Something else to worry about

Lev Raphael talks about dealing with a, shall we say, overenthusiastic copyeditor. It involves a lot of screaming and resharpening of the pencil he uses to write ‘STET’ (meaning, ‘keep this exactly the way I wrote it’).

Not only did the copyeditor keep editing Raphael’s style, which is not part of the job, but couldn’t get the fact-checking correct, either.

Given that I’m writing about the same general period as Raphael, I’m feeling nervous about this, if only because I have done my homework, and if there’s anything I’ve discovered it’s that research sources contradict each other. Sometimes this is due to perspective – see Hugh Trevor-Roper’s excellent introduction to the 7th edition (I think – the 50-year-anniversary edition) of The Last Days of Hitler – and sometimes because, as a friend of mine pointed out yesterday, no one is standing to one side, holding a clipboard, monitoring troop movements on a street-by-street basis. There are no objective sources – only what individuals see (or historians glean), and interpret.

Even what seem to be simple facts can be tough to pin down. Example: when does person x arrive at place y? I have two different possibilities and no way to verify which one’s correct. As a writer, then, I have to make that call on my own – it so happens that the 7th is a better day than the 8th because of the character’s personal timeline, so I’m going to go with the 7th. But a copyeditor can legitimately come along and say, hang on, this highly respected source says the 8th. (And so can the reader – and when you write about Nazi Germany you know that there are people who will know these things better than you do. I’m just hoping that being able to back up my historical choices will be enough, but I have no illusions about this – people will tell me I’m wrong no matter what.) Meanwhile, I’ve dug into the stacks of several university libraries, and I can only hope that my future copyeditor has the same depth of sources available, because while public libraries are wonderful places, their holdings simply can’t mirror what I used.

Probably some displacement going on here – I am not exactly at the point where a copyeditor is going to start critiquing the manuscript. But I will definitely be hanging on to my folder of research notes. No idea what to do if someone flattens the prose style, but I expect this is the kind of thing it’s nice to talk to one’s agent about.

Should dawn break?

Okay, so I read the first three books in the Twilight series. Now the fourth book is out, titled Breaking Dawn for those of you who reside under rocks or otherwise not in the vicinity of teenagers.

I deliberately looked for spoilers, and I found them, so in terms of knowing the plot, I’m pretty much set.

This doesn’t necessarily mean I shouldn’t read the book. Meyer can tell an interesting story, and I’ll be reading her new series once this TBR pile shrinks by a few dozen hundred books.

You tell me: is the finale worth reading even when I know what happens? And if so, which category does it fall into?

- rush out RIGHT NOW! How could you not go to buy it at midnight on its release day???
- go buy it
- reserve a library copy
- wait for the paperback

(I’m going to authorize spoilers in the comments, so if you wish to remain unspoiled, best not to read any comments.)

Libraries and black holes and books, oh my

The Chicago Sun-Times says ’squee!’ about the Chicago Public Library’s new online thingie. One of the advantages to this, according to the CST?: no more ‘hefty fines’!

Hefty? Dudes, please. CPL library fines for anything other than DVDs and museum passports are – hang on, this is going to shock you – ten cents a day. Yep, one measly dime. Even if you forget to renew for an entire week, that’s still barely the price of a Hershey bar. Me, I consider library fines a donation to the library (and a wake-up call to start marking my day planner with the next batch’s due dates). They let me take books home and don’t charge me for them! I think I can give them a few dimes.

Meanwhile, Alison Bechdel’s lament for the lack of time in which to perform fun reading really spoke to me. Yes, I was the geeky kid reading at a fifth-grade level in kindergarten; yes, my dad had to persuade me to stop rereading old favorites. (One of the ways he did this was to hand me a copy of the Complete Sherlock Holmes and say, ‘read this.’ Which I did – all 4 novels and 56 stories. Good thing Dad liked Conan Doyle himself, because I spent the next five years dragging him to local Sherlockian meetings.)

I do still read for fun – but I personally find a book list helpful. It keeps me from forgetting books I want to read but can’t because a) I am overloaded with reading material at the moment or b) the library doesn’t have them yet (see ‘books for free’ supra) or c) it only exists in the Library of Congress so I have to wait until my next trip to Washington DC. (Which is next month. Yes, I will be spending plenty of time in the Thomas Jefferson Building.)

And, finally, your lost e-mails go into black holes. Now you know.

Phantom book

A blog on collecting children’s books recently had an entry on Phantom Books, and it reminded me of a phantom book of my own: Dawn B. Sova’s Passion and Penance: The Lesbian in Pulp Fiction.

But surely this book exists? It has an Amazon page. It has an ISBN (0571199178; ISBN-13: 978-0571199174). It has a publisher and a publishing date – Farrar Strauss And Giroux (Nov 1 1997) or Faber & Faber (December 1998), depending on who you ask. It has a blurb from Ingram: ‘With unique access to several large private collections, Dr. Sova has extracted scenes and chapters from each decade’s pulp fiction, from the 1920s to the 1960s, and comments with wit, erudition, and light on the changing evolution of this heretofore unexamined genre of lesbian literature.’ It’s linked to at book sites and bookswap sites and library sites….

And yet. The Lesbian Pulp Fiction Collection at Duke University (seriously) lists it as ‘on order’ since December 1999. No book site or bookswap site actually HAS a copy. Aha! Worldcat says that the Library of Congress has a copy and so does a library in Halifax. So it MUST exist.

Except. I e-mailed the LOC to check on this and another book, both of which were listed as ‘on order’ in the catalog. Neither book is there. The other I found at Better World Books and let’s just say I’m treating the money I paid for this book as a donation to literacy, ’cause the prose was so bad it wasn’t even laughable (kind of a new age romance with a lizard bad guy – okay, HE was laughable, but otherwise it was at the level of excruciating fanfic). About the Sova book, the helpful librarian said that both the LOC record and the Halifax library’s record are incomplete, and the book was never received by either of them. Frankly, he doesn’t think the book was ever published. And when a librarian says that, it’s time to listen.

Yet it’s weird that there’s an awful lot of information out there about a book that was never published.

I wrote to F&F but never got a response, so if Dr. Sova ever reads this, maybe she can solve the mystery.

Who writes like Nabokov?

No one else I’ve ever read, that’s for damn sure. If I were keeping track of ‘number of times I’ve stopped and thought “wow, in a million years I would never have thought of phrasing it like that”‘ per page, he’d be the winner.

I wasn’t taking notes on Speak, Memory and I don’t write in library books – although given that this copy has what seems to be smears of blood on the pages (*fumigates hands*) a few pencil notations in the margins would hardly be a crime – so here are the only bits I remembered to quote:

I was always ready to sacrifice purity of form to the exigencies of fantastic content, causing form to bulge and burst like a sponge-bag containing a small furious devil. (Ch. 14)

[Note that things would go very wrong if there were a comma after 'small'.]

the narrow lane, the cloistered lawn, the dark archway (ch. 13)

Cambridge in a nutshell.

and the sense of leaving Russia was totally eclipsed by the agonizing thought that Reds or no Reds, letters from Tamara would be still coming, miraculously and needlessly, to southern Crimea, and would search there for a fugitive addressee, and weakly flap about like bewildered butterflies set loose in an alien zone, at the wrong altitude, among an unfamiliar flora. (ch. 12)

Library has too many users! Oh no!

Apparently some people are very upset about the fact that undergraduates are clogging up all the desks at the British Library, and complaining to the Times and other British newspapers. Right, let’s look more closely at this.

Point the first: the queues to get into the building are due to the fact that you have to get your bag searched. That’s whether you’re an undergraduate or Lady Antonia Fraser, and it doesn’t matter if you want to spend the day reading in Humanities 1 or gawking at the prices in the gift shop or checking out the Luttrell Psalter under glass.

Point the second: unless they’ve gutted the bottom-most floor since I was last at the BL – in which case they’ll have gotten rid of that splendid wall sculpture that when you walk past it looks like you’re walking past bookshelves (I can’t find a picture, but trust me, it’s cool) – there’s a perfectly good room with lockers. Some of those lockers will hold your coat and – this is the big point – they give you your pound coin back when you’re finished. So queuing for 20 minutes to leave your coat isn’t a mandatory part of this exercise, though elbowing someone out of the way to get to the only remaining big locker may be required.

Footnote to point the second: here’s an account of a visit to the below-ground-level floors of the BL, complete with pictures. I would like a set of those rolling bookshelves, please.

Point the third: okay, yes, it is annoying when you are trying to access the only copy of the Gutenberg Bible bound in human skin existing in the world, and undergrads are taking up desk space for brushing up on Philip Larkin or Rick Astley or whoever British undergrads study these days. But, um, how exactly are you going to decree who is desk-worthy and who isn’t? Except, of course, for Lady A. But her comments about having to wait 30 minutes to get her books clearly don’t refer to undergrads who are only taking up desk space, as otherwise there wouldn’t be a crunch at the issue counter.

Footnote to point the third: there is no Gutenberg Bible bound in human skin. It was a joke.

Finally, point the fourth: Her Ladyship and others (Tristram Hunt whines over at the Grauniad, f’rinstance) complains that the undergraduates should use their own university libraries. Um, those would be the university libraries getting their accession budgets slashed? Those libraries crammed to the gills with students studying for end-of-year, if not end-of-degree, exams? And why can’t those undergraduates choose to go to the BL, when their parents, and eventually they themselves, pay the taxes that support that fine institution?

Conclusion: if they’re eating, drinking, shoving their tongues down each other’s throats, or putting their feet up on the manuscripts, kick them out and revoke their passes. Until then, they deserve to be there just as much as you or I.

And if you still can’t hack it, go to a different London library and borrow a person instead of a book.