John Updike
March 18, 1932 — January 27, 2009
"An adult human being consists of sedimentary layers. We shed more skins than we can count, and we are born each day to a merciful forgetfulness. We forget most of our past but embody all of it."
Here's a very interesting article in Time by Lev Grossman, about the future of publishing and of literature. Reading it, I felt alternately grumpy, scared, and exhilerated. Grumpy, because I'm a middleaged guy who doesn't handle change well; there's a reason there are so many cats in my books, mainly because I'm so much like a cat myself. I like my comforts and my routine and my little patch of sunlight, and I get snarly and petulant about any changes.
And I'm scared, because I'm a midlist author with a new book coming out in a publishing environment that's changing daily. It's not quite as big a change, say, as the comet that killed the dinosaurs—though maybe it is, and if I follow that metaphor through, I have to wonder if I'm a dinosaur myself (albeit a small one), or one of the early mammals, a scurrying, furry little critter (see above about cats) engineered to survive and even thrive in the new world after the comet.
And I'm exhilarated, because the wild, wide-open new world of writing that Grossman predicts sounds kinda thrilling. Not particularly lucrative, though, but when was it ever?
It doesn't take much to make a midlist writer happy—you don't actually have to have read one of my books, just say you're heard of me, and pick up the tab—so imagine my unholy glee when my friend Alan Hardy sent me the latest installment of the Guardian's series 1,000 Books Everyone Must Read. Today they're doing comic novels, and my book The Lecturer's Tale made the list. I'm here, right between Bohumil Hrabal's I Served the King of England (which I've read) and Christopher Isherwood's Mr. Norris Changes Trains (which I haven't).
It's a tiny little thing, of course, and probably won't sell me many (or any) copies. But it makes me stupidly happy. Like I say, I'm easy to please.
RSS Feed