An extended, freeform rumination on Lyari, Karachi, Pakistan, of prices paid, ambition, pain, despondency and, yes, amateur boxing. Absolutely stunning. Written by Maniza Naqvi.
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
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.
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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.
I feel as if I don’t really need—or am basically at a loss—to describe this one.
Been there, done that. Advice for America from the Entity Formerly Known as the British Empire.
At this rate, I may as well just make a post category for David Foster Wallace.
A personal essay published in the December 1991 issue of Harper’s Magazine, for your reading enjoyment.
Watching Sen. Specter fight his way through a town hall meeting in Lebanon, PA this morning has been an indescribable experience. But I’ll try.
Though I’ve never been a huge fan of Specter – in a country of transparently ambitious politicians, he must be the most transparently ambitious – it was tough not to feel for him as he tried to navigate a room full of people who don’t even seem to be speaking the same language as me anymore.
Thus far, the questions asked of Specter have come in the form of demands: that he sign any bill legalizing baby-extermination, government death squads or forced yielding of private bank account information at the peril of his immortal soul. None of that is not hyperbole. There seems to, quite literally, be no middle ground. Nobody expressing cautious doubt – which is, perhaps, the first clue that this is no longer an intellectual issue, but an emotional one.
Here’s the thing. These are all completely earnest questions – all-consumers from people who fear for their futures with the tenacity of your average Coast to Coast AM listener and mask that fear with petty anger. These are people who are furious now that they have discovered that there aren’t enough hours in a day – hell, hours in a year – for a representative to field all the insane questions that people want to ask him. Logistically, one man just can’t meaningfully answer millions of questions about petty shit. It’s just math.1
The state of reading comprehension in America plays a large part in all of this. The Bill in Question, HR 3200, is freely available online. At one point, a man stood up and announced that he had spent the last two weeks carefully reading the 1017-page document.2 Or trying to anyway – he conceded that it was written ‘like a Russian novel,’3 and that he had been having some trouble. Another man, a teacher, asked that Specter do his part to ensure that all future Congressional bills are written at a junior-high level from here on out.
Which is a nice idea, but it brings up a question that I thought we put away when we elected Obama: why are we so scared of the thought of electing people who are smarter that we are? As Jon Stewart joked, “In fact, not only do I want an elite president, but I want someone who is embarrassingly superior to me.”4
Amen.
Honestly, it’s tough to blame them for all this. Our Constitution, with its completely unrealistic promises of individual importance – at any given meeting there are hundreds of contentious people vying for thirty speaking vouchers, deli-style – has made us a country of uniquely self-entitled people. Moments like this, it really shows that the document was written by men who couldn’t possibly imagine that there would someday be 300 million people asking questions. And that most of them would not have the ability to understand the arcane language of legislation. 5
So what is all this noise? Is this what the breakdown of democracy feels like? Or is this what it feels like when democracy flexes its muscles?
This movement is millions of people screaming out loud, frustrated by how small their voices really sound. It reminds me of a political science class I took in college, when I came face to face with the regular frustration of having to listen to another student express viewpoints to which I was wholly opposed. You can’t help but cast the odd glance at the clock as the class period dwindles away to nothing. At these moments, it is easy to kind of give up on the idea of meaningful communication in a group setting. There’s simply not enough time to be fair. And, even if you wait your turn, the chances are good that the conversation will be so far away from where it was when you wanted to interject that there isn’t even a point. So you suck it up. 6
This is, in a nutshell, many moments rolled into one.
First, it has exposed the inadequacy of how our representative democracy handles angry mobs. And, hell, about the inadequacy of democracy in general for fairly governing 300 million people who have devoted their lives to self-service.7
Second, it is an important moment in sociolinquistics – the moment in history when the whole country became intimately aware of the significant limitations of spoken language. One on one, we’re fine. But the more people you add, the greater the chance of a complete breakdown. By the time you’ve got an entire room of people, the only hope for a civil discourse is social decency.
Last, it is an intimate psychological crisis. At one point in he distant past, it may have even been a waypoint on the way to adult development – the realization that the dynamics of group living often make it impossible to talk without a megaphone – but it isn’t anymore. Perhaps common American sentiment – self-empowerment – simply is incompatible with the notion of being one of a million (rather than one in a million). Self-sacrifice has never been less in.
Which is bad news for healthcare. And bad news for my worldview.
In the course of Making Things there is an undisputed, torturously difficult first step: getting started. Whether it’s because you’ve got a whole heap of self-doubt, little spare time or inferior – you call them unworkable – tools, there are some serious barriers to entry for creative work.
Merlin Mann has made a career out of advocating ways to cut through personal apathy, excuse-making and general procrastination. Though I have only read a relatively small slice of what he has written – reading it all would be a pretty arduous task considering the wide scope of his internet presence – it’s the above quote that really got me. If you’ve ever experienced a creative block, I’m sure it’ll get you too.
Mann is, of course, referring to the Brute Force school of thought, the key dictum of which goes something like this: sometimes you can’t hop over those barriers to entry – sometimes you’ve got to push through them. A binary choice: do it or don’t. Easy, right?
Let’s pretend it is. You suddenly find yourself at that most crucial of all junctures – the painful first step, the point at which all energy is just potential.
To your left is a torturous path of self-consciousness, repetitive stress injury, possible dysfunction and, perhaps ultimately, self-respect and absolution. This is where you want to be, but it’s certainly not going to be easy (and never claimed to be, either).
To your right looms whatever it is that you’ve had all along. And the way there is all downhill. Heck, you can lie down and roll there, if you want. 1
Presented with this maddening choice, how’s a rational human being supposed to act?
To this end, I resolved over a month ago to sit down every day and write 1,000 words.
The inspiration came in the form of a blurb on author Michael Chabon’s Wikipedia page describing his own writing process: write Sunday through Thursday, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. I had never thought of approaching writing that way before – as if it were a job, with clearly delineated hours and overtime. I mean, was I supposed to clock in or something?2
Chabon, of course, had his first novel published when he was just 25. Clearly his discipline was, and continues to be, a powerful asset.
The simple truth is that nobody is born with a fully-developed writing muscle; it’s slowly sculpted, Schwarzenegger-style, over the course of years of backbreaking work. This is the second-most important thing to remember when it comes to creativity (the most important being, of course, the quote at the top of this page).
As it turned out, 1,000 words per day was a tall order. I managed to keep up with it for about a week before I got my first lousy post-college job and the bottom fell out. Since then, it’s been snatches of 200 words here and there. In the month of July, excepting this blog and all the writing and coding that I’ve stuffed into its craw, I have written a total of 2,722 words3.
By most accounts that’s a pitiful figure for a person who was hoping to make a serious commitment. 4 And, to make matters worse, I tend to cite all of the barriers I mentioned in the first paragraph – no time (I have a job!), extreme self-doubt (what do I have to write about, anyway?) and a complete lack of tools (if I only had a camera-a nice one-I’d be the greatest thing since Hitchcock!) – as the reasons why.
With this blog I hope to redouble my efforts. Even so, I consider it fairly emblematic of my worst tendencies (it took me nearly two months to design and code everything – a period during which I did very little writing, citing the fact that I was too busy working on my imminent vessel of true expression and would start as soon as it went live, etc etc).
Think rationally. Understand that, objectively, there is absolutely nothing standing between you and your first novel. Or your first painting. There’s just tons of hours to get through and some bad habits to slay.
So get going. We’ll do it together.
Godspeed, Jonny Flynn.
After two years at Syracuse University, upstate New York’s favorite son is headed to greener pastures. Flynn is one of three starting players – forward Paul Harris and guard Eric Devendorf being the other two – on the Orange men’s basketball team who will enter the NBA draft this year.
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