On Being a Publisher

Publishing – small press, micro press, book packager, co-publisher… Over the last 10 years GobQ has published Gobshite Quarterly – a multilingual quarterly magazine (now back I print after a long hiatus), co-published Curse + Berate in 69+ Languages, a multilingual dictionary of language from the dark side; a bilingual edition of Gato Eficaz, an early novel by Luisa Valenzuela; and Golems Waiting Redux, an account of the vandalism of local sculpture in downtown Portland in 2002.

The first time I ever held a manuscript in my hands was when Oriel Gray let me take Scraps of Paper home to read. It was her memoir, fresh and vivid. There was something about the unbound pages and the indented lettering (Olivetti portable) that made me shiver – some life or power fresh from her mind and hands came, straight and unmediated, to my hands and mind.

Though that manuscript became part of my furniture for almost 30 years, I forgot what handling real manuscripts is like. When RV Branham suggested starting a magazine I wasn't paying much attention, truth to tell. But when the manuscripts started coming in…. I'll never forget the day Vénus Khoury-Ghata's Words arrived at the Gobshite Quarterly office, as a mailed fax from Marilyn Hacker in Paris. It was a delirious experience: I couldn't focus on them, the sense of awe and strangeness and déjà vu was so strong; I couldn't stand quite upright. I put them down and picked them up again, read them, and finally took them to my own office – a quiet, west-facing room upstairs, with nothing but a desk, 2 chairs and 2 windows – even northern light on the one side and filtered western light on the other – and laid them on the desk, in order, and began again. They were so good, and so far outside the realm of English poetry that having them in my hands felt made me feel as though something I'd never known but always known was trying shake itself free of the categories I always thought in, or lived in.

We ran them all in issue 1, in French and English. (That is, we ran 14 in French and 13 in English: The New Yorker had bought one of the translations.)

In that issue we also ran "Sirens," a short story by Frederic Raphael (Two for the Road, The Glittering Prizes), which hadn't placed in England. It's a great story, another world-view shatterer. I couldn't believe it'd been "Good luck placing it elsewhere"-d. In England. Couldn’t believe it.

The 3rd most wondrous experience was an email from Palestine (long after we'd given up hope), allowing us to reprint some of Mahmoud Darwish's poems. (Typesetting the Arabic was an adventure – it was eventually done by one of the partners in a local printing business, who'd studied Arabic and been to Syria for a year as a Fulbright scholar. As we didn't have the right font at the time we scanned the page as a jpg and InDesigned it that way.)

Marilyn Hacker also brought us the French poet Marie Etienne. Writers from Cuba and Mexico and Argentina contacted us, looking for translators; translators contacted us, looking for publishers (Hungary, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Poland), and we found translators and published them.

On a visit to Portland Julienne Eden-Bušić chanced to see us mentioned in The Oregonian. She brought a treasure-trove of new Croatian, Slovenian, and Bosnian poets – Tomica Bajsić, Barbara Korun, Dubravka Oraić-Tolić and Ferida Durakovic, as well as prose-writers Edo Popović and Gordan Nuhanović. Tomica Bajsić's poetry was – seeing it in manuscript was just a rush, it really was. Seeing something that good, and new, already accomplished and huge with future possibility – fills you with hope and joy and repletion, all at once.

The other astonishing thing about publishing, perhaps particularly about Gobshite, was that the printed object travelled roads we'd never imagined. People kept saying they'd run across a copy in a train in Spain or some other obscure way-station. The Algerian poet Amari Hamadene contacted us after seeing a copy in an Algerian café.

And just as well the manuscripts shake the world and then travel beyond imagining, because the financial dance of publishing is awful. We were just beginning to get some ad-revenue when our major distributor collapsed, leaving us with pennies on the dollar, unable to return to print until very recently.

And we are beginning to return to print, using Portland printers and very small runs. Issue 12 came out just before last Christmas, featuring a short story by Lidia Yuknavitch, essays on the Occupy movement by Richard Melo and Joyce Reynolds-Ward, Occupy sketches by Shannon Wheeler, an excerpt from a lost Russian novel about the Revolution (by Anatoliy Mariengoff; we are hoping to co-publish the entire book when translation is complete), an etymological reminiscence by Katherine Dunn; short, surreal prose-poems from Denmark – all sorts of things that do not appear elsewhere in English, and certainly not in conjunction with each other. We intend to print issue #13-14 this coming autumn.

Though I usually function as factotum, reader of first or last resort, proofreader, poetry editor, image-bank, and bookkeeper for Gobshite I am preparing a couple of books for publication later this year. One is almost ready; the other, which will be larger, I haven't quite mentioned to the writer, yet… I'll drop by later this week, and have a word.

Sometimes the World Works

Perhaps it was the hint of rain in the air, but this morning I did things in the front garden instead of what I'd usually do. The moss and ferns (largely unwanted on the one hand, struggling on the other), reminded me of a terrarium -

The first writer's organization I was a(n associate) member of was SFWA. (Sometimes the world works in very strange ways.) From the early '80s to the early '90s,LOSCON was local and we went to it every Thanksgiving. For 2 or 3 years during the late '80s there were wonderful terrariums in the dealers' room, fantasy castles on moulded plastic cliffs, and wizards with staves topped with orbs of opalized or coloured glass in among ferns and mossy things; they were small and whole fantasy worlds, made with real, living plants from this one. You could look into them and find them surrounding you.

And at work there was a young lad who'd come to study in the Library every morning before his first class, always awkward and overwhelmed. One day his mother came in with him, bringing his lunch in a brown paper bag, and urging him to do well. She was badly dressed and missing some teeth: they were clearly very poor and the boy was both the apple of her eye and the family's great hope. His frailty and burdens worried me. I wanted to tell him about the terrariums in the dealer's room; I knew the plants would comfort him; but I didn't know him well enough to talk to him about anything at all.

I suppose he graduated; he stopped coming in in the mornings. In the brutal way of the daily grind I forgot him.

Some years later I was walking back to the library from the cafeteria (I worked there a very long time), and I saw a tall young man talking to some students. I bristled and asked him if he needed anything, unknown adult male on campus, talking to a group of quite young girls. He replied that he was talking to his sister. Naturally I wasn't convinced. And then he said, "Don't you remember me? I'm Carlos."

And yes, it was Carlos. More than 6 feet tall, in fatigues (name-patch at the join of clavicle and shoulder), out of the Army now, studying to be a Forest Ranger.

The Inside-Out, Utterly Hypocritical, Pre-Paid, Jerry Who? from Where? "Review" "Scandal"

It's a Gordian knot of bad faith and absurdity.

Firstly, the matter of e-book authors writers paying a supplier for positive (5-star) reviews from "readers" who may not have read the books in question. (That's actually 2 matters - firstly, the automatic 5 stars, and secondly, and the one I assume the hoo-hah is about, is the availability of the paid service.)

Now this could not happen - the reviews wouldn't convince potential buyers - if customer reviews hadn't already been a large feature of Amazon's database, if people hadn't already been using them to make buying/reading/viewing decisions.

I've used the customer reviews there many times to decide about DVDs I wanted to use for some of the DVD film-festivals at work a few years ago. I needed them particularly for things I wasn't personally familiar with (Korean TV series, films from Mongolia and Iran, some older new-wave films from China I hadn't seen, and so on). I liked Amazon customer reviews because they are, generally, without guile. If people got bored half-way through, or even ten minutes into, they said so. There were usually enough reviews of a title to form a balanced judgement before setting in motion a lot of possibly needless activity in setting up the festival, and to save myself a lot of embarrassment.

So that was valuable knowledge. I appreciated its existence.

And, once more, there are 2 things to consider here.

Firstly, how can I go on trusting Amazon customer reviews if they can be bought and paid for?

Secondly: why do I value Amazon customer reviews for their honesty, if the old-media, "professional" reviews, are also honest?

Answer: because the professional reviews are not honest.* They are every bit as pre-paid as the "scandalous" e-book reviews - they just work in the 2.5-4.5 star range. (Their question seems to be: Is this book a good or bad example of its type?)

(Publishing is an assembly-line; the assembly-line mass-produces predictable objects. The potential book should announce its similarity to previous books; it  should not take place in a particular locale, but be equally local to all potential readers...) (But that's old news. This development began in the mid-'60s, when profits were first going to be "maximized" and corporate mergers were still just proposals and plans. It took another 10 years for the doing away with the mid-list to become an explicit, effective policy. Norman Spinrad was one of the first to raise that alarm among writers, in 1978.)

The function of professional reviewers has always been to keep the books selling, and, hemi-demi-semi-consciously, reviewers feel the pressure. (How many times have you read a negative review that revised itself into positivity before your eyes and its own end?)**

This is another kind of silencing of dissent, trivial, creepy, and indicative. If you can't tell the truth about a book you've read, what can you tell the truth about?

In an understandable effort to create an island of sanity/probity in this steaming swamp of payola, this anyone will do anything for money - which is a definition of slavery, among other things - 49 British authors wrote a letter to the Daily Telegraph, condemning the widespread use, by authors, of fake identities to puff their own pieces and slam those of their "rivals". (See the introductory article here.)

Yesterday I came across a hard copy of Steve Lawhead's The Spirit Well (Nashville, Thomas Nelson, 2012). This is a transcript of the first two pages. (Emphases in the original.)

==

What Readers Are Saying about The Bright Empires Series

"His mastery of the art of description is beyond belief. (I had to stop several times to jump up and down because I loved his style so much, seriously.) His level of attention to details like period mind-set and speech is a delight to behold (especially for die-hard background-first novelists like me)." - Sir Emeth M.

"This is a story that has it all: mystery, history, damsels in distress, and a mind-bending meditation on the nature of reality. It is in equal parts Raiders of the Lost Ark, National Treasure, and Jumper. Highly recommended." - Chad J.

"Filled with descriptions that beguile all five senses and all the beauty and charm of the language I have come to expect from Lawhead, this book is a fascinating blend of fantasy and sci-fi." - Jenelle S.

"... a hold-your-breath beginning to a new series. This novel mixes ancient history, time travel, alternate realities, mystery, physics, and fantasy, to create a story so compelling that I find myself recommending it to any who will listen." - Sheila P.

"[A] sure winner for eager sci-fi readers... The vivid imagery and witty lines help keep the reader on the edge of their seats." - Jerry P.

"Time travel and high adventure abound in this brand new title from veteran author Stephen R. Lawhead." - Ben H.

"Imagine Narnia merged with Hitchhiker's Guide, and you have a starting point for the adventures of Kit Livingstone." - Rick M.

"Lawhead vividly describes the sights, sounds, and smells of the markets in Prague, the streets of Restoration England, and even the dry heat of Ancient Egypt... The premise of ley-line travel is fascinating yet mysterious, with scientific definitions that are detailed without being too technical. The characters are personable and complex, and it's easy to get caught up in their search for that elusive map." - Malinda D.

"... an excellent, mysterious storyline that draws the reader in." - Kieran

==

Let's leave aside the fact that The Spirit Well is volume 3 of the series and that at least one of the quotes does not strictly apply to the item in hand.

What I immediately notice is that:
*the punctuation is surprisingly correct for the level of prose - "I loved his style so much, seriously"
*the pitch-points/selling-points (bolded) are surprisingly concise for people who are "beguiled" by Lawhead's prose, which is flat, sloppy, flatly under-imagined and flatly overwritten, awkward in contemporary scenes and awkward in period.

None of these accolades is credibly sourced. They sound like some Amazon reviews but they don't sound quite real.  They smell of over-eagerness; they have such a sameness of tone and intent, such a single thrust of argument, they smell of some sort of fix.

A major publisher including such "reviews" in the book itself, is, to me, an even greater scandal than writers puffing themselves, no matter how deceitfully and underhandedly.

These pages in the book are not accessible to greedy individual authors, mavericks who suffer an unfortunate ethical insufficiency, and who will be discovered, eventually, pass through the mandatory brief public shame and so be absolved, i.e., forgotten and left to begin again under a pseudonym.

The beyond-Amazon, hard-copy corporate sponsorship of this kind of review is not being mentioned. The "scandal" is being confined to the behaviour of flesh and blood individuals. Corporate persons are exempt from, defined as above and beyond, whatever rage results from the hijacking of the mouths they call ours.

===

*Writers glad-handing each other's work is not just a recent occurrence: writers reviewing each other favourably and arranging exchange professorships / lectureships / fellowships for each other goes all the way back to the New York Review of Books, which was founded by publishers, notably Random House. (NYRB also pretty much founded the travelling writer's lecture business, another medium for promoting some writers, some books, some ideas.)

All this is detailed in The End of Intelligent Writing, by Richard Kostelanetz (Sheed and Ward, New York, 1974). This book is invaluable about the history and shape of U.S. publishing - and if nothing else, will explain why is is so important to know that Jason Epstein was Jeff Bezoz' mentor.

**In the Australian case I see the fear that bad reviews will kill a genuinely tiny industry. Unfortunately, that  industry can also die of good reviews. The precariousness of Australian book activity, like that of the other English-language publishers, comes from trying to make a branded, assembly-line industry out of an essentially unpredictable, low-margin business.

Poor Fellow, My Language: What Language Is This?

And so I pick up this book, runner-up for the 2011 Miles Franklin, and the apparatus of mediation and apperception – everything from The Australian Book Review to The Independent to The New York Times bestseller's blurb – says it's great – "fierce economy of style" and so forth: and I pick it up and find that it's written in dead-speak. Perhaps, I think, this is meant to be some sort of analogue to the early C20th newspaper accounts of disasters; perhaps it's meant to be like that. (This is the first chapter, where the murder takes place in the storm.)

I am slightly surprised to find, in the second chapter, Quinn, the falsely accused brother of the 12 year old girl, isn't 13 or 14, but 16. That seems old, for the father to have been so worried about them in the storm and flood. You'd expect a lad of 16 to have some physical strength and sense, enough to look out for a 12 year old; enough, at least, for that thought to have crossed the father's mind, even in a monstrous storm.

And then, in the midst of the stiltedness, the book begins to be populated by sentences like this: He steadied himself against a tree and was afraid. (p. 24).
??
"He was afraid and steadied himself against a tree"?

Quinn, waking from a nightmarish dream, frantically struggling with his gas mask, says to himself: Move it, move it, move it. (p. 32)

Not in 1919, in Australia, he doesn't. The Australian idiom was "Move!" or "Move your arse!" "Move it!" is American.

He closed his eyes to better enjoy the sun's warmth. – General tone & flavour. (p. 37)

Quinn visits Mary, his mother, who is dying of influenza. She speaks of going into the murdered girl's bedroom, hoping in her grief that handling the girl's things, reciting lines of poetry over and over again, can bring her back.
She says to Quinn: Your father hates that I go in there. (p. 57)

That's a particularly New York Jewish construction. You'll hear it in Woody Allen's early films. Neither Mary nor anyone else would have said that in outback NSW in 1919. There's no indication in the book that Mary's first language is Yiddish.

The woman in question was perched in a green armchair. Her thin and restless fingers wrung a pair of black gloves in her lap, as if to death. Her husband stood at her shoulder and each of them wore a startled, pensive expression like they had steeled themselves for bad news so many times that their faces were permanently set thus. (p. 62)

If the narrative voice of this novel is, in its stiltedness, attempting to evoke the starchiness of early C20th Australian newspaper speech, then "like" meaning "as though" is completely out of place. It is an Americanism that became familiar to Australians when American TV did; it entered Australian English (where it still clangs) no earlier than the mid-'50s. Combined with the fussy and self-important "thus," the passage becomes a whipsaw of USUK usages posing as a period Australian sentence.

The mise en scene is muddled... The hardscrabble of dry land and people driven crazy by poverty is well evoked (the Irish placenta on the river flats… Although by this time you are ready to suspect Kurosawa or the Chamberlain affair).

What's not clear is how the lush orange and nectarine orchards near the richer part of the town (named Flint), relates to the rest, where the water ends, how the grass high as his knees could survive away from the river. The farmer that must have brought his flock up here to graze – whereabouts would he have gone afterwards? What of the sheepdogs? (Never a bark, a nose, a threat of being sniffed out; never another allusion.)

It's all very well for The Independent to say the descriptions of the Australian bush have "a precise and transporting intensity." The Independent has no way of knowing these descriptions haven't got a feasible, realized geography. The Independent would never have let D.H. Lawrence get away with crap like this.

I have no objection to Australian writers or anyone else using American or English idioms whenever they like. What a good novel requires is that writers know what they're doing, where and what period the expressions they're using come from, and what their origins suggest; writers need to use them to build to deliberate and successful effect. Novelists need an ear for dialogue...

I don't even care that by my lights this is a bad book. Bad books sell well all the time; in certain moods I'm ready for a really bad book.

My real objection here is twofold: that the writer has no ear and no idea; and that that the "critical" apparatus of at least two countries has made a concerted effort to tell me this is a good book. More than a good book, a Miles Franklin runner-up. Does the critical apparatus of two countries have a tin ear? Doesn't it know what it's doing? (Doesn't it know that it doesn't know?) (Is it just that the cheques keep clearing?)

There are Henry Lawson stories that are pitch-perfect, still, a hundred and twenty years later. The Slap is pitch-perfect. They're written in a particular language.

This book's not alone in its lack of an actual language.

Another recent award-winning Australian novel featured, in its first chapter, an American soldier in WW2 Sydney describing Australian mouths as being (as thin as) "letter-boxes," when the word the character would use is mailslots – the American word, where the emphasis lies on the horizontal line the character is actually registering. A page or so later this same man sees a girl sitting on her "bottom" and not on her butt or ass…

So I end at my beginning. What language is this, where Australian characters normally speak Yiddish or standard American, and American characters speak in English euphemism?

==

Womersley, Chris, Bereft: a novel, New York, Silver Oak, 2012
McConnochie, Mardie, The Voyagers, a love story, Melbourne, Penguin, 2012.

==

I didn't finish Bereft; I read slightly past the 100-page mark, where I found it turning into a detailed treatment for the film it always wanted to be. (I won't mention Quinn training himself to be still for hours on end, to avoid snipers in the War, and then standing still in the bush, and noticing his stiffness after, as though it were not routine.)

I've only read the online chapter of The Voyagers.

I haven't read the rest of these novels. If I'd been in a bookshop looking for something to buy, the clear lack of command of the material in these books would have killed the sale.

Poor Fellow, My Language: 'Im Bugger-Up.

It was when I was editing library catalogue headings for the University of Sydney, around 1996-1997, that I first began to realize just how non-standard Australian English had become. I had been gone from the country about 15 years at that stage, and so had lost any sense of the texture of Australian life.

Since then what seems to me to have been some kind of linguistic – movement, more than revolution – in the quality press. Fairfax, to be particular: I have not been able to overcome my dislike of the Murdoch media long enough to actually read The Australian since 1975.

I used to read The Age andThe Sydney Morning Herald online before going to work. I did that from late 1996 till, I suppose 2008, when they had both become tabloid: everything was sport, conflict, sex, crime – lurid and inescapable. I found that frustrating because I wanted to know what was going on, and footy and gangland murder, drug arrests and police corruption were what I was being given instead of political and social coverage. I used to find Michelle Grattan interesting and informative, but her column appeared to have denatured itself. The books pages – originally updated weekly, and particular to the papers they appeared in, first became more toothless, then began to be updated less and less frequently until they finally became one page pointed to by two different URLs, and almost changeless.

However, the period between 2001 and 2007 was interesting because language which had never before been in the register of newspapers of record regularly appeared on the front page, and this language was what would once have been called "coarse."

The first example that comes to mind is the word "stoush." It means "fight" – verbal or physical conflict long after the initial point of contention or conflict has been identified, and argued about. Originally the word belonged to the street. It would have been used in good and earnest by the Irish gangs of Sydney before the turn of the last century, and to comic effect by C.J. Dennis in the 1920s.

These words are Australian in the sense that they have been in Australian English for a long time (carried over from Cockney or London working-class or criminal or semi-criminal speech). They have not been part of the standard Australian English. Thirty years ago they were archaic. But like "bonza" and others, they have been resurrected and injected into the mainstream of Australian English as Australian identifiers.

To complain about "the coarsening of language" is not only to sound Victorian, but to miss the point.

Language like this is intensely political. It does not signify the sudden inclusion of formerly excluded groups, a new and pervasive flavour of Scottish shop-stewards, as it were.

This kind of language was being introduced and intensified as the "children overboard" incident was passed on as truth so John Howard could win a Federal election, as boats of Afghani or Iraqui refugees were being intercepted by the Australian Navy and turned back to Indonesia or offloaded at the prison on Christmas Island, as refugees were imprisoned in horrifying camps near Woomera or other places on the mainland or off-shored to camps / prisons on Nauru (paid for by Australian taxpayers), as the infamous Cronulla riots occurred.

Language like this is:

a) historically Australian, and so guarantees the "Australianness" of what is being said - that the matter is particularly or primarily Australian, unconnected to other happenings elsewhere, or virtuously Australian - that this should be thought or done to or for, by, with, or from Australia(ns)...
b) inflammatory

And, being inflammatory, it limits the scope of what may be readily perceived about what is being said.

It's the language of and imprimatur for right-wing street-thuggery, a la National Front, but without the embarrassment of an explicit political link.

Free Will and Determination

With more 

• anger
• humour
• history
• geography
• moxie
• wisdom 

 and sheer philosophy than ever before -  the Knitting Alone post originally called "The Myth of Balance" has become the first part of:

"Free Will and Determination" - an essay on the blog at Red Lemonade.

:)

Shock! Horror!

The new job's not hideous!

This is kind of what it's like.