Shirin Neshat

...is an Iranian photographer who takes interesting pictures. Here is my review of a big retrospective book of her work:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/123913-shirin-nishat-by-arthur-c.-danto-and-marina-abramovic

I Like her stuff.

I'm no expert...

...but based on what I've seen, this interesting article by Jay Baron Nicorvo makes some mighty interesting (and relevant) points about the current state of the publishing industry:

http://www.guernicamag.com/features/1688/third_degree_burns/

An excerpt:

"Editors have to run around anxious to find the book that’ll help them keep their jobs. Most editors these days are speculators. They’re no longer asked to acquire the books that readers will read a hundred years from now—books that not only preserve the culture but further it. They’re expected to acquire the books that readers will want to read today, and so instead of reading manuscripts, they read the current cultural landscape. They assess the mass market to figure out which manuscript might be the next bestseller. Literary editors at commercial publishers, the few who still acquire novels, have become investors. [John Maynard] Keynes writes that investing is, “so to speak, a game of Snap, of Old Maid, of Musical Chairs—a pastime in which he is victor who says Snap neither too soon nor too late, who passes the Old Maid to his neighbour before the game is over, who secures a chair for himself when the music stops.” But Keynes made another, more lasting, comparison, what has come to be known as the Keynesian beauty contest.

Keynes thought investing was like newspaper competitions in which “the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view.” In order to win, competitors are forced to select the outcome most selected by others, whatever their personal preference. “It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree, where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be.” If there’s anything that’s killing American fiction, it’s not MFA degrees and the institutions that bestow them. It is this: the third degree."

For your consideration

A couple more reviews I wrote, one positive, one not so much. First the happy one:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/review/123526-crow-planet-by-lyanda-lynn-haupt/

Then the disappointing one:

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/in-paper-magazine/books-and-authors/ghost-story-140

More to follow. In other news, Honolulu is overcast and rainy today, and feels about 60 degrees. Where the hell do I live again? This tropical paradise reminds me of Scotland more than anyplace else. Not to complain or anything, but geez.

Collateral murder.

Hey, they all look the same, right?

What's especially chilling is the helicopter waiting for the van to pick up the dead bodies... and then opening fire. This violates the Geneva Convention, not to mention basic humanity, but then again the US has always claimed special privilege for itself.

Please watch the entire video before responding. The uneditied version makes clear that there were no weapons in evidence other than the video camera and lens. All this chatter of multiple weapons, AKs, RPGs and so on is just cover.

http://collateralmurder.com/

The funniest thing I ever saw on the net...

...is linked below. I tried to post it here bt it wouldn't fit, alas.

Take a look:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nFicqklGuB0

My article on Pop Matters

Below is a link to an article I wrote for popmatters.com, a nifty pop-culture web site, on my current obsession, French film pioneer Georges Melies:

http://www.popmatters.com/pm/column/122089-george-melies-the-most-important-filmmaker-youve-probably-never-seen/P0/

The guy is well worth checking out, if you care to track down DVDs of his stuff...

The above still is from his 1901 movie The Man With the Rubber Head, in which Melies uses a bellows to expand a copy of his own head to enormous size. It eventually explodes. If this doesn't sound like something you want to see, I can't help you.

Well, that sucks.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that The Hurt Locker won the Oscars last night. After all, it's a movie that shows how rotten war is... for Americans. And how war really takes a heavy psychological and physical toll... on Americans. And how it's really unfair... for Americans... to be put in these dangerous threatening situations. Not much is heard from the Iraqis in this movie. Why should they have a place? They're not important, they're just the villains who set up the big set-piece explosions. What matters in this story is the (white, male) American hero, not the sand niggers that his army has been sent over to kill.

Imagine if this movie had been made about a German soldier in Poland. ("You know, just fighting for his country.") Or a Japanese one in Manchuria. ("Hey, protest the war, but not the brave guys out there doing their duty.") Or (dare I say it?) an Iraqi soldier fighting a war in, um, Iraq. I wonder how many Academy Awards that movie would have won.

No, never mind. I don't need to wonder.

For a more thoughtful parsing of Hurt Locker (and Avatar, its main competition for the Best Picture Oscar) from an Iraqi (who?) perspective, check out this brief article, written about 2 weeks ago:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2010/022610a.html

Of course, the above was written by an Iraqi journalist, so you know, what the hell does he know about anything? Like movies, or pain, or fairness, or war.

NOW I'M NO LONGER THE MOST FAMOUS PERSON FROM FARMINGTON, CONNECTICUT 06032

...Actually, I don't know if I ever was.

But now I am definitely not, as Farmington's own ERIN PAC has won a bronze medal in bobsled at the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Here's a link to her official page. Please note her hometown:

http://www.nbcolympics.com/athletes/athlete=2327/bio/index.html?__source=binganswers

And a slideshow gallery (no video? Boo hiss!):

http://www.nbcolympics.com/photos/galleryid=445718.html?&s=1

So, I'd never heard of Erin before last night, but I like to think I probably went to high school with her mom or something. Hey it's a long shot, but whatever gets me rubbing elbows with fame, man.

Congratulations, Erin, and you too, co-pilot Alana. That's some sled you've got there.

Some comics I'm reading these days

Ahoy.

Not much time to chat today, as I'm drowning under a flood tide of freshman comp papers (oy), but I thought I'd toss up a few covers to some comics I've been reading these days. Not much common ground here, maybe, although four of the five titles are published by Vertigo (all except for Viking), and they are all, I supposed, targeted to "mature readers," which means some swearing and violence. All are available at you local neighborhood comic shop, and they're all worth a look, in my opinion, if you like stories wit' pitchers, as I do. All these books have also been collected into bound volumes containing several installments each, so you can sample them and get a sense of whether it's the kind of thing you want to come back to every month.

Briefly:

The Unwritten - an odd story about a character form a series of children's books (think Harry Potter) who has, apparently, come into reality in this world. But things get interesting as the author explores the idea that fictional worlds a.) have their own physical realities, and b.) can collide with our own. Oh and there's a vampire.

Greek Street - modern-day retelling of the Greek myths--Oedipus, Madea and all the rest--transported to modern-day London's red light district. Lots of nudity, sex and violence, which is to say, it's pretty faithful to the source material.

Northlanders - fairly low-brow comic about Vikings, or at least Norsemen, or at least people who lived in cold places. A series of loosely-connected vignettes of anywhere from one to eight issues apiece, following various characters and their stories from roughly AD 950-1050. The surrent storyline is set in Siberia, but check out the two-parter "The Shield Maidens" for some killer artwork.

























Madame Xanadu - modern-day witch/priestess located in Greenwich Village dabbles in the occult and tries to help people out. Hilarity ensues. MX used to hang with King Arthur, and her horrid sister is Morgana le Fay, so there's all that going on too, fairies and so forth. It's less dumb than it sounds.

Viking - possibly the dumbest book on this list, but it's Vikings, what do you expect? Nicely oversized, with killer painted art, the story is fairly incomprhensible--I'm pretty sure there's a feud, and somebody makes some bad choices and a lot of people get whacked. Beyond that I'm pretty much lost, but the art makes up for a lot. Did I mention it's about Vikings?

The Greatest band in the World.

A little overdue here, as I've been listening to them for maybe three years. But anyway here they are. TINARIWEN. Look 'em up. New record out is great, as are all their albums.

Na'vi protesters storm the Wesk Bank

I guess the Avatar hype really has gone global. Protestors in Palestine, who march every week against the continued presence and expansion of the Israeli-built (and USA-funded) wall that divides their territory into ever-smaller pieces, dressed up as Na'vi, the aliens from James Cameron's epic.

Pretty clever, considering the movie's indigenous-rights subtext and it anti-militaristic POV.

Plus, just seeing a blue space alien with a tail holding a Palestinian flag pretty much makes my day...

Here's a link to the other pictures:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/gallery/2010/feb/14/west-bank-barrier-avatar-protest?picture=359309720

Rock and Roll Will Never Die...

...not even in Lahore. You can't say they aren't trying to kill it, though.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/28/lahore-rock-pakistan-conservatism

I don't know this Basim guy, but the writer he mentions, Michael Muhammad Knight, is the writer of this seriously strange book, which I reviewed for Dawn last year:

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/in-paper-magazine/books-and-authors/mixing-it-up

It's worth a look, especially for anyone more interested in the weird fringes of things than the well-trodden middle ground.

Our books are back.

I guess I can stop boycotting Amazon now.

For now.

Hey, that was relatively quick... I wonder how long before the next bit of stupidity?

Well worth reading

I've heard of this guy, never read his stuff, but he's a Macmillan author with an interesting view on the Amazon debacle. Also very much worth reading are the comments.

http://whatever.scalzi.com/2010/02/02/a-call-for-author-support/

PLEASE BOYCOTT AMAZON

As of today, my books and Uzee’s Trespassing are still not on Amazon.com . Neither are the other Macmillan authors.

I am asking anyone who cares about authors to boycott Amazon. There are some people (see the previous post) who think this misses the point, and maybe it does, but fuck it, Amazon is boycotting me.

Meanwhile, here's an open letter to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.

Dear Mr. Bezos,

You don’t know who I am, so allow me to tell you: I’m a writer whose books you are currently refusing to sell. This will not significantly harm my publisher, St Martin’s; nor will it benefit you in any meaningful way. The only consequence of note is that I will lose a few sales. As best I can understand, you are doing this out of a drive to acquire a monopoly on e-books.

Mr. Bezos, forget the monopoly. Amazon.com is a powerful force on the internet, and a reasonably profitable business as well. You should be satisfied with this. Take your earnings, count your money and be happy. If you get bored, you can count your money again. You have a great deal more than most people could dream of.

My publisher, Macmillan, has every right to determine a fair price for their product. That is what manufacturers do. If Amazon wishes to devalue the product—in this case, a book—by selling it below its market price, then Macmillan has the right to withhold the product from you and from anyone else who does this. They will make it available to other retailers, such as Apple, to sell at a fair price. Some time down the road, when the price drops, Amazon will then sell it for whatever you want.

Are you with me so far?

There are plenty of examples of this model already. Movies are released in theatres months before the DVDs are on sale. A DVD might cost $20 new, which is the price of just two movie tickets. If a family wants to see a movie, why would they spend $40 at the theatre when they can buy the DVD for half that? They will not (unless they’re willing to pay the extra cash to get out of the house and see the big screen). So, DVDs are held back for a few months so that the product—the movie—is not undervalued.

Do you need another example? Paperback books, which are cheaper than hardcovers, typically come out a year or so after the hardcover is released. Same idea. Let people pay more for something they get right away; otherwise, they can wait a while and pay less. Seems reasonable, doesn’t it? Consumers get to choose what they want. Fair, right?

Now let’s talk about you, Jeff. You want to sell your ridiculously overpriced and overhyped Kindle reader, but nobody will pay $300-$500 for a box they don’t need. So what do you do? You drop the prices on e-books—all of them, new, old, just-released, whatever—to $9.99 or less. You are actually losing money on every e-book you sell, but that’s okay, because you are giving people a reason to buy that electric box. This has the effect of cutting in to book sales, which hurts authors who rely on sales to get a few bucks back for their effort as opposed to the nickels and dimes they get for an e-book royalty. But you don’t care about that, because you’re after the monopoly. Over time, fewer writers will be able to be writers, because they won’t get paid, so they’ll have to work second and third jobs (many of us already are) but you don’t care about that, because you’re after the monopoly.

Macmillan took the step of saying, “Well, okay then. If you refuse to respect our pricing ladder, we won’t do business with you. We’ll release our books to places like Apple, who will sell our books for a fair price, and then, once prices drop to what what you want, we will make them available to you, too.” This is a step which, I stress, has many precedents in the arts and commerce today. See the above examples.

Your repsonse was to stop selling my books, and Uzee’s book, and many other people’s books.

You know what, Jeff? That’s stupid. That’s fucking idiotic.

Punishing authors will not make you more money, and it won’t get you that monopoly. It simply alienates the people you rely upon to make you your living. Your tidy fortune exists, Jeff, because of people like me, who create the things that you sell. Without people like me, and Uzee, and Hilary Mantel and the Rolling Stones and Black and Decker and every other artist and manufacturer whose products you retail, you would have nothing.

So here’s an idea: respect that.

I realize that talking to a peddlar about respect is like talking to the government about efficiency. But it’s the only thing I can think of that might get through. And also this: until my books are back on sale on Amazon, along with all the other Macmillan authors’ books, I will be boycotting Amazon. Uzee will too. Will anyone join me? I can only hope. Maybe it’s a forlorn hope, but maybe not. Maybe people will return some of their business to their local bookstores, which are run, often, by people who actually read and care about books.

Oh, and another thing? Yesterday I read that Amazon’s stock prizes dropped 5% since the argument with Macmillan. One might even call it “market forces.”

Sincerely,

Dave Maine

You may be getting bored with all this, but it's pretty important to me

The lastest on Amazon's monopoly attempt and supposed backdown:

http://www.mediabistro.com/galleycat/bookselling/authors_guild_defends_macmillan_in_amazon_price_fight_150730.asp

I'm giving them till tomorrow to start carrying my books and Uzee's, after which I'm officially requesting that people boycott Amazon and shop from B&N, Border's or--best of all--your friendly neighborhood book seller. Like this one from my hometown:

http://millracebookshop.com/about.html

No, my books still aren't on Amazon...

...so I guess there's nothing to do in the meantime, but have a cup of coffee. Which some people claim is good for you:

http://health.yahoo.com/experts/healthieryou/10497/9-reasons-to-drink-more-coffee/

Not sure I believe this, but what the heck. It's something to do while fuming.

More on the Amazon fiasco...

Don't know if this is true, but according to the publisher, "the plan would allow Amazon to make more money selling Macmillan books and that Macmillan would make less." This sounds, to me, altogether too believable. Full article is here:

http://www.usatoday.com/life/books/news/2010-01-31-amazon-ebooks-pubs_N.htm

Another sobering point made in the article is that, according to Amazon, "The company now sells six digital copies to every 10 physical ones of books available in either format."

And here's an interesting batch of comments on the issue from boingboing.net, a tech-oriented web site. (DRM, by the way, stands for Digital Rights Management, which is essentially electronic copyright, but is also apparently a mechanism by which Amazon can delete books that readers have bought, paid for, and downloaded.)

http://www.boingboing.net/2010/01/30/macmillan-ceo-on-ama.html

The times, they are a-changin'.

Yes, our books still exist...

...they just don't exist anymore on Amazon.com:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/technology/30amazon.html?ref=economy

In brief: Books published by the Macmillan group, which include all of mine, Uzee's Trespassing (pub'd by Picador) and many others (Hilary Mantel, Ishmael Beah, Janet Evanovich) have been removed by Amazon because of a disagreement over pricing of e-books. Amazon, which sells e-book downloads for its Kindle reader, prices everything at $9.99, which doesn't leave much to go to the publisher and author after Amazon takes its cut. (Typically, I make between 75 cents and one dollar per new book sold; if a new book is ten bucks, I'll get 50-75 cents per copy. Publishers will also receive less, which leaves them less cash to pay writers for their books. Amazon will net less also, but will be spending less on warehousing, shipping, paying staff to pull the book and pack it, etc).

Publishers have been pressing Amazon to raise prices to around $15, which would be more in line with a new book price after Amazon takes its usual huge discount (which us writers also pay for, by the way). Amazon has been refusing; meanwhile Macmillan has offered its list to Apple, which is launching its own e-reader and has agreed to a pricing formula more in line with what Macmillan wants.

So in retaliation, Amazon has pulled our books. Thanks, guys! This is why I hate business, pretty much.

I can't tell people where to buy their e-books, so I won't; but I will say that if you're shopping for something of mine, or for Uzee's Trespassing or anything else that's suddenly vanished from Amazon, you can still find it all at barnesandnoble.com, borders.com, or--maybe best of all--through an order at your local independent book store, the one run by the nice old lady and/or the cynical bearded guy and/or the weird grad students with all the piercings. Hey, stop in and say hi, they'll appreciate the business...

R.I.P., Holden.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_obit_salinger

I read it in tenth grade, which was more or less the perfect time for me. Great book then, great book now. Probably the most perfect opening 5 or ten pages ever written, ever, by anybody.