The Passive Voice A Lawyers Thoughts on Authors, Self-Pub and Traditional Publishing

Time 2021-01-08 13:04:23

Web Name: The Passive Voice A Lawyers Thoughts on Authors, Self-Pub and Traditional Publishing

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Never judge a book by its cover. And never, probably, begin a review by quoting that line. But I think it’s appropriate here. For as I gazed at the cover of Francesco Boldizzoni’s “Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures Since Karl Marx ” and noticed the presence of the Grim Reaper, I prepared myself for a detailed discussion of the millenarianism that has characterized leftist thinking, not only since Marx but indeed long before him.Such a study would involve an investigation into the religious or quasireligious reasons that have underpinned belief in capitalism’s impending downfall. Their origins stretch back to antiquity, stemming from a desire to overturn the existing order—whatever that might be—and replace it with a heaven on earth. Mr. Boldizzoni offers a glimpse of this: “Fantasies about . . . the second coming of Christ, and speculation about the advent of a classless society, were not different in function. In both cases, at stake were the restoration of justice and the just rewards of the deserving at the end of the turbulent process of contemporary life.”Despite some backward glances, however, Mr. Boldizzoni’s narrative focuses mainly on the mid-19th century and later, when the rise of capitalism was quickly accompanied by the first forecasts of its replacement. Drastic social change raised questions of whether it was the right social change. As Mr. Boldizzoni demonstrates, those expecting capitalism’s eclipse went beyond the usual suspects: John Stuart Mill turns up, as does John Maynard Keynes. Both looked forward to a time when humanity would be prosperous enough to rise above grubby, sharp-elbowed capitalism, a vision that perhaps reflected their own privileged backgrounds more than anything else. That said, the predictions of capitalism’s extinction made in the past 200 years or so are of considerable interest. There were, for example, Depression-era writers who thought, with more than a nod to Marx, that underconsumption would bring capitalism down. Such doomsayers have (so far) been proved wrong, but their analyses can be well worth the effort Mr. Boldizzoni puts into examining them, even if some are treated with more seriousness than they deserve—out of a deference maybe to the author’s own political inclinations. On the other hand, his adherence to, roughly speaking, midcentury social democracy—an “arguably . . . mild variety of capitalism” with its strong unions, mixed economy and generous welfare state—also gives him valuable distance from his subjects.Mr. Boldizzoni attributes the failure of predictions of capitalism’s fall to factors that range from overly crude analysis to wishful thinking to mistaken trust in “progress.” The last is usually dated back to the Enlightenment but, I’d argue, is in no small part a relic of centuries of religious thinking. Mr. Boldizzoni writes that “the entire history of social forecasting and its mistakes is intertwined with faith in progress.” His use of the word “faith” is telling—and faith is an unreliable guide to the future. Even soundly based arguments have underestimated the resilience of capitalism or, perhaps, capitalisms—it can take many forms, whether the laissez-faire version of the early 19th century, the more tightly regulated varieties that followed or today’s information economy, and there are plenty more to choose from. Nevertheless, rather than look to capitalism’s adaptability or effectiveness, the author prefers a more complex and not altogether convincing explanation of capitalism’s durability, one resting on the way it is maintained by the combination of a “highly hierarchical social structure” and an “individualistic orientation” of those at the top.PG notes that capitalism has been practiced on a small scale for centuries, sometimes even in the midst of socialist or communist societies. Neighbors have sold or swapped. Government officials in socialist societies have accepted bribes for additional services or products. Workers on state farms have set a little aside for themselves here and there.When the idea came to me for my novel, I remember racing to my computer and writing in a sort of frenzy. I wrote a few pages in this exhilarating state of mind, then closed my computer and went on with what I had been doing, probably cooking dinner. Reading what I had written the following day, I realized I was on to something, and that perhaps this could turn into a book. That was an amazing feeling!But what happened during the years it took me to finish was far from linear or formulaic. In fact, it was probably the messiest, most organic, albeit exciting, experience I have ever lived through. In the beginning, I had no outline, structure or direction. But there was a magic that would occur, with sparks of illumination so insanely thrilling, that I just couldn’t stop writing.Mostly though, as every writer will tell you, the process was more prosaic and consisted of staring at the computer screen for hours on end and coming up with very little. Putting in the time and not giving up was crucial. Some days were good, some days not so good. But miraculously, those two states of mind, the enchanted and the mundane, merged into a river of creativity, that resulted, to my utter delight, in a book.My story began to develop and grow in unexpected ways, much like a baby who resembles neither parent at first but occasionally, even eerily, flashes a crooked smile or gives you that soulful gaze that makes you know you are staring at your spiritual twin. If you think about the things that have preoccupied you in life – the people, passions, loves, heartbreaks, milestones, interests, hobbies, books, travels, dreams, regrets — tucked away in the deepest recesses of your memory bank, chances are you will find them in the pages of your book. They may be softly woven throughout your pages, quietly vibrating in the background or take center stage, emerging with crystalline magic.In the 70 years since the comic strip “Peanuts” first appeared, countless other comic strips have come and gone. All the while, seemingly seamlessly, utterly unconsciously, some of the themes and touchstones of “Peanuts” have woven their way into our vocabulary, our views and voices, our senses and sensibilities.It plays a singular role in the popular culture, especially in the context of a society in which it seems that there is little, if anything, on which we can all remotely agree, divided as we are on politics, values, technology. That’s what makes the strip—which officially ended in 2000, when Charles M. Schulz died, but continues in syndication, plus the holiday TV specials, the books, the adaptations for screen and stage, the apps and the ads, and all of the paraphernalia—sacred and even more cherished than ever. It may be hard to imagine considering something as universally popular as “Peanuts” as under-rated, under-appreciated, for what it is. But it is, and its status deserves recognition: it is one of last great shared texts in our culture.It’s axiomatic that we live in a highly polarized culture. To ideate about enduring cultural consensus about almost anything seems an exercise in wistful nostalgia. And yet, we would do well to imagine what such broad consensus might look like. And we might find ourselves thinking, about the most recent and arguably final example of a great American work of art loved broadly and without reservations by the masses, the elite, and everyone in the so-called middle.Fifty years later, when Schulz died, in 2000, “Peanuts” was read in 75 countries, 2,600 papers and 21 languages. In all, well over 18,000 strips appeared over the course of almost a half-decade, making it, according to Robert Thompson, a professor of popular culture at Syracuse University, “arguably the longest story ever told by one human being.”Along the way: “Peanuts Gallery,” a concerto, was performed at Carnegie Hall in 1997; Schulz received the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture; in 1990, his work was shown at the Louvre. Just last year, Apple TV launched the Peanuts Channel, featuring “Snoopy in Space.” “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown” continues to be the most produced musical ever, with over 40,000 productions and counting. And as happens perennially, faithfully, over the coming weeks and months, we will come together to watch the Peanuts holiday specials: “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown,” “A Charlie Brown Christmas,” and the under-appreciated Thanksgiving special, sandwiched in between.What is it about the world of “Peanuts,” then, that still compels us to enter? Until “Peanuts” came along, comic strips where largely populated by grown-ups acting like children. One of the refreshing revelations, part of what has made “Peanuts” resonate so strongly, for so long and with so many, was that it’s a world of children who act, talk, think, and feel more like adults. This spiritual system peopled exclusively by children, preternaturally wise beyond their years, included among its core beliefs that: Life can be hard; perseverance is required; joy is fleeting but attainable; and imagination is essential.IT IS OUR LAST full day in London, my daughter Melissa and me. We take an Uber to the Tower of London and book the hour-long Beefeater tour. The guide is dressed as a guardsman in a red suit, trimmed in gold, and a tall black hat. He cracks jokes on the lawn that used to be the castle’s moat — jokes about the plague and the lack of modern amenities and the beheadings. We laugh, blissfully unaware that we are less than two years away from a plague of our own. It is an unusually warm summer day in London. California weather, ironically. My daughter and I are enjoying our trip, excited to be in a different country, the day filled with possibilities. I am exhilarated.The guide shows us the White Castle, the Crown Jewels, the battle turrets. When we come upon the Tower Green Monument, my mood changes. The monument stops me cold. This is not the spot where Anne Boleyn was executed, but we are surrounded by her death. Boleyn was beheaded by sword on May 19, 1536, at the age of 35, in a spot that is visible from the monument, to the right of where we are standing. It is now a tourist-filled walkway between the White Tower and the building where the Crown Jewels are kept. Boleyn’s body lies within the Chapel Royal of St. Peter ad Vincula, just behind the monument and directly in front of us. Behind and to the left of us, the prison towers rise — the Beauchamp Tower, the Bloody Tower, the Bell Tower — the cramped quarters where Boleyn and so many others awaited their deaths, prayed for mercy, witnessed the executions of their friends through grated windows the size of postcards, scratched their names and their last words into the stone walls. “The bell tower showed me such sight / That in my head sticks day and night,” the poet Sir Thomas Wyatt wrote in 1536 from a prison cell overlooking the Tower Green. He was imprisoned with Boleyn and is said to have witnessed her execution. “These bloody days have broken my heart.”I feel a kinship with Anne Boleyn, with women whose portraits will not end up in the National Portrait Gallery for their accomplishments. Women whose only accomplishment was having survived for a brief period of time in a world which did not belong to them. The monument jolts me from a sleep, reminds me that here a man ordered his wife’s head severed from her body without remorse. The crimes of which Boleyn was accused hardly matter. Her biggest crime was not holding her king’s attention.In her book Severed: A History of Heads Lost and Heads Found, anthropologist Frances Larson writes that beheading another human being is an act requiring feelings of both distance and superiority. In the 1500s, King Henry VIII was already superior to any woman by virtue of his birth as a man. Perhaps not so different from today, I think, except the optics have changed. But he was also born a Tudor and became the king of England. In terms of privilege, entitlement, and appetite, I picture him a 16th-century Donald Trump.At one time, Henry was so infatuated with Boleyn that he broke with the Catholic Church in order to marry her. Three years and three miscarriages later, his feelings had cooled. I imagine King Henry VIII going through the mental gymnastics necessary to distance oneself from a former lover, the rationalizations required to convince oneself the leaving is justified, the cruelty needed to cut the ties, to harden the heart, to take a new lover while the old one is still living, breathing, crying. I have done it. I have had it done to me. However he managed it, Henry distanced himself enough from a woman he once loved, the mother of one of his daughters, to have her killed. He was engaged to his new crush, Jane Seymour, the day after Boleyn’s beheading. They were married 10 days later.King Henry VIII had between 57,000 and 72,000 people executed during his 40-year reign. The tens of thousands of people who were killed here could never have imagined what this place would become 500 years later. They could not have imagined the people like me, coming here for amusement, gawking and joking and snapping photographs.PG notes that, as many around the world, including many of the visitors to The Passive Voice, worry about sickness or death from Covid, there have definitely been more dangerous and difficult times to live during the past. PG is presently reading an excellent biography of Peter the Great by Robert Massie.Peter was the the 14th child of Czar Alexis by his second wife, Natalya Kirillovna Naryshkina. All the other sons, except one, died before Peter, at age ten, became the Tzar, chosen over an older half-brother, Ivan, due to Ivan s severe physical and mental disabilities.Immediately prior to Peter s affirmation as Tzar, at the instigation of a competing Russian royal family, the elite Streltsy Guard fomented a huge riot in Moscow. During this turmoil, Peter witnessed the slaughter of several members of his family, including two of his uncles at the hand of the Streltsy.Well, I wish your mom was uglyAnd your dad was ugly tooThen they couldn t have a girlTo be as beautiful as youBob Schneider, Wish the Wind Would Blow MeNot necessary relevant for all authors, but certainly of interest to authors with day jobs.For much of the past century, work has been a place where people went. For big organizations, a workplace meant “concrete, steel and glass monuments built to service commerce and Mammon; commanding the skyline of the modern cityscape and dominating the lives of the millions of people who work in them.” So observes corporate real-estate veteran Chris Kane in “Where Is My Office?” But now, he says, “the world of work is changing.” Office work especially is “no longer anchored in one place.” Indeed, he notes, work has become a thing that people do and not a place where people go.So what is to become of those monuments to Mammon? And how about all those workers whose lives were dominated by them? Mr. Kane explores this question in his intriguing, if meandering, book on “reimagining the workplace for the 21st century.”Much has been written on the future of work, mostly by management gurus. Mr. Kane comes at the question from a different angle, with a background in the property business—mostly, though not exclusively, in the U.K. He calls himself an “industry provocateur” who has spent his career persuading the people who finance and build offices to think about what their tenants will actually want. (Oddly enough, they don’t seem to want the “uninspiring spaces of beige, grey or off-white” that the industry delivers.) He has also helped large companies rethink their property portfolios, urging executives to see that property can be converted “from a cost centre into a value creator.” He observes that “a well-designed and well-run workplace has beneficial effects on the performance of its occupants.” They collaborate. They feel inspired. They don’t quit quite as quickly. Handled well, property can be a strategic tool. Mr. Kane is also keenly aware that many past attempts to rethink office life have resulted in ideas that are questionable at best: Witness seas of soul-deadening cubicles or the attempts to do away with assigned seating completely that ended up with much-hated “hot desking” policies—everyone has to fend for herself every morning to score a workable spot.While noting that companies will want more flexible spaces to scale up and down and shorter leases, Mr. Kane wisely doesn’t endorse no-personal-space policies that seem unaware of human nature; nor does he recommend shrinking square-footage requirements to save money and then hoping for the best. He argues that smaller, fluid spaces can’t just be about cutting costs; they should be “about choice of how and where we work.”The options include renting space in commercial co-working spaces such as WeWork and working from home—something companies were loath to allow in the past, since “many managers insist on being able to see their staff and have them physically present in the same office.” Managers fear that “no work gets done unless they can see their staff at their desks.” Mr. Kane is quick to argue against this fear, but 10 months into Covid, much of this debate seems moot.The proportion of Americans who had ever worked from home doubled in the span of about two weeks in March 2020. There is every reason to think that, even if “normal” life returns, many companies will aim to keep at least part of their workforce away from central hubs and office towers and that many employees will refuse to endure commutes after a year or more of skipping them. To what effect? one wonders. While Mr. Kane refers to the pandemic from time to time, “Where Is My Office?” feels as if the bulk of the manuscript was written before this game-changer. He says that “the corporate sphere now needs to take a Darwinian approach—adapting and evolving in order to cope with uncertainty.” But the BBC’s new spaces were created with the idea that employees would show up at them more days than not. Now it’s unclear how many organizations really need a gleaming headquarters—no matter how well-designed the headquarters happen to be.PG has seen more than a few articles discussing how former office workers should set up and outfit their home work spaces. This type of information can also be helpful for any author who writes some or all of their work at home.A comfortable chair that won t make you ache if you sit in it for several hours a day.A good keyboard. As a sidenote, at his mother s wise insistence, PG took a typing class in high school and became the fastest and most-accurate typist in his class (it was a very small class). PG s typing skills were valuable for him in college since he earned money by typing papers for other students at exorbitant prices because he could start typing a 20-page term paper at midnight and get it finished in plenty of time so the procrastinating student paying him could turn it in at 8:00 AM and PG could get some sleep before his own 8:00 AM class the next day.PG typed the answers to all of his law school exams (essay questions were standard) as well as the essay portions of his bar exams. Since he could type far faster than he could write (legibly or illegibly), PG could put a lot more of the extensive information he pretended to have in his head into these exams.While PG did a lot of dictating while he had a more typical law practice than he has now, he also did some typing on documents, or parts of documents, that required particular attention and detail that was not conducive to efficient dictation.When computers first came into law offices, PG bought the first computer for himself so he could amply explore its potential uses in his practice. Typing well meant he could experiment quickly. After this learning process, PG gave his computer to his secretary and provided suggestions about how she could use it efficiently (PG always hired the smartest secretaries he could find and paid them well so they stayed with him for a long time). Of course, PG bought the latest faster and more powerful computer available for himself to replace the one that migrated to his secretary s desk. Whenever he bought a new computer, his secretary got the one he had used before that was typically about a year old, so everybody stayed up to date.This is a very long explanation of the basis upon which PG recommends a good keyboard for anyone who spends much time typing. The difference in cost between a good keyboard and a cheap one is relatively small. PG has used ergonomic keyboards for a long time because he finds them more comfortable and faster. Currently, he uses a wireless keyboard to reduce the substantial clutter on his desk a tiny bit. If you want to do all your writing in a coffee shop, you will want to use a laptop. For PG, however, the keyboard on laptop computers (he has owned and used many) are definitely second-rate. At times (like on an airplane), using a separate keyboard is not feasible. However, it s not difficult to slide a small cordless keyboard into a canvas briefcase, backpack, carry-on bag, etc., so typing is better when your not on a plane or in an airport.For fellow keyboard nerds, yes, PG does miss the old Northgate keyboards with their lovely key-switches, but we all have to move on from tragic losses like that.Getting out of the hospital is a lot like resigning from a book club. You re not out of it until the computer says you re out of it.Erma BombeckThree-quarters of the 3,417 respondents who say they are in a book club are in groups that arecurrently meeting. Some have experienced sickness, quarantines or fatalities among those closeto them, and many feel drained by current events; but they also feel supported by their bookclub and buoyed by a greater sense of friendship and community.The great majority of groups had previously met in person and indoors. Now, 65% of those thatare currently meeting are doing so virtually, almost all on Zoom, and 17% are meeting outdoors(with some looking for a new winter location).A quarter of those who are currently meeting say their group’s attendance rate is lower thanlast year, mostly due to technical issues meeting virtually or not feeling safe meeting in person.But 14% of virtual groups have gained members, mainly due to the ease of meeting online andformer or part-time members being able to join virtually.Looked at as a whole, the resilience of book clubs shines through. Of course, they would prefernot to be meeting with restrictions, but the majority have persevered and found a way forward,with many saying they have a greater appreciation for their group. In fact, although a third ofrespondents in groups that are currently meeting say that their overall book club experience isnot as good as it was last year, half say their group is more important to them.Respondents meeting virtually greatly appreciate that technology allows them to stayconnected and maintain a sense of community.In general, technology adoption is viewed as positive, with Zoom frequently described as alifeline. However, some groups still struggle with technical issues and virtual etiquette, and manyare temporarily missing members who are unable, or sometimes unwilling, to meet virtually.Virtual discussions tend to be less free-flowing. This is seen as a benefit by some who feel theirgroup’s book discussions are more focused and inclusive due to fewer side conversations; butothers miss the organic flow of an in-person meeting.The full report is available in downloadable PDF as an ebook an no charge from the BookBrowse website. They ll also sell you a printed version if you prefer that. You are required to give your first and last names and an email address. Additionally, you have the option of signing up for periodic BookBrowse newsletters at no charge.PG has signed up for and received a couple of periodic free newsletters from BookBrowse for several years and doesn t recall being placed on any spam email lists he can attribute to BookBrowse selling its email list.The work of the literary editor is conducted in a kind of shadow, cast by the name of the author. A few editors have stepped out of that shadow, becoming perhaps more infamous than famous, for the labels “editor” and “famous” seem like a contradiction in terms, essentially incompatible. An example is Gordon Lish, who became known in the literary world as “Captain Fiction” and whose authors included Raymond Carver. Another is Maxwell Perkins, editor of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, whose epithet was the “Editor of Genius.” One of the most celebrated editing jobs ever done was carried out by Ezra Pound, not in any formal capacity, but as a friend, his ruthless hand paring down an early version of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” into the form in which we know it today. Gordon Lish’s editing was quite as unconstrained and uncompromising, the style we think of as Carver’s being in fact Lish’s work. Carver himself was rather ambivalent about it, though it unquestionably established his name as a writer. This became apparent when Carver’s own manuscript was published after his death, his stories there being quite differently ample and expansive, barely recognizable. There is little doubt that the editor’s Carver was better than Carver’s Carver, and how must that have made the author feel as he stood in the spotlight to receive his accolades, hailed as the great new name of American literature? The example is interesting, for the job of the editor is to exert influence, not for his own good, nor necessarily for the author’s, but for that of the book, and if we can suggest that Lish went too far, we must also ask in relation to what? After all, the book was certainly the better for it. Were the wounded feelings of its author more important? Without Lish, Carver’s books would have been poorer and he would have been a reasonably good writer rather than a brilliant one. This raises the question of what a writer is, and where the boundaries run between the author, the book, and the surrounding world.America has a tradition of strong editors, though the issue is not specifically American. I know of Norwegian editors who to all intents and purposes move their author’s feet, so to speak, in the dance of their literary endeavors, who basically instruct them: left foot here, right foot there, left foot here, right foot there. And I know, too, of Norwegian writers at the exact opposite pole, who deliver print-ready manuscripts to their editors and would change publishers promptly at the suggestion of reworking anything.Lish’s job on Carver is perhaps too extreme to serve as an example of the role of the editor, but what any kind of boundary breaking always does is to draw attention to the boundary itself—in this case between editor and writer, who together with the text form a kind of Bermuda Triangle within whose force field everything said and done disappears without trace. Had Lish not gone as far as he did, everything in Carver’s texts would have been attributed unequivocally to Carver, the way all novels, short stories, and poetry collections are attributed unequivocally to the writer. To understand what goes on in this shadowland, we could ask ourselves: What would the books have been like without their editors? In my own case, the answer is simple: there would have been no books. I would not have been a writer. This is not to say that my editor writes my books for me, but that his thoughts, input, and insights are imperative to their being written. These thoughts, this input, and these insights are particular to me and my writing process; when he is editing the work of other authors, what he gives them is something particular to their work. The job of editor is therefore ideally undefined and open, dependent on each individual writer’s needs, expectations, talent, and integrity, and it is first and foremost based on trust, hinging much more on personal qualities and human understanding than on formal literary competence.I remember a time in my late twenties when I was working for a literary magazine, we had commissioned a contribution from an established poet, and I was given the job of taking care of it. I read the poem and responded with a few comments, some suggestions as to minor changes, and a tentative inquiry as to whether the poem might be developed a bit further in the same direction. The reply that came back can be summed up in a single question: “Who are you?” In fact, there may well have been an undertone in that reply warranting an even more forceful wording: “Who the hell are you?” I was vexed by this, my comments had been cautious and, as far as I could see, justified. It was how I was used to commenting on the works-in-progress of my writer friends. Surely a poet of such experience and standing could relate more professionally to their own writing?But the reaction wasn’t about the poem. It was about a faceless editor wanting to change the poem, which I guessed was being construed as an attack. As if there was something wrong with the poem and this faceless young male academic thought he knew what was needed to fix it. Objectively, I think my comments were on the right track, but when it comes to writing there is no such thing as objective, it’s all about the person writing and the person reading. If I had met this poet a few times, if we had been able to gain an impression of each other, perhaps get an idea as to each other’s literary preferences, I think my comments might have been taken differently, perhaps even prompted changes to the work, though not necessarily in the way I had envisaged.The situations in which creative writing takes place are often complicated, to put it mildly—anyone even slightly familiar with the writing profession, as we so grandly refer to it, knows that it is one great big entanglement of neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination—and working with writing in that kind of context means that a concept such as quality is a poor standard indeed, at least if we think of quality as an objective norm. In literary editing, quality is a dynamic entity, more a process than a grade, and one that will vary according to the individual writer and editor.That the books that come out of this are treated in almost exactly the opposite way in literary criticism, which is very much about weights and measures and comparisons to other books, can often throw an author into shock and is something one never quite gets used to. It feels almost as if there are different books, one belonging to the editor, another to the critic, and for the author this can be difficult; should he or she listen to his or her editor, who will invariably say that critics don’t know what they’re talking about, that they are insensitive and stupid, driven by their own agendas, and so on, or to the judgement of the critics?PG could (as usual) be wrong, but he suggests that not all (perhaps not even a majority) of authors are rife with neuroses, hang-ups, blockages, frailties, idiosyncrasies, alcoholism, narcissism, depression, psychosis, hyperactivity, mania, inflated egos, low self-esteem, compulsion, obligation, impulsive ideas, clutter, and procrastination. Based solely on his personal experiences, PG would guess that there are a higher percentage of attorneys that manifest some, many or all of such problems/issues/behaviors than there are authors that do the same. Certainly, due to the pressures of their work (or whatever), a higher percentage of attorneys have problems with alcoholism and drug abuse that is typical of the general population at large. A great many bar associations sponsor seminars and other educational programs for their members that deal with addiction, drug abuse, mental illnesses, etc. Some even require participation in such programs for a specified number of hours every couple of years.Honesty is the key to a relationship. If you can fake that, you’re in.Richard Jeni​​My friends tell me I have an intimacy problem. But they don t really know me.Garry ShandlingIn the end there doesn t have to be anyone who understands you. There just has to be someone who wants to.Robert BraultFollowing his earlier post about a Relationships Thesaurus, PG was intrigued while considering the enormous number of various types of relationships and shades of relationships between people (and groups of people) as compared with the more limited scope of relationships he sees in many books and stories.Here a single sub-part under Relationships from WordHippo that PG picked because most of the synonyms had little or nothing to do with romantic or family relationships. Successful stories are driven by authentic and interesting characters, so it’s important to craft them carefully. But characters don’t usually exist in a vacuum; throughout the course of your story, they’ll live, work, play, and fight with other cast members. Some of those relationships are positive and supportive, pushing the protagonist to positive growth and helping them achieve their goals. Other relationships do exactly the opposite, derailing your character’s confidence and self-worth or they cause friction and conflict that leads to fallout and disruption. Many relationships hover somewhere in the middle. A balanced story will require a mix of these dynamics.The purpose of this thesaurus is to encourage you to explore the kinds of relationships that might be good for your story and figure out what each might look like. Think about what a character needs (good and bad), and build a network of connections for him or her that will challenge them, showcase their innermost qualities, and bind readers to their relationship trials and triumphs.Description: A host or hostess is someone who welcomes and entertains guests at a venue, function, or in their own home. They are responsible for taking care of the needs of their guests, making them feel both valued and special. In this relationship, self-worth is tied to each person’s role. The guest feels valued through inclusion; depending on the event, the importance tied to other attendees, and the situation, inclusion is a symbol of status and respect. In turn, the host takes pride in their role and the experience they offer guests. Their ability to oversee a successful event (which sometimes also means having to set aside personal feelings or ignore politics) will raise their esteem in the eyes of others, in turn feeding their self-worth. Of course the opposite is also true – if either party fails in their role, esteem will diminish, especially the closer the relationship is between host and guest (family, friends, business partners, exes, etc.). A negative experience means guests will feel undervalued and view themselves as a burden which may leave them angry at the host for making them feel this way. A less-than-ideal outcome will leave the host feeling inadequate due to their failure to manage the event properly or provide for their guests.Dynamics of a Healthy RelationshipRespect and appreciation that flows both waysEnsuring the other party has any information they need (where to find things, a timetable of activities, and any special requirements, allergies, constraints, or expectations the other may need to know)Being polite, friendly, and patientDoing as instructed and playing one’s role (as the good host, the well-mannered house guest, the sociable guest speaker, the appropriately attired attendee, etc.)Being on time and not making unreasonable demands of the otherBeing appreciative of the other’s time and attentionPlaying peacekeeper and discouraging drama should it crop upDynamics of an Unhealthy RelationshipMonopolizing someone’s time because they believe they have the right toNot respecting the host’s property, time, or reputationTempers that flareBeing two-faced (threats hidden behind smiles, veiled insults, gossiping about the other to bring down their reputation)Seeking to undermine or exploit the otherUsing one’s role to make the other look bad (creating problems for a host that are impossible to fix, or calling negative attention to a guest, thereby singling them out among their peers)Making unreasonable demands (forcing too many rules on a guest or demanding a host go above and beyond)Taking advantage of someone’s hospitalityNoticeable friction between a host and guest that makes others uncomfortableEndangering guests (conducting illegal activities while at the host’s home, distributing drugs at a party, etc.)PG posted this as a suggestion for authors to consider the wide range of relationships and relationship dynamics that can exist between people and characters.Aged 15 I got a Christmas job at my local bookshop in Battersea so I could save to go interrailing. My parents’ bookshelves were brimming with mostly Black writers: Chinua Achebe, Buchi Emecheta, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Chester Himes, Terry McMillan, and I was surrounded by ‘consciousness’ (as we then called ‘woke’). I was yet to read European works in translation, and the bookshop opened up to me the rest of Europe and its myriad cities, cultures, languages and complex histories.I started with French literature and read Anais Nin, Simone de Beauvoir, Georges Perec, Georges Bataille. From there, I explored more of the continent, José Saramago, Italo Calvino, Primo Levi. Reading Milan Kundera’sThe Unbearable Likeness of Beingwas haunting and powerful. Kundera confronts readers with questions of exile, identity, belonging and selfhood.I discovered John Berger, who, although not exiled, was a cultural émigré from Britain to France and his work introduced me to artists, writers and thinkers across Europe. Reading hisOnce in Europaopened me up to Russian literature and I was that 23-year-old girl in pubs reading Nabokov and Dostoevsky at the table whilst everyone chatted around me. I felt like I was a character in a Mike Leigh film and a total cliché, but I found my first true love and didn’t business what anyone else thought. A few years later when John and I met we became friends and he encouraged me to move to Europe and fulfil my potential.From Russia, I went back to Bohemia and discovered the fantastical mind of Franz Kafka.Amerika, which inspired an incredible piece by German artist Martin Kippenberger,The Happy End to Franz Kafka’s Amerika, which I saw at the Tate Modern in 2005. I’d never thought Germany, with its complicated history, as a place that I would find compelling, but after seeing that piece I became curious.A year later I went to Berlin for the first time and visited an institution called The Literatur Haus in Charlottenburg: a grand villa where the sole purpose is to connect readers with writing and literature. There are eleven Literature Houses across Germany and a European network of cities including Oslo, Copenhagen and Prague, yet not one in Britain. Literature Houses offer a deeper cultural exchange that is very different to libraries. These buildings stand tall as a beacon of the importance of narratives and storytelling. I understood that German culture, Gutenberg to Goethe and beyond, was built on the basis that, without literature, nothing else can be formed. I was hooked. Heading back to London, I enrolled in classes at the Goethe Institute and they helped me to discover the works of Hans Fallada, Hannah Arendt, Joseph Roth, Jenny Erpenbeck, Julia Franck, W.G. Sebald and Stefan Zweig.What was so striking to me about the literature from the continent was that it seemed to be concerned with progress, difference and change. Outside of Shakespeare, English classics always felt so stuffy to me and obsessed with maintaining the status quo and birth rights. Where forbidden love and class was the order for the day in Britain, central European literature was concerned with surviving regimes and emphasised hard work and humility. Southern European literature seemed full of creativity and bold new ideas, centring humanity. It seemed to me that continental European literature reflected the region’s turmoil and revolutions, while Britain maintained elite ruling classes and divided rule from the playbook from the Age of Empire.Looking towards the publishing industry, where Europe’s biggest nations publish up to 42% in translation, Britain merely publishes 5%. The continent has always been interested in listening, thinking about and understanding the lives of others.PG will end this late day of blogging with a handful of additional classic Noel Coward songs.It’s that time of year again. I present to youPredictions in Publishing: the 2021 Edition!It’s hard to believe that last year at this time I was bemoaning the fact that the book publishing industry seemed to have stagnated and not a lot was changing. Then, WHOOSH, in March everything changed all at once. And here we are counting down the days to the final end to the Year of the Great Pause, where we can see the light at the end of the tunnel into 2021. Let’s hope it’s not a train! (It’s not a train…)More editors, agents and other publishing pros have moved out of the New York City metro area, and are working from homes in other cities, and even states, where the cost of living is significantly lower. If they bought or rented a house with a yard and several bedrooms/office space elsewhere, or moved in with their parents and find it delightful, the thought of moving back into a comparably-priced studio or one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan or Brooklyn might not be strong enough to get them to return.They have gotten comfortable with working remotely. They are now Zoom or Google Meeting pros. And they see how much more work they can get done (especially editing) if they don’t have to commute or do endless in-person meetings every day. Even art departments have developed successful workarounds. This has fundamentally changed the publishing process.As we move into the future, I believe you’ll see a diaspora of publishing professionals, just like tech workers or other non-geographically-tied workers have experienced, and eventually they will either be located in a smaller building in NYC or will Zoom-in remotely when needed, only visiting the main office once a month or so. It has long been the case with agents and even the odd editor, but now it will be commonplace among the major houses. New York will be the center of publishing in name only. Virtual companies will have the edge.Everyone got used to buying all kinds of things online, and that includes ebooks. But will this trend continue once bookstores are open again?I believe so. Readers have become comfortable with reading on a screen as part of the total ecosystem of reading, just as they’ve become comfortable with shopping at their local retail stores as well as Amazon, Bookshop.org, indie bookstores, reading apps, etc.They will consume hardcover, trade paperback, mass market, ebooks, audiobooks and any new format that comes along. Publishers need to understand that and work it into their P Ls on stories and worlds they want to license.Indie bookstores (traditional publishing’s main retail outlet) have been severely disrupted. Do they survive and thrive or collapse? Will Barnes Noble make it? Will Amazon continue to dominate or willBookshop.orgchallenge them? I think all these issues will play out in the latter half of 2021.I think indie bookstores have already pivoted successfully by being creative and community-minded. They rocked drive-by distribution and deliveries. They figured out how to do many of their promotional events and author “signings” online.It’s the larger box bookstores like Barnes Noble, now under a new management team led by Brit James Daunt, who I see fumbling the ball and perhaps not being fiscally viable much longer. Five years and they’ll either be gone or severely smaller. That’s my prediction. Amazon is hastening their exit. Look back at prediction number 3.Virtual book promotion is here to stay. It already was not making economic sense to send an author on a multi-city tour to promote a book, when only a handful of fans would show up at the local Barnes Noble in each city. If all bookstores, even small ones in rural locations, can get an author to do a 1-hour Zoom chat about their book with fans who’ve already ordered the pre-autographed book from said indie bookstore, it’s going to catch on. It’s affordable, easy to accomplish, and readers will like it if they can watch their author heroes while in their jammies.Also, need I say, school visits will become a lot more accessible and affordable if done virtually. This way authors can earn a few dollars and bookstores can scale up or down depending on the popularity of the authors virtually visiting their locales.It is 2021, but PG still does not always agree with everything he posts on TPV. For one thing, Bookshop.org hasn t a chance in hell of taking a hundredth of one-percent of Amazon s share of the book business.PG will note that, although more honored in the breach than in the observance, the .org extension was originally intended to be reserved for non-profit organizations.In the case of Bookshop.org, the website is run by a Limited Liability Company (LLC) which, at least in the United States, denotes an organization that strives to earn a profit. Again, in the United States, a charitable organization is typically operated as a non-profit corporation. Corrected per CE Petit s comment and superior knowledge of current LLC practices and law.That said, regardless of its intent, PG suggests that Bookshop.org will have quite a bit of difficulty generating a profit of any sort and its business and commission structure is designed for traditional publishers, so it will generate teeny-tiny royalties for the authors who make books possible in the first place.PG says that, if you or your reading friends wish to encourage and compensate authors, buying through Amazon is the only way you go.The stately homes of England How beautiful they stand,To prove the upper classesHave still the upper hand.Though the fact that they have to be rebuiltAnd frequently mortgaged to the hiltIs inclined to take the giltOff the gingerbreadHannah Rothschild’s new comic novel “House of Trelawney” is about an ancestral home in Cornwall where the gilt has definitely come off. Trelawney Castle, situated on a bluff overlooking the ocean, has belonged to the same noble family for 800 years. “The castle was their three-dimensional calling card, the physical embodiment of their wealth and influence,” writes Ms. Rothschild. “Each Earl added an extension until it was declared the grandest, if not the finest, stately home in the county of Cornwall.”It sounds wonderful. It’s not. The novel opens in 2008, and the castle has fallen into “chaos and decrepitude.” The bungling and ineptitude of the last eight dissolute earls, “along with two world wars, the Wall Street Crash, three divorces and inheritance taxes” has eaten up the estate. There were once medieval oak woods, meadows and waterfalls on the 500,000 acres known as “Trelawneyshire.” Now ponds have silted up, hedges are bedraggled, and arches are covered with vines. Inside the castle, which has a room for each day of the year, empty squares discolor walls where great paintings once hung. In the rooms “the huge side tables were covered in a layer of dust and detritus, and a grand piano sat in a pool of water.” And the decay is accelerating: “Occasionally a great crash of avalanching plaster could be heard falling like a tree in a faraway wood.”In 1988 the 24th Earl of Trelawney, now aged 85, handed the pile to his feckless son and heir, Kitto. His oldest and smartest child, Blaze, couldn’t inherit because she was female. Such were Britain’s archaic rules of primogeniture. With no funds left for its upkeep Kitto, like many an earl or duke before him, was forced to marry for money. Jane, his dowdy bride, possessed a fortune. But, inevitably, Jane’s money ran out. So did the heating and hot water. Now she is martyr to the cause, the house “skivvy,” feeding her aging parents-in-law and three teenage children cut-price mince (ground beef). She delivers pots of hot water to the freezing elderly earl and countess who reside upstairs in a fantasy world peopled with imaginary housemaids and butlers. They still change into formal clothes (now rather shabby) for dinner.Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn t figured out a way around it.) My mother always told me I wouldn’t amount to anything because I procrastinate. I said, just wait.” Judy TenutaWriters who want to hold dearly to the myths of writing must stay away from math. Math can be super deadly to writer’s fears and myths and beliefs. Math, after all, is just numbers.You write 250 words of fiction a day, shorter than many of your emails. Most writers can do that in 15 minutes or less.So you do that every day, you manage to make your writing important enough in your life that you carve out 15 minutes a day to do it.Now is where this entire column gets brutal. Let’s say you really like writing 50,000 word novels like I do.And you can manage to cut out of your busy game schedule and work and family and television schedule one hour a day to write. And if you are like most writers, you can do 1,000 words in that hour. (If you are much slower than that you need to deal with the fear.)1,000 words x 365 days = 365,000 words divided by 50,000 word novels = 7.3 novels a year. So say you took two weeks vacation from that horrid hour-per-day schedule so you only wrote 7 novels in a year.Excuse #1… What about rewrites?If you are still lost in that myth, I can’t help you. Learn how to cycle and write in to the dark and stop being sloppy and produce a finished draft.Excuse #3… What about all the publishing that goes along with that?Oh, no, every month or so you might have to spend a few extra hours to publish your novel so you can make money.Excuse #4… What about all the plotting and outlining and character sketches and such to get ready ahead of time.(Oh, my…seriously?)Happy 2021! Now that the longest year in history is over, it’s a good time for reflection and taking stock of things. And by “things” I mean those Christmas and/or Hanukkah gifts you got. If you’re a writer, you probably got a lot of writing-centric gifts. I’m going to say it so you don’t have to: some writer gifts are better than others. (I know, you don’t want to seem ungrateful, but another coffee mug? Really?!)If Santa decided to go off-list for you, take heart that even the worst Christmas gift for you may be a reasonably serviceable birthday gift for someone else. That’s right, we’re talking about the greatest of holiday taboos: regifting. Some may frown on it, but a properly executed regifting prevents waste and saves you a trip to the store, which is more important than ever during a pandemic, so really you’re doing everybody a favor. The 2021 Regifting Guide for Writers will help you decide what to keep, what to give away, and how to do it without looking like a jerk.Motivational posters: The implicit premise behind many writing-themed gifts is that writers are in an unceasing funk in which they have no ideas or inspiration. This is accurate, of course, but it’s kinda mean to broadcast it to everybody, right? Few gifts signal writers’ daily desperation as loudly as the motivational poster. Designed to fill writers with creative inspiration, writing-inspiration posters more often remind writers of all the writing they’re not getting done. Verdict: Regift it.Notebooks: Cracking open a brand-new notebook fills writers with inspiration, and can be a fun way to kickstart a new writing project. Verdict: Keep it.Pens: The most ubiquitous tool of any author, pens are portable, useful, and make a statement about your commitment to your craft (or that you snagged a promotional pen when you dropped off your suit at the dry cleaner). Writers get a lot of pens as gifts, some of which are impractical, fussy, or require a very spillable inkwell. However, there are few things more frustrating for a writer than not having a pen when you need one. Verdict: If it’s a fancy pen, keep it. If it’s a box of cheap, ordinary rollerball pens that will actually fit in your pocket, keep it and write a very nice thank-you card.Writerly coffee mugs: If there’s one thing people know about writers, is that they’re always drinking coffee, unless they’re drinking alcohol. Coffee mugs emblazoned with statements like, “BE NICE TO ME OR I’LL PUT YOU IN MY NOVEL” and “I AM SILENTLY CORRECTING YOUR GRAMMAR” are popular gifts from folks whose friendship is good enough that they know you’re a writer, but not so close that they will read your work. While each author mug has a different catchy slogan, they all contain the same subtext: “I AM NOT PUBLISHED.” Verdict: Regift it to an unpublished friend. I am a published novelist and a rabid reader, but I’ve been stalled in both those areas. Between the cultural tumult and my almost-15-year-old dog’s terminal kidney disease, I’ve become a worried political activist and an exhausted canine hospice caregiver. Between my dog’s IV drips and endless treks up and down my four flights of stairs to walk her, I found I cannot concentrate on reading new novels, let alone meeting new characters and remembering who everybody is. So suddenly my reading habit—a great source of joy—stalled.In these incredibly dark days, I’ve found solace talking to people I’ve known since childhood. And, likewise, I realized I need books with a personal foundation already in place: books that I already know are outstanding, that I know will transport me—books that I trust because of my long history with them. I have such books already on my shelves, but I also bought a couple more.I’d read a library copy of Percival Everett’s God’s Country in the past, and I bought a new one from Bookshop—assuring him a royalty, a local indie bookstore a sale, and me the leisure to take my time and mark it up for my second reading. I bought a used edition of And the Birds Rained Down by Jocelyne Saucier, translated by Rhonda Mullins, from Better World Books, whose profits support literacy programs, and I read it twice within two months, taking as long as I wanted to savor the delectable prose.I’ve lost count of the times I’ve read my paperback and my parents’ 1951 hardcover ofThe Catcher in the Rye, and it is beckoning again. In these rough times, there might be something sweet about hanging out with Holden Caulfield.Likewise, I’ve lost count of my readings ofA Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole’s brilliant and hilarious novel whose rejections may have contributed to his suicide. How could publishers have ignored this book? How could a writer do something this original and alive and not meet the sort of welcome that would include the Pulitzer Prize he posthumously received?WRITING A BOOK is a lonely pursuit, one that can take years of solitary work. Selling a book is another story. Authors give talks in cramped storefronts, schmooze at luncheons, and learn to casually discuss their belabored creative project as commercial content. The publicity circuit can be dispiriting, sleazy, and exhausting. It can also be exhilarating, liberating, and fun—a chance for people who spend a lot of time alone with their thoughts to feel like someone’s heard them. This year, releasing a book into the world became another task largely undertaken solo, at home, staring at a screen. The Covid-19 pandemic forced the publishing industry to reimagine its process for convincing people to buy its latest offerings. Even the industry’s fanciest nights, like the National Book Awards gala, took place as digital events, with participants glammed up and sitting at home.I was lucky enough to have a few in-person events before quarantine. One of the events was recorded for Book TV, on C-SPAN, and because it was one of the very last in-person bookstore events that happened anywhere, it ended up playing repeatedly in March and April at odd hours. The first month of quarantine, I wasn t sleeping so great, so I would be awake at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. I had signed up for email alerts to tell me when it aired and I’d get the emails sometimes just before I’d go to bed. I was staying with my parents, and my dad wakes up really early. The first time it aired, we were both up, and I was able to watch my event with my dad.It could be a lot worse. The kind of person who wants to hole up in a room and write 80,000 words is not necessarily the kind of person who loves to be the center of attention. So there are some aspects of the virtual events that are less nerve-wracking than doing them in person. But the drawback is that these bookstores aren t getting the same sales. And you don t have the conversations you used to have; you re not meeting in a restaurant and getting to catch up with old friends who show up to the reading. I miss those things. When you log out of a Zoom and you re just alone in a room. It s really bewildering.Just staring at the screen feels exhausting. There are only so many ways to make virtual events different. But one of my upcoming events will be different—it’s a Second Life Book Club, hosted by Bernhard Drax. He creates avatars for authors on request. I asked for a cyborg avatar. I’m excited because it is a creative approach that isn’t trying to replicate the offline experience of a book event.At first I was really nervous about Zoom. What if the connection cut out? Would I be presentable on camera? I got to do an event with the writer C. Pam Zhang, who wrote an incredible debut this year. Her book was picked for the Goop book club—the first pick!—and she invited me to be on a panel. I was really excited, and since it was for Goop, my wife Michelle and I wanted to present our home in a nice-looking way, with me in front of a built-in bookshelf that Michelle had made. But the connection wasn’t good enough, so I had to move to the bedroom. Only afterward did we realize that the dresser behind me was covered in a layer of dust visible on camera. We had moved some books off of it, so there was a negative outline of dust around where the books had been. This only made it more noticeable. So much for a good impression on Goop!That was probably the worst mishap I had until the National Book Award. [Ed note: Yu won the National Book Award!] It was a mishap of my brain. I really didn t expect to win, so I prepared absolutely nothing. When they announced my name, I started freaking out. My son was next to me and he started freaking out. My daughter was upstairs, she started freaking out. Michelle and I just looked at each other, freaking out. So I give my remarks, which are totally off the cuff—and I forget to thank my family. When I realized afterward, my stomach dropped. My book is about people who are underappreciated and I forgot to thank the people who d supported me all those years and were literally in the background when I won. And my parents were watching in their home. I’ll never forgive myself for that.Going to an awards ceremony in our living room was really fun, though, because afterwards I changed back into shorts and we had pizza.Perhaps PG s blown out with too much holiday consumption, but the promotional efforts of the publishers in the OP seemed to be very underwhelming. Why screw around with traditional publishers if they can t figure out an effective way to promote your book? PG s not a publishing marketer, but he could think of ten ways to do a better job than was done for these authors.OTOH, author appearances via Zoom certainly don t cost the publisher any sort of meaningful money.Today is New Years Day in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and elsewhere (although PG may be a little fuzzy about the effects of the International Date Line and whether it may 2020, 2021, 2022 or still 1960 in Australia or not).The traditional book biz was trying to sell books as Christmas presents, but after that, it really went dark.PG doesn t know whether regaining his sanity after this strange year is a hopeless endeavor or not, but a day off can t hurt that process (or make it worse).PG wishes one and all a good/better/best 2021 and he will be back tomorrow providing that he has not devolved into a pool of primeval slime before then, in which case, he may need to spend another day evolving back to the point of at least limited coherence.I m not offended by all the dumb blonde jokes because I know I m not dumb and I also know that I m not blonde. Dolly PartonThe way I see it, if you want the rainbow, you gotta put up with the rain. Dolly PartonThe cleverest of all, in my opinion, is the man who calls himself a fool at least once a month. Fyodor DostoevskyYou don t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.Ray Bradbury COMMEMORATING THE CENTENNIAL of the great Ray Bradbury, biographer Sam Weller sat down with former California poet laureate and former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts Dana Gioia for a wide-ranging conversation on Bradbury’s imprint on arts and culture.SAM WELLER: The first time I met you was at the White House ceremony for Ray Bradbury in November 2004. You were such a champion for Ray’s legacy — his advocate for both the National Medal of Arts and Pulitzer Prize. As we look at his 100th birthday, I want to ask: Why is Bradbury important in literary terms?DANA GIOIA:Ray Bradbury is one of the most important American writers of the mid-20th century. He transformed science fiction’s position in American literature during the 1950s. There were other fine sci-fi writers, but Ray was the one who first engaged the mainstream audience. He had a huge impact on both American literature and popular culture. He was also one of the most significant California writers of the last century. When one talks about Bradbury, one needs to choose a perspective. His career looks different from each angle.It’s interesting. You see him as a California writer. He moved to California from Illinois in April 1934. He was 13 years old and he’s often associated with the Midwest, the prairie, and its ideals. How do you separate those two things? Is he a Californian or Midwestern writer? Is he both? Or does the question ultimately not matter?Regional identity matters more in American literature than many critics assume. We have a very mobile society, so today many writers are almost placeless. But Bradbury is a perfect example of a writer for whom regional identity was very important.How do you decide where a writer comes from? There are two possible theories — both valid. The first theory looks at where a writer was born and spent his or her childhood. But I favor a different view. I believe a writer belongs to the place where he or she hits puberty. That’s the point where the child goes from a received family identity to an independent adult existence.Once Bradbury came to Southern California, he never left. He lived in Los Angeles for 77 years. All of his books, all of his stories, novels, and screenplays were written here. The great imaginative enterprise of his life — bringing science fiction into the American mainstream — happened in California.Let me offer one perspective. If you compiled a list in 1950 of the biggest grossing movies ever made, it would have contained no science fiction films and only one fantasy film,The Wizard of Oz. In Hollywood, science fiction films were low-budget stuff for kids. The mainstream market was, broadly speaking, “realistic” — romances, comedies, historical epics, dramas, war films, and adventure stories.If you look at a similar list today, all but three of the top films — Titanic and two Fast and Furious sequels — are science fiction or fantasy. That is 94 percent of the hits. That means in a 70-year period, American popular culture (and to a great degree world popular culture) went from “realism” to fantasy and science fiction. The kids’ stuff became everybody’s stuff. How did that happen? There were many significant factors, but there is no doubt that Ray Bradbury was the most influential writer involved.How do you place Bradbury in this opposition of the realist and romantic traditions of storytelling?Bradbury never went to college — that’s one reason why he was so original. He was not indoctrinated in the mainstream assumption of the superiority of the realist mode. He educated himself. He read the books that he wanted to — from masterpieces to junk. Then he began to write children’s literature, which is to say, pulp science fiction and fantasy. But he mixed in elements from the realist tradition.Then something amazing happened. In a 10-year period, Bradbury wrote seven books that changed both American literature and popular culture. They were mostly collections of short stories. Only two were true novels. In these books, for the first time in American literature, an author brought the subtlety and psychological insight of literary fiction into science fiction without losing the genre’s imaginative zest. Bradbury also crafted a particular tone, a mix of bitterness and sweetness that the genre had never seen before. (There had been earlier novels, mostly British and Russian, in which serious writers employed the science fiction mode, but those works showed the difficulty of combining the different traditions of narration. The books always resolved in dystopian prophecy.) Bradbury, for whatever reasons, was able to manage this difficult balancing act — not once but repeatedly.What books are you thinking about here? What do you consider Bradbury’s best period?Sam, you’ll probably disagree with me — but I think Bradbury’s best work was mostly done in a 10-year period in the early part of his career. In one remarkable decade he wrote:The Martian Chronicles(1950),The Illustrated Man(1951),The Golden Apples of the Sun(1953),Fahrenheit 451(1953),TheOctober Country(1955),Dandelion Wine(1957), andA Medicine for the Melancholy(1959). The books came one right after the other, and he created a new mode of speculative fiction.The culture immediately recognized his achievement. Suddenly, major mainstream journals published his fiction, and producers adapted his work for movies, radio, and TV. Millions of readers, who would not have read pulp fiction, came to his work. He also became the first science fiction author to attract a large female readership.On December 22, 1849, a group of political radicals were taken from their prison cells in Petersburg’s Peter and Paul Fortress, where they had been interrogated for eight months. Led to the Semenovsky Square, they heard a sentence of death by firing squad. They were given long white peasant blouses and nightcaps—their funeral shrouds—and offered last rites. The first three prisoners were seized by the arms and tied to the stake. One prisoner refused a blindfold and stared defiantly into the guns trained on them. At the last possible moment, the guns were lowered as a courier galloped up with an imperial decree reducing death sentences to imprisonment in a Siberian prison camp followed by service as a private in the army. The last-minute rescue was in fact planned in advance as part of the punishment, an aspect of social life that Russians understand especially well.Accounts affirm: of the young men who endured this terrible ordeal, one had his hair turn white; a second went mad and never recovered his sanity; a third, whose two-hundredth birthday we celebrate in 2021, went on to write Crime and Punishment.The mock-execution and the years in Siberian prison—thinly fictionalized in his novel Notes from the House of the Dead (1860)—changed Dostoevsky forever. His naive, hopeful romanticism disappeared. His religious faith deepened. The sadism of both prisoners and guards taught him that the sunny view of human nature presumed by utilitarianism, liberalism, and socialism were preposterous. Real human beings differed fundamentally from what these philosophies presumed. Dostoevsky’s characters astonish by their complexity. Their unpredictable but believable behavior reminds us of experiences beyond the reach of “scientific” theories. We appreciate that people, far from maximizing their own advantage, sometimes deliberately make victims of themselves in order, for example, to feel morally superior. In The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Father Zosima observes that it can be very pleasant to take offense, and Fyodor Pavlovich replies that it can even be positively distinguished.In fact, people harm themselves for many reasons. They tear at their own wounds and derive a peculiar pleasure from doing so. They deliberately humiliate themselves. To their own surprise, they experience impulses stemming from resentments long suppressed and, as a result, create scandalous scenes or commit horrible crimes. Freud particularly appreciated Dostoevsky’s exploration of the dynamics of guilt. But neither Freud nor most Western readers have grasped that Dostoevsky intended his descriptions of human complexity to convey political lessons. If people are so surprising, so “undefined and mysterious,” then social engineers are bound to cause more harm than good.The narrator ofThe House of the Deaddescribes how prisoners sometimes, for no apparent reason, suddenly do something highly self-destructive. They may attack a guard, even though the punishment—running a gauntlet of thousands of blows—usually proves fatal. Why? The answer is that the essence of humanness lies in the possibility of surprise. The behavior of material objects can be fully explained by natural laws, and for materialists the same is true of people, if not yet, then in the near future. But people are not just material objects, and will do anything, no matter how self-destructive, to prove they are not.The whole point of prison, as Dostoevsky experienced it, is to restrict people’s ability to make their own choices. But choice is what makes us human. Those prisoners lash out because of their ineradicable craving to have a will of their own, and that craving is ultimately more important than their own well-being and, indeed, than life itself.Thenameless narrator of Dostoevsky’s 1864 novellaNotes from Underground(usually called “the underground man”) insists that the aspiration of social sciences to discover the iron laws of human behavior threatens to reduce people to “piano keys or organ stops.” If such laws exist, if “some day they truly discover a formula for all our desires and caprices,” he reasons, then each person will realize that “everything is done by itself according to the laws of nature.” As soon as those laws are discovered, people will no longer be responsible for their actions. What’s more,All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000. . . . there would be published certain edifying works like the present encyclopedia lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and designated that there will be no more . . . adventures in the world. . . . Then the crystal palace [utopia] will be built.In the late 1960s, Dolly Parton got her big break as the “girl singer” on “The Porter Wagoner Show,” a syndicated television program that brought hard-core honky-tonk and down-home humor into the living rooms of America. It may be hard to believe now, but back then Ms. Parton was only the second most flamboyant performer onstage. One of country music’s most magnetic stars, Wagoner had a peroxide pompadour and eye-popping, rhinestone-studded Nudie suits that defined Nashville glitz. Meanwhile, “Miss Dolly,” as he called her, was kept buttoned up in demure outfits despite her natural radiance and zest.Underpaid and underappreciated, Ms. Parton would later compare her seven-year stint with Wagoner to the time that indentured servants were required to work in order to earn their freedom. It was indeed a raw deal, but it was worth it. It gave her national exposure and performing experience with a peerless entertainer twice her age. It also allowed her to hone her songwriting talent, which had brought her to Nashville in 1964 as an 18-year-old from the Smoky Mountains.One day, as the Wagoner tour bus headed to the next town, something caught Ms. Parton’s fancy. “We rode past Dover, Tennessee, and my mind started going,” she recalls in“Dolly Parton, Songteller: My Life in Lyrics” (Chronicle, 376 pages, $50). “There was this field of clover waving in the wind. So there we were, Dover-clover, and that started me off: ‘The sun behind a cloud just cast a crawling shadow o’er the fields of clover. And time is running out for me. I wish that he would hurry down from Dover.’ ”The verses that flowed from this roadside epiphany told a story from the point of view of a pregnant girl deserted by her lover and abandoned by her scandalized parents. Alone but still hoping for her lover’s return, she decides to have the baby, which is stillborn. With its Southern Gothic overtones, “Down From Dover” evokes the dark fatalism of the mountain ballads that Ms. Parton heard as a child. Its subject matter was taboo for country radio when it appeared on a 1970 album, so “Dover” was never the hit that she thought it could be. But it remains a favorite of Ms. Parton and many of her fans, and it has enjoyed an afterlife as one of her most covered songs, not only by country singers (Skeeter Davis) but also by campy pop sirens (Nancy Sinatra) and New Wave chanteuses (Marianne Faithfull).“Down From Dover” is one of 175 Parton compositions over a six-decade career featured in “Songteller,” a lavishly illustrated compendium of annotated lyrics and back-story anecdotes. The songs range freely across genres, from classic country weepers to proto-feminist hits like “Just Because I’m a Woman” to frothy upbeat pop crossovers; from stark acoustic bluegrass and movie-soundtrack blockbusters like “9 to 5” and “I Will Always Love You” to Broadway show tunes. It is only a portion of Dolly Parton’s staggering output of 450 recorded songs.A pair of timely new studies, by a journalist and a musicologist, both unabashed Dolly fans, trace the thematic threads that run through this canon. Both offer reappraisals of Ms. Parton as a complex and often contradictory artist overshadowed by her larger-than-life image as an entertainer and the proprietor of a multi-media empire. Sarah Smarsh’s“She Come by It Natural” (Scribner, 187 pages, $22)is a bracing personal account that celebrates how Ms. Parton has given a liberating voice to an often ignored segment of the American working class—resilient and independent-minded blue-collar women. Lydia R. Hamessley’s“Unlikely Angel” (Illinois, 286 pages, $19.95)offers a scholarly analysis of representative songs, as text and in performance, to explore Ms. Parton’s creative process. From self-described “Backwoods Barbie” to American Bard may seem a stretch, but there is merit in the argument that, for too long now, Ms. Parton’s formidable body of work has been overlooked for the sake of her relentlessly scrutinized body. As Ms. Smarsh puts it, Dolly Parton has had to “answer more questions about her measurements than her songwriting.” In fact, the lyrical content at the heart of “Songteller” shows the wide sweep of her oeuvre, a blend of darkness and light with natural affinities for the scorned and the misunderstood. There are outcasts and misfits of all sorts: hermits, prostitutes, winos, orphans, clairvoyants, gamblers and, not least, resourceful women of all stripes, but mostly poor and rural, in every conceivable predicament. Wordplay and O. Henry-like plot twists abound. No subject is off-limits: suicide, insanity, lust, faith and doubt, adultery, depression, illegitimacy; there is even a song called “PMS Blues.”Some of Ms. Parton’s best-known tear-jerkers, such as “Me and Little Andy,” about an abandoned girl and her puppy seeking refuge in a storm, have been savaged by critics through the years. (“As heinous as any of her past offenses against good taste,” wrote one.) In fact, these songs, concert staples still beloved by fans, reveal Ms. Parton working in the tradition of the sentimental Victorian-era parlor tunes with which, we learn, her mother serenaded her.Ms. Hamessley supplements her close readings (and close listenings) with incisive comments from Ms. Parton, who sent responses via cassette to the author’s inquiries, mostly about her native Appalachia’s folk roots. When asked about the early 19th-century hymn “Wayfaring Stranger,” whose stark melody re-appears in a number of her compositions, the now 74-year-old Ms. Parton dredged up a childhood memory of an old man at a local church in faded overalls who stood up mid-service and sang it impromptu: “It was the saddest, most beautiful, most lonesome thing I’d ever heard,” she tells Ms. Hamessley.By the time of her 1973 nostalgia-drenched album “My Tennessee Mountain Home,” her boss Wagoner had had enough. As her producer, he controlled much of what she recorded, often in slick arrangements that went against her wishes. For him, the money was in love songs. “Dolly, nobody gives a shit about ‘Mama’s Old Black Kettle,’ or ‘Daddy’s Working Boots,’ ” he told her. “Who cares?” Her response was “Jolene,” her biggest hit yet, garnering her new fans outside country music, and it wasn’t long before she broke free from Wagoner and went solo.For Ms. Smarsh, a Kansas-based freelance journalist and author, Ms. Parton’s tumultuous relationship with Wagoner is only too familiar for the women Ms. Smarsh herself grew up with on the Kansas plains. Through the years, and even after Wagoner’s death in 2007, Ms. Parton has played down and publicly forgiven the abusive treatment at his hands. Ms. Smarsh puts back the hurt and sting.“Parton had left home for the lights of Nashville and found success,” she writes. “But, in some ways, she was just as trapped as she would have been as a knocked-up kid in a shack in Sevier County. . . . She wound up professionally and contractually bound to a man who fancied himself her husband, her father, her owner. . . . What she’d stepped into was the wealthier, show business parallel of a life she’d meant to escape.”Bristling with sharp insights and righteous anger, “She Come by It Natural” is a moving account of how Ms. Parton’s music has helped “hard-luck women” make their own escapes from deadbeat men and dead-end lives. Women like Ms. Smarsh’s Grandma Betty, who survived a string of abusive husbands and helped raise Ms. Smarsh even as she juggled low-paying jobs. “When I was a kid, Betty would put one of Dolly’s tapes in the deck of her old car while we rolled down some highway,” she writes. “It’s the only music I remember her singing and crying to in that emotionally repressed Midwestern culture and class.” That mountain girl had left on a bus with her guitar and three paper bags full of dirty clothes, the hooting laughter of her high-school classmates ringing in her ears after she had announced on Graduation Day that she was headed to Music City to make it big.PG is a sucker for stories about people who started with nothing and worked their way up. Dolly Parton certainly qualifies for that category.Here s a copy of an album cover from Ms. Parton s My Tennessee Mountain Home album, released in 1973. Ms. Parton was born in a one-room cabin. The photo on the album cover is of a later family home, presumably a better one, where she spent much of her time growing up. She was the fourth of twelve children in her family. The last two children, twins, were born when Ms. Parton s mother was 35. Ms. Parton s father was illiterate.She finished her education at Sevier County High School, graduating in 1964. Within a week she was in Nashville, trying to earn a living from her musical talent. Here s a copy of her graduation photo.Nothing is as easy to make as a promise this winter to do something next summer; this is how commencement speakers are caught.Sydney J. HarrisPG read an item which turned out to be not quite what he expected, hence, its lack of appearance on the august pages of TPV. That said, the article began with the phrase, When my first novel was published. Astute visitors to TPV will immediately recognize the passive voice in that phrase (no blog-title irony intended).What struck PG about the phrase was how much different it seemed than something an indie author would say. Something like, When I published my first novel. Perhaps PG is truly in the advanced stages of Covid-craziness, but the whole sense of the author being in control of both the creative and publishing parts of her career feels so much better to him. I just published my fifth book in three years, or I decided to write and publish a book about a woman who killed and ate a shark, seems like something that an assertive individual, an individual in control of their own destiny, an individual who runs the show instead of watching the show would say. When my first novel was published, is something Lydia Bennet would say. Elizabeth would say, When I published my first novel. Pride and Prejudice analogies will be something that will interest PG s psychiatrist if Covid doesn t end soon. By the time of its reclusive occupant’s death in 1987, the faux-Elizabethan country manor Wilsford, in Wiltshire near Stonehenge, overflowed with a dusty mishmash of valuable antiques, ephemeral gewgaws, and exotic objets d’art. Outside, ivy shrouded the gables and moss thickened on the roof tiles. In the overgrown gardens stood a myriad of neglected statuary, marble urns, stone columns, and rococo fountains. To disperse it all, Sotheby’s hosted hundreds of potential bidders, over four days, at what they described as an “English eccentric’s dream house.” Said eccentric was Stephen Tennant, who was born at Wilsford in 1906 and died there, aged eighty-one. According to his devoted housekeeper and nurse, Sylvia Blandford, he’d have turned in his grave at the spectacle of his possessions being pawed over and auctioned off piece by piece. But he had left no will. Death was not, perhaps, a notion permitted within Tennant’s elaborate fantasy world, into which he had retreated ever deeper as the decades passed.Like a fairy-tale character magically granted every conceivable blessing, only to discover those blessings carry a curse, the Honorary Stephen James Napier Tennant began life arrayed with sublime advantage. His father, Sir Edward Tennant, came from a family who owed their vast wealth to a Scottish ancestor’s invention and patenting of bleach powder in 1799. Edward’s blue-blooded wife, Pamela Wyndham, was a socialite who courted the leading artists and writers of the day. Pamela doted on Stephen, her youngest child of five, and encouraged him in his creative pursuits. As he was turning fifteen, she even arranged for his first art exhibition, at a respected London gallery. All the biggest national newspapers covered the event, offering fawning praise of the artist and his work. It must have been intoxicating indeed. And yet, as any former child star will attest, nothing warps one’s sense of self like youthful celebrity.It was in the late twenties, when Tennant was around twenty-one, that his life peaked. Among the so-called Bright Young People, whose decadence and penchant for fancy dress kept gossip columnists in brisk trade, he shone the brightest. “His appearance alone,” theDaily Expressrhapsodized, “is enough to make you catch your breath.” He inspired Nancy Mitford and Evelyn Waugh characters, was sculpted by Jacob Epstein, wrote style columns, and stole the show in the group photographs that helped launch Cecil Beaton’s century-defining career.Soon after Beaton was introduced to Tennant in late 1926, he accepted an invitation to Tennant’s home, Wilsford, for the weekend. “My whole visit from beginning to end,” the twenty-three-year-old Beaton recorded in his diary, “was like being at the most perfect play. Here Stephen was saying glorious things the entire time—funny, trite, vital, importantly exact things.” Tennant’s influence was formative, believes Beaton’s biographer, Hugo Vickers. “While Stephen was far from short of ideas, he lacked the stamina to carry them out himself. Thus he was often the inspiration of an idea and Cecil its executor.” The same phobia of being seen thwarted Tennant’s literary ambitions. As a young man, he wrote at least one novel, which he chose not to publish. And he spent many decades on his projected magnum opus, a Marseilles-inspired novel to be titled “Lascar,” conceived in 1938 and never to be completed. He revised, rewrote, and reconfigured the story of, in his words, “crude desires, lusts, fidelities, and treacheries.” He began other novels, and engaged in such procrastinatory activities as illustrations and designing covers, only to return to it. In 1941 Cyril Connolly’s magazine,Horizon, published a “Lascar” cover featuring one of Tennant’s own paintings. In Connolly’s opinion, he was “an interesting and pathetic phenomenon, a great writer who can’t write.” E. M. Forster, meanwhile, read sections and urged Tennant to stick with it. Various other author friends offered kind words and advice, including Elizabeth Bowen, Rosamond Lehmann, and Willa Cather, whose work he idolized. (He wasn’t very interested in male writers.) The American novelist, an unlikely but close friend, said she had high hopes for “Lascar.” In the eighth decade of Tennant’s life, and of the century, by which point he rarely ventured beyond the perimeter of Wilsford, he was still, supposedly, working on it. Callers were received as Tennant reclined on his unmade bed. He only got up in June, he’d explain, to see the roses. In truth, he sometimes went shopping: a lifelong occupation was buying furniture and curios for the house and gardens; the more recherché, the better. A 1966 letter from his brother Christopher, who looked after his finances, suggested mildly: “I think the first thing to find out about the seal pool is how much it would cost to maintain and look after the seals.”The OP was written in connection with the Covid-restrained opening of an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery about photographer Cecil Beaton, who was a close friend of Tennant and principal recorder of Tennant s life and release of an associated book, titled Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things. Following are a couple of photos from the book and a short video from the National Portrait Gallery:How like a winter hath my absence beenFrom thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!What old December s bareness everywhere!And yet this time remov d was summer s time,The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,Like widow d wombs after their lords decease:Yet this abundant issue seem d to meBut hope of orphans and unfather d fruit;For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,And thou away, the very birds are mute;Or if they sing, tis with so dull a cheerThat leaves look pale, dreading the winter s near.William Shakespeare, Sonnet #97Speaking of sitting around, sheltering in place, eating and drinking holiday cheer, etc.One of the biggest myths about exercise is that it’s natural. If anything, human instincts lean more toward taking a nap. Want to feel bad about skipping a workout? Blame evolution.Daniel E. Lieberman argues this theory in his new book “Exercised: Why Something We Never Evolved to Do Is Healthy and Rewarding,” which tips some of the fitness world’s most sacred cows. Everyone knows exercise is good for them, yet studies show most people don’t get enough of it. Mr. Lieberman set out to find out why, and the answers, he hopes, will help remove some of the shame people feel about their own inactivity that makes it even harder to get moving.Mr. Lieberman criticizes people he calls “exercists” who brag about how much they work out and pass judgment on the less fit as unnaturally lazy. Those who take the escalator instead of the stairs are not guilty of the sin of sloth, he writes, but doing what they were evolved to do—saving energy only for what is necessary or recreational.Other highlights from the book out Jan. 5: People who believe brutal cross-training workouts bring them closer to the brawny body that belonged to their ancient forebears probably are not familiar with research that shows Neanderthals were only slightly more muscular than today’s regular humans. Fitness buffs who think civilization’s pampering has muted our natural strength might not realize that a profoundly inactive couch potato moves more than a typical chimpanzee in a day. As for our natural talents, it bears noting that the average person runs as fast as a hippo.I wonder how people who do high-intensity cardio with weight training will respond to this book. I feel like you’re calling out CrossFit in particular.I guess I am. I’ve done some CrossFit workouts, they’re great. I’m not anti-CrossFit. But there’s this CrossFit mystique that your inner primal macho ripped hunter-gatherer ancestor is who you were meant to be. If that gets you happy, that’s fine, all power to you, but you don’t have to make the rest of us feel bad for not doing these intense crazy workouts. They’re not necessary.You get this sense by reading some books or popular articles that those of us who are contaminated by civilization are somehow abnormal because we don’t want to get out of bed and run an ultramarathon or go to the gym and lift 300 pounds. Our ancestors never did that and they would think it’s crazy because they were struggling to survive with limited food.From an evolutionary standpoint, how do you explain people who love to exercise?It’s not that we don’t have rewards for being physically active. Our brain produces this wonderful mix of chemicals that makes us glad we’ve exercised. The sad part of the equation is that our brain doesn’t create these chemicals to get us to exercise. We’ve turned something normal and simple and basic into a virtue signaling thing.It’s like people who are intolerant of other peoples’ weight. Most people in America are now overweight. They’re not overweight because of some fault of their own and they’re struggling, and yet there are people out there who are unacceptably mean to people who are struggling. I think we need to have the same level of compassion toward people who are struggling to exercise. There’s nothing wrong with them.PG notes he usually doesn t include two posts from the same source on the same day and hopes all the lawyers who work for the Wall Street Journal are skiing in New Hampshire or otherwise distracted. However, a great many of those writers and editors who work for news publications that cover traditional publishing seem to be experimenting with how it would feel to be permanently unemployed over this holiday break. PG won t name names, but some online publications that find something or several somethings to post about traditional publishing every day are running the same headlines they were before Christmas.I was a student in the University of Cape Town’s English department when the Ransom Center acquired J. M. Coetzee’s papers. This was in 2012, when to be a student in the English department at UCT was to be required to hold a strong, fluently expressed opinion on J. M. Coetzee, his life, his work, the position he held within the South African academy, and whether or not there was a “fascinating contrast” between that position and the one he held overseas. Extra points if you could get all this off while referring to him at least once as “John Maxwell Coetzee” in an ironic and weary tone of voice. I never really got to the bottom of why people liked that so much, saying “John Maxwell Coetzee” and then looking around proudly, sometimes with the nostrils a bit flared. I’d managed to discharge the obligation to have an opinion on Coetzee by having a strident opinion on Nadine Gordimer instead, and so never learned why it was hilarious to refer to him by something other than his initials.I did learn to smile knowingly when it happened, which was very often. No smiling about the Ransom Center acquisition though, a subject that was discussed with such bitterness that for a while I thought “Ransom Center” was departmental shorthand for American rapaciousness, something to do with rich U.S. institutions holding the rest of the world to ransom, riding roughshod over questions of legacy and snatching up bits of history to which they had no rightful claim. The Harry Ransom Center is of course a real place, situated on the University of Texas campus, containing one of the most extensive and valuable archival collections in the world. One million books, five million photographs, a hundred thousand works of art, and forty-two million literary manuscripts. Highlights of the collection, according to the center’s unusually user-friendly website, include a complete copy of the Gutenberg Bible, a First Folio, and the manuscript collections of Capote, Carrington, Coetzee, Coleridge, Conrad, Crane, Crowley, Cummings, and Cusk, looking at just thec’s. James Joyce’s personal library from when he lived in Trieste is in there, as well as the personal libraries of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Don DeLillo, and Evelyn Waugh.A friend who went to UT told me that the Ransom Center is an ordinary-looking building, big and brown, and that it would be easy to walk past and have no idea what was in there. She said that undergraduates do it every day. I have confirmed this description by looking at photos online, but it doesn’t sit right with me on a symbolic level. It should be bigger, surely, resembling more of a compound or fortress. It should emit some kind of low humming sound, or glow. Forty-two million manuscripts! A million books! Kilometers of archival holdings in climate-controlled rooms, all wrapped up in sheaves and purpose-built cardboard boxes, lovingly tended to by armies of well-compensated grad students. This same friend was doing some work in the archives when they received Norman Mailer’s manuscripts. Great jubilation heard throughout the Center, she said. A week of celebrations culminated in a party where all the attendees were given little boxing-glove key rings.I didn’t know all that then, only that the Center had a lot of money, and that people in my department said it had effectively ripped Coetzee’s papers out of the hands of South African scholars forever. Cape Town is far away from a lot of places, but it is very far away from Texas. Even if you got funded, who would have the resources or the time to apply for the visa (expensive, takes ages), travel to Texas, and then sit in the reading rooms of the Center for months, going through the small spiral notebooks in which the earliest drafts of Waiting for the Barbarians were sketched out? I sympathized, but not very much. The bulk of Gordimer’s papers, as far as I knew, had been at the Lilly Library in Indiana since 1993. Also very far away, also involving grant applications in order to travel for many days, and the reading room was probably not even as nice. I had long ago accepted that I was just not the sort of person to overcome these obstacles, and I thought the Coetzee people should see their problem in a similar light. They might never actually touch the manuscripts with their own two hands, but someone would, and surely it was nice to know they were being looked after so well. David Foster Wallace’s archive, which included about two hundred annotated books from his own library, had been acquired by the Center two years earlier. There were already stories of students going to Texas purely to sit and commune with his library, weeping over his copy of White Noise, touching the pages of certain books over and over until they went all soft and frilly and had to be removed from general circulation, replaced with digitized copies. I myself could not imagine getting on a plane in order to touch a book, but I liked the idea that some people would, and that there were institutions with the money and the will to facilitate this kind of behavior.It’s possible, also, that I was able to take this benevolent view of things because the documents I needed for my own research were housed in a building about a ten-minute walk from my front door, at the Western Cape Provincial Archives on Roeland Street. I was writing about literary censorship during apartheid, with a particular focus on the state’s treatment of the novels of Nadine Gordimer. Six of her novels passed through the system. Three were banned and three weren’t. There was no discernible logic behind these decisions. The Publications Control Board was accountable to almost no one, and the censors were given extraordinary freedom to ban whatever they liked. Often what they did with that freedom was write long, rambling, defensive accounts of their decisions.I was fascinated and disgusted by their reports, the venom and the stupidity and the intellectual waste they represented. I’d go to the archives to fish out a specific set of documents—say, the files pertaining to the appeal against the banning of Burger’s Daughter—and I’d end up stuck there for a whole day, and then a week, helplessly reading through a knee-high stack of files relating to the censor’s opinions on Pale Fire, or a stash of letters from members of the public demanding that the censors do something about copies of Franny and Zooey continuing to circulate through the nation’s public libraries (“dangerous filth emanating from a certain class of writer in the United States of America and masquerading as ‘culture’”). I’d worked out that these boxes of files amounted to just under a hundred linear meters’ worth of material, and I hated the idea that I would never be able to look through it all.I read Carolyn Steedman’sDust: The Archive and Cultural History, and drew a red wiggly line under the part where she says that Archive Fever is “the desire to recover moments of inception: to find and possess all sorts of beginnings.” Carolyn Steedman, thank you very much. I drew a less vigorous line under the part where she withdraws that understanding hand and says, “And nothing starts in the Archive, nothing, ever at all, though things certainly end up there. You find nothing in the Archive but stories caught halfway through: the middle of things; discontinuities.” I knew she was right, that every archive is necessarily fragmented and incomplete, but I didn’t like it.I stopped being a student, eventually, after finally managing to wrench myself out of the archives and write something about what I believed I’d found. I stopped worrying that I hadn’t looked at enough of it, because of course I hadn’t, and I stopped making urgent notes to myself in the margins of Gordimer’s novels. I read her books for pleasure again, and tried not to look too proprietorial whenever her work came up in conversation, because no one cares about your thesis.PG notes that, based on his ancient past as a student employee in a large university library (entirely physical, including the books on microfiche, which were torture to read), if a book is misfiled in a large library, unless it s misfiled in a likely location, it might as well have been shipped to Dallas or Capetown.Perhaps major research libraries pay their staff a lot more than PG earned, but he suspects that moving very many boxes, books, cases, binders, etc., around any sort of library or archive will involve one or more poorly-paid laborers in that process.One of the many, many nice things about digital collections is that they can be backed-up and copies of the backups can be disbursed all over the place so nobody really can destroy all of them.As PG has mentioned before, in ancient times, he spent about three years working for the company that provided (and still provides) the Lexis and Nexis and related databases for you to search in to your heart s desire provided your credit card limit is sufficiently high. Everything was on a bunch of mainframe computers in a data center surrounded by thick glass walls and even the president of the company had to be escorted into the actual presence of the large collection of mainframe computers. (The president when PG was there wouldn t have known the difference between a mainframe and a refrigerator in any case, so PG doubts he ever did anything other than glance into the glass fortress on the way to a meeting somewhere else.At any rate, the organized electrons humming around on those mainframes had cost millions and millions and millions of dollars to organize and be made searchable. The building surround the mainframe was built like a medieval fortress and, supposedly a jetliner could crash into the outside of the building without making it through to the electrons. That said, each day, a backup of the entire collection was made (presumably on a bunch of giant reels of magnetic tape, but PG never asked) then a copy of the backup was made. One copy was sent many miles North and the other copy was sent many miles South for storage in some secret place. This was done so a major catastrophe would have to hit all three places at about the same time to wipe out the entire collection, a task that would likely to have required a large air force that knew exactly where each of the places were. The main data center was far away from earthquake country, but the storage locations were earthquake-proofed, etc.Regardless of how impressive its physical structure, a major research library with everything or most things on paper or in other physical forms is quite a dangerous place to house original and irreplaceable documents.Thirty years ago, I became hooked on the work of socio-linguist Deborah Tannen after reading her smart, savvy, relationship-saving (yup, my husband read it, too) bestseller “You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation.” Here, and in Ms. Tannen’s many books since then, she displays an acute ability to decode and explain the hidden messages and assumptions our words unwittingly convey, whether about power, status, a wish for greater connection or its opposite. If there is a common lesson in all her volumes (among them, “I Only Say This Because I Love You” and “You’re the Only One I Can Tell”), it’s the importance of listening—and learning how to tune in to what’s really being said.Now, in her appealing memoir “Finding My Father: His Century-Long Journey From World War I Warsaw and My Quest to Follow,” Ms. Tannen reveals how she acquired this skill, courtesy of her adored father, Eli Samuel Tannen:When I was a child, and the family gathered after guests left, my father would comment, “Did you notice when she said . . . ?” and go on to explain what meaning he gleaned from the guest’s tone of voice, intonation, or wording. So I trace to him what became my life’s work: observing and explaining how subtle differences in ways of speaking can lead to frustration and misunderstandings between New Yorkers and Californians, women and men, and people of different ages, regions, or cultures.Over the course of his long life—he died in 2006, at the age of 97—Eli loved nothing more than to reminisce, especially about his earliest years in Warsaw, where he was born into a large Hasidic family. He left that world behind when he came to America in 1920, but he never stopped missing it. His oft-repeated tales made his wife, Dorothy—Ms. Tannen’s mother—roll her eyes at what she dismissed as tedious stories about dead people. For her part, Dorothy remembered almost nothing about her childhood in what is now Belarus, from which she and her family had escaped in 1923. Why look back on a place that, had they stayed, would have probably cost them their lives in the Holocaust?But young Deborah loved her father’s tales, many of which resembled scenes ripped from an Isaac Bashevis Singer story. She was captivated by Eli’s detailed memories of the tightly knit Jewish community where he spent his first 12 years. The poverty was visceral in a neighborhood teeming with bow-legged children suffering from rickets, and shoeless beggars wearing clothes made from rags. Yet Eli felt sustained by the sheer liveliness of his grandfather’s multigenerational household, where the boy lived with his widowed mother and only sister, surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins of all ages.Many of these relatives had remarkable stories of their own. Aunt Magda, for instance, having early in her life eschewed religion for communism, fought with the Soviets in World War II and afterward became a high-ranking official in the Polish government. Aunt Dora’s brilliance led her to a career as a respected mathematician and physicist who studied with Einstein, became his lover and, even after aborting her pregnancy by him, followed him from Europe to Princeton, N.J.Eli’s own life took a different course. Despite high aptitude scores at his American public school, he dropped out at 14. He spent the next three decades struggling to make a decent living, first to support his widowed mother and his sister, and then his wife and children. In those years he notched up 68 jobs and occupations, from garment worker to prison guard, while also going to night school, eventually earning a law degree before finally opening his own law office in the 1950s. When he retired from his law practice in the late ’70s, he began writing down and recording his memories on tape, so that Ms. Tannen might someday write a book about him. Here, at last, is that book.In her overly discursive early chapters, Ms. Tannen herself wonders why it took so long. To be sure, it was a daunting task to sift through the countless letters, notes and personal journals Eli had preserved over the course of his long life. But perhaps there was a deeper obstacle. In reconstructing the substance of her father’s life, the author admits that she was also forced to revise what she thought she knew about her parents, both as individuals and as a couple.The first family myth to fall was the intimate setting of his grandfather’s Warsaw household. Instead, Eli’s letters reveal Aunt Magda admonishing her nephew for waxing nostalgic about a family warmth that never existed. Unable to rebut a truth he had preferred not to acknowledge, Eli admits to his idealized childhood image and owns up to the lack of family closeness he himself had so painfully observed, experienced—and, it seems, repressed.Glen had a disability more disfiguring than a burn and more terrifying than cancer. Glen had been born on the day after Christmas. My parents just combine my birthday with Christmas, that s all, he explained. But we knew this was a lie. Glen s parents just wrapped a couple of his Christmas presents in birthday-themed wrapping paper, stuck some candles in a supermarket cake, and had a dinner of Christmas leftovers.Augusten BurroughsAfter Columbia, Casey started an internship in Washington D.C., hoping that would turn into a full time job.But two years later, she moved to Thailand, and started writing for content mills (a dead-end path to make money writing).“I supplemented my writing income with other gigs,” says Casey. “Writing a documentary script, editing novels for way too little pay, tutoring schoolchildren and even dabbling in voice acting.”She pulled lots of all-nighters trying to make money writing.She was constantly worried about money, rent, food, finding more workThe scarcity mentality drove her to accept whatever assignments she could find, even if it didn’t pay wellEven after writing for some big-name publications, moving back to the U.S. strained her finances.“I was as broke as I’d ever been,” says Casey. “I signed up for food stamps to get by, but I was ashamed to need assistance.To be clear, I fully support welfare programs and believe they should be there for people who need them. I vowed that my food stamp application would be a one-time situation.When the initial six-month period ended, I was determined to not need to renew my claim, and I made good on that promise.”For a lot of freelancers, English majors, and former journalists, it’s not writings skills. It’s something else. Things like…Business senseto make connections, hire people or mentors to help you, manage your money, and land clients.Marketing savvyto leverage your connections, reach editors and marketing directors, and showcase your best work.Confidenceto raise your rates, pitch your dream clients, and land high-paying contracts.Consistencyin marketing, self-care, booking work with only good clients, meeting deadlines, tracking progress, and pursuing goals.When Casey finally realized this, something clicked. She set a goal to earn $100,000 in a year. She forced herself to step out of her comfort zone. And she learned a lot of hard lessons along the way that can help you make money writing.The last thing you want is to plateau before you’ve gotten started, so once you get the hang of one type of assignment, look for your next (more lucrative) challenge.I spent a long time in assignment hell, because I was too unsure of myself to go after better-paying, higher-profile work on a regular basis.Tip:Upward momentum is crucial to feeling fulfilled and making good money as a freelancer.Day to day, you’re so busy pitching and working on deadlines that you don’t always see how your portfolio and skills are growing.That causes you to accept assignments at the same skill and income level, which causes your career and earnings to stagnate.Once I took a hard look at what I had achieved in my career, I realized I was seriously under-earning by working with low-paying clients who were never going to pay me what my skills were worth.Tip:When you do a quarterly or annual review, you’ll be surprised by how much work you’ve accomplished and how much your writing has improved. That will motivate you to raise your rates and weed out the low-payers.One of the biggest traps I fell into during my early freelance years was taking on low-paying work because it sounded interesting or I wanted a particular clip.The problem:I wasn’t earning enough from those assignments to cover my expenses, so I’d have to take on whatever other work I could get. Oftentimes, those would be assignments:I didn’t really wantI couldn’t afford to turn down, orBoth, which meant I was trying to cobble together an income from a lot of bad jobs.Don’t do this, OK.Not only does that approach make it tough to pay the bills, it’s also exhausting and demoralizing. I cried *a lot* in those days because I knew I needed to make a change, but I felt too burned out to market myself or pitch better outlets.The moral of the story?Insist on a fair, livable rate, even if you’re new to freelancing. That’s what sets you on the path to six figures and gives you the confidence and clarity of mind to keep improving.PG notes that the OP is about writing articles, not books, but some of the underlying principles are the same for each form.Doesn’t just apply to people, either. Also applies to books, because time-pressed readers/editors/agents take only a few seconds to make their buy decision, and authors have the same few seconds to make their sale.If you’re aiming for a traditional publishing deal including relevant comp titles in your query letter is a must, because comp titles help define the expectations and positioning of your book. If you’re self-pubbing, well-chosen comp titles are a guide for the readers you hope to reach. In bothinstances, comp titles provide a target in a crowded marketplace, and will affect your cover, blurb, sales pitch and marketing plan.Agents and publishers ask for comp titles because they need a quick shorthand way to establish the basis for sales expectations and marketing. The agent/editor/potential reader needs a reference point, and, if your book will appeal to readers who enjoy legal thrillers, steamy romance or epic fantasy, you’re providing a valuable selling tool by providing appropriate comp titles that give a solid clue about which market you’re aiming at.According to John Medina of the University of Washington, the human brain requires meaning before details. When listeners don’t understand the basic concept right at the beginning, they have a hard time processing the rest of the information.Bottom line for writers: The title and the cover—image plus title—have to work as a unit to explain the hook or basic conceptfirst.Wrong image and/or misfit title confuse the would-be buyer and you lose the sale. On-target image plus genre-relevant title and the reader/agent/editor will look closer.Here s one of the things I learned that morning: if you cross a line and nothing happens, the line loses meaning. It s like that old riddle about a tree falling in a forest, and whether it makes a sound if there s no one around to hear it.You keep drawing a line farther and farther away, crossing it every time. That s how people end up stepping off the edge of the earth. You d be surprised at how easy it is to bust out of orbit, to spin out to a place where no one can touch you. To lose yourself to get lost.Or maybe you wouldn t be surprised. Maybe some of you already know.To those people, I can only say: I m sorry.Lauren Oliver, Before I Fall“GUYS ARE LIKE school admissions,” Claire Wang’s mom tells Claire in Parachutes, a new YA novel by Kelly Yang. “Get in first. Then worry if you like them back.” The analogy is cheeky yet revealing: colleges and boyfriends function on a model of scarcity, and thus attainment is far more important than agency. Parachutes traces this logic with a critical eye, as conflicts arise not only out of relational drama, a staple driver of YA fiction, but also out of the stresses surrounding elite college admissions.Parachutes follows the relationship between Claire, who moves from Shanghai to Los Angeles, and Dani De La Cruz, a Filipina girl who is Claire’s host sister and a scholarship student at her prep school. The book is named after “parachute kids” like Claire, who are flown in from China in order to get a better education. Ironically, Claire is not very interested in playing the college admissions game, but Dani is resolute about getting into Yale, which she believes will lift her and her mother out of the working class.Another recent YA release, Ed Lin’s David Tung Can’t Have a Girlfriend Until He Gets Into an Ivy League College, is “college admissions fiction” at its most blatant, beginning on the first page:I was ranked eighth out of a class of 240. If I could end the year in sixth or seventh place, that would be a major win. […] My school is a public institution based in a landlocked town in northern New Jersey known for receiving 20-25 Ivy League college admissions offers every year. […] We’re the only school on the East Coast where about 80% of the students are Asian American, nearly all Chinese, and many with immigrant parents.Unsurprisingly, the primary tension in the novel involves David’s attempts to square his nascent romantic relationships with the all-encompassing demand to build a perfect admissions portfolio. And, like Dani inParachutes, David is a working-class outsider enveloped in a cluster of affluence.Haven’t we all wished for an aunt like Ferdinand Mount’s Aunt Betty? A stylish, darting little woman nicknamed Munca, she loved having her nephew spend childhood summers at her Sussex house (complete with chauffeur, nanny, cook, maid) and, in later years, ferried him up to London in her Rolls-Royce to meet theater friends at the Café de Paris. One memorable encounter in 1957, for example, was with the aging trouper Sophie Tucker. “This is my nephew,” Aunt Betty proudly declared of the mortified teenager. “He’s going to be a writer.” To which Tucker responded, “That’s swell . . . I’ve always had a lot of time for the guy with the pencil.”A family photograph from the previous year says it all: Betty; her husband, Greig; their daughter, Georgie; and Ferdinand’s sister, Francie, smiling—and the young writer standing just apart unmistakably “glum and ungrateful.” For Betty was, in many ways, just too much. Whether plumping up the cushions in her chic drawing room, deadheading her rosebushes or igniting a drinks party, she seemed always to attack and overwhelm.Just how much more there was to this armor-clad butterfly is revealed—incrementally and irresistibly—in “Kiss Myself Goodbye: The Many Lives of Aunt Munca,” a family history so deftly excavated and winningly conjured that it restores our faith in a literary species too often given to flabbiness and self-absorption. “It is a personal memoir that turned into a quest while I wasn’t looking,” Mr. Mount explains of his decade-long exhumation of a past riddled with as many deceptions and double-crosses as any espionage novel. “In this book, nobody’s recollections are reliable,” he cautions. And isn’t that putting it mildly.All begins, as it must, with a birth. “Betty just went off to Cornwall and came back with a baby,” Ferdinand’s mother announces of her sister-in-law. Arriving in 1941, Georgie was Betty and Grieg’s golden girl and their only child until, sometime in 1950, “an adopted baby sister suddenly arrives, out of the blue, like a food parcel during the war.” Georgie and her Mount cousins adore chubby little Celeste. Then one day, she’s gone. “We just borrowed her to help her parents out,” Betty explains, and that’s that.The mystery of the borrowed baby nags at Mr. Mount, as do other, seemingly related conundrums of Betty’s life: her ruthless sabotaging of Georgie’s marriage plans, the serial romances of her past, her hazy connection to her jaunty brother Buster, her real age—her real name(s), for heaven’s sake. “I had tugged the thread,” he writes of his growing curiosity, “and I could not resist following it to the end.”Immersing himself in birth and marriage archives along with newspaper reports of divorce and bigamy cases, among other tidbits, Mr. Mount uncovers a camouflaged trail that begins in the industrial north of England, about as far from the Café de Paris as you can get. “She was the daughter of John William Macduff of Sheffield, a scrap metal merchant,” Mr. Mount learns of Betty’s sister, Doris, who “told the truth when she filled in a form.” Betty, on the other hand, always pretended that Doris was an unrelated “honorary aunt,” even though the two women lived near each other in opulent Berkshire where Betty “in her Rolls might bump into Doris in her Bentley any day of the week.” For both sisters had married well, if a little too often in Betty’s case.Her marital record, however, was surpassed by Buster’s, whose “blitzkrieg approach to wooing” resulted in seven marriages, six divorces and numerous dalliances. The busy fellow also acquired three birth certificates, whereas Betty appeared to have none. When Mr. Mount finds that document he realizes that his aunt had reinvented herself as tirelessly and thoroughly as any secret agent. Which she was, in a way, being a scandal-shadowed child of poverty who had to cover her tracks and lie consistently in order to infiltrate the alien territory of the British upper class. In one of Betty’s maneuvers, for example, a real husband is “erased and replaced by the shadowy and dead Mr. Baring”—the name Baring, of British banking fame, having the required cachet.Betty reminded PG of one of his clients in the quite distant past, a woman who had her own unique style of divorcing ( dumping might be a better term) a series of husbands.PG didn t mind that this client neglected to pay a legal bill on occasion because she provided him with so many great stories for use during gatherings with his brothers and sisters in the legal profession during conferences sponsored by various bar associations.For those who had the good sense not to attend law school, the best parts of meeting together with fellow attorneys under the pretext of continuing legal education is swapping client stories (which do not involve any identifying details, just character types that real attorneys encounter during their practice lives) during lunches and dinners associated with those educational affairs.

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