I’ve met John Metcalfe and enjoyed his company in person, even though I seldom agree with him in print… That said, you can pretty much just shoot me in the face if I ever do something that Barbara Kay feels needs defending… I’ll obviously be in the wrong… I’d say she sounds like a broken record, but I don’t think records have been invented yet in her timeline;
Instead of the rabble of depressives, shirkers, grudge nursers, monomaniacs, and dogs in the manger that we know most great writers to be, Fletcher portrays the authors covered in Wonderworks as a gang of spunky Thomas Edisons, each intent on coding a new storytelling app whose value proposition is to improve our “daily mental health and happiness.” For thousands of years, the world’s great writers have provided “solutions” to problems people didn’t even realize they had, Fletcher declares, using the power of neuroscientific principles that hadn’t been discovered yet.
We’re back on track here on The Rock, with only one active case in the province after our flare up of the British variant last month. Now we go down to level 2 tomorrow and we’re emerging back into the light like vole coming out of the earth in Spring. Here’s hoping it sticks this time. Steady as she goes, b’ys.
Did you know there’s a book TikTok? I mean, I thought it was just all cute babies and mushroom foraging… And what amounts to children dancing in bikinis;
I’m going to be honest with you: pretty much everything gives me anxiety these days. Anxiety is all around me and in me. I can feel it like a foreign body under the skin. I wallow in it. I medicate and self-medicate against it. But it envelops me like I’m a litter of unwanted kittens and it’s a burlap sack weighted with stones being tossed off a bridge. I want to not be anxious, and I can even see a life of free of anxiety just over there, but I can’t quite commit to getting there. I live in anxiety the way a prehistoric fish with proto-legs lives in water: I can see the shore, but I’m just not ready to leave the water for very long.
I’ve reached the point in life where my relationship with bookstores is—how to put this?—well, it’s complicated. I love the idea of bookstores. I smile when I see their bright windows on a block. I talk about a new bookshop like normal people talk about newborns. And after the global pandemic loosens its grip on New York, I know one of the first things I’ll do is visit a bookstore in my neighborhood. In my imagination, this means spending a long lazy afternoon browsing shelves and flipping the pages of dozens of new books. There’s just one problem: I long ago ceased to enjoy bookstores. Even before the pandemic, I couldn’t spend more than a few minutes inside one without wanting to leave; no, without wanting to flee, shoulders hunched, like a child caught trespassing.
“I’ve messed up many things in my life, but I’ve tried to write what I want to write. Publishing has gone a bit like the music industry, in that you either sell 300 copies or 300,000. There’s no middle ground for experimentation.”
Thoughts on this? Can you be uncompromising while still actually selling books? I don’t mean the special cases. I mean, in general.
Bookninja 