and my desk after I spent an entire day and a half clearing it. 

So now I have a desk like the people in movies and on tv!  Yay!

If a publisher or journalism outlet ever again deems me worthy of a commissioned author’s photo, I will foreswear the book-lined library backdrop in favour of a mobile phone mast or wifi hub, I swear. 

Two conversations have got me thinking, yet again, about the future of publishing, even though of late I’ve been trying to tell myself to stop thinking about the future of publishing:  one with Anna Lewis of completelynovel.com via e-mail, the other with Antonia Byatt of Arts Council England.  Publishing, as we know it today, will surely collapse due to multiple factors too complex to go into here.  The only important question left, really, is HOW TO CONNECT READERS TO WRITERS.  In a world where writers may have to become their own brands, forms of curation – whether that is prizes, or book clubs and reading groups, or the websites and blogs that we rely for personal recommendations – will be of huge importance.  The traditional role of publishers - gate-keeping - will become more akin to curation. 

In my bad-tempered way I do wonder what will happen to the big conglomerates with their huge overheads.  But, to tell the truth, I don’t really care what happens to them, and I am certain that readers don’t care about publishers either.  Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely thrilled to be published by them, that’s not what I’m saying.  What I care about, on a highly personal level, is being able to write what I want to write, being able to publish that writing in some way, and for that work to be able to find its way to readers other than my siblings.  These three things – write, publish, be read – matter more than anything else to me as a writer. 

I do want to be able to make an income from this activity as well though like most writers I will never expect to be able to live by writing alone. 

As a reader, what I want is access to good writing, to long-form sustained prose narratives as well as work that experiments with form, content, and media.  At the end of the day I don’t really care how that good writing is delivered to me, whether it is via the printed page or via digital files on a screen of some kind.  But I want to be able to find the writers I want to read, even if I’ve never heard of them before.  Which leads me back to my original upper case statement a few paragraphs back:  the only important question left, really, is HOW TO CONNECT WRITERS TO READERS.

Any publisher who isn’t addressing this directly and urgently will be in trouble soon.  And I don’t mean in trouble with me. 

And that’s my prediction for today.  I’ll go back to admiring my tv-lawyer style desk now.

Whenever I go to Bratislava, the National Theatre flies me in and out of Vienna, but I’ve never actually been to Vienna, so this time I left Bratislava a day early and spent twenty-four hours in Vienna.  My student Leo Thompson lives there, and he took me on a tour of the city on the back of his motorcycle, which was great fun.  I managed to cram in two art galleries and a walk around the city centre; I found Rachel Whiteread’s Holocaust memorial sculpture in Judenplatz hugely moving.  It is ugly and squat and very very affecting. 

But a highlight for me was the Kunsthistorische Museum; this museum has a number of Velazquez paintings.  Not Las Meninas, of course, which is in the Prado, but it does have a series of three paintings of the Infanta Margarita Theresa, the little princess at the centre of Velazquez’s great painting.  The portraits of Margarita Theresa depict her aged 3, aged 5 as she is in Las Meninas (wearing the same dress, but with a much more solemn expression), and then aged around 8; once painted, these pictures were sent out to tour the royal families of Europe as a way of showing off the Infanta’s potential as a future wife.  This series of portraits astounded me. 

And now I’m home again. 

I wonder what the circumstances were for this young man.  Was it simply that he wanted to leave Romania but couldn’t afford the airfare, and had heard that you could stowaway inside a plane by climbing up through the landing gear?  Or was he desperate to get away from something?  How desperate and/or ill-informed would you have to be to consider stowing away on an airplane like this?  Did he think he’d be able to climb inside the airplane?  Or did he think that he’d be able to tuck himself away behind the landing gear and ride all the way to the plane’s destination without getting inside the plane.  He was so lucky in so many ways with this journey - only 97 minutes, flying at much lower altitudes than normal - what can that 97 minutes in the air have been like? 

All fascinating stuff for me and my project Flight Paths, and the new book I’m currently attempting to start writing. 

The same day I read about this, I also happened to read an essay by Arthur Schlesinger Jr, ‘History and National Stupidity’.  You can read the beginning of this 2006 essay online at the New York Review of Books, though I came across it in a book of collected NYBR essays called ‘The Consequences to Come:  American Power After Bush’. 

Schlesinger’s essay is remarkable - short, pithy, and very moving.  In it he discusses his own book about American President Jackson, ‘The Age of Jackson’, which Schlesinger wrote in the 1950s, in relation to a new book about Jackson and the causes of the Civil War by Sean Wilentz.  Schlesinger pithily and mercilessly lays bare the problems with his own book which, as he explains, was a product of a certain time and place, as all books - history and fiction - inevitably are.  Schlesinger says ‘I was hopelessly absorbed in the dilemmas of democratic capitalism made vivid for my generation by FDR and the New Deal, and I underplayed and ignored other aspects of the Age of Jackson.  The predicament of slaves, or the red man and the “trail of tears”...the restricted opportunities for women of the period… were shamefully out of my mind.’ 

Schlesinger begins this essay with the following statement:  ‘History is not self-executing.  You do not put a coin in the slot and have history come out.  For the past is a chaos of events and personalities into which we cannot penetrate.  It is beyond retrieval and it is beyond reconstruction.  All historians know this in their souls.’

This is why history is fascinating.  This is why each generation reconstructs the past anew.  This is why there is room for yet another book about D-Day, and yet another book about power and money.  This is why my attempt to write the ‘true’ story of Sally Naldrett, a humble maid, made homeless and jobless by the employer to whom she had devoted her life, is a worthy topic for fiction.  And, as anyone who stoops so low to actually read fiction that deals with historical subjects knows, this is why fiction can sometimes be the only way to tell the truth. 

To date the publication process of this American edition of ‘The Mistress of Nothing’ has been so interesting.  The attention to detail over the manuscript itself was like nothing I’ve ever seen before.  The ms went through two stages of copy-editing, the first for typesetting and Americanisation of the text, the second for proofing, and that in itself was an eye-opener.  And these Advance Reader’s Editions (in the UK these are called ‘bound proofs’) are lovely - it’s a very very nice bound paperback edition of the book, ‘not for resale’, full colour front and back covers - the only thing to distinguish it from a rather nice trade paperback edition is the slightly cheaper paper.  I can’t wait to see the actual hardcover edition!!!  It is going to be a thing of beauty! 

Pah to audio enhanced mutlimedia ebooks!  What was I thinking?  These Advance Reader’s Editions smell lovely! 

                                                                      Contact: Mark Marino
                                                                      (310) 420-4481 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)
                                                                      Director of Communication
                                                                      Electronic Literature Organization

Los Angeles, Calif. (May 25, 2010)—What good is an iPad if you only read 19th-century novels? The Electronic Literature Organization (ELO) wants you to spend less time fretting over your gadgets and more time exploring new literary forms.

This June, ELO announces the Electronic Literature Directory 2.0, the latest version of its online directory of 21st-century electronic literature, full of novel interactive works, like:

Inanimate Alice: http://eld.eliterature.org/node/407

And that’s just the beginning….

The Directory will officially launch at Brown University at the fourth International Conference and Festival (http://ai.eliterature.org), June 3-6, 2010, hosted by professor and poet John Cayley.

“Print books on a Kindle are not electronic literature. E-lit uses computer processing to deliver new forms of story, poetry and drama,” says ELO President and University of Illinois professor Joseph Tabbi. “And we’re even seeing works that, while they’re clearly literary, fit none of those settled genres inherited from print.”

The works in the directory run the gamut from the first pieces of e-lit, such as Michael Joyce’s “afternoon,” to Jhave Johnston’s 2009 “human-mind-machine.” Authors include novelists, such as Kate Pullinger; poets, such as Stephanie Strickland; and literary scholars, such as N. Katherine Hayles of Duke University. The Directory includes international e-lit authors Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries (South Korea) and Jaime Alejandro Rodríguez Ruiz (Colombia).

The latest version of the directory leaves behind the static layout of version one to take up the “Web 2.0” model of collaborative curation through a wiki structure. “However, unlike the just-about-anything-goes format of the Wikipedia, the Directory relies on the review and detailed annotations of an extensive directory review board,” says Davin Heckman, who currently coordinates the working group and teaches English at Siena Heights University.

“The Directory is ready to serve you some outstanding 21st-century summer reading or novel novels for your Fall 2010 syllabus,” says Heckman.

“Did you really buy that iPad just so you can read Sense and Sensibility? Reading print books on your iPad is like using your e-mail to send Morse Code,” says Mark Marino, Director of Communications of ELO and writing professor at the University of Southern California College of Letters, Arts & Sciences.

Although just in its initial stages, the working group has vetted more than 150 works and has as many more in the pipeline of this ever-expanding collection. Along with artistic pieces readers will ultimately find critical essays on electronic literature and venues for publication.

At the June conference entitled “ELO Archive and Innovate,” ELO will honor Robert Coover, whose New York Times essays ushered in and out the “golden age” of hypertext. Coover’s son Roderick appears in the Directory with his work “Unknown Territories.”

This year, ELO will also be publishing the second volume of its Electronic Literature Collection. To view the first volume, go to http://collection.eliterature.org/1/

Media passes to the conference are available upon request. Contact Mark Marino at (310) 420-4481 or .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).

More electronic literature is just a click away!

Inanimate Alice: Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph
A multimedia online novel in four episodes set in China, Italy, Russia, and the protagonist’s “Hometown,” featuring a girl growing up in the 21st century. Reader participation and interactivity increase as the series progresses, reflecting Alice’s engagement and influence in her environment as she grows older. http://eld.eliterature.org/node/514

Roulette: Daniel C. Howe and Bebe Molina
A language game for readers, a single work that can be read in roughly 64,000 ways. The lines of the poem shift every time readers interact with one of the three lines of the poem. http://eld.eliterature.org/node/511

The Jew’s Daughter: Judd Morrissey with Lori Talley
An interactive, non-linear, multivalent narrative. A hypertext, but one that transforms the text (rather than just linking from one stable text to another). As soon as the reader moves the mouse over highlighted keywords (links), segments of a page replace one another fluidly. http://eld.eliterature.org/node/509

JB Wock: Eugenio Tisselli
JB Wock is a self-described “English-speaking blogmachine” created by poet and programmer Eugenio Tisselli. JB Wock, a PHP script, searches the web for a phrase that it “likes” (from a site that publishes notable quotations), “twists” these phrases by substituting synonyms, and publishes the results daily on its blog (which also includes a comment feature, inviting readers to respond).

slippingglimpse: Stephanie Land and Cynthia Lawson Jaramillo
A 10-part generative Flash poem combining videos of ocean patterns with text. http://eld.eliterature.org/node/507

Sydney’s Syberia: Jason Nelson
A poetic meditation on urban space presented through a Flash-based “infinite zoom” interface, which Nelson has repurposed and re-titled as “infinite click and read.” http://eld.eliterature.org/node/487

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Founded in 1998, The Electronic Literature Organization is a non-profit, multi-institutional organization that draws together an international body of artists and critics.

 

The Lazarus Project (which doesn’t seem to have a website) takes books from this backlist, gets them scanned in India, copyedits, tidies up the file, and reproduces original cover here in the UK, and makes them available for between £15-20 as print-on-demand.  Alistair Horne, the speaker, said they only need to sell 4 or 5 copies to make this financially viable.  He used the example of a splendid book called ‘The Complete Bibliography of Sponges: 1598 to 1754’ which they had brought back to life - and have now sold 22 copies.  An interesting look at the potential economics around print on demand for backlist titles.  Tell me again how publishers figure a royalty of 25% on ebooks - which, afterall, remain as a digital file so don’t even have printing costs -  is fair? 

It was a good evening, but I came away with a weariness about our endless discussions about the future of publishing - and I’m not a publisher, lord knows how they stomach it.  For the time being, when it comes to these kinds of events and discussions, I’m going to try to focus more clearly on writing - the future of literature, what literature and good writing can offer in the digital age.  Good writing, and good reading - these are the things that matter to me.  How will we read in the future?  Will the novel as we know it today fundamentally change?  Is the investment we writers ask of our readers worth it?  I’m not talking about the £7.99 - or less - you hand over to buy a book, print or digital.  I’m talking about the hours and hours readers spend with our work - the time they spend reading.  No other cultural producers require such a huge investment of time.  Opera might be long, but it’s nothing compared to reading a novel.  Does this matter?  Will this change?