http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/la-fi-
realrome27aug27,1,4748814.story

August 27, 2005

THE NATION

Dreams of Hollywood Disappear Along With Fake 'Real Rome'

By Richard Verrier
Times Staff Writer

There are two reasons that Jeff Barr, an aspiring screenwriter, won't
be able to bring himself to watch Sunday's debut of the HBO series
"Rome."

The first reason is that Barr is among 18 writers, art and costume
designers, researchers and a producer who allege that they were victims
of a con involving a docudrama project called "Real Rome," which they
mistakenly believed also was backed by HBO.

The second reason is that Barr, 24, who moved from Columbus, Ohio, for
the "Real Rome" job, can't afford premium cable these days. Having
never been paid for his work, he can barely make his rent.

Since discovering that "Real Rome" wasn't real, Barr said, "I feel like
my dreams have been destroyed."

The person who destroyed those dreams, Barr and others alleged in
interviews and in formal complaints to the state labor commissioner, is
Wayne Heyman-Hanks, a 43-year-old self-proclaimed producer who also
goes by the name Dewey Wayne Hanks Jr.

They said Hanks fabricated an elaborate deception that lured not just
hopeful novices but also accomplished professionals.

"It seemed like a big deal," said John Vaughan, the former director of
production for MCA Television, recalling how Hanks persuaded him to
come aboard. Later, when Vaughan learned he'd been fooled, he said, "I
couldn't believe it. I was staggering around in a daze."

"Real Rome" looked legit. Hanks housed his enterprise in a Studio City
bungalow across from the CBS Studio Center soundstages on Radford
Avenue. But it turns out that he never paid the rent. "Real Rome"
employees were hired at competitive rates that seemed to imply Hanks
had both cash and credibility. But not a single paycheck ever
materialized.

Hanks denied that he presided over a hoax. In an interview, he also
disputed the claim, made by several people, that he repeatedly told
them that HBO planned to use "Real Rome" as an "appetite whetter" to
drum up interest in its "Rome" series.

"This is a muddy, convoluted thing that's full of misinformation,
gossip and character assassination," he said.

Hanks blamed the disintegration of "Real Rome" on a Danish screenwriter
named Jesper Kodahl Andersen, who Hanks said had agreed to finance the
project.

Andersen, who was supposed to direct "Real Rome," called that "a total
fabrication." He said he too was Hanks' victim, having spent $60,000 of
his savings to help pay expenses on "Real Rome" and two other projects.

Court records show that Hanks has been in trouble before. Over the last
decade, Hanks and companies he ran have been sued at least a dozen
times by creditors seeking payment.

"We're still waiting for our money," said Mitch Russell, executive vice
president of Chelsea Studios, a Los Angeles company that won a $5,000
judgment against Hanks in 2001 after he leased offices to conduct
auditions for another project, but did not pay his bill.

This April, as he was assembling the "Real Rome" staff, Hanks was
arrested and charged with lewd conduct and indecent exposure after he
allegedly exposed himself to a Los Angeles police officer, who was
undercover. He has pleaded not guilty.

When The Times called Hanks to schedule a prearranged follow-up
interview, Hanks' telephone number had been disconnected. He has
vacated the Studio City apartment where he used to live.

The story of how Hanks persuaded 18 people to embark on "Real Rome"
says as much about the culture of Hollywood as it does about any one
man's wiles. In a town where appearances can be as important as
reality, Hanks talked the talk.

In the entertainment industry, where relationships are the mortar with
which deals are cemented, Hanks also claimed to have friends in high
places — people with impressive credits who could get projects on the
air. Then, as each new person joined his project, Hanks built upon his
or her connections and reputation to lure others.

Anna Waterhouse was one of the first hired. A 50-year-old professor at
Orange Coast College who has worked as a script doctor, she learned of
the project when a friend saw an ad that billed "Real Rome" as a
"premium cable-network series."

She'd never heard of Hanks' LightForce Productions, but she agreed to
meet him for coffee. He and screenwriter Andersen arrived wearing faded
T-shirts and jeans, looking more like "aging college students" than
major players, Waterhouse thought. Hanks, a heavyset man with a courtly
Alabama accent, drove a pickup truck, not a BMW.

But when Waterhouse vetted him on the Internet, she liked what she
found: several articles in Alabama newspapers that called Hanks a
successful Hollywood producer who planned to use his film profits to
buy fire equipment to donate to various cities in his home state.

Hanks offered Waterhouse $6,480 a week — more than her usual rate — and
offered to make her head writer. When he presented her with a 13-week
contract, she signed.

On April 18, Waterhouse reported for duty, presiding over a five-member
writing staff that included both veterans, such as a former staff
writer for the Sci Fi Channel, and first-timers such as Barr, a
freelance writer who got the job online. Then there was Don Philbricht,
who quit his job as an assistant manager at Cost Plus World Market in
Sherman Oaks.

"This was supposed to be my big break," said Philbricht, 34.

Several people said they didn't doubt Hanks in part because they
couldn't imagine what he stood to gain by hiring people he couldn't
pay. They also were won over by his frequent mentions of what he
described as a close association with TV producer Glen A. Larson, the
man behind hits such as "McCloud," "Magnum, P.I." and "Battlestar
Galactica."

Larson said in an interview that he remembered meeting Hanks, who had
once pitched him some ideas. Although he found Hanks "very charming,"
he said the relationship ended there because Hanks never followed up.

Hanks was more persistent with Bobbie Mannix, a costume designer who
has worked on feature films such as "National Treasure." Mannix came
aboard after he tracked her down and offered her "top dollar," she
said. She got right to work, spending $3,000 of her own money on books
and supplies.

Mannix also sent a crew to Western Costume, which immediately ordered
$8,000 of sample centurion outfits from Pakistan as well as swords and
other equipment. Eddie Marks, Western Costume's president, said it was
typical for such work to begin before contracts were finalized. After
all, he said, Western had an account with HBO and a long-standing
relationship with Mannix.

By May, the "Real Rome" writers were working 12-hour days plotting out
what Hanks described to them as a gritty, raunchy look at Rome in the
vein of HBO's "Real Sex." Hanks seemed particularly interested in the
sexual life of ancient Romans, they said.

As Hanks turned his attention to casting, a parade of muscular young
men trooped through the bungalow to audition. But no one from HBO ever
stopped by, a fact that was beginning to make "Real Rome" employees
suspicious.

At one point, Hanks "announced that the show had been picked up by HBO
for three more episodes," Howie Davidson, a researcher, wrote in a
complaint filed with the state labor commissioner. But why then had no
one ever met an HBO executive?

That's when Hanks introduced everyone to Vaughan, the producer who
several people said Hanks described as "HBO's guy, but he's cool."

Vaughan had worked on an upcoming HBO miniseries, but he wasn't
employed by HBO. He said he never represented himself as such.

Vaughan said Hanks called him up out of the blue and said he was
dissatisfied with the producers HBO had recommended for "Real Rome." He
said he wanted Vaughan instead. When they met, Vaughan said, Hanks
showed him the bungalow, which he called temporary quarters.

Then, Hanks took him across the street to the CBS Radford lot, where
two CBS executives took them on a tour of what Hanks said would be
"Real Rome's" new home.

"This is where your office is going to be," Vaughan said Hanks told him.

A CBS spokesman confirmed that Hanks was shown around and that his
company had a pending application to rent space. But the application
later expired, the spokesman said, because Hanks didn't submit a
required credit application.

As weeks passed and no paychecks were distributed, the "Real Rome"
staff began to get antsy. Hanks tried to calm them by blaming a
paperwork glitch, several people said.

He also announced that the production was moving — not to the CBS
Radford lot, but to a bigger space. Unbeknownst to the "Real Rome"
staff, Hanks was actually being evicted by the landlord, Radford
Venture, for failing to deliver more than $5,000 in rent, said property
manager Serena Elliott.

Vaughan, meanwhile, was beginning to wonder why he hadn't received any
payments from HBO. Already, he was out more than $3,000 in expenses. He
called someone he knew at HBO who said the cable network had never
heard of "Real Rome" or Hanks — a fact that an HBO spokeswoman
reiterated to The Times.

On May 27, almost six weeks after the project had gotten underway,
Vaughan informed the staff that, to his dismay, "Real Rome" was fake.

Now, three months later, the staff of "Real Rome" remains baffled by
what motivated Hanks to create such a doomed enterprise. Some think he
was living out a fantasy of being a Hollywood mogul. Others aren't so
sure.

"I'm not sure he was delusional," said Waterhouse, the head writer.
Perhaps, she said, "he was thinking that he was going to generate heat
and have these scripts and even if HBO didn't buy them, someone else
would."

That's scant comfort to those he allegedly fooled. Barr told the labor
commission he was owed $45,201 for the 13 weeks on his contract. So did
Philbricht, who said he was now collecting unemployment after Cost Plus
declined to take him back.

Jeffrey Knight, a 43-year-old writer, is also out the same amount, he
said. "Real Rome" caused a financial tailspin, Knight said, that caused
him to move his wife and two young children back to their native Canada.

For his part, Andersen says he knows that many people who hear the
story behind "Real Rome" will wonder how so many people could be so
gullible.

"If you're not in Wayne's world, it looks so ridiculous and obvious,"
he said. "But when you're inside the bubble, it kind of makes sense."

Just this week, Hanks surfaced again, putting in a call to one of the
Alabama fire stations for which he'd promised to buy equipment.

According to Hartselle, Ala., Fire and Rescue Chief Steve Shelton,
Hanks missed a meeting several weeks ago to discuss donating two new
"Hollywood edition" firetrucks: top-of-the-line pumpers used by
firefighters in Los Angeles.

But then, a few days ago, Shelton said, Hanks called to say he still
intended to donate the pumpers.

"I want to say he's still good for what he says," Shelton said. "But
until I see the trucks roll into the station, it's going to be hard for
me to believe."

---------
Copyright 2005 Los Angeles Times

http://jaiarjun.blogspot.com/2005/05/siddhartha-deb-and-new-heart-of.html
Tuesday, May 03, 2005
Siddhartha Deb and a new heart of darkness

Reading Siddhartha Deb’s Surface, I felt the rare thrill of seeing a talented writer working closely with the template of a revered book that’s more than 100 years old, and still managing to bring something new to it - reworking its themes and ideas in a different setting. The older novel shifting beneath the translucent surface of Deb’s book is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and more than once while reading Surface I was tempted to stop midway and give the Conrad a quick re-read. But Deb’s novel was gripping enough in itself to stop me from acting on that temptation.

In Surface a mercenary journalist, Amrit Singh, working half-heartedly for a Calcutta newspaper, travels to the north-east mainly to investigate a photograph that points to the possible killing of a porn actress by insurgents. But Amrit becomes intrigued, and then obsessed, by the talk he hears of an "alternative community" known as the Prosperity Project, located somewhere in the heart of this wilderness, and run by a visionary named Malik: "A creator of order in the wilderness. A messenger of hope for an area plunged in darkness." Everything in the novel now starts to converge towards this mythic figure, and Amrit’s journey increasingly starts to resemble the journey of Conrad’s protagonist Marlow, travelling through the African jungle in search of the enigmatic ivory trader Kurtz.

In Conrad’s novel, Marlow’s journey ends with an understanding of how a once-great man was corrupted by forces beyond his comprehension; of civilisation destroyed by the cruelty inherent in nature. In Surface, we eventually learn less about Malik and the forces that might have made and unmade him. But the similarities between Conrad’s Kurtz and Deb’s Malik are startling: from the words used by admirers to describe the two men - "remarkable", "extraordinary", "genius" - to the presence of a woman who never loses faith in the fallen figure despite all evidence to the contrary. And, in what is a telling nod to the earlier book, Deb even uses the line "Mr Malik. He’s dead" - an echo of one of literature’s most famous four-worders: "Mistah Kurtz. He dead", which is associated not only with Conrad but also T S Eliot, who used it as the epigraph for his poem "The Hollow Men".

I wasn’t all that surprised by the Conrad influence on Siddhartha Deb’s book. I’d interviewed Deb around three years ago when his first novel The Point of Return was being launched, and while the interview wasn’t a huge success (I was a bit of a greenhorn then and my questions were maybe a couple of rungs further up the Sensibility Ladder than "How do you get the idea to write a novel?") one of the things I gathered was that Deb was a big admirer of Conrad (and Faulkner, Melville and W G Sebald among others). And I remember noting with interest that his email ID had the domain name secretsharer.net ("The Secret Sharer" being a Conrad story).

Heart of Darkness was written around 1900 and published a couple of years later. So much has happened in the intervening hundred years; the world has opened up so much more than it had in several centuries previous, and it’s easy to be deluded into thinking we now know everything there is to know about the planet - that no region is inaccessible, that there are no dark places left. But as recent fiction has shown, that’s far from true. A few months ago we had Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide shedding light on the Sunderbans, a region so little is known of. Surface is another important reminder, one that also fills an important gap: that of quality fiction set in the pockets of darkness in northeast India.
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"And this also has been one of the dark places of the earth."
- Marlow, speaking on the banks of the river Thames, in the opening pages of Heart of Darkness

From Inside the Leaf Storm

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1050828/asp/opinion/story_5144365.asp
FROM INSIDE THE LEAF STORM
- In search of the ‘exciting and new’ in Indian writing
The Thin Edge - Ruchir Joshi


Writing to live
In the first volume of his autobiography, Living to Tell the Tale, Gabriel Garcia Márquez recounts a telling episode. As a young writer living in Colombia, Garcia Márquez sends off his first novel to a competition in Spain. To his great joy and surprise he wins the first prize, which includes the publication of the book by a prestigious imprint in Madrid. What Garcia Márquez sends off to Spain is a manuscript, written in the powerful, local Spanish of his region, what he gets back is a ‘corrected’ proof from which all the edges of his own language have been edited out, in which a ghost of his original story is now laid out in the buttoned-up, haute-bourgeois language favoured by the literary establishment of the mother country.

Garcia Márquez puts aside this ‘publication’ and, despite the ‘prize’, it takes him another three books before he is recognized as a great genius of Spanish literature. Writing to live and living to write from his late teens, it takes Garcia Márquez till his late forties before he can make a living from writing fiction. It takes even longer for the English translations of his work to make him world-famous.

Across the quarter-century that Garcia Márquez struggles, contemporaneously with other unknowns such as Mario Vargas Llosa, Julio Cortázar and Carlos Fuentes, there is only one name from the entire continent of South America that is properly recognized in world literature — Jorge Luis Borges. This doesn’t stop the marginal writers and critics from writing, reading, dreaming and banging café tables as they sit over their coffees and beers arguing at regular tertulias — the South American version of the adda.

This was a time when there were, of course, no mega-dollar advances, no Booker Prizes, no TV interviews and the only people who made it to the equivalents of Page 3 were the filmstars, shipping magnates and debauched royalty. This was also the time when ‘Art’ came exclusively from Paris or New York, ‘Literature’ from Britain, France or the United States, ‘Cinema’, again, from these same countries and continents. The post-war world of art and literature was a flat, North America- and Western Europe-shaped slab floating above an undifferentiated abyss of the ‘obscure’, the ‘parochial’, the ‘minor’ and the ‘local’.

While I have no wish to indulge in any false nostalgia for a time I did not experience, I find it helps to remind myself of the odd, anti-linear, slow, seemingly hopeless, sometimes accidental and often poetical tectonic shifts that brought about the far more complex intellectual landscape we inhabit today. Also, it is good to be able to recognize the un-dead cadaver of the old, Euro/US flat-world-view whenever it rises to ambush us, which it still does, and often.

To take just one example, it’s worth examining the two or three interconnected ‘debates’ that have been set up around contemporary Indian fiction written in English.

The first among these is the latest phase of the 30-year war between V.S. Naipaul and Salman Rushdie. Put simply, the Naipaulites deride Rushdie for what they label as an ‘imported’ and ‘imposed’ genre of writing — Magical Realism — which they claim is a superficial and gimmicky way of portraying the realities of the subcontinent. In this, the Naipaulites disingenuously ignore two things: our own, homegrown narrative traditions which long preceded Garcia Márquez’s incorporating of his own culture’s non-realistic, epic-poetic story-telling modes and, secondly, the fact that for many people it was Rushdie’s early work that exploded open possibilities of different modern fictional depictions of this region, far more than the prissily ‘correct’ and ‘realistic’ cadences of Naipaul’s own writing, itself heavily indebted to the 19th century European novel. On Rushdie’s side, in their eagerness to turn Surajmal the Clown into Lord Vidiamort, a kind of Dark Wizard from eastern UP via Trinidad plantation (though, like J.K. Rowling’s villain, Naipaul too does strive ceaselessly to hide his ‘mudblood’ antecedents), Salmanites are obliged to skim over the fact that Rushdie has now become a parody of himself, a kind of hopped-up Peter Sellers-like character, adorned by glamour, money and an array of ersatz Indian accents, with nothing very much at the core except the damned good occasional mimicry of a politically engaged essayist. The fact is, both Naipaul and Rushdie are pathological egomaniacs, both kala aadmis acting out their little putul naatch for a gora audience; the fact is, the contributions of both to ‘Indian’ and World literature belong well in the past and have very little to do with what is exciting and new in Indian writing today.

Taking off from this crude puppet-theatre, what is ‘exciting and new’ in Indian writing is, again, defined by too many people according to parameters laid down by publishers’ marketing managers in central London and Manhattan: The New Rushdie/The New Naipaul, Booker/No Booker, Looker/Non-looker, Pulitzer/No Pulitzer, Top Ten Bestseller/ Non-bestseller, and so on. A bizarrely wide range of people continue to leap headlong into this trap, from jumped-up gossip columnists trying to be Books Editors of national magazines to my friend Willie Dalrymple, writing recently in The Observer, London. Dalrymple, someone who you’d think would know better, spends many words insisting that there are not too many talented or interesting people writing from within India, that the ‘Indian’ or ‘Sub-continental’ competition for the Booker Prize will come from the recent crop of British and American writers of South Asian origin. These POSAOs, sailing out of Bradford, Brick Lane and Jersey City, will rule the international literary waves for the foreseeable future, or so we are told. Okay. Maybe. Good for them. But, so? So, what does this have to do with the price of rice in Jhumru Talaiyya, Bhopal or Lake Gardens? Does Indian literature, in whichever language, vaporize itself because no one with an Indian passport has won a Booker or a Nobel for x years? Does the fact that publishers in the West don’t yet have the nose, time and space to recognize a work make it mediocre?

Talking about J-Talaiyya and Bhopal, another little idea that’s been slimed into the general argument is about the origin of the writer. This, too, has to do with the needs of the Western world: is he or she from an ‘elite’ institution in India? In which case, pip-pip and Ram-Ram, for not only are you genetically out of touch with Indian ‘reality’, you have no hope of ever getting in touch. If, on the other hand, you are from a ‘small town’, an Allahabad, an Etawah, a Nagpur or Kanpur then, talent or no, you should be fast-tracked to getting a licence to Represent India in Literature. It’s like saying you can only write about America or England if you’re from Smallburgh, Ohio or Milton Keynes. As a model for a literary quota-system this has, so far, been only lightly sketched out, but it is an idea towards which all sorts of people, including editors from Western imprints, may soon start to genuflect. Even if it comes out of a plush office on Fifth Avenue or Bloomsbury, this is ultimately a small-town mentality perpetually and desperately searching for another: we want the ‘real India’, yet another exotica guide-book, but an easily digestible one, written in idiot-prone prose, that we can massage into the final marketable product.

It’s a khichuri of absurdities that a young Garcia Márquez might have savoured as he went around scribbling on his small roll of newsprint: Suddenly, as if a whirlwind had set down roots in the centre of the town, the banana company arrived, pursued by the leaf storm…Hungrily absorbing the city and the world, even as he passionately recreated his provincial home town of Aracataca, the banana company Garcia Márquez wrote about was American and the leaf storm was one made up of humans following the crazy gold rush of an early multinational. The company comes, takes, destroys and departs, leaving behind decrepit compounds fenced by rusting barbed wire. It might be a slightly magical stretch to compare Western publishing houses to the United Fruit Co. and the whirlwind to the literary one that seems to be dying down in the small town called India, but there’s a warning lesson for us in that text, both in its content and in its form.

Indian Literature

Seven years ago, publishers descended on Delhi in search of the next Arundhati Roy. But, writes William Dalrymple, the future Anglophone Indian bestsellers are more likely to come from the west

Saturday August 13, 2005
The Observer

There is a wonderfully telling line in Mira Nair's movie Monsoon Wedding: as the Verma family gathers from across the globe for a marriage, the heroine announces that she has applied for a creative-writing programme in America. Her businessman uncle nods approvingly: "Lots of money in writing these days," he says sagely. "Look at that girl who won the Booker: she became a millionaire overnight."
If it was the literary merit of Arundhati Roy's novel, The God of Small Things, that made the greatest impression on readers and critics in the west, it is fair to say that it was the size of her advance- more than $1 million in total - that made the most impression in Delhi. India has always had an enviable glut of talented writers; what has been much rarer, until recently, have been Indian writers who have been properly remunerated for their work (or indeed widely read outside India). The Robert Frost line - "There's no money in poetry, but then there's no poetry in money" - used to be true of even the most successful South Asian authors: the letters of the greatest of all Urdu poets, Mirza Ghalib, are full of endless worries as to whether he could pay his bills or afford to drink his beloved firangi wine.

Either way, Roy's international critical and commercial success in 1997 radically changed perceptions of Indian writing in English, and not just in Delhi. Roy's book was immediately recognised as a major literary achievement: it won the Booker and sat at the top of the New York Times bestseller list for several months: by the end of 1997 it had sold no less than four million copies in two dozen languages.

There quickly followed a major publishing feeding-frenzy: international literary agents and publishers descended on India from London and New York, signing up a whole tranche of authors, many of whom received major advances for outlines of novels they had barely begun. Picador launched a list exclusively devoted to Indian writing in 1998; the office was soon buried under an avalanche of unsolicited manuscripts. Throughout the late 1990s, barely a month went by without the news of some fledgling scribbler being discovered lurking as a sub-editor on the Indian Express or pushing papers in the Ministry of External Affairs.

Several other writers had of course prepared the ground for this success. Roy could not have happened without VS Naipaul, Salman Rushdie and Vikram Seth: in particular Rushdie's 1981 masterpiece Midnight's Children liberated Indian writing in English from its colonial straitjacket. It also gave birth to a new voice, one that was exuberantly magical, cosmopolitan and multicultural, full of unexpected cadences, as well as forms that were new to the English novel but deeply rooted in Indian traditions of storytelling. It won the Booker, as did Naipaul's Bend in the River. Then, in 1993, Seth produced his massive - and magnificent - A Suitable Boy. Rushdie's prediction that "Indians were in a position to conquer English literature" seemed about to be vindicated.
That same year Pico Iyer wrote a widely quoted Time Magazine cover story, "The Empire Writes Back", in which he noted that: "Where not long ago a student of the English novel would probably have been weaned on Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and Aldous Huxley, now he will more likely be taught Rushdie and Okri and Mo - which is fitting in an England where many students' first language is Urdu. The shelves of English bookstores are becoming as noisy and polyglot and many-hued as the English streets. The English language is being revolutionised from within. Hot spices are entering English, and tropical birds and sorcerers; readers who are increasingly familiar with sushi and samosas are now learning to live with molue buses and manuku hedges."
More than a decade later, however, it has to be said that there is a slight sense of disappointment in Delhi. According to David Davidar, the founding editor of Penguin India, who did much to kick-start the Indian publishing boom, after the excitement of the 1990s, the situation has, as he diplomatically puts it, "stabilised". There are many interesting books still being produced, many fine authors at work, and there is still the odd thrill as news breaks of another new talent being snapped up and translated into a dozen languages - most recently a civil servant named Vikas Swarup (indeed, the sheer number of Indian civil servants who appear to be working on novels might be one reason why the Indian bureaucracy still churns so slowly). As far as prizes are concerned, since Roy, we have had Anita Desai, Rohinton Mistry and Monica Ali on the Booker shortlist, Jhumpa Lahiri winning the Pulitzer; while off the prize-piste there have been two exceptionally brilliant novels by Hari Kunzru (The Impressionist and Transmission) and a fine book each from Manil Suri (The Death of Vishnu) and Nadeem Aslam (Maps for Lost Lovers
The truth is, however, that since 1997 there has been no new galaxy of stars emerging to match the stature of those of the 1980s and 90s. Many of the Indian novelists who were signed up with such excitement 10 years ago failed to repay even a fraction of their advances. The only Indian-themed book to win the Booker - The Life of Pi - was written by Yann Martel, a white Canadian. In India itself, there is no new internationally acclaimed masterpiece, no new Roy.
That said, Roy always was rather different from her contemporaries. When I interviewed her before the publication of The God of Small Things, she noted as much herself: "I don't feel part of a pack," she said. "I grew up on the banks of a river in Kerala. I spent every day from the age of three fishing, walking, thinking, always alone. If you read other Indian writers most of them are very urban: they don't have much interest in, you know, air or water. They all went from the Doon School [the Indian Eton] to St Stephen's [the Indian Oxford] and then on to Cambridge. Most of those who are called Indian writers don't even live here: Rushdie, Seth, Amitav Ghosh, Mistry: they're all abroad, while I've never lived anywhere except India."

Roy fingered what is without doubt the strangest aspect of the renaissance of Indian writing in English: the extraordinary degree to which, at least at its highest levels, it is now almost entirely written by the diaspora. As far as writing in English is concerned, not one of the Indian literary A-list actually lives in India, except Roy, and she seems to have given up writing fiction. It is not just that the diaspora tail is wagging the Indian dog. As far as the A-list is concerned, the diaspora tail is the dog.

In one sense, of course, this doesn't matter: the great Dublin novel, Ulysses, was written in Trieste, and whatever problems subsequent readers have had with the book, no one has ever suggested that James Joyce's Dublin was any less authentic for having been written in Italy. Indeed, distance can be helpful for writers trying to percolate their thoughts about place: many of the most famous Australian writers now live outside Australia - Peter Carey, Germaine Greer and Robert Hughes all have home addresses in London or New York; and there is a similar pattern with many of the best Arab writers - Amin Malouf and Tahar Ben Jalloun live in Paris, Hanan al-Shaykh and Ahdaf Soueif in London, Assia Djebar and (until his death last year) Edward Said in America.

It is true that in India there has been some sniping about the haute bourgeoisie origins of this literary diaspora, and some questioning as to what a bunch of Indian public schoolboys living in London and New York really know about the less romantic side of the daily struggle for life in India. A few years ago, one Indian critic, M Prabha, wrote an entire book dismissing the whole movement of Indian writing in English as The Waffle of the Toffs (as she named her silly if amusingly vitriolic book), while the writer and critic Pankaj Mishra has attacked what he called the "slickly exilic version of India", manufactured by a "cosmopolitan Third World elite ... suffused with nostalgia, interwoven with myth, and often weighed down with a kind of intellectual simplicity foreign readers are rarely equipped to notice".

There is, however, a strong suspicion of double standards inherent in this repeated charge of diaspora inauthenticity. Western writers can go off and live in self-imposed exile abroad without being called deracinated or out of touch with their countries of origin: think of Graham Greene and Anthony Burgess in Monte Carlo, Gore Vidal in Ravello, Christopher Isherwood in LA, Hemingway and many others in Paris, Nabokov in America and Switzerland, even Philip Roth for a time in London; but when an Indian writer goes away he is somehow regarded as suspect, and charged with making a living out of his exotic upbringing while actually living in the great urban centres of the west. As Rushdie once asked: Was Picasso deracinated when he drew inspiration from African masks? If not, then why should an African be regarded as deracinated when he draws inspiration from Picasso?

Nevertheless, the sheer scale of this diaspora of India does remain an odd phenomenon. From the 1890s through to the 1930s, most English-speaking readers received their notions of India through the mediation of British-based writers such as Rudyard Kipling or EM Forster. That briefly changed between the 1940s and 1970s with the rise of Mulk Raj Anand, Ahmed Ali and RK Narayan, deeply rooted writers who really lived and breathed the air of the India they wrote about. But by the 1980s, London again became the place of mediation with the rise of Rushdie and his ilk - except that New York (the residence of Ghosh, Gita Mehta and Lahiri), Toronto (Mistry and Michael Ondaatje) and even rural Wiltshire (home to Naipaul and Seth) now had to be added to the major centres of Indian writing in English.

All of which is, in many ways, fine: great writing is great writing wherever it is produced, and literary merit has never been dependent on your home address - except that for those of us who live in India, it is in some ways a surprisingly quiet place in terms of its English-language literary life: one tends to meet far more Indian writers in English at the literary festival of Hay-on-Wye, deep in the Welsh countryside, or Edinburgh or even Sydney, than one ever does in Delhi. For a place supposed to be at the eye of the postcolonial literary hurricane, it is all a little, well, peaceful.
This is a huge contrast to the situation during the last great literary renaissance in the city, 150 years ago. Farhatullah Baig's Dehli ki Akhri Shama, The Last Musha'irah of Dehli is a fictionalised account of what purports to be the last great mushairah or poetic symposium held in Delhi under the patronage of the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar: around a courtyard sit several poet princes of the royal house, as well as 40 other Delhi poets, including Azurda, Momin, Arif, Bedil, Azad, Dagh, Sehbai, Shefta, Mir and Ghalib himself. Much of the detail of this mushairah may have been invented, but this stellar gathering of poetic talent could have happened. In a Delhi whose population was then little more 100,000, you could still find a gathering of 45 poets, at least 10 of whom are still widely read and admired today.

Nor was this just an elite pursuit: The Garden of Poetry, a collection of Urdu verse (or tazkirah) published in 1850, contains no less than 53 poets from Delhi who range from the emperor and members of his family to a poor water-seller in Chandni Chowk, a merchant in Panjabi Katra, a young wrestler, a courtesan and a barber. Seth and Lahiri may have a more international audience than Momin or Mir Taqi Mir ever did; but one can't help thinking that, at least as far as Delhi is concerned, something has been lost in the trade-off.

There is also the important question of how far Indian writers in English have to compromise if they are writing primarily for a firangi audience. After all, the market in India itself, while growing fast, is still tiny: most books sell less than 1,000 copies and even 5,000 copies can make you a bestseller; therefore to make a living as an Indian writer in English you have to crack the British and American markets and that can mean serious compromises.

Rushdie vigorously resisted all attempts to constrain the Hindi words in his novels within italics; Roy was also very brave in this respect, making it quite clear that she would not obey her foreign editors' injunctions to explain Indian words: Updike didn't explain baseball for an Indian audience, she said, and she was damned if she was going to explain the ways of Kerala to a Manhattan audience - they could take it or leave it. Other, newer writers, however, have had less leverage to resist such pressure and one often comes across tell-tale passages in Indian novels in English that explain, for example, that dal is a confection of lentils fried in garlic.

The other odd absence from the English-language literary scene in India has been the startling lack of any biography, narrative history or indeed any serious literary non-fiction of any description. Earlier this year, Suketu Mehta published what is without doubt the best travel book published by an Indian author in recent years: Maximum City, his remarkable study of Bombay. But Mehta's achievement only highlights the absence of any real competition, for with the notable exceptions of Naipaul and Pankaj Mishra, and one book each by Seth and Ghosh, there are no other Indian travel writers.

The situation with history is even more dire. Although brilliant young Indian historians such as Sanjay Subramaniam produce many excellent specialist essays and learned academic studies, it is still impossible, for example, to go into a bookshop in Delhi and buy an up-to-date and accessible biography of any of India's pre-colonial rulers, even of the most obvious ones such as Akbar or Shah Jehan, the builder of the Taj Mahal. Why is it that much the most popular biography of Mrs Gandhi was by Katherine Frank, an American living in England, and the most authoritative study of Hindu nationalism by a Frenchman, Christophe Jaffrelot? Why are there no Indian authors writing this sort of thing better than us firangi interlopers?

There is even a relative absence of genuinely accessible, well-written and balanced general histories of India. The most widely available introductions to the subject - the two Penguin Histories by Romila Thapar and Percival Spear - are both fine, scholarly works, but pretty heavy-going. This as much as anything else, I think, has allowed Hindu nationalist myths to replace history among a large part of India's middle-class, who are keen consumers of desi fiction, but still have surprisingly little home-grown history to interest them.

In India, with the exceptions of the cricket historian Ramachandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani, author of The Idea of India (who has now decamped to Washington) - there is simply nothing like that. What English language non-fiction there is seems to be written by academics for the consumption of a handful of other, rival academics.

As for the future, there is at least a lot of writing going on. The Indian superstars of the 80s and 90s - the Rushdies, the Ghoshs, the Seths and Chandras, the Mistrys - are still in their 40s or 50s and presumably have at least another 20 years of great books in them. Most are still at the height of their powers, and developing in a fascinating way: look at the spectacular way Ghosh's work has grown and matured since The Circle of Reason. Most still visit India very frequently, still think of themselves as Indian (or at least as hyphenated Indians: Indian-Americans, British-Indians and so on), and some may even move back here when they come to give up their day jobs - in contrast to previous generations of emigrants who usually left India for good.

Every year Penguin India produces nearly 100 new books, and this year there looks like being at least one major novel in the pipeline: Inheritance of Loss by New York-based Kiran Desai. And then of course there is the great Elephant in the Living Room that is so often ignored in discussion of Indian writing in English: the whole wider universe of Indian vernacular writers, especially in Hindi, Bengali and Marathi, where authors such as Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, UR Ananthmurthy and Paul Zakaria can sell tens of thousands of copies - much more than most Indian writers in English - but remain untranslated and largely unknown to readers in the west.

The big uncertainty in the years to come, however, is whether it will continue to be Indians in India mediating this country in the future - or will this increasingly come to be the preserve of the diaspora. Here a big and daily growing question mark remains. In Britain during the last four or five years, the waves have been made less by authors from south Asia, or even from the immediate south Asian diaspora, as much as British-born Asian writers such as Nadeem Aslam or Meera Syal, and particularly what Rushdie might call "chutnified" authors of mixed ethnic backgrounds who are, in Zadie Smith's famous formulation, "children with first and last names on a direct collision course. Names that secrete within them mass exodus, cramped boats and planes, cold arrivals, medical checks".

When he was in Delhi last summer launching Transmission, Kunzru surprised many Indian interviewers by emphasising that he was a British author, not an Indian one, and that he was very happy living in London with his British identity: to one interviewer, he remarked that although his books have some Indian characters and partly Indian settings, he is not "one of those expatriate Indian writers who scours the Indian landscape looking for my roots", adding that he "abhors the nostalgic writing that many writers of Indian diaspora usually indulge in. My next book will not have anything to do with India at all." For him, he said, India was a place where his cousins lived and where he came for weddings and winter holidays.

In Hong Kong, he confirmed this: "I am very careful never to describe myself as an Indian writer," he said. "I am a British-born, British-resident author. I have connections to India and I feel they inform what I do to some extent, but more than this I cannot claim. What I and Zadie are doing is British writing about British hybridity. It is a completely separate story to that strand of writing which is about Indian-born writers going somewhere else. People should not confuse the two."
Writers such as Kunzru, born in Hounslow or Edgware or Brooklyn or New Jersey, have a clear and built-in advantage over their cousins brought up in Jhansi or Patna. They have far more confidence in English, and their ethnicity and geography makes them natural bridges between cultures, able automatically to translate an Indian sensibility for the west - if that is what they want to do. Certainly, their background effortlessly puts them in a position to draw together a range of different influences, to work with ease in India and Britain and the US, and to produce art that is readily comprehensible at both ends of the globe.

If the last few years are anything to go by, I suspect that in the years ahead the main competition Indian writers aspiring to win the Booker will face will not be the Alan Hollinghursts or the AS Byatts, so much as their own cousins born and brought up in the west.
· William Dalrymple's most recent book, White Mughals (Harper Perennial) won the Wolfson Prize for History. A stage version by Christopher Hampton has just been commissioned by the National Theatre.

Distribution UPdate Mike Shaskin

The Future of Distribution
July 20, 2005
Presented to the Stanford Professional Publishing Program
by Mike Shatzkin


"The future of distribution" is simply too big a subject to be covered in an hour, even by a fast-talking New Yorker like me. So we're going to focus our attention on "distribution" as defined by the companies that call themselves "distributors" and by publishers who offer "distribution services" to other publishers. That is, we're going to talk about how it works when a publisher hands off important distribution functions to another entity.

One might say that this is a subject of universal and growing importance. Almost every publisher today is either a distributor of others or a distributee of another. More than a handful are both. The chances are good that, whatever publisher one works for, a distribution relationship will be part of the landscape.

And right this minute is a pretty active time in the world of distribution. Competition has heated up; distribution deals are where a lot of the consolidation of the trade book publishing industry in the US is taking place.

Let's start by defining the distribution functions. What is covered by the term "distribution"? Here's the complete list:

* Warehousing (and related services)

* Receiving orders

* Picking, packing, and shipping the orders

* Managing data associated with maintaining inventory and filling orders

* Collecting accounts-receivable

* Sales representation to the trade channel (usually exclusive)

* Sales representation to special markets (usually non-exclusive)

* International sales representation and fulfillment

* Sale of subsidiary rights

* Sales representation to non-trade, special sales, or export channels

* "Basic" publicity

* Additional title-specific marketing


Distribution arrangements usually cover most, but not all, of these functions.

So why do publishers collaborate for distribution? What's in it for the distributing publisher? And what's in it for the distributee?

Publishers take on other publishers for distribution to reduce their own costs. "Scale" is an advantage for virtually all aspects of distribution. If you've got a warehouse, you want to fill it, because you pay the same for empty space as you do for utilized space. More volume gives you more leverage to collect money and makes it easier to support a sales force. And we live in times where systems costs keep rising; several of the largest publishers have spent double-, or even triple-digit millions in the past few years putting in new "enterprise" systems to manage their business. That's one of the factors driving the growth in distribution activity now. It is helpful to amortize those costs over more books than publishers care to invest to create.

Another factor driving distributing publishers to seek clients is that launching new titles successfully and maintaining sales on backlist are both getting harder and harder in the current marketplace. So volume increases are most easily achieved by getting more books to sell from somebody else's investment. That means getting distribution clients.

The distributed publisher also seeks the value of "scale" that may be beyond its means. Only a handful of publishers can afford to invest in an S.A.P. enterprise system. Selling today requires knowledge of standards for data transmission, for example, that all big publishers and distributors have and that would be expensive and draining for small or new publishers to gain.

Going to a larger entity for distribution also has the effect of making large costs "variable" rather than "fixed." You pay for the warehouse space you use, not the whole warehouse. You pay for the pick and pack activity associated with your actual sales; you don't have a payroll to meet regardless of whether anything is selling this week. In the ideal world for a distributee, sometimes achieved, distribution costs can be set as a percentage of net sales, creating a high degree of predictability of expenses in relation to sales.

What also becomes more predictable for the distributee is the pace of collecting their money. Little publishers, particularly, may find themselves stretched out well past 90 days waiting for payments. Bigger publishers and distributors usually have more reliable collection times, so that they can "guarantee" payment of receivables on a contractual schedule timed to the sales. This certainty of when cash will arrive can literally be of life-or-death value to a small publisher.

Distribution relationships are complicated and cover a lot of ground, which is reflected in the great variation that exists in the deals that govern them.

Of course, the first question is: what is covered? Historically, distribution usually covered sales and fulfillment as a bundled service at an overall, percentage of sales, price. When I first got involved in distribution more than 30 years ago, just about the time current industry leader PGW began in business, most deals covered virtually all the services we enumerated earlier and the charges were usually a fixed percentage of net sales. Some publishers, like Harper at that time, offered a sliding scale of charges that were reduced as volume increased. One publisher at that time, Scribner's, charged based on gross sales -- what they shipped out rather than what was sold net of returns received. Scribner's percentage charges were lower, but they transferred some of the "risk" of returns to their client publisher. A publisher with high returns would end up paying a greater percentage of "net sales" for distribution. This is fair and logical, but less attractive to a smaller publisher seeking cost certainty.

The two biggest dedicated distribution companies -- PGW (for Publishers Group West) and NBN (for National Book Network) -- have standard arrangements that illustrate this distinction. PGW's contracts, usually, call for them to collect a fixed percentage of the "net sales", which means "value of shipments minus the value of returns." NBN's standard contracts enumerate two different percentages. They charge a percentage of "gross sales", which means "value of shipments" for the fulfillment portion of their responsibility and a percentage of "net sales" for their sales efforts.

"Sales only" distribution relationships are rare but there have long been "fulfillment only" relationships. For an example involving very large players, HarperCollins has been handling the trade fulfillment for Scholastic for many years, although Scholastic handles its own sales efforts. For years, Hyperion has been distributed and sold by TimeWarner. Hyperion has just taken back the sales component, but continues to use TimeWarner for fulfillment.

There are other charges by distributors to distributees. Some of these are for ancillary warehouse services a distributor might perform, such as stickering inventory or putting books into promotional display cartons. But sometimes extras are for core services. Distribution contracts might call for "in and out" charges: a fee by the distributor for "receiving" inventory or for shipping books on behalf of the distributee when the distributor doesn't share in the revenue, to a foreign distributor, for example. Some contracts charge for warehousing based on the volume of books being stored. More and more contracts call for "returns processing" fees.

Another variable in distribution contracts is how the distributee is paid. It is normal for there to be a contractually-defined payout based on when billings are achieved, and the payout is designed to pass money along to a distributee only after it is collected from the accounts. Most contracts call for all money to be paid within 120 days of billing, but, beyond that, there is a wide variation in the speed of payment.

A major concern for many publishers arranging to be distributed is their "identity" as publishers. This starts with the control of "metadata"; the information about each book that is put into the supply chain by the publisher or the distributor acting for the publisher. This basic information -- title, author, retail price, type of binding, subject matter of the book expressed in standard ways using BISAC codes -- includes the name of the publisher or distributor. It is not uncommon for a distributor be listed as the publisher, rather than the publisher itself. This has even happened on books on a Bestseller List.

This confusion of identities is almost inevitable. The distributee's books are often presented from the distributor's catalog. The review copies may go out in the distributor's box. Because bookstores and wholesalers order the distributee's books from the distributor, the distributor may be listed as the "publisher" in many of the customers' internal systems. The distributed publisher faces an ongoing conflict between pushing its own identity forward out of pride or pushing its distributor's identify forward out of practicality.

But perhaps even more important than what imprint name appears on the bestseller list is a distributed publisher's lack of direct contact with major accounts. Majors have opportunities, and new ones arise daily, to promote titles in exchange for payments from publishers. Whether these opportunities are "cost-effective" can be questionable. But the sheer logistics of capturing these offers and referring them to another publisher's organization for a decision can lead a distributor's rep to turn down these proposals without even submitting them. This can result from an honest difference in perspective. I have seen more than one case where a distributor, usually a larger and more powerful company, thinks that a customer's deal for a promotion is not good value but the smaller distributed publisher would have jumped at the opportunity to buy into it.

The market for distribution services in the US right now is in greater flux than it has ever been. The number of players among publishers has been growing, as has the size and number of dedicated distributors, for at least two decades. But a pair of recent re-entrants into the market, Random House and Ingram Book Company, are accelerating the movement of lines from one distributor to another.

Ingram tried for years, with less than great success, to set up distribution services for publishers, shutting down the effort a few years ago. Random House disposed of its distribution business when the company was bought by Bertelsmann from Advance in 1999. Bertelsmann's thinking at that time was that they didn't want lower-margin distribution business using their state-of-the-art capabilities; they saw their distribution operations as a competitive advantage they would prefer not to share.

But then Random House spent an enormous amount of money improving their capabilities even further, particularly on an S.A.P. enterprise system. Ingram saw their primary business -- book wholesaling -- under assault as independent bookstores died off and big ones, like Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and now Borders, created their own distribution centers to supply back-up stock. The allure of being able to use existing facilities to serve distribution business became too compelling to resist.

It is coincidental, but at the same time, the biggest dedicated distributor, PGW, lost several key clients, which made distribution's biggest player suddenly aggressively pursue more distributees while, at the same time, redoubling their efforts to keep the ones they have. PGW's parent company, a wholesaler called Advance Marketing whose business was primarily in mass merchants and price clubs, suffered a criminal investigation centered around sales to publishers of ads in circulars which weren't printed in the promised quantities. This hurt PGW because distributees feared a possible negative impact from the parent corporation's troubles. It increased the urgency for PGW to leverage their global sales and marketing capabilities across more publishers. PGW executives maintain that they have added over 25 new distribution clients, including several with sales in the millions of dollars annually, even in the face of their difficulties.

Both Random House and Ingram have great operations and they brought them to the market at rock-bottom prices. PGW's principal competitors among dedicated distributors -- NBN, IPG, Consortium, and Midpoint Trade plus other major players among the publishers -- Simon & Schuster, Holtzbrinck, TimeWarner, Norton, and Chronicle -- all have responded by getting increasingly active pursuing additional lines while they're scrambling to hold onto what they've got. Prices for distribution services appear to be falling and unbundling -- buying specific distribution services rather than an all-inclusive deal -- has become common. A recent distribution deal was announced for one publisher who will use Ingram for fulfillment and Midpoint Trade for sales.

When a publisher shops for distribution services, which all but the largest publishers will do every few years in the current environment, the biggest decision is how to handle sales. Comparing the quality of fulfillment services is relatively straightforward. How efficient each distributor is can be learned from their customers, the stores and wholesalers. But how effective the sales effort will be depends not just on the skill of the selling organization, but also on the effectiveness of the communication between the distributor and distributee. And that's a variable within every stable of distributed publishers.

By my observation, the experienced dedicated distributors tend to have better procedures to absorb product information and project it through the sales organization than publishers who distribute. And they also tend to have established mechanisms to manage coop offers and marketing opportunities through many publishers at one time. Distribution clients are, inevitably, more important to the top management of dedicated distributors than they are to big publishing houses. Every client relationship is different, of course, but the generalization still holds and, in many cases, really matters.

But, while consolidation on the customer side has really made it essential to have a larger operation with "critical mass" to warehouse, bill, collect, and to make bookstores and wholesalers feel comfortable buying the books, the paradox is that sales can still be done by a small company. If your books come in a box from a company they already do business with, most large accounts will make some time for a small company to see a buyer. If a small company has enough titles in a niche, it can even establish real relationships with major accounts. And there are still commission rep groups in every corner of the country looking for lines to pitch to the smaller bookstore and specialty accounts in their territories.

The challenge for the distributed here is that increased "control" only comes with increased management responsibility and expense. Yes, you can cover major accounts yourself and handle the rest with commission reps, but you have to manage the big relationships and support the reps with costly selling materials and management attention. None of these is a trivial task.

Although distributors will often offer "basic" publicity -- getting to key pre-publication review channels, listing the title in various databases and sending out an initial press release -- and will broker marketing opportunities with retailers, which more and more is about in-store price and position promotion -- the marketing direction has to be provided by the distributed publisher. Some rights activity takes place as a by-product of marketing, such as serial sales. But even keeping those rights to save commissions might be a mistake, because the administration of these things can often be done better by a larger department.

Some special -- that is, non-book-trade -- sales activity arises naturally out of marketing, as well, particularly for a niche non-fiction publisher. An important element of special sales success is "critical mass"; a body of titles in a subject area is necessary to serve the accounts. Publishers who have it often have already cultivated key sales relationships before they arrive at a distributor. In many trade book distribution deals, the special markets are carved out and treated separately, or not included at all.

So the choices and combinations of choices for distribution, if not limitless, are so plentiful that very few publishers have the time, energy, or resources to explore and consider them all.

The best strategy for any distributed publisher, which most are and will be, is to keep contracts and commitments as short as possible because competitive pressure is likely to keep prices falling for some time to come. When looking for a distributor, a publisher should try to shop the market as broadly as possible and maintain touch with the ones they like but don't pick, because they'll still be there when the next contract is up. And all publishers should do their best to own as many buyer relationships as possible, even if a distributor has primary responsibility for sales.

Book publishing everywhere is bound to have more publishers using fewer warehouses to supply an increasingly consolidated general account base in the years to come. That means that getting the most out of their distribution relationships is bound to be one of the core concerns for publishers over the next decade or longer.



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