The Abridged Ajani

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I remember that I started to read Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone at about the age of ten. Harry was Year One then.

Harry Potter started out looking like a children’s book. Indeed, if you ever have the time to reread everything you have so far, everything until the Half-Blood Prince, then you will realize that J.K. Rowling’s style changes as Harry changes.

More accurately, it ages with Harry. That is the strength of her writing - one cannot expect Harry to have the same kind of thinking now as he had back at Book One.

It seems obvious to say that as a child turns into a teenager, as a teenager turns into an adult, they become more settled, in control of their emotions, more mature when it comes to love.

I have grown older, Harry has grown older. We are both changed people from say… The boy we were at eleven?

J.K. Rowling specified once that she initially started out the series with no age range in mind, though publishers saw children of age nine to eleven as targets.

It is about that age where we all started to love Harry, but we have all aged too. Technically we are all childish adults, still reading a book that we ought to have overgrown.

Yet we still read Harry, and we are of the age to read more mature materials too. To let Harry age, not just physically in the book, but emotionally too, is something she should continue. It is the strength of the series - it grows with the fans. The Potter boy in the books is alive and growing well, thank you very much.

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In the Matrix movie, Neo holds a copy of Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation in his hands. Morpheus, too, spoke of the Desert of the Real. Throughout the movie, interpretors see Baudrillard’s ideas of the simulacra recurring. Yet to me, it is such a gross misinterpretation.

In fact, according to the Le Nouvel Observateur, Baudrillard himself had denied that the Matrix had nothing to do with his theories at all. (Source: http://blog.empyree.org/post/2205)

The simulacra theory is one of the postmodernist age’s best philosophical thoughts. It involves an endless copy, where the copier and the copied take after each another so much that eventually all truth is gone, all meaning is lost.

An example would be the question “Does life imitate Hollywood, or Hollywood imitate life?” One might argue that violent acts and behaviours were inspired by Hollywood movies, but in turn you could also say that Hollywood simply took am existent problem of society and made it into a movie. Both cases are true, both sides actually just keep on chasing after one another endlessly, causing the original Truth, the Origin of all that which the first copy was created out of, to be lost.

According to Baudrillard, there were four steps to making a simulacra:
(1) Basic reflection of reality (Copying)
(2) Perversion of reality (Recopying again, but taking after the name of the former)
(3) Pretense of reality (The copied is the true Origin)
(4) Simulacrum, which “bears no relation to any reality whatever.” (Nothing is Real anymore - the Hyperreal)

Even pornography itself is a simulacra. It presents to the viewer a distorted view of sexual intercourse, so that the watcher gets aroused by it. Eventually he confuses sex and pornography, and he can no longer distinguish that which is real and that which is not.

Comparing it to the Matrix, all these examples happen according to the four steps suggested by Baudrillard. They also take place within the same world, so as to speak.

Regarding the Matrix, Baudrillard had this to say.

“The real nuisance in this movie [The Matrix] is that the brand-new problem of the simulation is mistaken with the very classic problem of the illusion, already mentioned by Plato. Here lies the mistake.”

The Matrix movie divides clearly two worlds - the physical Zion, where Truth seems to remain, and the digital Matrix, which is mistaken as a simulacra. Very clearly, the process of simulation requires two mediums in constant reflection. However, as we see, Zion is not to be influenced by the Matrix at all. It is an adobe of Truth against the Matrix illusion, not Matrix simulacra.

There is at best just one-sided copying from Zion to the Matrix, as it attempted initially to program all of Man’s behavioural patterns and conventions - working for a living, respect to the law etc. In fact, the Matrix had been designed, originally as a utopia, according to the in-movie Architect, to show that there was no prior copy of it.

The interpretations of the Matrix have confused what is Illusion, and what is Simulation. There is nothing to be copied, the Truth still exists, and everything else is only an image.

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How do you know that which you do not know?

All questions that may be asked will ultimately be answered. What cannot be answered, however, is that which you do not know to ask.

I shall use the well-known bicycle-smuggling tale a lot of us have heard of.

On the Mexico-USA border, there is a kid every day riding a different bicycle each day. He attempts to cross the border with a sealed bag each day. The Customs police check his bag.

They think they know there is something funny in there, but every time they do the check, they find nothing illegal or questionable - most of the time, it’s only sand. They let the boy pass each day as he goes between Mexico and USA.

One day, when the boy grows up, he enters USA again, but this time without any bike or bag. A Customs officer who remembers the boy, his curiosity raging, goes forth to question him.

“What were you actually smuggling all the while in the bag as a boy?” The officer asks.

The boy smiles and replies.

“I was smuggling the bicycles!”

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Self-publishing, in today’s era of Web 2.0, is characterized by online print-on-demand services like Lulu.com, or even by the average blogger.

Although self-published books do get marketed out of the Internet, it is undoubted that online advertising has become very much the norm for self-published authors.

Indeed, advertising remains to be very much the key to success for every author, self-published or traditional. If J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone had not been a success early, it would seem quite impossible for the entire series to reach the kind of prestige it has now.

What really attracts the reader to buy a book?

Traditional publishing houses have extremely strict and high standards when it comes to choosing which books they would be willing to publish for the summer market. In fact, no writer today has an easy route into traditional publishing unless he/she has a literary agent’s endorsement, and the agent in turn having his/her own set of stringent critieria.

Yet when it comes to post-publishing on the bookshelf, what actually makes the average consumer even open a book beyond its cover is the advertising - the cover.

Self-publishing skips all the hassle it takes for a book to get through a traditional publisher. The self-publisher knows well that their final audience is you - the reader, not some third-party publishing house. Who cares about pleasing the publishing houses? As long as their text pleases you - the buyer, anything goes.

Of course, this is assuming that the self-publisher knows well enough than to produce a piece of substandard work that will not even appeal to the consumers, let alone the publishing house. What always works for the consumer might not necessarily work for the old publishing houses.

Yet, what works for the publishing house will definitely work for the consumer, it seems. Even if sales of a traditional book are dismaying, they usually net enough for the author to claim a small profit. This is the appeal of a traditional publisher - a guarantee of success.

Also, traditional publishing takes care of all the book formatting, marketing, distribution and non-content aspects of the book. All the author has to take care of is his/her well-written manuscript. The self-publishing author, however, is to take care of everything, even though outsourcing certain work is not unheard of. This may incur additional costs he/she has to bear compared to the traditional writer.

It is an investment into a risky venture. Self-publishers, as discussed above, are all for the consumers’ satisfaction. This, however, means that the former shall be responsible for the latter solely. A publishing house would have done this kind of hard work for them if they did have one.

Yet something is to be added into the equation. The traditional author does not enjoy his/her full share of profits. Royalties are paid to publishing houses, agents before the final earnings reach his/her hand. To compare the profits of two similarly-successful authors, one a traditional, another a self-publishing one, the latter would have a greater overall profit still despite his heavy initial costs.

To connect to the reader - both types of authors know that, is the ultimate art of writing. The enlightened writer makes little distinction between both - writing is for the soul.

The self-publisher’s path is a journey, but so is the traditional author. At any time, both roads intersect and people do switch their destinations.

The path starts from the manuscript. It is set for a purpose - to communicate an idea.

The self-publisher learns many things as he/she goes onto the path. Without all the pressure coming in from any agents and publishers, he/she reflects on the works. He/she learns about writing, marketing, pricing and a variety of skills to serve him/her well in the future.

The traditional author is rejected from place to place. Finally the time is right and a major publishing house agrees to endorse the book. The author’s reflection is on the times he/she got rejected, obstacles in the path, only to be conquered by his/her determination.

At the end, both get famous and happy. The purpose of the writing is achieved. It is very much a matter of personal choice, like life itself, how the writer chooses to make his book surface onto the market. Finally, all’s well that ends well.

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