Another Not Scotland by Alasdair Gray

Below is an excerpt from Another Not Scotland commissioned by the Edinburgh International Book Festival:

"The genre I preferred always began with someone who seemed, like me, in a world regarded as commonplace, and then found an exit into a place of magic adventures. The earliest classics of this kind were Lewis Carroll’s Alicebooks, with others I read or heard dramatised on the BBC’s Children’s Hour – The Magic Bed-Knob, The Wind in the Willows, The Box of Delights. A subdivision of this genre had children who discovered lost or hidden lands when on holiday. Enid Blyton wrote a shelf of books about children finding mysterious geographies – The Valley of Adventure, Seaof Adventure, Castleof Adventure, Island of Adventure, etcetera. Growing older I found similar books had been written for adults – Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, Rider Haggard’s She, The Return of She and Allan Quatermain.There were films about them – King Kong and Lost Horizon. In a BBC radio dramatisation I heard H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds and at once ordered through Glasgow Public Libraries all his early romances, which I still think are science fiction’s unsurpassable best. His The First Men in the Moon took me to an impossible moon, yet imagined with such inventive detail that humanity is shown in a new light. That novel, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds describe exotic worlds elsewhere, but are no more escapist fiction than Gulliver’s Travels and Orwell’s 1984.

Before leaving secondary school I decided to write a book about a world of my own invention that would also satirise the world I knew. When planning it I was inspired by Kafka’s The Trial, with Edwin and Willa Muir’s foreword saying that Kafka’s protagonist was seeking salvation like John Bunyan’s Pilgrim, but in a world where neither Heaven nor Hell are signposted. In Kafka’s world the agents of an obscure but inescapable bureaucracy hound a man in his rented bedroom, in the attic of a slum tenement, in the cupboard of a bank where he works and in a cathedral outside service time – encounters that I felt could happen in Glasgow. Kafka’s bureaucrats were more humane and believable than Orwell’s Thought Police, and his hero was so ruthlessly selfish that I never doubted his guilt. I was also reading books about the growing pains of men in other cities nearer my own in time and space – David Copperfield, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Sons and Lovers. I now saw that books which (Milton says) the world would not willingly let die, must contain real local experiences such as those Dickens, Joyce and D.H. Lawrence suffered, even if they combined with Heavens, Hells and Wonderlands elsewhere. Most books in the Bible did that, most folk tales and the Scottish Border Ballads. In a public library (Denistoun, not Riddrie) I found Tillyard’s The English Epic and Its Background which, after briefly surveying the great epic poems and histories of Greece, Rome, Italy and Portugal, concluded that since Milton’s time, great epics were likely to be written in prose. He said that Walter Scott’s best novels almost (though not quite) amounted to a Scottish national epic. So that was what I set out to write."

Unfinished Book by John Green Hits No. 1, Thanks to Twitter, Tumblr and Other Social Media - WSJ.com

Unfinished Book by John Green Hits No. 1, Thanks to Twitter, Tumblr and Other Social Media - WSJ.com

In only a few short years, the ability to use social networking as a literary megaphone has gone from an afterthought to the focus of most marketing and image shaping by publishers. "Everyone is now focused on it, because when it works, it can be a runaway train," says Tim Duggan, executive editor of Harper, an imprint of News Corp.'s HarperCollins Publishers Inc. News Corp. also owns The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Green's runaway train started like this: On Tuesday afternoon, he posted the title of his new book on Twitter, Tumblr and the community forum YourPants.org. An hour later, he upped the stakes by promising to sign all pre-orders and the entire first-print run, while also launching a YouTube live show. Mr. Green discussed his plans for signing the book and also read a section to give viewers a sense of what "The Fault in Our Stars" would be about. (It's a story of two young cancer survivors.)

The announcement then assumed a life of its own. Fans began to make and post hundreds of potential dust jackets for the book, which doesn't have one yet. They also turned to Twitter and Tumblr to discuss pre-ordering the books. The book then began a steady climb up the charts, says Mr. Green. It hit No. 1 on Amazon before 9 p.m., and No. 1 on Barnes & Noble.com an hour or so later.

Almost all authors today feel pressure to use social networking tools to try to build their fan base and generate interest in their work.

As the number of big bookstores continues to diminish—Borders Group Inc. has already closed more than a third of its stores this year—the issue of how new titles will be discovered is of increasing concern. That fiction readers are increasingly embracing e-books has made digital channels even more important.

"People are finding their news online, and as long as they're there they take a trip to YouTube and follow their favorite blogs," says Patricia Bostelman, Barnes & Noble's vice president of marketing. "There's a tremendous amount of do-it-yourself in the marketplace today, and it's essential."

Publishers say that the issue of discovery has become critical, but it's unclear whether all books can benefit from social networking. "Clearly these are the tools we need to learn how to use, but they will work better for some books than others,," says Robert Miller, group publisher of Workman Publishing Co. "Books that need to be seen and held and that are thought of as gifts are different from commercial fiction."

Mr. Green and his brother Hank, a musician, made early use of the Internet, offering videos and zany postings that gave Mr. Green's fans a sense of his personality. In a video posted now on the Web, Mr. Green does a victory dance of sorts, celebrating the fact that "The Fault in Our Stars" was at the top of the best-seller lists.

For now, the book is listed online without any description and with a black-and-white block print placeholder cover. On Barnes & Noble.com, it even has an average rating of five stars.

Today's feed: Hauntology, Vorticism, Publishing and Will Self

Hauntology: A not-so-new critical manifestation | Books | guardian.co.uk

Like its close relative psychogeography, hauntology originated in France but struck a chord on this side of the Channel. In Spectres of Marx (1993), where it first appeared, Jacques Derrida argued that Marxism would haunt Western society from beyond the grave. In the original French, "hauntology" sounds almost identical to "ontology", a concept it haunts by replacing - in the words of Colin Davis - "the priority of being and presence with the figure of the ghost as that which is neither present, nor absent, neither dead nor alive".

Today, hauntology inspires many fields of investigation, from the visual arts to philosophy through electronic music, politics, fiction and literary criticism. At its most basic level, it ties in with the popularity of faux-vintage photography, abandoned spaces and TV series like Life on Mars. Mark Fisher – whose forthcoming Ghosts of My Life (Zer0 Books) focuses primarily on hauntology as the manifestation of a specific "cultural moment" – acknowledges that "There's a hauntological dimension to many different aspects of culture; in fact, in Moses and Monotheism, Freud practically argues that society as such is founded on a hauntological basis: "the voice of the dead father". When you come to think of it, all forms of representation are ghostly.

3quarksdaily: The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World

The main success of The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World is that it underlies the electrifying force and vitality of this movement and the profound effect that it had on the modernisation of the visual arts in this country. It was one of Britain’s most exciting and genuinely radical moments in art that swept away cosy Edwardian assumptions of drawing room prettiness. Yet by the time the first Vorticist exhibition took place in June 1915, the slaughter of the First World War was well under way and the idealisation of the machine simply looked, at best , naive; an apology for boy’s toys. Technology, it seemed, was not going to provide the western world with some bright Utopian future but leave millions of dead on the battlefields of Europe.

Publishers and the internet: a changing role | Cory Doctorow | Technology | guardian.co.uk

The internet has created a large number of new kinds of publishers who act to connect works and audiences. These essentially group intosearch engines, then bloggers, curators, and tweeters, and finally suggestion algorithms (such as Amazon's "people who bought this also bought…" recommendations; Reddit's human voting system; Netflix's suggestion system).

In their own way, each of these entities acts to toss works over the attention transoms of audiences. There's not always money involved, and when there is, the entity that gets the bulk of the money differs for each example. But generating and distributing money are no more essential to publishing than printing or distribution are. Collecting societies like the PRS gather lots of money on behalf of musical performers but do no "publishing" to speak of; meanwhile, the people who pay them may be doing rather a lot of publishing, as when a hot club plays an obscure track for its impossible-to-reach, rarefied customers.

Publishing – including film and music and game publishing – has always been first and foremost about connecting works and audiences, because without an audience, there's no reason to improve a work, to duplicate it, to distribute it, nor to sell it. But for the first time, it's possible to "publish" without engaging with any other part of the process, and that is a weird and wonderful thing. It changes the power relationship between publishers and creators and investors – think of the musician who storms out of her label deal, puts her own work online and relies on Amazon or Magnatune or an influential MP3 blogger to promote the work to her fans.

50 Impressive Literary Figures You Should Follow on Twitter | Accredited Online Colleges.com

1. Mat Johnson: University of Houston professor and author of the acclaimed Pym tweets sophisticated, whip-smart and witty observations on everything from writing to politics to daily phenomena.

2. Christopher Moore: Irreverent writer Christopher Moore, known for his Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal humorous takes on the horror genre, keeps a very funny feed.

3. Maya Angelou: She may not update much (or have a verification seal), but this sterling former Poet Laureate and powerful activist, memoirist and educatory still commands a right fair amount of social media respect.

4. Saul Williams: Saul Williams masterfully blends poetry and music (usually hip-hop) for amazing slam performances; his published works still contain the same punch. Follow his Twitter for writing snippets and information on upcoming projects.

5. William Gibson: Of course one of cyberpunk’s progenitors would make his way to Twitter! William Gibson is generous with retweets and replies, but he does talk about his own work as well as things piquing his interest.

6. James Lileks: The former journalist and front man of the Institute of Official Cheer delivers his signature mix of gleeful, campy kitsch and pop culture commentary in 140 characters or less.

7. Chuck Palahniuk: Watch the acclaimed Fight Club author’s Twitter for the latest updates on appearances and projects, as well as some thoughts and fan interaction.

8. Warren Ellis: Even tweeps who’ve never once scanned a Warren Ellis book, comic, essay, article or blog post still follow his feed; he’s just that hilariously absurd, intelligent and profane.

9. Neil Gaiman: Neil Gaiman’s willingness to write for kids, young adults and adults alike nets him a massive fanbase; his prodigious talents keep them hanging on to his every tweet — and he certainly keeps an incredibly active space!

10. Doug Coupland: Most of the Generation X and Hey, Nostradamus! writer’s feed is occupied with brief thoughts and the occasional link.

Paris Review – Will Self on ‘Walking to Hollywood’, Jonathan Gharraie

Were you drawing on a tradition of writing about the city which has been brought up to date by the psychogeographers—people like Peter Ackroyd and Iain Sinclair?

There are all sorts of proto-psychogeographers, from Blake to De Quincey to Dickens even, people who’ve all been walkers in the city, so I think that there is a big tradition of walking and writing about it. For Ackroyd and Sinclair, it’s the city that has the psyche. It becomes kind of mystical; it becomes the idea of the city as a person. So psychogeography becomes a kind of psychoanalysis of the person that is the place.

What sort of influence does Jonathan Swift have on you?

I think he is absolutely fucking timeless. Whether it’s that he’s so deeply encoded in the culture, or whether it’s just that he got it all right. When the Irish banks collapsed, they’re still collapsed, I was thinking it would be quite amusing to write something for Ireland and I was looking at A Modest Proposal and thought about updating it. Rewrite it for the current Irish imbroglio. But then I read it again and realized it was completely up to date, there’s absolutely nothing to do to it for it to apply seamlessly to the current situation. Satire is always about assaulting hierarchies; it’s always about—adapting Mencken’s phrase about journalism—afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, and if it doesn’t do that, it’s not satire. And he got all the fundamental ways of doing that sorted out a long time ago. I think that satire is much more metrical than other literary forms. It’s quite precise. It’s no surprise in a way that it could be formulated in relation to hierarchy quite early on. I’m not constantly reading Swift, or constantly going back to him, but he’s the Shakespeare of satirists in that way.

Future of book publishing: Amazon, Google and Apple

What's that coming over the hill? | FutureBook

"...parallels between the way mass market paperbacks and e-books have and are changing the publishing landscape is striking.

The key difference is that in the seventies it was the young, thrusting paperback houses – the Headline’s of this world - who, by simply showing greater market savvy were able to grow fast and swallow up their venerable and far bigger competitors. It was an organic process.

The difference now is that the interlopers are not sleek minnows but Amazon, Google and Apple. Corporate giants capable of swallowing publishers whole. Relationships between agents and publishers are often strained but I have yet to meet an agent who relishes the prospect of those three dominating the publishing landscape. It is hard to see that as a world that would be better for writers."

Ebooks: the latest frontier for spam

Ebooks: the latest frontier for spam | Technology | guardian.co.uk

"With Google clamping down on content farms, the attention of those looking to get rich quickly from churning out content is now turning to major ebook retailers – and to selling stolen and replicated content.

A key starting point of the problem is Private Label Rights content (PLR), which allows anyone to buy prewritten content in bulk that they can then make into ebooks or website content. PLR seller Ronnie Nijmeh of PLR.me describes it as "royalty-free content, which means, when you pay for a licence, you get the rights to use the content without royalty in nearly any way you please". We might be familiar with that in photographs – the stock photo – but when it comes to words, the idea of reusing them is less well-known. But the explosion in the number of ebook readers has made such reuse suddenly attractive to some."

Blake Butler: There Is No Year

Blake Butler: There Is No Year

"Butler understands the failure of language to convey any individual’s reality...What There Is No Year does most impressively is to emphasise the importance of literature as a solitary experience, despite the attempts by book clubs and online forums to persuade us that it is a communal, collective one. Here the book is so uninflected and open that every reader will have a wildly different experience. Many will hate it, some will love it, and a few – count me in – will veer, settling on a positive response through the book’s sheer, wilful, beautiful difference.

Buy the book: There Is No Year

The Grimm Brothers Reader

Ellen Handler Spitz on fairytales: Not quite like ancient myths, which use nymphs and satyrs to explain recurring natural phenomena; nor like fables, whose timeless moral lessons are parlayed through the escapades of animal characters; nor like legends, which exude the pungent aromas of one particular locale and its history, fairy tales are stories spun into gold at the wooden wheel of a miller’s daughter: stories made to summon wonder, horror, enchantment—and not necessarily anything more. Uncanny in the purest sense of the word, which is to say, both bizarre and familiar at once, they are meant to be told, not read, and they truly possess an inexhaustible power. Children hold on tight, turn pale, close their eyes, and beg for more.

A review of an alt view of the novel

Alberto Manguel on Steven Moore's 'The Novel': Though it is true that the word "novel" did not come into common use in Europe until the 18th century, the thing itself thrived under many other names in the literatures of almost every country. When in the early 16th century the tag "novel" began to be used in English to describe a certain kind of narrative (a short history first and an extended tale afterwards), the split between fiction and reality became so ingrained in the collective psyche that less than two centuries later, in 1726, when Jonathan Swift published "Gulliver's Travels" as a "true account," a certain Irish bishop observed that "the book was full of improbable lies, and for his part he hardly believed a word of it." For the Irish bishop, a book had to be fiction or nonfiction: It could not be both.

This Space reviews Josipovici

This Space: What Ever
Happened to Modernism? is a
book about modern fiction. "[It]
is no coincidence" he says "that
the novel emerges at the very
moment when the world is
growing disenchanted". The
Novel dramatises the emergence
of the self not under God, yet
who nevertheless seeks
enchantment however secularly
it is defined. The book's earliest
example is Rabelais' Gargantua &
Pantagruel but the most telling is
perhaps Cervantes' Don
Quixote. What Josipovici
identifies as modern here is not
only the comedic critique of the
Knight's idealism but that the
novel makes us aware that its
critique relies on "the primal
idealisation in the conception
and execution of the very work
in which the critique is made."

The Reformation Centenary Broadsheet

Religious historian Karen Armstrong on the broadsheet: "Well it's very noticeable in this picture, the emphasis on the written word. Up until this point, religion had been precisely about listening for what lay beyond language. People had thought not in terms of words so much, or concepts, or arguments, but in terms of images, icons, in terms of music, in terms of action. Now, because of the invention of printing which helped Luther disseminate his ideas, everything is going to become much more wordy. And that has been rather the plague of western religion ever since, because we are endlessly now stuck in words. The printing enabled people for the first time to own their own Bibles, and this meant that they read them in an entirely different way."

Tom McCarthy talks to Lee Rourke about C

Tom McCarthy on his novel C: "There's that Kraftwerk song, "I am the receiver and you are the transmitter", or however it goes. One way of thinking about art, or the novel, is that the writer is the transmitter, the originator: I have something to say about the world and I'm going to transmit it. But this isn't how I see it, I see it as exactly the inverse: the writer is a receiver and the content is already out there. The task of the writer is to filter it, to sample it and remix it – not in some random way, but conscientiously and attentively. This is what Heidegger says about poets: to be a poet is to listen before speaking; it's first and foremost a listening and not a speaking. Kafka said it as well: "I write in order to affirm and reaffirm that I have absolutely nothing to say." Writing, or art, is not about having something to say; it's about aspiring to a heightened state of hearing. It's why C is a totally acoustic novel and a receptive novel. The hero, Serge, sits there for hours trawling the aether waves, absorbing, listening to ship-to-shore transmissions, stock market prices, sports results, writing them all down. In a way, if you could see Serge's transcript it would probably read like an Ezra Pound canto." [More...]

Simon Critchley on disenchantment

Simon Critchley via Time's Flow Stemmed "[...] the problem for us moderns is clear: in the face of the disenchantment of nature brought about by the scientific revolution, we experience a gap between knowledge and wisdom that has the consequence of divesting our lives of meaning. The question is: can nature or indeed human selves become re-enchanted in such a way that reduces or even eliminates the meaning gap and produces some plausible conception of a good life? The dilemma seems to be intractable: on the one hand, the philosophical cost of scientific truth seems to be scientism, in which case we become beasts. On the other hand, the rejection of scientism through a new humanization of the cosmos seems to lead to obscurantism, in which case we become lunatics."

Eric Ormsby in the WSJ on Gabriel Josipovici

Eric Ormsby in the WSJ on Gabriel Josipovici's Whatever Happened to Modernism: "A novel, to be compelling, has to have plot, dramatic incident and narrative momentum, but these are the very elements that are lacking in our daily lives, confused and messy as they are. It is the distinction of Modernism, Mr. Josipovici argues, to acknowledge that the stories we tell ourselves—even as we strive to fill them with coherence, dramatic logic and ultimate meaning—are hopelessly flawed, incomplete and contradictory...Mr. Josipovici, it should be said, is a champion of Modernism. He sees it as a valuable tradition in its own right, one that is not merely endangered but virtually extinct, especially in the smug, ultra-Philistine realm of contemporary British fiction."

Derrida documentary - indie fashion

Blogged by Seedy: Ziering Kofman shot Derrida “in indie film fashion — i.e., whenever we had money” - in both Paris and the U.S. Then practical difficulties led her to consider seeking a co-director. “I’m an academic, so my hands-on knowledge of actual film production was, at the time, limited.” In 1997, she attended a rough-cut screening of Kirby Dick’s SICK: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF BOB FLANAGAN, SUPER MASOCHIST. “I was thrilled by Kirby’s refusal to impose value judgments on the sexual preferences portrayed in that film. He wasn’t stereotyping; he was open to respecting his subjects without hierarchizing their roles in the classic, static dominant/submissive positions. He was, for me, demonstrating in a way, a Derridean precept, one in which in any system of opposites it is difficult to entirely privilege one position over another.”

Interview with Stanley Hauerwas:

Third Way: You once said of Karl Barth that he would have been a better theologian if he had read more Trollope. Can you name some novels that you think are essential reading for a theological vision? And say why?

Hauerwas: Well… Crime and Punishment. Dostoevsky looked into the heart of the world that was [in the process of being born] and, I think, saw clearly how it made Christi­an­ity unintelligible to itself. And of course to look into the heart of that world was also just to look into the heart. He saw the terror...

Modernism an antidote to the elitism of British fiction?

Rhys Tranter (A piece of monologue): "But while culture has changed, and is forever changing, the work of McEwan, Amis and others seems to proceed as though everything is the same. McEwan's Saturday articulates a post-9/11 culture of middle-class conformity and the ennobling salvation of literature (the 'sweetness and light' of Matthew Arnold). While Amis' evocation of 9/11 in 'The last days of Muhammad Atta' sees reality through a troubling portrayal gender and racial identity. Neither is particularly convincing, but both are politically and ethically problematic. Conventional British realism appears too assured of its claims to truth, of old values and old ideas."

Making modernism matter

Gabriel Josipovici in the New Statesman: "By the early 1990s, Encounter and the Listener had gone, to be replaced by three-for-the-price-of-two creative writing courses and literary festivals. What had happened to literary modernism in this country? How did it expire like this, without leaving a trace? To answer this question, it was necessary to show that modernism was not a "movement", like mannerism, or the name of a period. Like Romanticism, it is multifaceted and ambiguous. And it didn't begin in 1880 and end in 1930. Modernism, whenever it began, will always be with us, for it is not primarily a revolution in diction, or a response to indus­trialisation or the First World War, but is art coming to a consciousness of its limitations and responsibilities."

Making the artisan chapbook

Below is a film by Blackheath books documenting the making of an artisan chapbook:

A history of chapbooks

Chris Morton on chapbooks: "They were waistcoat pocket-sized, very cheap, crudely made and definitively coverless. Usually just a single sheet of rag paper - printed on both sides, folded and simply stitched to make 8, 12 or 16 little pages - the outside ones thus doubled as their own book cover. They were usually incongruously illustrated with splendid impartiality using recycled woodcuts. For our pre-printing, oral culture the advent of these "small merry books" in the 1500s literally "made the word flesh" ... they were the only form of - and format for - literature."

L'affaire Josipovici

Mark Thwaite of readysteadybook: "The critics who responded to Josipovici seem disenchanted that he has reminded them how small their current giants are, annoyed that he has asked why so many of the books they have spent a lifetime praising are so thin and insubstantial, and they have responded spitefully to an authoritative critic that they don't have the nous to read carefully and even to begin to understand."