The Keepers

November 14th 2014

We live in a time of paradigm changes, which makes it a very exciting era to be in.  The bishop of Truro recently gave the Church of England six years before it gives up the ghost (and I'm not talking of the holy ghost!) ; all of art in its many forms is slowly wandering out of the desert of solipsism; physics, they said in the news this week, is on the brink of a whole new Copernican revolution; the explosion of social media has really changed the game on just about any front you can think of.

I have a daughter who is tearing around the country promoting the Indie film she wrote and starred in and which has done very well on the Indie film circuit garnering ten awards, including three for best actress. I bring this up because her struggle against the old paradigm, "the film industry" is very telling. Any time an "industry" moves in to represent the voice of the artist, then you have something like the kind of totalitarian regime that we, in our "free" society, love to denigrate.

The Hollywood monopoly still stands in so far as it continues to dictate our viewing options, but there are noises now from down the ladder, loud noises that are questioning the gate-keepers and why they were ever given that power in the first place.  Robert Redford put his mega-millions to very good use when he started his film fest at Sundance (quite apart from anything else, they sell fantastic clothes!) but inevitably the renegade morphs into the status quo, and though those films are still good, they have begun to rely more and more on big money and star-power.
You might wonder why I am going to such lengths to describe the film industry (apart from the obvious fact that my daughter has taken up arms against it!  (http://bit.ly/ImagineImBeautiful) I'm going on about it because this kind of indy movement is happening all over the arts and not in a small way in the book industry. Independent publishers have been around for a while, and of course we all know about "the big six," one of which (happily for me!) published my own book.  There are reasons of course for shooting for traditional publishing and reasons for going down the independent road. Both have their bonuses and pitfalls. But something else is beginning to emerge, a sort of half-way house between the independent publishers and the big industry ones, something that gives more power to the author (check out booktrope.com)
The truth of the  matter and the impetus for change is that the voice of the artist doesn't necessarily conform to industry standards. Actually, how could it possibly? In an earlier blog I was talking about the difficulty Pulitzer prize winning Paul Harding faced trying to find a publisher for "Tinkers." He eventually went with this teeny little publishing company called Bellevue, and I am sure he must have worried for a while if he shouldn't be committed to Bellevue (on another level) for putting his hard-won opus into the hands of an underfunded company with a staff of one or two. For Harding it payed off big time. But there ought to be a larger more consistent outlet for "art" as opposed to "commercial art." Let's make the distinction, call a spade a spade. Who would publish James Joyce, DH Lawrence, Steinbeck, Faulkner, even Marilynne Robinson these days? Is it because their writing is outmoded? No. It's because by industry standards, they could not be successful, meaning, not enough people would cherish them to make a profit. But history will cherish them. The better side of our nature will cherish them. Great art is to be cherished and savoured over time, not sold for the fastest dollar.
We stand at a watershed-moment in many areas of life. All we know is, we don't need more gate-keepers. What we need, and what we are slowly getting, is a new paradigm.

Apologies to designer of this great image for using without permission

Menschliches, Allzumenschliches

21st June 2013

Sometimes these blogs feel like me marking time, a Robinson Crusoe effort to score life onto a piece of desert island bark. But that is only because I was born with a fertile imagination and daily events in my twisted universe take on gargantuan proportions. It is both a blessing and a  curse, and made me very difficult to live with when I was a child. Perhaps even more so now. Too often, I am like that mother in Neil Simon's "The Good bye Girl," shaking her daughter awake to insist that the new flatmate's guitar playing in the middle of the night must be disturbing her.
Enough of the preamble. Here I was all week floating around the Aspen Writer's Conference, handing out the postcards advertising my book which came overnight from New York (thanks to my editor at Simon and Schuster!) Being terminally socially awkward, it suits me much better to be able to hand someone a card instead of actually converse with them. The cards are bright green, green cards, in fact. So buy my book and you will automaticially have leave to stay in the USA for an indeterminate time. "Time is indeterminate," is what I should say when people ask me what my book is about. Instead, they get handed a green card.
Enough of the post preamble. Let's get down to the nitty gritty. I came to the conclusion after attending (and part of the time moderating) the local writer's group for ten years, that gatherings like this are only of limited value. I am always telling beginning writers to attend them, because at that stage a sounding board is a good thing. It is helpful to know if your writing is on the level of some of the folks (usually of the male sex) who came to our local writer's group and mumbled a section from their journal (when the journal comes out, you start to worry.) More often than not, it was beyond incoherent. You can't do better than a roomful of people agreeing on a piece of writing missing its mark. But for more advanced writers, the variety of reader responses might only be confusing, and you definitely shouldn't change anything unless it resonates at a deep level with yourself.
And now to Paul Harding, at whose feet I had the privilege to sit this week. The paradox of the artist is that he or she is the vessel for what Nietzsche calls "the desires of the gods," without actually being a god him or herself. This is Peter Shaffer's point in his brilliant play "Equus." Mozart couldn't possibly have lived up to Salieri's high minded expectations, because he was a human being. And it is the all-too-human folly of the supplicant to expect him to.
Harding has a new book coming out in September called "Enon." (Geez, my editor would never have allowed me to keep that title!) You should buy it, because Harding is a  Mozart of the word. You should buy it because in this age of high literary fashion, he is an artist who talks about the essence of truth and beauty. That's why he couldn't publish the pulitzer prize winning "Tinkers," for five years, and why it is some kind of minor miracle that it was published at all. I am expecting the same great things of "Enon," and I will be equally fanatical about foisting it on everyone who comes within arm's reach.
Paul Harding is a man with his particular heroes. He is annoyingly sure of his ideas. (Anyone who knows me will be laughing at this point with a dark sarcasm.) He has his own particular universe, his own cosmology. I sat at his right hand and nodded at most everything he said. But my hackles went up when he opted for the thology of Saint Paul, John Calvin and Karl Barth and dismissed Nietzsche as a quack. Calvin? I said, that's like putting your money on Quasimodo over Heathcliff. (Well, I wanted to say it!)
In "Equus," Salieri, hidden from view but witnessing Mozart spout obscenities, is aghast. If truth is beauty and beauty is truth, how can Mozart be all so human? How can Paul Harding have this rigid avenue of himself so divorced from himself as an artist?
This is the question. And the truth is, it is Paul Harding's prerogative to have avenues of himself that look any way he likes.
All that counts is that Paul Harding keeps churning out books. Whatever it takes. A hundred years down the line, this is all that will matter. Vessels become broken and fall away, but the unfathomable essence of what they contain persists. In the beginning was the word.
Get your hands on a copy of Tinkers and see how good literature begs to be read again. Get lost in the images and the layers, and don't concern yourself with the speaker. He's a nice guy, but for the purposes of art, he doesn't matter. And neither do I. Thus spake Zarathustra.

Vox Clamentis

17th February 2013

I am still on hold with regard to my agent's intercession for me at the publishing house.  But this much I know: they're not going to budge on the publishing date. March 1st 2014, it is. What I am pushing for now is to be granted an official "acceptance" date for the manuscript (i.e. the date it left the editor's office) because that secures me two things:
(1) The publication date won't be pushed any further back (within the terms of the contract, they have to publish within eighteen months of this "acceptance" date.)
(2) My second payment cheque
I encouraged my agent to let me in on what he had proposed to the publishing house to make the medicine a little sweeter, but he wasn't coughing. He says it has to do with the promotion of the book and will cost them money, so my editor has to go to her boss for approval. This will take time.
The title of my novel should be switched from "Veil of Time," to "It Takes Time," because it is taking a bloody lot of it. Time being the theme of my book, I ought to have more understanding for the illusory nature of time. And I do, really. 
In the meantime, a writer friend this week was urging me to exert pressure on my agent to get on with hawking my other books. Because it's not just this book that is held up with this new publication date, but my eight-book backlog.  However, by the terms of my contract I am obliged to show my next novel to Simon&Schuster, though any offer they make on it has to be agreeable to me. Also, by the same terms, I cannot publish another book within six months of the first. So it's just a big bung-up all along the line.
I am toying with the idea of taking a writing class by Paul Harding this summer. His book "Tinkers," is one I admire and keep going back to, so I figure I stand to learn something.
No pearls of wisdom this week. I am speaking from the wilderness, a place where time loses all meaning and no sound echoes back.