Hub_93 by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
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Bleeding Words #5: Stories Lost and Found

by gary mcmahon I have this memory – or is it a dream? I do that a lot: have dreams that I recall as memories, convinced that they actually happened. It gets a bit confusing at times, but no real harm is done. At the worst, it gifts me some wonderful memories of the things I never did (hang on; there’s a story in there somewhere. Hands off – I thought of it first!).

Anyway. Let’s get back to this memory.

I remember as a boy writing short verses of bad poetry or brief prose sketches on ragged sheets of narrow-lined foolscap paper, taking each individual sheet and wrapping it around a stone, which I would then throw into the river. I have no idea why I might have done such a thing, except that maybe I had some vague and juvenile concept of “found art”, or was providing literary nourishment for the scabby flatfish that populated the River Wear.

Then there’s the story of Jack White, from the rather good band The White Stripes. Apparently he used to work for a furniture company before he was famous, labouring for hours a day over chairs and sofas, either covering or stuffing them (I’m not sure which). The story goes that he would write little songs and stories and sew them up inside these chairs and sofas, hiding them away like small gifts of art. I like that. I like it a lot. The idea of some fat corn-fed American sitting drinking beer and watching the World Series on top of Jack White’s early song lyrics amuses me.

The point I think I’m trying to make is that we can draw parallels with these two stories regarding the internet. Blogging and publishing on websites is rather like wrapping your words around stones and chucking them in the river, or stitching them up inside a recliner chair. They hang at the surface for a couple of second and then sink to the bottom, where they sit and gather silt. Furthermore, the same could also be said of modern small press publishing. Due to the ease and popularity of PoD publishing coupled with the fact that so few people actually buy and read genre books anyway, we can all be seen as small boys (and girls) throwing our stories into the river of literature, where they will quite probably just sink and be forgotten.

It’s a nice image, but also rather a sad one. So many books being sent out there for so few readers to get hold of. And the future of publishing looks even gloomier: ebooks, Kindles, Sony Readers. In theory it makes the material so much easier to get hold of, but I suspect the reality will be that nobody cares about the small-circulation books published by independent houses. At least now we have the collector’s market, a bunch of book lovers who buy beautiful editions of novels by writers they’ve perhaps never even heard of just because they’re bound in the foreskins of aardvarks or the hides of Australian jumping mice.

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