I dont get it but it happens all the time

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I grow some amazing stuff in my little garden, and it happens cuz I don't repeat mistakes and make the same errors.

Yet yesterday I pick up a book by an author I highly esteem for his writing skills, and its shit. It seems like every sentence is a vessel for a noob problem. Instead of enjoying the story I edit the crap the writer and editors 'missed.' This is Standard Operating Policy at LIT. The attitude that, I AM A CHILD OF THE UNIVERSE, WITHOUT BLEMISH, I CANNOT FAIL...

 

[DesEsseintes]

It's not just here. It's the absurd extension of democracy from people having a say in how their country is run to feeling they should have an input on absolutely everything. We have transitioned from a society based on skill to one based on a ridiculous false assumption of absolute equality. It is somehow elitist (for which, of course, read 'bad') to say that one person is cleverer, or more literate, or simply a better writer than another. So we all have blogs; BBC and other huge news organizations ask obsessively for feedback, and to contact them via Twitter, and once-respected newspapers farm out opinion pieces to interns. It is the reign of 'content' rather than writing.

The reason newspapers should not be free is because good journalism costs money. The reason the public should not be invited - no, almost forced - to express its opinion on the Middle East, or hospitals, or schools, is that, by and large, its opinion is ill-informed and hence valueless.

We wouldn't want an untrained dentist in our mouth messing around with a loose crown. We wouldn't want an untrained pilot flying us across the Atlantic. So why do we accept untrained teachers, journalists, etc? Because otherwise we imply that some people are better qualified than others, or that we ought to pay them more, or that sometimes life's paths close as well as open for us. And that, apparently, is unconscionable.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Sure, every voice is a voice to be heard, even when its incoherent and incohesive.

 

[DesEsseintes]

Yet yesterday I pick up a book by an author I highly esteem for his writing skills, and its shit. It seems like every sentence is a vessel for a noob problem. Instead of enjoying the story I edit the crap the writer and editors 'missed.'

Name and shame! Enough of this cloak of anonymity!

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Name and shame! Enough of this cloak of anonymity!

Philip Kerr.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

The book I'm struggling with is titled THE ONE OR THE OTHER by Philip Kerr. Its book #4 in the series. And its weird.

Chapters 1-3 are awful writing, I mean crude and flawed, like a noob with no English courses wrote it. Beginning with Chapter 4 the writing suddenly improves a lot. All the errors vanish. WTF!

Methinks the publisher made someone write 3 bogus chapters. Chapters 1-3 are set in 1937, chapter 4 is set in 1949. Weird. Chapter 4 continues the last chapter of volume 3, chapters 1-3 are just kinda there but not related to anything in any of the books.

 

[DesEsseintes]

Methinks the publisher made someone write 3 bogus chapters. Chapters 1-3 are set in 1937, chapter 4 is set in 1949. Weird. Chapter 4 continues the last chapter of volume 3, chapters 1-3 are just kinda there but not related to anything in any of the books.

It sounds very postmodern. Have you read 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' by Italo Calvino? Similar premise.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

It sounds very postmodern. Have you read 'If on a Winter's Night a Traveler' by Italo Calvino? Similar premise.

No, but I will. I added it to my Amazon Order.

 

[ScouriesWorld]

Philip Kerr first made money as an author when he was 12 years old, writing and then renting out pornographic stories “for the edification of his schoolmates”. His first title – "The Duchess and the Daisies" – was heavily influenced by Lady Chatterley’s Lover, one of the titles his father kept on a top shelf under lock and key, and which Kerr devoured the moment his old man’s back was turned. "The Duchess and the Daisies" was discovered in the hands of a schoolmate and the author’s identity made public. Instead of anything so conventional as a beating, Kerr’s father, an austere Edinburgh businessman devised a brilliantly sadistic punishment: Kerr was made to read his work to his own mother.

"She fled the room after a couple of sentences, thank God,” he says, “but it gave me quite an insight into the power of words.”

Since then he has put pornography behind him and he now does most of his book-based research in the Wiener Library, newly moved to Russell Square. The library had been based in what sounded like very parlous conditions in Devonshire Street, where the cellar flooded every winter. The archive, built up by Alfred Wiener during the 1930s and brought to London from Amsterdam in 1939, concerns political resistance to Hitler, and was garnered from interviews with exiles as they fled various anti-Semitic pogroms.

During the Second World War, it was loaned to British intelligence who mined it for information about German internal politics. Since the end of the war the archive has been added to piecemeal, and as the last survivors of the Nazi era die, many leave it their papers. According to Kerr, new insights into the regime emerge every day.

He cuts a dapper figure, in silk and cashmere, breezily at home in the smart new Wolfson Reading Room, where the autumn sun floods in through the floor-to-ceiling windows. Though in 1993 Kerr was on Granta’s list of Best Young British Novelists and has written a score of novels since (including a string of entertaining children’s books under the name of PB Kerr) he is perhaps best known today for his series of Bernie Gunther novels.


An oddity of the books is that Kerr wrote three in quick succession – March Violets in 1989, The Pale Criminal in 1990 and A German Requiem in 1991 – and then stopped.

“I didn’t want to just get on the treadmill and march away,” he explains. “I wanted to take risks, try something different. That’s the real joy of being a writer. Besides, I’d spent too long leafing through all this stuff about the Nazis. It was like being in their company and after finishing each book I felt I needed a shower.”

But in Bernie Gunther Kerr had created a character people couldn't resist. So 15 years later, Kerr gave in to “a critical mass” of the reading public who demanded he went back to good old Bernie.

That first “new” book, The One from the Other, was greeted with rapturous applause, like the return of an old friend, but it was hardly a homecoming, because it was set after the War, and was the beginning of Bernie’s travels as he went, like some latter-day Flying Dutchman, along the network of escape routes the Nazis had established after the fall of their Reich. Now, five “new” novels later, Kerr has abandoned the chronological order, and Prague Fatale is set back in 1942, in the Czech city under the command of Reinhard Heydrich, where Bernie is set the task of investigating a locked-room murder.

“I always worry I’ve probably written one too many Bernie Gunther books, and that I should probably give him his gold watch. One or two of the commentators on Amazon seem to think so anyway…”

From TobyClements interview with Philip Kerr

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Yep, Kerr bounces all over the map and years.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I was right.

I peeked the end of the novel, and there it was, a chapter related to chapter one. Chapter One is so crude its poor quality is obvious. Its a patch the publisher added.

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

John Le Carre is a hundred million years old and was first published with an instantaneous best seller when he was just two months old - but that was after he got a degree from Cambridge so that's okay, Len Deighton has written more books since his death than the pilot has stories out (a prodigious feat!), and Jeffrey Archer never not even once, um, well I won't because I WILL get sued for this one even though it is completely true.

Ah well, Max Clifford is still inside and no one need worry about his revenge... yet.

At least Rupert Murdoch never published a fake story, especially not a Nazi one, ever.

Why do I get the distinct feeling that 'Anon' is either someone who is impotent and smokes way too much, or a mainstream publisher ever so slightly annoyed that people here write substantially and consistently better material than anything Allen and Assoc., and the Council for Foreign Relations, funded the publishing of over the last thirty years at least!

Rushdie speaks in rl with dynamism but he writes rubbish.

Archer, Rushdie, Le Carre (modern one), Kerr would sink like stones on a place like Lit.

Most books I 'try' to flick through these days are entirely unreadable and make no sense at all for the most part or at best are so highly derivative that I just can't, just can't... be bothered.

I'm not a believer in dead people writing books that get published posthumously.

Commercial sales? Well, that old fool Murdoch has sold criminals to the public as leaders and politicians for years. Right now, he has an unstable psychopath as the Prime Minister of Australia.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

John Le Carre is a hundred million years old and was first published with an instantaneous best seller when he was just two months old - but that was after he got a degree from Cambridge so that's okay, Len Deighton has written more books since his death than the pilot has stories out (a prodigious feat!), and Jeffrey Archer never not even once, um, well I won't because I WILL get sued for this one even though it is completely true.

Ah well, Max Clifford is still inside and no one need worry about his revenge... yet.

At least Rupert Murdoch never published a fake story, especially not a Nazi one, ever.

Why do I get the distinct feeling that 'Anon' is either someone who is impotent and smokes way too much, or a mainstream publisher ever so slightly annoyed that people here write substantially and consistently better material than anything Allen and Assoc., and the Council for Foreign Relations, funded the publishing of over the last thirty years at least!

Rushdie speaks in rl with dynamism but he writes rubbish.

Archer, Rushdie, Le Carre (modern one), Kerr would sink like stones on a place like Lit.

Most books I 'try' to flick through these days are entirely unreadable and make no sense at all for the most part or at best are so highly derivative that I just can't, just can't... be bothered.

I'm not a believer in dead people writing books that get published posthumously.

Commercial sales? Well, that old fool Murdoch has sold criminals to the public as leaders and politicians for years. Right now, he has an unstable psychopath as the Prime Minister of Australia.

The secret to PILOTs genius is how he changes names of characters and sexual vehicles with every story. In one story Willie bends Perry over a barrel, in another story Marvin bends Lawrence over a pool table.

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

I was right.

I found a copy of ONE FROM ANOTHER by Philip Kerr missing the crude prose I complain of. As I imagined, someone made an inept patch at the beginning. The patch is missing from the later printings.

 

[KlaytonFrost]

They say that everyone has a book inside of them. Just turns out most of those books are poorly-written drivel.

I don't know what it is about writing, but everyone seems to think that they can do it. Not everyone has the same blind spot when it comes to painting or drawing, but writing? Just grab a pen, scribble out your thoughts and slap that shit up on Amazon for the world to digest...

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

They say that everyone has a book inside of them. Just turns out most of those books are poorly-written drivel.

I don't know what it is about writing, but everyone seems to think that they can do it. Not everyone has the same blind spot when it comes to painting or drawing, but writing? Just grab a pen, scribble out your thoughts and slap that shit up on Amazon for the world to digest...

The only thing sweeter than our thoughts are our farts.