Somebody in this region tried this some years back: design a garden, with trees, flowerbeds, shrubbery and all, alongside a highway - it’s not too hard to do, as long as there’s some way of providing a water supply and some people willing to undertake a bit of regular maintenance (here, along Provincial Route 5 in Cordoba, Argentina, had the fire brigade of a town nearby provide irrigation services but it went to weed when enthusiasm from the volunteer gardeners ran out).

I posted about this in my other web log, Q’s Place - but I’ll repeat it here: An initiative prompted by The American Horticultural Society (as a ‘new idea’: fair enough as no one has published it formally as far as I know): From small, manicured beds of flowers maintained by community volunteers to extensive landscaping projects along America’s byways, roadside gardens are taking root.

Whoever can take credit, it is a good idea and deserves support from any authorities, groups, anywhere in the world: a win win thing if there ever was one. Best would be a cooperative of individual enthusiasts but it’s hard to imagine that many people that would take on a largely altruistic effort - this is a place where town councils, state and provincial authorities can meddle and provide fine outdoor work as ‘jobs for the boys and girls’ if they must. Better by far than enclosing inexperienced youths in administrative offices so that they can mess up peoples lives with careless form filling and messed up data gathering (but that is another rant).

If you happen on this post - keep it in mind and if you can, approach anyone you can to get this show - literally - on the roads in your region. And if you can, spread the word through trackbacks and comments on your space on the ‘net.

See this morning’s Science Daily , from where I picked this up.

Q

Johnathan Morrow, on the  Copyblogger blog (founded in 2006 by Brian Clark and which is a very interesting and useful place to get stuff on this arcane thing of an Internet Presence has a very thought provoking post:

“How to be Interesting” - Copyblogger

All the sins of being a bore: I have committed most of them! Check it out, even if you don’t try this stunt of writing a journal on the web: I think much of the advice is very useful for writers in general.

Until next time, when we will try and be more interesting here, at Mostly by Knight.

Q

Stories are as old as humans, and publishing not far behind. These paintings record something significant, to some people (most certainly hunters) about 16,000 years ago near what is now called Lascaux, in France. We can don’t know why they chose to publish these pictures on the rock walls of a cave but can admire the skill and guess at the slow and laborious process it took these early artists to craft them.

They are certainly not the oldest paintings on record: there are some that go back as far back as 35,000 years - but they are accurate and beautiful and even now can tell us a little of something that happened long, long ago. We can ttrack our evolution as a distinct species from the fossils of the mortal remains of our ancestors, from leftover artifacts, but I think it amazing how soon painting and writing about things, in some form, began to come into the pattern of discoveries …

Painting and drawing is an obvious means of representing something. To produce the “whole picture” is just as obviously impossible and unnecessary. Some simplification is called for, some abstraction of just enough to show what the author meant. Then just show the little bit that makes the point as the details don’t matter (and much of those can be supplied by the reader’s (or viewer’s) imagination.

Skip forward a mere few tens of thousands of years and pictures became pictographs and hieroglyphs. Not quite individual letters nor completely understandable as pictures but strung together as language, well suited to the permanent task of keeping things on record. The famous Epic of Gilgamesh was recorded in Akkadian about 2000 BC and this portion in cuneiform script on a clay tablet tells the story of a Great Flood: The legend was already old , about 3500 BC and there is some evidence of the Black Sea being filled from the Mediterranean roughly around that time. Certainly an event dramatic enough to be recorded. Or maybe it wasn’t something that happened: early journalism or a work of fiction (or as some would have it, a Divine Message) whatever, the record stands - published.

So publishing goes back a long way. Forty thousand years? An author from so long ago can still tell his tale. Published in a durable medium with something worthwhile to tell, someone still holds our interest. Until later. (June 2d.- I changed the title, as this will be a series, maybe three parts, leading up to Drupa, the printing industry’s quadrennial extravaganza in Düsseldorf, May 29 to June 11)

Q

The Amazon Kindle is very expensive but selling well, apparently.

I was shown one recently and despite my love for books I couldn’t help liking the lil’ thing. It’s a cute gadget, smaller than I expected and the “electronic paper” is agreeable; not at all like a computer screen. It works like paper anyway; one reads the letters by reflected light, not transmitted: no glare, well placed buttons “turn” the pages: not all that different from a book bound in paper (and the pages won’t begin falling out as they do in our copy of Lord of the Rings among other recent books we’ve bought, here).

It isn’t the only reader of course, Wikepedia lists all these:

• Polymer Vision (2008)

• Astak Mentor (2008)

• GeR2 by Ganaxa (2007)

• Kindle by Amazon (2007)

• Cybook Gen3 by Bookeen (2007)

• FLEPia by Fujitsu (2007)

• Hanlin eReader by Jinke (distributed as Lbook eReader in Ukraine) (2007)

• Sony Reader by Sony (2006)

• ILiad by iRex (2006)

• Librié by Sony (2004)

None of this is new. To me, the only unexpected thing is that there are that many - although, come to think of it, there could be many more (some of those on the list are pretty obscure)

But what is astonishing is the discussion that’s going on about them. Publishers are on the way out? Good bye editors? Unlikely.

That the publishing industry is changing is probably true, we are seeing that from the writer’s side. As a beginner I have learned that my chances of getting published with a small press are very much better than they’d be with a large concern. Print on demand, where the book is made up and shipped only after it’s purchased must be taking over, and it surely will even with the big guys.

These are just the gadgets, the medium - and the medium is not the message, not in this case anyway. Yet much of the debate seems to center on the demise of publishing as we know it. Between the writer’s first glimmer of an idea for a story, and the reader actually getting one there is a huge amount of work. From the author’s personal “act of creation” whatever that is, through the draughts, revisions, critiques queries, submissions (through agents or not) , publisher’s front door, editors desks and tentative acceptance, more work with he writer, revisions - throw in a few rejections and start the cycle all over again or continue - to art work, and then (and only here) the printing, marketing, purchase and delivery and into the readers hands … between the writer and the reader there is a lot more than just printing so whether it’s done on mashed up trees or solid state screens, the process of printing a worthwhile book is the final product of a much longer gestation.
Sony

That much is obvious. Mr Bezos at Amazon announced that they would feature the POD books done with their own BookSurge company only (they acquired BookSurge in 2005, and at that time they also bought the European Mobipocket.com from which the Kindle technology is derived), but far less is said of the announcement by Penguin Books Ltd. , that they would issue all their new books electronic form as well as paper. Amazon is a retailer. Penguin is a publisher. Whether Amazon’s purpose is an attempt to grab the market, or to keep vanity publications off their inventory, or both, or neither or something completely different is irrelevant - and if it does hurt honest small publishers it’s despicable and worthy of discussion, but elsewhere.

HanLin Chinese/Ukraine?

The traditional editing process is a gatekeeper, hopefully ensuring that the reader is getting only the best efforts, from the better writers. I don’t think that it will disappear overnight. It may change, it may offer many more choices to potential readers (and thereby, more opportunities for us as writers). It is conceivable that something else may take its place or complement it. The new millennium is marked as the age of bewildering choices. We have so much set before us, all Glittering, New and Wonderful (admen and copywriters take note) that out task has changed from seeking out what we want to filtering out what we don’t.

In the long run e-readers will stay and take over. Us older folk, we get to keep our beloved books but they will become older and mustier. We can use the forests for something else (no we do not want to do Form WIMP-2548-ZING/b in re-quadruplicate , either). Vanity presses will also find life easier and there will be far more stuff on offer with no more than the authors own assurance, hope and prayer … but overall, we need the old fashioned editor, whatever form she or he takes.

And just imagine that one of these e-reader gadgets is offered to you right now for about $10 or £ 5 or a like amount of € …? Unlikely? Remember what we paid for an Apple II, or a Commodore 64, or a TI 99 (mine was about $3000 I think). Would you lay down ten bucks to get all the books in the world at your disposal. I think I would. Not taking up copy writing yet, in case you wondered.
Here is a link to a well-informed blog on the Amazon Kindle (not Amazon!)
Kindleville

Your comments of course, most welcome!

Q