Literary Bootlegs
Frank and Rich over at our favorite music site, That Truncheon Thing, have achieved bandwith crippling traffic to their site through great writing and fantastic one-of-kind music that you’re not likely to find anywhere else. Frank’s classic bootleg series has featured artists such as Miles Davis & John Coltraine, The Boss (Part 1 and 2), the always foxy Neko Case, and many others. You’ll have to do some legwork yourself to uncover the other gems on their site – staggering bandwith aint free.
It got me thinking. Always a dangerous thing. What would be the literary equivalent of a bootleg – that wouldn’t land us in jail. The closest I could come to finding a true “bootleg” are some fan translated works of Haruki Murakami that are either out of print in the US or stories that have never been published in English. You can find all the links over at the always thoughtful The Millions blog.
If you’ve got other ideas of literary bootlegs, links to unpublished stories, fan translations, etc, let us hear about them in the comments.
July 13, 2007 7:00 am 
Subscribe
By Frank, July 13, 2007 @ 6:13 pm
First off, thanks for the kind words. Second, it’s stunningly odd that you bring this up, because of something that happened to me about a week ago. My best pal from college lives in San Francisco, and married a woman whose father is best, life-long pals with Greil Marcus, who in turn is among my all-time favorite music and cultural critics. So I got to meet and talk music and books with Greil at my buddy’s wedding a few years back, sat next to Greil’s daughter at dinner, etc. Anyway, every so often, Greil will write something — an essay, a personal observation — not for publication, but just to circulate among friends. My buddy is now on the list to get these things, and when he does, he always forwards them to me. (You should see some of the e-mail addresses on the forwards, too — Sarah Vowell, lots of cool critics and writers, etc.) Anyway, about a week ago, I received one of these private essays that was the best one yet — a 2-page account that Greil wrote of an evening he had just spent in Paris at a private dinner at which Little Richard performed. And people like Tina Turner and Lieber & Stoller were at his table. It was just a lovely little piece of writing about an amazing night. And I so wanted to post or link to it at TTT, but of course I have no right to do that and wouldn’t in a million years. But that, to me, would be the literary equivalent of a bootleg.
By Rich, July 13, 2007 @ 10:22 pm
Thanks for the ups on the writing, that means a lot coming from you, DJ. But I have no illusions about reason for the traffic at TTT. It’s all about Frank’s boots.
There was an article in the AJC a few weeks ago about how Emory is accumulating all these great authors “papers” (including Salman Rushdie’s, recently), much to the consternation of people like, oh, Great Britain. I think those “papers” are the literary bootlegs. Does Emory even let us plebes look at them?
By thinkulous, July 13, 2007 @ 11:25 pm
I did hear this morning on NPR that the ever-enterprising Chinese capitalists are not booting tons of Western books. They translate them unofficially and then sell them through the gray market, because the official translations take months and cost scads of money.
Of course, they’ve focused on the Harry Potter series, but even Bill Clinton’s weighty biography was booted there. If I remember correctly, the unofficial version reports that Bill’s secret nickname is “Big Watermelon.”
By thinkulous, July 13, 2007 @ 11:26 pm
Make that “Chinese capitalists *are* booting…”
That’ll teach me to post comments after a long day.
By DJ Cayenne, July 13, 2007 @ 11:52 pm
Frank: You’re welcome. That sounds like exactly what we’re looking for. Where could we find a “not you” source for that kind of material?
Rich: I was reading that the Rushdie “papers” include the hard disks from the computers that he used to write several novels. We have a man on the inside. I’ll ask if those are available to the unwashed.
By DJ Cayenne, July 14, 2007 @ 12:02 am
Think: That’s interesting. I’m guessing that these English translations of Murakami are similar to what the Chinese are doing with Potter.