 | The Second Mistaken Impulse of An Undisciplined Heartby Miracle Jones |
Posted by miracle on Wed, 27 Aug 2008 23:40:18 -0400 -- permanent link
| Penguin Books Starts Up a Damn Dating Websiteby Miracle Jones |
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The Penguin imprint was started by Allen Lane in 1935 in order to get books in people's hands for as cheaply as possible. Lane had the same dream that people who publish fiction always have: he wanted the world flooded with stories -- stories everywhere -- little paper doors to take you out of reality anywhere you looked, books available for pence, for pickles, for a song.
The story goes that Allen Lane went to go visit his pal Agatha Christie, and on the way back he found himself standing at the train station without a book to read. You could buy cigarettes, but not books. You could buy modern gin or modern underwear, but not modern fiction. You could buy white pudding in a paper cup, but you couldn't buy a paperback. In fact, paperbacks didn't even exist. So he invented them. He stole the idea from the Germans -- alright, fine. But he made it work.
Allen Lane was also was the first British publisher to handle "Ulysses," and he had to get in a street fight with the Queen and her nobles to do it.
It was scandalous! It was Irish! It was filth!
Penguin was prosecuted by the crown; Penguin was triumphant.
Lane and his Penguin imprint were fighters for books and literature -- the kind you don't see anymore. He put books in vending machines (something called the "Penguincubator"),
he put books in the hands of dangerous radicals, he published people whose names couldn't be easily pronounced and people who were on the wrong side of politics and the law. The Beatles would never have stopped holding hands and got fucking sexual if it weren't for Penguin's cheap paperback editions.
He published to educate; to socialize; to edify; to entertain. The man loved books, and his imprint let poor people smoke up literature as if they were burning down the forest.
Print runs of 20,000? And sell that shit like bubble gum!
Now his company (he is very dead) -- a company which once distributed books from a single press out of a London crypt -- now his company has partnered with Match.com to help you find a person to curl up with...and do crossword puzzles...
All these publishing companies think tepid social networking is going to make literature important again. It won't. They are just going to make books another box to check right under your height, weight, and mood. If they aren't careful, they are going to make books just another way to sort people instead of a way to wake them up or medicate their souls.
"I really hope any romances are happy ones, but hopefully our readers are fully aware of what can go wrong as that's the kind of thing our Penguin Classics are full of."
Yes, they are:
While I certainly think using books as a gateway to sex is a good idea, I wish Penguin was still out there fighting for us instead of trying to be cute. I wish someone was still out there fighting for us.
Oh well.
"Publishing companies don't need to get into dating to stay in business," says Bill Chapters. "They need to get into CRIME."
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Posted by miracle on Wed, 27 Aug 2008 05:46:32 -0400 -- permanent link
| Keep the Aspidistra Bloggingby Miracle Jones |
"The Orwell Prize, Britain's pre-eminent prize for political writing, is publishing George Orwell's diaries as a blog. From 9th August 2008, Orwell's domestic and political diaries (from 9th August 1938 until October 1942) will be posted in real-time, exactly 70 years after the entries were written.
Orwell's 'domestic' diaries begin on 9th August 1938/2008; his 'political' diaries (which are further categorised as 'Morocco', 'Pre-war' and 'Wartime') begin on 7th September 1938/2008.
The diaries are exactly as Orwell wrote them. Where there are original spelling errors, they are indicated by a dot following the offending word."
For the next three years, using his keen, lucid insights into language and coercion (insights hardened by real, honest labor in coal mines and tanneries) our atemporal correspondent will contemplate the impending fracture of the world into three competing tribes -- capitalist, communist, and fascist -- as they each fight for the future of the world's heart, head, and soul. Each day is a new perspective. Each day is a new challenge.
The war is coming! Wake up every morning and see the world as George Orwell saw it. Black, cold, polluted, and impossible.
Some of his blog posts will be the most important swatches of political rhetoric you will ever read in your entire life.
Others will be about -- you know -- whatever.
"August 26, 1938
Hot. Dense ground-mist early this morning. Many blackberries now ripe, very large & fairly sweet. Also fair number of dew-berries. Walnuts now nearly full sized. Plenty of English apples in the shops."
The diary SEEMS prosaic on the face of it; almost Dorothy Wordsworthian in its obsessive accumulation of daily facts that could never be interesting to anyone. But what secret codes, associations, and correspondences lie in the mind of England's most famous paranoid psychotic?
Bold conjecture regarding today's entry:
Hot = trouble
Ground-mist = Nazis
Blackberries = opportunities to stab Nazis
Dew-berries = working class girls who like to wear lipstick any old day of the week, just to live WRONG AND HARD
Walnuts = bastard children conceived in train cars
English apples = English apples
Shops = hands of decadent intellectuals instead of in the hands of noble workers and artists
Posted by miracle on Tue, 26 Aug 2008 14:49:54 -0400 -- permanent link
| Take a Test; Win Ten Thousand Pounds of Booksby Miracle Jones |
The Sunday Times Literary Supplement is holding a contest in association with Faber & Faber to put 10,000 pounds worth of literature in the hands of a clever librarian who knows the answer to obscure and pedantic literary questions like:
"Who would have liked to arrive on a donkey to pick strawberries?"
And:
"Which novel opens with seasick passengers singing for a showbiz evangelist?"
And:
"Which Victorian science teacher had a see-through stomach?"
In fact, you have probably arrived on this page searching for the answers to one of those questions. I can't help you. I only read porn, and sometimes I read books by dead American alcoholics.
If your book shelves are not clotted with mildewed armfuls of contemporary British literature from the past fifty years, these questions are going to furrow your brow and make your molars feel too large for your face. You will feel stupid, illiterate, and unhip -- as if you have never read a book in your life, and you have arrived at your college final exam drunk, naked, and foreign. Your brain will begin to pulsate and churn, even as a few of the answers to these questions drift at the very edge of your consciousness like balloons on the ceiling at a child's birthday party. These balloons will only piss you off more.
You will also need to know what your favorite literary icons looked like when they were small British children. Hint:
The prize is pretty good, though. Ten thousand pounds in books is a lot of books. That's worth double here in America, right? You can probably sell them all for fifteen grand if you are sharp.
You need to have a UK address to win, but New York probably counts.
"Ah, yes -- London," says Dr. Future. "The sixth borough."
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Posted by miracle on Sun, 24 Aug 2008 20:56:07 -0400 -- permanent link
