Peacock-thoughts for a Pandemic Sunday

Peacock by Clive Hicks-Jenkins
for Charis in the World of Wonders
Ignatius Press, 26 March 2020

It's quiet in the village today. My amaryllis is silently, slowly opening. Though we're near the hospital, there is little traffic going by, and a good many Sunday villagers are or have been or will be snug in a comfy chair, watching the streaming services of their local church... or not, as they choose. 

At top, see a Clive Hicks-Jenkins peacock with its tail furled, one of the chapter division images for Charis in the World of Wonders. Peacocks have been a natural for symbolic bird since ancient times and for many cultures. Those eyes. The splendor of the shaking, unfurling fan. The rich, glitter of color. The piercing cry.

The early Christians adopted a belief of the ancient Greeks that the peacock was connected to immortality. Aristotle believed that the flesh of the peacock did not become corrupt after death. Perhaps ancient Greeks never let peacock leftovers last long enough to find out! But many years later, St. Augustine made experiment of the meat and agreed with Aristotle, finding that the flesh became only a little drier over time. Curiouser and curiouser!

Our modern image of a medieval royal table probably includes all sorts of weird, fantastic platters of food, including swans in plumage and peacocks with the great fan attached and spread. Desiring to have your own medieval feast, you might follow this advice:

A pecoke

Cut hym yn necke and skald hym 

cut of þe fete & hede 

cast hym on a spete 

bake hym well 

the sauce ys gynger.

That's a recipe from fifteenth-century England (Pepys MS 1047), by way of godecookery. The site also suggests that you not eat a peacock because it is tough and stringy. For myself, I would recommend that you not eat peacock because the peacock is beautiful and will give you a great deal more pleasure when rustling its tail of stars.

Nevertheless, godecookery offers a fourteenth-century sauce for your inedible peacock: poivre jaunet, from the 14th century Le Viandier de Taillevent. Grind up ginger, long pepper, saffron, an optional bit of cloves with verjuice, all toasted and then infused in vinegar or verjuice. Verjuice (Middle French "green juice") is a juice to pucker your mouth. Press some sour fruits like crabapples or grapes not yet ripe, and maybe even add some lemon or sorrel juice. 

Now you have it; take your scalded and spitted and stringy peacock and slather him in a sharp yellow pepper sauce. Tada! Here is the immortal flesh, preserved in acid and spice!

Paintings or mosaic work with peacocks appears as early as the third century A. D. in Roman catacombs. Part of this seems to be bound to the earlier idea that the flesh of the bird does not decay and holds some sort of immortality; that thought becomes a symbol wandering into regions of eternal life and resurrection. Part must be bound to the idea of leaving the earthly body and receiving a glorified body and soul, for the peacock in his fully revealed green and bronze and cobalt pomp and magnificence is an image of radiance and splendor. This sumptuousness finds its culmination in the peacock as symbol of Christ, who did not decay in the tomb and is transfigured and glorified.

 The Annunciation, with Saint Emidius by Carlo Crivelli, 1486
National Gallery.jpg (Public domain Wikipedia)
I see a kind of triangle between the source of God-radiance in the sky,
the figure of Mary at prayer, and the peacock with its tail pointing toward Mary.

Flannery O'Connor was child-famous at the age of five for her backwards-walking chicken, a buff-colored Cochin Bantam, and later for her writing and her love of peacocks, kept on the farm at Andalusia. And given O'Connor's Catholic faith and the great fan of symbolic meanings associated with the peacock, that's not surprising. Her "Living with a Peacock" is a marvelous thing, and you should go and read it right now. The dressing ("A gray bantam named Colonel Eggbert wore a white piqué coat with a lace collar and two buttons in the back.") and addressing of chickens, the aloof habits of peacocks, and much more are delightful. Her first peacock arrives with no tail but "carried himself as if he not only had a train behind him but a retinue to attend it." Here, go! And if you need a nibble to entice, here is one:

When the peacock has presented his back, the spectator will usually begin to walk around him to get a front view; but the peacock will continue to turn so that no front view is possible. The thing to do then is to stand still and wait until it pleases him to turn. When it suits him, the peacock will face you. Then you will see in a green-bronze arch around him a galaxy of gazing haloed suns. This is the moment when most people are silent.
“Amen! Amen!” an old Negro woman once cried when this happened and I have heard many similar remarks at this moment that show the inade­quacy of human speech. Some people whistle; a few, for once, are silent. A truck driver who was driving up with a load of hay and found a peacock turn­ing before him in the middle of our road shouted, “Get a load of that bas­tard!” and braked his truck to a shat­tering halt. I have never known a strut­ting peacock to budge a fraction of an inch for truck or tractor or automobile. It is up to the vehicle to get out of the way. No peafowl of mine has ever been run over, though one year one of them lost a foot in the mowing machine.

And doesn't this sound like an O'Connor encounter with strange grace from her stories?

An old man and five or six white-haired, barefooted children were piling out the back of the automobile as the bird approached. Catching sight of him, the children stopped in their tracks and stared, plainly hacked to find this superior figure blocking their path. There was silence as the bird re­garded them, his head drawn back at its most majestic angle, his folded train glittering behind him in the sunlight.
“Whut is thet thang?” one of the small boys asked finally in a sullen voice.
The old man had got out of the car and was gazing at the peacock with an astounded look of recognition. “I ain’t seen one of them since my grand­daddy’s day,” he said, respectfully re­moving his hat. “Folks used to have ’em, but they don’t no more.”
“Whut is it?” the child asked again in the same tone he had used before.
“Churren,” the old man said, “that’s the king of the birds!”
The children received this informa­tion in silence. After a minute they climbed back into the car and con­tinued from there to stare at the pea­cock, their expressions annoyed, as if they disliked catching the old man in the truth. 

What stops so many is that galaxy of eyes in the shivering fan of feathers. O'Connor's people, black and white, instinctively grasp what a medieval man or woman felt about the peacock. Awe in the presence of the utterly strange and beautiful knocks at their doors. Symbolically for the medieval Christian, the spread feathers expresses the overwhelming, beatific vision of God. For them, the feathers made an analogue to God's glory.

Further, the eyes suggested the all-knowing nature of God, who sees and fathoms both the depths of all things and even what we may regard as things of the surface and small like the death of a sparrow or the number of hairs currently residing on your head. Interestingly, the peacock is also the vanquisher of serpents in medieval bestiaries, and also a bird immune to poisons. That means that the peacock stands in relation to the serpent as Christ stands in relation to the devious snake in Eden's garden.

I found this shot of Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church (San Francisco)
on Pinterest, and can't seem to find the photographer...

The peacock still lingers in our world as a resplendent symbol of majesty, particularly in the Orthodox church. The rich double peacock image above shows the part of an Orthodox church called the Beautiful Gate, used by clergy, with its deacon doors or angel doors on each side. As is usual, Christ is on the right and the Theotokos on the left of the gate and doors.

I'll end with a poet who reached for the effulgence of the peacock and the preternatural nature of its cry. Here's a snip from a poem:

 And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.
 .
 The colors of their tails
 Were like the leaves themselves
 Turning in the wind,
 In the twilight wind.
 They swept over the room,
 Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
 Down to the ground.
 I heard them cry—the peacocks.
 Was it a cry against the twilight
 Or against the leaves themselves
 Turning in the wind,
 Turning as the flames
 Turned in the fire,
 Turning as the tails of the peacocks
 Turned in the loud fire,
 Loud as the hemlocks
 Full of the cry of the peacocks?
 Or was it a cry against the hemlocks?

In "Domination of Black," Wallace Stevens sweeps together darkness and autumn, deathly hemlocks, the gathering planets (so like the unfurling galaxy-tail of the peacock), and the idea of turning... all set against the memory of the preternatural cry of the peacocks. The otherworldliness of that stands opposed to dark and year's end, autumn and the hemlock, long associated (via funereal plantings and by the hemlock--not really the same hemlock as ours!--drink of Socrates) with death in the West. And this turning of autumn leaves in the wind, of flames in fire, of feathers in firelight is, not so surprisingly, a motion familiar to the peacock, who turns as he shivers his fantastical milky way of eyes.

And here's an image mixing peacock and leaves--
could not find peacocks in hemlocks!
Peacock in the Woods - 1907  (Public domain Wikipedia)
by Abbott Handerson Thayer (August 12, 1849 – May 29, 1921)

Metaphysical tea party with Edith Sitwell and Flannery O'Connor and peacocks

Clive Hicks-Jenkins, interior vignette
for Glimmerglass

SEEING

 Edith Sitwell: It is a part of the poet's work to show each man what he sees but does not know he sees.

 Flannery O' Connor: The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

 ON “KEEPING RABBITS”

 E: A great many people now reading and writing would be better employed keeping rabbits.

 F: Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher. 

HIDDEN LIFE

 E: The poet should speak to all men, for a moment, of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.

 F: I use the grotesque the way I do because people are deaf and dumb and need help to see and hear.

HALF-ALIVE

 E: I am not eccentric. It's just that I am more alive than most people. I am an unpopular electric eel set in a pond of catfish.

 F: Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one. To be able to recognize a freak, you have to have some conception of the whole man, and in the South the general conception of man is still, in the main, theological.

 WOOD FOR THE FIRE

 E: I have taken this step because I want the discipline, the fire and the authority of the Church. I am hopelessly unworthy of it, but I hope to become worthy.

 F: Most of us come to the church by a means the church does not allow.

 F: All human nature vigorously resists grace because grace changes us and the change is painful.

 ART AND INCOMPLETENESS

 E: Poetry is the deification of reality.

 F: The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

 F: The novelist doesn't write about people in a vacuum; he writes about people in a world where something is obviously lacking, where there is the general mystery of incompleteness and the particular tragedy of our own times to be demonstrated, and the novelist tries to give you, within the form of the book, the total experience of human nature at any time. For this reason, the greatest dramas naturally involve the salvation or loss of the soul. Where there is no belief in the soul, there is very little drama.

Pigs and Pearls, part 2

Recommended
by a commenter

People are very opinionated about God, the Bible, and Flannery O'Connor. 

Here are some responses to my prior post opposing the publication of O'Connor's prayer journal that I found interesting or compelling. These comments are all ones that you would not have seen if you follow my blog but are not on facebook.

Some address the question directly, and others have a slantwise relationship to the topic. I find some of the arguments in favor of publication to be quite strong, though I didn't change my mind. I still prefer to think of her prayers gleaming and burning in the old spiral-bound book, and they are fine for me that way.

The post includes thoughts from some visual artists, a composer, a novelist, a longtime books editor, a publisher, and a Lutheran pastor.

For more responses, look at the comments on Pigs and pearls.

    * * *

Oh I love her prayer book! And I have been reading the selected spiritual writings from her letters in Habit of Being. She has been very much on my mind these days...

I am grateful it was published -- as a convert I am always interested in the experience of cradle Catholics and it is always instructive to learn that they struggle too with many of the same things I do. And between the two readings -- the prayer book and spiritual writings -- the younger and the more mature O'Connor, it provides a fascinating perspective of faith as a journey.

I am making sure that if my diaries are published posthumously they will be interesting to read. In fact, they are so interesting to read that I should simply write that instead of living a life! I do not enjoy the idea of reading someone's private work, if truth be told.

Interesting. First, I am one who may be mistaken for a swine who is actually a pearl, and I don't mind. No, I am not fat, I am bohemian We are mistaken for all kinds of things we are not. An artist. I like many pigs, many among them have pearl-like characteristics in the mix of who they are. All of an artist's output will hopefully be fair game for the world of swine and pigs to benefit from or not. Or, that is my hope.

I imagine someday they will be digging all of the text messages and Internet correspondences of famous people out of the virtual mud.

Thanks for this interesting topic, Marly, although I"m inclined to agree more with A.--the issues around who is casting the seeds or the pearl seem less important to me than the potential of grace to enter some completely new person's mind because of that seed or that pearl. And I don't think the pearl loses its true luster even if pigs trample it--it may be perceived as being "dirtier" but it surely isn't truly sullied.

If Emily Dickinson had a blog today, she would have very few followers. But then she wouldn't care. She'd be right about that.

Biblically speaking, "pearls before swine" also stands in tension with the lavish generosity of the sower who throws his seeds on fertile ground and rocky soil alike. (Or the wasteful love of the Prodigal Father in the story of the Prodigal Son).

Not that this removes the other murky ethical issues around publishing something which was intended to be private, but it does raise interesting theological questions about which holy treasures are to be cast about willy-nilly for all, and which are to be protected and guarded with care (and to what degree).

The New Testament witness seems to me to err on the side of offering grace freely, even to those who might throw it back in our faces or abuse it. That is Jesus' example, at least.

I must wonder if in the context of Matthew 7 (about hypocrisy in judging others), we are not to identify more with the swine more than with the one casting the pearls. I'll be the first to admit, however, that it isn't entirely clear what's going on there.

But we could also very well say that a prayer journal is not so much the treasure itself (or even the seed itself), but a mediator of the treasure. Grace has always been mediated to particular people in particular ways (the Scandal of the Incarnation-- that Jesus didn't just come as a Big Idea).

There is perhaps greater reason to discern about the distribution of private evidence of the treasure because in its particularity, has a great deal of bearing on how the infinite treasure is received. Those who are dismissive of O'Connor's journal may well be receptive and fertile ground if the witness came from another source.

In any case, there is much to ponder.

Pigs and pearls

I'm still thinking about Flannery O'Connor's prayer journal, published in time for Christmas gift-giving, and why that publication might have been a fairly bad idea. R. T. aka Tim brought it up on his new blog, A Commonplace from Eastrod, and there I simply said that the book was part of that unclean effort to trawl through a writer's remains and find something, anything publishable.

Long ago I was asked for my manuscripts and papers by a librarian at Wilson Library at UNC, and I replied that I was not sure that I liked that idea, and that I would think about it. I'm still not sure, though in a sense one would be lucky if anybody actually wanted to trawl through one's remains in hopes of finding a bit of ambergris in the beached corpse! Certainly a great deal has been published that would have been better to remain as rare library research material for academics or else destroyed. I'm still wondering whether it is not better for writers to burn the dross and leave the gold.

So one reason to dislike the publication of the prayer journal is that it was a private thing, not meant for people but intended by O'Connor solely for the maker of the prayers and the Maker of the maker of the prayers. Flannery O'Connor was guided by that purpose and her audience was one, or three-in-one. Some words are meant for a wide audience; some are not.

But there is another, stronger reason not to publish the journal, and it is one that surely compelled O'Connor in her writing: the well-known biblical injunction not to cast your pearls before swine. In the Bible, the kingdom of heaven is compared to a great, wondrous pearl. So when a Christian like Flannery O'Connor is enjoined not to strew pearls before pigs, she is being cautioned not to offer what is holy where it will be debased and muddied: "Do not give what is holy to dogs; and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under foot and turn and maul you" (Matthew 7: 6, NRSV.) And no, it doesn't mean people are pigs...

O'Connor the writer, reading that familiar line, knew that it was asking her to know her audience, and saying that it is wrong to be the cause (don't strew your pearls willy-nilly!) of other people trampling on what belongs to God. What is holy can be muddied and torn by people with no sympathy or understanding, and that can lead to rejection and scorn for the one who offers the pearl. Well, that's familiar as part of the story of Christ, isn't it? Interestingly, the gospel record shows that Christ was willing to say the most astonishing things to people just-met but was rather close-mouthed and oblique with unsympathetic questioners. Moreover, the gospel shows us the peculiar power of story. Parables often carry the freight of meaning; they tell the truth but tell it slant--that is, stories protect the pearl yet reveal it to those with eyes to see, ears to hear.

Flannery O'Connor seems to feel in a similar way about art and writing in her essays: “Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.” Without eyes to see and ears to hear, one never grasps the pearl of art. And in O'Connor's view, that understanding is limited to those who will take the trouble to grapple with stories. What is regarded as the difficulty of her stories can be seen as a way of obeying the injunction not to cast pearls before swine. Only those who will take trouble to understand will, in fact, receive them.

 * * *

For further comments and some sharp arguments against me, go to Pigs and pearls, part 2. Some of them have a better grasp than I do on those pigs and pearls!

Ashes to ashes

Flannery O' Connor meant a great deal to me as a young woman, and probably some day I will have to go back to her. The only book of hers I've reread in the past decade is her wondrous book of essays, Mystery and Manners. Here are some quotes from it in honor of Ash Wednesday.

The Regional Writer: When Walker Percy won the National Book Award, newsmen asked him why there were so many good Southern writers and he said, ‘Because we lost the War.’ He didn’t mean by that simply that a lost war makes good subject matter. What he was saying was that we have had our Fall. We have gone into the modern world with an inburnt knowledge of human limitations and with a sense of mystery...

On Her Own Work: I have found, in short, from the reading of my own writing, that my subject in fiction is the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.

The Grotesque in Southern Fiction: There is something in us, as storytellers and as listeners to stories, that demands the redemptive act, that demands that what falls at least be offered the chance to be restored. The reader of today looks for this motion, and rightly so, but what he has forgotten is the cost of it. His sense of evil is diluted and lacking altogether, and so he has forgotten the price of restoration. When he reads a novel, he wants either his senses tormented or his spirits raised. He wants to be transported, instantly, either to mock damnation or a mock innocence.

The Regional Writer: The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

Click on her name below if you can't get enough of Miss Flannery of Milledgeville.

A little mystery for Advent

A challenge still with us fifty years later from the woman who turned my head around when I was a mere child:

It is the business of fiction to embody mystery through manners, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind. About the turn of the century, Henry James wrote that the young woman of the future, though she would be taken out for airings in a flying-machine, would know nothing of mystery or manners. James had no business to limit the prediction to one sex; otherwise, no one can very well disagree with him. The mystery he was talking about is the mystery of our position on earth, and the manners are those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery (Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners, 1962,p. 124.)

What a grand book of essays! And who couldn't love a girl who began with a chicken taught to walk backward and went on to be a woman of words and peacocks?

Irresistible: L. Frank Baum and chickens!

Photo of baby bantam citron-spangled hamburg chicks
 by Ryan Zierke under a Creative Commons license at Wikipedia.

Everybody (most everybody?) knows about Flannery O' Connor and chickens. And if you have read this blog for a very long time, you may remember that I have a chicken pact going with novelist Howard Bahr. But do you know about L. Frank Baum and chickens?

According to the spottily-all-knowing Wikipedia, Baum started a monthly journal in 1880 devoted to the subject of hamburg chickens (this is not a contradiction between types of meat but a single type.)  He loved his adorable hamburgs so much that he wrote an entire book on the subject, appropriately named . . . The Book of the Hamburgs! Okay, okay, it also had a fancy sub-title: A Brief Treatise upon the Mating, Rearing, and Management of the Different Varieties of Hamburgs.  These days Baum would over the moon somewhere in Oz to know that there are more Hamburgs that ever--silver-spangled, gold-spangled, golden-penciled, silver-penciled, white or black (so ordinary! I want magic pencils! and spangles!) and even a new citron-spangled bantam. A citron-spangled bantam: doesn't that sound impossible and cunning?

Why was I looking at these diminutive spangled and penciled chickens with their "rose combs" and "slender legs," as Wiki would have it? Well, it does have something to do with Howard Bahr, The Great Chicken Pact, and A Death at The White Camellia Orphanage.  That much I may reveal.  For more, you'll just have to wait till the book comes out in 2012.

THE OZ CHICKEN QUIZ
(No, no, no CHEATING at all!
Making up is, of course, dandy.)

1.  What is the name of Dorothy Gale's chicken?
2.  In what Oz book does she appear?
3.  What is her name?
4.  How does she resemble a Hamburg?

The House of Words (no. 9) Zephyrus side note to 8:1

Photograph of spaghetti courtesy of sxc.hu
and Marcin Jochimczyk, Sosnowiec, Slaskie, Poland.

zephyr said...

i wonder:

how many writers were successful enough to not need a job in the era when editors could focus on art and publishing houses were individual, home owned entities? Perhaps more novelists, poets, essayists were published but how well did all those books sell? How many were remaindered?

Are there fewer successful writers--writers who did not need to supplement their income from advances-- now that publishing has changed so much?

i wonder.

It seems to me there have only been a few in each generation in each of the arts who get to do what they want and not need another source of income (perhaps in the form of a spouse who brings in the cash). Clearly publishing has become a very icky business and fewer writers get published...but does it mean fewer get to do what they want for an income?

It is clearly harder to get published, but is it harder to succeed, financially, with one's art?

i don't know. But i think it would be interesting to see those statistics.

Dear zephyr,

Perhaps you could breeze about and find the answers! What a lot of questions, and the answers not always all that clear.

Historically, citizens of this country haven't been that good at finding great writers or presenting them with a living wage through book purchases, either because of international pillaging of texts and copyright problems or lack of promotion. The states tended to be more concerned with survival early on. In fact, the U. S. didn't have much interest in a full-time writer until Charles Brockden Brown, and he didn't make it as a writer for long. Cooper, Twain, Helen Hunt Jackson, and William Dean Howells in the nineteenth-century were certainly more successful (and Melville started out with a good seller, though descended into obscurity later), but plenty of others were rewarded less--and books like Susanna Rowson's Charlotte Temple were the bestsellers of their century. I have read Charlotte Temple, and I know whereof he spoke when Hawthorne complained of the "damn'd mob of scribbling women." (Actually it wasn't that bad. I have encountered worse. And Hawthorne didn't think all writing women belonged in the mob.)

I think most literary historians agree that the modernist era saw supportive houses rise. Editors had famously large roles in the lives of writers, even if the authors were a bit feckless--like Thomas Wolfe, say. The late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century saw plenty of magazines that paid writers, a help to Fitzgerald and Hemingway and many others. And as time went on, even less popular writers like I. B. Singer could count on some income from a publisher who might be a tad stingy but who took pride in his stable of writers. Anecdotes of the pre-war publishing world are full of stories of writers who camp out at their publshing houses or at magazine offices and are bailed out of fixes. Editors didn't depart, as they often do now, at a hat-drop.

All these things are in the realm of fairly common knowledge. We can tell suggestive anecdotes, and I bet you could check the most recent edition of that big fat reference book, The Literary History of the United States, and find a decent overview.

The issue today is not that fewer writers are not being published--we are publishing more writers than ever. And self-publishing has added to the spate. The number of books published per year has burgeoned in recent years. But I believe that fewer books are being properly edited, marketed, and distributed.

This erosion means that fewer writers are being sustained financially. That tendency is impossible to deny simply because of the great influx of the self-published, but I also think it true of national publishing trends because of what I read but also because of what I see happening in the writing community. I have a good number of friends who have been flattened by publishing events--the implosions of HarperCollins or MacAdam Cage, the lack of loyalty by a house to writers whose editors depart, and so on.

Now that writing is also MFA business, we produce more writers capable of a certain level of achievement. Here I remember Flannery O'Connor, who approved the squashing of young writers:  "Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."  The more desirable programs are capable of funneling students into the publishing world and establishing contacts and sometimes contracts for them. The route from the pages of a dreamy young writer to finished book has changed for many.

You ask about "doing what you want" for an income. A mid-list writer who wants to break out and be self-supporting is going to work hard and do a lot of ancillary business. For example, writer Jeff Vandermeer went independent a few years ago, and with his wife he regularly cranks out the anthologies. As he is in what could be called literary speculative fiction, he crosses boundaries and has a foot in several worlds. That's helpful. Recently he published Booklife, a rather unusual how-to manual for writers, speculative, literary, and otherwise. Jeff is attached to various summer writing programs, and he has an outgoing nature and the energy to go on tour repeatedly. He is willing to try new ways of getting the word out; he collaborates with bands, filmmakers, and artists. He throws out all sorts of spiderlines and in the process makes a larger web for himself. The end result is that he can catch a greater number of flies and be more visible. But it's not easy, hiw way, not for the timid or those unwilling to work with others.

The current trend toward commercialism (or shall we say, seeking greater profits in a tight market) is hardening the lead-book strategy--more focus on lead books, less on the list as a whole. So I hear and read, anyway. That means a large publishing house is looking for a reasonably well-written commercial prospect. I might not call the whole enterprise "icky" as you do, for I have had many good experiences in New York, but I do feel sorry that finances thrust some of our historically fine houses toward the commercial. Of course, we Americans don't own them any more so it is difficult to pull away from the demand to increase profits.

In addition, the window of opportunity for a book to gain an audience keeps shrinking. The common wisdom used to be three months. You had to get your reviews well within that narrow window because bookstores would be returning stock after three months, and because the world moves on quickly. Changes in tax law so that publishers were taxed on stock-on-hand meant that U. S. publishers had an incentive to remainder quickly and keep books moving out of the warehouse to stores and then into remainder bins. The law of unforeseen consequences kicked in, as it usually does when the government (bunch of lawyers! let's have some farmers and shopkeepers!) is involved, and backlist books no longer were kept on hand as they had been previously.

Of course, the digital age is changing all this--easy to keep backlist in stock if it's just digital. But if one yields digital rights, other things become problematic. What about that house that wants to reprint my novel but wants to accompany a printing with digital downloads? But my digital rights are lodged elsewhere... Etc. (A good many people are avoiding the whole issue by going publisher-free, and we'll look at that later, as well as the small press world.)

The idea of the publisher's current list (minus the lead books, of course) as a mound of spaghetti that is flung at a wall to see what will stick is an idea I have seen over and over and over again. And I have heard editors say or write the same. It seems to be the metaphor that clicks and fits for a lot of people.

Here, let's try it!

I love home scientific experiments.

Okay, back from the kitchen with an extra-large colander of still-warm pasta: I drag out one of our three colorful, powerful home catapults (traditional Cooperstown 6th grade project, associated with Medieval Day.) The cats are interested. The brainy calico, Theodora, is wary. The incredibly sweet, rabbit-dumb, and now-shaved-for-spring (and to get rid of dreadlocks that culminated in her resemblance to a felt hat on peg legs) Blue Persian looks at me lovingly and rubs up against the catapult.

Ready? Bate your breath, people!

I launch the spaghetti at the wall.



Courtesy Brandy at clker.com

Splat!

It's publishing all over again.

What happens is that the bulk of the pasta immediately tumbles to the floor. Some clings for a while, waving feebly. A strand hangs from the wall, half attached.

Hope that helped. Kitchen science at your service, zephyr. I am perfectly willing to be wrong about any of the above (except the pasta--that the cats and I saw with our own eyes, right?) and guarantee nothing. No statistics here, but I'd be happy if somebody dug up the numbers and shared them.

Meanwhile, I'm going to fetch Susquehanna the dog. She wags her tail for spaghetti.

Good cheer,
Marly