The Open Society and its Enemies

Yesterday the Literary Saloon announced that the most recent addition to its 'complete review' series is their take on Karl Popper's The Open Society and its Enemies. The Lit Saloon comments that, given the current Bush administration's pronounced closed-society tendencies, Popper's (originally two-volume) book is, once again, a highly pertinent text, even for American readers.

I don't know why they stuck that 'even for American readers' on the end. Popper was always a highly relevant book, for Americans, Brits, and anyone else concerned with the freedom of the individual as opposed to the demands of the almighty state.

First published in 1945, Popper's book is chiefly noteworthy, I suppose, for its intellectual demolition of Marxism. For ever after, it was difficuit -- well, actually impossible -- for any Marxist to claim, as they had hitherto, that Marxism was 'scientific'.

The Complete Review provides its own little introductory essay to Popper and his thinking. This essay is mercifully written in plain English -- and what a massive relief that is, when one contemplates the ghastly academic bullshit in which it might have been couched. Five stars to whoever wrote it.

The essay makes a number of very interesting points, one of them being that Marx's heart was in the right place. Given the times in which he lived, he was quite right to highlight the miserable condition of the working classes. And, I may add, it was really not surprising that he should take the view that revolution inevitable.

Here's the conclusion of the Complete Review's essay:

In a world where religious fundamentalism again manages to move the masses (and leads far too many to do the outrageous), and powerful democratic states like the United States move, under the jr. Bush administration, to limit the rights and voices of individuals, while arguing that they benevolently (yet untransparently) are working towards the greater good, The Open Society and its Enemies remains an essential work. And it's also an engaging and accessible read.

Highly recommended.

Well, the Complete Review essay is certainly recommended. Whether you feel strong enough to tackle Popper himself is up to you. I read him as a young man and was no doubt all the better for it.

Wottakars is a-cummen in

There have been so many twists and turns in this everyday story of booktrade folk that I have grown weary of even thinking about it, let alone saying anything here. But it seems, subject, no doubt, to the whims of the gods, that HMV (owners of the UK bookselling chain Waterstone's) are at last about to buy Ottakar's (a smaller chain). Reuters have the story (link from booktrade.info).

There are those who feel that this is a thoroughly bad thing for writers and publishers, in that it will reduce competition on the UK high street, and create an entity even more powerful than the present Waterstone's, i.e. one which can bully the publishers to an even geater extent than is the case today.

The wisdom of Tim O'Reilly

Tim O'Reilly is a publisher and general computer guru whose thinking about the interaction of the internet and publishing has been recommended here more than once. On 18 May 2005, for instance, I referred to his 2002 essay, in which he made a number of telling points: the most notable, to my mind, being that 'Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy.' And again, on 28 February 2006, I referred to Tim O'Reilly's definition of Web 2.0.

Now, thanks to John Sundman, I have been pointed to some other most interesting material. On O'Reilly Radar, for instance, you can find the results of an analysis undertaken by O'Reilly Research. It's a longish article, and calls for some concentration, plus a study of the comments and discussion afterwards.

My interpretation of the data is that the internet creates a much more level playing field for writers and publishers than does the high-street bookstore. In other words, making books available online -- in one form or another, whether complete texts or samples -- enables readers to find, and perhaps buy, such books much more readily than does the average madhouse which currently masquerades under the name bookshop.

Here on this blog we tend, perhaps, to concentrate on fiction, which may lead us to overlook the fact that most books are non-fiction of one type or another. In my opinion, non-fiction writers are going to find that Web 2.0 is really good news. And not only in terms of sales: as Lynne Scanlon has pointed out, a book can provide benefits other than simply through royalties; and the better known that book is, the greater the benefits.

John Sundman also led me to another piece by Tim O'Reilly, this time entitled Publisher, be very, very afraid? Actually this is a quote from the New York Times headline in reference to Kevin Kelly's recent article Scan this book. Kelly's article included, among other things, an argument in favour of a universal, free digital library that would be available to everyone, even 'elderly people in Peru'.

Scan this book, published 14 May 2006, got a cool reception in some quarters, notably from Sara Nelson of Publishers Weekly. Nelson was alarmed by Kelly's comment that the original purpose of copyright was as an incentive to keep a creator working, whereas the 1998 congressional extension of copyright 'now exist[s] primarily to protect a threatened business model.' And among some of those who commented on Sara Nelson's editorial, the Kelly piece seems to have engendered abject terror. The idea that present copyright laws might not be in the best public interest upset a few people (but not me -- see my comments on the Nelson article at the PW site).

Well, Tim O'Reilly's point is that much of this alarm at Kelly's ideas is misplaced. 'There is,' he says, 'a lot to learn in the new world, but the biggest fear that publishers should be thinking about is the fear that they will be displaced by new publishers who are better at mastering the [changed] rules of business than they are.'

As with the first O'Reilly essay, this one has some enlightening comments attached to it. There is the parent, for instance, whose teenage daughter has built up a small but international online audience for her music. And there is the thinker who proposes the following thesis: 'The entire publication industry, all media, will be reduced to four businesses -- retail, reviewers, librarians, and content creators.' (O'Reilly disagrees.)

As for the copyright issues raised by the Kelly article: well, I am in favour of observance of the law. However, as Macaulay pointed out, in the House of Commons in 1841, bad laws are ignored and flouted. And if copyright law, or certain aspects of it, comes to be seen as a barrier to the public interest, something is going to have to give. Compromises are going to have to be made.

And, of course, before you get too panicky about that, remember O'Reilly's main point. The smart thing to do is not to stand there wringing your hands, but to figure out a way to make the new technology work to your advantage.

One of O'Reilly's commenters says this:

Consider Michael Tiemann's "Metcalf's law" economic analysis of FLOSS -- very relevant, I think, to your own view of Web 2.0: "The value of a network is proportionate to the square of the number of users." The potential value, therefore, of the cross-linked, universally annotatable library is vast. Is copyright law enough to lead us to resist that potential value? I would think not -- rather, the assumption of such a library should be a dominant factor in planning for the next few years. (I say that copyright law is not strong enough here because it is unenforcable beyond a certain boundary and, if rivals outside of that boundary begin to realize the value of the hyper-participatory-library, those inside the boundary will have no choice but to adapt by emulation.)

I don't know whether this stuff interests you at all, but if you're a publisher you really ought to wrestle with it, whether you find it interesting or not; and, if you're a writer, all the more so. The comments on this second O'Reilly piece are, by the way, several times longer than the original article itself, and will take you some time to absorb.

I heard it on the grapevine

A couple of yesterday's papers (e.g. the Financial Times) carried small reports, based on an Audible.co.uk press release, to the effect that:

The world's first audio-only novel will be launched this week in a sign that the surge in demand for downloadable books is set to provide a new medium for budding authors and performers.

Sex on Legs, a 75,000-word novel written and read by Brian Luff, will be available for download on audible.co.uk despite Mr Luff, a London-based comedian, having no contract with a traditional book publisher. Audible, the US company that dominates the audiobook market, is the company behind the popular Ricky Gervais podcasts.

You can read more about it on Audible itself. You have to pay for Sex on Legs, of course. This ain't no freebie.

More ado about nothing new

On Monday we noted that the Sunday Times was attempting to claim credit for exposing a book-trade scandal (retailers charge publishers for display space et cetera) when in fact the 'scandal', if such there be, was known about at least five years ago.

On Monday the ST's sister paper, the Times, rehashed the story: Secret of fees that make a bestseller. And yesterday, also in the Times, the columnist Libby Purves took a third bite at it: Reader, you're a right dimwit.

So much so fairly standard operating procedure, I suppose, at least in the newspaper world. And there's no real need to read any of it. But it's worth noting that Libby Purves repeats the statement which I do not believe to be true, namely that it was the Sunday Times which first broke this story in 2001. If the Times staff repeat it a few more times it will become established fact.

However, it seemed to me that Libby Purves did make one good point. Here it is:

You would think that, knowing how skewed the trade has become, book page editors would question the status quo as journalists do in every other area. You would think that their mission was to seek out interesting new books while scornfully ignoring hype-fests. There is little evidence of this, except in some odd and praiseworthy corners. Journalists like to feel they are up there with the “buzz”, even if the buzz is largely artificial. Where reviews do diverge from the well-trodden track of the week’s “key” books, it is often only into a cosy circuit of settling old scores, or bigging up friends who will soon return the favour. This is often undeclared, which shocks the strait-laced American media (read the New York Times arts ethical policy online, boys, and hang your heads).

Hear, hear.

Ain't it awful?

Oh, dearie, dearie me. Things is not what they was. Wind back the clock. Tell me it ain't so.

In the Observer (link from booktrade.info) Robert McCrum laments... well, laments something or other. Has the novel lost its way? he asks. Novelists now become celebrities and they get lots of money. But, in the rush to cash in, 'quality control has plummeted and the British novel has suffered.'

Well, bless his old heart, this article is mostly a load of cobblers, and I don't really know why I bothered to read it. But since I did, here are a few comments.

Malcolm Bradbury, McCrum tells us, defined the literary novel as a difficult book that nobody wants to read. I rather like that. Anyway, according to McCrum, round about 1969, when the Booker prize was first established, the (British, literary) novel was more or less dead, being overtaken in prestige and popularity by the New Journalism (as expounded by Tom Wolfe) and the theatre (in the shape of David Hare). Then along came Salman Rushdie and injected new blood into the novel's system.

Following Rushdie, it soon became clear that, if you won the Booker, you could become a famous millionaire. And everyone wanted a piece of that, so they all got busy. Result: rubbish. McCrum quotes Tom Maschler, 'veteran cheerleader for the prize', as acknowledging that 'some of the [shortlisted] novels have been such very strange choices that it is really very difficult to make sense of them.'

McCrum also tosses in a reference to blogging, which, he says, 'has enfranchised a new group of wannabes, creating the sensations of authorship (with none of the pain).' Well, speak for yourself, sunshine. I take a few pains over mine.

And then he lists 20 'all-time great Booker winners', plus ten runners-up. Of these 30 books, I have read one with great enjoyment. That's Fingersmith, by Sarah Waters. I don't think Fingersmith is a literary novel at all: I think it got on the Booker list by accident, like Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell. Fingersmith is a piece of neo-Victorian porno-lesbian melodrama, and bloody good with it.

As for the other books on McCrum's list, I sort of read Possession, by A.S. Byatt, because that's also Victorian, but I found it hard going. And I tried to read Last Orders, by Graham Swift, because he apparently went to the same college as me. But I only stuck it for about ten minutes. After which I decided that it would be more fun to go outside and put my hand in the lawnmower blades before they had quite finished turning. I saw the movie versions of a couple of others, though. Does that count?

As usual with such learned and literary chaps, McCrum twitters on about the state of the novel, totally ignoring the novel as read and loved by ordinary people: the ones who read crime, romance, science fiction, and mainstream books by the likes of Jilly Cooper and Joanna Trollope.

Now, I have no objection whatever to people writing, publishing, and reading literary novels. If they enjoy them, lucky them. But what really gets up my nose is the sheer bloody arrogance of those who speak of 'the novel' when they really mean just a particularly narrow type of literary fiction. There are other sorts of books, you know, and I have yet to hear an argument that convinces me that literary novels are, in any significant way, superior to any other kind.

Those who, over the past few decades, have celebrated the death of snobbery in England were, I fear, a tad premature. Snobbery of the most objectionable kind is alive and well and living in Bloomsbury.

Lost? Or just confused....

A few years ago -- well, perhaps 20 or 30 -- a British TV company did a bit of research and found that those who watched the silver screen often couldn't tell the difference between re-enactments of events and actual events, caught on film.

In other words, when questioned about a TV documentary which had included some acted-out versions of events which had never been filmed live (perhaps the arrest of some spies, say), the viewers often thought that they had been watching the real thing. Fact and fiction can easily get blurred in the minds of those who are watching TV while they eat their tea. Which is one reason, I suppose, why you now see little labels at the top of your screen saying Re-enactment, or Reconstruction, or words to that effect.

It's getting to be a bit similar in the book world. I say that because Gary Troup, it seems, has written a novel.

Gary Troup, who he?

Gary Troup, he a fictional character in Lost, that's who he. And Lost is a made-up TV story. It ain't true, OK? But that doesn't stop the Hanso Corporation taking full-page ads in the American press to object to the way in which they are portrayed in Gary's novel. And it doesn't stop our Gary having a web site of his own either.

And it doesn't stop people speculating on how the internet might be used to attract readers to a whole new interactive fiction/fact thingummy-whatsit, and all like that. And before long you'll be telling me it's Tuesday, when I know perfectly well we're still in May. Unless, of course, you happen to be reading this in June.

And why does the clock at the Hanso Foundation change to OB:EY whenever it hits 15:04, or 15:08, or 23:15? That's what I want to know.

Answers to all these imponderables may be found in the Scotsman (link from booktrade.info). Or perhaps not.

Charles J Shields: Mockingbird

Today, 30 May 2006 (unless I mistake me), is publication day for Charles J Shields's biography of Harper Lee. Its full title is Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee.

Harper Lee (and not everyone will know this because they aren't all as old as we are) is the (female) author of a novel called To Kill a Mockingbird. First published in 1960, her book was a big seller and a big critical success (winning the Pulitzer). It has gone on being both ever since. The 1962 movie, starring Gregory Peck, didn't do it any harm either.

Here's part of the synopsis of the book on Amazon.com:

Set in the small Southern town of Maycomb, Alabama, during the Depression, To Kill a Mockingbird follows three years in the life of 8-year-old Scout Finch, her brother, Jem, and their father, Atticus--three years punctuated by the arrest and eventual trial of a young black man accused of raping a white woman. Though her story explores big themes, Harper Lee chooses to tell it through the eyes of a child. The result is a tough and tender novel of race, class, justice, and the pain of growing up.

That tells you enough, I think. It's about growing up (as everyone does, somewhere), and it's about the race issue in the deep south; and it's about justice. Some forty-plus years have passed since I read it, but I seem to remember finding it just a bit too politically correct for my taste (though we didn't use that expression then), and a bit too cutesy and twee. I never took to it.

Most other people did take to it, however. It was the right book in the right place at the right time.

So 'right' was it that, for whatever reason, Harper Lee has never written (or at least published) anything else. She came close, once or twice, but it has never happened. So far.

This, then, is the woman who is the subject of Charles J Shields's biography. He got no help whatever, it seems, from the lady in question: Harper Lee stopped giving interviews in 1965; but he did interview some 600 other people.

I have a horrid suspicion that one of the reasons why Mockingbird has continued to sell is that it is on the reading lists of many a US (and probably UK) Eng Lit course. That is a circumstance which, for a writer, is better than a pension; it's a neat trick to pull off, but I have absolutely no advice on how to do it. As I say, right book, right time, right place. I'm not sure you can plan for that.

Meanwhile you can read Shields's book and try to figure it out.

Bungs in Britain

Yesterday's Sunday Times did a little bit of work on quite an old story, and, in the true tradition of journalism, claimed that its report was new and exclusive.

'£50,000 to get a book on recommended list' said the headline. And the text which followed revealed how WH Smith (Britain's biggest bookseller) is 'demanding payments of £50,000 a week from publishers to get books on its supposedly impartial list of "recommended" reads in the run-up to Christmas this year.'

The story continues:

The WH Smith scheme is the most expensive in a range of confidential deals being operated by retailers to promote lists that consumers believe are based on independent assessments of a book’s quality.

No authors appear on recommended lists unless their publishers pay the fees, and those refusing to pay may not even find their titles stocked.

Other big booksellers which charge for places on schemes such as 'book of the week' or 'recommended' are Waterstone’s and Borders, which owns Books Etc.

The most expensive is WH Smith’s 'adult gold' scheme, which is currently being presented to publishers who are expected to pay £50,000 a week per book for a place.

This guarantees a prominent position in the store’s 542 high street shops and inclusion in catalogues and other advertising. For the critical four-week Christmas sales period, it would cost a publisher at least £200,000 per book.

And so on.

Well we've known all this for some time. The Sunday Times claims that it was the first to expose the schemes five years ago, but I've always believed that it was an anonymous article in the Spectator which first blew the whistle.

Now, however, publishers feel that the whole thing is getting out of hand. As well they might, if the prices quoted are correct.

The Sunday Times followed up this story with an editorial, if you please.

Most of us have the impression that titles placed prominently on display have been put there on merit. A book chosen as the week’s best read must surely be good or it would not have been selected by such a seemingly agreeable shop...

When you see a Waterstone’s book of the week, bear in mind that the publisher will have paid £10,000 for the privilege. Inclusion in three-for-two or other promotional schemes also involves money changing hands. There is nothing wrong in this if the shops are open about it. But customers are fooled because they believe that the titles come with the bookseller’s unbiased recommendation. Usually they do not. When record companies bribed DJs to plug records, didn’t they call it 'payola'?

In the meantime we are happy to have brought the culprits to book.

Well, actually, chums, you're five years behind the Spectator, and you've got some of the details wrong.

This whole question of bungs for books has been discussed on the GOB before. More than once. And the last time, in response to my rather tetchy comments, Nicholas Clee (a former editor of the Bookseller and himself a regular writer for the Times), kindly gave us details of how the deals are really struck. Here's what he said:

The reason people make a fuss about co-op promotions [between publishers and retailers] now is that they cost more, and are more visible. The principle is not new. The bookseller chooses the books; it goes to the publisher; the publisher pays.

It has been suggested that Waterstone's and co promote books only because publishers will pay for them. At the same time, one reads that Scott Pack is making the choices that determine what will be on the bestseller lists.

The latter assertion is a caricature, but is closer to the truth than the one about publishers simply having to get out their cheque books to buy space. Waterstone's, Ottakars, Borders and co choose the books they want to promote. These books tend to be the ones they think their customers will want, and they tend to be ones that publishers are prepared to back. I've heard of no instance of a publisher's buying space that a bookseller would not have given without financial incentive.

Trainspotting

Times change, eh?

This utterly banal and entirely unoriginal thought popped into my head as a result of a visit, on Saturday afternoon last, to the Theatre Royal, Bath, to see a stage adaptation of Irvine Walsh's novel Trainspotting.

Trainspotting was the author's first novel, and you can find an exhaustive discussion and description of it on Wikipedia. First published in 1993, the novel was both a literary success (longlisted for the Booker) and a popular hit.

There are two main points to be made about the novel here. First, parts of it were written in a phonetic version of English as spoken with an extreme Scottish accent. This form of speech is technically, I suppose, a dialect rather than a separate language, and for a scholarly discussion of it you should again dip into Wikipedia. But you should know that speech in this style is pretty difficult to follow, either in written or spoken form, unless you were born north of the border.

Second, you should know that the book deals with a group of young Scottish low-lifes, drug addicts, layabouts, psychopaths, and general no-goods, with associated shocking events. Well, potentially shocking.

The book was turned into a film, in 1996, but that need not detain us here. And earlier, in 1994, Harry Gibson had done an adaptation of it for the theatre. One succinct description of his play version sums it up as follows: a 'bleak , black, tragically funny tale of a wasted generation destroyed not by madness but by heroin.'

It is a new touring version of this play that Mrs GOB and I saw on Saturday afternoon, at the odd time of 4.00 pm. Presumably the producers hoped, by putting on the matinee performance at that hour, rather than the usual 2.30, to attract a younger type of audience. And in that they succeeded: Mrs GOB noted that the audience included quite a number of young women in pairs (for company, I think, rather than because of any lesbian relationship), and a number of young men who had made only irregular, and not recent, visits to the shower room.

The play features a flexible set, easily converted to represent quite a number of locations, and five actors sufficed to cover considerably more than five characters.

There are several things to be said about the play (in case you're thinking of seeing it). The first is that, as with the novel, the language is so Scottish as to be more or less incomprehensible unless you're used to it. The second is that it is unrelentingly filthy. I could recognise about three words in ten, on average, and two of those words were usually fuck and cunt. If there was an adjective employed other than fucking, during the entire evening, I missed it. And cunt was used as an all-purpose noun, meaning man, woman, friend, enemy, idiot, bright boy, and so forth. All the other four-letter words made their appearance at regular intervals.

Since the play is about a bunch of drug addicts, we got plenty of on-stage shooting up, with all the usual paraphernalia: belt round the arm to raise a vein, candle, spoon, and so forth. We had some nudity: at one point a junkie came on stage naked, failed to find a vein in any normal part of his body, and in the end injected himself in his penis.

Then we had some set pieces:

There was the one at the start, where the main character describes how he woke up in a strange bed, not knowing where he was, and discovered, to use his terms, that he had shat himself, puked up, and also, for good measure, soaked the bed in piss. The character then embarked on an account of how he gathered together the soiled sheets, set off to try to get them clean, but only succeeded (if I followed the story correctly) in showering his girl friend's parents with the contents.

Another set piece occurred (again I am assuming that I followed the drift of the story correctly), when a girl who was working as a waitress in a restaurant took offence at the manners of someone she was serving, and found an opportunity to mix the contents of her thoroughly soaked tampon with the customer's food. Another disliked customer was served profiteroles. the chocolate sauce on which had been liberally dosed with 'shite'.

There was a third story (just by way of example -- there were others) when one character described how he obtained some opium suppositories to dampen down the side-effects of his various drug-related aches and pains. Overtaken by a sudden and absolutely catastrophic attack of diarrhoea (copiously acted out), the young man eventually realised that he had unwittingly disposed of his two opium suppositories in the toilet bowl. Fortunately he had not yet flushed his prizes away, so he got down on his hands and knees, and groped about, up to his shoulder in shit (amusingly splattering the front rows of the audience as he did so), until he eventually found what he wanted. Then he shoved them back up his arse again.

Now... However appalling these stories may sound -- and they certainly are appalling -- they were performed on stage by some very skilled young actors who managed to make them funny. Even to me. And sitting behind me were some middle-aged women, of Scottish descent, who could clearly follow every word, and who cackled away like mad things.

A middle-aged couple sitting next to us did not return after the interval, but Mrs GOB and I are made of sterner stuff. We had found it just a tad tedious, frankly, being bombarded with this endless stream of obscenity, simulated sex, pregnant women being kneed in the stomach (and also shagged from behind in the toilet, a process graphically referred to as putting one's cock in the baby's mouth), junkies' babies being found dead, and so forth. But we had hopes that act two might be better.

It was. Considerably. Aided by some outstanding acting, the characters began to assume a curious kind of stature which somehow made them tragic and impressive. And, while I couldn't say that I had a very clear idea of what happened to them in the end, one felt somehow moved to have made their acquaintance. On the whole I was quite glad to have seen the play.

Which brings me back to my first point.

Times change, eh?

You won't remember, and you probably won't care, but censorship of stage plays was not abandoned in the UK until 1968, when I was nearly thirty years old. Prior to that date, every British play performed in a public theatre had to meet with the Lord Chamberlain's approval. And it is absolutely inconceivable that the Lord Chamberlain would ever have allowed even one mention of words such as fuck and cunt. Totally inconceivable. In the first production of Waiting for Godot, the word fart was found unacceptable, and belch had to be substituted. Homosexuality could not be mentioned on stage, and neither could Jesus. Anything remotely smutty, religious, or political, was banned.

So, in the 1960s, Trainspotting would never have got off the ground. The language, the nudity, the occasional blasphemy, the simulated sex, and the drug taking, all of these would have rendered it impossible of production.

Compare that with today. I have just re-read the review of this play which appeared last week in my local paper, the Wiltshire Times. This, you should understand, is a strictly regional newspaper devoted to reports of weddings, accounts of meetings of the Townswomen's guild and the like, and the local football scores. Short of something exciting, such as a stolen car, 'Dog cuts paw on canal bank' will be a front-page story.

What did this paper make of Trainspotting?

Well for a start the review said nothing about the language or the nudity. True, it did refer to a 'rollercoaster ride of drug-induced highs and unsettling lows', and 'black humour, with detours into tragedy and despair'. But there was no hint that you might get a short training course in how to use heroin, that you might hear some fairly revolting stories about getting your own back on rude customers, or, indeed, that you might see anything on stage which might perhaps cause any shock or offence. Not a whisper to the effect that this play might be anything out of the ordinary, or that it might provide a theatrical experience rather different from that of, say, Private Lives.

And who wrote this review? One Amy Watkins.

Well, all I can say is, she must be young.