Oh how I love to watch dull things.
I liked to read dull things when I was younger. Still do, but don’t have the time anymore. My head is kinda full, now, too, so I look for opportunities to lighten its load before I take on more ballast.
I’d rather read a newspaper that was one hundred years old than a brand new one. Everything in a newspaper is interesting if everyone’s dead. The mundane-r the stuff you’re reading in it, the better. The ads are better than the articles in any publication, generally.
Look what had to happen to get a book in print in 1947. It’s the reason that the apparatus to publish a book had so many gatekeepers along its Appian Way to the bookseller. Can’t waste copper plates on fanfiction. Eventually, like with so many things, the gatekeepers thought they were the business, and became a calcified roadblock for anything their crabby little worldview didn’t like.
Reform is not possible with large, complex, monolithic entities. They have to collapse. In general, they collapse right after their hegemony over the entire landscape of their walk of life is reached. No one can imagine a competitor. This lack of imagination is a swamp where the noxious exhalations of innovation come from.
I typed a book on an ancient Frankensteined Dell computer running XP, sent it to Amazon, and less than a week later I had a box of them in my lap. No other human was involved in its production on my end. At the printing end, for all I know, seventeen Yetis with a glue gun and a barrel of ink made the damn things.
I don’t know much, but I do know that if the entire edifice of publishing was still in place, I’d have never written anything, and would never write anything else. Good riddance to bad trash.
8 Responses
I got one of them in my trash pile. Have to look at it afore I tosses it out. Might even like it enough to keep it. Stranger things have happened, but most of them to you.
Had you nothing else to show for your life, this book would suffice. It's OK to be proud now and then. Make more, please.
Oh, I have about 4 major competitors that live in my mind rent free
Dr. Sip. I have a copy of your book. It is fascinating to watch how your imagination turns out a story. A verbal picture of stark black and white with swirls of gray mixed in to keep it honest. I like to collect private printing odds and ends — poetry, personal thoughts about life,etc. Your book shouldered its way in. Blick PS thanks for sharing your two boys with us.
Reform is not possible with large, complex, monolithic entities
seems an empire or two might be found there
Devil's in the Cows is the only printed book I've finished in the last 20 or so years. Must have started 50, but couldn't make it to the end.
Friend of a friend was rejected by several ossified publishers. Her book is, I'm told, one of Amazon's best sellers.
I'd do it too, if I had something to say…
Chortle.
"Reform is not possible with large, complex, monolithic entities. They have to collapse. In general, they collapse right after their hegemony over the entire landscape of their walk of life is reached." Are you talking about printing, or American government?