Welcome to the future. The joyous business of immersing oneself in the prose, ideas and stories of someone who may not even have appeared on television may soon begin to seem rather too much like hard work, faintly futile and distinctly old-fashioned.Terblacker aol
More from Terence Blacker. When publishers and booksellers discover that there is easy money to be made from the snappily packaged, unread works of celebrities, the books that lose out are those – both popular and literary – which demand editing, and imaginative marketing based on content rather than the name on the cover.More seriously, perhaps, reading itself becomes infected. In the modern publishing business, where displays in the front of the big bookshops are bought by the big conglomerates and where investment goes on the sure-fire titles with a famous name attached, their dominance is assured.The problem is that something has to give.
The words they contain are, in a sense, the least important part of the product and, this is why the fact that they may have been written by a ghostwriter matters little to most buyers.It is the object itself that matters – the book that represents in a tangible form the personality whose name it bears. By contrast, the books which have turned so many of the large bookshops into museums to contemporary celebrityhood are as exterior as the author photographs on their covers. The news has been most restricted and they will also be the places where getting aid in will be most difficult. Roads and airports can bring in aid just as efficiently as they bring in tourists; internet cafes disperse real news just as effectively as friendly e-mails. Look at how much quicker the news has travelled from Phuket or the Sri Lanka resorts than it has from Aceh which remained a black hole for news for days after the waves struck, even though it is probably the worst-hit region.For the reasonably intrepid the time to head back to countries where closed doors are reopening is also sooner than the powers that be recommend. With names like The Underblenge, Munty Flumble, The Grundit, they have weird habits which are summarised in brief, zany captions.These kinds of nonsensical creations, the knackered descendants of great absurdist work from Lear, Gorey, Nash and Milligan, are much more difficult to write and draw than most people think, and the publishers who turned down Gervais’s cartoons were probably right.
His pictures and jokes are the sort of doodling work which is privately amusing but which would not, under normal circumstances, be original enough to merit publication.These circumstances, as the publisher who answered the knock of those four Baftas rightly surmised, were far from normal. We read to be able to show off at dinner parties, or to make ourselves feel as if we are on the cultural cutting edge, or to provide some of the things – action, laughter, sex, the possibility of change – that may be lacking in our real lives.But however base the motives for reading a book, however transitory the hit that it provides, the experience is an intimate one; it tangles with our inner lives. Those who bought Gervais’s book were not spending money that they would otherwise have spent on the latest novel from AL Kennedy or David Mitchell – indeed, because Flanimals is published by the impeccably serious house of Faber, one could argue that the profits from its sales might well help less starry, literary authors to be published.But, looking down the list of the year’s bestsellers, it is difficult not to conclude that the act of reading itself is in the process of being changed. The vast majority of buyers, booksellers reported, were adult fans who were buying the book for themselves.It would be silly and snobbish to wring one’s hands every time a mediocre book found success because its author was famous.