Thinking About Aaaahnold

The Governator

This is no scandal.

The only people who think such behaviors are scandalous are the people who think that public figures must subscribe to a code of behavior appropriate to sainthood. Life is more complicated than that, always has been, and the reasons for committing adultery are many and varied. If Bible-thumping yahoos had their way, our only leaders will be passion-free milquetoasts, and from our recent history we’d have lost the leadership and intelligence of Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, arguably Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton.
Should we prefer moral purity for the vision and leadership of the New Deal, a warning about the military industrial complex and the interstate highway system, the courage of a nation in the Cuban Missile crisis, the Great Society and the Civil Right movement, and the last President in the US to lead for 8 years of peace who also brought us balanced budgets?

Close to the end of my  mother’s life, I asked her what she thought of Clinton and Lewinsky, and she laughed, “He’s a man!”

They should have put her on FOX News.
Having a pair of balls–literal or metaphoric–should not disqualify any woman or man from public leadership.

We want to remember that for every adulterer of either gender, there is a facilitating partner usually of the other gender. Does anyone suppose that Arnold’s household staffer did not know he was married?

Personal heartache–yes. But a scandal is a stone-cold rapist leading the International Monetary Fund–assuming the stupid bastard is guilty, which it looks like now, at any rate.

The real drama is the incredible moment when Schwarzennager decided to run for office. “Ja! I shall run. Who will ever discover the little boy?”
That might have been a good time to tell your wife, ya think, Arnold?

Bye Bye Bookstore; Hello Library

About 100 years ago, people were mourning the many, many downtown stable closings.
What shall the stable-boys do? And the horses! Dear heaven, how I will miss the horses! The pungent smell of piss, manure, and sweat, the flies, the tack, and the wonderful excitement of a runaway on a crowded thoroughfare! Why O why are people in such a hurry! Why must they close our stables?
The nostalgia surrounding failing bookstores is so much horseshit. People rending their garments and scattering ashes on their heads need to acknowledge the obvious: bookstores are failing because the business model is unsustainable, neither cheap nor convenient.
Consider:
• Bookstores keep about 90 percent of all books published invisible to readers;
• Bookstores accept payment for prominent near-the-door display;
• Bookstores when they offer to order a book for you not only duplicate a service you can perform for yourself, but do so at a higher price;
• Bookstores perpetuate secondary sales of used books and deprive writers of royalties;
• Bookstores accelerate the process of making a title go out of print because they do not stock idle inventories, reducing the shelf life of a book to less than a can of beer.
Creative destruction may in fact return us to civic communities. Make your public library community center again and get your town to fund the place adequately. Kids can attend story hour—without a sales pitch! Your civic group can meet—you’ll have to bring your own snacks. And your librarian! My o my: what a resource! True, the kid with five piercings at the bookstore may be more interesting to look at and might brew a better cup of coffee, but your librarian has a few skills, too.

Untrue Grit

The original True Grit had flaws–as does this new version. Fans will note that the Coen brothers have moved the eye-patch from Wayne’s left eye to Bridges’ right.

At issue in the novel and the original are courage and heroism, virtues that contemporary audiences distrust because those virtues require certainty, and post-modernists sensibilities would have us believe that the only certainty is that there is no certainty. This passes for sophistication among people who also equate criticism with creativity, impresses people who do no critical thinking at all, and have never had the courage or desire to be genuinely creative because to do so requires self-examination of core values. 

You cannot create art and hope it will have lasting worth if you believe all principles have equivalent value and that yours will change with time, place, and how much coffee you’ve had.

Wayne was not a great actor; he was a great icon, employed by Howard Hawks and John Ford in movies that defined the American mythos immediately before and after WWII. The Searchers, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Stagecoach, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence are complex stories; Sands of Iwo Jima is a very great, complex, war movie, not propaganda. Sure, in his long career Wayne made more than a few stinkers–what star does not? A guys gotta eat.

Living in a post-modernist culture of cynicism, the Coen’s do not know what to do with the idea of “heroism.” What the hell do they think “grit” means?   Bridges plays the lead very well, but Wayne played the hero as an archetype and was probably the only actor who could do that, not out of any amazing talent, but because of his long legacy as a journeyman western hero and the connection in the audience’s mind that Wayne=Americanism. Wayne’s personal politics were Reagan-Right, but skepticism about his performance that won an Oscar because of his personal politics is like rejecting Ezra Pound’s poetry because he was a fascist, somewhat off point. He won the Academy Award for a lifetime of roles–everyone knew that. So what?

The Coen version ends with a tired contemporary cliché of an older person who recalls the action for us–awkwardly imposed on the film as no such character is hinted at in the opening. Lacking a vision of courage and moral certainty, the Coens simply had no ending, and fell back to the faux memoir, a narrative that roots all story-telling in individual perspective and makes all “facts” really simply “recollections.”  Like Titanic. Yes, well, no doubt the two outlaws Mattie interviews at the end of the Coens’ version were bad men in their time–but see? here they are in a western show with Rooster Cogburn. There is no such thing as good and evil: it’s only thinking that makes it so. Everyone gets old and dies; nothing matters.

But the original ends with a freeze frame of Wayne: “Well, come see a fat old man sometime!” as his horse leaps a fence, the camera shooting from the ground up, making Wayne larger than life–which he was.  

So the Coens give us a sigh that means “paths of glory lead but to the grave,” a pretty limp emotional point, but in the original we see the larger-than-life image of a dissolute, ageing, principled loner whose courage and grit in a lawless territory who comes to respect a 14-year-old girl he calls “little sister” because she too has grit. Pointedly, the Coen brothers omit the dialogue by Wayne, “She reminds me of me,” uttered when Mattie and her horse swim the river into Choctaw territory, fearlessly leaving law and her lawyer behind. The famous “jousting” scene in both films is observed by Mattie from a height and distance, but in the original Mattie excitedly says, “True grit? I’ll say!” but in the Coen brothers version she may as well be in the cheap seats at an NBA game. They’ve edited out courage.

When a culture cannot identify evil and questions its own motives, it can no longer identify its enemies.

Yes, there is evil in the world.

Yes, not all claims to virtue are of equivalent value.

Yes, this is what the original westerns taught us—which is why they have gone out of style.

The End of Publishing As We Know It

This week, the Times announced that The New York Times Book Review will soon begin to list Best Selling e-Books.

There will always be books–as luxury items. They look sharp on the living room table and they impress visitors.

But for the kind of texts people read and then donate/resell/lend, who in their right mind would pay $30.00 for a book when they can download the equivalent for $10.00 or $12.00 onto a device that costs $150.00?   Read five books in the first year, it pays for itself.

It’s All Good

Faster, cheaper, and more efficient models trumps dead trees and toxic inks. Prepare to say farewell to an industry so over-inflated with its self-importance and so risk averse that it no longer can afford or want to consider new writers unless they produce “projects” with a waiting audience.

Digitized novels and stories and poetry will stay available literally forever. Writers with small audiences will be able to reach their readers. Small forms–novellas, a cycle of short stories, a poetry chapbook–will have distribution possibilities.

When the music industry found out people were not buying vinyl or CD plastics, there was a lot of noise about professionalism, distribution channels, prestige, etc. The market for new music is youth–totally uninterested in such values, they download digitized songs one at a time, at about the same price that 45 rpm records were sold 50 years ago.

After inflation, that’s about 75% less expensive.

How’d you like to be the person at Columbia Music who used to design album covers or write liner notes?  Remember when bands had fan clubs organized and run by their recording studios? They sent newsletters in the mail–Where o where are my beloved Monkees in June? (And who wrote the newsletters?) MTV videos, part marketing, part art, used to cost a bazillion dollars: now anyone with talent and a videocam posts on YouTube and then market through connectivity via Facebook, MySpace, etc. If you’re a start-up band, you and your buddies make your own stuff and hope to go viral.

Paper is no different from vinyl. Media is media, and media is separate from creative art.

The real ballsy attitude is held by the publishing industry itself, which seeks to embrace the new technologies that outsource so many former publishing functions and the associated intermediary labor onto the creators. “You write it, proofread it, find an agent who will edit it, design it, market it–we’ll sell it!”

And all for a mere 85 percent!!!

Worse…”Build a platform of 30,000 readers of your blog–which you will do for free–gather 100,000 Twitter followers by being clever 5 times per day, and we just might read your book manuscript.”

This is pure chutzpah.

What Next?

With every new competitor, the price of the Kindle drops. My bet is on the Barnes and Noble Nook–due for release next week. It’s the first to have color, allows lending, works on Google’s Android system, and is smaller than the iPad.  That means children’s books and graphic novels. Imagine–you have three kids and are going camping for two weeks.  Hmmm…Say, Martha, shall we carry homework, reading, and entertainment on a 7 oz. device or shall we tote 14 lbs. of books for Sally, Billy, and Junior?

Sucky Social Networking

As the means for digital distribution penetrate the market, more and more people will ask, “What’s good to read?”

The social networking models don’t work well. The metrics of popularity rule social networking. If that were accurate for books, fundamentalist religious tracts and pornography would dominate publishing, as they do, online. Book readers want a trusted source and authority. This doesn’t mean an advanced degree: what it means is a reviewer who consistently is honest, accurate, and plugged-in. Trust is earned, not granted.

Audiences will find their communities the many serious blogs that intelligently review books. What in a brick-and-mortar bookstore passes for genre is online already a network of niche-targeted blogs. Gay and Lesbian? Women’s Books? Action-Adventure? Sci-Fi? There are associated book blogs, reviewing and recommending with sincerity and ability.  Compare that to the clerk at my local bookstore whose qualification for the job is talent at steaming milk.

Prediction

The first electronic reader that sews up the college and post-graduate textbook market will end publishing as we know it.  Why pay thousands for a law library when for a fraction of the price you can carry it in your briefcase–and it will be searchable, as well. Those lovely color plates in Gray’s Anatomy—why look at them on coated paper stock?

Someone go to midtown Manhattan and stick a fork in their asses; turn them over. They are done.

Privacy Now!

Despite two American wars and a financial community that makes the corruption of the Court of the Tang Dynasty seem like a Girl Scout Troop meeting in Beverly Hills, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal has devoted a multi-part investigative series to the issue of privacy. The Journal, the champion of the business community,  is shocked– shocked!–to learn that in the digital age many “free” services are supplied to Internet users by websites that harvest information!
In the spirit of those revelations, we present this plan:

Take immediate measures!

1. Pry the address numbers loose from your home’s front porch and your mailbox. Remember, scammers from Nigeria are eager to send you a letter. Why tell them where you live?

2. Drape all of your windows with opaque materials. Draw those curtains closed. Why allow spies to see what you own?

3. Blindfold  house guests. Innocent chatter  about your possessions, your children, or your marital arrangements without your knowledge may be overheard by unscrupulous individuals.

4. Feign poverty. Take a sledge to your car, paint one door a different color than the rest, eradicate out at least two digits on your license plate, place trash on your front lawn. Why invite identification?

5. Never use your credit card to purchase food, drugs, gasoline, lodging, or any service. Unscrupulous banks will  stuff unwanted ads into envelopes along with your bills, ads designed to take advantage of your purchasing patterns. It’s no one’s business but your own.

6. When in public or using any cell phone, address your children by code names.

7. Register your children at public schools under false names; use a false address. Colleges and the armed forces will eventually try to recruit your kids. Never tell them where you live.

8. Take a hammer to your GPS, cell phone or tool-booth transponder.  What could you be thinking?

9. Quit your job. Someone is sure to ask you for your social security number.

10. Whether you are male or female, wear false facial hair in all places where there might be cameras, especially at your bank or any ATM machine. Why ask for grief? Remove your disguise  only before your spouse, if you dare.

© Perry Glasser

The Credo – Worth Repeating

In 1992 I wrote,

“I write out of certain convictions no longer universally accepted and, in some circles, under attack; that the purpose of the Arts is to illuminate and enrich the human experience; that however dark, unknown, changing and inchoate, a universal human experience exists; that human experience can and even must be communicated across the lines of our obvious physical differences; that the product of the Artist must be readily accessible to an audience; and that while the expression of the Artist embodies the essence of a time, the Artist speaks to and for an audience beyond that.”

Still seems true.

But you know you are in trouble when you quote yourself.

Student Suicides

The feedback I am getting from former students who are reading the newly published, Stairway to Heaven – Led Zeppelin: A Riff on Love, has been touching.  They remember Anita, Beth and Michael, as do I.

The piece has been on  my computer for many years, evidently too potent or sad for many magazines, so a special tip o’ the fedora to Richard Murphy, the guest editor for Ekleksographia, Wave Three, The Boston Issue.

Yet More Men Don’t Read

I do not argue with numbers, but the publishing industry’s “wisdom”  that men do not read is based on simple statistical surveys, especially among people who read more than ten books in a year.

At issue is why this should be true. Perhaps the market does not supply men with books worth their time.

Publishing is dominated by women who came of age  and were educated in elite schools where gender politics is blood sport.  Educated by ardent feminists, the notion of “quality” is divorced from pure literary judgment to one of political efficacy.  Political efficacy means the exertion of power, and power is the ability to make others do one’s bidding. Quality, therefore, in those elite classes, becomes intertwined with whether a writer serves a political cause, that cause being the elevation of women.

There’s nothing wrong with elevating the social perception of women in America, not when disparities in salary and status still abounds. The cause is a good one.  I write as father to a daughter.

However, subverting art to social ends has never produced great art. Soviet Realism comes to mind, approved authors and those whose work was circulated by samizdat, the kinds of apparatchiks  who found Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova unacceptable because they did not adhere to a party line. Unfortunately, a  number of less-than-clear thinking champions of feminism cannot imagine how to promote an agenda without recourse to one of two awful strategies:

• male bashing
• claims of victimization

Neither of these stratagems elevate the perception of women–they do keep men out of bookstores. And, as Katie Roiphe pointed out in  The New York Times Book Review in January this year, a generation of male American writers have simply denied male sexuality — as a stratagem to be published at all.

In publishing, therefore, among the elite school A students now executives, a “good” book is one that adheres to a party line:

• depicts men abusing women, or
• one that is about a woman victimized by a man,
• or one that shows men behaving badly, or
• one that depicts a man passively devoted to a dynamic woman.

The question needs asking whether “men don’t read” is a “fact” in publishing because the industry lacks the imagination to publish books that show men as they are.  A “man’s book” turns out to be software for film–action, adventure–pot-boilers with no real insight to character and how we–all of us–live in our time.

Give men books worth reading, and they will buy books.   Give us John Irving and Richard Russo and Kent Haruf and Ian McEwan and Michael Chabon. Give us Tim O’Brien and Ron Hansen and Ron Carlson. Give us short fiction with plots.  Give us poets like Sydney Lea and Mark Doty.

I’ll see you in the bookstore.

More: Men Don’t Read

The Pulitzer Prize went to Paul Harding for his debut novel, Tinkers. Harding’s novel  is published by Bellevue Literary Press, an organization so small their website asks for donations: and, yes, Virginia, they are associated with the NY hospital known for its psycho wards.

Gasp! No “platform”?? How could such a book succeed? The book was never reviewed by the NY Times.  Imagine that.

Tinkers is about the elegantly written memories of a dying grandfather.  Melancholy and quiet, the Pulitzer citation reads, “a powerful celebration of life in which a New England father and son, through suffering and joy, transcend their imprisoning lives and offer new ways of perceiving the world and mortality.”

The two cited finalists were short story collections, one by Lydia Millet, the other by Daniyal Mueenuddin.

The artistic bankruptcy of major publishing is taking readers–and prestige–elsewhere.

Men Don’t Read

The prevailing wisdom on Publisher’s Row is that men don’t read, don’t buy books, and that the only reason your average red-blooded American male will visit a bookstore is to buy some nonfiction, maybe a manual about tools, if he can tear his eyes away long enough from the Tivo.

The prevailing gurus may have to think again. The first week after its release, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War by Karl Marlantes was #7 on the NY Times Best Seller list. This week, it “sinks” to #10.  Marlantes served with distinction as a US Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. Only slightly less courageous is the fact that it took him 30 years to write the novel, a book now earning raves as a work of art and as a tight read.

Someone is giving Tim O’Brien a run for his money.

First, a tip o’ the fedora to Grove/Atlantic, the company that defied the prevailing wisdom and simultaneously published the book in hardcover and in an e-book edition Second, let’s ask the Skidmore interns now sipping mocha lattes in every publishing office just who they believe is buying the book.

Could it be that Baby Boomer men have not drifted into drooling senility quite yet? Perhaps they constitute a significant part of the reading public, have money in their pockets to spend, but have grown tired of trade paperbacks bound in pink with a required blurb that reads, hysterical! one joke about menstruation,  gay male friend, and a required lesbian who is eminently reasonable with a wry sense of humor. Oh–and shoes. What’s a novel without shoes?

Now, I would not point this out just because I have a novel shopping for an agent, and I’d never mention that I also have 300 pages of unified memoirs that have all seen publication and sort of, kind of, are about coming of age as a Boomer but cannot get the book read because it lacks a platform. Not rejected, mind you—never read. Maybe I should retitle it: First You Eat Your Heart Out; Then You Start Over In Indonesia.

No, wait, that’s already a bestseller: I’d better leave it alone. After all, publishing is a business, and everyone knows that middle-aged men don’t read.