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The Free Word and the Paid
by David Nunes da Silva
Bookstores,
publishing houses, book reviews, Amazon.com - these are the
institutions of the paid word. But the paid word is not the whole: there
are other words, a whole planet of other words - namely the
books, stories, and articles posted on the internet and given away for
nothing. That is the world of the free word.
FancyFree is the adult e-zine of the free word.
It will
have original stories, reviews and recommendations of free books and
stories, and articles about fiction on the internet.
FancyFree will not be limited to adult content, but it will not censor
anything for being too graphic or too disturbing, and I expect quite a
bit of the content will be adult. So this e-zine as a
whole, and not just individual articles and stories, will carry an
adults-only label. The primary focus of FancyFree will be
free fiction, but non-fiction will be included and reviewed, if it is
good writing. Content other than words, such as pictures, video,
and music, will be included and reviewed as
well. But only what is free - a free review of a
published non-free book, would not belong here.
The gap between the paid word and the free, runs deep. Of the books that will be published over the next
month, it is no doubt true that the books of the paid word, will be on the
whole better, and also more important, that the books of the free
word. But if you chose the 200 best
or most important books, of all the books published in that month, it is not the case that every single one of
those 200 will be from the paid word. Some
few at least will be free. But in the review magazines of the paid word,
of the many hundreds of books reviewed, not a single free book will be reviewed. Probably, not a single
free book will be mentioned. And in other ways, you can live and read on the planet of the paid
word, and the planet of free word is invisible. If you buy a
book from
Amazon.com, you will see a message - readers who bought this book also
liked such and such. But you will never be told
about a free book you might like. Users of public
libraries are rarely alerted to free books. Browsers in
bookstores don't find out about free books. One
reason some books are given away free, is that aspiring authors hope to
gain a readership that will then buy their other books. But publishers must not think this works,
because publishers never link to free books.
How does the free word, differ from the paid? The
free word, as literature, can be stinkingly bad. And gut-wrenchingly squicky. The
paid word can be fairly bad as
well, sometimes.
But only fairly: even publishers of romance novels have reputations to
maintain. A published book, any published book,
is edited by a professional, and while it may not be great literature,
it was presumably selected from other unpublished manuscripts not good
enough to publish The editors at publishing
houses are not that different from one another; they tend to come from
the same schools, read the
same literary magazines and share a lot of cultural
assumptions.. Each publishing house has a standard of what
would be too pornographic for it to publish, and this influences what
is published, even if there is very little that can't be published
somewhere. An author told by an editor that a sex
scene is too graphic, is not likely to leave that publisher and switch
to one who sells primarily in porn shops, just to maintain the artistic
integrity of that one scene. (And that one scene would not
make the book pornographic enough to
sell in porn shops, anyway.) So the existence of porn
shops and the books for sale in them, does not change the fact that the paid
word censors its authors.
The stories of the free word, in contrast, do not have to meet
any standards of quality whatsoever, so if someone wants to post
something fuck-awful, or merely fuck-fuck-fuck, they can.
Not that most postings are either of those things - the average work is
fair, and the best is spectacularly good. But
all of it, fuck-awful to spectacular, is unconstrained. If
a story involves a rape for example, and the author thinks that a rape
should be described accurately when it occurs in story, then she describes it. There is no
editor to tell her to tone it down. Perhaps, she will
herself decide to rate her story as NC-17, because of the rape, and
this may cost a few readers, while gaining others. But this
effect is small and is unlikely to be a factor in the author's choices.
Political blogs, and the respectable media: Most
people have heard about political blogs, while the scale and scope of
free fiction is somewhat unknown. The problems with political
blogs are also pretty well known. But anyone who reads political
blogs comes to understand that the other news sources - the respectable
news sources - represent a constrained world view. Newspapers
that are supposedly independent and competitive, cover the same small
range of stories, and treat them in the same ways - as if all the
reporters were in a club. This self-imposed censorship may even
be a good idea - but it does exist, and anyone who compares
conventional news sources with blogs, can see at once that the blog
webmaster is outside the club, and the self-imposed censorship is not
just broken, it is blown away. FancyFree is not a
magazine about politics, but about good writing - and especially
outside-the-club writing. So well-written blogs are within
its scope.
Politics is not the only subject of blogs and other independent web
sites. If someone wants to maintain that the Earth is flat,
or that it was created 6000 years ago by a Semetic patriarch with
supernatural powers, or any other view, they can get a website and post
to it. The opinions expressed in peer-reviewed
scientific journals are undoubtedly more reliable than what you might
find on some website - but it is the outside-the-club writing that this
e-zine cares about.
One part of the planet of the free word, is fanfic.
The sources of pop culture are blockbuster books, TV shows, and movies
-
Star Wars, for example, or Harry Potter. These books
are of the paid word; professionally written, edited, and
published, and the movies and TV shows are of course made by
professionals
as
well. Pop culture is a thing for the masses - as
consumers. It is far from being from the
masses, as creators. The sources of pop culture
are created by an
elite, and the flow of ideas is from this elite to
the mass. Reviews of those blockbuster books
and movies, which are the sources of pop culture, do not describe the
culture of the populace - those reviews describe the culture of an
elite, which the populace merely consumes.
But there is a branch of pop culture,
which is produced by the populace, and not just consumed by them -
fanfic. Reading the blockbuster books, and seeing the
movies, doesn't tell you what is going on. And the reviews are
worse. They can't tell you how the populace thinks
Fanfic is the thing itself.
A large proportion of fanfic is written
by teenage girls. Teenage girls are just about
invisible in our society, as creative thinking beings (they get noticed as
money-spending beings). But while it may be
invisible to the world of the paid word, fanfic is a massive phenomenon. There
are hundreds of thousands of authors, perhaps a million stories,
with typically hundreds of page-reads each. This is truly
the populace. But the difference between what this
populace is thinking, and what the paid word world would like to sell
them, is fantastic; you need only compare the work of fanfic authors
themselves, largely teenagers, with the contents of the youth section
of your local bookstore.
The most notable difference, is sex. I don't know how many
young fanfic readers click past links that say "over 18." I don't know how many
of the stories beyond those links are in fact written by authors under
18. I suspect both are common. But even if we
look only at the fanfic rated PG-13, there is a great difference
between the free word and the paid, in attitudes to sex, with the free
word being more sex-positive, not to mention having a lot more sex in
it. In the United Kingdom (which has the highest teen pregnancy
rate in Europe, though far below that of the United States), about half
of the population has had sex by age 16, and pretty much all of them
masturbate. The Hogwarts of J.K. Rowling has quite a bit
less sex and masturbation than this; the Hogwarts of fanfic has rather more. And
the same for other fandoms. Wesley Crusher does not have a
friend with benefits. He does in fanfic.
Perhaps it is a good thing that minors are restricted to published
works that are either sexless or sex-negative. I don't
know. The point is that the literature that teenagers create
themselves reflects their world, and their concerns, one of which is
sex, and the works written for them by the elite, do not. They are so
different as to be from different planets.
Even more striking is the difference in attitudes to gay
sex. Slash (male/male sex and
romance) is very common in fanfic. The word slash seems to have
come from sex stories labeled by the characters who have sex, with
Kirk/Spock (Kirk-slash-Spock) being an important pairing from the pre-internet
days. Not all these stories were gay, but so many of them
were, that "slashing" came to mean writing a fanfic sex story about two
male characters who were straight in the canon. The
writers and readers of these slash fanfic stories are overwhelmingly
female, and I think many are under 18, or not much
over. Naturally the stories of gay sex written by
gays, are different in style; less romantic or at any rate
differently romantic, and stories of this style are not called
slash, but gay. Presumably gay writing about gay sex is the more
realistic. I think there is at least as much slash
fanfiction as het fanfiction. So teenage girls, in so
far as they express their interests by what they write, are largely
interested in men fucking men, often in a very romantic
way. But on the
planet of the paid word, clueless publishers market gay romance novels to gays!
Manga. Anime, Yaoi, Shounen-ai, J-rock, X-box, and RPG. In the United States, there is some concern that the population is both
ignorant of, and hostile to, the outside world.
Supposedly most of us could not find Iraq on a
map. But there is one country at least that has
been embraced at the level of pop culture, to an degree almost
amounting to a national mind-meld. A great
fraction of all fanfic is based on video games, anime, and
manga. Japanese manga publishers have
been more welcoming of fanfic than publishers in English
have been.
Some of the fanfic written in English, is by Japanese or Koreans.
The UK seems less interested in Japanese fandoms than the US
does, although a lot of other fanfiction comes from the UK.
Writers and readers in Germany and Italy are rather more interested in
Japanese fandoms, especially J-rock RPS. RPS stands for
real person slash, and it means fictional stories about real people,
usually straight male real people, who are depicted in fictional
stories as having steaming gay sex. Not perhaps a
nice thing to do. The men subjected to this are
typically the actors (not the characters) of blockbuster movies - The
Lord of the Rings in particular - and the members of Japanese rock
bands.
The word yaoi comes from an acronym, which means (bizarrely) no climax.
It described, originally, a story that was just sex
without any point or end; a point being, presumably, getting married
and living happily ever after. Currently, yaoi means gay
sex - yaoi stories are, like the slash stories that came out of science
fiction, largely written and read by women and girls. Quite a
lot of them are not Japanese. There isn't really a lot of
difference between good yaoi and good slash - yaoi is slash in a
Japanese fandom. But yaoi is, if such a thing can be imagined, is
even more romantic, and the characters even more
androgynous. Shounen-ai (girl love) is the
usual word for lesbian fanfic in Japanese fandoms, and there is a lot
of it. Lesbian fanfic on other fandoms, such as Star
Trek, is different from Shounen-ai - it is rather more butch, and
appears to be written by actual lesbians. The girls
who write shounen-ai stories are just
young. Yaoi and shounen-ai
are not that different; in both cases it is love with a partner who is
just about the exact opposite of the stereotypical Japanese husband.
But whatever the origin of youi and shounen-ai, there is a lot of it,
even a lot in English. A lot of the writers are
from the US.
So what is the picture of these young writers that emerges from their
writing? Racism, at least of Europeans against
Asians or Asians against Europeans, is so absent as to be just about
unimaginable. (Also absent is any mention of Africans
or Muslims). The Japanese and the Americans each regard the
other country's culture as cooler than their own. And
gay sex is the best kind.
To turn to something completely different - one way that fiction becomes free, is for the copyright to expire.
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http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/ebooks/
http://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/texts.html
http://arthursclassicnovels.com/arthurs/
http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/
http://www.teleread.org/booksalreadyonline.htm
As noted in our write-up of e-books at a Chicago parochial school, readers can already enjoy a wealth of good resources online.
You can download gems ranging from first-class lesson plans to fairy
tale collections. Also enjoy books from Project Gutenberg, the Internet
Public Library, the On-Line Books Page, the English Server, the Electronic Text Center at the University of Virginia, and the University of California Press.
With links to so many other resources, the Internet Public Library might be the best single place to start.
The
just-given links will lead you to thousands of titles. Although
TeleRead would vastly improve matters, it isn't as if the Net right now
is a total wasteland. What's more, BookShare.org will soon offer a legal way for people with print-related disabilities to be able to share many books.
Here are a few more existing resources:
--Microsoft's e-book area, which even includes some free copies of best-sellers. You can download the Microsoft e-reader at no charge
--Adobe's area, which points you to online sellers of e-book and also offers free reading software.
--The e-book areas of Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble and Yahoo, all of which sell books from major publishers.
--Commercial online libraries: NetLibrary, ebrary,
Questia and Follett Software Comapany.
--Yahoo's listing of electronic book publishers. They range from Peanut Press (offering software for Palm computers) to Time Warner Bookmark. Among other things AOL Time Warner owns iPublish, a wonderful concept in theory even though the contracts are stacked against the new writers who use the service.
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