THIS PUBLISHING BUSINESS -- APOLOGIES & COMMENTARY

THIS PUBLISHING BUSINESS – APOLOIGIES & COMMENTARY

James R. Fisher, Jr., Ph.D.
© June 1, 2010

READERS WRITE:

Publishing is not what it was forty years ago, one writer writes, when you published your first book. Only too true. Others have mentioned an error in my missive. Still others wonder if I am self-conscious about being so personal. The answer is “no.” I confess that I do give a lot of personal information, but as one person said a long time ago, "Fisher, you manage to make candor the best blind of all." I suppose that is true. I am a very private person who uses candor as a narrative mechanism.

MY RESPONSE:

First of all, apologies are called for, as I failed to correctly name Truman Capote's book, which was IN COLD BLOOD, not "In True Blood.”

By a peculiar set of circumstances, I suppose, which perhaps has much to do with my first five years of life, I have had great comfort as a loner, reader and observer. It colors everything that I am and say.

For example, years ago, when I was an executive with Nalco, and constantly on the road, I took special comfort in reading my copy of SATURDAY REVIEW OF LITERATURE, especially the columns of Granville Hicks. I can recall to this day what he said about John Updike, "He writes beautifully but has little to say." I happened to agree with Hicks but fortunately for Updike, not most readers.

There was a similar comfort with THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY in those days, which like Saturday Review is only a chiaroscuro shadow of what it once was.

During that halcyon period, I was known in Nalco as its "token intellectual." This charge was largely because I preferred reading to jawboning with my colleagues. It didn't help that the books they saw me reading were about such people as Erasmus, or books written by the likes of Camus and Sartre.

It was the age of psychedelic drugs, when I was a non-drinker and non-smoker, but knew much about the chemistry of these drugs through my reading of this mind-expanding culture. I was curious as to where it was going, but had no interest in climbing aboard.

Guys would see me reading and query me even about the word, psychedelic, which was foreign to them, as the range of their interests was chemical engineering, period.

In high school, on a football trip, eating training table in a restaurant on the road after a game, the shop teacher, who was also the bus driver, yelled at me from another table, "Fisher, you're so smart, what is osmosis?"

Without turning my head, I said, "passing of a fluid through a semi-permeable membrane to restore hydrostatic balance." Everyone laughed, except him.

I tell you this because I was out-of-step with my time, then, and am out-of-step with my time now. Go figure!

Be always well,

Jim