Hooked on Dildonics (Redux)
You know I wanted to go out this week on a note of unabashed positivity. And you know I love the Ward Sixers. But I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with them on the LongPen, I think.
In response to Matthew Tiffany's cry of fraud regarding the Doomsday Device, Ms. Ellis responds:
But who is being scammed? Maybe, possibly, those book collecters who want to believe that when they pay big bucks for a Signed First Edition the book was in contact with the venerable writer's very own personal fountain pen.
It's only a cheat if you think that the experience of the author *actually touching* your copy of her book has some kind of mystic value.
The work is all that REALLY matters. And what's so wonderful about the LongPen is that it nullifies the fetishization of the "autograph." When you get a LongPen autograph, you DO get to chat with the author on video (an experience that is somewhere in between getting a letter and an in-person visit) and you get a note in your book actually meant for you, in a reasonable facsimile of the author's handwriting. It's an experience at least as legitimate as mailing the book to the writer and getting an autograph that way, actually.
Most people ask a writer for an autograph because they liked the reading or book, and want to commemorate their having talked with the author. I've asked for lots of autographs this way, and people generally seem happy to to provide them and say hello.
But every medium-sized city on up has at least one Weird Dude (always a dude) who has like multiple copies of your book, with acrylic wrappers on the dust jackets, and wants you to sign them all. "Just your name," they say, with a tiny bit of desperation. As if, should you write, "To Weird Dude, good luck with your search for a girlfriend! Best wishes, J. Robert Lennon," you would ruin everything.
And you would, because they are not trying to commemorate a pleasant human interaction. They don't give a crap about your book. They barely look at you, in fact! No, they're squirreling away your stuff in the unlikely event you become super famous, and then they'll get to make a huge profit selling the signed editions on eBay.
The Weird Dude really brings to light the whole problem with autographs...the fact that a story is ephemeral, and takes a different shape in every reader's mind, and that this is the entire point. That a story is a seed for the individual imagination. That the physical book is not the important thing--let alone one's contact with the author.
[...]
It isn't that Condalmo's wrong, per se, but he is missing the point that author autographs overall are just kind of pointless. And if you're as famous as Margaret Atwood, you could spend your whole damned life sitting at a pressboard buffet table gazing up in exhaustion at the Weird Dude, and why not make something that can obliterate that experience from your life?
Yes, I see their points.
