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.

Dangerous Places – Virginia Quarterly Review

Spring 2010

Dangerous Places, by Perry Glasser. BkMk Press, $16.95 paper

These six stories set in the Midwest and New York City feature wildly diverse characters bound by one commonality–that their ordinary lives are made extraordinary by sudden, dangerous circumstances. In the first piece, “An Age of Marvels and Wonders,“ the elderly narrator, resigned to a life disappearing before him, falls in love with a young woman. When confronted by her jailbird ex-husband, the old man uses deadly violence to protect her. His life changes, becoming more hopeful and urgent. In “Fishhook,“ we watch a college student spy on a thief at his summer job. And when the thief brings his son shoplifting with him, he gives the student, and the reader, a closer look at what it takes to get the heart beating harder. If there’s one message here, it’s that danger, in all its manifestations, introduces excitement into our suburban existence. We are thrilled by the spectacle of it, and then shocked by its realness. And that’s Glasser’s goal, to get us closer to the realness. He asks us to consider the lives his characters lead. He lets us listen to the sound of their blood flowing, and then asks if it really sounds different from our own.

—Lee Clay Johnson

Blowing my Own Horn…Just a Bit

On January 28th, referring to the iPad I wrote a blog entry that ended: “Make no mistake, this is a game-changer.”

Walter Mossberg in today’s Wall Street Journal reviews the iPad and calls it a “Game Changer.”

It will change a lot of things: computing, reading habits, publishing.

In today’s news, also note that the end of Amazon’s monopoly means a fairer shake for writers–the cost of a Kindle book dowload is going from $9.00 to $12.00. You’ll be carrying feature films, books, magazines, your email, your kids’ photos, search engines and all the rest on a decice that fits in your briefcase, weighs next to nothing, and has an 11 hour battery.

Does it have room to improve?

Of course! Will the improvement be soon? You betcha.

Call your broker.

Who Is Your Daddy? – Amazon Blinks

 Amazon blinked this morning. 

Amazon pulled Macmillan — e-books and paper–because Macmillan smelled blood in the water and circled in for a bite at more profit. Macmillan stood its ground. As of this morning, Amazon is selling Macmillan titles once again.

Anyone under the impression that publishing is a game for ladies and gentlemen with high artistic ambitions is invited for a swim in the shark tank.

Until two weeks ago, the only serious game in town for electronic distribution was Amazon’s Kindle. With the announcement that Apple and its iPad hadcast an eye on Amazon’s lunch, Macmillan stirred, smiled its biggest teeth, and asked, “Who is your Daddy?”

Amazon had set a price designed to push the Kindle into the market, creating a de facto monopoly. At ten bucks per Kindle title, a lot of readers were excited, publishers were thinking about moving to smaller quarters and writer—always at the bottom of the food chain—were asking their spouses to remind them exactly why they had just spent three years writing that book. Amazon was selling their work for less than it costs a family of four to dine at Mickey D’s.

Writers still need publishers, but it’s hard for this writer to be terribly sympathetic to the publisher’s despair at e-books. Those of us born prior to last week recollect when the publishing world boasted dozens of publishing houses (nearly all in Manhattan between Gramercy Park and 59^th Street). But globalization has consolidated publishing in the US to a meager five corporations. Sorry, Bunky, you may think you see dozens of imprints on the spines of books, but 90 percent of all books are published by only a very few companies.

They are:

• Hachette Book Group (owned by French company Hachette Livre)
• HarperCollins
• Macmillan
• Penguin Group
• Random House (subsidiary of media conglomerate, Bertelsmann)
• Simon & Schuster

(with thanks to  John Brown)

 This is one sorry-ass state of affairs. Are you looking for book-people?

HarperCollins belongs to Rupert Murdoch— “nuff said.

S&S, wirh 20+ imprints (remember Atheneum? Pocket Books? Scribner?) is a subsidiary of National Amusements, a privately held company whose most lucrative assets are movie theaters.

The Penguin Group is really part of Pearson; if you want to know what a “group” looks like, take a peek at this Wikipedia page—go ahead, we won’t tell your teacher.

Bertelsmann, the book behemoth, is converting dollars to deutschemarks with titles from Knopf, Anchor, Doubleday, Dial Press and Modern Library, all companies once headquartered on the Eastside in the 50s (that’s how New Yorkers locate themselves).   

Meanwhile, on the Internet, small presses grow like kudzu.

Izzat the future?

Watch this space.

Writers in the Middle

Suppose you hanker to read the expose of John Edwards, presidential candidate, homemade porno-star, and general shit-heel. No one would blame you for not wanting to be seen in public buying this ephemeral bit of ordure, but if your plan was to read it on your Kindle or have it shipped in a plain brown box to your door from Amazon—you need a new plan.

For book people, that game this Sunday in Miami is the second most interesting competition around. Faster than a runaway Toyota, we are seeing the book biz rules rewritten by the imminent introduction of the iPad.

Once the only serious game in town, Amazon and its Kindle dictated the price for reader content, and at $10.00 per book, publishers saw their dreams of villas in Europe and Ivy League educations for their kids transform to damp rented condos at the Jersey Shore and Sallie Mae loan packages to attend State U.

But before a single iPad has been sold, on the mere threat of the announcement of a Kindle competitor, big-ass Apple has the book biz dancing like mice in electrified cages.

Earlier this week, Macmillan reopened talks with Amazon. The subject was its pricing policies. Macmillan wants more money.

Amazon retaliated. Oh, the temerity! It stopped selling all Macmillan titles. Not just e-books. If you want to find out how big a scumbag John Edwards really is, you may need to drive to a bookstore (don’t take the Toyota).

You might also try the third largest bookstore in the US: Books-A-Million which—oddly—is featuring Macmillan titles.

Amazon’s grief is just begun. It seems that another publisher, Hachette, is reopening talks with Amazon. Those are the French folks who bought Time-Warner and Little Brown.

Jeff Bezos, CEO and founder of Amazon, must feel like Darth Vader in the Death Star just as the Rebellion’s pesky Tie Fighters started buzzing around like gnats.

Writers are, for now, caught in the middle. After all, if you are a Macmillan author, the world’s largest bookstore is not selling your title; if Macmillan has just published your book, and you are in that critical first six weeks of sales, then you are hurting indeed. The business will shake out in the long run, with a better shake for readers who will have choices, and writers and publishers who will get more for their work, but in the short run, writers are getting squeezed.

That seems a damn shame.

The A-Wars – If Apple and Amazon Duke It Out, Can Google Be Far Behind?

It’s about publishing, stupid.

The forthcoming iPad vs Kindle war will have two definite winners—readers and publishers. The allies are taking sides quickly. The Wall Street Journal noted today that Apple is signing up textbook publishers, just as this column predicted just last week. And today’s NY Times notes that Amazon just scoped up a small company that manufactures…wait for it..wait for it…state of the art touch screens.  What’s a Giant Kindle gonna cost?

 The iPad is indeed a game-changer.

 Textbooks are the golden river of publishing—forced sales of expensive books to an audience that renews annually, and in the Kindle division of Amazon they are slapping their foreheads…Color! Textbooks! Duuuuuuhhhh….what were we thinking?

 So readers can expect in just months to be able to buy an electronic reading device at lower and lower prices—competition does that. Expect richer functionality, more bells and whistles to prop up a price point, and then collapsing prices. A lot is at stake: the electronic publishing industry last year took in $45 billion; what do you suppose it will take in once e-readers penetrate the market? 

Remember the introduction of the iPod. Do you think the other players are going to stand with their hands in their pockets and allow Apple to develop another  lucrative de facto monopoly? No question: readers come out winners.

Publishing comes up winners, too. For the past few years, chill winds have blown through mid-town Manhattan where publishing lives. The Kindle promised a bleak future for all those former English majors…but now, there will be competition for the product. When Amazon was the sole player, all electronic books cost $10.00. Publishers could take that price or leave it.

But with another player bidding for book rights….which way will the prices go? Expect “exclusives” and package deals as the e-book manufacturers vie for customers by bidding up what they will pay for the privilege of selling titles.

 Readers need not worry—the cost of distributing e-media is so low that the price of books will hit a ceiling—somewhere near where publishers and writers all make enough money to compensate for their work, but without paying for the destruction of forests and toxic inks. Anyone in marketing with half a brain will be shooting for the youth market: next Christmas, the Complete Harry Potter or Twilight is going to be in a lot of brand new e-readers under a lot fo trees, and the set will cost a lot less than the print editions. Sfter that, our 12-yer-old reader will be downloading, and dowloading, and downloading….what right thinking Mom and Dad will deny their darling device that make reading fun and cool?  and if they can get some sort of social networking onto the iPad or Kindle…Katie, bar the door, ’cause th habits of a generation are going to change.

 The 500 lb. gorilla in the room is—as usual—Google. You remember Google…the search engine company that somehow became an advertizing company that now is making telephones. Oh, did I mention that are scanning everything ever written anywhere by anybody—and that it is searchable?

Will Google be supplying content to Amazon or Apple or…here’s a safe bet..are they thinking about ways  to serve up their own? They own the books; they have the telephony systems…

Let the warfare begin.

e-Books and iPads and Kindles, O My!

Last week this column called the iPad a game-changer, and this morning’s news confirms that. It seems Macmillan Company, one of the five publishers left standing, is renegotiating its prices for electronic books with Amazon. Details are as yet unavailable, but you can be sure this is bad news for readers and better news for publishers.

There is gloom at Amazon. Once the only serious game in town, at $10 per book, it seems Macmillian will be partnering with Apple clout to raise the price to $12 – $15. This is not the way competition is supposed to go, but despite it’s anti-establishment ads and positioning itself as the computer company for the rest of us, Apple enjoys monopolistic pricing practices, and always has. Buy an Apple computer, you are into Apple printers. Once Apple monopolized the music business, songs went from $.99 to $1.29. Even Wal-Mart could not compete. The chubby uncool guy and the sleek tieless cool guy in the Apple ads both have teeth filed to points–it’s just that Apple has persuaded a generation of naive users into thinking they are hip while forking over 20 percent premiums.

Significantly, analysts under 40 fail to grasp the more significant story, which is that Apple has trained it eye on a new market segment. Actually, make that an old market segment.

Baby Boomers are the new black.

Having conquered the tattooed, pierced, over-medicated generation that knows no individual identity and breaks into cold sweats and loses sphincter control without constant connectivity, Steve Jobs and the innovative elves and designer fairies of Cupertino have noticed that the largest segment of the consumer population is still the Boomers.

Balding, sagging, wheezing, squinting and bewildered, Boomers are limping into old age with money in their pockets. Clueless, inept and RICH.

Hordes of geeks who spurn the iPad because it has no camera and does not allow multitasking need to take another dose of Ritalin and lie down. Breath slowly.  The iPad is NOT FOR YOU. Just speed dial your therapist—a new ‘script will get you through the crisis. Being extricated from the universe’s center is relatively painless.

The iPad is not “just” a big iPhone, nor is it a hot piece of technology for which goons without lives will line up to buy before its release. The price point is designed to seduce the technologically less-savvy into taking a plunge. Steve Jobs is selling digital crack to Boomers—and they are going to like it. The iPad is an inexpensive device large enough for failing eyes to read, watch a video, and store handsome pictures of the grandkids. It fits in a briefcase or big purse. There is going to be a market in neoprene shoulder slings.

Boomers are tired of paying $30.00 for bad books; they are weary of chain bookstores that are incapable to catering to niche markets. They are tired of bookstore clerks who do not read. They want the community that is online—they now will have the device that makes access easy.

Publishing will be wiped out in about the same amount of time it took the iPod to blow up the music business. After that, TV is not far behind.

Feel the temblor?