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Where, When, How Much, What Flavor.
1. Only 2/3 of my costume has arrived by mail. As of tonight, I'm Dr. Gregory House without a cane.
2. I was so sick this weekend that I missed my friend Mace's party.
3. 2006 has not been the best year and I'm really just waiting for it to come to and end so I can start over.
Attended SF Tech Sessions last night and me oh my there are a lot of companies getting going in the Bay Area. Social Bookmarking was the theme of the evening and short rundown of attendees included...
Featured Presenters
Wists: Called "social shopping", lets you create sharable pages of
images from across different retail sites.
Kaboodle: Community shopping site which lets you create "collections" of products and share them with others.
Ma.gnolia: Think friendster with bookmarks.
Interesting Folks in Attendence:
SlideShare: "The Youtube of Powerpoint" hosts and lets you share presentations.
ZapTix: An online box office for small venues. Down with Ticketmaster!
Wifi Earthcode: A community driven directory of wireless cafes.
Lotta hot action going down. Might have to come back next month.
I have achieved a level of fame I am rather proud of. I am friends with people who some other people might recognize. And that suits me fine. Because I don't get strange emails from wannabe geek-boys (a few booky girls but I digress) and can still get into some neat places and get few trinkets thrown my way.
It's a good life.
I was thinking about this yesterday when my Sunday New York Times arrived which not only an essay from my friend Wendy McClure but a piece by Steven Johnson. Miss McClure and I became friends last year when both on book tour (hers beat mine into bloody submission and then pulled its pants down in front of the entire school). Mr. Johnson I've never met but would commit several acts unholy, up to and including window watching, if we could hang out just once.
The reason I bring up Mr. Johnson is I am friends (jeez, I sound like Perez Hilton) with his editor Sean McDonald, who was kind enough to send me a copy of The Ghost Map, SJ's new book which I've been eager to read.
It needs no more press here (see for yourself) so let me just say thank you to Sean for sending it my way, that I will be reading it soon, hello to Wendy and we should hang out, girl, Mr. Johnson, say the word and my bucket and squeegee will be right there and this level of fame is just fine. For now.
A annotated list of all 111 of Homer Simpson's jobs (via Kottke).
The last post put me in a foul mood.
"In my many years I have come to a conclusion that one useless man is a shame, two is a law firm, and three or more is a congress." --John Adams
(via The Writer's Almanac)
The run-up to next Tuesday's election is getting weirder by the day. First I found this NY Times story which has corporate America pouring donations into to the coffers of Democratic candidates in a classic case of trying to befriend the winning team before the opening pitch. At the same time, the Washington Post reports (via Davenetics) that Republicans are leaning on the last remaining crutches of the desperate. "It'll be worse with the other guys!"
I fail to see how it could.
Meanwhile, from Bob Garfield's blog at Advertising Age, the ads the Republican National Committee are running against Tennessee Senate candidate Harold Ford, who (no points here), is black.
That may be the slimiest thing I've ever seen. And I've been to a sploshing party.
The incomprobable A.M Homes had this great piece in the Financial Times about the incomprobable Chateau Marmont Hotel high above Sunset Blvd. in Los Angeles...
Built in 1929 as LA’s first earthquake-proof apartments – modelled after Chateau Amboise in France’s Loire Valley, this “residence” hotel has quite a history – everybody who is anybody has stayed here. Infamous for being the spot where John Belushi died of a drug overdose and where long before that Harry Cohn, founder of Columbia Pictures, uttered the infamous and accurate phrase: “If you must get into trouble, do it at the Chateau Marmont.” And they did, all of them: Howard Hughes lived in the penthouse, Elizabeth Taylor brought Montgomery Clift here after his car accident, James Dean hopped in through a window to audition for Rebel Without a Cause. More recently, the Red Hot Chili Peppers recorded most of an album while in residence.
The hotel is a well-known hideaway for both those who live here and those who come in from around the world, and with all that comes an oxymoron – privacy and exposure in equal doses. The rooms and public spaces are a safe haven for people who are perpetually over-exposed, the building’s architecture and decor like a heavy drape to cloak oneself. The hotel is a little bit of paradise, a perfect stage set for the fantasy narrative we tell ourselves about who we are and what we are doing in this place.
On the city itself...
Los Angeles is like a mistress who cannot be fully possessed – beautiful, elusive, ever changing; the most thrilling of seductions. Languid, laconic, especially in summer, the humid haze lulls me into a stupor of attraction and desire. It can be experienced in a seemingly inexhaustible number of ways – think of the noirish world of James Ellroy, the decadence of Bret Easton Ellis, the urbane insight of Mike Davis and Joan Didion. It is a city of many cities, vast in its sprawl with great depth of cultures and fast becoming an international destination for art, music, architecture.
(via LA Observed)
You'd expect them to have more swagger than this. But the nice boys who play guitar in the band seem as amazed by their success as the rest of us.
Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Maxine Hong Kingston and Zadie Smith. All born on this day (via The Writer's Almanac)
Sometimes I'm amazed people still read this thing looking for book recommendations because lately I've sucked at posted about what I've read. Like really sucked up the joint.
Here's the catchup, all in one place...
Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
A lovely sad, poetic character study. Makes you want to cry and sigh deeply. Then call your best friends because life is too short not to.
Instant Love by Jamie Attenberg
Quick read, debut novel. Seems like chick lit at first sight but is really quite sad and tragic by the end. More about how expectations and fantasy can blind us to our own happiness.
Post-Soul Nation by Nelson George
1980s, black culture, the topic's like friggin catnip to me. I also liked George's use of a calander as an organizing principle. Not as intellectually rigorous as hist seminal "Hip Hop America" and but if you look past the bluster and bragadoccio, there's a solid document of a decade there.
"Talking Right" by Geoffrey Nunberg
Perhaps the densest book I've read this year. Nunberg has done maybe 15 years worth of research for this barely 250 pages volume and dragged in a bibliography that would humble Harold Bloom. It's great stuff that bears multiple rereadings, especially since Nunberg tries to outfancy his subjects at times, much to books detriment. Overall, though, it's a juicy, thoughtful look at where the Democrats stumble on framing political debate, where Republicans succeed and how that imbalance can be corrected.
All caught up now....
Do you know Miss Snark? Because if you have any interest in publishing a book some bright day in the future, you should. Miss Snark is the Howard Cosell of literary agents. She's both in the business of telling it like it is and being scremingly funny and yet erudite while doing it. I've never seen photos but I'm guessing she's kinda sexy too.
I never wanted to get with Howard Cosell (don't do cigars) but Miss Snark? Perhaps if we met in a darkened book during BEA and she had a thing for geen-eyed yids with Irish first names?
Yes, lets make that happen.
So when you see an article titled "iPod: I love you, you're perfect, now change", is your first instinct to self-induce an epileptic seizure? Because mine is.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the twitching wildly on the floor. I read this piece (by the often perceptive Farhad Manjoo) and was quite impressed. Posing as a review (really a sideways poking at but who's counting?) of Steven Levy's new book "The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture and Coolness" Farhad wings in one layered observations after another, pointing out his own biases yet maintain a rigid curiousity.
Witness:
So you come to Levy's book with justified fear that this is going to be a valentine, one whose depth of feeling threatens to turn embarrassing. There's not only the hagiographic title but also the book cover, which mimics the look of the iPod, and the flow of the text itself: In order to "spiritually link my book to its subject," Levy has written a collection of free-standing pieces, allowing every copy to have a different -- that is, "Shuffled" -- arrangement. By the time you learn this, you're quite prepared for Levy to divulge that he's also named his kids Mini and Nano, so far does his iPod lust seem to go. You want to tell him to take his Shuffle and get a room.
And on himself...
Neither of these problems frustrate the iPod-loving hordes very much, and Levy doesn't address them in his book. I suspect a more widespread issue, though, has to do with the way the iPod seems to work against listening to new music, which has become my chief complaint about the machine. Like many others in the so-called iPod generation, years of surfing the Web have reduced my attention span to not much more time than the length of a typical YouTube clip; consequently, my iPod, stocked with 4,124 songs, routinely turns me into a hyperactive freak show. If you have an iPod, I'm sure you know what I mean. You put on something that you've been wanting to listen to all day. Lucinda Williams' "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" album, say. But you're three-quarters of the way through the first track, and even though you're really digging it, something about the scratchiness of Williams' voice reminds of something else entirely -- the Carter Family. And, hey, don't you have a copy of "Wildwood Flower" on here? Why, yes, you do. So you switch. But of course, putting on the Carter Family is going to remind you of Johnny Cash. And you have the feeling that you must, just this minute, play Cash's version of "In My Life" now. So you switch again. But you're a minute into Johnny and you start to wonder about the Beatles' original version of the track...
This is a great piece about a subject I could never hear about again and be delighted. Well done, Mr. Manjoo. Now please, use whatever influence you have to get Mr. Jobs on iPod: The Next Generation.
This is one of the most clever bits I've ever seen. How many of these album covers do you remember? (via Waxy.org)
And speaking of self-immolation, how about reading all of the Enron email between 1999-2002? (via Sam Felder).
It's such a crime that Drive in Theater.com, "Dedicated to the keeping the American drive-in alive" is possibly the ugliest website in creation.
This from my friend Min Jung....
My personal relationships are not for public consumption or broadcast. There’s no PR in my romances. I find it horrifically offensive when people put broadcast spin of a web 2.0 nature on their personal relationships. That, I find really gross.
For instance, I received a sms msg via Dodgeball from someone I know stating “@ a very romantic place! having a brilliant conversation with my amazing boyfriend” To which I thought the following:
a) But not saying where you’re at, you kinda defeat the purpose of using dodgeball for its intended purpose
b) if the conversation is so brilliant, why are you dodgeballing in hoping someone will track you down to join you?
c) how amazing is it that this social utility, dodgeball, has been tweaked for such anti-social behavior
d) ok. you guys are squishy. we get it. now can we move on with our lives because the rest of the world really really isn’t that interested in your love life. i mean, it’s not like you’re tom cruise and katy holmes. and even them - i don’t really care much about. Not even in that (and don’t draw parallels here) train-wreck kinda way.
Yes, yes, yes and one second, yes. I do not use new media to broadcast who I'm dating or involved with because
A) It's no one's business.
B) I have a little dignity and thinking that the world needs to know everything I'm up to says more about my insecurity than it does about The Power of Technology or anything mythic and imaginary like that.
C) I still believe I exist even if no one flickrs/tags/dodgeballs/blogs/podcasts my wheelings and dealings.
D) If I don't or if you don't, I'm yanking the plug on (y)our hyperconnected lives right now and forcing you/us to communicate through a tin can telephone.
Twitterpated: adj. Confused by affection or infatuation.
First used in the movie Bambi. Suggested by my friend Jenny.
I have a yucky flu that makes me want to crawl under a boulder and die. But not writing makes me feel limbless. So I'll do what I can...
"The world is won by those who let it go! But when you try and try, The world is then beyond winning." -Lao Tzu
While at the Idea Festival last week, I met Ashley Cecil who is doing a neat thing she calls "painting journalism" which she characterizes as such...
Welcome to the marriage of painting and social activism. I’ve been creating art ever since discovering that my mom’s Chanel lipstick made a great oil pastel. Through formal art education and years of professional experience, the adult version of this vocation has evolved into my own job title, “painting journalist.” I’m addressing philanthropic issues utilizing painting as my medium of communication. Much like a photojournalist, I travel to locations/events of cultural interest and capture them, only with my brush.
She then sells her paintings and donates a portion of the proceeds to non-profit and progressive causes.
The left needs more creative approaches to media activism like this one. I agree with linguist Geoffrey Nunberg who argues in his new book Talking Right that the "perpetually aggrieved style of Pacifica Radio" not only turns potential activists off but it makes every issue seem like a hopeless David v. Goliath struggle. My hat is off to Ms. Cecil for lending her creativity to a movement that often lacks it.
Does anybody get what KCRW is trying to accomplish with its new website design? I actually find it harder to find program notes than before.
Oh and my local public radio station 91.7 KALW has a new website. In the words of Station Manager Matt Martin, it's a giant leap forward from the previous design. I agree.
A couple of weeks ago, Sound Opinions did a fantastic show honoring the 30th anniversary of Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life album. I bought this record years ago and hadn't listened much to it but this dense, smart hour of radio made me want to dive right back in.
If you haven't been listening to The Treatment, in September, they did a 4 part series on men's fashion that made me want to wear a suit. In the daytime. Guests included photographer Timothy Greenfield-Saunders and designers Thom Browne, Scott Sternberg and Oswald Boateng.
Last week I was elated that This American Life had begun offering podcasts of new shows. Now I find out that Marketplace, which I never remember to tune in to has started podcasting 5 days a week.
I think this is the dam starting to give way. Fresh Air, you're next. Hurry up.
The SF Chronicle reports that Josh Wolf is on his way to being the longest jailed journalist in US History.
I've given my opinion on Josh's case and will continue to correspond with him. If you'd like to write to...
Joshua Wolf 98005-111
Federal Correctional Institution - Dublin
5701 8th St. Camp-Parks, Unit J2
Dublin, CA 94568
(via New Media Musings)
I love stuff like this list of where band names came from:
COUNTING CROWS - Comes from old English nursery rhyme which had to do with predicting the future from the numbers of birds seen. Originally the rhyme was about magpies, but as people came over to America, crows were used instead. From the song "A Murder of One" one of the versions of the rhyme goes "one for sorrow, two for joy, three for girls, four for boys, five for
silver, six for gold, seven for a secret never to be told..." Adam Duritz liked the rhyme...
Sure to impress at parties (via BoingBoing).
Has anybody tried putting Wikipedia on their iPod? How does it look (via Micropersusion)?
I'm sorry to have to be the one to record this but Fraggle Rock, one of the greats of 80s children's television is being developed for the big screen by, eh, Ahmet Zappa.
Third child of Frank Zappa, ex-husband of Selma Blair, author of children's book. Sure, I see it.
(via Fishbowl LA)
Steve Rubel asked some interesting questions not to long ago around the closing of Tower Records...
This gets me thinking, what's next? Drive-in movie theaters are gone. Will movie theaters be next? Somehow, I think not. People love the communal experience.
So what about bookstores? Ebooks and audiobooks are hardly mainstream today, but who knows about tomorrow.
My point here is not to play the prediction game. That's easy. Rather, it's to remind us that things are constantly changing. New technologies and habits replace old ones. Remain complacent with what you have in atoms and you might be disappointed when it moves to bits. In marketing and PR we need to always be mindful of this flow. That's because one day, everything will be bits.
I don't know if I agree with the "everything will be bits" part but this question's been on my mind a ton lately. I grew up in record shops, video stores and movie theatres. You know you've hit a certain age when your childhood feels like a dying era.
I've been writing about this a lot lately and I've largely concluded that being sentimental (or relying on others to be) is an unhelpful waste of energy. Indie businesses are not teddy bears, cute, heartwarming but fundamentally without consequence on our lives. They have to survive as businesses too. And indulging in hackneyed platitudes about the big meanies who run chain stores or assuming that community goodwill will rule the day, even if it should, is a fantasy none of us can afford.
So while it feels like working the funeral beat, I'm still both fascinated by how this will play out and reassured that genre bookstores are holding on and, according this this article, folks continue to open bookstores. Maybe it's a fools errand, I don't know. But from asking around at places like Readerville, this new generation of booksellers has studied the market, formed strong community alliances and are establishing online operations before they open their doors. So maybe there's hope after all.
If anyone has stories of suvival in the independent video store, movie theatre and record store spaces, send 'em this way. I'm researching another article as we speak.
When I travel, I love to catch up on magazine reading. But a pile of 9-15 magazines is both heavy and impractical since I can't shed then if I want to save articles. So I came up with this idea to cut out the articles I wanted to read using an Xacto knife, papercliping then together then sticking them in a manilla folder. Light, compact and easy to ditch when done reading. Worked like a charm.
Here's what I read.
I'm home after nearly a week away. Thank Christ. No more travel until Thanksgiving. Although this looks mighty tempting.
Memo to Houston Police: Are you freakin' kidding me?
Saw this on Boing Boing this morning...
Last Friday night, a small music venue here in Houston (Walter's) was in the middle of a show when a cop walked in on a noise disturbance call (not unusual for Walters), and instead of talking with the management to turn down the music or shut down the show, walked straight up to the stage to tell the band to shut down. The band had no idea what was going on and asked why, at which time the cop tried to grab one of the musicians' guitar, and then slammed the musician to the ground... of course from that point on melee ensued, with at least three people being tasered by this cop, and several people being arrested. One of the kids tasered was a 14 year old kid who was there with his parents! One account states that the boy's father was also tasered.
The band, according to SFist, was Two Gallants, a San Francisco duo I'm fond of (I extolled their song "Waves of Grain" on Episode #6 of my podcast)
This is insane. Look at the tape and judge for yourself but at the very least, the city of Houston should be looking into this, the police department should discipline this over and police procedures regarding recruiting and proper procedure in a high density situation like a concert should be reevaluated. It's a wonder this didn't start a riot.
We pay police departments to protect us from harm, not to make it worse before it happens. This is not public safety. This officer is a power-hungry thug who deserves to be sanctioned and then dismissed immediately.
Update: Two Gallants reports they've had lawyer up. They also break it down over at Rolling Stone and in an interview with SFist.
This NY Times examination of why Friendster is now a Silicon Valley cautionary tale has been jumping around the web lately. It paints Friendster as a classic tale of Valley hubris gone wrong--A headstrong CEO, investors drunk on hype, product flaws papered over and a blurry eye towards competitors. But it misses one crucial point in a haze of euphemism describing Friendster founder Jonathan Abrams.
“Jonathan is very much an acquired taste,” said Larissa Le, a former Friendster employee and longtime friend of Mr. Abrams. “He’s your typical engineer from the Valley who can come off as very arrogant.” For a time Mr. Abrams, then in his early 30’s, cut a high profile in the Valley, showing up regularly at parties with a strikingly attractive woman on each arm and his head in the stars.
An "acquired taste?" Let's get one thing straight. I ran into Jonathan Abrams several times at different events and never found him to be an "acquired taste"." I found him arrogant, standoffish and rude. That may be fine if your that attitude commits you to running a strong business or at the very least gets your company some buzz. It does not work if your company is called Friendster and the founder, the company's public face is no one you'd want to be friends with
The Departed (2006): "Death is the only place we are free from sin and maybe, not even then."
Notes: Seen at Showcase Cinemas, my old high school haunt here in Ann Arbor. Film was Scorcese's biggest opening weekend of his career and is still doing great at the box office which makes me happy too.
I've been waiting for about 85 years for Songbird, hailed as the greatest thing in media players since iTunes, to have a Mac version. Well they do now. So I went ahead and download it.
I give it a B-.
The thing looks great. It's got a lot of neat features like being able to search mp3 blogs and listen to their music files right in the player. You can also tag songs to create snazzier playlists. But it misses the point in one very big way.
I am not looking for another application to fondle. Music listening is, for the most part, a passive experience, turn on, hit play, go. I do not want to hoover over my music player (which is the problem I had with MyStrands, although that may have changed), tagging and moving songs nor use it as a second rss reader to find new music. I've got Pandora and Last.fm. I've got Google Reader. I gave at the office.
To convince me to abandon iTunes, I would need to be able to use Song Bird with my iPod (no dice) and some album art would be nice (this one I don't get. How hard is it to sync the thing up with Amazon or Gracenote and pull down some album art). I wouldn't be surprised if they've got this in the works because they seem like smart folk. But right now, Songbird is a music geek product and I'm only a music geek a few minutes a day. I'm just an ordinary music fan the rest.
Yes, I would love to get crap delivered to my house at all hours of the night ala Pink Dot in LA and the long-departed Kozmo. But LicketyShip is not the answer, with its $19.95 delivery charge and limited hours. I don't know what the answer is, short of teleportation, but I hope they have bigger plans than this. 'Course it's in Alpha, so we'll see.
(via Willo).
So I'm camped out in my old hometown of Ann Arbor, Michigan, decmpressing after attending the wildly successful Idea Festival. The amount of collective brain power in there actually make me feel very smart and horribly stupid at the same time.
Got to see my old friends JD Lasica and Elizabeth Spiers. Paled around with Will and Mangesh, founders of Mental Floss magazine whom I've known virtually for nearly 2 years but never met. Befriended the new Mental Floss editor Mary Charmicael whose charming as all heck and knows a bunch of science stuff I could stand to learn. And had coffee with Dr. Leonard Schlain who is one of those genius people doubly blessed to be from SE Michigan but currently residing in San Francisco. I hope to be like him when I grow up.
From my wrap-up at the Huffington Post, I had this to say about what I learned...
...I've learned from world-renowned primate biologist Robert Sapolsky that chimpanzees commit genocide on rival troupes and that chess masters can burn 6000 calories a day from mental taxation during tournaments. I've heard http://www.loe.org/about/steve.htm">Steve Curwood, host of NPR's "Living on Earth" propose a government-sponsored corporation ala Fannie Mae to guarantee loans for the building of home solar and wind systems. I've heard inventor Ray Kurzweil inform us that we are only a decade and a half away from computers having the processing power of the human brain, witnessed DJ Spooky remixing "Birth of a Nation" live and science writer K.C. Cole explain quantum mechanics in 10 minutes better than my college professors did in 4 months. Along the way, I also missed a presentation on Zora Neal Hurston, another on the mind of Leonardo Da Vinci, and a third on the special effects wizardry of The Matrix. I'm disappointed on the one hand: When will be able to hit on those three topics in a single afternoon again? On the other I'm relieved, because the psychic contradiction they raise may have made my head explode: At the Idea Festival, you feel smart and stupid at the exact same time.
Big thanks to Kris Kimel and his staff for making it all happen. If you'll have me, I'll be back next year.
Additional information from...
*The Idea Festival Blog
We now return to regularly scheduled blogging.
I want to tell you all about the Idea Festival (which was a blast) and about a thousand other things but I just arrived in Ann Arbor for my 3 days of R&R and couldn't be happier. More tomorrow...
This American Life is now offering podcasts of their latest show.
This is what they say in their intro...
"This is Ira Glass of This American Life and you have successfully subscribed to our brand new podcast. Welcome. We welcome you with open arms. We have been waiting for this moment. And perhaps you have as well. The first podcast will be coming to you on Monday."
Hallifrickinlulljah.
15 ways to energize your newspaper. It's from a reporter at the LA Times. My favorites include...
#2. Fire any reporter or editor who refuses to learn how to use the Web to its greatest advantage, or to experiment with what works on Web vs. what works in print.
#4 Celebrate the idea that news is many things -- investigative, features, trends, results. Key daily news meeting question: "Does the public NEED us today?"
#11. Announce that for home delivery customers, the paper will once again be found inside their screen door, not in the puddle in the driveway. Every home, every day.
#14. New newsroom rule: Answer phone calls. Respond to e-mails. On weekends and vacations, talk to real people.
(via Kottke.org)
I'm at the Idea Festival this week, a scarcely 7 year old conference that's already bringing in talent like Sir George Martin, Robert Sapolsky, Twyla Tharp and Ray Kurzweil. I got in on the lesser known speakers outreach program. Despite both its youth and calibur of its programming, the Idea Festival remains both affordable to attendees and old school in style: The "bunch of smart people in a room, mix and stir" formula was perfected nearly 60 years ago by the Conference on World Affairs in Boulder, Colorado, clearly an ancestor of the Idea Festival.
I'll be speaking on Saturday on a panel about new media with my friends JD Lasica and Rob May, journalist Debra Galant and Plus, I'm in Louisville, Kentucky, where I've never been before.
Take a gander at the speakers and the schedule then book your tickets for next year.
Litquake, San Francisco's biggest badest literary festival is going on this whole week. The complete schedule will have you staggering. And don't forget the Lit Crawl this Saturday, 31 events, 150 up and down Valencia St. Not to be missed.
To get yourself in the mood, give a read of Lawrence Ferlinghetti's poem in honor of Litquake.
I'm not sure I buy the Washington Post's fawning praise of The Paris Review since journalist Philip Gourevitch took over the editorship of the world's most famous literary magazine in March of last year. Gourevitch is quoted as saying "My mission was to revitalize the magazine, to give it new life for a new generation," as well has "We want to be fresh. We want to be surprising." I'll buy the first. The second is a stretch.
The first: The Paris Review has redesigned itself as a leaner, more colorful publication with larger type and great space devoted to visual images. Good move. McSweeney's, graphic novels and the general hyper-sightedness of our world has shown us that literature can be much more than words on paper. I would have gone so far as to feature illustrators too instead of just photographers as well.
Also, portions of each issue as well as the complete archive of the famed Paris Review interviews (in excerpt form at least) is available online. TPR makes enough pieces available from the current issue so that their website doesn't seem like an exercise in digital tokenism. The interview archive sadly is little more than a well cataloged tease. One or two questions are available from each followed by a plea to purchase the issue or an announcement of when the interview will be available in book form. A few, (like Nelson Algren's) are available in full PDF download but which ones are anyone's guess.
This is bad presentation in several respects. One, the issue list price is still $12, an outrageous sum if what you're after is one interview. Second, The Paris Review seems to have received some money from the National Endowment for the Arts to make this archive possible. Perhaps the transferring of more compelte interviews is in progress, perhaps the money only covers some of the catalog. I have no idea. But would it kill the magazine to explain the situation in a few sentences somewhere on its website instead of presenting this tremendous gift to readers the world over half-finished while calling it the "DNA of Literature?" Taking that metaphor, they've currently offered up enough DNA to produce a carpenter ant. Way too much of the code is missing.
This "new generation" Gourevitch courts wants their information quickly, mutably and generally for free. A literary magazine is not an oil well so free might not be feasible. Fine. How about $3 an interview, payable through Pay Pal? How about supporting the interview section with a few tasteful google ads? How about an interview membership for those who want to read the interviews--MFA students, devoted fans, scholars--but don't need full issues. This is not the riddle of the sphinx. Gourevitch & Co. could pay an NYU graduate student to set up any of these features over a long weekend.
Finally, The Paris Review's newest feature "Encounter", a short Q&A with "an interesting, obscure" person not only leaves me cold but smacks of condescension. Look a non-literary person! Someone you'd never run into at Elaine's! Someone who's too real to be in fiction. And we found them, yay us and our love for the common man!
Maybe the idea is a kind of human eco-tourism, which fits in the age of reality television and Lonelygirl15. But it is neither fresh nor surprising. It's at best warmed-over Joseph Mitchell without the humanity. And with the considerable brain power contained within the walls of 62 White St., they could have done better.
Bottom line: The Paris Review will still publish the world's finest writers of fiction and poetry. It has the cultural cache to do much more without compromising what has made the publication great. But it is still thinking like a traditional literary magazine and it may be the very last literary magazine in an age of unbound content with the freedom to do so. At the head of dwindling pack, The Paris Review should be leading the way into the future, instead of nodding at it while seated comfortably in the past (via Arts Journal).
To the authors of this fine book...
Please please please release a version for California. Or Michigan, or New York or Texas or any state I visit more than once every 15 years. I will by copies for everyone I know (via Cinema Treasures).
Andrew Wylie, one of the world's most prestigous literary agents (Philip Roth, Martin Amis and the late I.F. Stone are clients) gave a rare interview to the French newspaper Le Monde. Since we here dont' speak French, the link is to The Elegant Variation's helpful translation. Thank you to proprietor Mark Sarvas for his labors.
This was my favorite part...
Q: You had thirty authors when you began and, with your principles, it must have been difficult to make much money. Today you have the most prestigious client list – some say the most snobbish.
A: Undoubtedly the most snobbish!
I’ve lost some money over the years. I gave up 50% of my agency to the British. Then I bought back the shares. I opened my own office in London. Then an office in Madrid, which I closed after three years in order to concentrate on London, where I spend one week per month, and New York. I fight for the authors I love. I believe in the future of publishing. I believe that the fight, such as it is, between literature and commerce is going to continue. I understand how some editors can sometimes be pessimistic when 70 percent of the people in the business are trying to convince the world that The DaVinci Code is something interesting. Whereas it’s completely uninteresting.
I followed everything that took place in France concerning the sale of Vivendi Universal Publishing, which is a case in point, the concentration on playing the commercial card. But I’m not at all pessimistic, I’m actually utterly optimistic about literary publishing’s capacity to survive. And it’s not merely wishful thinking – that wouldn’t fit my reputation at all.
Brilliant article by Kevin Sampsell, one of the events managers at Powells Books in Portland, on how to not make an ass of yourself (authors and audiences) at bookstore events. My favorites...
Author:
Don't go on forever. This is one the most common mistakes of the author and probably one of the reasons why more people don't go to literary events. Listening to someone read for longer than 15 minutes can be like watching C-SPAN. There are only a handful of folks who are capable of entertaining an audience for that long.
Sometimes it's best to get the Q&A going before folks start dozing. Be mindful of when the store is When it gets to the book signing part, don't gab to every fan for five minutes.
Audience:
Don't bring weird gifts. A few years back, a fan gave David Sedaris a hideous sculpture of a naked person. How he was going to take this on an airplane was probably not considered. After the reading, Mr. Sedaris kindly asked me to dispose of the statue and some of the other "gifts" he had received, including home-baked foods (suspicious), vanity press books (sad) and a T-shirt (I've noticed that people who give authors T-shirts are usually affiliated with some kooky political group).
When we hosted Jane Fonda last year, one man gave her snapshots of himself standing next to her, posed with a shy but excited grin. (In the photo, Fonda doesn't seem to know he's there, she's looking off in a totally different direction). Those photos were left behind, along with a postcard from someone who wrote, "I apologize for my offensive behavior. Please forgive me."
(via Readerville)
So Google has bought YouTube for $1.6 billon. Yes, billion. The founders had this to say about it..
Susan Mernit did a nice wrap up of the chatter.
(via Waxy.org)
Episode #9 of Talking Pictures has been posted for your listening pleasure. Finally.
"The empires of the future will be empires of the mind." --Winston Churchill (via Business Pundit)
