All that is solid melts into air…
I know, I have beefed about our new electronic world before but now I have a brass tack excuse. Our Tecky Department has no conception of paper or anything solid it seems. It’s all about task lists and memory cells and the great Fixit Syndrome we have in publishing – Penelope or Sisyphus Syndrome depending on your gender. To make us more efficient (would that were possible) we have struggled with BaseCamp and now we have Apollo thrust upon us (half the price and better or so I am told). But I protest that I am a man of the Legal Pad and the Piles-On-The-Desk and the Post-it Note (see, I can do technical) and the last minute phone call and the I-am-sure-I-can-find-it-somewhere moment.
My desk is a Mnemonic Device in and of itself. But that is lost on those whose idea of a desk is a platform for a computer. Ok, so only I can use it as others merely see this, my Renaissance Palimpsest, this, my Palace of Secrets, this, my Cabinet of Curiosities, as… as, well, as a Mess and as my Mess at that, indecipherable and unsightly. The cleaner won’t touch it; more’s not quite the pity.
Karl Marx comes to mind as in “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.” Not that the Communist Manifesto has passed across my desk at all recently you understand but the man has a point. On this and some other issues I might add.
It’s not quite as dramatic hereabouts but things are definitely melting into the ether as far as I can see (or not as it were…) and the bit about “man’s relations with his kind” does raise the issue that you can do a lot more with physical objects on a physical desk to jog the fading, superannuated, (is that an Oxford Comma I saw there?), memory cells than you can with a key board and a screen on which you have to remember to raise Apollo before you remember anything else! I need post-it notes all over the laptop to remind me how to remind myself of how to reach the memory threshold and the lists. All of which doesn’t even get me to first base. Hell, I even have trouble with pin-boards.
A small row, sorry, a pile really; a small ever-changing pile of books come and go with attendant subliminal messages about things to Fix and do, quotes to use, definitions, adumbrations of ideas that might, just might, become a book in one of our (at that particular moment, unsuspecting) authors to whom the e-mail might start “Might I suggest…”. Two or three yellow legal pads lie ready to be indiscriminately used for listing, note taking, doodling, calculating, listing again, recalculating. Endless print outs from the computer travel from one side of the desk (as flat sheets) and exit stage left into the recycling bin as I scrunch them up and practice my hoops.
All of which brings me to the question of discipline. All this talk of self-publishing: they have no idea. From this, my Mess issues sufficient direction or indirection, as meaner colleagues have remarked, to get the hundreds of decisions that book publishing entails done and dusted. A clean desk is a sign of a sick mind…and cyberspace is always clean?
