Final Fridays Read Online Free PDF Page B

software and hardware required to get at it, are far from eternal, either as items in themselves or as modes of access. Jeff Rothenberg, a senior computer scientist at the RAND Corporation, declares (in print) that “the contents of most digital media evaporate long before words written on high-quality paper. They often become unusably obsolete even sooner, as media are superseded by new, incompatible formats (how many readers remember eight-inch floppy
disks?). It is only slightly facetious to say that digital information lasts forever—or five years, whichever comes first.”
    Good luck, electronic fictioneers: Golf courses and ski slopes last longer than that; may the products of your lively medium fare as well.

Two More Forewords
    â€œTwo more” in two senses: 1) This essay-collection has been foreworded already; and 2) its forerunner, Further Fridays , included a section called “Four Forewords”—to my first five published novels, on the occasion of their later reissue as trade paperbacks by Doubleday’s Anchor Press. 1
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    T IME WAS WHEN the publishers of good-quality books with less than best-seller appeal could hope at least to break even by keeping such works in print and selling a modest number of copies per year over an extended period, meanwhile deducting for tax purposes the cost of warehousing the unsold copies. The U.S. Supreme Court’s unfortunate “Thor Tool Company” ruling in 1979 2 declared that practice illegal, with the unhappy result that in America nowadays, a book either makes its publisher a profit in a hurry or is fed to the shredder—just as, in commercial television, a high-quality drama series may be canned because its audience, while sizeable, is less so than that of some competing network’s offering: bad news for the culture in both cases. Periodic attempts by such organizations as the Authors Guild and PEN (Poets, Essayists, and Novelists) to overturn that infelicitous court ruling have thus far been unsuccessful; until they succeed, if ever, the slack has been taken up somewhat
by university presses and others outside the “trade,” where volumes of poetry, essays, and good-but-non-“commercial” fiction may find sanctuary, and by the larger houses’ “trade paperback” lines: Doubleday’s Anchor Press, Random House’s Vintage Books, Houghton Mifflin’s Mariner Books, et cetera.
    A number of my own past productions have had the good fortune to lead second lives in such editions, for which their new publisher often requests a foreword. Hence the “Four Forewords” aforementioned, and hence the two here following: one to the large and complex novel LETTERS , first published by Putnam in 1979; the other to the smaller, more straightforward Sabbatical: A Romance , from the same publisher three years later. Neither novel was a commercial success; happily for their author, both were subsequently reissued (in 1994 and 1996, respectively) by the University of Illinois’ excellent Dalkey Archive Press, to continue their trickle of annual sales. After all, one reminds oneself, long-haul trickles can have large effects: e.g., the Chesapeake Bay and its tidal tributary outside my workroom window, both formed in part by the eons-long trickles of the last Ice Age’s retreating glaciers....

LETTERS
    â€œAnother interminable masterpiece,” my comrade-in-arms William H. Gass has called the novel here prefaced. I like that.
    â€œIrritating and magnificent,” says the critic Zack Bowen of the story’s ground-plan and overall conceit. 3 I like that, too.
    Gore Vidal, on the other hand (Or was it Tom Wolfe? One of those knee-cappers, anyhow, who write so entertainingly on other matters but often get literature all wrong), in a general diatribe against fictive Fabulism, Postmodernism, you name it, has declared that the
movement “culminates in John Barth’s novel LETTERS