July | 2013 | Guy Portman's Blog

Posthumously Famous Authors II

Jul 26 2013

The following blog post is dedicated to two authors, who became more famous after they died.

Franz Kafka

(July 3rd 1883 – June 3rd 1924)

Notable works: The Trial, The Castle, Amerika, Contemplation, The Metamorphosis

Franz Kafka is today regarded as one of the greatest European writers of the 20th Century. Born in Prague in what was then The Austro-Hungarian Empire, Kafka did not find fame during his lifetime and what little of his writing was published received only scant attention from the public. Kafka, though always committed to his writing, spent his days working in a variety of roles in the insurance sector and later, managing a family-owned asbestos factory.

The author, who had suffered bad health for many years met his demise when a bout of laryngeal tuberculosis left him being unable to eat because of the pain, resulting in Kafka starving to death in Vienna in 1924.

Posthumous fame came quickly for the German language author when the first of his three novels, The Trial, was published a year after his death in 1925. The following year, The Castle was published and the third of Kafka’s novels, Amerika, followed in 1927. The author’s reputation has only increased over time and his insights into the human condition are viewed by many as being amongst the most poignant of any writer.

Sylvia Plath

(October 27th 1932 – February 11th 1963)

Notable works: The Bell Jar, Ariel, The Collected Poems

The Boston born American writer studied at Cambridge University and later wed British poet Ted Hughes. Sylvia Plath was well regarded as a poet during her short-life, examples of her early success included winning The Glascock Prize for poetry in 1955. In 1960 Plath’s first book of poems, The Colossus, was published.

Plath, who had a history of depression, committed suicide in 1963 by poisoning herself with carbon monoxide, in her own kitchen. Much controversy surrounded her death, with some claiming that Plath had not meant to kill herself, whilst others, particularly feminists blamed Hughes, Plath’s husband, claiming that he had been abusive.

Death did nothing to stop the writer’s growing popularity and respect from the literary establishment. Her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, published a month before her death in the UK, was published in the US in 1971 and went on to achieve critical acclaim. In 1982 Plath won the coveted Pulitzer Prize posthumously for The Collected Poems and then in 1985 her letters, titled Letters Home: Correspondence 1950 -1963 were published.

There is no doubt that Sylvia Plath’s premature death brought her much attention and was a major factor in her becoming something of a martyr to the feminist movement. However her lasting legacy is that today she is regarded as one America’s greatest ever female writers.

Click here to read Posthumously Famous Authors part 1.

Tormenting Twitter Types (Part 2)

Jul 19 2013

Anyone who follows my blog knows that I have an emotional attachment to social media. Though Twitter will always be my first love, I have recently started seeing Google+ and must confess to becoming somewhat infatuated with her. Though I have devoted many posts to confessing my love for Twitter, this post (one of a series) is dedicated to Twitter grievances.

Repeater Tweeters – We have all come across accounts that repeat Tweets over and over again, often multiple times per day. These Tweets contain a link, nearly always have at least some capitalisation and more often than not the syntax remains if not the same, virtually identical. I am talking about the:

REVEALED – OBAMA IS A COMMUNIST!!!!! – obamacommunist/q2

What can the revelation be, I asked myself, clicking on one of these type of Tweet links. Perhaps Obama has just been photographed by the paparazzi on the beach on his summer holidays, sporting a full-back Karl Marx portrait tattoo, with additional Communist Manifesto quote tattoos coiled around his limbs. However the information transpires to be nothing more than the when Obama was at college he allegedly had a sandwich or smoked one of those things he used to smoke, with someone who had left-wing tendencies variety. We are not living in the McCarthy era anymore.

There are others too

LEARN the TRICK discovered by a MOM to TURN YELLOW TEETH WHITE for UNDER $5!!!!! – whiteteethmom/q7

White teeth – It seems the whole world wants them now. If you do too, try going to a dentist or buy toothpaste with whitener from a supermarket, do not go on Twitter and click on one of these links. Not only will your teeth be turned black and your credit card details seized, but you will live to regret the day you were born. Maybe this is a bit of an exaggeration, but not much.

(Courtesy of Siliconangle.com)

SMUT SPAMMERS – Porn is everywhere on the internet or so I am told. Millions of sites are dedicated to pornography and it is only a click away. There are sites dedicated to all tastes, apparently. Not only is this Tweeting practice reviled by many, but there is also a case for arguing that it is unlikely that people would go on Twitter to look for pornographic content. These Tweets vary from the relatively innocent:

Check out Bella’s h*** t*** bellaporn/q6

To claims of remarkable feats such as:

Watch Jemma take 2 c**** in the a** at the same time buttqueen/q9

The links above aren’t real by the way.

Inept English Language Tweeters – I tried to make the name of this type of tormenting Twitter Type begin with the same letter or ideally rhyme, however I failed to achieve this. Considering these Tweeters Tweeting habits perhaps this is appropriate. Most of us have probably come across Tweets like:

#BLI^M $$$ MI$MIZ – GN$Z!!!! SHO%TZ W^^DZ???? C$@KZ!!!!

Admittedly English has digressed from its original form as it has travelled around the world and been embraced by different cultures, but do Tweets of this nature really make much sense to anyone. One hopes not and if they do, the end of the world is surely not far away.

Click here to read part 1.

Controversial Authors (Part 3)

Jul 12 2013

This is the third and likely final instalment of the Controversial Authors series. The following blog post is dedicated to two widely acclaimed literary figures whose work provoked controversy.

Vladimir Nabokov

(April 22nd 1899 – July 2nd 1977)

Notable works: The Defense, Lolita, Pale Fire, Speak Memory.

Born in Saint Petersburg, the son of a politician, Vladimir Nabokov was a renowned novelist, lepidopterologist (someone specialising in the study of moths) and chess composer (creates endgame studies/chess problems). The author’s first nine novels were in Russian, but it was his later English prose which assured him a place in the pantheon of literary greats.

Lolita, Nabokov’s most famous work, is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels of the twentieth-century. Accolades such as the book’s inclusion in Modern Library’s list of the 100 best novels of the twentieth-century bear testimony to this. Lolita is also amongst the most controversial books of all time due to its sensitive subject matter.

The story is about a man named Humbert Humbert, who falls in love with a twelve-year-old girl, Lolita, the daughter of his landlady. Humbert Humbert goes on to marry the mother so he can stay close to Lolita. When the mother dies in a car accident, the protagonist takes care of Lolita, in exchange for sexual favours. Lolita eventually leaves him and marries someone else, infuriating Humbert Humbert to such an extent that he kills the man.

The book’s pedophilic theme resulted in Lolita being rejected by numerous American publishers when it was written in 1953. Two years later the book was published by Olympia Press, a Paris based publisher. To this day the book courts controversy. The producer of a long-running one-man show in Saint Petersburg, in which Leonid Mozgovoy reads out passages from Lolita on-stage, was assaulted after being accused of being a pedophile. A disturbing clip of the incident was posted on YouTube.

Salman Rushdie

(Born: June 19th 1947)

Notable works: Midnight’s Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses.

No list of controversial writers is complete without the inclusion of the Indian born British writer, Salman Rushdie. Rushdie’s second novel, Midnight’s Children, won the Booker Prize in 1981. The author went on to achieve further success with his third novel Shame, published in 1983. His fourth book, The Satanic Verses, published in 1988, caused controversy from the outset. The title of the book was deemed offensive by many Muslims as it refers to a number of allegedly pagan verses, temporarily included in the Qur’an and later removed. Some pious Muslims were also displeased that the prophet Abraham was referred to as a ‘bastard’, in addition to various other insertions, too numerous to mention here.

Any hopes Rushdie may have harboured over the furore dying down were shattered when the Supreme Leader of Iran, The Ayatollah Khomeini, issued a Fatwa against the author in January 1989. Rushdie was rushed into the protective custody of Special Branch as rioting, book burnings and fire-bombings raged through the Muslim world. The left-wing bookshop Collets was burned down and a Dillons firebombed as the hatred spread west. In August of 1989 Mustafa Mahmoud Mazeh was martyred in a failed plot to blow up the author in Paddington, London. In a separate incident Hitoshi Igarashi, the Japanese translator of the book was stabbed to death.

To this day the author receives death threats, including a Valentines Day card of sorts that he gets every February 14th, threatening to kill him; and no they are not from one of his four ex-wives.

Click here to read Part 2 of the series.

Amazon’s Domination

Jul 05 2013

Amazon’s aggressive empire expansion shows no sign of abating. An arms race between the major players in the online publishing industry has seen the world ravaged by the ‘Ebook Wars’. Technological advancement and investment has resulted in Amazon’s heavily armed Kindle offerings leaving Barnes and Nobles’s Nook on the brink of annihilation, in a war reminiscent of the carbine rifles versus sharpened bits of coconut conflicts of yesteryear. Barnes and Nobles announced last month that they will stop manufacturing Nooks all together and that they are currently seeking an ally to build them. In the previous fiscal year the Nook lost close to $475m. The continual bombardment also resulted in 20 Barnes and Nobles retail businesses being reduced to dust last year. Amazon currently occupies about two thirds of the US online publishing market and ninety-percent of the UK’s. Analysts argue that Amazon’s updated supersonic multi-attack fighter, the Kindle Fire, is already riding a-mock through the smoking rubble of the online publishing industry.

Tank (Courtesy of www.dragart.com)

The ‘Ebook Wars’ were followed in quick succession by ‘The Pricing Wars’, as Amazon’s enemies battling for survival in the face of a relentless attack, have mimicked their strategy of offering 70% royalties to authors within a certain price category. Kobo, seen by many as the friendly face of online publishing are offering 70% of sales for ebooks between $2.99 and $9.99. Only time will tell if Kobo have any defense for the predicted retaliatory Amazon carpet bombing campaign. It seems doubtful that the friendly face will provide it. Barnes and Nobles’s highest rate for authors is 60%, which might yet prove shrewd in allowing them to slip under the radar, but this strategy offers little defense against the stealth bomber that is KDP Select (An author offers their book for free on Amazon for a limited time as a promotion on condition they remove it from competitors sites).

Of course many have argued that global domination is Amazon’s main objective and that the publishing side is merely a means to an end. Perhaps none have put this as eloquently as @JoeWikert, who Tweeted:

Books are nothing more than roadkill on Amazon’s highway to total retail domination: http://onforb.es/RypySa #TOCcon

Some people have been up-in-arms over the accusation that our sacred books are being used as cannon fodder, others have argued that anything is fair game in war.

Technological advancement has been the deciding factor in global dominance throughout history and this appears to hold true for Amazon, whose complex algorithms and list features, give an arguably more streamlined, user-friendly and informative experience than any of their competitors. Another reason for their success is their sense of community (some claim propaganda) recently bolstered by the capture of Goodreads. For Amazon’s enemies this is a major strategic loss as they will no longer have bases on Goodreads linking them back to their mainland sites. All links will go directly to Amazon HQ.

(Courtesy of en.wikipedia.org)

Goodreads users can expect a considerable reconstruction investment from Amazon, resulting in more complex algorithms that give better book recommendations and an improved interface. However some self-proclaimed whistleblowers are warning users on Goodreads forums to flee and seek refugee status elsewhere, in the face of what they claim is Amazon tyranny, arguing that a take-over will result in a loss of independence. Whether these whistleblowers face extraordinary rendition and detention in some Central Asian Amazon affiliate or become assimilated in a new and improved online environment remains to be seen.

We all have our own opinions about the new world in which we find ourselves, but I am sure that all us book lovers will hope that once the dust settles, a few undamaged bookshops will remain standing, if only for nostalgias sake.

Click here to read Part 2.