Category: Uncategorized

by Carol Verburg

Every year on this date, a sudden murmur outside catches my ear.  It quickly rises to a gabble, rather like the parrots who squawk hysterically when they fly overhead.  It’s the kids in their Halloween costumes!

They walk up the Greenwich Street hill from Stockton to Coit Tower.  When they reach the bottom again, they’ll make a ceremonious circle around Washington Square Park.  Like the Columbus Day Parade, this event has endeared itself to me for its hokey straightforwardness — “We are wonderful and we want to show you!” — plus its diversity.  A Latino Spiderman, a Caucasian Wonder Woman, a Chinese tiger: chattering to each other, sometimes holding hands, the kids show off their rainbow of ethnicities at the same time they’re showing off their costumes.

Over the ten-plus years I worked and hung out with the artist Edward Gorey, he never particularly relished Halloween.  Kids, yes: they charmed him almost as much as cats and dogs did.  To adults he could be courtly and courteous or sardonic or chilly, but to kids he was just plain sweet.  He was also partial to bats and skeletons, more so to mysteries, less so to pumpkins; but not in the same up-close way.

He thought it was bizarre that adults kept linking him to Halloween.  He disliked anyone calling his work macabre.  There was nothing prurient in his curiosity about death.

In San Francisco, death, like almost everything, is practically an art form.  Edward only visited this city once that I know of.  He and his friend Connie, who attended Mills College, met on the top floor of the Fairmont (as I recall) one weekend when he was on leave from his Army job in Utah and danced the night away.  (For more on that Army job, which I strongly suspect fostered many of his later interests, including The X-Files, see my book Edward Gorey on Stage…a Multimedia Memoir.)  He had already put down his roots by then in the sandy, stony soil of Cape Cod.  California interested him, as everything interested him, but he had no inclination to travel here (or anywhere).

Still, every year when the kids go by, I think of Edward.  He would have stood on the balcony, as I do, and watched this homespun parade in absorbed fascination.

Then he would have chucked the cat under her chin — “Wuzzum wuzzum!” — and gone back to his drawing board.

Here in San Francisco, “reality” can be more fluid than elsewhere.  Last night Litquake, our week+ October literary festival, popped up at the Mechanics’ Institute Library for a vibrant and vigorous panel discussion entitled “Get Real: Perception and the Nature of Reality.”
Looking under every stone from particle physics to game theory were Robert Burton, MD, author of A Skeptic’s Guide to the Mind; UC Berkeley psychologist and NPR blogger Tania Lombrozo; conceptual artist Jonathon Keats, author of Forged; and game designer Jane McGonigal, author of Reality is Broken.  Their adept moderator, novelist and physicist Ransom Stephens, posed questions which encouraged a wide-ranging investigation.  Some highlights:

• Stephens launched the quest with a physicist’s working definition — “Reality is a space where things move” — and noted that, perceptually, reality appears entirely different at different scales (vide the 1977 Eames film Powers of Ten).
• Robert Burton used the double-arrow paradox to illustrate that perception is not only deceptive, but cultural: whether you see both arrows as the same length or as different depends partly on where you grew up, as do many other observations and beliefs.  He depicted the whole concept of reality as convenient more than factual.  He also observed that “language comes after feeling”: In our perpetual quest for purpose and value, we’re most likely to perceive our lives as having meaning when we feel that things (work, love, and other arenas of struggle) are going well.
• Jane McGonigal debunked the popular idea that gamers are escaping from reality: in the first place, winning points turns out to be less of a motivator than the thrill of pitting one’s smarts and skills against a challenge; and, second, grappling with virtual reality has been shown to sharpen those smarts and skills as well as to boost other measures of health and success.  Far from making people dysfunctional, games can be valuable in treating dysfunctions such as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
• Tania Lombrozo, whose specialties include explanation/causation and moral reasoning, probed the mysterious human itch to explain reality.  What use is it?  Why are we so picky about what kinds of explanations satisfy us? — for instance, preferring one that includes a cause-and-effect story (preferably with us humans in the picture) to a simple observation.  She noted that explanations accomplish more than what’s on the surface: “Sometimes you can learn something new just by explaining to yourself.”
• Jonathon Keats described some of his and others’ conceptual-art explorations, positing the goal as in effect stepping outside of everyday cause-and-effect consensual reality into “purposeful purposelessness” (e.g., the silent ringtone).  In keeping with his latest book’s subtitle, “Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age,” he toured the fuzzy border between art (e.g., drawing a dollar and trading it for a cup of coffee) and forgery (“Would a moron in a hurry mistake this for the real thing?”).

What about reality beyond the handsome book-lined walls of the Mechanics’s Institute Library?

• Regarding the current 3-ring circus in Washington, Jane McGonigal disputed the common contention “This isn’t a —ing game!”  On the contrary: the problem is that different sets of participants are playing different games with incompatible rules and goals (e.g., winning re-election vs. alleviating poverty), which hugely complicates the challenge of achieving an outcome that’s acceptable to all the players.
• Tania Lombrozo added that studies have shown that new evidence doesn’t always help contenders move toward agreement or harmony; instead, somewhat paradoxically, it can stiffen their original positions.
• She also emphasized that there isn’t just one “reality.”  Robert Burton agreed that we are inclined and able, often seamlessly, to integrate multiple realities (e.g., a spiritual and a scientific explanation for an experience or phenomenon), rather than opt for a single consistent set of beliefs reflecting what Ransom Stephens called a Grand Unification Theory of reality.

Much more of interest was said during the panel discussion and Q&A which space prevents including here.  Congratulations to Litquake, MIL Events Director Laura Sheppard, the exceptionally fascinating panelists and moderator, their large and uncommonly astute audience, and MIL staff and volunteers for an outstanding evening!

 

On Friday night 9/27 the Mechanics’ Institute Library hosted its third annual Booktoberfest, celebrating San Francisco Bay Area book artists, craftspeople, and producers, including MIL’s own Indie Publishers’ Working Group.

What better way to toast local books than with local beers?  21st Amendment Brewery, Speakeasy Ales & Lagers provided some Dionysian lubrication for this Apollonian event, with the excellent assistance of Specialty’s Cafe & Bakery, UC Berkeley Extension, Wiley publishers, and Bay Area cornerstone The Book Designer, AKA Joel Friedlander.

Congratulations to our extraordinary table of independent publishers: Adele Fasick, Carol Costello, Mary O’Toole, Jon Foyt, Jackie Davis-Martin, and Carol Verburg, also representing the absent Renee Gibbons.  Also to separate participants Alicia Young, Charles Sullivan, Paula Hendricks, and David Colin Carr.

The books created by this diverse and distinguished group cover such a broad range–from Adele’s Guide to California Government to Alicia’s Savvy Girl’s Guide to Grace to Carol C’s novel Chasing Grace–that we may need our own website to do them justice.  Meanwhile, most or all are easily found at individual websites and via search engines.

Congratulations, everybody! and keep up the good work!

In the roller-coaster publishing business, it’s the best of times and the worst of times.  Mystery writer Bill Buford directs our attention to an illuminating article by Erica Wagner in the Financial Times a few days ago:

“. . . When you scan the cultural landscape, it seems like everything is getting bigger and bigger and bigger. . . . How will publishers counter the might of Amazon, which recently reported sales of $15.7bn in three months? By mustering their regiments into one giant army: the merger of Penguin and Random House will mean a single company controlling a quarter of the world’s book market.”

Thirty years ago, my publishing colleague Ron Pullins observed that the industry’s obsessive focus on best-sellers and consolidation had the happy side effect of opening up room in the smaller markets.  After an internecine battle restructured the company we worked for, impelling us both to jump off the corporate ladder, Ron created his own company, Focus Publishing, and fulfilled his dream of never working for another @#%!#@ again.

Wagner, on the other side of the Pond, paid a call on publisher David Fickling, who recently parted company with Random House.  Fickling–cosily settled in his “pleasingly ramshackle Oxford office”–quoted Albert Einstein:  “The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

Most of us who chose creative callings did it for the gift, only to find ourselves browbeaten by the servant.  The democratization of the arts, which has fulfilled the hippie dream of Power to the People, AKA the socialist dream of workers owning the means of production, sometimes seems to have let so many hundreds of flowers bloom that we’re all in danger of suffocating from the pollen.  It’s useful to remember that the core of what we do is its own reward.  Those twin Colossus of Rhodes pillars of our culture, Discoverability and Monetization, are only the legs holding up the creation.

Still, ya gotta have feet!  In the “feats don’t fail me now” department, Michael Wolf’s The NextMarket Blog offers some exciting tips on New platforms enabling authors to side-step Amazon Kindle.

“JK Rowling Unmasked as Author of Acclaimed Detective Novel!” crowed the Daily Telegraph on July 22.  “Writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith, the Harry Potter creator wrote a 450-page crime novel called The Cuckoo’s Calling.  The book is billed as a “classic crime novel”, written in the style of PD James and Ruth Rendell…”

So — instant hit, right?

The Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith sold a total of around 1500 copies between its publication in April and its unmasking in July.  In contrast, The Cuckoo’s Calling by Galbraith AKA JK Rowling skyrocketed to #1 on Amazon and has more than 1500 reviews so far.

Agent and Author Nathan Bransford remarked (as I quoted previously) that this shows even Rowling can write a good book that sinks with hardly a ripple.  Book Designer Joel Friedlander further noted that the takeaway lesson is: PLATFORM!  An author without media visibility is like a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it.

Some of us are bemused by the 21st-century trope that a book sells because its author is well known — reversing the longtime assumption that an author becomes well-known because her/his books appeal, i.e., sell, to readers.  Platform evangelists go further: A website isn’t enough; your author platform must include a blog, posted regularly (weekly? daily?) to promote yourself and thereby your books.  Your blog must include a way to recruit subscribers: a sign-up widget, plus some incentive to join, such as a free book.  Next step: market your blog!

Peter Brantley remarked some time ago that what’s changed about publishing in this new century is that the big decisions are no longer made by literary people — authors and editors — but by techies, at mega-companies such as Amazon and Google.  Put it all together and you have a publishing industry which undercuts writers whose greatest strength is writing, and boosts those whose greatest strength is marketing.

What kind of literary landscape does this shift in slant produce?  Is the word “literary” even applicable to today’s book world?  One author I know regards his book as his business card, handed out more often than sold (and shelved or tossed more often than read) — an upscale credential for his real work as a consultant.

A bright spot on the horizon from my POV is the fairly new, and burgeoning, alliance between Canadian online e-book/e-reader giant Kobo and the ABA (American Booksellers’ Association).  A reader who creates an online account with Kobo by way of his or her favorite local bookstore’s website can then buy books from that store through Kobo.  This program isn’t exactly the belated Good Fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, but it may be a deus ex machina of sorts — life support for the long-time alliance among publishers, bookshops, readers, and writers.

I’m currently investigating how small independent publishers may be able to create a synergistic niche in this emerging ecosystem.  Have you discovered one yet?  Let me know!