I met a man the other day. Not a great man perhaps, but at least a very good one, I can tell you.
From the monthly archives:
March 2009
Filed Under: Essays, Featured, The Death of the Book
Lost Covenant [an open letter to our bookshop customers, March 17th, 2004]
If I were to suggest that no author should be paid more than, say, $100,000 per book, some readers would actually accept the premise, if not the exact amount. I have spoken to such people. I have listened, not very patiently, to a proposal that great books should be paid a higher advance than lesser books. This was by a literature major who had graduated from Harvard, a renowned local college which has recently lowered its standards. I have even read a proposal that there be a minimum placed on what a publisher can pay per word. This was in a promotional brochure for a proposed “writers union.’
The absurdity of all of these ideas relegated them quickly to oblivion. But nevertheless, they will be proposed again, and again. It is a smallness of mind which is tightly bound to an egocentric view of the universe. It is a…
The theft of time has always been a primary fascination and pursuit. Beyond my own conceit, the subject is more commonly known as history. But I have always seen the subject both more broadly and more personally than would be accepted by, say, the typical academic.
Usually, pedagogic prejudice does not openly admit its failings and weakness. Needing fortification against the untaught masses who might otherwise question the tattered cloak, the academic will often throw up a screen of minutia and assumed fact and bellow its affected knowledge loudly. ‘Do not look behind the curtain.’ Information is buried in the labyrinth of libraries and ‘off-site’ storage facilities. Few professors are true scholars and anyone who approaches the citadel without first accepting the self-perpetuating rules of academic engagement will be denied entry to the sanctuary of the academy.
Some of this is understandable. The entry fee to those precincts…
