cheese it, the cops!

nonononono

just to continue the assault on high-end pubs: so, the way they operate depends on a star system, very similarly to the ways pop music in the 80s, say, or hollywood in the 40s operated. but in this case (as actually at moments in the others), this coincided with 'modernism' in the 'fine' arts. one of the features of that is the dogma of the genius: touched by god or madness, more than human, demanding worship. so, i'm not saying that knopf hasn't published many good books (man they published many a subversive screed by my man mencken, e.g.), or that i'm not glad that faulkner or fitzgerald got their books published or something. but on the other hand i think they tried to give this status, which no human almost by definition finally deserves, to many people whose work appears absurdly inadequate now when judged by the standard they tried to impose. but the god-touched transcendent genius is in this case a commercial strategy. and even with all the errors in this regard, you only get a few of them in any period. whomever they're trying to promote like that gets all the attention: they're on all the npr shows, reviewed everywhere, are up for the awards, and so on. and the publishers themselves, though they like now to portray themselves as champions of the mid-list, dropped you like a sack of shit if you didn't gain this status or show the hoped-for sales.

i have known a lot of people who write books of different kinds. and i say that they are made miserable by this. you start when you're 20 or whatever, aspiring to nothing so much as to climb this mountain. you spend much of your psychic energy yearning for it and envying the people who get it, and maybe feeling bad about what you're doing because it doesn't take you to these heights. this is true even of most people who get the fantasy contract, because it usually all goes to hell and remainder. in a way, all but 17 novelists working now are failures in this system. i might be somewhat happier if i were convinced that getting that contract or turning into the booker-prize-kissed super-genius correlated with quality. i do not believe that. knopf or hachette portray themselves as champions for authors. nonononono.

no, i'm not signing your petition.

i keep getting stuff in my inbox asking me to sign various anti-amazon petitions, or sharing letters from people vowing to boycott, etc. i guess they're trying to get an author's movement going. but, first, i think the only authors really being hurt are the top twenty or something, and when i say 'top twenty' i mean people arbitrarily anointed into greatness in our insufferable little prestige pecking order literary world. i don't think prestige pubs like hachette or knopf or whatever actually do much of a service to literature: i think they are by and large a bunch of pretentious twits and that the whole thing is primarily about parties and status.

most authors can't even get to the point of submitting to a publisher like that: you need an agency and so on: it's like publishing novels is a mere hierarchy, a celebrity culture with added pseudo-seriousness (kind of oriented traditionally around high-end booze, cocaine, and who's fucking whom), and i am less impressed than many with the quality of the result. it's like a rotted aristocracy to which one is absurdly required to bow, and if that world is in danger, i'm happy about it. i don't think many people make a living writing books in this world, or ever did, so i don't see these as public resources of some kind. i want to point out that anyone can publish basically anything they want on amazon and charge whatever they think is fair or effective. i say that actually is a public resource.

also, hachette can take care of itself, and i tell you that the big pubs will reach an equlibrium with amazon. it's just a corporate dispute, like if gm was wrangling with its steel suppliers. it's not really worth worrying about. i take more seriously the way amazon is constantly squeezing small publishers, and i would hope that when they reach their modus vivendi with the big boys that that helps the smaller fry.

what hachette is fighting for is higher prices for ebooks. say you read ebooks. why would you want that? and it is quite relevant, as amazon argues, that it is cheap to produce and distribute an ebook. that makes publishing far more available to more people, and it has the potential to make books more accessible to larger audiences. and yet you're going to fight for absurd mark-ups and price-fixing cabals? 

the disintegration of the recording industry has been a service to music, i believe. those five labels that controlled everything were utterly miserable, and they made most of their artists utterly miserable, and they created whole sahara-like eras of bad yet extremely expensive pop. and again, to fight for them on creative grounds was to fight for the top 7.2 pop artists, who needed no help anyway and were raking in millions, while almost no one else on the creative end really could access an audience for their recordings, or make a living as recording artists.

I despise Upworthy, don't you...cue Emily Dickinson

 

I really don't like that bloody thing. Upworthy -- what the hell does it even mean? It's kind like RL Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verse which some people find poetic but I always found it to be saccharine, maudlin "why the hell did they give me this instead of the book about Vikings I wanted" even when I was a kid. But, in the words of the old Russian proverb, Даже слепая свинья находит желудь иногда, or as we say in Dusquesne, WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON WITH THIS SCREWY INTERFACE?

Ok, it's ok now. Actually, it translates like this...

Charlie: You're getting on. You're pushing 30. You know, it's time to think about getting some ambition. 
Terry: I always figured I'd live a bit longer without it. -- 

 

 

Anyway, there is also music provided by that twanging philosopher, Mr. Dwight Yoakum. But, watch the Ted Thing and I know you'll like it

And if you're taking a course in Aesthetics and Politics with Herr Professor Doktor Sartwell, compare and contrast values based on this contrasting versions of the Clash piece by Mr. Yoakum and Ms. McColl with extra credit if you can describe the similarity in the personal sitations of Ms. McColl and Mr. Strummer in 2012. Guaranteed C-, I tell you. Trust me. I used to be in govenment...

 

in defense of amazon

publishers hate amazon. bookstores, if any, hate amazon. the government of france hates amazon. etc. now, putting it mildly i was an early adopter, and i don't want to know how much i've spent there over the years. everyone always goes all jonathan franzen or nicholson baker or whatever and yearns for the time when one was browsing and making discoveries and talking to book enthusiasts at your local bookstore, if one ever was. but the local bookstore was good for some things and not others. probably a good spot to discover alice munro, say, and find people to enthuse about her with. but how many of them had even a half-decent philosophy section? and how many owners cared about stuff like that? the answer is merely 'not'. more or less they were all fiction heads who thought life was a story or whatever woolly jive people like that do believe. i used to go bookstore to bookstore, never finding the things i needed, or even anything i wanted, or even the very basic classics. mention this or that and they'd just look at you blankly. then i'd give up and maybe special-order it. they'd call me three months later, by which time i was on to something else. the idea that i could order any book in print and it would show up on my doorstep two days later seemed miraculous, and it has been extremely useful to me as a scholar: i can't imagine life without it now, really. 

p.s. what the principles are by which french legislators operate, or what they take to be the scope and limits of their power, are matters incomprehensible. they'll yell 'liberte-with-an-accent!' and then arrest you for wearing the wrong outfit. if i were them, i'd drop their entire political tradition and adopt the british one, har har.

what happens when microsoft tries to come back

what went wrong at microsoft? it's very simple: they committed suicide by their own (temporarily successful) attempt to achieve a monopoly. so, somehow they managed to impose windows on the whole world, and spent much of their energy crushing the oppostion (and trying to fight off anti-trust, etc). right, but windows was an unbelievably shitty operating system, which became immediately evident to anyone who was able to access an alternative. it was full of stupid bugs, unbelievably virus-vulnerable, crazily heavy, still working on underlying dos code a decade or more beyond where that many any sense. i have no idea what their thousands of code writers and such were doing that whole time: playing tiddly-winks, maybe. so, in the usual fashion, a monopoly grows mind-numbingly complacent. after a certain point, it didn't (and it doesn't) matter what they did: people associated their flagship product with palpable shittiness that fucked up their day every day. it may well be that there's no coming back from that even if you improve, and i say good riddance.

 

you might want to think about this history when bill and melinda are trying to tell you how your children should be educated. i'm not saying they aren't extremely, insanely, unbelievably wealthy, however, which of course does entail their excellence in all possible dimensions.

junior sisk and rambler's choice rock in general - for one thing, a fresh repertoire within a traditional vein (check 'the story of the day i died', for another example) - and i am rather delighted by 'old bicycle chain'. i'm going to let it stand as my reply to highs in the low fifties, while speculating on the grounds of having read all the author's other works that this one is liable to be extraordinarily well-written and very hilarious, with moments of profundity.

solar scandal

actually, i think the solyndra scandal is kind of serious, and getting moreso with each revelation. i don't think you can argue that half a billion dollars funneled to one company is not a...substantial expenditure. the technical term might be 'huge-ass.' it kind of takes shape as a beautiful argument that you don't actually want economic decisions made by political people, or as an illustration of one thing that's wrong with a 'planned' or 'socialist' economy, or at any rate with 'public/private partnership': could you please delay your total collapse until the day after the election?

 

 in today's washpost: Bill Gates and Chad Holliday| In the realm of energy, we need a vigorous strategy to invent our future.

i've heard more interesting ideas from my deck furniture. also my deck furniture has a less debased prose style.

rove, abramoff, kozlowski

these people are filthy. eventually, one hopes, scandals will take rove from all sideds and drag him  to the appropriate pit of hell.

Tyco -- whose executive L. Dennis Kozlowski had just departed under an ethics cloud -- was worried that the Bush administration might embrace legislation promoted by Democrats that would impose higher taxes on domestic-centered companies that had moved offshore to cut their tax bills. The legislation was motivated by popular anger over such offshore moves, and carried the additional penalty of barring such firms from receiving federal contracts.

Lobbying disclosure statements filed by Abramoff listing his work for Tyco cite the "Executive Office of the President" as one of his lobbying targets on the tax and contracts issues. Others were the Department of Commerce, the General Services Administration and Congress. Greenberg Traurig records submitted to Tyco describe specific contacts with the White House legislative office, a source familiar with the matter said yesterday.

Rove's personal assistant at the time, Susan Ralston, formerly worked as Abramoff's secretary. It could not be learned yesterday whether she was among those contacted by any of the 14-person Greenberg team recorded as working on the Tyco account.

 

the stock market plunged today on news that the rate of increase of methamphetamine use in the workplace is dropping, a trend that is likely to have disastrous results on per-employee productivity, and to drag the economy into recession.