Every day I produce a minimum of five lucrative ideas. Unfortunately, I lack an entourage of five people needed to make them successful, namely, 1. a scribe, 2. a translator, 3. a designer, 4. a publicity agent and 5. a VC (that's Venture Capitalist, not Viet Cong). For a time, I tried to be all those people but it was exhausting. For instance, five years ago when I was living in the slave quarters of a grand house in New Orleans I put a stack of books on the steps of my building with a sign that said $5. The tourists and riff-raff who wander the French Quarter with heads full of kitsch, passed the tower of my quality volumes without paying attention. They were in search of adventure, and books, which are full of them, had already happened to other people. A young man stopped. He picked up the Selected Poems of Ezra Pound and said incredulously: "Five dollars?" I explained: "It's not your five dollars. I'm paying you five dollars to take it and read it." That seemed to appeal to him, but I added, "Under one condition. That you actually read it." He nodded in agreement. "And," I continued, "you have to come back in five hours and tell me what your thoughts about it are, to make sure that you really read it." He thought about this for a bit. "Seven dollars?" he said. I agreed.
Word got around fast and, by evening, when the serious drunks started their rounds, I had a line of customers. It cost me about $200, but it was worth it. I had distributed some of the best minds of several generations to a number of individuals. I didn't think my idea was a success until, next day, at the same hour, I sat on the steps with a new stack. My first customer showed up. "I'm giving you back three dollars," he said. "I understood mostly nothing. Besides, it's poetry. Still, I got four dollars' worth because I went to Molly's and I met a guy who bought me dinner and my rather expensive special services." Molly's is a bar. It's true, I hadn't told him it was poetry. "Did you read any of it?" "The preface," he said, "It was interesting. " A triumph. A preface is not nothing. The only thing more satisfying than a preface is a blurb. In the next few hours several of my previous day customers showed up: some of them returned my money, some of them had actually read the books, and some of them, actually said perceptive things about them. And some of them (maybe most of them) never showed up.
Needless to say, I had distributed only quality books, by canonical or should-have-been canonical writers. The reason for this Reverse Sale, as I called my business, was to put great books in "the hands of the people," as the communists used to say, or did they say "to educate the masses?" I could have sold them to a used book dealer or placed them into an archive (some of the living classics had actually signed them because they were my friends), but bureaucracy unnerves me and I am truly something of a populist. By the end of the week, my entire library was gone, a number of French Quarter tourists and locals had profited from the "sale," and my back thanked me. I was moving. After all my moves I had to see a chiropractor, an acupuncturist and a drug dealer immediately, because of the books.
Now imagine just the health-benefits of this business: Americans could stand straight again, maybe even proudly. In addition, if my Reader-for-Pay scheme is adopted on a large scale by authors, publishers, and by the innumerable owners of unread libraries, there would be a public sigh of relief. Publishers, for instance, would make an actual profit from the word-of-mouth fate of their books, instead of relying on the ponderous network of ass-kissers and dealers that eke a living out of them, not to speak of the real way they make money, which is to sell the books back to their authors at a pitiful discount. Needless to say, the Reader-for-Pay business has nothing to do with e-books because e-books are culturally insignificant: they depend on content and party chatter. In other words, e-books are not literature. They are not even furniture.
Another of my ideas, unrealized for its prohibitive price, was to turn millions of unsold hardbacks into bricks, and to build forts with them. This would work well in desert climates but it's not practical in the South. I discussed glues with a chemist. The price of a glue that would seal a book for humidity and vermin is too much for southerners, who as everyone knows, possess the largest for-sale libraries in the world. By the South I don't only mean Alabama and Southern Illinois, but South America and the tropics as well. I have many other ideas that are not about books and are infinitely more profitable. Some of these are: Quadripedal Yoga, Body-Writing Seminars, and the Disposition of Famous People's Body Parts to the Religious Proletariat.
If you are a 1. a scribe, 2. a translator, 3. a designer, 4. a publicity agent or 5. a VC, contact me via this newsletter.
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