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Where I grew up, you could purchase a copy of a choose-your-own adventure book with any name substituted for the hero, presumably to give as a gift. As a kid, I implicitly understood the offer to be attractive. Now, I wonder what is that makes that offer, and this one, attractive.
I suppose that text, especially printed, bound, and mass-circulated text, carries a certain authority. It is (increasingly, at any rate) the prime carrier of history. I suppose, with our star-struck culture, that we are increasingly made aware of a divide that separates our lives (which often strike us as benign, anonymous, and conventional) from the lives of those whom we perceive to be in meaningful, mutual dialogue with the world. To see one's name in print lends one's identity an aura of individuation and meaning. It creates the illusion that the chronicle of human experience has somehow registered our individual presence. In short, it is a strange species of immortality, the kind afforded to an organism when its fossilized shell registers in the bedrock.
I will pay anyone a fiver a head to put their name in my first novel, as I need all the words I can get.
Have you thought about writing unnecessarily detailed genealogies for every character, however minor? You can auction off ancestral spots. |
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