And the Good News Is...

Borders has agreed to buy books on a no-return basis. At Galleycat, via Moonrat.

Why Book Publishers Fail

Is there anyone who reads The Drudge Report instead of a good book? Does it make sense to blame the internet for publishing's decline, or is it instead the result of several years of bad decisions? The loss of 2,000 independent booksellers? Dohle's depredations at Random House? Cutting expenses by replacing senior employees with newbies? Or has publishing dumbed down, and "drifted into the paper-thin celebrity culture that defines just about every other domain, and which is rendering American culture as dull and monotonous as anything in Western history." Lawrence Osborne at Forbes.

I agree that publishing seems a bit dumbed down, but in the same article, Osborne says industry insiders blame agents, editorial failures, and lack of "franchise authors" to bolster overall sales. It sounds like you can't swing a cat without hitting someone who is to blame. Agents for trying to make fast money, instead of building authors' careers, editorial failures in the form of cuts in actual editing -- "resulting in longer, sloppier books that bore readers stupid" -- and Dan Brown for not writing an enticing sequel to the DaVinci Code.

A friend in publishing (laid off from Random House, incidentally) makes the point that the market for books is not readers, exactly, but those readers who buy books, and that we buy them for their content and quality -- remember when books were the authority on grammar and spelling? Now I don't remember the last time I got through a new book without noticing a dozen or more sometimes appalling errors. Not to mention the awful shapelessness of "longer, sloppier books" -- for $25 and up. Books used to give the reader the sense that something in the world made sense, or perhaps that sense could be made of the world. Am I naive in writing that? I used to feel, when reading a good book, that someone in the world knew what they were doing, how to think and express things, that the world might actually be in good hands. Okay, I'm naive, but it really was about world view. And now publishing is yelling about the sky falling. I'm not shelling out $25 for that, and neither is anybody else, apparently. Unless it's really well written...

Writers Need Food

I somehow missed this excellent NY Times article, in the form of a memo from Michael Pollan to the next U.S. President. He makes the excellent point that a major ingredient in the food we eat is oil, as in petroleum, whether in the form of transportation, chemical fertilizers and/or pesticides. The cost of food has skyrocketed along with the cost of energy, and the pollution from waste that was once recycled as fertilizer...well, you get the picture. We feed 40% of all our grain to animals to fatten them up in inhumane feedlots, and another 11% to cars and trucks as biofuel.

He makes very good suggestions, from polyculture farming to converting a piece of the White House lawn to a victory garden to having one meatless day a week at the White House. I'd also like to suggest vegetable/vegetarian cooking classes in schools -- it's time we stopped treating meat-based meals as the only acceptable standard. Our eating habits are killing us and our environment.

Michael Pollan is the author of The Omnivore's Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, and The Botany of Desire: A Plant's-Eye View of the World. Thanks to Food is Love for pointing me to this article.

Thanksgiving Thought

"We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. Remote from universal nature and living by complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys the creature through the glass of his knowledge and sees thereby a feather magnified and the whole image in distortion. We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate for having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein do we err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours, they move finished and complete, gifted with the extension of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings: they are other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth."
~ "The Outermost House" by Henry Beston

Henry Beston was a naturalist who lived from 1888-1968. He spent a year in the outermost house on Eastham Beach, Cape Cod, and wrote the book The Outermost House about that year. I love this quote. I first saw it hanging in the vet's office.

My Five Cents

Can I just say that the Starbucks $.05 promo -- that's right, five cents -- that's what they're donating to AIDS charities for each "hand-crafted" beverage (read: the more expensive ones) you buy within a limited time period -- can I just add that this does NOT impress me in the least? Hey, take plain brewed and send $2 to the charity instead, or, better, drink coffee at home and send $3. Or tell Starbuck's to bite the bullet and send more.

Jeez. Can they even spare a dime?

I guess this is kind of in the bookstore category for me because I only ever go to Starbuck's when I visit the local Barnes & Noble.

Just The Facts Ma'am

Moonrat explains the awful facts of publishing's crash in September and October of this year. Her blog is one of my favorites (sidebar - Editorial Ass). I'll give a hint: it was the big chain stores' strategy of sending books back to publishers to raise money for the holiday shopping season. Publishers have to buy their books back whenever the stores decide they've been on the shelves long enough and haven't sold.

In fact, the books in my previous blog entry which were gutted and made into purses were quite likely originally returns of that kind. The solution? Buy books this Christmas. If you buy a book purse for your favorite book lover, buy a book to go in it as well. Books for everyone!

The NY Times is cautiously optimistic on the same subject, pointing out that inexpensive entertainment like books doesn't suffer as much in bad economic times as pricey fun like vacations, new electronics, new cars, etc.

Make it so, readers!

Holiday Shopping for Writers

Thanks to Ju'nen for leading met to this fab collection of book purses. Even if it is a bit naughty to gut hardcovers and make them into fashion items. I had a moment of rejecting the idea, then came around thinking it's a fact that many hardcovers get remaindered, then sent to the trash. Why not make something fun out of them? It's recycling.

A Modest Proposal

While perusing this article at Reason.com arguing against consumption of local foods --

Local food production does not always produce fewer greenhouse gas emissions. For example, the 2005 DEFRA study found that British tomato growers emit 2.4 metric tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of tomatoes grown compared to 0.6 tons of carbon dioxide for each ton of Spanish tomatoes. The difference is British tomatoes are produced in heated greenhouses. Another study found that cold storage of British apples produced more carbon dioxide than shipping New Zealand apples by sea to London. In addition, U.K. dairy farmers use twice as much energy to produce a metric ton of milk solids than do New Zealand farmers. Other researchers have determined that Kenyan cut rose growers emit 6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per 12,000 roses compared to the 35 tons of carbon dioxide emitted by their Dutch competitors. Kenyan roses grow in sunny fields whereas Dutch roses grow in heated greenhouses.

-- I had a brilliant idea. Since the most efficient sources of food seem to be in Africa and certain southern hemisphere locations such as New Zealand, why not turn those areas entirely into farms for the nourishment and support of the rest of the world? It would cut down on carbon dioxide emissions, slow or eliminate global warming, and make lots more space available for condominium development closer to home.

What do you think?

With thanks to Jonathan Swift.

The Rejection Collection

of cartoons that failed to make it into the New Yorker.

This had me laughing out loud in Barnes & Noble. I particularly liked "Death Takes a Crap" and "You're lucky. I'm turning into my mother." (Husband turning into werewolf on couch next to blase, bathrobed wife fiddling with remote.)

What's for (Naked) Lunch?

If you didn't read the Independent's article about And the Hippos Were Boiled in their Tanks, the "new" crime novel based on a true story and jointly authored by Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs, you might not know that the murder victim was an old friend of Burroughs' -- and the murderer a respected editor at UPI who wished fervently for the book to be suppressed in his lifetime, and it was, although the story was well known to beat aficionados.

The real-life events behind the book occurred in the early hours of Monday morning, 16 August 1944. Carr and Kammerer were walking beside the Hudson in Riverside Park on New York's Upper West Side. Lucien Carr was 19, slight, blond and good-looking. [David] Kammerer was 33, 6ft tall, athletic, muscular. They'd met in St Louis in 1936, when Carr was 11, and later at George Washington University, when Carr joined nature hikes conducted by Kammerer, the PE instructor. Kammerer was gay and had for years been sexually obsessed with Carr.

Both men were drunk. They quarrelled and rolled on the grass. Kammerer made what the papers called "an indecent proposal," presumably backing it up with action. Carr responded with fury. He stabbed Kammerer twice in the chest with a little Boy Scout knife. Then he put some rocks in the bleeding man's pockets and rolled him into the Hudson.

For his action, Carr received a maximum 10-year sentence, of which he served two years. Kerouac narrowly missed being charged as an accessory.

More at the Guardian.

I saw this book at the local bookstore the other day. As the Guardian points out, it has an understated cover for such a lurid story.

How Rimbaud, Verlaine, Lennon, Eminem

and...Hefner? grew from rebels into lovable old chaps.

In 1873, in a hotel room in Brussels, the dastardly boy-poet Arthur Rimbaud was shot in the wrist, half-accidentally, by the outrageously hideous alcoholic man-poet Paul Verlaine. (Verlaine went to prison, whereupon Rimbaud shut himself in his mom’s attic, moaned his scandalized lover’s name, and single-handedly invented Surrealism.) The year before, halfway across the world in patrician Baltimore, an unusually large baby was born and christened Emily Price. She went on, as Emily Post, to publish Etiquette, the twentieth century’s most comprehensive encyclopedia of high-society tyranny (or, if you prefer, social betterment). As she was revising its second edition, a newborn version of Hugh Hefner managed to emerge from the presumably unphotographed loins of a conservative Methodist housewife in Chicago. In 1940, Hefner was just beginning high school, one of the golden periods of his life, when, during a brief lull between German air raids, John Lennon’s birth incrementally increased the wartime population of Liverpool. In 1972, as President Nixon worked up a case to deport the ex-Beatle from New York, Marshall “Eminem” Mathers was born into deeply unpromising circumstances in Missouri.

A slew of new biographies shows that all they needed was love (and attention), aww. I bet the money didn't hurt, either.

Life and Debt

Margaret Atwood argues that we have taken the human factor out of debt:

We are social creatures who must interact for mutual benefit, and — the negative version — who harbor grudges when we feel we’ve been treated unfairly. Without a sense of fairness and also a level of trust, without a system of reciprocal altruism and tit-for-tat — one good turn deserves another, and so does one bad turn — no one would ever lend anything, as there would be no expectation of being paid back. And people would lie, cheat and steal with abandon, as there would be no punishments for such behavior.

At the NY Times.

I like her optimistic view of what comes next, even though I don't share it. Her new book is Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth.

Middle-Aged Lolita

Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, published in America 50 years ago, has engendered the most embarrassed, looking-sideways-for-the-exit, highfalutin, and obscurantist talk of any book ever written — any. Only a handful of critics have been forthright, most famously, Lionel Trilling: "Lolita is about love. Perhaps I shall be better understood if I put the statement in this form: Lolita is not about sex, but about love."

Somehow, not all commentators and readers have lined up behind Trilling on this point, many finding themselves agreeing ...that the novel is clearly about pedophilia, rape, and the destruction of innocence by a vile, if fancy-talking, Humbert of a monster. The most prominent recent example is Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: "Ironically, [Humbert's] ability as a poet, his own fancy prose style, exposes him for what he is." And what he is is not a device or a literary character but a real and true criminal: "What bothers us most, of course, ... is not just the utter helplessness of Lolita but the fact that Humbert robs her of her childhood."

Even Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem for his trial, returned Lolita to a guard who had presented it to him, denouncing it as "very unwholesome."

Lolita, at The Chronicle.

Love or sex? I always thought Lolita was about obsession, which is not properly either. I can't see making the argument that Humbert loves her, after the way he treats her -- it would be a narcissistic approximation at best. Yet all desire doesn't lead to obsession (does it?), so it's not just sex.

Anyway, Happy Birthday.

Why I Love Email III

Retirement Plan Investment Tip:

If you had purchased $1000.00 of AIG stock one year ago, it would now be worth $56.91.

With Washington Mutual, you would have $120.36 left of the original $1000.

With 'Fannie Mae'(FNM), you would have $11.34 left.

If you had purchased $1000.00 of Lehman Bros one year ago it would now be almost worthless; less than $0.86.

If you had purchased RH Donelley, you would have $45.69 left.

But, if you purchased $1000.00 worth of beer one year ago, drank all the beer, then turned in the cans for the aluminum recycling refund you would have $214.00.

Based on the above, the best current investment advice is to drink heavily and recycle. This is called the 401-Keg Plan.

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*GROAN* I like this, though. At least someone isn't lamenting and popping Paxils. It's hard to get into a conversation that isn't about either the stock market, the election, the cost of the upcoming winter or what prescription drugs are making it all go away. The election is starting to look a little brighter, at least.