Yesterday, apparently, was National Authors' Day. Which nation?
I'm guessing the nation in question was the US, but I don't see why it shouldn't be a global authors' day.
Anyway, I learnt it was National Authors' Day from Joe Pulver. He was suggesting, commendably, that we support the writers we enjoy by writing a review and posting the link. So I did. Well, I wrote the review, of Nina Allan's The Silver Wind on Amazon, but it took a while for the review to upload, and then I edited out some typos, and that took longer, and then it was no longer National Authors' Day. But anyway, here's the link to the review.
I don't actually find it easy writing reviews. You might think I would, considering the way I spend my time, but I don't. This is not actually the first Amazon review I've written - I think it's the second, although this is the only one that shows up under my name for some reason. I feel like I should write more online reviews, as I do feel strongly that living writers should be supported. I'm pretty sick of the old joke about dying being a great career move.
I hardly know if I should mention this here, and I don't really know if I'm right or if I'm just 'being pessimistic', but it feels to me like we have entered an age of virulent philistinism. Since when? Hard to say. The 21st Century generally feels like a golden turd to me. Having said that, it's only this century that I've really started to get published (if that's any measure of anything). Anyway, since I'm pretty sure that philistinism thrives on opposition, I don't really know what to do about it, apart from forging blindly ahead in my usual way.
Do you know what I mean, though?
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i walked down the street past the closed-down TLA, the last place you could rent avant-garde or "underground" videos outside of the internet (in my city). and then past the empty and abandoned Borders. i was thinking about how culture is being systematically erased. and maybe soon the museums will close for lack of funds, how last year almost a third of our public libraries had been threatened with closing. and from now on there will only be billboards. the radio will broadcast commercials and blasts of discordant noise. i felt as if, with the death of J.D. Salinger, there were no more GREAT living authors. i read an article about indie publishers who publish themselves completely digitally and how that means more money for the author but also less filtering of what kind of material is being pulped. so that you have a glut of washed-down mod-speak. To Kill a Mockingbird is boring according to one forum here on goodreads.it makes me want to peck my brain out. but just because you see a lot of that, doesn't mean that it is the only thing that is happening. poetry seems to be rising on a crest of reemergence. there are people who still believe in art and literature, who will promote it.
Yeah... I hardly know what to say about this kind of thing at the moment. I feel a strange emptiness, perhaps as a result, in some ways, of all the incoherent Internet shrieking and chatter, of which, of course, my blog is part, and it makes me think that silence is a very blessed thing. But to me, art and chatter are different (by the way, I'm using 'chatter' here with a very specific application; I don't mean to suggest that all communication is bad).I feel like you can tell art, or something like that, because it comes out of a kind of silence. And it's that silence that is being lost. And without that silence, nothing really can be heard.
