I was quite unprepared for the bizarre practices that persist in the selling of a book. Apparently, I must set a price for our books (that must end with 99p, obviously) and then offer a whacking discount to the trade. They then order a couple of hundred copies, hide them at the back of the shop for six months, sell two and send the rest back to me. This is regarded as so commonplace that no-one bats an eyelid, and the returned books are pulped and form the hardcore of motorways. Tell this to an ordinary reader in a Waterstone’s Costa outlet, and they will be utterly amazed. I was too, and also entirely out of pocket.

Helen Miles is the proprietor of Solidus, a small, independent, Stroud-based publishing house using print on demand technology to get up-and-coming writers into print.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt have announced an unprecedented buying freeze on new manuscripts. Among the employee layoffs was the distinguished editor Drenka Willen, whose list of authors included Günter Grass, Octavio Paz and José Saramago.

Simon & Schuster laid off 35 employees, and a companywide memo from Random House’s CEO announced the dissolution of Doubleday and Bantam Dell.

The Christian publishing company Thomas Nelson also announced 54 layoffs.

Macmillan laid off 64 employees.

The piece in Salon then goes on to consider what needs to be done, looking again at the ebook revolution and the continuing importance of the blog.

Last week we learned that Amazon.co.uk has bowed to pressure to stop selling a book by a former senior Irish Scientologist. The Complex: An Insider Exposes the Covert World of the Church of Scientology (Merlin Publishing, Dublin) describes John Duignan’s 21 years in the religion, not all of it a happy tale. According to Amazon, “Unfortunately, we have had to withdraw The Complex by John Duignan in the UK because we received a specific allegation that a passage in the book is defamatory regarding an individual named in the book”. Other bookshops are also thought to have been warned not to stock the book. And everyone who has ever encountered the Church of Scientology sighs and says, “Here we go again.”

*

America – Bush ushers in Midnight Regulations:

Dozens of new rules have already been introduced which critics say will diminish worker safety, pollute the environment, promote gun use and curtail abortion rights. Many rules promote the interests of large industries, such as coal mining or energy, which have energetically supported Bush during his two terms as president. More are expected this week.

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SFGate reports on the 20 most trusted companies:
A report which is bizarre to say the least, being sad and funny at the same time. Neither Google or Microsoft are on the list while other omissions include Countrywide Financial, Bank of America and Weight Watchers.
The top ten, however, include American Express, IBM, eBay, Amazon and Apple, most of which I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole. (TimesOnline today report on Amazon, Britain’s most popular website for Christmas shopping, which is making its staff work seven days a week and threatening them with the sack if they take time off sick.)
Can’t understand why McDonalds and Starbucks didn’t make the list. Must be a mistake.

With thanks to A Little Red Blog

*

The Guardian has a piece from Richard Price on his old tutor, Richard Yates, author of Revolutionary Road:

We were in our early 20s, and most of us had neither read nor even heard of him. In class he called you by your last name, no title: a brusque, slightly boarding-schoolish and utterly seductive form of address. He regularly and passionately savaged those writers whom he perceived to be his more validated (“lucky”, he called them) peers, but he treated a student’s work, no matter how hapless, with shocking earnestness.

He was a nurturer of grudges; an incubator of slights.

His personal gods were Hemingway and Fitzgerald.

He was bitter.

He had every right to be bitter.

He was really bitter.

*

Chris Bowers at Undernews doesn’t see much hope or change on the horizon:

Even after two landslide elections in a row, are our only governing options as a nation either all right-wing Republicans, or a centrist mixture of Democrats and Republicans? Isn’t there ever a point when we can get an actual Democratic administration? Also, why isn’t there a single member of Obama’s cabinet who will be advising him from the left? It seems to me as though there is a team of rivals, except for the left, which is left off the team entirely. Not a single, solitary, actual dyed-in-the-wool progressive has, as far as I can tell, even been mentioned for a position in the new administration.

*

Jonathan Dozier-Ezell speculates on writing and publishing:

It’s now easier than ever to get your ideas and content out to readers with or without help from publishing channels. Now there are writers who only write to see their names on a pulpy spine (and they will be disappointed), but on the whole, writers, authors, poets, etc. simply want to be heard. Being paid is nice, but it really isn’t the priority.

*

Robert Fisk in the UK’s Independent:

General Roberts of Kandahar (told) the British in 1880 that “we have nothing to fear from Afghanistan, and the best thing to do is to leave it as much as possible to itself. . . I feel sure I am right when I say that the less the Afghans see of us, the less they will dislike us”.

*

Love Thy Belly:

The record label Roadrunner has been getting some serious online bellyache from fans of one of its artists, Amanda Palmer of The Dresden Dolls, after she reported on her blog that she had been asked to cut shots from the video for her solo song Leeds United because “they thought I looked fat”.

To summarise you might say that Penguin was fathered by Inspired Accident upon a Beleaguered Democracy. Marx argued that in a Capitalist state ‘culture’ belongs to the super-structure. It is there to legitimise the interests of the governing class. You would expect this to hold especially true in times of economic crisis, when ‘culture’ thus understood would tend to come even lower down the working man’s list of priorities. Allen was well-placed temperamentally and professionally to anticipate it, but this massive popular demand for serious literature broke all the rules. The appeal of these paperbacks cut across all class distinctions. I wonder what a Marxist analysis of this would look like.

Certainly, any attempt to cast Allen Lane as a crusading ideologue is doomed from the outset. He was not the stuff that pious memories are made of. He was above all an intuitive, an adventurer. And once his company was afloat he was in it above all for the fun. He was constantly restless for new ideas and quickly bored by them once they came. He had an uncanny, almost trickster-ish talent for spotting a bestseller or the right kind of editorial staff.

*

The tiny community of Harrold, in the far north of Texas, has recently approved a local decision to allow it’s teachers to bring firearms to school to protect against possible shootings.

*

An American book prize has blacklisted Random House following its “cowardly self-censorship” of Sherry Jones’s novel The Jewel of Medina, which is about the child-bride of Muhammad. A spokesman for the prize said Random House’s decision not to print Jones’s novel represented “a threat to all literature”.

*

This is Matthew Syed on Sex and the Olympic City:

Barcelona was, for many of us Olympic virgins, as much about sex as it was about sport. There were the gorgeous hostesses – there to assist the athletes – in their bright yellow shirts and black skirts; there were the indigenous lovelies who came to watch the competitions. And then there were the female athletes – literally thousands of them – strutting, shimmying, sashaying and jogging around the village, clad in Lycra and exposing yard upon yard of shiny, toned, rippling and unimaginably exotic flesh. Women from all the countries of the world: muscular, virile, athletic and oozing oestrogen. I spent so much time in a state of lust that I could have passed out. Indeed, for all I knew I did pass out – in a place like that how was one to tell the difference between dreamland and reality?

My initial reaction is to recall Robert Service, though Rachel Fox certainly doesn’t go in for epic narratives. Maybe it’s the way she uses rhyme? She gives us more song than poetry, as if she wants us to lose ourselves in sound.

But then again:

Generation less

The papers say
Our world
Will sink
Drown
Be dead

We say
Why tell us?
We are the generation
Who would rather stay
In bed

The pop stars say
People are starving
And its all our fault
Because we buy over-priced long-distance green beans
When we should make do with something less exploitative
Instead

We say
But what can we do?
We are the generation
Bought up to enjoy post-that-one-war prosperity
And at the same time made stupid by television
And a general lowering of educational standards
We don’t even understand
Our own insignificant day-to-day problems
Or why we even have them when we should be happy
You see
That’s what goes round
In our head

The big brands say
Well give us your money then
You’ll be happier
Handing it over
Now get back to the TV
You might have missed something important like
“Celebrity dogs on holiday”

We say
Well that we can manage
We know we are the pointless generation
Very little backbone
Or understanding
Just a great reservoir of useless trivia
Not much to be proud of
Anyway

The old folk say
Everyone’s a writer now
A singer, a performer, a TV presenter
No one wants unglamorous jobs
It’s the curse of freedom
In a way

We say
What can we do about it?
We are the generation
Too shallow
For serious endeavor
Too spoilt
For hard work
Too vacant
To care about anything beyond
Today

They all say
It’s important this time
The earth really will
Explode
Implode
Starve
Burn
Suffocate
In fact you’re too late
Somehow
One way or another
We will all die
Now

We shrug
We munch
We have a drink
We are the generation
Watching it all
From a no deposit
Nothing to pay till September
Leather sofa
We watch the fireworks
And the end of the world rock concert
It’s pretty amazing
Wow

Echoes of the Liverpool poets in there, though Rachel Fox is, of course, from a completely different generation. It just goes to confirm, though, how these influences permeate down through time.

Another poem in the collection reminds the ear of Larkin and the old toad, work:

The perfect life

Perfect employees
Get up early
Specifically
So they can think about work
They drive in
In cars
For this shows individuality
And individuality is good
They make coffee for all
For this shows the ability
To work as part of a team
Which is also necessary
And/or essential

Perfect employees
Answer the telephone
With the correct phraseology
And never use one word
When ten will do just as well
They smile down the cables
Teeth defying biology
They win the accounts
If not the hearts
Of clients who also
It goes without saying
Like to think about work

Perfect employees
Love to stare at flickering screens
It is the future
ICT
It is easy, simple and labour-saving
Don’t you see?
I do
I do see
They demand more residential training courses
More dates with flip charts
More interminable quiche-laden buffet lunches
More introductory ice-breakers
They shout
In unison and individually
That they want to
Love to
Think about work

Perfect employees
Do not cry unless someone has died
Do not overeat
Do not make up words
They wear soft suits
That are made cheaply
But not sold that way
They can always think of something polite
And ideally ingratiating
To add to a conversation
They have no interest in feeling
They are too busy thinking about work

Perfect employees
Pretend to like each other
When they absolutely do not
They send each other cards
And emails of course
Full of wishes and jokes and handy little tips
Congratulations on your engagement
(You have to be married
Can’t let the place look untidy)
They regard each other’s rise and fall
With the same expression
They go home
In their cars
Thinking
Always thinking
About work
Always work

I loved that short expression:
They win the accounts
If not the hearts
Of clients

For “A Wedding Poem” she gives us
another girl in big frock
and simple lines like that leap out of this slim book almost wherever you open it. e.g. Robert Plant helped with the ironing today.

The short poem “Sex and Drugs” comes at you out of left-field, hinting at a sense of humour which combines ‘off-the-cuff’ with something very much darker:

Sex and drugs

Sex and drugs
Do go very well together
You’re high
Times high
You’re gorgeous
And so’s whats-his-name

The dark theme is better illustrated in “Alone Place,” which touches on places and feelings which she sometimes seems to avoid, as if afraid of what waits there, fearful of disturbing a snoozing monster:

Alone place

Don’t leave me
Alone
Alone is not a place
I want to be
It’s not
What it used to be
It’s not
A chance
For rest and recuperation
It’s not
Quiet
At all
It’s the most noise
And screeching confusion
In the smallest place
I stand on
One leg
Or one toe even
Balancing in that most
Unbalanced way
Bombarded on every side
By noise and waves
And prodding fingers
Energy wastes itself
Continually
Beating my every surface
Continually
When I’m alone

When you’re here
It leaves me be a while
I know what’s not
An answer
I know that’s
A cop out
I know
I should I really should
This time
Try
Counselling, alternative therapies and yoga
I know I know
But that doesn’t help me
Now
When alone
When fear does its
Paralysing worst
Gets me
On the
One toe
Head bowed
Brain suitably whipped and battered
My, my this masochism
Really must stop
We must stop meeting like this
I and I
In the small space
The smallest of small
The end of it all
The throwing it all away
No sad song does it justice
t is a loveless matter
I and I
When alone
It is the fullest emptiness
I know
So
Don’t go
Go
And yet
Don’t go

At some point in the production of the book the decision was taken to give the poem, “History at 40,” a smaller font than every other poem in the collection. I can’t imagine why, as it is a bad aesthetic mistake. This is even more pointed in a book which has taken care to present itself with a pleasing cover and used good quality recycled materials. Pity

Some of the verses here are incidental, little more than jottings to capture a fleeting thought – like Pascal’s Pensées or Lawrence’s Pansies (1929) – while others carry more weight. And as the eye flits from one to the next it is as if one were searching for diamonds among an old chest of doubloons.

The book was supplied to me by the author. The poems quoted above are all Copyright © Rachel Fox and are reproduced here with her permission. I left my copy on a shelf in Norway, hoping someone would find it and enjoy it as much as I did.