I had a dream that Australia Post introduced a new size of prepaid red satchel - a smaller one, perfect for fat paperbacks too thick for prepaid envelopes. It was about half the width of the 500g satchel, and was really cheap. I was excited by this.
Just a short non-entry to let you know that despite the lack of updates, this blog is still functioning, and should still be checked on a semi-regular basis. For once my silence does not represent any great angst-ridden period of self-doubt and disillusionment; I just haven’t had much to say in a public space.
I have been writing, though – I’ve written one and a half thousand words of a truly banal and unambitious short story, which I’m determined to complete. It’s been so long since I’ve written fiction that I feel happy just to be putting words down. The sentences are OK, they read smoothly enough, and it’s getting written, when I have enough time, with suprising speed and fluency. It’s a shame it’s no good, but this I can live with at the moment.
I watched the Martin Scorsese documentary on Bob Dylan that screened on SBS, and it hit deeply with me – after I watched each installment I paced my apartment, talking to myself, my hands moving with the rhythm of my thoughts. I was mesmerised by the examination of the process by which somebody becomes a creative genius – the focus, the confidence, the desire and imitation, the steady gaze and unwillingness to compromise. I was going to write a lot about it here, but it’s quite personal, and I think what I felt would be difficult to communicate and sound very pretentious. I do aspire to that level of artistic expression and see it as a process of both calculation and emotional abandonment, and it meant a lot to me to see both sides of that reflected in Dylan as portrayed in the documentary, as well as making me upset at my own compromises.
I’m attracted to and afraid it: a controlled insanity, a self-concious derangement, a blending of these two sides of my personality into a razor’s edge of intense creativity. I move towards and away from this at various points in my life, and shy from it as often as I seek it. It’s been a part of me for so long, this thing, and I’ve recently realised that it’s probably not even essential to who I am, but perhaps just a pathological condition arising from a lifelong habit of solitude. Yet I define myself by it, I am creative because of it... I told you it would sound pretentious, and I’ll stop now.
What else? I went to a party on Friday night and stayed up, uncharacteristically, until seven in the morning, somehow maintaining a level of intoxication that kept me feeling good, with a dellusional impresison that I was the most charming person in the room. I went to another on Sunday and drank nothing, spent two hours wandering sober, appalled and afraid in search of a conversation. Both experiences seemed valid, if not real. For the last month or so I’ve felt more like a writer, and less like a bookseller, which I think is a good thing, though others might disagree.
Without a doubt, one of the more fun sides of this strange job is the last day sales at large book fairs. In an effort to clear out the books, the leftovers are virtually given away at a nominal price - five or ten dollars for a picked box of books. By this time everything obviously good has sold, and what is left is the junk, the overpriced, and the whatizzits. With little time to choose, and books ridiculously cheap, you take virtually anything that looks vaguely different or interesting, and work out afterwords what you've bought.
Anyway, among the many boxes of randoms I bought at a last day sale recently was a book called "Down Amongst the Cherry Trees" - that's not quite the title, but putting the correct title on here would just result in an avalanche of unwelcome visitors. The book didn't look like much, and I have no idea why I picked it up - maybe the curious cover photo of a bunch of teenagers all a-tangle. So, sometime later, I come to catalogue this box of books, and this book most definately falls into the "whatizzit" category - it's a New Zealand health book from the seventies, "a resource on sex and social development" - none listed for sale on the internet. When this happens, it's sometimes hard to decide if there's none available because it's popular, or because it's such an obscure piece of junk that it has rightly dissapeared into oblivion. I decided it was in the latter category, and put it on at about fifteen dollars - a price which says, "I doubt anybody will ever want this, but if they do, they probably be willing to go that high."
This was, actually, a pretty bad bit of bookselling by me - the subtitle should have been a tipoff that I had a book in that strangest and most "collectable" of all categories - the pedophile book. It sold the next day - to a New Zealand library, thank god - and ever since I have been deluged with orders, including no less than four from some creep, who I eventually had to send a very stern email telling him to stop trying to order it. The lack of copies
should have caused me to do some research - if I had, I might have found the following, from
this web page, which in turn quotes from the Sunday Mirror:
No crime is more despicable than child sex abuse, and families rightly demand that their children have every possible protection from paedophiles. So, on the face of it, the proposed British Paedophile and Sex Offender Index seems a welcome attempt to provide a warning system.
**Until, as the Sunday Mirror has done, you make some enquiries into the background of the man who is producing it.**
Alister Taylor's first literary venture was The Little Red School Book, published in Australia in 1969. The 200-page booklet told young children about masturbation, petting, intercourse and orgasm. It is so disgusting that when it appeared in New Zealand the government amended their obscenity laws to deal with it.
Taylor's next book was "Down Amongst The Cherry Trees", an explicit sex manual aimed at children, with photos of naked bodies in a variety of sexual positions.
By 1995, his unsavoury fascination with child sex led to the publication of the New Zealand Paedophile and Sex Offender Index. Last year he brought out an Australian version - a 300-page A to Z of people convicted of abusing children since 1991. Now his researchers are in Britain, scouring newspaper cuttings for an index here.
**Many experts are appalled, and rightly so.**
Ray Wyre, who works in a child sex offenders' clinic, says: "Paedophiles will buy it for sexual pleasure. It gives graphic details of offences and tells how victims were lured into sex. It will only reinforce paedophile behaviour." [Note that this quote is couched in the present tense - which suggests that Wyre has already seen it.]
In other words, this "index" is no more than a paedophiles' charter, an instruction manual for child sex abuse.
There is a case for a register of child sex offenders, but it must be done responsibly, with the co-operation of the police, courts and social services.
**Alister Taylor is not the man to do it. He should go back to Australia and take his filth with him.**
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Interesting that Taylor should have published 'The Little Red School Book' and 'Down Amongst the Cherry Trees', as both were considered useful radical publications in their day. It would appear that Taylor is either a radical with a hidden agenda to put peds in contact with each other, or an opportunist who likes to shock.
How strange. What would I have done if I'd realised? I don't know, I suppose I would have looked at the book and made up my own mind whether it was something I was comfortable selling or not. If I'd decided I wanted to sell it, I would have priced it about twenty times what I put it at - the desire of pedophiles for the books they want knows no limits.
I have come across two other "pedophile" books. (Note: I have never come across child pornography, and hope I never will. These are books that are at least superficially of some conventional validity, yet are absolutely unobtainable at any reasonable price on the web, for no obvious reason other than their apparent appeal to people with a sexual interest in children). One of these - which I haven't had a copy of - is a book of naturist photography that a bookseller I know bought a crate of, remaindered, in the sixties, and now sells for a thousand dollars each - he sells about one a month. The bookseller is a famous opponent of censorship, but he is under no delusions about why he can sell this book for so much money. I quote from his catalogue description of the book:
Renowned photography book of the Sixties Era, set in a naturists holiday camp on an island in a river near Bremen, in Germany, where naturism has always been popular. Photographs of family groups in meadows and on beaches, and many photographs of a canoeing club, the "Hanseatic Pirates". The young people stride through fields with their canoe paddles, towards the beach, to set off on an expedition. From antiquity, the figure of Pan is still alive, and visiting Germany, and follows the adventures of the young people in the canoeing club.
I think if I had a remaindered crate of this book, I'd probably sell it - there is nothing intrinsically obscene about the human body, and no doubt the thousand-dollars-a-copy would be quite an incentive.
The only other such book I have come across was one that a staff member discovered on my shelves, that was likewise unobtainable, and had more "wants" on it than any other book I've ever come across. It was a non-fiction psychological study with a title like "The Man They Called a Monster" - a defense of a man charged with a long list of pedophile crimes, which studied him and his victims and concluded that he was, in fact, a beneficial influence. I asked myself, and a couple of other people, a question - "is this something that could conceivably tip a person with pedophilic tendencies into becoming an actual abuser of children?" and I concluded that yes, it was possible. I refused to sell that one, and when I told the famous opponent of censorship about it, he said it was something he would refuse to sell as well. It created quite a conflict in me, because it was unavailable for purchase, and I am also highly opposed to any sort of censorship. Most books are all too common, but here I was in a position to make available a piece of writing that was otherwise unavailable. I compromised - or wimped out - by giving it to a third dealer who has no such moral compunctions, who has done nothing with it for reasons that have nothing to do with morality.
I'm asking questions here, not giving answers. The issue of pedophilia is complex and currently surrounded by a level of hysteria that prevents rational discussion. I suppose I will continue to make judgments about such things on a case-by-case basis, and try not to let the lure of big money sway my judgment. The only conclusion I would draw is that pedophilia must be more common than most people realise, and their compulsions must be very strong - virtually all books are in oversupply, but these three titles cost a fortune, or are unobtainable at any cost. Unless some fool of a bookseller lists a copy for fiteen bucks.
Well, I finally got offered so much money that I pretty much had to accept, and as of late February, Plup will cease trading at its current location, in order to enable the new owners of our building to put in a brothel or an internet cafe or whatever they want to do with it. The good news is I will basically own my own bookshop at that point; the bad news is I have no real idea what sort of a shop I will have. It may be a storage unit and a web address. I hope not, but rent along King Street is vicious. We're getting a lot of money, in the end, because I didn't really want to move, and was a prick about it. Also my arithmetical skills are incompetent, and I didn't realize quite how much money I was demanding until they agreed to it - let's keep that to ourselves, shall we?
I have so many thoughts about all this, most of which I don't feel comfortable sharing on this blog. Even what I've written already is probably far too much. There is a major gap between my logical and emotional response to it - logically, I recognise that it is a stroke of unexpected very good fortune. Emotionally, I feel like I've been kicked in the stomach. If only debt felt like real money to me, so that it actually seemed like I was
getting the money, rather than just paying down debt... if only I could find another shop, for the same rent, in the same spot, and with the same ambience... As it is, I will have to make compromises somewhere: either more work for me (and no time to write), or no shop. Anyway - I wish I had something else to share here, but I don't. I was chatting to Bree on instant messaging today, she'd been reading the Sydney Morning Herald online, and John Howard is rushing through anti-civil liberties legislation (or anti-terror legislation, depending on your outlook I suppose), muttering ominously about a "specific threat" he's not going to tell us about, and Sydney apartments are falling into gaping holes in the earth, and she said it seems like the world's ending... I wouldn't get quite that dramatic, but we live in interesting times. I read the paper at the coffee shop this morning, and all I came across was the story of some university kid in England who got killed shooting himself out of a catapult, and I wondered if the catapult plans were on the internet, anywhere...
