Underminers in German

With very little effort from me, and a huge amount from a fellow traveller, the German translation (I think of it as a “translocation”) of Underminers is now available from http://wuestenzeitung.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/underminers-in-german.html thanks to the incredible efforts of Jürgen.

It is entitled “Radikaler Wandel: Anleitung zur praktischen Untergrabung der Maschine” which makes me very happy, especially from a cultural point of view. The idea of my work being translocated is important, as stories are the root of all culture, and thus it is imperative that any “translation” takes serious account of the culture in which that work is part of. As well as this, had I just put the book through Google Translate, then it would have ended up a rough copy that in some places made little sense, and as a whole was not true to the source.

On page 11 is a Foreword, which very much comes from the heart:

Foreword

I was contacted by Jürgen in the summer of 2017 with a generous offer to make a full translation of the original, author’s edit of “Underminers : A Practical Guide for Radical Change” which I first released online in 2012. As with all texts intended for use on the edges of society, I have no way of telling what impact this version, or the subsequent New Society (2013) edition have had. I could hope, but that would be as good as praying, and I neither pray nor hope – as an Underminer myself, I try and live by the words I have written. This German-language version, so lovingly translated, translocated and updated for 2018, carries its own weight of words, which are now as much Jürgen’s as mine, and as much yours, dear reader, as the authors’. You are the Underminers, and this is your time.

Keith Farnish
Scotland, May 2018.

Pulped

This morning, the result of many emails, I received two large boxes. Inside are many copies of Underminers which have been saved from the process the publishing industry calls “remaindering” or variations thereupon, but which is more correctly called “pulping”. My publisher asked me how many books I would like saved, for a reasonable price per book, and they eventually found 60 copies in a warehouse in England.

The outcome of all this is that I have some books for sale or, under certain circumstances, to give away. On the home page is a Paypal link to buy Underminers for £10 (or equivalent) per copy. There’s also a brief explanation of how to get a copy for free. My criteria for deciding whether to charge or not, will essentially be around whether people will benefit from Underminers who otherwise would not have been able. So, if you have a local group, library, activist cell or whatever, then get in contact.

For the time being I have to find a place to put the boxes. A good thing one of my offspring has just moved out…

Get A Free Book

SORRY – ALL BOOKS NOW CLAIMED, SO OFFER IS CLOSED.

Thank you for all your kind comments and offers of distribution.

Yes, it’s true, I have some free copies of Underminers: A Practical Guide for Radical Change to give away, courtesy of the funds remaining from the Kickstarter project back in 2012, and which I would like to use up before a year has elapsed.

The book available is the one for sale (for the moment) at Lulu, a 524 page, lovingly-crafted brick of paper that will be superceded in September, once New Society starts selling the published version Underminers: A Guide to Subverting The Machine. There are enough funds for about 30 copies, and the offer is limited to one copy per application.

All you have to do is contact me via the form below telling me why you or your organisation needs a copy of Underminers, and I will do the rest. Books will be sent by surface mail, so may take a few weeks to arrive. This is not a competition – if I think there is a good case for sending a book then it will be sent. The only condition is that the book is read, re-read, passed around and made available in the same way as the electronic version.

Keith, June 2013.

A Publishing Date

Hooray, I have a date for publication. I know this because I checked on Amazon. It’s September 26th 2013.

That’s the last I really want to have to do with Amazon because, as most people probably know, they screw publishers and especially authors into the ground so they can sell books as cheaply as possible, thus in turn screwing other booksellers, especially independents into the ground. They also use offshore tax havens, so also screw taxpayers, or rather people who would otherwise use services that are paid for with the tax that Amazon does not pay.

Like it or not, though, most people are going to buy the book through Amazon, which is a great shame. I suppose the same applies to other online booksellers like Borders and Barnes & Noble, and both of those, with their physical outlets, did a huge amount in killing off the independent bookseller. Basically this (although Black Books isn’t your average independent)…

It’s a fair way off, this publication date, but there’s lots to do, not least all the pre-promotion stuff which will mean speaking to a great many people who don’t get Underminers, nor will condone any suggestion that Industrial Civilization is a Bad Thing. Still, if life is meant to be a challenge then what’s the harm being challenged?

Americanization, yeah!

Well, it was bound to happen, and so it has. Those who have taken the time to pore over my written output – especially those from the northern part of the continental landmass conventionally called America – are bound to notice that I bring more than a little Britishness to the page. Obviously that’s because of the way I speak, but I have also made a little effort to reach out across the Atlantic and take a sprinkling of Americanisms to the text where it seems appropriate, especially if the subject in question is in that (your?) part of the world.

The online version of Underminers, and the Lulu (soon to be unavailable, get it while you can!) book is written in that British-sort-of-American-with-a-touch-of-Scots way, which is perfectly fine for most purposes and which I have no intention of changing. On the other hand, when a book is about to be pushed out to the North American public (and I mean public rather than the people who would normally seek out my work), then a certain amount of translation is called for. It was explained to me, very understandingly by my publisher, that the convention for books to be sold in the USA is to be written in American English.

Here is where I plead ignorance. Until my gracious and tolerant copy-editor pointed out the multitude of words in the book that were rarely if not ever used in the USA, then I had no idea. The spelling – mainly involving “z”s (pronounced “zee” rather than “zed”) – was perfectly fine; hell! I write “civilization” instead of the British convention “civilisation”, all the time. The words, though, were interesting. Here’s a sample, to give an insight into the process:

Caravan. In Britain, a caravan is a thing that you attach to a car (automobile) and take on holiday (vacation) with you so you have a home-from-home. I had to change it to “motor home”, even though it wasn’t – “travel trailer” is unknown in Europe, so that wouldn’t have worked.

Paracetamol. In Britain, it’s a generic painkiller that acts on the central nervous system. In the USA it’s called acetaminophen and usually Tylenol. I have never taken acetaminophen knowingly, but the converse applies in the USA, so an explanation is now in a footnote.

Football in Glasgow. In Scotland there are (at the moment not, but that’s very complicated) traditionally two big football (soccer – I could have gone native and said fitba’) teams, Celtic and Rangers, or rather Glasgow Celtic and Glasgow Rangers. They are rivals in terms of football, and in terms of different flavours of the same major branch of the same religious belief system – i.e. one is Protestant, one is Catholic. Fights ensue. There is even a new law in place ostensibly to stop fans of one team using religious slurs against the other. This takes time to explain, so I just took the reference out.

Workmate. This is a type of folding workbench produced by the manufacturer Black and Decker that was all the rage in the 1980s in Britain, and which I still have in almost pristine condition from then – they were very well made. I checked, and they are unknown in the USA, so even though I did use a Workmate, to save confusion I took out the whole reference, and just used a saw.

There were lots more, along with all sorts of stylistic changes including a bizarre round-trip. A friend had seen an early extract and pointed out the proliferation of “that” where the word wasn’t really needed in his opinion, such as “the house that Jill built”, which reads more easily as “the house Jill built”. I agreed and spent ages removing every excessive instance. What I didn’t realise is that in the USA, the word “that” is used much more frequently than in Britain, so back a load went! I did re-remove a few, though – you can have too much of anything.

The final edit is complete, and the manuscript is now with the layout people, who will do all sorts of fancy things over the next few weeks. This is the bit where I don’t really get involved much at all – they know how to sell books; I just write the words.

I Have A Publisher

And it’s not me.

One good thing about being the eternal realist is that when really good and unexpected things happen, they really are good and unexpected bringing with them all of the lovely positive emotions those particular things entail. The blog of April 12 described what I genuinely believed at the time: “When the book is finished then I will begin work on a publishers version, with the aim of selling as an e-book and Print on Demand – assuming no publisher takes this on as a going concern.” Even earlier I used the phrase: “No publisher will touch this”, and really meant it.

At some point along the way I threw a few emails to publishers asking if they might be interested, ignoring those that had onerous application demands which essentially boil down to: “How much money will the book make us?” (Only one of the publishers got back to me, and that was just to apologise they didn’t have the funds to take on anything new.) In the main, publishing is a business – a very big business indeed, which makes this kind of question obvious. For me, it’s a barrier; the key question should be: “Why is your book worth publishing?” I think it is worth publishing, so I went off and did it myself.

Part of that process was engaging in the, now successful, Kickstarter project, which has led to me being able to send copies to various people involved in the publication of the book, and which was also intended to fund an eBook version of Underminers. What also happened was that a representative of New Society Publishers got in touch saying they were interested in the book and would like a chat. That was back in late November. As of now I am an author with one of the few publishers I would have really liked to have published Underminers.

The upshot of this is:

1) The Kickstarter project money will be used to fund the sending of the “big” version of Underminers to a variety of groups and individuals who could benefit from having it to hand.

2) A honed-down version of Underminers, which I have edited specially to be more digestible but no less radical, will be produced by New Society in paper and eBook (EPUB, Kindle, Nook etc.)

3) The online version will remain available on this website in perpetuity under a Creative Commons license in HTML and PDF format.

4) The self-published Lulu version (see sidebar) will be available only until the New Society marketing campaign starts this spring, upon which I will take it off sale out of respect to the publishers.

This all sounds very formal, but in a nutshell it means the text will be available to the widest possible audience in the largest variety of formats available, which has to be a good thing…unless you are a big fan of industrial civilization.