So I’m reading New Grub Street by George Gissing. This is a pleasant little narrative about the business of literature. Not the best known novel ever written but when your reading schedule is governed by random selection from a large library of classic novels you’re bound to hit upon a few obscure nuts from time to time. Anyway, discussion of the publishing industry made my Neural Gnomes tap away.
Before the internet, the average writer was doomed to anonymity due to the costs of publishing. Unless you were lucky, rich or exceptionally good your material simply didn’t get published. This is of course debated to a certain extent by those who hold most of literature (some people I’ve heard have even been known to criticize such masterful work as Moby Dick) to be naught but a widespread waste of words. We’ll pick fights with these people later.
In today’s world, as this entry and its cohorts demonstrate, any author no matter how puny of mind, content or vocabulary can castigate the masses with his or her random banter. Amusingly, the shear volume and availability of writings from every conceivable corner of the Earth has cast the average writer right back into the same cloud of anonymity. We’ve advanced in technology and technique but somehow ended up with the exact same problem we had before. We are at the mercy of some ruling authority whether it be the publishing house or the volume of work to be perused. I suppose I should just go randomly read a few dozen blogs as a way of spurning the officious intervention of this oversized internet thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment