
Take ‘A Modest Proposal’ by Annie Callanan with You
At age 86 I’ve survived 70 years in the news business and written about most everything you can imagine. As you undoubtedly know, when you reach that point — sure enough, up pops something you never wrote about.
This is that something.
I looked up the top dog at R. R. Bowker, the folks who keep track of published books and have since 1886. I wanted to complain. I have four novels coming out March 12, 2019. But every time I tried to get a new identifier number (ISBN) from Bowker, they tried to sell me all kinds of frills. I couldn’t get a number unless I entered a coupon to buy at least one frill.
I became annoyed.
I learned long ago that often the most efficient way to fix a corporate fault is to call it to the CEO’s attention. Their secretary usually boots the complaint to a department head who drafts an answer for the CEO. That can lead to solving the problem.
But there wasn’t any problem.
Bowker’s support people had informed me that I didn’t have to buy any frills; “just scroll to the bottom of the page to complete the order.”
Oh. I was the problem.
But before I learned this, I had tracked down Annie Callanan, the former CEO, now CEO at the UK-based Taylor & Francis Group. Before complaining, I wanted to learn a bit more about her and watched a 16-minute video, “A Modest Proposal.” Stunning. It must be shared, from Academic Publishing in Europe.
I believe the thinking readers of Medium could all benefit from Callanan’s presentation.
It’s about the impact of what we all do, but mostly you folks who shape our future. Me, I’m older and still learning the hard way. I should instinctively have known to scroll to the bottom of the page.
But I didn’t. Instead I stumbled into Anne Callanan who I share with you. Her modest proposal deals with making sense out of randomness and chaos, an endeavor dear to all writers, especially the thinking writers who write for Medium. You folks focus as Callanan does on improving the world, as I escape into fiction. The funny thing is, we’re not that far apart.
A few years ago, I gave a presentation at a symposium entitled “Fact, Fiction & Subjectivity” at the Bicentennial Literary Conference of the North American Review.
I called my piece, “Understanding the Power of the Oblique: Why it will Survive the Electronic Age.” I said “Oblique” because I’ve always had trouble spelling “Soliloquy.” But that’s what I meant.
In fiction we get away with a lot. I started with John Steinbeck: In “Sweet Thursday” there’s a character that makes Steinbeck’s case about what I choose to call the oblique. He says:
“Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”
Whether we call it hooptedoodle or the oblique, it’s when we spin up some pretty words or sing a little song with language. The oblique hangs out there above the story line all by itself.
It’s what the writer really thinks.
Today all of the stuff that gets written winds up as electrons in the Ionosphere. You are not limited to 10 percent (of what’s available) like newspapers. Oh no, today 100 percent of everything goes electronic. Whether its inspired oblique hooptedoodle or mundane twitter trash. It’s all the same.
Now here’s what’s going to happen:
Some nut will find a way to blow up the electric grid. All these electronic gadgets that rely on electricity will go dark. The batteries will run down. We’re talking Cormac McCarthy darkness, black on black. . . except for one distant flicker of light. It’s on a beach probably Australia. Survivors will make their way through the dark and find the light from a single candle. Next to the candle will be a lad with a note book scribbling away with the last pencil on earth. He’s writing about what happened. He hopes someone will read what he writes. That’s what writers do. They hope.
Just as Medium is dedicated to ideas, good fiction — even literary — is similarly dedicated. We don’t have algorithms to help, we sort of stumble on good stuff, sometimes by scrolling to the bottom of the page.
