Magazines have long pulled the ignoble trick of getting their subscribers to sign on for multiple years, suggesting with repeated correspondence and feverish pitches that subscriptions are in jeopardy when there’s still plenty of time to renew. And if you’re a person (like me), who subscribes to about six billion periodicals, then you send in your check on impulse, only to find that you’ve unexpectedly signed on for another two and a half years.

(I won’t name names, but I’ll just say that certain magazine empires are even more egregious than this. When the magazine folds after a handful of issues, they don’t even bother to refund a partial amount to their subscribers unless the subscriber calls them. But most of them forget and, of course, take their sweet time in sending out the checks.)

But Wired‘s treatment of its subscribers takes the cake. Apparently, Wired assumes that if a subscriber doesn’t renew his subscription, then the magazine automatically assumes that the subcriber wants to renew. If there is no written notice provided by the subscriber, they sic the North Shore Agency, a major debt-collection firm, upon the reluctant renewer.

One San Francisco resident, Bob McMillan, received a variety of letters reading “Request for Payment” and “Account Status: Delinquent.” (A sample letter can be found here.)

There is no doubt in my mind that Boing Boing will not mention any of this. After all, all of its authors contribute regularly to Wired. This seems hypocritical to me, considering how EFF-friendly and pro-individual they present themselves to be.

Further, Wired isn’t the only one doing this. One subscriber reports that PC Magazine has been nebulous about the number of times the magazine is published and automatically renewed his subscription without his permission. Another blogger experienced a Kafkaesque moment when he was hassled on the phone by Time. (See the May 28, 2005 entry.) (And interestingly enough, the Time Inc. Magazine Group was the subject of a multi-state investigation into their subscription practices two years ago.)

Apparently, Wired is able to do this through direct-mail solicitations that contain a clause in fine print — what is sometimes referred to as advanced consent marketing. But are these clauses clear and conspicuous enough to the magazine subscriber. Even the MPA notes that magazine subsciptions have guidelines, subject to Federal Trade Commission regulations:

The customer must take an action to demonstrate affirmative consent, such as checking a box, affixing a stamp, pushing a number on a telephone keypad, pushing a key on a computer keyboard, clicking a mouse, giving an oral response, or returning an order form. The customer should have all the material terms of the sale, disclosed in a clear and conspicuous manner, prior to taking the action demonstrating affirmative consent.

The FTC suggests that anyone who has been misled into automatic renewal to contact their state Attorney General or local consumer protection office.

But if automatic renewal has become such a major problem, then perhaps government legislation that upholds the clear and conspicuous consent of a consumer and that enacts substantial fines and punitive damages upon the magazines who mislead their readers is a better answer.

There are two types of people: people who get geeky and groove to Rush and people who don’t. If, like me, you’re one of the former, then you’ll enjoy this eyepopping CGI animation of Peart playing the drums for “YYZ.” (via MeFi)

Solid coverage from The Mumpsimus regarding Readercon:

Jonathan Lethem Samuel R. Delaney said that he read a western story by Theodore Sturgeon that, in the first half, was a beautiful Sturgeon story, and then in the second half was also a beautiful Sturgeon story, but a different one, and the experience of reading this story then made him want to write a western that was more unified but still beautiful, and this impulse was enough to get him thinking about something new to write [I forget what he said it was came out of this — maybe one of the stories in his first collection]. Writing, he said, comes from an urge to write something like someone else who inspired you, or to fix something that you read by someone else.

[UPDATE: It was Delaney, not Lethem. Thanks, Kathryn!]

M. John Harrison: “My gut instinct is that we ought to talk less to each other. Some people think that religion is to blame here. I think it’s something prior to that. I think it’s language. You can’t do religion until you have language. You can’t promise someone ‘freedom’ (Bush) or ‘paradise’ (bin Laden) except with words; those items are labels without a referent. And if I have to read another article by Martin Amis or Ian McEwan — middle class wankers who have never been in harm’s way their whole lives, competing with one another to produce dully clever, middle-aged Britpap about real events; or if I have to hear another soundbite in which Slimy Tony, dressed up in a casual jacket to look ‘hard’, licks the arse of the biggest bully in the global playground by ‘pledging’ himself; or if I have to hear any more investment bankers presenting themselves as wounded martyrs in the ruins of the Church of Money; or if I have to hear another Islamic spokesman misappropriate the words ‘caution’ and ‘evidence’; I think I might fly an aeroplane into something myself. Only so I don’t have to hear words any more. Do you see? I’m fucking sick of words because I’ve spent nearly forty years manipulating people with them for a living, and they don’t come near being the thing itself. All rhetoric, including mine, is empty rhetoric. Every death is a real one.”

More Harrison interviews can be found at Strange Horizons, Cyberdark, and Zone SF. His work is highly recommended.

As if the 9/11 victimhood card being played by politicians to start wars based on fixed intelligence and now being used by priapic reactionaries to prop up London as a fait accompli for living in chronic fear* weren’t bad enough, it seems that the Portland Tribune has seen fit to offer yet another ridiculous article about how 9/11 has made it difficult to finish novels. Here’s what novelist Richard Rinaldi has to say:

“And because so much had changed, I was aware that I�d probably lost a novel, but so what? In the scheme of things it didn�t matter. My options were to just throw it away or put it another city. But my agents were leaning on me to include 9/11. Initially I was very reluctant, but I came around and said, �All right, I�ll give it a try.� “

For those who haven’t been watching the calendar, 9/11 was three and a half fucking years ago. In other words, most of the time it takes to finish an undergraduate degree (assuming that you’re on the four year plan).

While certainly 9/11 has changed American life, I’m disheartened by the idea that a novel itself must completely change or drastically alter its content to reflect the jingoism of its time. Particularly when authors are, for the most part, paid a pittance to sweat over a novel that they’ve labored over for many years. The thing that matters is what the author has to say at the time he writes it. Wrapping a novel around the American flag or a sense of victimhood that will date poorly is hypocritical to the nature of art, and I would argue that it’s akin to a total sellout. Do we really need a marketplace saturated with potboilers that represent today’s answers to Peter Bryant’s Red Alert? Further, is a literary effort truly literature if it answers to the dicta of what’s hot with the public? Besides, from a marketing standpoint, this seems anathema to the nature of publishing, given that a book undergoes a two-year production process and attitudes are likely to change.

Technorati Tags: publishing, artistic integrity, Richard Rinaldi, jingoism, sellout

* — For more on this subject, Ian McEwan has penned an essay for the Guardian on how the London bombings were inevitable.