William Denton wrote:
> People. really. I never thought we'd see Harriet
Klausner discussed
> here. That's -50 eggs to all of you.
Yeah, no shit. But we Americans are all Klausnerites. It's
too bad, a shame, a gol-dang shame. If only we weren't so
insular.
The self-vaunting Internet site-floggers think that there's
some great big wall around America, that it can't be
penetrated by quality literature. Is this remotely true? Not
hardly. This is a giant lie, but a popular one for those
lesser creatures that can't crack the market. You can't get
published in America with a Tronno or Helsinki setting? Tough
shit! Take up plumbing!
Remember the old saw: Bad money drives out the good. Well,
the opposite has now become true. The Internet may give
Harriet (n饊 Burton) Klausner a platform, but it also gives
us, that is, everyone everywhere, the ability to denounce
her, as Mario Taboada rightly understands, as a robotic fool.
Besides which, on-demand printing makes obsolete most of what
we understand as publishing, including everything Goofball
Harriet reviews. Publishing is well along the road to the
same fate as the Dodo bird. A gone goon. With the soon-coming
100-percent-correct machine translation, you can write your
novel in Thunderfart, Ontario, in the morning and a customer
in Marseille can buy it, print it, and read it in the
afternoon.
If noir/hardboiled is to survive, it will have to slug it out
in the market, which is inescapable. It's a niche market and
nothing more. There is no turning back the clock to some
unknown "golden era," which never really existed. And America
can't stop you.
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