A publishing phenomenon in China

Aventurina King at Wired is reporting on a publishing phenomenon in China, where free web access to novels has spurred record sales of printed books.

Literary sites like Source of Chinese and Magic Sword invite authors to upload their novels onto the web, where they might get noticed by an avid audience of young readers and eventually by publishers. King tells the history of Zhang Muye's serialized novel Ghost Blows out the Light, which has been "viewed more than 6 million times online" and has "sold 600,000 in print," and of another novel titled Killing Immortals that was launched online before selling over a million copies.

This is a collaboration of media that provides opportunities for emerging writers, increases revenues for the sites and for the publishers, and broadens readership. King mentions that "writing and reading novels has become the hobby of an estimated 10 million youth." The trend also strikes a balance between the "wisdom of the crowd" in determining pop-culture merit and old-fashioned editorial gatekeeping, since site publishers can identify the best novels to present only on their for-pay "VIP section."

The trend even contains a hint of throwback to the Victorian age, with its rage for serialized epic-length stories:

In the print world, book length is limited by the cost of paper, printing and distribution. On the Internet, where production costs are close to zero, length equals profit. VIP readers pay a couple of cents for every thousand characters (a print novel generally has 250,000 characters). Contracted authors are paid seven to 12 dollars per thousand characters, depending on their clout.

I've been arguing for years that hypertext does not represent any threat to the book. Here's a case of the web's influence to preserve a traditional aesthetic in writing while revolutionizing the economics of publishing, for the benefit of writers and publishers and the public.

Nor is it in the least surprising that the audience is willing to buy the books they can acquire at a lower price or even for free online. The pleasure of reading, especially fiction and poetry, continues to require the physical page. In his essay "Visible and Invisible Books" that appeared in The Future of the Page, University of Virginia's Jerome McGann points out that:

The history of the book medium and the development of fictional conventions within that medium have evolved an extraordinarily nuanced and flexible set of tools for the imagination. The truth is that the 'hyper' media powers of the book, in this area of expression if not prima facie, far outstrip the available resources of digital instruments.

On the Road for 50 years

I've been following the NY Times open forum on the 50th anniversary of On the Road, which has racked up almost 300 comments so far (just before noon, Wednesday).

More praise than criticism, I'm pleased to see. Much of the condemnation of the book amounts to an ad hominem against Kerouac himself for his treatment of women, drug addiction, alcoholism, etc. Much of the praise amounts to lyrical affirmations of the counter-culture movement. But nowhere, so far, has there been any mention of the typewriter's role in that novel.

The book that Truman Capote dismissed as "typing, not writing'' is the quintessential typewritten novel, and the story of its making is the stuff of legend: Kerouac, pumped up on coffee and amphetamines, composed On the Road during a 20-day marathon in April 1951. To avoid having to stop repeatedly and insert paper, he stitched together a 120-foot scroll beforehand and fed it into the platen.

Kerouac could thus type as he had traveled, the pages rolling through the typewriter like the road rolling under the wheels of cars on their way west. On the Road couldn't have been written any other way. The typescript sold for $2.4 million in a 2001 auction.

Today we write with whispering keyboards on electronic screens. We run spell-checkers, move blocks of text around at will and print perfect copies that never have to be marred by an eraser or a handwritten correction. Fifty years ago, Kerouac created the prototype for one part of the modern technology: Word processors provide a "virtual'' scroll that allows us to glide along without interruption, from page to page, on a spotless white road that stretches to the vanishing point of an imaginary highway.

The Kerouac scroll was a rough, two-lane Rt. 66.

The major drawback of our modern word processors is that they make editing and revising too easy. They distract writers with limitless opportunities to second-guess themselves, to tinker with every sentence, to rethink and revisit everything they write. That writers get anything accomplished is a wonder.

His scroll compelled Kerouac to move relentlessly forward, along with the momentum of the work. It moved in one direction only, through the story and out of it, with no way to retrace his steps or reconsider his course. The lack of an opportunity for second thoughts set him free.

I think the immediacy of blogging is a healthy correction to the impulse for always producing faultless copy. In the rush to continue this freeforall online conversation, we publish errors and infelicitous phrasing. That in itself is a healthy, humbling discipline.

I think that if Jack Kerouac were alive today -- and sober -- he'd be blogging with the rest of us.

(Note: Parts of today's entry are re-cast from a 2001 article I wrote for the Columbus Dispatch.)

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure

Robert Blechman's insightful article, at blogcritics, on how science fiction has depicted time travel in terms of the dominant media of the time (vehicles and roads in the print era, portals and beams of light in the early television days), set me thinking about one of my favorite movies of all time, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure.

Blechman's piece reviews Paul Levinson's novel The Plot to Save Socrates, which presents an intricate tangle of time jumps instead of a linear journey to another age and a return trip back. Blechman notes that Levinson's characters "hypertext" across time.

Like Dr. Who, the title characters of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure use a phone booth as a time machine, but the movie (released in 1989) is eerily prescient of student research techniques of the 21st century.

In the film, Bill and Ted are high school friends whose plan to become heavy metal stars is threatened by the fact that they're both failing history. When they need to give an "excellent" report in order to fulfill their strangely significant destiny, a force from the future provides a time machine so they can travel into the past and capture historical figures (Abraham Lincoln, Billy the Kid, an hilarious Socrates, and others) to give the report for them.

Many of our students have become Bill and Ted. They hyperlink, following trails of embedded associations rather than pre-structured routes laid out by inductive or deductive logic. They gather raw source material, often with randomness that frustrates their professors, and present what they've collected as finished work, something they view as original because of their novel juxtapositions of items that had never been brought together before.

Our students, I believe, sincerely interpret what they do as research. We academics, of course, dismiss this kind of work as slapdash laziness. The disagreement represents a gap in training and experience in professional research. It also represents an age gap, however, between one generation that's grown up with hypertext and the internet, and another that mastered research techniques using print.

Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure should probably be required viewing for both students and professors in every Introduction to Research Writing class around the country, with a question for class discussion: "Did Bill and Ted make an excellent report? Why, or why not?"

In praise of paper, in hope for hypertext

I've just finished reading Matthew Sharpe's dark, hilarious novel Jamestown, in which one of the multiple narrators wonders at himself in the act of recording his thoughts on "humankind's flimsies and least likely invention, paper."

My own feelings about paper are untinged by irony, but hypertext has complicated my relationship with it.

Last month, I spent an afternoon sorting through some boxes I'd left unopened in the basement for over a decade, and discovered a folder containing yellowed typescripts of poems I'd assumed lost after a hasty division of personal effects when my first marriage suddenly ended. My only other copies existed as WordPerfect 5.1 files on a 5.5" floppy -- irretrievable, corrupted documents on antiquated technology.

Our electronic files are fragile, in danger of obsolescence. Paper lasts. Even when the individual page disintegrates with age, the technology remains constant, unchanged for thousands of years. All hail to paper.

A few weeks ago at Salon, Laura Miller reviewed David Damrosch's The Buried Book, which is an account of how the Epic of Gilgamesh lay "buried in the ruins of a Mesopotamian palace" for almost 3000 years before being unearthed by archeologists in the 19th century. The story, of course, was recorded in cuneiform and baked onto clay tablets -- an even hardier medium than paper.

I have no idea what expectations the Gilgamesh scribe might have entertained about the future, the longevity, of his efforts. It's clear, though, that papyrus and then paper enticed writers to visions of immortality. The paper text offers the advantage of being easily reproduced, whether by scribe or (later) by press. This possibility of such permanent, portable, reproducible records led the Roman poet Horace to predict (rightly!) that his poems would outlast bronze monuments ("Exegi monumentum aere perennius"), a sentiment echoed by Shakespeare ("Not marble, nor the gilded monuments / Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme") and other writers through the ages.

I continue to work in the medium of the printed page, almost every day, pursuing every writer's dream of a finished, published piece that will live beyond my allotted years. This morning I taught a Business Communication class in a computer lab where two editors from Columbus State's student literary magazine, Spring Street, were compiling manuscripts for this year's edition. Watching them work, I felt the old romantic thrill of bringing the work into print, birthing it into paper.

Hypertext, the electronic document, is impermanent. We bloggers and web writers commit our thoughts to binary code, electronic files, servers, and pixels on monitors -- all technologies that may be as useless in the next decade as my old 5.5" floppy is now. What we write today may be (will likely be) unavailable to a future audience in any form.

But its singular appeal is its novelty. Unlike paper, hypertext isn't freighted with millennia of cultural history, social associations or artistic expectations. It's a radically new medium, with potential that's we've just begun to realize.

The crisis in newspaper book reviews

Novelist Richard Ford has never read a literary blog, but he's ready to critique them anyway.

In a May 2 New York Times story about the decline of the book review in papers across the nation, Ford remarks that "“Newspapers, by having institutional backing, have a responsible relationship not only to their publisher but to their readership, in a way that some guy sitting in his basement in Terre Haute maybe doesn’t.”

While I'm reluctant to second-guess one of our greatest living authors (and a fellow Mississippian, as well), such high-brow stereotyping of the blogger lacks understanding and gratitude for the contributions the blogosphere has made to the book industry, and to individual authors such as Mr. Ford.

The crisis of the newspaper book review was a topic of conversation on yesterday's Talk of the Nation, when John Freeman of the National Book Critics Circle was a guest. Economics are at the root of the problem, with publishers struggling to cut costs in the face of market uncertainties, in part brought on by Internet competition. Seemingly no one views this as a welcome development, and no one with an ounce of sense is about to claim that the blog can replace the traditional book review.

But book bloggers are a major force for good for the publishing industry, and for authors. Motoko Rich of the Times mentions the case of the short story collection This Is Not Chick Lit, which was largely overlooked by print reviewers but received a great deal of support and attention in the blogosphere. The result? The book "is now in its sixth printing with 45,000 copies in print."

I hope that Mr. Ford, a man of great sagacity, will reconsider and sample at least a few of the book blogs where 'guys sitting in their basements' have been promoting his work for years. I myself stand second to no one in my love of the old-fashioned book review, and I hope for its rescue.

However, if it goes the way of extinction, the blame will fall on the newspaper publishers who have abdicated their responsibility to the literary community -- a responsibility that the literary bloggers seem happy to assume.

Narrative, perception and hypertext

I've returned from a short spring break between quarters at Columbus State, a week I devoted entirely to editing a final working draft of my novel and putting it into the mail to several potential agents.

Writing this one has been an interesting experience. I consciously decided to create a traditional novel, one with a linear plotline. It was the structure needed for this particular story. I haven't taught any literature courses for almost a decade, having turned my efforts instead to technical communication and hypertext. Returning now to the craft of fiction, I realize how far I've wandered from the traditional plotline's Aristotelian assumptions about the nature of reality and perception.

In the world of the standard novel, experiences occur through chronology and causation. Characters hasten through a corridor of moments, constantly progressing forward. With each step, however, the corridor grows narrower, as one event or one decision limits the range of possibilities for all subsequent actions or choices. It's essentially a tragic perspective, although the novel often provides a comic alternative by revealing at the end that the characters' own perceptions were flawed or that a secret force has been at work to counter and alter what seemed to be an inevitable outcome.

So I was intrigued, one day after completing the manuscript, to find an article in the New York Times about anthropologist Mary Douglas' new analysis of the "ring composition" in narrative. Douglas concentrates on literary works and sacred texts that are characterized by their "lack of structure, repetition and episodic incoherence." The article's author Edward Rothstein mentions the Book of Numbers, Persian poetry, epics and unconventional novels like Tristram Shandy as classic examples. Douglas believes that these are organized according to an organizing principle of experience very different from the Western sense of narrative, but closer to living experiences when we make sense of events only through dawning realizations:

At first one event follows another. We may not be entirely sure where it is going. Is there a point at all? Then, with declarative emphasis comes the turning, where, with a shock, we hear a first echo. We connect these different moments; a pattern begins to take shape. Then, step by step, other similarities are heard — they too take on meaning — moving backward from the most recent to the earliest in time, until we return to where we began. This kind of narrative needs to be heard again, for it is only in the retelling that the full nature of its order is revealed.

One point I derive from the article is that we have legitimate alternatives available to the Aristotelian aesthetic of chronology and causation of linear narrative. The ring composition is one of those. Hypertext is another, since it operates through simultaneity and association, through an open space rather than a corridor, with options and alternatives opening with each act or decision, rather than closing. Hypertext fiction is still in its infancy, hampered I believe by the absence of tools to allow the full realization of its potential. But its comic aesthetic is promising, nonetheless.