In South Pacific, Nellie says to Emile of World War II, “I don’t think it’s the end of the world. Do you?” He replies, “The end of some worlds, perhaps.”
Technology always ends some worlds for some people. One of my brothers-in-law is a farrier — a specialist in the care and shoeing of horses’ hooves. Such people were once ubiquitous. In the early 21st century, he’s the closest thing to an anachronism I personally know. The automobile nearly did away with his profession years before he was born.
Garrison Keillor laments the dismissing of the guard in the world of publishing. The technology that lets me post my haiku and fiction here and that lets me run my own little publishing company is slowly gaining ground over the model of publishing that was the norm during the 19th and 20th centuries.
His points about authors not making a living from writing anymore and how difficult it may become to find the best writing without its having been anointed by a gatekeeper are well taken.
But I like the democracy inherent in our digital publishing forums. The times, they are a-changing, and with all due respect and then some to Mr. Keillor, I can’t get nostalgic about carbon copies and the whims of dyspeptic editors (having been one myself over the years). The more people we have practicing literacy, the better.
This topic has been squatting in my mind ever since your essay “Using Song Lyrics in Fiction” (May 7, 2010 in this blog) referenced Blake Morrison’s essay on “the cost of quoting lyrics,” and this thought of his stuck with me:
I’m of three minds: on the one hand, some of the greatest literature was produced by gentry with too much time on their hands and a privileged access to a liberal education. On one of the other hands, Shakespeare was a literary capitalist, no gentry. And on the remaining hand, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence that the working class is barred by practicality from posting their work, does there?
Greg, each of your three minds has a valid point. Looking just at the third, though, the working class seems to have plenty of time to share recipes, post lolcat pictures, comment on the political issues of the day, or write poetry and novels online.
That is what some of the for-profit writers really hate about people such as myself: there are so many of us violating Dr. Johnson’s rule about not writing but for money that it’s becoming more difficult to write for money. It’s a valid rant. Heck, I’d like to be getting paid for my writing, but at present it’s much more valuable to me to simply write and get my words out there than to wait three to six months for a reply on a single story from a single magazine. (More on this in Friday’s Pen to Paper.)
But yeah, the unwashed masses have found the World Wide Web and digital publishing (books, music, movies). All of cyberspace is now the public commons. I hope it remains wild and woolly for a long time to come; imagine what governments and corporations would be doing without the constant public ranting against them.