NUMBER 61

Craig Mod’s recent essay, Books in the age of the iPad—I recommended that you read the whole thing now before pushing on—raises some interesting points about the philosophical challenges and opportunities introduced by the iPad and its ilk.

I thoroughly enjoyed his insights. I’m on the edge of my seat, here, imagining how Mod’s concept of vertical chapters might be realized.

But I couldn’t help but be vexed by an offhanded remark he makes in his introduction:

As the publishing industry wobbles and Kindle sales jump, book romanticists cry themselves to sleep. But really, what are we shedding tears over?

We’re losing the throwaway paperback.
The airport paperback.
The beachside paperback.

We’re losing the dredge of the publishing world: disposable books. The book printed without consideration of form or sustainability or longevity. The book produced to be consumed once and then tossed. The book you bin when you’re moving and you need to clean out the closet.

These are the first books to go. And I say it again, good riddance.

Anyone who buys books will probably understand what he’s talking about. Even while running your eyes over the shelves at a bookstore, it’s not impossible to fantasize about which books you’d proudly keep on your bookshelf when you’re finished and which ones you’d probably resell on Amazon¹—the fact that you haven’t actually read any of the books you’re judging notwithstanding.

Of course, physical dimensions are a helpful guide; he doesn’t explicitly write it, but the throwaway/airport/beach paperback is often a mass market paperback. In case you’re not familiar with the terminology, close your eyes and visualize a novel from any one of the genres—romance, science fiction, fantasy—that have always been relegated to the critical ghetto. Note the diminutive 4×7 cover, the thick binding, the cheap paper. It’s an unmistakable image.

Despite the fact that I’m just as priggishly dismissive of such books as the next guy,² I can’t help but disagree with Mod’s assertion that they are expendable.

As is the case with TV, it’s the tremendous profits from the popular stuff that subsidizes the high-investment/low-return niche stuff. To lose mass market paperbacks—worthless or not—is to lose a large chunk of revenue. Which translates into a loss for all professional publishers and writers and a grievous blow for the ones with limited commercial appeal.

Though Mod’s publishing credentials are infinitely more impressive than my own (as in, he has actually published books), I worry that he’s mistaking ‘foundation’ for ‘dead weight’.

With large publishers scrambling to rebuild the bottom line, would it really be a stretch to imagine that a printed version of Infinite Jest—the weird, sprawling, annotated, 1104-page masterpiece—would never see the light of day? Or that a person would need to barter a kidney to get his or her hands on one?

There’s simply no telling whether an ebook model would suit the mass market format. Though Apple and Amazon will have no trouble matching the basement-level pricing scheme, one cannot look past the fact that getting them into the casual consumer’s hands will first require getting a $250+ device into the casual consumer’s hands.

It seems to me that the path of least resistance (and thus the most likely next step) will be the opposite of what Mod suggests—to send the niche publications to the ereaders and continue to sell the mass-market stuff for as long as the demand holds out.

The shortcomings of such a reality are apparent. Compiling a worthy bookshelf is, to the devoted aesthete, one of the unmatchable joys of life. Physical books can be lent to friends and colleagues, or dog-eared, or forgotten in airplane seat-backs. Losing these small things will be a bitter pill to swallow.³

There’s no questioning that the iPad will do for boutique publishers roughly what the Internet did for graphic designers and software engineers. Which is to say, in a decade, small publishers might find their thoughts drifting to how they ever got along without it. That’s the core of Mod’s essay, and I can only echo his hopes that it will become a reality.

But because the niche typically encounters tremendous resistance when it tries to cannibalize the mainstream—for the mainstream would probably rather just stop reading than read more challenging things, if forced to choose between the two—it seems a little shortsighted to cheer the possibility of a large-publisher apocalypse between then and now. There are few who would profit from it.

1. Or box up and abandon on the front steps of the library on a dark and stormy night [↑]
2. Disclosure: I recently bought the mass market version of Carl Sagan’s excellent Cosmos. [↑]
3. Though I suppose it would be somewhat less so if it were coupled with some sort of receptacle system—perhaps a network of drop boxes in public spaces, wherein readers could leave their ‘disposable’ books to be repulped and recycled [↑]

I’m a little late to this party—this graphic was released on Tuesday—but I figure that people who aren’t Facebook Fans of the president or readers of the Daily Kos¹ should see it too:

source

1. Or people who watch or read news of any kind [↑]

The following is a list that’s aim is to make you a better painter or artist in general.

PRACTICE!

Draw every day all day and then some more. Get a sketchbook, use it. Use it often.  Set up a space for the sole purpose of art. paint there, draw there, live there.

☛

Jacob Weisberg’s latest piece in Slate (the provocatively titled Down With The People), published this past Saturday, has been in heavy rotation these past few days.

And rightfully so. The subhed:

Blame the childish, ignorant American public—not politicians—for our political and economic crisis.

At first blush, it’s tough to disagree. And Weisberg offers some pretty compelling (anecdotal) proof of his theory—namely, that many Americans seem to be ruled by their emotional brains when it comes to passing judgment on federal policy. How else to describe the ongoing erosion of the wide-ranging support for 2008’s supremely popular stimulus checks?¹.

Not to mention the absurd shift from demanding increased regulation of the financial industry in 2008 and growing leery of it by 2010.

Weisberg offers up the case of Senator Scott Brown, perhaps the most chronologically accessible avatar of this country, materializing before out eyes, that “simultaneously² demands and rejects action on unemployment, deficits, health care, climate change, and a whole host of other major problems.”

Weisberg wisely resists speaking in absolutes and offers no remedy. I’m not so sure there is one, short of either (a) leashing public figures with something more potent than implied dignity³ or (b) making hundreds of millions of people smarter.⁴

Nevertheless, I believe that what Weisberg has offered is a false dichotomy. Far more nefarious than an exploitable, restless, vindictive and contradictory electorate are the people who have managed to yoke it. People like Brown, Sarah Palin and Roger Ailes, who continue to ride the upswell of deranged populism.⁵

A more immediate example: an editorial in today’s New York Times describes how Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told Politico, with disturbing candor, that he wants to “block financing for civilian trials of terrorism suspects⁶ so Republicans can brag about it this fall.”

So it’s difficult for me to place the bulk of the blame on Dumb America for allowing itself to be steered, because that allegory requires the existence of coachmen, flailing away with rhetorical whips.

I think that Weisberg fails to give them the attention they deserve. Certainly, a large number of Americans want—paraphrased from Weisberg—for government to address modern issues while simultaneously shrinking, spending less and reducing their taxes.

But you can’t buy a fantasy if nobody’s selling it.⁷ Can you?

1. I suppose it’s tough to stay behind tax-subsidized free money once they’re two years behind you and only getting further away [↑]
2. And perhaps unintentionally [↑]
3. Probably unconstitutional. [↑]
4. Impractical. [↑]
5. Watch Palin’s speech at the First National Tea Party Convention. [↑]
6. Read: Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed [↑]
7. Ex: Mickey Mouse was not born through intuitive, popular consensus. He was offered to us. [↑]

Ed: The following memo was found taped to the door of the janitorial closet.

TO: You
FROM: Me
DATE: Saturday – November 14, 2009
SUBJECT: Phase I COMPLETE

Phase I of the development of the Tags page is complete: effective immediately, it exists. Which means I can now strike another tiny-feature-that-I’ve-been-putting-off-for-months from my to-do list.¹

This is an historic—hold on a minute. Why are your eyes glazed over?

1. More importantly, it means I can put that lousy jquery menu to rest forever. As it should be. [↑]

On November 9, 1989, an East German spokesman named Günter Schabowski accidentally announced on live television that all East German citizens would now be allowed to travel without restrictions. Effective immediately. The swell of German people—from points both East and West—who soon converged at the Berlin Wall took the guards completely by surprise. They were as confused as anybody else. They swung open the gates.

As the story goes, Günter hadn’t been to work that day. Party officials, who had just finished hashing out a new policy meant to relax (in orderly German fashion!) the prohibition on travel for East Germans, called a press conference, stuffed a memo in Günter’s hand and pushed him out in front of live television cameras.

They hadn’t meant for him to use a phrase like effective immediately. But Günter somehow misunderstood what was written on the memo, and did. And the wall was crushed to pieces and the pieces were then sold to tourists and collectors. Which, I suppose, represents the ultimate symbolic victory of capitalism.

That’s why today—the 20th anniversary—is a great opportunity to stop and think about the enduring power of mythology.

We’re taught in our anthropology classes that mythmaking comes as easy to we humans as eating and sleeping and other, less printable pursuits. And they’re right—it does. Nobody teaches us the rules for wielding metaphor. Every human child grows up with the capacity to use similes, to understand books and movies and television. Though there are, perhaps, infinite levels of such understanding, the underlying principle is undeniable: we are not strictly mathematical creatures. And even the most well-trained eggheads are at a loss to explain why.

Why, for instance, do Americans fawn over Chilean novelist Roberto Bolaño? After he died in 2003, something like eight of his novels have been translated to English—most of them coming after the translation of The Savage Detectives became a smash hit with critics.

Call it sour grapes, but Horacio Castellanos Moya, one of Bolaño’s friends and contemporaries, wrote in this month’s issue of Guernica that there’s something a little disingenuous about how American publishers have turned Bolaño into an industry:

The market has its landlords, like everything on this infected planet, and it’s the landlords of the market who decide the mambo that you dance, whether it’s selling cheap condoms or Latin American novels in the U.S.

Moya explains that the endlessly marketable Bolaño pictured on dust jackets of his newly published books—the scruffy, long-haired revolutionary poet from the 1970s—is not an accurate picture of the Bolaño who wrote the novels he’s best known for. Moya knew Bolaño to be a quieter, family-oriented man. But the latter wouldn’t exactly excite American imaginations. In this era of Hollywood-made Che Guevara biopics, there are few things hotter than bottled revolution.

And then there’s the case of Aravind Adiga. The White Tiger, Adiga’s first novel, won him the 2008 Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards in the English-speaking world. Global fame followed—except for in Adiga’s native India, where the book received a lukewarm response.

In both cases we’re left with a curious disconnect between success in one’s own culture and success in a foreign one. Call it Big In Japan Syndrome—the old gag that an unexpected cult following in backwards little Japan is a sort of consolation prize among bands and actors for whom greater success has proven elusive.

Of course, the Western literature market isn’t exactly the bush leagues. Dollar for dollar, there’s little doubt that we Westerners spend more money on books than anybody else in the world. So when a foreign-born author is abstractly plucked from his or her own culture and aggressively sold here—to people who will literally buy whatever they’re told—it’s probably the best thing that ever happened to him. Call it village-pillaging.

Which somehow brings us back to the Berlin Wall.¹

As Michael Meyer wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece last week, Ronald Reagan did not tear down the wall. The famous speech—Tear down this wall, Mr. Gorbachev!—was delivered in 1987. Which, if you’ve paid attention, was two years before the wall came down. Which isn’t to say that Reagan did nothing. His chummy relationship with the Saudi royal family proved instrumental when it came to starving the USSR of oil revenue. And the Afghanistan quagmire, which Reagan’s CIA helped exacerbate, certainly did not help. And then there’s the Marshall Plan. Economic containment. The Bomb.

But the USSR did just as much to defeat itself. After the Soviets built an empire on a one-dimensional oil economy and maintaining one of the largest standing militaries in history, successful revolutions in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria and Romania—not to mention the protests at Tiananmen Square—the bottom simply fell out.

So we must resist the urge to construct simple narratives from unbelievably complicated events. The full picture is one of infinite nuance. As Meyer describes it:

Americans have never bothered to understand how, exactly, it ended. Rather than appreciating its complexity, not to mention the element of chance, we credited ourselves with unambiguous victory.

In closing, all of this seems to beg the question: do we have the ability to just appreciate things as they are? Can’t we judge Bolaño and Adiga on the merits of their respective works? Can’t we just acknowledge that the Berlin Wall fell not because of a stubborn American president, but also because of decades of horrific institutional decay?

I’m not so sure. Here’s what I do know: last week, I bought the three-volume special edition of Bolaño’s 2666. I, too, have a weakness for mythology.

1. Trust me. [↑]

Congrats, Bill Owens! May your career of meddling with your own party’s agenda be long and fruitless.

Check out this map of NY-23 from The Swing Vote Project. It helps you get some perspective on how unlikely this was:

An interesting note: based on Nate Silver’s analysis, Owens seems to have carried all three of those pink counties.

So this wasn’t a really situation where more liberal-leaning counties dragged the rest along. As a matter of fact, it seems like Owens performs better the farther North you go. Which couldn’t be further away from my own forecast.

It will be interesting to see where the stragglers fall in line.

That, according to a seriously shaky Wolfram|Alpha calculation, is how much land that each person would get were the Earth (minus Antarctica and the Sahara Desert) split 6.67 billion equal ways.¹

Here’s the equation:

For comparison, 4.659 acres is about the size of 2.6 FIFA-sanctioned international match soccer fields.

If you’re thinking, Gee, that actually kind of sounds like a lot, bear this in mind: the actual Earth is not a flat grid of equally habitable cells—inevitably, many millions of people would get stuck with parcels on mountainsides or in toxic waste dumps, swamps, deserts and Siberia. The above figure is clearly on the generous side.²

That said, I’m on the borderline of horror with this one. It either makes the world seem very small or makes mankind seem very stifling.

Either way, this much is certain: the fact that Wolfram|Alpha can help be indulge in such childish things is undeniably cool.

1. A side note: one of mankind’s greatest inventions is the technique of building vertically. But, for the sake of this hypothetical, I’m talking straight-up land ownership. [↑]
2. And no, there’s no easy way to further refine the equation, short of making an exhaustive (and totally subjective!) List of All Terrestrial Hellholes Known to Man and plugging each item in one after another. [↑]

I’ve made an iPhone¹ version of the site:

A couple things. I’m going to be making some changes to the way that full posts are displayed, like ditching the speech bubble icons used to display how many comments a post has—they just tend to get in the way. I also need to take a serious look at the navigation bar on top, which I’ll do as soon as I get the chance.

Aside for noting that I’ll need to rework the comments section of each permalink page, I haven’t really taken a look at how this condensed layout affects other pages. So if anything looks stupid, bear with me. Or, better yet, let me know!

There’s no special url – just visit the site from a mobile device.

1. Works on any mobile device, though – it’s designed to be viewed on displays that are 320 pixels wide. Because I’ve only got an iPod Touch to work with, I don’t know how that looks on, say, a Blackberry. For the sake of making sure this looks good on as many devices as possible, I’m going to make the assumption that 320 is pretty standard by now. [↑]

Alternate Title: Wake Me in January: The Chad Pennington’s Throwing Shoulder Benefit Mixtape

Fueled by nothing but reheated dinner, autumnal ennui and prevailing financial paranoia, I have compiled the Playlist to fit this exact moment in football history.

Listen closely and soon you too may find yourself bouncing a bald tennis ball against the wall and singing softly to yourself. Or drinking irresponsibly while you stare out the kitchen window at your fenced-in apartment-complex yard and the looming city with a punctured sort of feeling. Somehow, through it all, absently massaging your own right shoulder, imagining what it must feel like to have it ripped apart by some fat young brute from San Diego. Hoping, beyond all reason, that next Sunday just simply fails to materialize.

Moping.

I invite you, dear reader, to come away with me on an emotional journey. All links lead to corresponding YouTube videos.

1. Van Morrison – Sweet Thing from the album Astral Weeks
2. N.E.R.D. – Sooner or Later from the album Seeing Sounds
3 Elliott Smith – Oh Well, Okay from the album XO

Had to establish a rule early on: only one Elliott Smith song allowed. A guy like that could monopolize a list like this.

4. Roy Orbison – It’s Over
5. Eric Clapton – Tears in Heaven from the album Unplugged
6. Jeff Buckley – Last Goodbye from the album Grace
7. Belle & Sebastian – Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying from the album If You’re Feeling Sinister
8. Nick Drake – Pink Moon from the album Pink Moon

I saw it written and I saw it say / Pink moon is on its way / And none of you stand so tall / Pink moon gonna get you all

9. Gnarls Barkley – Whatever from the album The Odd Couple
10. The Notorious B.I.G. – Suicidal Thoughts from the album Ready to Die
11. Tom Waits – November from the album The Black Rider
12. Elliott Smith – A Fond Farewell from the album From a Basement on the Hill

It’s OK to cry. I am.

In an article posted Sept. 22, Clusterstock’s John Carney tries to make the argument that Paul Krugman is wrong about Wall Street bonuses. I say ‘tries’ because his argument, as you read through it with a feeling of mounting incredulity, is pretty flaccid.

On October 13, a year will have elapsed since New York Times columnist (and Princeton professor) Paul Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economic Science. Krugman has been something of a guiding light throughout our financial blowup. He has the enviable ability to simplify extraordinarily eggheaded economic principles and to shape them into compelling calls to action. He is unashamedly in the Keynesian mold, a true believer in the importance of strong government involvement in times such as these—times in which the moral invincibility of free market principles feels increasingly discredited.

Krugman’s line throughout the crisis has remained steady: everything is rooted in the actions of deeply irresponsible bankers who knowingly took on too much risk because they were rewarded with big short-term profits.

Carney has dubbed this the “banker pay myth”—so you pretty much know right away where he stands. He cites a post on Causes of the Crisis, a blog set up by a bunch of wonks from the Critical Review. Here’s the relevant passage:

For one thing, bankers were often compensated in stock as well as with bonuses, and the value of this stock was wiped out because of the investments in question. Richard Fuld of Lehman Brothers lost $1 billion this way; Sanford Weill of Citigroup lost half that amount. A study by Rüdiger Fahlenbrach and René Stulz [3] showed that banks with CEOs who held a lot of stock in the bank did worse than banks with CEOs who held less stock, suggesting that the bankers were simply ignorant of the risks their institutions were taking. Journalists’ and insiders’ books about individual banks[4] bear out this hypothesis: At Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers, for example, the decision makers did not recognize the risks until it was too late, despite their personal investments in the banks’ stock.

Perhaps the most powerful evidence against the executive-compensation thesis, however, is that 81 percent of the mortgage-backed tranches purchased by banks were rated AAA[5], and thus produced lower returns than the double-A and lower-rated tranches of the same mortgage-backed securities that were available. Bankers who were indifferent to risk because they were seeking higher return, hence higher bonuses, should have bought the lower-rated tranches universally, but they did so only 19 percent of the time. And most of those purchases were of double-A rather than A, BBB, or lower-rated, more-lucrative tranches.

Nope. Your eyes do not deceive you. Yup, the Review’s case for executive exoneration is the fact that any high-stakes crook worth his salt would have made a blindingly obvious cash-grab and gotten out. He would have made it so nakedly obvious that this debate we’re having right now wouldn’t be a debate at all—it would be two fairly reasonable human beings agreeing on an observed fact. Right?¹

Right?

That which the Review and, by proxy, Carney fail to account for is perhaps the oldest trick in the book as far as fraud is concerned: an imperfect money-sucking machine draws less attention and—this is the important part—hides behind an inscrutable veil of doubt. Mathematics and economics, alas, have a tough time accounting for simple deceit.

For an alternative example, look to the recent beef that Nate Silver started with Strategic Vision over some cooked poll numbers. Even the dumbest pollster knows the danger of releasing badly lopsided poll numbers (when compared to the aggregate of other similar polls). Slightly smarter dumb pollsters at least make it look competitive—their favored choice wins reliably, but never by an unrealistic margin (see: the 2009 Iranian election)

Obviously, that’s all a metaphor. Polling is not subject to the same rules as financial raiding, but it’s certainly subject to the same strategy: cook it but make it look, at the very least, believable. There’s simply no evidence against a scenario in which the execs picked tranches with lesser value so that they could keep plausible deniability on their side.

It’s telling that Carney should offer up a couple of goats like [Lehman Bros CEO] Richard Fuld and [Citigroup CEO] Sanford Weill—two guys who steered their respective firms to the bottom of a crater. More relevant examples would be dudes like [Goldman Sachs CEO] Lloyd Blankfein or [JPMorgan Chase CEO] James Dimon. How have they fared?

Don’t bother—I can answer that. See, it’s no secret that in July, Goldman reported its largest quarterly profit in its history as a public company. JPMorgan was no slouch, either.

So instead of giving us two examples of jugheads who probably were legitimately blindsided by the whole thing, why not talk about the guys who cleaned up?

Because, of course, that would be devastating to Carney’s case. That’s why. Carney’s logical paradigm seems to favor an all-or-nothing scenario—either they were all in on it or they were all doofuses. He either does not understand or is unwilling to admit that the plights of two clueless firms are not representative of all firms.

But I’m not going to hold that against him because it actually is a pretty effective illustration of an important yet little-understood distinction: all of the major Wall Street firms caused this mess, but some had the foresight to realize it beforehand. The rest were hapless pretenders who fucked up, made things worse and then imploded.

All evidence—literally, all of it—points to Goldman having set up the market like a bowling pin. Hank Paulson, who was CEO of Goldman before Bush tapped him for Treasury Secretary in 2006, had an outrageously suspect relationship with his old firm.²

In citing the examples of only the most hapless executives (Fuld and Weill et al.), Carney has demonstrated that he’s either a hopeless naïf or that he’s the sort of guy you can really count on to keep your secrets from the cops.

1. If you didn’t read it earlier, read it now: The Myth of the Atomic Bomb [↑]
2. Yeah. That’s a link to an actual substantive scoop by the New York Post. What of it? [↑]

According to Politico this morning, President Obama’s request earlier this week that New York Gov. Paterson abstain from running for reelection in 2010 came at the urging of several U.S. senators and concerned state legislators.

Who? I can’t help but wonder.

Since he took over last year, Paterson’s had a tough time. The extreme highs of being the guy who replaced Eliot Spitzer gave way to the lowest approval ratings in state history as problems piled up.

Like the recession. Because Wall Street has taken some serious hits, so has their taxable revenue. New York is uniquely dependent on a booming Wall Street. The wonderful things that we New Yorkers enjoy – like a large, accessible public university system – are unsustainable in times like these.

And, of course, there’s the Great Senate Stalemate of ‘09, in which Democrats briefly lost their tenuous majority because of a couple of unashamed opportunists.¹ The ensuing weeks were as close to a breakdown of American government as we have ever seen.

By any metric, Paterson has had a trying term. But, given the circumstances, it’s unclear just what – if anything – that Paterson could have done avoid it. His heart is generally in the right place, as far as Democrats go. He supports gay marriage and wants to institute ‘fat taxes’ on soft drinks. He’s unwilling to raise tax rates on the extraordinarily wealthy.

This latest news just reiterates the fact that Paterson can’t even count on that eternal fallback of any mainstream politician: the support of his own party.

update: Andrew Cuomo? I’m just sayin. It’s not like he needs to resort to underhanded shit to beat Paterson next year, but maybe he feels better with a little insurance.

1. To be fair, it’s tough to tell whether that all happened because Paterson was too weak or whether it happened because Sen. Hiram Monserrate and Sen. Pedro Espada, Jr. are extremely easily bribed – Monserrate, after all, was rewarded for his defection with the post of president pro tem. [↑]