A la carte

pricing for short story collections? Sort of like mp3 files... Is this really what's in store for e-books? Not to mention rewriting to influence search engines.

“perhaps entire books written with search engines in mind.”

*shudder*

And, what happens when we can't tell what other people are reading on the subway, and what they have on their shelves? How can we prejudge them/influence their first impressions of us, if nobody can tell we have great lit on the Kindle?

Obviously, we need a Kindle that displays a slideshow of the titles contained within, and some way of telling that the person actually has the books, and not just the slideshow.

We don't serve your type.

Somehow, I don't think the torture memos (see previous post) were written in Comic Sans. But, apparently, everything else is and some people have a problem with that.

Literature of the Bush Administration

We love to torture.

The resemblance to Dick Cheney is scary.

Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter

What else is there to say? But somehow, Bill Clinton, vampire hunter, would work better for me. Maybe because it seemed the undead really came out after him.

"The day I let the media set my reading list

is the day I want someone to creep up on me with a big blunt instrument." Not to be outdone, here is A Reader's Revenge.

"I just know from my own experience how much harder it is to meet a novel-reader now than it was twenty or even ten years ago. So many intelligent people seem to have given up on novels because they trusted the media to pick out the best ones for them. And of course it's the quality of contemporary fiction that's driving them away. The stuff is just dull. How often are we told to interpret our boredom or irritation with a new novel as a surefire indication that it's challenging, and therefore good? DeLillo "has earned a right to bore us for our own good," as Salon puts it. You've got to hand it to postmodernism; no other literary movement in history ever spread so much boredom in the name of playfulness! But it's precisely the intelligent people who wander off to art forms they can enjoy, like the movies. What you have left are the puritans, the grinds, the cachet-hunters, because it's never occurred to them that the arts can be fun."

Strong opinions, but interesting to consider from the point of view that publishers are letting non-readers down. I know I have given up on anointed best-sellers because "the media" gave me a few bad recommendations. Bad and expensive.

But watching TV, ah, that's living

Publishers, retailers and librarians are missing out on a potential market of 20m consumers because the book world is too intimidating, according to research conducted by HarperCollins, the Trade Publishers Council and the National Year of Reading (NYR).

The research, to be published this week, looked at attitudes to books in the C2DE socio-economic group, characterised as lower income, non-professional families and estimated at 20m in size.

It found that in many such families, books were seen as alien and unattractive, while reading was considered an anti-social activity for people who, as one respondent said, "don’t know how to live."

...They are one step away from book-buying - they do consume lots of leisure products and may have 2-300 DVDs in the house.

I thought this article at The Bookseller was a good follow-up to A Reader's Manifesto, which I just dug up and reread. It explains why modern literature turns people off. It's just not any good, it seems.

Pincher Moscowitz

Did Woody Allen read The Two Deaths of Christopher [aka Pincher] Martin? Did Bernie Madoff? At the NY Times. What is the karmic difference between a lobster on a rock and a lobster in a restaurant tank? Read and learn.

Second Lifecraft

I meant to write this right after the Neal Stephenson post, since his novel Snow Crash explores the concept brilliantly, but then I got a puppy, and here I am, weeks later, finally writing about the Second Life phenomenon, or a phenomenon involving the Second Life phenomenon.

Research at Stanford University indicates that Second Life players with socially successful avatars are more confident, those with thin avatars will lose weight, and other astounding observations that make it seem as if Second Life, far from attracting escapists and social losers (as the geek reputation goes), is attracting people who are visualizing a new world... or, partaking in an effective kind of self-hypnosis. Maybe it depends on the person. Hey, if we keep war and pollution out of Second Life, can we keep our world clean and peaceful, too? Maybe we need a World of Peacecraft?

Second Life, at Time.

He was the baby in the barn...

Nicholas Hughes' suicide.

When I read of the death of Sylvia Plath's son, I thought of the poem, Nick and the Candlestick, which reads, in part:

o love, how did you get here?
o embryo...

You are the one solid
the spaces lean on, envious
You are the baby in the barn.

From Ariel. Sad.

Why I Love Neal Stephenson

This excerpt, about a house meeting:

Ike got up and announced he was moving out. He was tired of the plumbing problems, he said, and the weird messages on the answering machine, and Roscommon had come in while he was at work and torn down the Mel King campaign poster on our front balcony... Tess and Laurie, the lesbian carpenters, announced that they liked the kitchen better after we'd untrashed it and cleaned it up, so why not try to keep it that way? I pointed out that I had bought three new badminton birdies before I left for Buffalo and now they were all gone. Should we call this place a "co-op" or a "commune"? How about calling it a "house"? Who had scrubbed the Teflon off the big frying pan? Since Tess had weeded the garden, how many tomatoes did she get? Whose hair predominated in the shower drain-- the women's, since they had more, or the men's, since they were losing more? Was it okay to pour bacon grease down the drains if you ran hot water at the same time? Could bottles with metal rings on the necks be put in the recycling box? Should we buy a cord of firewood? Maple or pine? Did we agree that the people next door were abusing their children? Physically or just psychologically? Was boric acid roach powder a bioaccumulative toxin? Where was the bicycle-tire pump, and was it okay to take it on an overnight trip? Whose turn was it to scrub the green crap out from between the tiles in the bathroom?

I almost want to dye my hair pink and get a pair of Dr. Martens. It's page 157-158, chapter 20 of Zodiac.

Nonproductive Creativity vs. Productive Mediocrity

Perhaps Leonardo's greatest discovery was not the perfectibility of man but its opposite: He found that even the most profound thought combined with the most ferocious application cannot accomplish something absolutely true and beautiful. We cannot touch the face of God. But we can come close, and his work, imperfect as it may be, is one of the major demonstrations of heroic procrastination in Western history: the acceptance of our imperfection — and the refusal to accept anything less than striving for perfection anyway.

Leonardo is just one example of an individual whose meaning has been constructed, in part, to combat the vice of procrastination; namely, the natural desire to pursue what one finds most interesting and enjoyable rather than what one finds boring and repellent, simply because one's life must be at the service of some compelling interest — some established institutional practice — that is never clearly explained, lest it be challenged and rejected.

Interesting look at nonproductive genius, of which the author says there is much in academia, compared to forced production. At The Chronicle.

I know that we often feel the push to capitalize on our talents, to make money just to pay the bills, and people complain about the quality of the resulting product -- mediocre TV, sensational journalism, poorly written genre books, scandalous, attention-getting art. We mostly agree that money isn't the whole point. The point is to share genius, inspired energy, with others. One hopes to also make a living at it, but completing work is not just about money. Leonardo worked on commission, btw, and still didn't complete that much. It was his recognized genius that kept him afloat financially, to the chagrin of other artists who did complete work, Michelangelo, e.g. Genius alone doesn't pay as well as it may once have, so we don't have the option of postponing completion of work if we want to make a career of it. We have to make judgments -- when is something finished? When can it no longer be made better? When is it time to move on anyway? We show ourselves, our level of talent and genius, in what we choose to share, what we label "finished." Maybe Leonardo was never satisfied with his own genius, or maybe he didn't feel the urge to share. Today, creative people must resist the pressure to put half-realized work out there to try to make a buck. In my opinion. I might feel differently if my writing paid for an expensive lifestyle. It's easy to get attached to that.

Schwedenkrimi

I love this word. Although I have not read any of Stieg Larsson's crime books, set in Sweden. The closest I came was The Redbreast, a Norwegian crime novel by Jo Nesbo. I wonder if there is a word for that?

It takes an average of 475 hours to write a novel.

That is #8 on 25 Random Things About Reading.

12. Half of all books sold today are to people over the age of 45.

That kind of makes sense. It doesn't seem terribly lopsided.

15. Women buy 68% of all books sold.

We knew this, although it could be that women still do a disproportionate share of small-goods shopping. (Women probably buy 85% of all milk sold, e.g.)

13. Adults who read literature on a regular basis are more than two-and-a-half times as likely to do volunteer or charity work, and over one-and-a-half times as likely to participate in sporting activities.

Is it because doing good deeds, like literature, is good for us?

It's a fun list. Check it out at www.itzabitza.com.

Tweet Nothings

When the [Twitter] service was introduced in 2006, it was ridiculed as the latest narcissistic way to waste time online.

Last year, minds began to change. Twitterers tapped out tweets during the earthquake in China while the ground was still shaking and live during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India. One of the first pictures of the airliner downed in the Hudson River last month, picked up by major newspapers and magazines, was “tweeted” by a 23-year-old tourist with an iPhone who happened to be aboard a ferry sent to the rescue. Suddenly, Twitter has become a venue for “citizen journalism,” a way to learn what’s happening sometimes even before news organizations themselves could find out.

"Citizen journalism" certainly is appealing. At CSMonitor.com.