Is cute the new cool?

The conversation started like this. An old friend, a thespian (who shall not be named, considering the propensity for name calling and flaming amongst some segments of our society), was in the shop the other day, and we started bellyaching, as it seems the norm these days, about the ‘Malaysian condition’. He mentioned a friend, also a Malaysian (but shall remain nameless), just back from Australia, who asked him to tell her just one thing Malaysians are good at. Though cornered into a position of indignant ire, all he could do was bluster, but he refused to concede defeat. So, the question remains: what is the one thing Malaysians are good at?

When one is confronted with a question like this, one normally assumes he means: “Tell me one thing Malaysians are ‘world class’ at.” At which juncture, one would be tempted to be flippant and say, “Video piracy, fake ‘Lolek’ watches, football fixing, money laundering, and ‘How about that guy who was arrested in America recently with 400,000 credit card details in his laptop?’”

Seriously.

His was a familiar lament: “The theatre is gone. Nobody wants to work hard. Maybe there is no talent anymore.” That isn’t logical, of course. How can talent simply disappear? Is there such a thing as an entire talentless generation? I, certainly, cannot buy that; I work with so a many young people, though I do remember a time when Malaysia had world class sportsmen, world class universities, world class research institutions, and doctors and engineers and lawyers and ... Maybe we still have them, maybe we are only having one of those ‘good old days’ nostalgia trips, to feed our illusion, our maya.

The discussion was going nowhere, so I decided to divert it. “But, what I really cannot understand is this epidemic of cuteness that’s going around. You should read some of the stuff I get. They can’t write, but they want to be cute.”

“So, that’s it then. If you have no talent, be cute,” he said.

We were both being unfair, of course. I do get good manuscripts sometimes, it’s just that the bad ones outnumber them, and can be seriously bad and painful. “It is about the content, darling, not how cute you are,” one is tempted to say, but never does. One only suffers in silence. (I have a hypothesis about this, from my experience: the more cocky and pushy the writer, the less talented he or she is. The quiet shy ones, the painfully self-effacing ones, often surprise.)

Still, I find this cuteness thing a little bizarre. I was at a wedding dinner at a hotel in Subang Jaya recently. You know how they used to have this cheesy “Eye of the Tiger” routine, with burning torches and all, to introduce the first dish? Anyway, the lights went out, the music (not the one mentioned above) started. I waited for the torches to appear with our dinner. But, nothing. The music went on and on, still nothing  happened as far as I could see. Then I noticed that most eyes were on the stage behind me. I turned around, and almost burst out laughing. On stage, two painted cardboard swans were ‘dancing’ slowly towards one another, finally ‘kissing’, sending out a shower of red ‘hearts’. It was so corny, but I am sure many of the rest thought it was cute.

I must be getting old. Wherever I go these days, I seem to be surrounded by cuteness. Hideous fibre-glass pitcher plants, steel hibiscus lampposts, plastic Christmas trees with cotton wool snow … Ever been to a PTA concert where everyone goes, “Oh they are so cute,” and you are thinking, ‘But they are so talentless’? They are, of course, using the word in its original meaning: cuddly, harmless and sexless -- like babies, puppies and kittens. Referring to grandpas, grandmas, uncles, aunties and other grownups as cute probably suggests the same thing -- sexless and harmless with a certain weirdness or eccentricity.  I am not used to it but, I guess, it’s the fashion. (Remember when we used to say ‘groovy’ for everything -- ughhh!) But when someone says a guy is ‘so cute’ or refers to a girl as a ‘cute chick’, I feel like, “It is so weird, man!”

Then, there is this Facebook thing, with 500 million people out there trying to ‘out-cute’ one another. Now, that is scary, enough cuteness there to start a pandemic of diabetes, or nausea, or both.

Maybe, thinking of the ‘groovy’ old days is not so bad. It is only nostalgia -- useless, lame, embarrassing, but harmless.

It is that time of the year (and decade) again. So, Happy Holidays. (Avoid the malls if canned holiday jingles drive you crazy.)

How I survived Frankfurt

Having seen the retail fish market that is the Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair, I have never been enamoured of them -- book fairs, I mean. They are too big, fussy and noisy for my taste, I have decided. KLAB (The Kuala Lumpur Alternative Book Fair) is my limit -- small, smiley and friendly.
“You have to go to Frankfurt,” I have been told for ten years. Why? “Because it is an experience, because it is the biggest book fair in the world.” But none of that were convincing arguments as far as I was concerned. You probably think this strange. I have been buying books for over half a century (saving tuck-shop cash when I was in school), but the very thought of hundreds of thousands of square metres of books scares the life out of me. That’s why I avoid mega stores whichever city I visit, just as I avoid warehouse sales. I find them too intimidating (and more than a little stupid). My best buys have always been from the little stores in the corner -- some curated, some not. One never knows what one will find there -- I bought a lovely hardback edition of Winnie the Pooh from a little shop with about fifty English language titles in Frankfurt this last trip.

Even so, when I received this invitation from Litprom (Society for the promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature), I was cautiously excited. I was prepared to be disappointed, but I was determined to give it my best shot -- whatever that meant. Although airfares and board was paid by the organisers, participants had to bear the cost of shipping their books, which can come to quite a bit when calculated in Euros (for a small publisher like us). Anyway, after I got to Frankfurt, I was told that exhibitors were not allowed to sell books except on the last two days when the fair was open to the public. Even then, a strict ‘no discount’ policy was to be followed. I ended up giving away most of my books because I didn’t want to ship them back.

The facts about the Frankfurter Buchemesse boggle the mind a bit -- started about 600 years ago, over 7,300 exhibitors in 5 humungous halls from 100 countries, some 300,000 trade visitors, 10,000 journalist and hundreds of forums and book events -- but none of that quite begins to give one an idea of the magnitude. “Try not to be overwhelmed”, “sit back and watch the book world go by”, “don’t try to take it all in on your first visit”, are some advice I was given. Still, when one goes in on the first day, it is like being hit by a tsunami. (In the 5 days I was there, I’d say I took in less than 5 percent of the fair, including Jonathan Franzen and Gunter Grass).

Silverfish Books was given a stall with the rest of those in the invitation programme, in Hall 5.0 -- each hall has several levels -- with the Arab countries, Africa and the East Europeans. The floor above us housed the Latin Americans, and next door were most of the Asian countries, including Malaysia. (The Malaysian pavilion in Hall 6.1 was curious, to say the least. Looking like a decorated piece of cheese cake, it appeared to be caught in a conundrum: what  was it promoting, tourism or books? It was so ‘gomen’, it was scary. The first two times I visited it, I quietly walked away because there appeared to be no one interested in talking to visitors. Only on my third visit did I see some friendly faces (from ITNM); I introduced a few friends of mine from Litprom to them and I believe they had a good meeting.) The biggest, Hall 8.0, was mainly occupied by exhibitors from the US, UK and India. (A person who should know said that there were more UK exhibitors in Hall 8.0 than at the London Book Fair. He also dismissed them derisively by saying that they were only interested in selling, not buying.) I visited Hall 8.0 on Friday afternoon and found it surprisingly quiet; maybe all businesses had already been successfully concluded by then.

Frankfurter Buchmesse is the place where one buys and sells rights; that is the raison d’etre of the fair. Though I have received inquiries from over ten countries, from Hungary to Holland (this will be a drawn-out affair), the most important aspect of the fair is how it opens the eyes of those of us stuck in the anglophone book world. Some of the East European and the Latin American stands were stunning (and not in the tourism promotion way), the quality and range of books were quite astounding. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of children’s books from Morocco and Lebanon, coffee table books from Egypt, Ecuador and Rumania, and fiction from Africa and Latin America. One publisher from the Dominican Republic makes his books himself in his house -- he has 64 titles to date and sells them friends, relatives and universities. Another from Venezuela says he was broke for a whole year after a beautiful art-cum-poetry venture, though it didn’t stop him.

The best part of the fair was meeting all those people more passionate and crazier than oneself. And, there are plenty of crazies out there.

The worst part? Well, coming home to humungous North Korean style political posters on the roadside and the blank ink blotch painted on the cover of my Time magazine.

What business do writers think they are in?

I leave for the Frankfurt Book Fair on the 30th of September, hoping to interest the world in some of our wares. This fair, the biggest and the most influential on earth, is more than 500 years old, the first one organised by local booksellers soon after Johannes Gutenberg invented printing in movable letters around 1439 CE. In a sense, the book industry can be forgiven for thinking that it will go on as it is forever, that books as we know it will never die.

Nothing in all the promotional literature for Frankfurt I have received so far suggests that the debate this year is going to be different. It is not whether books will survive, but how they will survive: digitally or in print. In many ways, what happens in Frankfurt may become a non-debate. 7000 exhibitors, from over a 100 countries will meet, talk and worry about the same things they have done for centuries. I have a strong suspicion that the song will remain the same.

But, will it? We’ve heard it before: the television did not kill the radio, and the internet did not kill television, and neither one of them has killed off books.

Books are still, by far, the most influential, if not the most glamorous, cultural medium. Leading writers still attain demigod status in most societies, even in Myanmar and North Korea where they are often sent to jail. Actors and movie stars come and go. They get mentioned in footnotes of history sometimes, but they are seldom elevated to godhood anywhere (apart from India). Dancers are even more ignonimous. Only musicians come close to writers (including poets and playwrights) in their reach towards the gods.

Some form of writing has been in existence since the dawn of civilization. Before that it is reasonable to assume that all communication existed only orally, with stories told, possibly, in grunts and groans. Musicians came in and started telling their stories in songs, giving them some sort of permanence. (Many of these songs are sung even today.) Cave paintings and stone tablets gave us the phrase “cast in stone”. The Gutenberg press made it possible to mass-produce writings for everyone to read (and to kill one another in pogroms as a result, in some cases).

Still, “Why is Indie OK for Musicians and Filmmakers…But Not for Writers?” asks Amy Edelman, who believes that self-published books deserve more attention from readers and retailers, in an article in Publishing Perpectives. Is that really true? She mentions movies like Hurt Locker and indie bands like The Shins winning tons of praise. Then she goes on to mention the success of indie books like Tolstoy’s War & Peace to Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad, Poor Dad. So, what’s her point, one is tempted to ask. Well, her point is she is trying to sell her service called IndieReader, the submission fee for which is USD149.00 per title for review and inclusion into the database. The money (less USD25.00) will be refunded if the book is not accepted. IndieReader wants to be the home for good quality self-published books. What it amounts to is that services like IndieReader will become the new gatekeepers – perhaps, they would prefer the word curators -- in the book industry who will decide what people read. Amy Edelman wants to be the one to discover the next War and Peace.

The book industry in moving along like it used to, business as usual, as if nothing out of the ordinary is happening. Frankfurt will be a fair for publishers and the gatekeepers -- readers will only be allowed in on the last two days. (Seems like no one asks them anything.) But that’s okay; businessmen need a place to meet and talk shop.

Maybe, there is nothing big happening to be too concerned. Maybe, there is. There was a time when newspapers ruled. Now, they are struggling to survive, let alone remain relevant.  (I get my news off the net.) Several magazines have disappeared, while others are discovering a whole new delivery system and experience, thanks to devices like the tablet. Will books be next? Will bestseller books become indistinguishable from blockbuster movies and video games? Will traditional books not be relevant anymore? Will all discussions due to take place in Frankfurt be, ultimately, futile due to events taking place outside the sphere of influence of the industry? Something they have no control of? Something they do not have the vision to see? The industry thinks it is immune to change, but, methinks there is a brave new world out there.

It is a scary thought, at least in the short term. And Amy Edelman is right: Times are a changing. But, not necessarily in the way she thinks.

Publishing Perspectives

Frankfurt Book Fair

Like everything else in life, no matter how long one has to prepare for something, there will always be a last minute rush. Maybe the problem is that we take on too much, or maybe that is the nature of things. I am now rushing for Frankfurt, though I have little idea what I’m rushing for -- all I need to do is to get on the plane on the 30th of September. But no, I need to make a good enough impression, I must not let the side down, the side being Malaysia.

That is the main reason I have not done it earlier, participate in the Frankfurt Book Fair, that is. People (in the industry) have been telling me for almost ten years now (ever since I started publishing) that I should go to Frankfurt -- it will be an experience, it will be interesting, you will not regret it, etc, etc, they assured me. I suppose they would have been correct, except that I felt I didn’t have anything to show, apart from a few collections of uneven short stories. Sure, it was groundbreaking; sure, it unearthed some talent, and I suppose many people would have attended the fair with less. Unfortunately, (or fortunately), I felt that I could (or would) participate in such events only with a fairly respectable list -- the book industry jargon for a catalogue. Anything less would have been too malu-fying, too embarrassing. (Maybe, I’m too sensitive.)

I will be taking with me books by seven authors that I feel are of international standard. (I have several more manuscripts that would fall into this category, unfortunately, I have not had the time to work on them.) I dare say, they are better, much better, then many out there. But then we are third world, right? We need to be twice as good even to be noticed. That is the barrier, the reality we have to face. Can the natives even write? Can they even read? Did they not just come down from the trees very recently? Or, when they discover the natives can write: why are all the characters so happy? Everyone knows how miserable their lives are. Women lead terrible lives, all native fathers rape their daughters, and uncles their boys. No, this cannot be authentic, this not how natives live. Asian women are not like that. Have they not seen that Suzie Wong movie? Slumdog Millionaire? Thank God, we know better. (Unfortunately, these sentiments are also expressed by many ‘natives’ who think they are not like the rest of us.)

The barrier faced by authentic ‘native’ authors in the international marketplace is quite daunting. One can only try, without selling out to the stereotype, the cliche, the market. Silverfish is committed to developing Malaysia’s own literature (albeit, in English), our own canon, our own stories, our own history. We are committed to producing books we can live with, maintain our dignity and not cringe in shame at its very mention a few years from now.

Frankfurt will have participants from over a hundred countries. Surely, not all will be blinkered? We live in hope.

Doom and boom

It’s no longer news that the book industry is in a frenzy over ebooks. Many have already started on their obituaries for the ‘dead tree’ book. Others are steadfast in the refusal to accept any other form and insist it will last for a long time more. Both are probably right. It  depends on which book industry one is talking about -- text, reference, academic, or general. Text books will probably be the first to go digital; the weight of a students’ backpack should decide that. As for reference material, when was the last time you opened a printed dictionary? Mine happened about five years ago. Academics really don’t need to kill trees to put forward their arguments. So the discussion is really only about general books.

The biggest positive news to come out of the book world in recent times is Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, which I have pre-ordered despite learning that it is over 500 pages long. (That’s how desperate I am for some good news.) The last time anyone heard of Franzen was during the Oprah Winfrey kerfuffle in 2001. How dare this pipsqueak of a writer insult their media darling, the media screamed although he, actually, didn’t. Perhaps there is a measure of guilt involved in media circles for the way they reported the incident despite the fact that it was not Franzen who unfriended Oprah but the other way round. (For those interested, some of the stories are still online.)

Maybe the media needs something to write about (and Franzen is a name the public is familiar with), and America needs a new literary hero for its own revalidation, after Iraq and the economic crisis, and to take his place alongside Salinger, Nabokov, Morrison, Wolfe, Roth and Updike. After all, he is a proven writer and a recluse -- ah, that great American literary tradition. A recent Time magazine report about his new book caught my attention. This is his first novel in nine years. “He writes six or seven days a week, starting at 7am. He’s often hoarse by the end of the day because he performs his dialogue aloud as he writes ... Franzen works from a rented office ... stripped of all distractions. He uses a heavy, obsolete Dell laptop from which he has scoured any trace of hearts or solitaire ...”

And, because he believes one can’t write serious fiction on a computer that’s connected to the Internet, he has removed its wireless card and super glued shut its Ethernet port. It is an obsession one can only admire. I have to read that book.

Then in the other corner, we have James Patterson, currently the author who makes the most money in the world. This is interesting because, by his own admission, he does not even write his own books. His name is on the front cover of thrillers, young adult and children’s books, and he churns them out year after year, but he does not write them as much as “he relies on a team of five to help him bash out the plots”, according to a report in The Independent. Now, with the dawn of the iPad like devices, is there a limit to what Patterson can do? He could hire another five (or fifty) people and turn his into a production house ala Hollywood.

When we talk about the general book industry, we always think there is only one. There are several. The one that has adapted itself best to social networks is probably sci-fi and horror. These people collect books by numbers, editions and book covers, so I can’t see how the e-book is going to affect them. There are many other segments. But, for what is commonly known as the general fiction market, Franzen and Patterson represent two different sides of it. Though these two are largely run by the same people, the two operate quite differently. Patterson represents the sugared-water side of the business and, just as, Coke will always outsell fine wines, the likes of him will clobber the Franzens financially.  Seriously, in future, which publisher will bother to wait nine years for a blockbuster, even if it is a cultural phenomenon, when someone else can churn out nine books a year? (Not quite yet, but it will come to that.)

That, perhaps, is the true future of books: big production houses churning out ‘3-D’ versions of books. Will they still be called ‘books’, though? Will the ‘dead tree’ book die, then? Me thinks not. It will survive, like indie or art-house movies, or music. It will not make too much money (except occasionally -- like now) but it will have its connoisseurs. It will be largely produced by independents with the passion. It may become a cultural good once again -- like in Europe -- and be treated like fine wine.

And fewer trees will die, too.

Time
The Independent

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times

It seems as if not a week passes without some new development in the book industry, mainly predicting the death of the physical book. Only a few made me sit up and notice. First, a story early this month said that Barnes and Noble may be put up for sale. That is serious shit. Then there was the story of the coming liquidation of the Good Book Guide, a service I used to love and rely on in the seventies and the eighties. Finally, what Random House CEO Markus Dohle said in his SPIEGEL interview about how 'The Printed Book Will Still Dominate for a Long Time to Come'

But  have a confession. I own an iPad, and I have downloaded books. I have been watching what I do and I notice that I am only interested in the classics, and that too, classic books for children. (No, they are not for my granddaughter as some have suggested.) No book on the front list has appealed to me so far. Besides, most of the classics are free. So when I am on holiday, I will have my collection of music, DVDs, games, internet browser and email client, and a few other odds and ends that I can bring along without paying for excess baggage.

Sale of Barnes and Noble

The board of directors of Barnes & Noble have announced that it is  considering a sale of the largest bookstore chain in the US. The company operates 777 stores in all fifty US states in addition to 636 college bookstores, serving nearly four million students and two hundred and fifty thousand faculty members across the country.

Barnes & Noble originated in 1873 when Charles Barnes opened a book-printing business in Illinois. Their first true bookstore was set up by his son, William, in partnership with G. Clifford Noble, in 1917 in New York. The business was sold, in 1971, to Leonard Riggio. In 1975, Barnes & Noble became the first bookstore to discount books, by selling best-selling titles at 40% off the publishers’ list price.

The blogosphere is in a frenzy with many predicting the final end of the brick and mortar retailers (again).

The Good Book Guide calls in liquidators

News last week says that the Good Book Guide has called in insolvency practitioners to deal with the liquidation of the company because they "can't satisfy its debts as they fall due". The company is holding meetings with creditors and shareholders on September 1.

It is understood that reviewers for the monthly book recommendations magazine are among those who have not been paid, but it is not clear if there were any publishers among the creditors. No issue of the Guide has been published since April.

The Good Book Guide started in the seventies as a mail-order bookseller, supported by a recommendation magazine with hundreds of reviews by professional reviewers every month. With the advent of the internet, they became an online retailer, still publishing the recommendations magazine monthly. Obviously, they couldn’t compete with the behemoths like Amazon.

The printed book will dominate

A headline 'The Printed Book Will Still Dominate for a Long Time to Come' caught my eye recently. It was a SPIEGEL interview with Mr Markus Dohle, 42, CEO of Random House, the largest publishing company in the world. I decided to renew my faith. I came across a few gems there which I shall produce verbatim below:

SPIEGEL: Did you work your way through the literary canon in preparation?
Dohle: There was no time for that. I was set up in the United States within a few days. It went very quickly. And when I started the new position, I was in the process of reading the Random House book "You're in Charge -- Now What?" It was certainly appropriate reading material.

SPIEGEL: Aren't you worried about embarrassing yourself while making small talk about literature with authors and agents?
Dohle: I do happen to have 15 Frankfurt Book Fairs under my belt and have spent my entire professional life in the book business at Bertelsmann. I've met plenty of major authors and publishers in the process. The book industry is a very creative environment. Ultimately, however, it's about making money with books.

Now we can all panic. The death of the music industry was caused by publishers who didn’t know or listen to the music they sold. The publishing industry now has Mr Markus Dohle.

Publisher’s Weekly
The Bookseller
The Spiegel

Recommending books

I read a column recently by Laura Miller of Salon.com about the Art of Recommending Book that led me to think how easy that was when we were young. My entire childhood experience was about sharing books and music. Have you read this, have you heard that? It was a time when one didn’t have to worry about books coming back because they usually did. (Stealing from friends started later in the teen years, a habit that often stretched to adulthood.) So stacks of The Famous Five, Secret Seven, Hardy Boy -- the boys never read Nancy Drew for some reason, we were sexist that way -- and Biggles (to name a few) changed hands rapidly. Later, it was Agatha Christie, Leslie Charteris (whose real name was Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin and was born in Singapore), Micky Spillane, Earl Stanley Gardner, Ian Fleming -- gosh, there were so many. Then all that stopped as if the music suddenly died. So, what happened? I have wondered about that. I suspect what happened was adulthood.

Laura Miller says: ‘Amazon and other online merchants have harnessed mighty algorithms to run their "If you enjoyed that, you might like this ..." suggestion engines, but these are still crude instruments.’ Interestingly, I have not bought a single book recommended to me by a robot in the last ten years I have been buying a from Amazon. But then, I might be the freak here. Is there a survey to show the percentage of buyers who purchase the books that are suggested? Or is it only a ‘nice’ feature?

Then there are the Booker and Whitbread (now Costa) book awards. Unfortunately, it has been several years since I have been excited by anything on their lists. I don’t think I am alone, though. A story on The Telegraph which I reported here says (to summarise): only Ian McEwan's On Chesil Beach did well (according to Nielsen BookScan August 18 figures) selling 110, 615 copies. Mohsin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist sold 2918 copies and Lloyd Jones' Mister Pip,2802 copies. In fact, the five finalists' combined sales, besides Ian McEwan's, came to 10,155 copies. (These figures were released before the winner was announced.) Maybe it was an unusual year, but I think not. The figure seem to suggest that books by the usual suspects still sell. Is the role of Booker Prize (and other such awards) as the arbiter of good taste in books, over then?

So what turns readers on? Newspapers, magazine and blogs? As a bookseller for ten years, I’d say that the impact of reviews are minimal, except to create awareness. Yes, there are those who come in with cutouts of reviews, bestseller lists or titles they read about, but these are a minority. What does get a book going are the word-of-mouth recommendation. “This book is damn chun man. You have to read it,” as we did when we were kids. Or if it’s a book the government has made a fuss over, like Chin Peng or The Malaysian Maverick. (That never hurts sales.)

As an independent bookshop, one of our functions is to recommend books. This is the part we enjoy the most, particularly when the customer comes back for more. Having said that, recommending books is an art. We normally start with two questions: “What are you reading now?” and, “Who are your favourite authors?” The answers to these help narrow things down considerably. Then the next question will be, “Do want something similar or would you like to try something a little different?” At this point you might detect a little panic in some cases, because of the word ‘different’. “What are these weirdos going to suggest now?” People do like things to remain the same. Forever. That’s why books by usual suspects continue to sell, and that’s why publishers continue to churn them out.

The other problem is -- and one can blame the Booker and other prize committees for it -- the idea that good books are either difficult to read, boring or both. Unfortunately, this notion is also promoted by many literary types, especially reviewers. Our first criteria for a good read is the story. Second comes the part that is a source of much debate and disagreement: is it well written? We have discussed this in our previous posts. We like simple straightforward language. Elegance is a bonus. Ostentatious and overly florid language will be regarded the same as Corinthian columns in Taman Melawati: with disdain. Third, is added value -- is it a slice of life, a comment on the human condition, or does it contain little known information?

Good books are certainly not difficult to read, but not all readers are equal. Some read more than others. So throwing someone into the deep end is not helpful regardless of how much we like a particular book.

Salon.com

The death of the American novel?

And, by extension, judging from the amount of white noise generated in the book world by Lee Siegel’s piece in the New York Observer, ‘Where Have All the Mailers Gone?’, one would wonder the same about the anglophone novel. Maybe, death is an exaggeration. How about ‘terminally ill’ or ‘comatose’ then?

Most book people would have, by now, heard of critic Lee Siegel’s declaration of that American novel dead, though, anyone who has read his story will know, that is not exactly what he said. His assertion is: “ ... no one goes to a current novel or story for the ineffable private and public clarity fiction once provided ...” not because they don’t exist but because readers no longer consider them relevant. He says, “Without a doubt, the next male or female Hemingway, Faulkner or Fitzgerald is out there somewhere, hard at work,” but does anyone (meaning the public, not individuals) care?

Not surprisingly, most of the storm it has stirred up is in America with writers, critics and readers all taking up positions (or not, which is also one). The rest of the anglophone literary world looks on nervously, wondering nervously if the child is right, if the Emperor indeed has no clothes, that what they have been seeing has all been an illusion. The Daily Telegraph says defiantly, “People have been declaring the death of the novel ever since the first novelist, Petronius, held the first launch party 2,000 years ago, in Rome.” Bravado, wishful thinking, Dutch courage or whistling in the dark? Which is all understandable, of course, considering how scary the alternatives are, particularly to the status quo.

One of my best lecturers in engineering school was one Professor Chin. His advice for solving any problem was simple: “When in doubt, go back to first principles.” In the case of the book, I guess the basic question is, “Why do people read?” It sounds like a dumb question, but it isn’t. Why do people read? Indeed, why do I read? How did I start?

Okay. First, it was the story. Yes, it was always about the stories, and in them I could become whatever I wanted: a pirate, a private investigator, an adventurer, whales fighter, captain of a submarine, become invisible, defeat aliens ... oh God, the list was endless. Then, I discovered stories where one could learn interesting facts, often embedded within fiction, but sometimes outside of it. Still, it was always about the story, even when it was nonfiction. Third, was language, the deceptively simple but beautiful sentences, and turns of phrases, words that came to life. Finally, there were stories I read for what they said about me, about the world, about our condition, for the “ ... ineffable private and public clarity ...”

So, what happened? In the last few years, I have practically stopped reading anglophone writings, especially those from America, United Kingdom and India, except for a few by the ‘usual suspects’. They no longer set me on fire. They have become, largely, predictable and tiring. (Having said that, I admit I enjoyed the technique and inventiveness of Matthew Kneale, David Mitchell and Diana Setterfield.) The genre novels either insult your intelligence, or they are so fat due to padding that you have to skim and scan through them like you are reading a local newspaper. Anyway, they are written for fanboys and fangirls, not for normal people. As for the so called literary novels (yes, the boring, difficult ones), getting past the verbosity and onanistic excesses of the writers is becoming really exhausting, and there isn’t even a good story at the end of it, most of the time. (I end up skimming through them, too, if I don’t give up after ten pages.)

My favourite reads now are translated works. Yes, I can hear the collective groans. “But, so much is lost in translation,” you protest. I agree, but is that necessarily a bad thing, given the current state of the ‘literary’ genre? In translated works, I get to read and enjoy all the best European, South American, Caribbean, African, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, Korean ... anything that’s available, without the dysentery (much of which, thankfully, is either lost in translation, or not there). In translation, I am able to enjoy pithy stories, well told, and still look at different cultures as they are and not what Hollywood (or anyone else) thinks they should be.

When released, was Hemingway classified as literary? Was Harper Lee considered commercial? So who killed (or is killing) the novel. The writers? Writers write what they feel compelled to write. Whether or not they get published is not in their hands. They are, certainly, no dumber than those from earlier generations. Readers? They read for entertainment. If it is too much work, they’ll weigh the benefit and cost, and switch. Also, they are easily exploited by cynical marketing. The gatekeepers? Driven by the dollar, agents and publishers have steadily reduced the book to FMCGs -- fast moving consumer goods -- no different from shoes. Nothing more, nothing less.

Is there no hope for anglophone fiction, then? One recent good news was the opening of a hundred new independent bookshops in the last two years in the UK. Another one is the refusal of St Martin’s Press to pay Janet Evanovich $50 million for her next four books. Greed has to be stopped somewhere. If more publishers do that, there is a chance that anglophone fiction will become relevant again.

There is only one hope for the anglophone novel (like for everything else): bio-diversity. We could do worse than have more (preferably, small) publishers releasing new writers, and let the readers decide. Since most small publishers are poor, perhaps the money men will go elsewhere and sell sugared water, groceries or something.

Is there another Hemingway or Harper Lee out there? I am certain there is. May an independent publisher discover them.

For Saramago, death is only an interval

José de Sousa Saramago died on the 18 of June 2010, but apart from some bloggers, few in the country seemed to know, or care. I didn’t see anything in the newspapers, not even in the ‘books’ section. Jose who? Exactly.

When I read the BBC report on my laptop aloud in the shop, several people said, ‘Oh, no,’ as if I had just announced the death of someone they knew personally. In a way, we all did. Someone suggested we close the shop for the day. Saramago wouldn’t have liked that, I decided, and stayed open.

According to most reports, Saramago died of multiple organ failure after a long illness, although one said that he had breakfast and talked with his wife for a time before he was overcome by ill health and died.

Some regarded Saramago as the best writer in any language when he was alive. Now, his work will continue to live with those of the other all-time greats. I thought of writing an obituary, but then I said, “Will a writer like Saramago ever die? Wouldn’t it be better for him to be read, not mourned?” Below is an introduction to one of the greatest 20th century writers.

Saramago was a writer’s writer, an intellectual's writer, a humanist’s writer, a politician’s writer, among other things. When he was awarded a Nobel prize in 1998, he was reported to have said, “I was not born for all this glory.”

Although he was good in school, his family could not afford to keep him there and, at the age of twelve, he was enrolled in a technical school whereupon, after graduation, he worked as a car mechanic for two years. After that he worked as a translator, a journalist and an assistant editor.
He wrote his first novel when he was 25, and it was a flop. Then fifteen years later he started writing again -- mainly poems and plays. International recognition, however, eluded him until 1987 when Balthazar and Blimunda (which he wrote in 1982) was released internationally.

I have stopped reading writers to death (because there are so many wonderful writers and so little time), but I have made an exception of Saramago. His prose was lucid, unpretentious and direct. Despite his long sentences, I never got the feeling that he was difficult to read. He would replace full stops with commas, and didn’t believe in quotation marks (when the speaker changed, he simply capitalised the first letter and got on with it). In the hands of a lesser writer all this would have become tedious, but not with his works. His novels were fast paced and relentless, simultaneously comic and brutal. His were stories of the human condition, about the astounding capacity of man for tenderness or violence.

My first Saramago book was the History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989). Proofreader Raimundo Silva is assigned to correct a book by his publishing house. After much deliberation, he decides to ‘correct’ a crucial sentence by inserting the word "not" in the text. So the new version says that the Crusaders did not come to the aid of the Portuguese monarch in taking Lisbon from the Moors, which is contrary to the account in standard textbooks. According to ‘agreed’ history, the 1147 ousting of the Moors from Lisbon was the event that resulted in the formation of the Portuguese nation. He questions the nature of history and its relationship to truth and reality. In the end the reader is left wondering if the proofreader’s transgression resulted in a more accurate version of what really happened. As Malaysians, we are all too aware of how history can and is being changed, albeit with much less finesse than Raimundo Silva.

My attraction to Saramago has always been the universality of his writings -- a mark of all great writers. I always felt he was talking to me, the Malaysian. An epidemic of ‘white blindness’ struck the population of a fictitious country in Blindness (arguable his greatest work), leading to mass panic and the collapse of social order, highlighting the repression and ineptness of the government in dealing with the situation. It was so much like home -- a country suffering from 50 years of mass blindness with the blind fumbling as they led the blind ineptly, ruling the blind, abusing the blind, and raping the blind. Despite all that, many still prefer to remain blind, and seek comfort in the condition. No proper nouns are used throughout the book,  and characters are referred to merely as the doctor, the doctor’ wife, girl with dark glasses, and so on.

The sequel to it, Seeing, involving the same people in the same city; a few years on, people begin ‘seeing’ with bizarre results. On polling day, 83% of the votes cast are blank, as the party on the right, the party on the left and the party in the middle look on. Journalists and bureaucrats are bewildered. Citizens carry on with their lives. When asked whom they voted for, the citizens remind them politely that the question is illegal. Then the government goes berserk and becomes increasingly repressive as it looks for the ringleaders, though there are none.

Does all this sound familiar? Is voting meaningless?

Saramago was a member of the Communist Party and an atheist, but that did not stop him from writing The Gospel According to Jesus Christ about a very human Jesus up against a megalomaniac of a God, while the devil tempts him with hedonism. Some have condemned this books as ‘antireligious’ while other have praised it for its ‘philosophical and compelling’ approach to the subject. (He also wrote another book on religion called Cain - the first murderer. The book has just been released.)

Saramago was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature one year after he wrote The Tale of the Unknown Island. It is one of those children’s books that are not really for children. It is a slim volume -- about 50 pages -- with illustrations. It is a deceptively simple tale full of metaphors about hope, dreaming, politics and governance. Following is a quote from the book:
"...you have to leave the island in order to see the island that we can't see ourselves unless we become free of ourselves, Unless we escape from ourselves you mean, No, that's not the same thing."

The Stone Raft deals with a hypothetical situation in which the Iberian Peninsula breaks away from Europe and drifts into the Atlantic. What if the Malay Peninsula were to break off at the Isthmus of Kra and float away, together with Sumatra, into the Indian Ocean? How would history be written?

Translation blues

The most common Malaysian joke about translation is probably tahi suci, a literal rendering of ‘holy shit’ in Bahasa. Whether that was really the part of a cinema subtitle, or is merely another urban legend, is unclear. Another example often cited by cinema aficionados is tembak, tembak for ‘fire, fire’. Apparently, there were no guns involved in the story. (This problem is, by no means, confined to Malay. There are dozens of emails going around about Chinese translations. We were watching a presentation of the Beijing Opera at KLPac once. The organisers had helpfully decided to provide surtitles for the Cantonese illiterate, me included. Somewhere in the middle of the show, when an opera couple was frolicking in a make belief garden, a translation flashed, “... like butterflies fondling in the garden.” It was certainly a good rendering of the Chinese opera (for neophytes like me), but that translation simply took my breath away. I was speechless. “What ... what ... whaaat?”

Among the things we do to pay our rent, is the editing of works already translated from Malay to English. One of the earliest ones we did involved head-hunters in East Malaysia about 150 years ago. In one scene, the characters talk about a tiang belian, the ironwood main pillar of a longhouse, and this was translated as ‘purchased pillar’! Hah, you didn’t know that, did you? One hundred and fifty years ago, headhunters already had kedai runcit in the middle of the jungle selling pillars for longhouses! Then in another scene in the same novel, the hero is confronted by the leader of the hunters who beats and puffs his chest to show off  kejantananya. This was translated as ‘beat his chest and shows off his manhood ...’ Flasher ... flasher!

Do translators even read over their work before submission, or do they not know any better?

Since then, we have insist on having the Malay original with us when we edit. Can you imagine this going into the international market in that form? We pick out dozens of such boo-boos in almost every book. How about this one we came across recently: “... kami cuma ada sepasang anak lembu, satu jantan dan satu betina ...” translated as “... we only have a pair of cow children, one male and one female ...”

I swear, time stood still at that point. Oh my God, it was so bad, it’s good. An Olympic gold medalist? You bet.

Then there is the prose. How is this for starters: ... mengikut tradisi tradisional yang amat berdradisi (repeated about a 150 times throughout the book). That is ‘ ... following traditional traditions that are extremely traditional’. (One might be tempted to think that this is a sure winner at the Olympics of prose until one sees the rest.) I am not a Malay scholar. I admit my knowledge of the language is purely functional, but can anyone out there tell me that this is good Malay prose? How does one edit stuff like that?

Then there are writers who love the ‘bunga-bunga’ stuff. How about this one: “The little clusters of sadness had become an island of sorrow that squeezed her in the narrows of her old age.”

Hahhh?

I can hear some people go, “Isn’t it so-oo beautiful? Like poetry?” Really? Like poetry? I am no poet, but if that isn’t an insult to the form, I don’t know what is. As far as I know, poetry lives on the economy of words, and the preciseness of their usage. This, on the other hand, is built on verbosity, diarrhoea; a writer carried away with his or her cleverness. This is the kind of stuff fifteen-year-old schoolgirls and schoolboys write to impress their friends and teachers. Anyway, does the writer even know what he or she is trying to say? As a reader, I certainly don’t. I could pretend, of course, so as not to look stupid. Read a few hundred of those and see what it does to your sanity.

This is not confined to Malay prose, either. Not too long ago there was a book that compared an earring falling into a cereal bowl to a meteor. One customer said that, when she came across this passage on page 90, she decided she had had enough. Another tossed his book across the room. This author went on to win the Man-Booker Prize for that year. There certainly is no accounting for taste.

So what is good prose? Is it merely a matter of personal taste, then? As a publisher, I have been asked that often. What do I look for in a manuscript? Okay, let me try:

Good prose is one that does not obstruct the flow of the story, nor take the attention away from it, nor bury it under a pile of verbose crap. It is like a good computer operating system: user-friendly, easy to use and elegant. It remains unobtrusively in the background, getting the job of telling a good story without screaming out for attention like an obnoxious five-year-old, “Mummy, mummy, look what I have done. See how clever I am.” Good prose is not about the cleverness of the writer. If the writer is clever, it will show. Every word, every phrase and every sentence will have to satisfy the conditions of necessity and sufficiency to earn its right to remain on the page.

Some might say I set the bar too high. After all, we are only Malaysians.

Banish that thought if you are planning to send me a manuscript.

Why we publish

We have heard it said many times before, that publishing in this country, especially in English, is crazy. Very often, it appears that way. It does sometimes feel like such a monumental waste of time. We have heard this many times before: no one reads in this country. But, having been publishers for ten years now, the converse argument often appears equally valid: no one writes.

Certainly, I am putting myself on the line for some verbal bashing with that . So, let me clarify. One only has to walk into any of the dozen mega bookstores (or any of the frequent warehouse sales) in the country to witness the feeding frenzy. So, Malaysians do buy books, whether they them read or not. But, the fact remains that the vast majority of the books bought are American, British or Australian, that is foreign. Many Malaysians would go as far as to say that they only read imported books because local books are not good,though it is unclear what exactly they mean by it: the design, the paper quality, the cover, the writing, the plot, the way the characters are drawn ... what?

We have said this many many times: if one wants a customer to buy one’s book, one has to give him or her a very good reason to pick it up instead of any of the thousands of other titles in the store -- including all the foreign ones, dating back to Homer and before. As far as book selling goes, Malaysians are totally and completely globalised.

So, on a bookshop shelf, egalitarianism rules; Malaysian books stand at par with imported ones, and a customer has every right to demand to know why he/she should spend hard-earned money on your book and not another. Is it good enough? What do you have to say that is unique? How is the argument presented? Is the writing any good? Will I be embarrassed if I were to take your book out in public? Etc, etc, etc. Life is so-oo difficult.

(We have also had customers ask why local books are so expensive. This book is RM30.00, and it has only 180 pages. That is more than 16 sen a page. How can? How much does it weight? What, 275 gms? That is almost 11sen a gramme, RM110.00 a kilo! That's too much. What is it about? Is there anything about May 13 in it? No? Why not? So what if it is a book on flower arrangement? It is Malaysian, isn’t it? Surely all Malaysian books must have something about the May 13th incident ... it can’t be much good then, can it? We do have all sorts of customers.)

For Malaysian publishing to survive, there has to be a credible book industry. Expect no help from the Government and, certainly, no handouts. Even a level playing field seems too much to ask. A media, less interested in glamour and more in news could be helpful, but don’t hold your breath.

Still, we persist. Why? Firstly, we don’t think Malaysians don’t read. Secondly, we believe Malaysian writers (living in Malaysia) can compete with international writers -- Shih-Li Kow did beat Booker winner Kazuo Ishiguro and Whitbread winner Ali Smith to the shortlist of the Frank O'Connor Award -- and Malaysians living abroad, and that too without ‘pandering’ to the Western reader (or the kukumars* amongst us) with the stereotype and the dubiously exotic. (When the Slumdog Millionaire circus came to town, we heard these comments. The first was from a Malaysian who said, "(Sitting in the cinema) I could imagine those mat-sallehs around me going, 'Oh it's so wo-onderful. Isn't is so-oo Indian,' every time AR Rahman's music score came on with another 'wretched-Indian' scene." The next one was from a white expatriate lady from South Africa who found the whole spectacle quite insulting. "This is exactly what they do to Africa all the time," she said.)

Thirdly, we know of many Malaysian readers (unlike those mentioned above) who are quite willing to pay for Malaysian writing, for its unique content, voice and experience. And finally, when we discover (or develop) a writer who is as good as any internationally, who sets a standard for writing and story-telling in the country, we get a major buzz. (That does not mean we don't know how much work the author has put into it.)

But  independent publishing can be a minefield, (unlike large publishing houses which are protected by several layers of anonymity).

Here is an example. One author (self published) who met a Silverfish staff on the street, wanted to know why we published so-and-so. She added that she didn't think Silverfish published 'that sort of thing'. What sort of thing? The answer should have been pretty straight forward: he is a good storyteller, he is entertaining, he is authentic and he is honest. Of course, we could not tell her that because her real question was, "Why are you publishing him, and not me?" Yes, life is so-oo difficult.

Note:
kukumars* -- a derogatory  term used in some parts of India to describe those who used to work as cooks in British households, who learned to wear dresses,  eat with tools, and (generally) refuse to speak any language other than English.

Why people write

I heard an interesting story recently about a boy who received a book from a girl he knew in school a few years ago (though they were not particularly close, according to him), but with whom he never really kept in touch, busy with his own life. How she obtained his address, he doesn’t know, but he thinks it was through friends of friends of friends. Anyway, the book was one of her own (self-published, or what, I do not know) with a personal message inside: I am a published author now, what about you?

Was it a challenge, a brag, revenge, or simply an inquiry -- nothing to say but, “What a day, how is your boyfriend?”

This brings us to 'why people write'. Although getting rich is still the prime motivator, fame, even if only as a dilettante, is a close second. Certainly, there are many who "simply must write”, though in most case the infatuation soon passes. Even so, this adds one more reason to the list. It is often said that everyone has a story within, to which others have, cynically, replied, “Perhaps, it should remain there.” Still, many want to write.

Obviously there are many forms of writing: for newspapers, magazines and websites, or, blogs, facebook, twitter, etc. But, the most curious of all is the need to get published -- to get a book out before one is sixteen, or twenty-one, or whenever, or just get one out. Is it the pull of immortality, knowing that a book is not transient, not ephemeral, that it has more than the one day lifespan of a newspaper story, or even a blog? Is it the burning desire to make the world a better place? To tell others how to lead their lives? Or is it about putting yourself out there, stark naked, for every one to gaze at, criticise and laugh. It is scary.

Why this strange affectation?

I read this on the internet: “Young people when asked what they want to do in life rarely give a sensible answer, firefighter, racing driver or rock star, spring to mind. However, an alarming number reply ‘a writer’ simply because they are under the illusion they could be creative in that profession or medium ... People believe writing requires no special talent, but is something humanity and human beings in general are able to do.”

Writing requires no special talent. Ah, how often have we met people who profess that. Then, there are those who consider themselves to be very special indeed (albeit, grievously misunderstood), even if they really aren’t, or are only marginally so. There are some who are certainly exceptionally talented but prefer (or remain trapped in) other things for various reasons. But, there are those who enjoy telling stories, spinning a good yarn, besides reading them. They make up stories for their children, their grandchildren, and for their friends and family.

This an extract from another article on the internet: “People start writing books as a way of putting their thoughts or ideas into words. They might also feel the urge to let others know what they are thinking. Some might be avid readers, who might want to venture out into the field of writing. There might also be people who want their ideology to be shared or sometimes even forced down on people's minds ...”

Whatever.

We know that many want to be writers, for whatever reason, but few succeed. Obviously, knowing what you want to do -- that is, write -- is insufficient. There is, obviously, the next step. How? How does one go about doing it? Writing classes and workshops? These will certainly top the list on many minds, and it is undeniable that one can learn a few ‘tricks of the trade’ there. But, there is also the danger of becoming serial course attendees. We know of many.

Actually the first ‘how’ is pretty basic. Don’t talk about writing, don’t think about writing, just write. Everyday. Every single day. If one wants to become a concert pianist, can one achieve one’s goal by not practising the scales for several hours everyday? For years? Answer this truthfully: when was the last time you wrote something creatively? When you were fifteen years old in school, trying to impress your friends? When you were ten, trying to impress your parents? Betty Edwards says that the average adult has the drawing skills of a twelve-year-old, because that was the last time they were allowed to draw creatively. Go figure.

The second is also very basic. Read. Yes, read, read, read and read. Not one book, not two books. Hundreds, thousands. In all subjects. By as many authors as you can. Far too many want to become authors after reading only one book. Can one become a concert pianist if one has listened only to one piece of music, or not at all?

The third ‘how’ is time. Yes, give it time. Say, you are 35 years old, and the last time you did a creative piece of work was when you were 15. And, the only thing you have done creatively since is fill up your income tax form. Now, you have twenty years of catching up to do. While it is not going to take you that long to write, you are not going to achieve anything much in the next two weeks, two months, or even two years.

Now that you have decided that you want to become a writer, and you know how you are going to go about becoming one, there still remains one major hurdle. Absolutely, the most important one. Why? Yes, why do you want to write? If your answer is fame and fortune, please join the queue -- there are only fifty million people ahead of you. And while you are at it, go buy yourself a lottery -- you will have a far better chance of winning the jackpot.

You write because you have to write. Why does Farish A Noor write? To become rich and famous? He writes because of the fire that burns within. Shih-Li Kow, too, writes to douse those same flames, though she prefers fiction. And Salleh ben Joned. And Karim Raslan ... they write because they think they have something to say, something important. They write about the world they want to live in. They write about their wishes, their dreams. They write about hope, even when they laugh about it, or cry in despair. Time and air and light and space have, really, nothing to do with it.

And finally, there is kiasu, afraid to lose, takut kalah. If you do something, there is a chance you may lose. If you do nothing, you cannot lose. Really? It this the Malaysian malaise, or is the reverse true? Takut menang. Are we so terrified of winning, of being relevant, that we can only subsume ourselves in mediocrity? If we want a world record, we choose a sport that no one else plays: tossing roti canai. If we want the world’s tallest building, we buy it.

Is takut menang what the badminton team suffers from?

Ether Books: the iTunes of short stories?

iTunes was introduced by Apple Inc on January 9, 2001, at the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. In 2003, Apple opened the iTunes Music Store and started a revolution in the music industry, one song at a time. At the time, the music industry was in turmoil over illegal downloads, and they were suing everyone in sight. (Does anyone remember Napster?) Enter Apple. In order to make it (legal downloads) to work, though, they had to convince the music industry to unbundled their albums and sell songs one at a time. That was not easy, but with a sufficiently strong reality distortion field they managed to convince the naysayers. The iTunes store started with 200,000 songs on its list (with DRM protection and all that to satisfy the industry). To date, some 10 billion songs have been downloaded.

Sophia Bartleet is now trying to do the same with Ether Books by launching an iPhone application that will allow readers to download short stories from the likes of Hilary Mantel, Alexander McCall Smith and (maybe) Shih-Li Kow, starting at GBP0.50. Sophia Bartleet thinks this will be “the renaissance of the short story."

Ether Books was launched at the London Book Fair recently. Currently, Ether Books bypasses publishers to sign up authors directly, and the application will initially be available only on the iPhone and iPod Touch. (It could be available for other devices in the future.) At the time of the launch Ether Books had 200 pieces from authors ranging from Hanif Kureshi to Paul McCartney.

It is a pretty modest start and there is no mention about how profits will be shared. That a service such as this will be a boon to short story writing is not a doubt. But will it be commercially viable? While I am totally supportive of the underdog, I believe that in a that runs on the hyperbole world, if you want to be noticed, you have to be big. Ether Books needs a lot more than 200 stories. Obviously, I have no way of knowing if she is a Steve Jobs, but I think she needs at least 20,000 stories up there to start with.

Will readers pay 50p for a story? It is nice to think that they would. In fact, I hope they do. But comparisons with the music industry are a little off, to say the least. When iTunes music store was introduced for legal downloads, music piracy was rampant. Apple bet that at least some of those involved in the illegal activity were (or had parents who were) honest  or sufficiently risk averse not to want to (or want their children to) end up on the ‘other side of the law’ with all its, real or imagined, dire consequences. It was, potentially, a huge market.

Unfortunately the same cannot be said for the short story. There is no rampant piracy going on worldwide. One even wonders if there is a demand. In an era where bragging rights are the most sought after of currencies -- money is no good if you can’t buy something with it that you can show off -- downloaded short stories in a mobile device are not terribly sexy. Cool is, queuing up in the freezing cold overnight for a Harry Potter or Dan Brown book, no matter how daft that is.

Still, I am optimistic. There will be the big names, of course, with their fan boys. But, strangely, I think that this market actually belongs to the small guys who live on the fringe -- literally. Imagine a one stop (online) shop with thousands of short stories from small publishers from over a hundred countries all over the world -- from Asia, Africa, Europe, Americas, everywhere. Who will be the buyers? The more serious minded, I should think; those who'd like to sample writings from around the globe; academics who might consider teaching some of the stuff they find, and students who will be required to study and write about them, at a cost that is a lot less than the price of a hardback or even a paper back. I think it would be a small market, but an extremely important one.

It could open up all sorts of opportunities. It could actually revive the short story form and put it back where it belongs. We have  customers who bemoan the ‘death’ of the short story, and we have those who say they ‘preferred’ to read novels, like as if they have moved on to the more ‘difficult’ stuff. (I use to think that when I was fifteen years old.) Then there are those who confess that they really cannot understand many of the short stories they read. Yes, liked in the case of all writing, there are many that require a PhD to understand.

The short story is a demanding form where every word, every sentence has to earn its right to live on the page(s). There is no room for laziness or obesity like in a novel. Hilary Mantel confesses in an interview with the BBC that it took her 12 years, on and off, to write her short story which is now available for download from Ether Books, and she certainly does not want it to be forgotten.

Here’s wishing Sophia Bartleet, and the Ether Books team, all the best in the venture, and thank you for trying to make a difference. Cheers.

Listen to the BBC World Service radio show with Sophia Bartleet, Hilary Mantel and others.

The end of an era

Personanondata writes in a story entitled The Physical Book Forever After: "Many believe the physical book will disappear within in the next ten years yet the example of the music CD suggests the future of the book may be more nuanced."

The ebook question crops up every time I give a public talk (or a lecture) on the subject of publishing and writing. The first time was at a Rotary meeting at a downtown hotel about six years ago. Do ebooks mean the end of "normal" books?

I remember saying at that time that the technology was not quite in place yet; the hardware, the software, and the internet were quite there yet, though they could catch up. But more importantly, they would have to sort out the financial model, which they will, too. But still it will not be the end for the physical book entirely; they will have to coexist for quite a while.

To quote another line from the blog by Personanondata: "... after more than ten years of both legitimate and illegitimate access to down loadable music, the humble CD together, with its environmentally challenged jewel case continues to represent over 75% of music sold." (This despite the music industry being in such shambles.)

Fast forward to 2010, and I am still asked the same question. The answers to some of the questions have changed but, for others, it remains the same. Do we have the technology now? Yes. Have they sorted out the financial model? More or less. Will the physical book die? Nope.

Yes, there was another round of the "death dance" by the media when the Kindle was released two years ago. No figures have been released by Amazon, but some analysts estimate about two or three million sold in that period, and the ebook market is currently thought to be about 5% of the total. There is no question that the publishing industry is in serious trouble, but it is mainly their fault, not that of the ebooks. (A Mail Online report on 30th Dec 2009 said: "Nielsen Bookscan has found that of 86,000 new titles published in the UK in 2009, 59,000 sold an average of 18 copies." Do we need to say more?)

I met Adrian the other day and he was saying how he met someone going on a holiday and had a Kindle with him with everything he wanted (or intended) to read. Cool, he thought. Yes, true. But with an iPad I’ll be able to take along a few books, DVDs, games, my entire music collection and a whole bunch of magazines too. The Kindle is already, so, last year. (Out of the estimated 2-3 million sold, I wonder how many have already become shelf ornaments?)

Then recently, I came across this story: Alice for the iPad in MacWorld. Then, I went into the iPad store for a peek: "Tilt your iPad to make Alice grow big as a house, or shrink to just six inches tall. Enjoy Alice in Wonderland digitally remastered for the iPad.Throw tarts at the Queen of Hearts - they realistically bounce off her. Witness the Cheshire Cat disappear, and help the Caterpillar smoke his hookah pipe. This wonderful book includes 52 pages and 20 amazing animated scenes.??Watch as full screen physics modeling brings illustrations to life." All this for
USD8.99.

I want it, I want it, I want it! I want it now!

Someone has finally figured out what an ebook is all about, all in true multimedia too. If this doesn't get kids reading, nothng will. It is not about boring black and white text, it is about multimedia. Imagine what this will do to magazines and newspapers, to books on cooking, travel, sports, celebrities, anything with graphics. Thank God for it. I will certainly buy an iPad, or a device like it. Now, I can buy it without any guilt, without having to feel I am betraying my entire over-40-year collection of books.

All my hardbacks that I have bought over the years to collect, to talk about and adorn my shelves, will continue to stand proud in their finest jackets, with nothing to fear. Nor will my first editions feel slighted. I can continue to display and brag about them. (Yes, I am sad that way.) Even my-well read, yellowed, tattered paperbacks, some from my student days but which I still dip into now and then, will know that their place is safe. (By the way, can any digital file last as long? All my hard disks crash in less than 5 years.)

The book is dead. The book is dead. Long live the book.

The class system in literature

Some years ago, when we were still in Desa Seri Hartamas, we were roundly scolded by one of our customers for selling John Grisham titles in Silverfish Books and having the audacity to display the titles in front of the shop. "You are not that type of bookshop," we were told, quite emphatically. Our only response was a very sheepish, "Just trying, lah. Experiment, lah." (For the record, we couldn't sell even one of his books and had to return them all -- it was a failed experiment.)

So what type of bookshop are we? We did have an idea of the type of bookshop we wanted to be when we set it up in mid-1999, right in the middle of an economic (and political) turmoil. It was before the mega bookshop era, and Skoob Books was the only decent bookshop in town. It was a time when chain bookstores had a section for "mature readers", leading to much doubt, introspection and mental trauma. Do I qualify? What if the cashier asks questions? What if she can smell fear? What if they ask for a blood sample to determine my DNA to ascertain I am mature enough? What if I fail the test? What if my friends laugh at me?

Sigh. Life was so-oo difficult.

Anyway, we wanted a bookshop with books we'd want to read, a book boutique as it were, and our customers have made sure we did not deviate from the path. They helped shape the character of Silverfish Books as much as we did, maybe more. And, consequently, we have received both bouquets and brickbats. On the upside we have been called a 'real' bookshop, a 'good' bookshop and a ‘serious’ bookshop. And, on the downside we have been called snobs, hoity-toity and, also, serious.

Book selling has many similarities with the rag trade. There are the boutiques run by designers (or those who pretend to be) for those who care. Then there are the supermarkets selling every damn thing for the consumer. And, there are the reject shops selling overruns, defective merchandise or stuff that has been on shelves for a while, for those who care less, a lot less. Basically, this is true of bookshops too.

Ian Rankin is reported to have said recently that "crime novelists have been placed at the bottom of our literary hierarchy". He was, of course speaking of the British literary scene where poets are generally regarded to be on top, followed by playwrights, and then 'literary' novelists. And after that come people who write crime, thrillers and on espionage, followed by the bottom feeders who do the rest of the stuff which we need not go into.

Some of the class system certainly seems to have filtered down to the colonies. (We shall not go into details, for we fear the wrath.) Personally, we do not subscribe to it at all (no matter how others might view us). There are good books, and there are bad books. Period. We do not necessarily have to like a book to accept some will consider it good, and vice versa. We do have a bias for good prose, though. Poor or lazy writing is so off-putting.

So, we choose every book we put on our shelves, but we do wish we have more resources to buy much more titles we like, quite a lot more. Certainly, we don't want to order every title on the list. (I have written before about why a book is not a shoe.) Unfortunately, poetry and plays are the first to be sacrificed because they really don't sell very well.

There is a rumour out there that good books are hard to read, or that good books are boring. So far, we have little evidence of that. It is a fact, good books make you think. In fact, they mandate thinking. Now, if thinking is considered hard work, then that is another matter.

For the original article see The Guardian

Censorship and the stupidification of a nation

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, Paris-based media rights watchdog, Reporters Without Borders, has listed Australia along with Iran and North Korea in a report on countries that pose a threat of internet censorship. So, another one bites the dust. Join the club. This is how it all begins. Been there, done that, wearing the T-shirt.

Censorship always provokes extreme emotional responses. Proponents deflect it by, self-righteously frothing in the mouth, arguing Asian (or any such) values. But Kamasutra is also banned in this country. Well, so much for that. Or maybe they think it comes from Europe.

The opponents can go on and on about freedom of speech and human rights, which are not noble thoughts and arguments, but mean nothing in the face of naked power. I was once persuaded to attend a meeting on censorship organised by a local NGO, and managed to piss off almost everyone. "Look, I have heard plenty about human rights and freedom of speech and all that today," I said. "You really don't need to convince me. I belong to the converted. You have to decide how you'd preach to the unconverted, explain to them why freedom of speech is better than censorship."

So, is freedom of speech better than censorship?

To quote US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes (not that I consider the US to be a paragon in respect of either human rights or freedom of speech -- censorship takes many insidious forms), "... ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas -- that the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market ..."

In other words: every idea has a right to exist, and has to be allowed to exist and compete freely with other views, particularly the entrenched ones, in a marketplace of ideas. While the benefit of this to the individual and to the country is obvious, why should naked power care? If one were the incumbent, why would, or should, one care about any view other than one's own, even if it is better, particularly if it threatens one's position of power?

John Stuart Mills, in his essay On Liberty, is clearer. "The peculiar evil of silencing the expression of an opinion is, that it is robbing the human race; posterity as well as the existing generation; those who dissent from the opinion, still more than those who hold it. If the opinion is right, they are deprived of the opportunity of exchanging error for truth: if wrong, they lose, what is almost as great a benefit, the clearer perception and livelier impression of truth, produced by its collision with error."

So, censorship is a lose-lose proposition. In short, it robs the nation and its people of the benefit of new ideas. Nothing can explain it more clearly than the case of Galileo (although there are thousands of other examples). Stephen Hawking says, "Galileo, perhaps more than any other single person, was responsible for the birth of modern science." Galileo's unstinting support of Copernicus heliocentric theory (which many other chicken-shit philosophers and physicist of the time supported, but dared not speak out in support), which was in direct opposition to the geocentric view held by the church, earned him a date with the inquisition and lifelong house arrest. But, if it weren't for the likes of him we would, certainly, never have had the iPhone.

Still, it does not solve the power equation. There are long-term benefits of free speech, certainly, but why should one care if one were in power, for surely one would have no desire to lose it? Why should one not simply let the country rot, as long as one can enrich oneself? There are enough examples of that in the world today.

Bertrand Russell wrote (okay, I confess, he was my schoolboy hero, and I was a nerd, but I also read Batman): "An attitude of obedience, when it is exacted from subordinates, is inimical to intelligence. In a community in which men have to accept, at least outwardly, some obviously absurd doctrine, the best men must become either stupid or disaffected. There will be in consequence, a lowering of intellectual level, which must, before long, interfere with technical progress. This is especially true when the official creed is one which few intelligent men can honestly accept."

He said further: "The Nazis have exiled most of their ablest Germans, and this must, sooner or later, have disastrous effects on their military technique." Now, this was written before the start of the Second World War. We all know what happened after that.

In the sixties our universities were world-class, the pride of the developing world, among the best in Asia. Now, we struggle to be counted. Students, those who can afford to, go overseas. They don't even want to consider attending a local one if they can help it, whatever the quota. As for the quality of the graduates, one need only ask our employers. Since the eighties we have lost thousands of our skilled workers overseas, not for reasons of economics, but due to real or imagined sense of injustice and an intolerable climate of intellectual asphyxiation. We have lost the battle to attract the life saving FDI because our workers are no longer considered competitive. Our civil service is constantly in the press, fire-fighting the results of poor decision-making. We hear of police confiscating books from shops one day, and ministers promoting reading the next. Even our football team is languishing. It is as if thinking itself has been outlawed.

Some may point to the eighties when civil servants were told to sit up, shut up, and punch clocks, when we sacrificed our young at the altar of Mammon for some to get unbelievably rich, when bad news was banned, when argument and debate ended, and when wisdom flowed from only one source. It was the end of dissent, the end of thought.

Now the high points in our life include talking about roti canai tossing competitions in Subang Jaya and teh tarik experiments in outer space. Oh yes, we also have a committee for winning Nobel Prizes.

Stupidification is not a condition, it is a process. We are not born stupid, but we can get there if we try hard enough.

Censorship by harassment

"... there is a widespread belief that doctrinal uniformity is essential to national strength," Bertrand Russell wrote in his treatise on power in 1938. But he also said, "... the most successful nations, throughout modern times, have been those least addicted to the persecution of heretics."

I remember reading these years ago when I was in school, and I wondered if Russell's views can somehow be proven wrong, without anyone noticing, that is. In Malaysia, 'book police' are back in the news after a short absence. Interestingly, this has happened very soon after Sister in Islam (SIS) won its court battle over the 'banning' of one of its books. Sorry for the cynicism, but one cannot help but wonder. It could be a coincidence, of course, but Malaysia does have a pretty long track record for 'censorship by harassment'.

Censorship is probably as old as writing itself, but it took on a whole new dimension from the 12th to the 16th century in Europe. Basically, reading was outlawed to all but the clerics since they were the only ones allowed to interpret the Bible. Lay people were lay people, sheep, or rakyat, not endowed with enough intelligence to make any decision for themselves. With the invention of the Gutenberg press and the printing of the Gutenberg Bible, things really came to a head. In theory, any lay person who could read, or was suspected of being able to do so, or, god forbid, be in possession of a Bible, was arrested, imprisoned, tortured and/or killed by various methods including being burnt at the stake, hanged, drawn and quartered, pulled apart by horses, drowned, impaled, and several other creative means. In reality, many were political opponents, or those who had gone out of favour, or merely casualties of random victimisation. By some estimates, 9 million people lost their lives, and many more -- presumably those who repented -- were left lame.

We all know how that ended. 'Censorship through terror' did not work then, and never has. Throughout history, 'book police' have always lost. But that does not seem to stop them.

Certainly, our own home grown variety of 'book police' are not quite that crude. Some years ago, we put up a list of so-called banned books on our website, 'so-called' because many were not actually banned by the Ministry. We do not know what actually happened in the background after that, but we can guess. All of a sudden there was a deafening silence from every direction; book distributors refused talk to us, especially about that dreaded 'b' list. It was as if omerta, a code of silence, had come into force. Many books we wanted to order became unavailable. Many distributors refused to import books for us, even if we paid them in advance, particularly if it had a 'banned' word in the title, or on the possibility that cover design could offend one ultra-sensitive individual living in Batang Berjuntai, or somewhere. (No prizes for guessing the words.)

The recent confiscation of multiple copies of several titles from bookshops around the country is interesting. Firstly these books have been in the market for over a year and anyone who wants one has already bought it. It could be another case of closing the stable doors after the horses have gone, something we do have a track record for. Or, it could be something more sinister.

Why do enforcement officers -- what an ostentatious name, indeed -- need to take multiple copies of a book if they only want to 'read them' for anything prejudicial to the security of the country, even if they say please. Wouldn't one copy do? Couldn't they get one from the publishers?

Recently, several copies of the first two titles were taken from one outlet of a chain stores on grounds that the books might have 'suspicious content'. A memo went out to its other outlets to have them all to be removed from the shelves. Diabolical, but effective. The bookstore will get a credit note from the distributor, who will in turn get one from the publisher. And the bookstore will, in future, be very hesitant to sell other titles by the same authors, or from the 'offending' publisher. (Remember the Salman Rushdie incident: although only one title is officially banned, all others have become endangered species in the country.) Why bother to ban books and have that gazette challenged in court, when this is so much more effective?

Inquiries are probabley a waste of time, omerta might already be in force.

Why I don't join book clubs

Reading Motoko Rich's story, The Book Club With Just One Member, I couldn't help thinking that she was writing about me. I love to read, but I really do not like to talk about books I read, which puts me a bind sometimes, being a bookseller and a publisher. When people walk into the store and ask me for a good read, it is quite easy. But when they ask me what the book is about, I get stumped. First of all, does a book have to be about something? Secondly, a good book is about many things, all at the same time, and that is its beauty. And different people will walk away from it taking different things with them, and the book will still remain whole. But, usually, I can tell them quite easily what a book is not about: it is not self-help, it is not management, and so on.

Fortunately, most of my customers do not expect a blow-by-blow account of the entire plot. All I need to tell them is how the prose leaves a pleasant after-taste in the mouth, or how full-bodied and big it is, or warn them that 'this is strong stuff'. Yes, it is almost like describing wine. Most understand, even love my suggestions, but a few will still want to know, "So, what is the story about?"

I have never liked taking apart a book, even when I was young, particularly ones I liked, I considered good. Thank God I didn't major in literature. All that deconstruction would have killed it for me. I often recommend good books to others, of course, but a 'you must read this' or a 'read this and tell me what you think' will be the extent of my spin. And all I would want in response would be a 'wow' or an 'oh my God!'. In my world, good books must be savoured and enjoyed whole, not talked about to death.

Certainly, I am obsessive. I do understand book clubs and the roles they play, and why people like to join them, even online ones. Why, I have even helped organise several, but I have preferred not to become a member of any. If I read something and I like, or can relate to a line, a sentence, a phrase or even a word, I do not like to strip it, take it apart, and parade it naked in front of a dozen prying eyes in public. Go on now, go! Go find your own personal moment, line, phrase, word or whatever! Go, parade that all you want, if you want. For me, let me enjoy my private moments with my books, moments that will live with me for years, or decades. I might mention it to someone special, someone close, someone whom I know will understand, in private as if at a confession. But, I would prefer not to go starkers in public.

So, that is why I do not join book clubs. Please do not misunderstand. It is nothing personal. Please join as many clubs as you want, and enjoy them. As Motoko Rich says, "The collective literary experience certainly has its benefits. Reading with a group can feed your passion for a book, or help you understand it better. Social reading may even persuade you that you liked something you thought you didn't."

But I am different. You might have heard the saying, "If you can talk about it, it ain't Tao." Or, to quote Louis Armstrong, "If you have to ask what jazz is, you'll never know." Reading, for me, is like that. It is a total body experience.

Read Motoko Rich's story in the New York Times

Read more local literature?

OPINION: Read more local literature?

As reported by Lester Kong in The Star: "Malaysian youths must be exposed to more local literature that highlight noble values like respect and responsibility", said Education Minister Tan Sri Muhyiddin Yassin, in his opening speech during the 18th HSPM (Malaysia Premier Literary Award) prize-giving ceremony on the 18th of January 2010.

“Reading high-quality literature needs to be encouraged because it is the best way to inculcate the culture of knowledge and instil positive values in our youths,” the Minister of Education is reported to have said, which makes one wonder who wrote that speech? Interesting sound bites, but the cynic in one does not expect anyone to hold his (or her) breath. Haven't we heard all this before?

It was another one of those 'don't know whether to laugh or cry' moments Malaysians are becoming increasingly familiar with. Get this: this was an awards ceremony for books in Bahasa Malaysia that were published in the 2004/2005 and the 2006/2007 period! Now, how sad is that! They were giving out prizes for five-year-old publications, many of which are probably out of print by now. Was someone sleeping on the job or was it not considered important enough?

According to kawat.blogspot.com, out of the 40 awards for the 2006/2007 period, there were no recipients for seven categories, the most glaring of which was 'Drama'. Was there not even one drama written or produced in Bahasa at all in 2007/2008? Or was there no 'acceptable' drama? (If Singaporeans can stage good dramas in Bahasa, why not Malaysians?) Also in this 'no show' category were short stories and poems for youths and children. Looks like nobody writes these, either. One question comes to mind though: were these awards only given to books published by DBP? How about all books published by all publishers in Bahasa (including those from the fringe)? And if we truly want to give out Malaysian Literary Awards, how about including all books published in all languages in Malaysia, some of which have received international acclaim (not to mention awards)?

The Minister also called on creative workers to take advantage of loans under the RM200mil Creative Industry Fund announced in the 2010 Budget, challenging local writers and publishers to enter the global literature market.

This is an extract from the 2010 budget speech by the Prime Minister under

PROMOTING CREATIVE INDUSTRY:

57. The creative industry has the potential to be further developed and contribute to economic growth. This industry encompasses performing arts and music, design animation, advertisement and content development. To coordinate the development of the various segments of the industry, the Government will

First Formulate a comprehensive Creative Industry policy for the development of the creative industry;

Second Establish a RM200 million Creative Industry Fund to finance activities such as film and drama productions, music, animation, advertisement and local content development. The fund managed by Bank Simpanan National will provide soft loans. The loan application procedure will also be simplified; and

Third Establish Tabung Kebajikan Penggiat Seni to ensure the welfare of artistes. For this, a launching grant of RM3 million will be provided.

Has anyone seen any rules for this? In our minds, jaded by decades of conditioning, one would automatically assume that those who create in English, Chinese and Tamil need not apply. Would that be a wrong assumption?