are, ill-informed and angry to the last. For you, a path that makes you more humble, less assertive, less emotional, more compassionate and just a wee bit happier won’t be the right one.

I’ve bought myself a Kindle and forked out a pittance (felt wrong paying so little) for the Howard Jacobson Booker Prize winner. But I can’t bring myself to sit down and read it. I want a book, the sense of a whole book, not a pageless Kindle-screed, in my hand.

35% of US sales in the first week of Jonathan Frantzen’s new novel were e-book, we’re told. How many have read it yet, as opposed to being attracted by its cheapness? Has anyone done the research to find out how they experienced it – how they read it, what they got out of it, how the book and e-book experiences compare? 

E-books of course aren’t so bad. Paper and digital can co-exist at this level. It’s when e-books get enhanced, and the whole book reading experience gets merged with the wider online cheap-knowledge experience that we have to start getting seriously worried.

* 

A few quotes and thoughts from Tom Chatfield’s article in the current (November) Prospect highlight the issues further:

We hear first from a few old-school voices. For Lionel Shriver carefully-crafted novels may be hard to find ‘in a sea of undifferentiated voices’. She’s also ‘concerned that the ‘kind of fruitful professional life as she knows it might be consigned to the past’.  Blake Morrison: ‘Will the craving for interactivity drive books to extinction.’  Philip Pullman: ‘I strongly resent the time it takes.’

Books in digital form, on screen, are suddenly part of a stream of media, so the danger is they’ll lose their identity. So Chatfield argues, and yet it seems he isn’t too concerned, there’s almost an inevitability about where we’re headed.

Apple, Google and Amazon will know what we’re reading, and all those authors who blog and tweet know all about their audiences too. They can write what their audiences want. Don DeLillo: ‘Novels will become user-generated.’ The new digital authors get out there and woo readers, and ensure their output generates mass discussion and consumption. We’re hearing more and more about telling stories, less about novels. Thrillers – ‘the only real genre’ (Lee Child). The novel as potential film script, novelist Julian Gough re-categorising himself as storyteller.

‘In whole fields of research, from politics to academia, the very notion of a book as a static, authored discreet hunk of prose – is starting to seem quaint.’ (Chatfield)

Time pressure: ‘Outside the elemental appeal of stories, many books are ill-equipped to fight their corners.’ The world is becoming increasingly customised, altered to individual specifications.  People will only click to read a novel that fits their own tastes and moods.  ‘This shrinking context will necessarily change the language that people, speak, write and read.’

DeLillo again: ‘Will language have the same depth and richness in electronic form that it can reach on the printed page?

 *

Digital it seems will change the way we read, and that means the way we think. Will we really be left with an undifferentiated world of pseudo-knowledge, with story uppermost and subtlety, critique and analysis sidelined? Chatfield’s analysis is over-egged, he’s bought into digital, doesn’t recognise that there’s a point beyond which digital may yet not go. It may run up against its own natural limitations. Our concern has to be that if and (as we must hope) when it does there is still a book industry – publishers, distributors, bookshops – to support it. And indeed authors worthy of the name.

The idea of story, even thrillers, taking over the earth is pretty horrifying. So too this lazy notion that we will even more than now only buy what matches our tastes and moods. There’s a trap here and the likes of Chatfield are walking right into it, because they rather love the buzz, and want to see what happens. Those of us who love books enough, and the serious business of reading that goes with them, need to start fighting back, and not lying back and let ourselves be steam-rollered.

Remember Philip Pullman’s comment about the time it all takes. Good writing takes time, slack writing doesn’t. Pullman has worldwide following, much of it online. But let them follow. Authors need to lead a different way.

Publishers are doing their best, but they’re covering themselves, trying to point both ways. We need the ‘lay readers’, ordinary people of the book, not publishers, to start fighting back. And we need to do it now. Lose bookshops and it will be much harder.

Let’s not get too alarmist – but there is a death of culture argument here.

Palin, Voldemort 2012

Joy almost unconfined when I read then news this morning. Hope at last! Big rally in Washington held by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert – the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. For once a halt to all those endless reports about mad hatters at tea parties, with Sarah Palin as a malevolent Alice, and Fox TV talking up the ‘patriots’, giving their events and issues attention they’d never normally have achieved. Maybe it’s not accidental that it’s been hard to pick up on sane America in the UK because we have to put up with the Murdoch Times, Murdoch Sunday Times, Murdoch Sun…with other natural tea party supporters in the Mail and Telegraph.

This suddenly is the America we remember from the Obama campaign and inauguration, that doesn’t get reported – and been there all the time. They’re disappointed, yes , that more hasn’t happened, critical of banks, health reforms (too much or too little), Afghan policy and much more, but aware that the American way shouldn’t involve all that confrontation and nastiness, opposition to any compromise or middle ground, the hatred of opponents… The Tea Party is a legit movement, but it’s got out of control.

‘Palin, Voldemort 2012’ was the slogan of the rally. A few more (courtesy of the BBC):

I’m a little annoyed but I’ll get over it

Somewhat irritated about extreme outrage

I’m pretty content actually

We have nothing to fear but fear itself and spiders

A few more:

Hyperbole is the antichrist

Obama – re-open NY subway toilets now

One nation under Aqua Buddha

Fox keeps fear alive. (Shades of Roald Dahl’s Fantastic Mr Fox and all those chickens.)

Aqua Buddha…. being interested in Buddhism I thought I’d check this out. Tea Party senate candidate Rand Paul, son of Ron, apparently ‘kidnapped’ a girl back in his college days and took her off to be inducted into the Aqua Buddha sect…all very unChristian, and Paul has had a lot of flak for it. Now we all want to know more about Aqua Buddha.

Stewart at the end of the rally:

We live in hard times not end times….. If we amplify everything, we hear nothing…. We hear every damned day about how fragile our community is – on the brink of catastrophe. We work together to get things done every damn day.

The last comment prompted the loudest cheer of the day, reports the Beeb.  And it is the best. The simplest of messages but with all the screaming going on around you the easiest to forget. They scream, you scream, we all scream. Ted Kennedy and John Macain had a better way when in the Senate of not long ago they worked together if the occasion demanded.

Obama is not up for re-election next week, but he might as well be as the crazy US electoral system could well impose a Republican Congress upon him, or at least a Republican House of Representatives. All we read is about the disillusioned masses, Tea Parties, Main Street rebelling against Pennsylvania Avenue and Wall Street. (Who would be a road these days?) It’s crazy to blame Obama for the crash and the housing crisis, but it goes deeper – it’s seen as battle for America’s soul, and Fox TV and others have tried to ensure that race and parentage cast Obama outside the pale of true Americans. It’s all been pretty vicious stuff, and I’m not certain I’d enjoy being out on Main Street listening to all the anger and vituperation.

The sad thing is – Obama is still Obama. The guy who wrote Audacity of Hope, who bared his soul in Dreams From My Father, hasn’t changed. His ability to do what he wants has been terribly constrained by the crisis, and a social liberal is not going to endear himself to the Sarah Palin right, and, well, the heathcare bill was always going to be massively divisive.

Out on the left of the Democrats we have people who wanted more, and blame Obama for that. By holding back their support they will get less instead. Strange how people’s political psyches work. 

On the right, if we had only an inkling before of what the backwoods were capable if we know better now. I can relate to the small town, the backwoods mentality. I want the state off my back. Give me a stretch of the backwoods and maybe a view out over the canopy, and a log cabin, comfy bed(!) and log fire I’d be happy, for a while at least. But there’s a real global world out there, and unless we get on board in both political and economic terms we’ve had it.  It’s the old argument: if you’re on board you can change things. (Likewise over here with Europe.) . If you’re not, they pass you by, and you’re left waving for the train to stop, and if you’re  lucky they’ll pull you up on to the last coach…

So get out all you Democrats, all you undecideds, students, anyone who looks beyond the small-town palisade – and VOTE.

Wish I could, but I guess I’m quite happy being English.  Less stressful ….

Walking in the October sunlight, in Richmond Park, the colours hardly changing, still the banks of green woodland as backdrop to sparkling water. A time of peace, which I then seek to analyse. It’s as if I am asking myself – what are the component parts of this peace? There is harmony of colour and form, but whence comes our appreciation of such harmony? At such times we feel good toward others, good without any prior motivation, so whence comes this altruism?  It was as if I must understand what I saw and heard before me, before I could appreciate it fully, and as I did I emptied out not all but some of the beauty. 

I then concluded I was over-analysing. Did Wordsworth do this in the Lake District two centuries ago, or Bach fifty and more years before that, or Yeats in all the turmoil of the Troubles?  No, they knew where they stood in relation to their world, they avoided self-consciousness,  and found a higher form of expression not least because they didn’t analyse.

Best on such autumn days just to enjoy the knowledge beyond words. The words will come in their own time. 

** 

The greatest art comes when societies are shaking off bonds and discovering their identities, Bach born thirty years after the Thirty Years War, Wordsworth reacting intensely against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and Yeats embodying that remarkable self-discovery that marked the Ireland of a hundred years ago. What have we in our own times? Less than 50% of Americans now believe in the American dream, we have a sense of a broken not a big society in our own land, we find identity in football not in any sense of our own creativity. So it’s not surprising that our art is valueless, and mimics the absence of identity and substance it finds around it. Arguably, in that sense it’s successful, but is success which merely confirms the disjunction we see all around us really worthy of the name?

And yet, taking this same fractured society, if we were only to view it, ourselves, and others, in a different way, see what binds rather than destroys, we might find we were living in a golden age.