Paolo Coelho scores riches through piracy

Author Paolo Coelho finds riches in piracy:

"His view is that letting people swap digital copies of his book increases sales. He gives this example of his experience in the Russian market where his books sold a mere 1,000 copies. He uploaded the Russian translation of his copy and the sales went up from 1,000 to 10,000 and more.

Once he found this avenue he says he set up his own site called ‘The Pirate Coelho’. He went to BitTorrent and got all his pirated editions and put them on his site. “Since then, my books have sold about 140 million copies worldwide,” he noted in his article.

According to him this gives a reader the possibility of reading your book and choosing whether to buy it or not."

Source: http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/189585/20110730/paulo-coelho-piracy-books-authors-the-alchemist.htm

Complete a Writer | LitBash 34

A writer is incomplete without readers. Complete one now, start with those who were:

Born this week:

Pamela Lyndon Travers, UK
"A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns."

Jorge Amado, Brasil

Alex Haley, USA
"In my writing, as much as I could, I tried to find the good, and praise it."

Fernando Arrabal, Spain

John Galsworthy, UK
"The world's a fine place for those who go out to take it; there's lots of unknown stuff' in it yet."

Died this week:

Frederick Marryat, UK

Hermann Hesse, Germany
"it matters little that you suffer, so long as you feel alive with a sense of the close bond that connects all living things, so long as love does not die!"

Ulrich Plenzdorf, Germany

Edith Wharton, USA
"No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity."

Sandor Brody, Hungary

Thomas Mann, Germany
"We are most likely to get angry and excited in our opposition to some idea when we ourselves are not quite certain of our own position, and are inwardly tempted to take the other side."

Ian Fleming, UK

Gilbert Cesbron, France

H. G. Wells, UK
"Money and credit are as much human contrivances as bicycles, and as liable to expansion and modification as any other sort of prevalent but imperfect machine."

Rainer Brambach, Switzerland

Bertolt Brecht, Germany
"People remain what they are even if their faces fall apart."

Elias Canetti, Austria
"The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other very well."

Reality of Espionage vs. Literature

What are the tools of spies: daggers, poisoned pins, silencers, and exploadings cigars, or an office chair?

Reality gets in the way of fiction writers:

"Nowadays the task for a spy writer, particularly an ex-insider, is different. Readers demand reality. Ever since Frederick Forsyth told us in The Day of the Jackal exactly how to get a false passport by acquiring the birth certificate of a dead child, accurate detail is expected. And much more is public nowadays. Greater openness and oversight, judicial and other enquiries, trials in which intelligence officers give evidence, authorised histories, have all lifted the veil.

But the reality is that the life of today’s intelligence office is as likely to be about waiting and watching, listening and explaining and trying to work out by painstaking analysis what is going on as it is about directly confronting the nation’s enemies. And those enemies are less likely to be the sinister representatives of foreign powers working to the arcane rules of a game which both sides understand than terrorists working to no rules, whose motives and objectives are unclear."

source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/ways-with-words/8608316/Ways-With-Words-The-truth-about-spies.html

Resistance through Literature

Le Clezio, a literary Nobel recipient:

“Every piece of literature is written in one language, and therefore is given its nationality,” he said. “Yet it has to connect with the people who do not share that nationality. Literature is an effort to understand the common experience of men.”

A piece of literature, after all, has to let its readers understand the universality of human experience, which transcends national and cultural differences, he said.

Le Clezio said the modern international public is often unconsciously manipulated by the mass media, and writers should resist such manipulation by writing.

“Of course a writer does not have much power compared to the mass media and television,” he said. “But writing can be a meaningful way of resisting. We’ll just have to keep writing.” Source: koreaherald.com

Others second Le Clezio's belief that writers can play a crucial role:

[...] "in the past dialogue used to be a weapon in our society, but now weapons have taken the place of dialogue in our society and there was urgent need to fight this mindset and literacy figures can play a crucial role in winning this war against terrorism." Source: ftpapp.app.com.pk June 18, 2011

Sitting on a bayonet

'The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.' --- Edward Bernays, 1928

We're all victims of propaganda, regardless of the level of education, and the higher the education the more susceptible to brainwashing we become:

"This ignorance and gullibility among the college-educated modern public is despite the fact that Western academe is at the forefront of the vast majority of behavior control and social engineering research studies, often funded by, or in collaboration with, Western intelligence, military services, and private tax-exempt foundations such as the Rockefeller Foundation, Carnegie Endowment, Ford Foundation, etc. The highly compartmentalized nature of such research ensures that few students and professors in on the ground breaking studies into human behavior can ever glean the bigger picture towards which they work so diligently to respectively earn their Ph.D. and research funding! Those few who do comprehend are invariably already engaged with empire in the largely unhidden orchestration of social engineering, or, recruited into it as agents and assets of the Mighty Wurlitzer.

The indoctrination of belief in authority figures and “experts” has reached pandemic proportions in the West. It is today perhaps the greatest public plague afflicting the mightiest superpower on earth, a direct consequence of “dumbing down” the public in the name of higher education to craft self-obsessed economic widgets, narrow specialists, and superficial generalists, for the Technetronic Era."

Source and more: scoop.co.nz June 2, 2011

Why the Soviets Built the Berlin Wall

Here's a take on the reasons behind the erection of the Berlin Wall, a Cold War symbol:

"during the 1950s, American  cold warriors in West Germany instituted a crude campaign of sabotage and subversion against East Germany designed to throw that country’s economic and administrative machinery out of gear. [...]

The United States and its agents used explosives, arson, short circuiting, and other methods to damage power stations, shipyards, canals, docks, public buildings, gas stations, public transportation, bridges, etc; they derailed freight trains, seriously injuring workers; burned 12 cars of a freight train and destroyed air pressure hoses of others; used acids to damage vital factory machinery; put sand in the turbine of a factory, bringing it to a standstill; set fire to a tile-producing factory; promoted work slow-downs in factories; killed 7,000 cows of a co-operative dairy through poisoning; added soap to powdered milk destined for East German schools; were in possession, when arrested, of a large quantity of the poison cantharidin with which it was planned to produce poisoned cigarettes to kill leading East Germans; set off stink bombs to disrupt political meetings; attempted to disrupt the World Youth Festival in East Berlin by sending out forged invitations, false promises of free bed and board, false notices of cancellations, etc.; carried out attacks on participants with explosives, firebombs, and tire-puncturing equipment; forged and distributed large quantities of food ration cards to cause confusion, shortages and resentment; sent out forged tax notices and other government directives and documents to foster disorganization and inefficiency within industry and unions"...

Source and more: Consortiumnews.com, July 28, 2011

Taste, chew, swallow, and digest | LitBash 33

Francis Bacon said: "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested." Gobble up as many as you want. Start with authors who were...

Born this week:

Herman Melville, USA
"It is better to fail in originality, than to succeed in imitation. He who has never failed somewhere, that man can not be great. Failure is the true test of greatness."

Romulo Gallegos, Venezuela

Witold Gombrowicz, Poland
"Any artist who respects himself ought to be, and in every sense of the term, an emigre."

Knut Hamsun, Norway
"And love became the world's origin and the world's ruler, yet littered its path is with flowers and blood, flowers and blood."

Guy de Maupassant, France
"Conversation. What is it? A Mystery! It's the art of never seeming bored, of touching everything with interest, of pleasing with trifles, of being fascinating with nothing at all."

Jiri Weil, Czech

Carl Brosboll, Denmark

Died this week:

William Burroughs, USA
"A paranoid man is a man who knows a little about what's going on."

Joseph Conrad, Poland / UK
"It's only those who do nothing that make no mistakes, I suppose."

Sidonie Colette, France
"There are days when solitude, for someone my age, is a heady wine that intoxicates you with freedom, others when it is a bitter tonic, and still others when it is a poison that makes you beat your head against the wall."

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Russia
"Literature that is not the breath of contemporary society, that dares not transmit the pains and fears of that society, that does not warn in time against threatening moral and social dangers — such literature does not deserve the name of literature; it is only a façade. Such literature loses the confidence of its own people, and its published works are used as wastepaper instead of being read."

Hans Christian Andersen, Denmark
"Death walks faster than the wind and never returns what he has taken."

Salama Musa, Egypt

Jorge Amado, Brasil

Rosario Castellanos, Mexico