There was hoohahing going on last week on bluesky anent people pirating books on account authors do not need the money and should be creating for Love of Art.

And I will concede that when it comes to Evil Exploitative Academic Publishing Empires, I cannot get my knickers in a twist over people downloading papers for which they have not paid the extortionate fee, none of which goes to author of the paper or the reviewers who reviewed it for the journal in question (wot, me, bitter?) - in fact I will be over here cheering or offering to use such library access as I have to get access and offer a copy.

But honestly the Average Author of fictional works is not making molto moolah but is probably supporting themselves by doing something else or being supported by someone else (hey, Ursula K Le Guin? e.g. mentions somewhere she was a housewife when she first started out) and writing is not their sole occupation or source of remuneration.

And even writers who we look back on as Important and Successful had their money problems: Hardship grant applications to the Royal Literary Fund... show authors at their most vulnerable:

Nobody goes into writing for the money: today, professional authors in the UK earn a median income of £7,000, according to the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society. Looking at the starry names awarded grants through the RLF’s history makes clear that the challenges are not new. However, Kemp thinks the problem has become more acute in some regards. “The kinds of deal you get with a publisher as a mid-list fiction writer has gone down, down, down, down, down.” Twenty or 30 years ago, such writers could survive; it is now much tougher, he says. Big publishers are “paying large amounts of money to a small number of writers”. A “tiny percentage actually survive on what they’re making from writing.”

“On the one hand there are people like Joyce and DH Lawrence, who are early in their careers, and indeed Doris Lessing, who are struggling to get going, who have made a mark but are finding it hard to make ends meet. And at the other end there are people like Coleridge, and more recently Edna O’Brien, who have had stellar careers, and you’d have hoped actually were doing OK, but the vicissitudes of a writer’s life mean that sometimes it goes to pot.”

Many documents show writers at the most vulnerable times of their lives, often in precarious positions early in their careers; everything from feeble book sales to illness to messy marriages to grief is chronicled here.... Nesbit, author of The Railway Children, wrote in an August 1914 letter that the shock of her husband’s death “overcame me completely and now my brain will not do the poetry romance and fairy tales by which I have earned most of my livelihood”.

I suppose it's remotely possible that there's someone with a similar name to mine for whom this would be a relevant conference:

The ITISE 2026 (12th International conference on Time Series and Forecasting) seeks to provide a discussion forum for scientists, engineers, educators and students about the latest ideas and realizations in the foundations, theory, models and applications for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary research encompassing disciplines of mathematics, econometric, statistics, forecaster, computer science, etc in the field of time series analysis and forecasting.

***

I have discovered a new 'offputting phrase that, found in blurb, causes you to put the book down as if radioactive': 'this gargantuan work of supernatural existentialism' - even without the name of the author - Karl Ove Knausgård - who has apparently moved on from interminable autofiction to interminable this.

***

A certain Mr JJ, that purports to be an Art Critick, on long history of artistic rivalries (between Bloke Artists, natch):

Shunning competition makes the Turner Prize feel pointless. It may be why there are no more art heroes any more.
Artistic competition goes to the essence of critical discrimination. TS Eliot said someone who liked all poetry would be very dull to talk to about poetry. Double header exhibitions that rake up old rivalries are not shallow, but help us all be critics and understand that loving means choosing. If you come out of Turner and Constable admiring both artists equally, you probably haven’t truly felt either. And if you prefer Constable, it’s pistols at dawn.

***

I rather loved this by Lucy Mangan, and will be adopting the term 'frothers' forthwith:

I like to grab a cup of warm cider and settle down with as many gift guides as I can and enjoy the rage they fuel among people who have misunderstood what many might feel was the fairly simple concept of gift guides entirely. I am particularly fond of people who look at a list headed, say, “Stocking stuffers for under £50” and respond by commenting on how £50 is a ridiculous amount of money to be spending on a stocking stuffer. They are closely followed in my pantheon of greats by those who see something like “25 affordable luxuries for loved ones” and can only type “Affordable BY WHOM?!?!” before falling to the ground in a paroxysm of ill-founded self-righteousness. On and on it goes. I love it. Never change, frothers. You are the gift that keeps on giving.

Further to that expose of freebirthers, A concerned NHS midwife responds to an article about the Free Birth Society