Juliet Flesch
Autor(a) de From Australia With Love: A History Of Modern Australian Popular Romance Novels
Obras por Juliet Flesch
150 years, 150 stories : brief biographies of one hundred and fifty remarkable people associated with the University of… (2003) 3 exemplares
160 years: 160 stories : brief biographies of 160 remarkable people associated with the University of Melbourne (2013) 2 exemplares
Love brought to book : a bio-bibliography of 20th-century Australian romance novels (1995) 2 exemplares
Etiquetado
Conhecimento Comum
- Sexo
- female
Membros
Críticas
Estatísticas
- Obras
- 7
- Membros
- 19
- Popularidade
- #609,294
- Críticas
- 1
- ISBN
- 7
We have no money, we have our addictions and Bobby is looking for angles. Ways for us to make money that don't involve the W word. By which I mean work. Since what he suggests is writing.
He writes to Mills and Boon, gets a pack for us. It is rather to our horror that we read, because we realise with growing dismay that this stuff is good. Written by highly educated people who know how to write, god damn it. And there we were thinking it was something any mug could do. Easy pickings. Fancy it turns out otherwise.
I'd already told him it was a bad idea. About 20 years earlier as a teenager I'd done a study on pulp fiction and discovered quickly enough that these were quality stuff. Indeed now and then my father would point out that such and such a one had been written by such and such a writer - a writer of literature, ie the stuff people don't read. The writer would finance this dilettante habit through writing stuff people did want to read. Interesting, isn't it? How we are so scathing of the stuff that actually gets read.
So, Paul Bryant who wrote this elsewhere on goodreads:
I do most certainly not say that the 'entire book-reading world' has been blindly wrong for decades, because you still don't get it. That world is MOSTLY people who read Mills and Boon. But the critics? The literary canon? They don't have a clue. The literary canon is a big wank.
Why do we call the population who read this stuff a ghetto? I don't get it.
So, I managed to convince Bobby that it would be hard, hard work, what he wanted us to do AND that we weren't good enough even with the hard yards.
I convinced him to take up his previous occupation, which was sitting on the sofa, phone and TV controls within easy reach, calling people to make deals.
Meanwhile, a couple of years later, in the course of researching a book on the works of a nineteenth centry novelist, I came into possession of this book. It records for posterity the extraordinary sales of writers who are scorned by the people who think they belong in ghettos where they can't contaminate real writing....These writers' books sell in the millions. That actually means something. Have you not ever wondered why people don't read literature? Has it never actually occurred to you that the stuff that sells by the million might be 'better'?
Well, in the course of writing my critical analysis of the works of Franc, I did get to have a whole lot of fun with the idea of the literary canon. Fortunately I'd done political science and history at uni, not English lit, so I didn't have a respectful, fearful bone in my body.
I might write more on that later in the weekend. It is 2am. I just got drilled at bridge. I'm going to bed.
Night, Paul.
No. a PS, a quote from this book:
And, now quoting my own book: 'Indeed, the authors are frequently ashamed that they write such material, the readers are ashamed that they read it and those that have never read one are proud of it.'
And this: isn't it funny that you think it somehow an inadequacy that these people only read what they like - you've even gone and checked it out - whereas they don't give a flying fart whether you are reading the stuff they love. I bet not one of those people in that ghetto has checked out whether the people who read David Wallace what'shisname read M&B.
I do hope this is food for thought.
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