paperpools

 Collins published The Credential Society in 1979, when his publishers took so tepid an interest in the book they refused to publish a paperback edition.  It's now a classic, took on new life with increased concern over escalating costs of university education and student debt in the US.

Turns out, he has a blog, The Sociological Eye - a blog I know I will never find again if I bookmark it.  So I link to it here.

 Short segment on Radio France on Proust's rejection by Gallimard, account of the many revisions Proust made to the MS once accepted for publication and typeset (he apparently made significant changes to FIVE galleys).  The text originally submitted to Gallimard was a "dactylograph" which did not have the now famous first line (Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heur.) - instead there was a rather long and not very interesting sentence setting the scene. It sounds as though the famous line did appear, but was written in as an interlinear note on the dactylograph.

The whole thing here.

Year ago David Levene (my ex) went to a talk about how you know whether someone mentioned in the Jewish Chronicle is Jewish or not.  I've sometimes picked up Jewish papers in the US, and it's never been clear whether they followed this kind of code, so I can't tell whether this is what I love about Judaism, or whether it's what I love about Anglo-Judaism  (I converted in the UK, and never feel at home going to services in the US). [This is an extract from my diary]

D called. He had been to a talk on linguistic markers in the Jewish Chronicle: how are Jews and non-Jews identified?  Sometimes context is enough: John Smith has been appointed Court Recorder. If the name is Jewish, and the person is Jewish, this need not be specified. If the person is famous, it's assumed readers know - Frankie Vaughan performed at such-and-such a charity event.  What if the person is famous, but not that famous?  "Michael Tilton-Thomas (whose grandfather was the Yiddish scholar Tomashevsky) . . ." Suppose there's a long piece about a woman and her family; at the end it says "Mrs So-and-So, her parents and children are members of the West London Synagogue."  This is to indicate that her husband is not Jewish.  Or this: "Mr Aarons, the pro-Israel writer . . ." -- it would not be specified that a Jew was pro-Israel. Sporting event: "AB came fourth in the tennis singles, losing to CD. EF won the event."  AB is the only Jew (that's why the person who came fourth is mentioned first in the article.)  Oh - one brought up earlier.  A piece about Seinfeld.  Everyone knows Jerry Seinfeld is Jewish.  But what if it mentions Seinfeld and George (Jason Alexander)?  People may not know Jason Alexander is Jewish.  "Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander (born Jason Greenspan) . . ."

(Surely I cannot be alone in being enchanted by the grandfather who was the Yiddish scholar Tomaschevsky. )

I'm really putting up a post, though, because there's a piece in the Guardian about divorce (here), and I wanted to put forward a different point of view, and I thought I'd do this on Twitter and wanted to link to a post HERE about the talk in which the Yiddish scholar Tomashevsky was a case in point.

Perhaps I should write a post later about divorce, but hey.

Interestingly, I was asked for a bio by my editor at PRH a few years back, when they decided to reissue The Last Samurai, and I was initially baffled - what could people possibly want to know?  I then realized that, while most biographical details would be no interest to anyone, the Jewish Chronicle and its readers would DEFINITELY be interested in the conversion to Judaism.  (I have no idea how the Jewish Chronicle would convey the fact that I had merely converted to Reform, in the eye of many Judaism-lite, but this is exactly the kind of thing we suddenly realize we would very much like to know.).  Sadly, my editor thought this was TMI, so, hm, but also wtf?  Are we all not enchanted by the JC?  But OK, OK, OK.

My inbox is flooded these days with appeals from PEN, the Authors Guild, all sorts of people who want me to agitate against (among other things) cuts to the National Endowment for the Humanities and National Endowment for the Arts.  I have mixed feelings about this (quite apart from the cluttered-inbox factor), because many of the things that bother me most about the forms taken by support for the arts are off the agenda of every single one of the entities availing itself of my e-mail address.

Having said that,  I was moved and impressed by a piece I read today by Margaret Renkl on LitHub. Renkl talks about the virtual collapse of (what shall I call it?) a public books culture (a hideous phrase, so I wish I weren't settling for it) during and after the recession - newspapers cutting book coverage, bookstores going bankrupt, and the role of the NEH and Federal Government in turning this around. 

Renkl has done such a splendid job of sketching out the importance of regional reviews, of local independent bookstores, and how these fit into the bigger picture (national press, publishers' support), that no isolated quote can do it justice.  It is hard not to warm to a piece, though, which includes the following:

The publication Humanities Tennessee dreamed up is called Chapter 16: A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby. (The name is a reference to Tennessee’s history as the 16th state to join the union.) They built the site in-house by reading a book called Drupal for Dummies, and they hired me to run it.

The whole thing here.

Engagement with readers, your soon-to-be readers, is key. It’s essential to have some semblance of an organic footprint (via social media, writing and publishing pieces, etc.), many months—no fewer than eight to twelve—in advance of your book’s publication date.

Semblance of an organic footprint.  So lovely.

From a piece on Lithub in which publicists offer advice to the hapless author. (Moral: Never publish a book.)

"Most tech company execs will do anything to keep their engineers happy."

Anil Dash is talking about what SF techies could do to stop being hated.

I came to AD via Joel Spolsky (whom I have been following for years); Dash is the new CEO of Fog Creek.  The idea that companies want to attract and keep good software engineers is a familiar theme in the annals of Spolsky.  It's bad and good for me to look over the fence.

Not to be unkind, I'd like you to imagine translating this sentence to a different sphere.

"Most publishers will do anything to keep their writers happy."

This is not that world.

Writers sometimes get asked whether someone who wants to be a writer should persevere, and they tend to sound rather curmudgeonly in their replies.  It sounds churlish to say something like "If you have to do it, you'll do it. Don't do it if it's not impossible to do anything else."  It sounds like the lucky few depressing the aspirations of the young and hopeful.

It's not really like that.  Writers know they don't live in a world where company execs, or, indeed, the lowliest intern, will do anything to keep writers happy.  They don't even live in a world where agents, or, indeed, the lowliest intern, will do anything to keep writers happy.  So they live in a world where the odds are heavily stacked against doing their best work, and actually, if you have a choice, you're probably better off being a dev.

It's not that devs don't live in a world where people drive them crazy.  Recruiters drive them crazy.  Management drives them crazy.  Open plan offices drive them crazy.  People calling them on the PHONE drive them crazy.  They may be required to write code in PHP when every fiber of their being revolts. (There are many languages which may prompt every fiber of their being to revolt.) But -- well, for example, they are not asked to wait months for a program to be debugged by someone who is not a programmer.

I was probably going to say more, but I think I'll stop now.

The Last Samurai did have a somewhat storm-tossed passage to publication.  It's possible if the Internet had flourished in something like its current form things would have gone better.  Back in the day, if Tina Brown was tight with Hillary Clinton, a party for Clinton's New York Senate victory could bump the launch party for the book back to a point when the author was no longer capable of public appearances.  Publicity involved dragging the authorial body here and there so that sentences could emerge from the authorial mouth.  And the events had to be set up by a publicist competing for scarce public space.  So if the author cracked up after the oft-deferred launch party and disappeared, if the publicist was in a miff, people who were excited about the book couldn't set up more congenial ways to talk about it. Couldn't unilaterally find venues independent of the whims of the publicist.

Anyhoo, the whole thing here.

Tom Shippey has a piece in the LRB on Njal's Saga (here).  It's a wonderful piece, but there are priceless lines strangely reminiscent of South Park (I heard these in the voice of Cartman):

This killing was legitimate. Thrain had given serious provocation: he had stood by twice when the Njalssons were called taðskegglingar, ‘little dung-beards’, and though he didn’t say it himself, in sagas rude words are never forgiven. 

So lovely.

Or how about this:

The pile of money is lying on the ground waiting for Hoskuld’s wife’s uncle Flosi to pick it up, when Njal adds a silk cloak to the pile, apparently as a ‘sweetener’, a further gesture of conciliation. It isn’t taken like that. When Flosi arrives, he asks who gave the cloak (why?). No one replies (why not?). He asks again, and laughs (laughing is a bad sign in the saga-world). He asks if they’re afraid to tell him, and when he gets a sharp answer from Skarphedin (‘Who do you think gave it?’), he lets fly the standard insult against Njal, that he can’t grow a beard and so may not be a real man.

This ratcheting-up of tension could have been avoided if a conciliatory answer had been given in the first place. It’s not clear what Flosi’s problem with the cloak is anyway. Some say a silk cloak could have been seen as an effeminate garment, but as Miller points out, Egil Skallagrimsson wore one, and no one called that troll-descended bruiser a ‘girly-man’. 

Thankfully, the critic later moves on to the kind of Emperor's New Clothes sanity so familiar in Kyle and Stan:

A lawyer himself, Miller has trouble with this combination of pettifogging and violence. ‘The problem for a legal system,’ he says, ‘is to keep the perception of tricksterism and actual tricksterism within acceptable bounds so that the law still maintains a certain level of respect.’ Non-lawyers may say that we were hoping for something rather better than that.

 The thing that particularly struck me, though, was the way the analysis places this social structure at a distance, not incomprehensibly remote, but remote in requiring explanation in a society with different values:

Miller’s analyses could make more of matters of honour (which has no status in modern law). Right at the start Hallgerd’s father, seeing his beautiful child, asks his half-brother Hrut what he thinks of her. Hrut says nothing, and Hoskuld asks again: ‘Isn’t she beautiful?’ Hrut says yes, but adds: ‘I cannot imagine how a thief’s eyes have come into our kin.’ Miller notes that Hallgerd’s father’s repetition of the question is tactless – he should have listened to the silence – but seems to think that Hrut might have held back his ‘insult’. I would suggest that in a prickly society, between adult  males, asking a question twice is a challenge that necessitates an equivalent response.

 Several years ago I had to look after my mother in the aftermath of an operation. This turned out to be a professional disaster, since Bill Clegg, the agent I had signed with, had failed to sell the book he had insisted on sending out, and now wanted 100 pages of an ambitious new book within a month. There was no way I could produce this while living with and looking after my mother; it ended badly. (He resigned while she was in intensive care.)  Since I was in a situation where it was impossible to work, though, I ended up watching all 5 seasons of The Wire courtesy of Netflix - and I was immediately struck by the Sophoclean clash between the honour-governed world of the black drug dealers (honour as this is understood in Homer) and the law-governed world of white Baltimore. (Law-governed in the sense that there are rules about the tricks that can be played.)

Matters of honour have no status in modern law... I've spent a couple of decades dealing with people who are comfortable with playing tricks as long as these either fall within what the law allows OR won't lead to a lawsuit  What's been interesting is not the games people play, but the extent to which a culture of honour is wholly incomprehensible.  It's been interesting to see how resistant this blind spot is to even the greatest literature.

Increasingly, restaurants are recording whether you are a regular, a first-timer, someone who lives close by or a friend of the owner or manager. They archive where you like to sit, when you will celebrate a special occasion and whether you prefer your butter soft or hard, Pepsi over Coca-Cola or sparkling over still water. In many cases, they can trace your past performance as a diner; how much you ordered, tipped and whether you were a “camper” who lingered at the table long after dessert. 

Susanne Craig at the NYT, the rest here.

The cafés and restaurants I go to aren't that hi-tech - but wherever I go, the staff say "Wie immer?" ("As always?") I don't have the same thing everywhere I go, but in each place I have a preference, and the staff remember it. The reason I go so often, too often, is precisely because people I barely know pay attention to my preferences - they WANT me to come back.  Whereas in every interaction with the biz I get people doing whatever they happen to want to do, whenever they happen to want to do it.

At the risk of stating the blindingly obvious, I care about my books a lot more than I care about my cappuccino & pain au chocolat, or my glass of rosé, or my green curry with tofu. In every single interaction on the path to getting a text out to readers (with, natürlich, the glorious exception of this blog), I have people blithely putting forward their OWN preferences for the text, and long-drawn-out arguments to reconcile said persons to sharing the (whisper who dares) author's preferences with the public. What would actually be so terrible about a publishing process where people were ANXIOUS to discover your preferences?

Be sane, be sane, be sane.

Why does no one send ME these witty rejection letters?  Publisher to Gertrude Stein, here.

"You've no idea how much email I get telling me how wrong every single thing in the book is. There are a lot of very specific things that Americans don't say and English people don't realise … Also New York has enough writers, and I don't think I need to add to them," she said.

Zadie Smith says she will never write another book set in the US, because she got so many complaints about On Beauty.  Well, I can see it would be annoying if peevish emails kept turning up in one's inbox. We can only hope Lee Child does not follow her example.

Sometimes, of course, one is bad. One knows one is in the wrong and goes on regardless.  Someone pointed out to me some time ago that "in no very good mood" is not American usage. I kept trying to think of a replacement that I liked and couldn't.  Finally I thought, Well, it may not be American usage now, but who's to say? Maybe Americans will see it and like it and start using it, and then this instance in my book will simply be the first attested case in American English.

A while back I read a post by Sarah Manguso on the FSG blog: How to Have a Career: Advice to Young Writers.  There were points that could have been made which it seemed best not to make...

Today I came across this clip from a TED talk by Fans de Wall, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay. HT MR, HT Greg Mankiw.

This does not really encapsulate the challenges that face you as a writer.  The problem is not that you get a cucumber while the other monkey gets a grape for the same work.  You write a book from scratch of 80,000+ words; you'll be lucky to get a cucumber.  Your agent/lawyer/accountant/other, meanwhile, is OUTRAGED if the book can't be crammed into a boilerplate - and lives on a lovely steady diet of grapes. If you are one of the lucky sods who got a cucumber, they will also be OUTRAGED if you fling that cucumber away and shake the walls of your cage.

I wrote to [his American publishers] expressing (with moderation) my dislike of the cover for The Hobbit. It was a short hasty note by hand, without a copy, but it was to this effect: I think the cover ugly; but I recognize that a main object of a paperback cover is to attract purchasers, and I suppose that you are better judges of what is attractive in USA than I am. I therefore will not enter into a debate about taste -- (meaning though I did not say so: horrible colours and foul lettering) -- but I must ask this about the vignette: what has it got to do with the story? Where is this place? Why a lion and emus? And what is the thing in the foreground with pink bulbs? I do not understand how anybody who had read the tale (I hope you are one) could think such a picture would please the author. ...

the rest here

After the failures of the Pamela sequels, Richardson began to compose a new novel.^[1]:73 It was not until early 1744 that the content of the plot was known, and this happened when he sent Aaron Hill two chapters to read.^[1]:73 In particular, Richardson asked Hill if he could help shorten the chapters because Richardson was worried about the length of the novel.^[1]:73 Hill refused, saying,

You have formed a style, as much your property as our respect for what you write is, where verbosity becomes a virtue; because, in pictures which you draw with such a skilful negligence, redundance but conveys resemblance; and to contract the strokes, would be to spoil the likeness.^[1]:73–4

In July, Richardson sent Hill a complete "design" of the story, and asked Hill to try again, but Hill responded, "It is impossible, after the wonders you have shown in Pamela, to question your infallible success in this new, natural, attempt" and that "you must give me leave to be astonished, when you tell me that you have finished it already".^[1]:74 However, the novel wasn't complete to Richardson's satisfaction until October 1746.^[1]:74 Between 1744 and 1746, Richardson tried to find readers who could help him shorten the work, but his readers wanted to keep the work in its entirety.

From our friends at Wikipedia.  (Depending on your point of view, you may feel that Richardson was born too soon, or David Foster Wallace too late. I know very little of Michael Pietsch, but I feel he would be unlikely to tell an author that 'you have formed a style, as much your property as our respect for what you write is, where verbosity becomes a virtue.')

1. We tried to follow Y Combinator’s advice to minimize time fundraising and get back to work. Our goal was not to die from lack of funding or die from losing focus on the product. All $1.5 MM was committed within 10 days of YC demo day. Once we hit that number, we got back to work on the product.  When we were fundraising, it was actually hard to work on the product.

Priceonomics on time allocated to raising money/work, the rest here

(Have been trying to convey this point of view to the publishing industry for 16 years, with signal lack of success.)

Skullkickers is now also a webcomic. I started serializing our early issues, one page every weekday, so that readers could discover us, start from the beginning and grow attached to the series, giving us outreach far past comic shop shelves and retailer ordering concerns. I’m thrilled to say that over the past 3 months we’ve generated 1.7 million+ pageviews to 96,000+unique visitors. That is about twenty times our monthly issue audience and reaches people in places that don’t have comic shops at all.

So, reaching people is great and all but how does that translate to actual sales? If most are getting the milk for free, will they buy the cow?

Good news: Serializing the issues hasn’t negatively affected our sales one bit. Our trade sales through comic and book stores are up, steadily climbing. Making more people aware of the series has made them want the current material more, not less. Quality and good word of mouth is helping build our readership in shops bit by bit.

Better news: At conventions I’m selling a lot more. I’m not twice the sales person I was last year, but I’m selling more than double the number of books since we started serializing online. 9 times out of 10, I’m selling it to people who read the series online. I asked almost every person who came to my table if they’d heard of Skullkickers before. No word of a lie, when they said “yes”, 90% of those folks also said they were reading it online. It shocked me.

the rest here, HT @ryanqnorth

Went to Vogt's Bier-Express for a Duckstein.  They had two poker tables set up at the back of the room. A guy told me the tournament started at 8: 25€ buy-in (3000 chips), with an hour during which 20€ rebuys got you 6000 chips. No-limit Texas Hold 'em.  I don't have much experience of live games, and when I play online I normally play limit games, which is safe though not very exciting. He said it did not matter, and the dealer explained how the system worked. 

I played with extreme caution, apologetically.  Another player said encouragingly that it was fine to fold, this was good tournament play in the early stages. This player also advised me to be more careful in looking at my cards, because otherwise people could see them - no one would do so intentionally, but sometimes they could not help seeing.  Another player explained that if I was still in the game I must put my cards back on the side of the table, rather than holding them, because otherwise people would not know I was in the game. Toward the end of the first hour I got a pair of Aces which won several thousand chips, and then an Ace and a King which won a few thousand more.  Much later I went all in with K8 of clubs, winning a few thousand chips.  The net result (mainly because the other players were much more aggressive) was that I came third in the tournament, winning 130 euros.  Each time I won a hand the other players congratulated me, and at the end they all congratulated me on coming out ahead. There was a pause during which we were brought a complimentary meal from the Currywurst place next door; then the players settled in to play a cash game.  They explained that I could play if I wanted to but I did not have to, so I watched for a while.  They were betting as much as 100€ on a hand, which wasn't money I would be happy to have at stake with only my modest skills to defend it.  The player who had advised about care in looking at my cards told me kindly that it was dangerous to play in cash games.  The general ambience, in case you're missing this, was one of care for an inexperienced player.

In my admittedly limited experience this is typical of the world of poker.  The object of the game is to take money off other players, but within that context there is a code of honour which includes not taking advantage of the inexperienced. 

I came to poker after having a book published; this world stood in startling contrast to the world of publishing.  To the uninitiated, it is in the interest of everyone involved in a book to explain how things work to the novice.  The publisher has tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars at stake; the writer, her entire livelihood. But there is no analogue for the code of honour of the world of poker. There is no one to explain how the system works, or where you might put yourself at a disadvantage by showing your cards.  If you ask questions, people lie to you.  The terms of your contract are words on a piece of paper.  If you bring in an agent you don't get someone who will give you a truthful explanation, the kind of thing you might get from a group of strangers at a poker table; you get another round of the runaround. 

Most people in this business seem to be in denial about the writer's exposure to risk.  I think I imagined, when I was put in touch with Bill Clegg, that he would have a clearer view of this; having left so many writers high and dry, he would naturally be anxious to protect new clients from risk. This point of view turned out to be not only wrong but offensive. It's probably impossible to convey how touching it is to find so much concern among people who profess not even a trace element of interest in literature.

...Each stage is easy enough, but it is a combination of all the parts that create the natural-looking, dwarfed, containerized tree in an artificial environment.

Yoshimura & Halford, Japanese Art of Miniature Trees and Landscapes

 Piece in the Guardian on Zero Books, with interviews of many of its authors . . .

SS: What was the background to your involvement in Zer0?
MARK FISHER: When Zer0 started, I was very conscious that the culture which formed me – free higher education; innovative public service broadcasting; a music press that unashamedly engaged with theory – was disappearing. In place of this egalitarian space, where concepts and theories could be encountered in popular contexts, there was a rigid split between, on the one hand, specialist academic writing that didn't engage anyone and wasn't really supposed to, and, on the other, facile populism. Zer0 wanted to disrupt this; it wagered on people's intelligence and appetite for writing that was lucid but conceptually dense.
The Zer0 project promised to make available the kind of writing that I wanted to read myself but which you couldn't read anywhere except online. I belong to a lost generation, really, one forced into online exile online by the lack of space in print culture for the kind of writing I was doing – writing that's too journalistic to be academic, and too theoretical to count as journalism. I'd got so habituated to this exile that, before the first books were published, it was hard to believe that the books would ever actually come out, still less be successful.

...

SS: Does a physical book perform certain kinds of function more effectively or differently from blogs or ebooks?
NINA POWER: The thing that really surprised me was the very different status a book still has in people's minds, even if the arguments and the texts have already appeared online in blogs and journals (which is where most of One-Dimensional Woman came from). The book still retains a curiously weighty status in comparison to blogs. A book is a snapshot of whatever it was you felt was interesting at that moment, and it's fixed in aspic, which can have its drawbacks.

[NB Nina Power has deleted all posts on Infinite Thought before the riots of 2011 as callow stuff 20s crap.  I've heard from young editors in New York who were inspired by, er, all the callow stuff that has now been deleted from Power's blog -- readers may the ever-present possibility of de-publication is precisely where a blog has its drawbacks.]

SS: How do you see the relationship between pop music and "criticality" these days?
OWEN HATHERLEY: The writing many of us encountered in the music press in (roughly) the 80s-mid 90s was exemplary in its combination of mass audience, unpatronising erudition, politicisation and fearless, sometimes experimental prose, and it is in lots of ways a model for what we tried to do with Zer0. That world rather disappeared in the late 1990s and then reappeared on the internet, with blogs by Simon Reynolds, Mark Sinker, Ian Penman, Taylor Parkes. The writing has become more distant from contemporary music, for reasons that are debatable – certainly music doesn't seem to articulate conjunctural events as it used to; to use a banal example, a Ghost Town for last year's riots is now inconceivable, so broken is that link between the streets, the music press and the charts. So we're trying to produce the same sort of writing but on completely different subjects.

The whole thing here.

Our friends at Wikipedia remind you of what you once knew about the Maginot Line:

The Maginot Line (French: Ligne Maginot, IPA: [liɲ maʒino]), named after the French Minister of War André Maginot, was a line of concrete fortifications, tank obstacles, artillery casemates, machine gun posts, and other defences, which France constructed along its borders with Germany and Italy, in light of its experience in World War I, and in the run-up to World War II. Generally the term describes only the defences facing Germany, while the term Alpine Line is used for the Franco-Italian defences.

The French established the fortification to provide time for their army to mobilise in the event of attack, allowing French forces to move into Belgium for a decisive confrontation with German forces. The success of static, defensive combat in World War I was a key influence on French thinking. Military experts extolled the Maginot Line as a work of genius, believing it would prevent any further invasions from the east (notably, from Germany). It was also a product of a historical inferiority in population and birthrate, exacerbated by the losses in World War One, which had been developing for three generations.^[1] The fortification system successfully dissuaded a direct attack. It was strategically ineffective, as the Germans indeed invaded Belgium, defeated the French army, flanked the Maginot Line, through the Ardennes forest and via the Low countries, completely sweeping by the line and conquering France in days.^[2] As such, reference to the Maginot Line is used to recall a strategy or object that people hope will prove effective but instead fails miserably. It is also the best known symbol of the adage that "generals always fight the last war, especially if they have won it".^[3]

 So, right.

A commenter on my last post suggested running Ruby on Rails on Heroku.  I had a look at Heroku and was transfixed - this looked like a way to try out all sorts of programs without getting mired down in all the downloads and installations and what-have-you that mean it can easily take a week to get through the preliminaries before you can actually try out whatever it is you thought you might like to learn. Preliminaries that would undoubtedly take half an hour if you were already up to speed in all sorts of techniques you hadn't realized you needed to know, but which take a week (or more) if you have to scour around online to find out how to implement the two lines of instruction that accompany whatever it is you actually want to be working on.

So, right, I have a look at Heroku, which looks great, and I think I might try this out on Python since I have been working on Python. I am then told that over and above having Python to hand I must also have pip and virtualenv.  Bear in mind that the attraction of Heroku comes largely, at this point, from the fact that I have just spent a day untarring tarballs, attempting to upload from my Mac's simple FTP facility, attempting the same from Cyberduck, succeeding at last via FileZilla, creating a database on my server, attempting and failing to find the relevant files in the unpacked Drupal folder via myPHPAdmin, scouring around online for alternatives, attempting and failing to follow the steps sketched out on various websites, investigating the possibility of changing servers, and at last discovering the various bits of information from my server that needed to be fed to Drupal for successful installation.  Bloodied and not noticeably unbowed, I wonder whether life might be easier if I defected to Heroku. Only to find myself blundering through attempts to download and install pip and virtualenv, scouring around online for tips when all goes less smoothly than one might have hoped . . .

Revenons à nos moutons.  To get back to the Maginot Line.  If you're a writer, you need protection. You can hire a lawyer, an accountant, an agent.  But the protection you hire never costs your time; it never sets a value on what you might achieve if you could invariably get the technical resources you needed in 2 seconds. The protection you hire will wrangle happily over deal points; it will wrangle over percentages of rights. It will NOT factor technical support into the value of a deal (this is not a deal point), it will NOT provide in-house technical support as facilitating completion of ambitious new work which might be sold for a handsome advance. It ignores both the greatest threats to a writer and the greatest opportunities.  And there is nothing to be done.

Except, of course, to soldier on. Install, presently, pip and virtualenv.  Tomorrow is another day.