Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
624-5. "dickinson and kafka are the exceptions that prove the rule. most writers want to be a part of the collaborative network that brings their books to readers and occasionally earns them a decent living. exactly when the myth of solitary genius began is not clear, but it has been connected with the concept of the poet as prophet and possessor of transcendent knowledge"; "there has seldom been a time when someone did not stand between author and audience in the role of a mediator, reviser, or collaborator"--"monks copied manuscripts" & there's "the author's agent," "a publisher, the acquisitions editor at the publisher," "the primary reader," "the copyeditor," "the typesetter," "proofreaders," "the promotion and advertising director; the marketing manager and sales staff members; book reviews," "wholesalers; and finally the bookstore owner"; of course "the publishing process is not the same as a collaboration between two of more authors in the writing of a book, but it is a collaboration that involves many people with various degrees of influence on the finished text"
626-7. in practice: "theodore dreiser...needed help, and when he wrote sister carrie, he sought it out by turning to his wife, a schoolteacher, and to his writer friend arthur henry"; "the book greatly benefited from what is clearly a collaboration"
628. in other generic arenas: "from the beginning, comic art has been a collaborative project."
629. regarding the author's own text here & now "anytime another hand enters into an effort, a kind of collaboration occurs"; thus "the published version should not be considered the product of my sole authorship, although only my name will appear beneath it."
630. likewise "probably we should put pound's name beneath eliot's on the waste land because under any definition of collaboration his name belongs there....but there should be a change in attitude about how we discuss our literature and culture so that we do not constantly downgrade authors according to the extent to which they compromise with the pragmatic and economic forces of time and place....if we allow more for a social and contextual concept of authorship, perhaps we can provide a more realistic and less romantic view of literary production" (<--which, depending on the tone you read that with, either says something encouraging about accounting for the real conditions of writers as creative producers in concert w/one another, or implies that collaborating is settling, but it's settling no one in the real world can help, especially if they need the money.)