RARA-AVIS: POD publishing & Conrad v Thompson

From: Rene Ribic ( rribic@optusnet.com.au)
Date: 10 Feb 2002


Anthony wrote :

It's too bad the owners of the copyrights on these stories haven't taken them to a POD publisher where they can at least be available to a small market if that is all there is.

And :

>. PODs being used in NY in one bookstore to
> stock and produce public domain classics. You want a copy of
Huckleberry
> Finn, you request one, they print it and you buy it. Barnes and Noble
> supposedly has plans to test install some POD machines in a couple of
> their stores. iUniverse is teamed or owned by B&N and their books

Very good point. It gives me some hope that this stuff will one day be available to anyone with an interest in it. Wouldn't it be nice to give at least some of that money to the authors or their estates (hopefully their families) rather than all to a 2nd hand dealer. (No disrespect intended, they do an important job.)

Mike r wrote about noir & fellow travellers:

we could throw in a decent percentage of Shakespeare, couldn't we? and what about Dante?

And :

  _heart of darkness_ seems to me like _the killer inside me_ runs for election, and wins. in its own way, it is a much scarier book that Thompson's.

I'm the kind of guy who sees elements of noir everywhere, from medieval epic lit such as "Beouwulf" & "The Nibelungenlied" (& even earlier) to the music of Robert Johnson (not to mention his life & that of many blues, jazz etc musicians). Which is not to say that these things are
"noir", in the sense of genre, no matter how loosely we define this rather artificial category. I think noir & it's overlapping close cousin, hard-boiled, are most definitely modern "genres" (I believe we're using these terms very loosely, re noir particularly, but that's OK - we have to be able to ID the stuff we love so much). I believe Conrad very much straddles the fence between C19th lit & C20th more than just in a chronological sense - his writing style is old fashioned but thematically he is very modern.Personally, I find Thompson scarier than Conrad because of the way he can make us sympathise & identify with the internal thought processes of his damaged "heroes". If he'd written
"Heart of Darkness" it would have been from Kurtz's p.o.v. & he would have had us identify closely with him.That is a truly scary proposition, IMO.

Rene

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