What, on earth?

This morning, literally three minutes ago, it hit me again: What am I doing here?! This crisis is getting old, but somehow it’s not getting wrinkled as it ages – it’s as shiny and appealing as it was five years ago. What on earth am I, a bibliophile, a writer, doing making books to sell? Who do I think I am?!

I recently moved up the ranks (well, one rank) as a publisher. I love the strategic thinking that my job requires: analysing the market and feeling out weak points, devising something to buffer that week point and then making it look pretty. Well, I would if this was what my job entailed. Except that in moving the book through the process, it comes out looking just like everything else. And the market doesn’t want to buy it – we have to convince them that it fills that weak point. Twist their arms into a Chinese bangle. Join the system and convert people, like a Jehovah’s Witness.

But do these books really do anything? Of course a book is a valuable thing. But are these books priceless or just pricey? I don’t think open learning will be effective – copyright exists because people want to be paid for their creative property. Open learning is only appealing because universities need more funding and entrepreneurs want to make money while being considered to be philanthropists. Open learning is the market of the wealthy and well-meaning but naïve liberals.

So again I say, publishing should be left to those who like books and those who don’t care, never to those who worship at their altar.

An update

Having moaned for the last few years about publishing and the sense that it is both the right and the wrong place for me, I am a-moving on. But not away from publishing - further into it. What are you doing? part of me yells (referring to herself in the second and now the third person). Finally, yells another. I (first person, singular) am becoming a publisher.

Note: I have no delusions about the new post. Technically, it's a promotion. Realistically, I am exchanging one set of challenges, perks and frustrations for another. The industry is the same no matter where you go.

But one day, I want to be in charge of a little part of that industry. I want to put my over-inflated sense of responsibility to good use. I want to make decisions, however difficult, and be responsible for them, rather than being held indirectly responsible for and suffering the implications of decisions I do not and cannot make. To do that, I have to do my time, earn my stripes, gather the scars and make a hit-list. No, not really. Only in my imagination.

Now I am not so lost in my imagination that I think that one day, oh one day, we will stop carving up our beloved pets and serving them in paper take-away bags. No, I may be idealistic but I am not stupid. But, I think, maybe one day I can dish one of my favourites up on a silver platter and feed starving children all over the world. Or something (this metaphor is running away with me a little).

Oh, and I bailed on Nanowrimo on Day 1

I can't be a Data Capturer, but neither can I do this

Again I wonder: Is publishing really the right place for a bibliophile to be? There are all these stories out there about people in corporate jobs who long to do something more meaningful and other stories about people who feel grateful to be doing something they love. But they mean something they love, on their terms. And those of you in the land of corporate greed, consider how you would feel if you had to bring something you love as you might love a child into that environment. Would your life be more meaningful? Or would the thing you love have less meaning? And what if you were surrounded by people whose only real qualification for the job that they are doing is that they like to read or that they studied literature. Ah, literature. You might appreciate beautiful gardens, but that doesn't mean you can plant and sustain one yourself. You might appreciate great photography, but can you really be Pieter Hugo?

I can't be a Data Capturer because it wouldn't take long before I'd wonder off from data-caturing land and find something more stimulating to do. So what's the problem with the job I have? Apart from the fact that I feel like a vet having to cut up the carcass of her favourite pony for dog food: I have patience, but not enough of it to outlast the type of incompetence of the type of person who would demand human sacrifices and pyramid-esque monuments if they had been born with that type of authority. Except that this person would demand that the pyramid be built upside down and the sacrifices take place in its shadow and suspended two metres from the ground without support because it meets some obscure sense of aesthetic. Next she'll be asking me to print on blotting paper, or perhaps buy an ancient press from a museum and typeset the pages myself, or delete every punctuation mark and every serif because it ruins the zen of the page.

My favourite ghost stories

I use the word 'ghost' in the title of this post as shorthand for Gothic. I love Gothic literature - the good stuff, not the penny 'orribles. The stories in which the ghost or monster is a metaphor for some social or individual repression (conscious on the part of the author, not accidental). In which the ghost leads you into some larger conspiracy with each step and ultimately, sometimes, to some kind of enlightenment, or at the least revelation.

So, here goes:

• The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. (Disclaimer: I adore James as I do EM Forster, Rebecca West, Virginia Woolf and most of the Modernists. I assert that I am a Modernist trapped in a Post-Modernist's frame of reference, which is a ghost story in itself.) The Turn of the Screw is the story on which the movie The Others was based, although the movie takes the plot and its sub-text in a different, more existential (more Post-modern) direction. James' version shows the preoccupations of the time, in which people were searching for transcendence and finding only traces of it in nature, human interaction and even human psychology. Also touching on the dichotomy of male and female, and sexuality. There is so much written about hysteria that I won't even touch on it here. Let me just say that this book made me a little jumpy.
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte. The same issues that haunt James' story haunt this novel. Bronte's symbolism is rich and its sexual metaphors far juicier. However, unlike James' story, this mystery is solved. But even this solution brings in more questions, about the role of women in a household and in relation to men. Again, there is so much written about the Madwoman in the Attic that I won't go into it here. But once you have read Jane Eyre, read the Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, a post-colonial novel that unpicks the psyche of the Woman. Then consider, by comparison, whether Bronte's novel is proto-feminist, or perhaps not. That's my ghost here.
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. Even if you haven't read the novel, you must have heard of Heathcliff and Katherine and their violent love. They spend their lives haunting each other in various forms: torturing each other, being tortured by memories and what-ifs, and finally a literal haunting in a setting that seems conducive to these kinds of things. Their longing for each other is so extreme that it seems almost to take on physical form. Wuthering Heights is an ancestor to Twilight and self-destructive/abusive relationships. But, in the former, there is meat that Twilight lacks and that lingers with you.
• Other Rooms Other Voices by Truman Capote. Mr Capote is my latest find, and I wonder what took me so long. His writing is always haunted by something, perhaps a mocking voice, a cynicism that is without the failed idealism that most cynics have. In this novel, a young boy whose mother has died is sent to live with his father, who no one knew was still alive. The boy is filled with hope at all his dreams coming true. However, all he finds are the ghosts, physical and metaphysical, that anyone must face if they are to mature, evolve. This is a coming-of-age novel that rings with the uneasy truths of Catcher in the Rye. There is a theory about the presence of the orphan in the great coming-of-age stories: Cinderella, Snow White, Great Expectations, Jane Eyre, Portrait of a Lady. We all as children had the fantasy about being orphans and the steerers of our own ships. Perhaps there was some greater truth here than just an interesting psychological fact: perhaps our parents do have to die in order for us to grow up.
• The Story of Edgar Sawtelle by David Wroblewski. Ok, I know I keep going on about this novel, but it is great and I did warn you that I was lost in it. (To be precise, I am lost in a cornfield with a dog in front of me and a fire raging behind me.) There are a few ghosts in this novel, apart from the obvious one (the boy's father). There is a second ghost, of a farmer, who haunts a shed that Edgar is cleaning out and who tells a love story - two, actually. Then there is the ghost that Edgar becomes and who returns home to exact vengeance. There are the ghosts of the conflict between the Sawtelle brothers, a man named Henry, who is the ghost of his own life, and a dog named Forte.

I think five is a good number at which to stop, although I could go on (Frankenstein, Dracula...). These are some of the ghosts that haunt me, and believe me, it's crowded in here.

The Man Who Was Thursday

"The most thrilling book I have ever read." This is one Kingsley Amis's endorsement of The Man Who Was Thursday. I'm sure it wasn't meant specifically as an endorsement at the time but those marketing b^$#@**$ will gobble anything and regurgitate it.

It worked though, because I bought the book. And read it too. And two days later, I'm not sure whether I enjoyed it or not. It definitely is not the most thrilling book I have ever read, although it is definitely one of the more bizarre. Reading the book so many years later, in light of the influence it has had on modern fiction, it's difficult not to find it staid and predictable. The story tells of a recently recruited but cunning detective who infiltrates a circle of anarchists, shortly before an assassination is due to take place. Hijinks ensue and the story devolves into a nightmare that ends in a bizarre rendering of the Last Supper. (No spoiler here, trust me.) There is some kind of moral here about anarchy and social order perpetuating each other, but quite honestly by this point I was too bored to thread it out.

It's not a bad book; it's just been done. That's not the fault of the book itself, only the fate of most revolutionary literature: to be outdone by their successors.

Having said this, the first paragraph is perfect - atmospheric, enticing, intriguing. I judge a book on three things: the first paragraph, the smell of the pages and the cover. Check it out on page 3 of Project Gutenberg and see what you think.

The Story of Edgar Sawtelle

Ok, so I can't believe I'm about to endorse a book that appeared on Oprah, but they say that in an infinite universe everything that is possible will happen. This however will only happen once, no matter how infinite the universe and the odds.

I took The Story of Edgar Sawtelle with me when I went home to recover from a really difficult three months during which I lived alone in my office facing failure every day. Because what you do when you're recovering from your own deficiencies is read a 400-page book. Obviously.

It did help me to recover. Cathartically. By ripping a hole in my chest just above my heart and pouring in some kind of preservative acid. Which means basically that I'm walking, breathing, talking and eating, but that there's a part of me lost in that book and refusing to be unlost.

When a friend recommended this book to me, she described it as Hamlet with dogs. That's both the best and worst summary of The Story of Edgar Sawtelle ever. It is indeed a retelling of the tragedy and there are indeed dogs. But what you don't expect from this summary is that the story will have all the tragic power of Hamlet and that Ophelia's character is more tragic as a dog.

I'm not going to summarise the plot here, because if you've read or seen Hamlet you already know it and if you haven't you really should. And not the Sparknotes version.

Consensus is that Hamlet is a tragic hero, by virtue of being the protaganist of a tragedy and being both noble and sympathetic. Which leads us to his tragic flaw (both a condition and therefore of the label of 'tragic hero'). The heavy odds are on Hamlet's inability to act. But there is more to human psychology than this kind of clinical absolute. Everything we do is at best influenced and at worst determined by a myriad of motivations, few of which we consciously acknowledge. Your worst enemy is yourself and if you don't believe me, wait til the shadow part of yourself tries to kill you and then let's talk.

Author David Wroblewski gets this as much as Shakespeare does. He gives our tragic hero Edgar a disability that signifies his ancestor's inability to act - the boy is mute. A disability that suggests that Edgar is forced into inaction by the weight of his ancestor's reputation; stifled. Because he does try to act and is left with the guilt of something beyond his control. Or is he? Is his muteness in some way self-perpetuated? Some prophetic mark that ensures the prophecy will bear fruit.

This brings us to the argument of whether the tragic conclusion is the result of psychology or circumstance. Or both. Edgar is a child facing decisions that would bring an adult to their knees. Could he have acted differently? Could he have acted with better consequences? And here we stumble upon destiny.

I could go on for pages. The Story of Edgar Sawtelle walked me through my own sense of failure, is still walking me through it. I'm not coming out for a while, thank you very much. Now read the book.