Filed Under Dale Cooper, Politics, Prose, Sarah Palin | 5 Comments
Sarah Palin has a memoir coming out in November. Its title: “Going Rogue: An American Life.”
This here agent doesn’t care for it. The going rogue part promises maverickyness and rogueability that Palin surely cannot provide, and what’s with the subtitle? Pretentiousness and non-descriptiveness don’t go together like peanut butter and chocolate, less good-looking Tina Fey. No they don’t.
I humbly submit that all of the following titles are far superior, and Palin should meet with her publishers forthwith to vote on which one of these they want to use. (My fee is just $5 mil. Call my agent.)
“Reading Vogue: Because I Know Fuck-All About Politics, But I’m Not Bad-Lookin’”
“Blowing Smoke: Up Many an American Ass”
“Going on CBS News: Stop Asking Me Questions! Brain Hurt!”
“Winking: Wink Grin Wink”
“Learning Geography: Can’t, Too Distracted by the Beauty of the Russian Coastline”
“Firing Dudes: Supercharges You Even More Than Shooting Wolves”
“Quitting: An American Fucking-Over of My Constituents”
Filed Under Comics, Entertainment, In the News, Literature, Music, Poetry, Prose, Technology, The Arts, TheMCP | 8 Comments
Dear Kindle Owners:
You are suckers, and you’ve been conned. Sorry, but I’m only stating the obvious.
You voluntarily purchased a device whose software is a trade secret, that is tethered to a corporate overseer, and that lets you read books that can be erased at any time.
So Amazon apologized and said they wouldn’t do it again. Do you really think they won’t? Amazon has a long history of abusing the power the Kindle gives them. Check out this run down from the Free Software Foundation:
“The deletion of the Orwell ebooks was Amazon’s third blatant demonstration of the control its software provides over users. In June, Amazon remotely deleted copies of Ayn Rand books, and prior to that, they disabled Text-to-Speech functionality for select titles — a move which was a slap in the face to all users and particularly to the visually impaired community.”
Forget the very real possibility of deliberate tampering. What if the Kindle just doesn’t sell well and Amazon cancels the product, shutting down the servers that allow you to access their proprietary content? As I’ve pointed out on this blog — that has happened before. Think Amazon is too big to fail? The last company to pull this stunt was Microsoft!
Turns out, Amazon is lying to you all down the line. When you check out — the big yellow button says “Buy Now!” But, as should be evident to everyone, you aren’t actually buying anything. You are paying to be allowed access to the book for an undisclosed and unknowable amount of time.
If the button said “Rent Now,” Amazon wouldn’t be able to charge nearly what they charge for those books. Imagine if the button was accompanied by large text that said, “Amazon can’t guarantee that these books will always be available – they could be gone tomorrow, they could be gone in fifteen years.”
$10 sounds like a bargain if you are buying something. But a $10 rental for a product that might one day just disappear doesn’t sound like such a bargain. If Macmillan goes out of business, the books on your shelves don’t all become blank.
Amazon.com knows that, and they are suckering people. If $10 seems like a reasonable fee to pay for temporary access to a product – then by all means, use the service. But Amazon should be more open about disclosing that fact, so that their customers could make an informed decision.
In the meantime, I’m going to wait for the marketplace to do what it did to the music industry. DRM lost there, and I see no reason why it’ll win with books. It is a dead end, and a terrible idea. Amazon could be the iTunes of books — selling DRM free products in a way that provides a great user experience from purchase to the last page of the book. But if they aren’t willing to be the iTunes of books, I’m sure somebody else will figure it out.
Also
The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has posted some cute videos critiquing the Kindle on their blog. They were made by a San Fran bookstore, so obviously they are book-slanted.
I don’t think we should move away from ebooks — digital media really is the future. I just think consumers should know what they are paying for. It turns out that when you invest in proprietary software, you inevitably get screwed in one way or another.
The EFF is a hell of an organization, and they’ve been around since the early days of the internet. They are a great advocate for open standards and individual rights on the net.
Regrets,
TheMCP
Filed Under Big Ideas, Entertainment, Literature, Poetry, Porchy, Prose, The Arts | 2 Comments
Courtesy of Jacob Grier’s Liquidity Preference I see that Wired has put together a list of “18 Challenges to Contemporary Literature.” It’s a pretty good list and I encourage the leaders of Porch Dog’s literati squad to head over their to hear what they have to say. I, for my part, would like to take issue with just a few of items on the list that I don’t think are as challenging, or aren’t challenges specific to contemporary literature.
2. Vernacular means of everyday communication — cellphones, social networks, streaming video — are moving into areas where printed text cannot follow.
It’s hard to deny that radio was also an area where the the written word did not easily follow and yet writers flourished there. Many became TV and movie writers in their time. Even with the growing predominance of shows like So You Think You Can Dance, Daisy of Love, and other “unscripted” reality shows, there is still a need for writers there. Indeed, even if we had twice as many of those shows, we would still have shows like Arrested Development and 30 Rock and other scripted fair. That’s not to suggest that these new “vernaculars of everyday communication” aren’t posing a challenge. I just don’t think it’s a particularly difficult one. Come back to me when people stop talking altogether, because that will pose a significant challenge to writers that wish to show or describe talking. In any case, I don’t see the direct link between the invention of a new form of communication and the necessary death of literature which is still its own form and its own means and ends which are not made unnecessary by the invention of a new kind of phone.
4. Means of book promotion, distribution and retail destabilized.
This is true and is an interesting case. One side of me recognizes that there was a time when book promotion, distribution, and retail had not yet been stabilized and yet the novel rose up anyway. So I shy away from a knee jerk loathing of our current failing model. On the other hand taken in conjunction with some of these other challenges this one could prove formidable. However, for a problem like this I maintain faith in the capitalist system. If there is a dime to be made with books, someone will stick around to make that dime and find a way to turn it into a quarter.
8. Long tail balkanizes audiences, disrupts means of canon-building and fragments literary reputation.
Journalist Tom Slee, author of No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart has a nice post on how the long tail is neither the scary marketing problem that some people think it is nor the democratization of the monoculture that others (like the writers at Wired) tend to promote. Basically, as with all things, we tend to like those things that other people like. This will never stop being true. It’s the way we gauge value in a world of uncertain knoweldge and limited resources-including time. Certainly it has its effects on canonization but since there has never been a consensus on the canon or how to build it, I have my doubts that this is a significant challenge to people either reading or writing literature.
10. Contemporary literature not confronting issues of general urgency; dominant best-sellers are in former niche genres such as fantasies, romances and teen books.
This is essentially false on its face. There has always been pulp literature that didn’t confront issues of urgency and there is still magnificent literature written today that does. The problem is that the worst pulp schlock doesn’t get remembered and therefore leaves us with a false impression of a past filled only with prescient, artful authors and a present filled with nothing but Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy that sell a lot of copies but can barely string together a 13 words without falling on the crutch of various literary cliches. But Dave Eggers’ What is the What most definitely confronts issues of general urgency, so does The Kite Runner, Junot Diaz’ The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and a host of others that I can think of that were written just in the last year or two.
11. Barriers to publication entry have crashed, enabling huge torrent of subliterary and/or nonliterary textual expression.
And yet most people still read schlock pulp fiction that comes from the major publishers. The author of the list needs to come up with a comprehensive response to this paradox.
15. Scholars steeped within the disciplines becoming cross-linked jack-of-all-trades virtual intelligentsia.
I don’t see this as being a challenge so much as an advantage.
18. The Gothic fate of poor slain Poetry is the specter at this dwindling feast.
We have been preaching the death of Poetry since the 19th Century and yet poets continue to find fresh and exciting ways to make their art relevant to our lives. I doubt Twitter will kill it–unless the Twitter birds find a way to convince poets to not write poems about the Twitter birds.
Filed Under Cinema, Literature, Porchy, Prose | 1 Comment
A pompous title that promises that which I promise not to come close to fulfilling. Today’s entry was inspired by this post from Mark Liberman over at Language Log Plaza. I offer, as I frequently do, some caveats before the post-proper. I am not criticizing Liberman’s academic prowess. Nor am I pinning him to the results of his Breakfast Experiment™. If I use “Liberman” as my example of a linguist and if use “Elmore Leonard” as my example of an author it is because of the post linked above and because all my thoughts on the subject (today) start there.
One further caveat, I have not read any Elmore Leonard novel, not for any other reason than the one I tried to read I didn’t like and I haven’t had the time to give him another chance…but I will.
As a student of one of the social sciences1 I have been introduced and re-introduced to the argument between analyzing facts as they appear and studying statistics. It seems that practitioners of the one don’t much care for practitioners of the other. My reaction to Liberman’s post is the latest example of this debate.
Can we apply mathematical formula to explain the impressions that we get from characters in literary works? Quick back story for my lazier readers who won’t click the link I so graciously included in the opening:
Terrence Rafferty of the New York Times mentioned that Leonard’s characters tend to be of the traditional “strong, silent” type and that characters given to loquaciousnesses in the author’s works tend to be the “bad guys.” I certainly wouldn’t have questioned whether or not this was true (as I said, I haven’t read the books, but it does seem to be the case from the movies I’ve seen that are based on works or were written directly by Mr. Leonard.)
Liberman, as is his nature, was concerned that Rafferty was simply playing victim of his own culture, a culture that both wants men to be laconic and perceives them as such even when they are not. To begin this challenge, Liberman begins counting lines in PD James and Leonard novels.
For those who have read the LL post, I don’t need to recount the types of errors presented in the Breakfast Experiment™ and I probably shouldn’t because to do so seems to admit that I don’t understand the nature of the test…I do. It’s a breakfast experiment! Liberman even notes that his sample is too small to make a definitive assessment, and that is it’s primary flaw. Simply put, PD James, used as a baseline, may not be. Also Liberman only counted a few pages of text from the sample novels, which begins to approach the larger flaw but doesn’t get us quite there.
Liberman determines how much Leonard’s characters talk first by finding the ratio of lines of narration versus lines of dialog and comes up with a figure. However, he presents that figure as a percentage of total text, but lines of dialog do not resemble lines of narrations. For example,
1: Your name Jake?
2: Not exactly.
3. Anybody call you Jake?
4. Some people, sure. But not you.
Compare the four lines of text to the four lines in the previous paragraph. I think anybody would be hard pressed to say that the two characters in those four lines are anywhere near as talkative as me…or even half as much.
Now, to be fair, that might be the kind of thing that may work itself out somewhat as the sample size is increased. But increasing sample size is going to magnify a problem already present in the smaller one.
Novels are not real life and linguistic analysis of this sort is only going to be able to get us so far. Literature works on the basis of a kind of crystalization. A book does not describe every minor aspect of a character’s life, nor even some pretty major ones. It concentrates on those things that make the story work. We imagine that the people in novels are real(-ish) people but we don’t pretend to be reading every thought or action. An author may never once mention that a character goes to the bathroom, but we can assume he does. A character in a novel may never once check his mail upon returning home from work, but we can assume, that like us, he gets mail, and unless he is constantly facing the wrath of his postman, he probably gets it emptied somehow.
The same is true for talking. That is, we don’t assume that we are always hearing every utterance of our characters, just the important ones. Sometimes a character speaks so little that we may, in fact, be hearing every, or nearly every utterance. We may be able to fill a novel with this persons fragmentary sentences uttered hours apart. Liberman could have come up with a figure closer to 90% dialog and I still wouldn’t necessarily determine that those characters were blabbermouths. How many days went by (in the narration) between these long patches of dialog? How reluctant were the speakers? How verbose were they when prompted to speak? How often did they turn down an opportunity to speak? How often did they cut themselves short? How often did they interrupt the other speakers? Does the author tell us that the characters don’t talk much?
Liberman’s type of analysis, as cursory as it might have been, would allow him to assert there are no laconic character’s in plays (given they are 100% dialog).2
There is a strong element of impression that escapes the numbers. Leonard’s characters, at least as they are translated to film, are generally quiet. Chili Palmer comes mind. Harry Zimm, Martin Weir, and Bo Catlett (although Bo less so) chatter endlessly about their plans, Chili just smirks, nods, and smokes. Only with Karen Flores does he open up about why he’s doing anything. Does the fact that Chili opens himself up to anyone mean he disqualifies himself from being classified as “strong and silent?” I don’t think so.
For one thing those characters are all presented to us in a way that indicates what they are like when we are not seeing them. They lack the sort of confidence that would enable them to relax and trust their instincts. They have to chatter because in chattering they are validating their past and creating grandiose futures. Chili on the other hand is not compelled to create himself this way. He only opens up when he feels the other person deserves to hear what he has to say. To use a ridiculous turn of phrase, Chili only talks with Karen; he talks at everyone else. With the others there’s not sharing at all. But, and I haven’t done the numbers, Chili appears in every scene of the film. Compared to any one other character his numbers, although still low, will appear unnaturally high. That is the numbers may make it seem he talks more than he does, even if they don’t make him talk a lot.
Of course given all the time in the world we could compare Chili to each character individually eg. in a conversation with Martin Weir how many words does Martin say versus Chili?
If we did this to each and every Elmore Leonard character and we did it to all the other non-Leonard characters to develop a baseline we might be able to numerically determine that Leonard’s characters (and his good guys more than the bad ones) are atypically quiet. Of course we would also have to look at every context in which they seem to be delivering an abundance of words to see if such a situation is warranted under a “laconic” personality. We would also have to do other things like note whether the author said “the first words he spoke in an hour” or if that was implied somehow.
Math in the social studies is akin to modeling and is part of modeling. But models are not life; and, in extracting the “pertinent” details for scrutiny the statistician has to forcibly ignore the details that cannot be quantified. If enough people reading Leonard novels come away with the impression that his characters are a little tight-lipped I think it is probably best for the mathematicians to take them at their word. And if that isn’t quite good enough then if the math keeps returning results that deny what we all know to be true, rather than assault the masses, we might have to ask if the mathematician didn’t consider enough variables to be pertinent.
1. Political science now, although I’ve done some time studying linguistic principles as they apply to both English (introduction to… and sociolinguistics) and Spanish (introduction to… and phonology/phonetics).
2. I am aware that ML is smart enough not to apply the narration vs dialog test to plays. But that is the only method he uses in determining loquacity so I can’t critique anything else.
Filed Under Familiar Essay, In the News, Literature, Porchy, Prose, The Arts | 3 Comments
This year, as many no doubt know already, is the 50th anniversary of On the Road the seminal great, American novel (apologies to The Great Gatsby which is the great American novel, which is something altogether different–note the comma usage.) I for one will not be re-reading the novel as so many others will be inspired to do. Nor will I seek out any events that honor the book. Not for any particular hatred, disgust, or disrespect for the famed author or his quasi-autobiographical rant across the the country and Mexico.
I quite loved the book. But college killed it for me.
While still in high school a very close friend recommended I read the book, thinking correctly that I would love Kerouac’s free prose stylings and his flirtations with exotic religions, not to mention drug use, graduate school women with loose morals, and car trips. He was right. Very right. There were elements in the book, scenes, sentence selections, word choice, subject matter, that still, when I think about them, make me cry with loss for things I never had or haven’t lost yet. I can’t be the only one that thinks that Kerouac must have been thinking he was writing a eulogy while he typed On the Road. His sadness and loss bind every word.
I fell in love with Kerouac after that and read everything except Desolation Angels for fear it might contain more sadness than I could bear. Desolation, after all, is the theme that hangs over every book and pome. When I met Gary Snyder I didn’t care two licks for his poetry (I can only muster up enough for one lick even today) so I had him sign a copy of The Dharma Bums. Mr. Snyder recognized my lack of interest in him and instead of giving me his autograph, signed the book “Japhy Rider,” the name, of course, of the character in the book based on him.
But I majored in English, which means a lot of talking to people about their influences. It means going to a lot of poetry readings and taking poetry classes. It means hearing a lot of people saying how much they love Jack Kerouac. It means hearing a lot of people read their poems as if they were Jack Kerouac. And then it dawns on you: you can dislike John Updike and Truman Capote for their snide elitism, their hatred of Kerouac and what he stood for. You can defend Kerouac’s artistic egalitarianism, his love of the spontaneous subconscious, his refusal to edit his work. You can understand that Kerouac was right to give the world permission to write their life without fear of critics, internal or external. You can recognize that those, like Capote, that criticized Kerouac’s style, were exactly the people that Kerouac was slapping in the face with his loose and freeform prose. But you also have to recognize that on a fundamental level, they were right.
When Kerouac gave the masses license to tell their tale, he filled the bookshelves of the world’s libraries with absolute dreck. Not his own. Despite all his claims to not editing, despite all his claims of writing as he talked, Kerouac, unlike the vast majority of his acolytes, was an artist. He filled pages with some of the most gorgeous, elegiac prose. In it there are vestiges of Thomas Wolfe, James Joyce, Proust, and others. Kerouac, unlike those that emulate his fast-paced style, was a true reader and it shined from his pages.
Kerouac made writing easy because he demanded no artistry, even though he exercised it. Readers of Kerouac, people that tell you they love Kerouac, invariably read Bukowski too, another poet of whom I have a similar complaint (more on him later). Kerouac was truly a blessing and a curse. I suppose if Kerouac had never gotten famous and preached his democratic prose on the Steve Allen Show, then people would still be writing poorly constructed tales of road trips and drinking wine on railroad tracks, but at least they would have the decency to keep them private and stop boring me with them.
And so for all my lingering love of Kerouac and the literary ideals he preached and practiced, I find I can no longer be a fan of Kerouac. I simply have to make do with the undying respect that enables me to still be a reader of his without the hero worship that so often seems to go along with it. Which means not re-reading it because a year divisible by ten has passed, and it means no pilgrimages to Lowell, Massachusetts to celebrate just this one out of so many great novels.
