thought for the day

It occurs to me when reading some of these things of late that story telling has changed greatly.

I’ve commented before on Tolkien with family, stating that it’s entirely likely that at least the Hobbit would never make it into print today. No editor would take it in its current form. I get the same feeling from Treasure Island. So far the story is not terribly fast paced and is so anecdotal that it’s not much of a story just sort of an idea shared from author to reader.

The Cyclops was a pretty big disappointment for me. But it was really meant, from what I understand to be the equivalent of an episode of the Simpsons to early Greek listeners. A sort of comic absurdity based on current events and pop culture.

I’m not saying there is nothing well written, it just seems that some of the classics wouldn’t make the cut today, and some of today’s works that make it would not ever be thought as classics in the future.

While the latter point should be no surprise (after all not every work is immortal) the former seems surprising to me. It reminds me of the story about a farmer who wished to breed a horse that was superior for jumping. So he built a fence and jumped the horses. When he had found which ones jumped best he kept them and got rid of the rest. Then he raised the fence. The long and the short of the story is that he kept raising the bar to get the beats horses. But eventually no horses made the jump.

I wonder if that is part of what we see in the market place. That we have raised the bar and prevented so great works from being seen. If you take my point about Treasure Island or the hobbit and imagine that there are some of these out there in trash cans by editors desks or hidden in somebody’s desk with the rejection slips out of embarrassment, then you must feel as sad as I do. But at the same time there are other works that arrive on book store shelves that I swear are just meant as decorative tissue paper.

I’m puzzled by the standards that the publishing world works by now. I’ve read some great and powerful stories online by people who can’t get published in this world and I’ve bought books that should never have been allowed in prints of more than ten total.

If they are using some sort of standard, the fence for the horse, it almost seems they changed their mind and want to see a horse do the limbo.

What is to be done about this? I don’t know, but increasingly I find myself drawn to internet writers and those that don’t put themselves to the strange standards of the publishing world. Yes you find loads of garbage that way, but you are equally likely to find truly precious gems that otherwise would be missed.

It’s sort of how I look at the world. A bit of a scavenger mentality. Everybody and their kin can point you towards the most commonly accepted ‘quality’ works in stores and such. So you shouldn’t have to search there much. But now you can find things that others are missing.
Just my thought for today. I’ll likely be back for tomorrow night as I have a fair number of errands to run and figure I’ll hit the labs after that and do a bit more Tinkering with HTML and get some more stuff done before the start of Nanowrimo.

Until then Take care of yourselves.
Roving Jack.