So if you’re a newspaper and you’re contemplating this whole “How do I make money in the digital age?” question, a new consortium with Yahoo might yield surprising results — assuming that the good folks at Editor & Publisher aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid here. A Deutsche Bank analyst suggests that this deal could generate positive revenue for newspapers. If this is true, are newspapers dead? Or are the times (and, of course, the format) a-changing?
When I’m not so busy, remind me to dredge up some experiential data sometime to support the fact that Garth Hallberg is not a nice man and has been known to chow down on leftover human kidneys from time to time.
To the four people who sent me the article, hoping that I’d get riled up: Nope, ain’t going to link to it. Bigger fish to fry.
Richard Russo’s reading recommendations create films!
Audible has launched its first crime serial. The series, entitled The Purloined Podcast, involves the murder of a Web 2.0 company executive by an angry listener who gets a bill for audio files he expected to download for free.
Heaven forfend! Books are too depressing. Middle-school reading lists need to have happier books. Because 14-year-olds simply can’t handle verisimilitude. According to Mary Collins, who is actually an assistant professor of creative writing, Shirley Jackson was “lazy” for writing “The Lottery.” Never mind that this short story is a pitch-perfect example of the use of irony in fiction. Never mind that if you keep pushing the standards about what is offensive further, that it’s a zero sum game. (via The Valve, which has a more measured response to this nonsense than me)
It seems a no brainer, but girlie covers are putting some boys off books. Personally, I’d like to see a few “girly” books with macho covers thrown into the marketplace as an experiment. Imagine a Jennifer Weiner book with Vin Diesel and an exploding tower on the cover. Maybe this is what it might take to change some perceptions.
The Internet is set to overtake television as the largest medium by 2010. Which makes me wonder why the NBCC doesn’t form a strategic alliance, Survivor-style, with the television medium to take out all these online upstarts who are apparently responsible for the crisis in book reviewing. A few strategically thrown grenades and Ciabattari and Freeman can take out Newton, Esposito, Asher, and that obnoxious Ed Champion guy in a few hours. Terrorism, you say? Not at all. This is the only way to resolve a crisis.
Now here’s a fragrance that will really make you want to go down on something. (via Smart Bitches)
Was Robert Altman’s Popeyeunfairly maligned? (And for what it’s worth, I like Popeye. Not the least or the greatest film, but enjoyable on its own merits. If you want to talk nadir of Altman’s career, try Ready to Wear.)
John Rickards has a few choice words about Second Life author appearances. And I have to agree. Unless you’ve written Flying Dolphin Cock and Other Virtual Fiction, you have no business making an author appearance in Second Life.
The 1950s issues of Playboy will be released as a DVD archive on November 2. Persona Non Data talks with Bondi Digital Publishing about how this happened. Bondi is also responsible for the New Yorker DVD-ROMs. Hopefully, they have improved the clunky interface.
Stage lights flashing / The feeling’s smashing / My heart and soul belong to you / And I’m here now, singing / All bells are ringing / My dream has finally come true
I wasn’t able to make it to last night’s panel, for I had a far more important conversation to participate in. But Levi has a report on the seventieth discussion this month on the crisis in book reviewing. For what it’s worth, I don’t believe you’ll be finding a lot of serious criticism in the NYTBR so long as a humorless and condescending tool like Sam Tanenhaus is editor.
Yo, NPR, how about a little fucking headline clarity? Exit Ghost ain’t the last Roth novel, but the last Zuckerman novel. Unless this was a skillful ploy to get us to click over.
PFD and ivory. Work together in perfect disharmony.
First Committee Purges: “James Flint and Hari Kunzru are expelled as they have become complicit with a publishing industry whereby the ‘writer’ becomes merely the executor of a brief dictated by corporate market research, reasserting the certainties of middle-brow aesthetics (‘issues’ of ‘contemporary culture’, ‘post-colonial identity’ etc.) under the guise of genuine creative speculation.” It appears that Tom McCarthy is running a very important organization.
The National Post, which ain’t exactly the bastion of liberal thought, devoted a series of columns devoted to attacking Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine. But here’s the funny thing. They also paid for excerpts of Klein’s book, essentially paying Klein dinero to slam her to the ground. So who’s influencing whom? (via Bookninja)
Facebookers are all narcissists! And other ways of overthinking social networks.
In fact, when I type in a sentence like “X on Y,” I cannot help but think of randy intellectuals twitching lustily between sheets. But there appears to be no better shortcut in the English language to describe one person writing about another. I have similar problems with the phrase “in conversation with” (two prepositions!), which suggests a needlessly formal way of simply saying “talking with.” Apparently, “talking” is not good enough. One must be “in conversation with” in order to say anything intelligent, uplifting, or otherwise seminal to the human species. But very often, the people I find “in conversation with” another tend to be full of hot air. (In fact, when a person is telling you at a party, “I’m having a conversation with so-and-so,” a not so veiled way of telling you that you don’t matter and that you should go away very soon because you’re not all that interesting, it’s quite a rude thing, isn’t it?) Perhaps these various organizations avoid direct verbs because what’s being celebrated here is not so much two people talking with each other, but two people being “in conversation with” each other. Meaning that, due to legal reasons or other factors, an institution cannot promise something as vivacious as “talking.” Meaning that an event billing itself with the “in conversation with” moniker may very well be boring. Meaning that the audience members are not part an important part of the experience, because one of the participants is essentially saying to them, “I’m having a conversation with so-and-so.” Please shut up and listen. Pontifications are the order of the day.
And while I’m quibbling over this subject, I should point out that I try never to say that I am “talking to” someone, but that I’m “talking with” someone. “Talking to” implies that you are speaking down to them. “Talking with” implies a shared conversational experience, which is more human, when you get right down to it. Then again, I’m usually the guy at the party who is introducing people to others. (Aha! Another trap! Should I not be introducing people with others? Well, in this case, I can’t, because it sounds wrong.)
To paraphrase Groucho Marx, we’re going to speed things up here. If a blog readership orders a one-hour roundup, I’ll give it to them in twenty minutes. If they order a twenty minute roundup, I’ll give it them in ten minutes. If they order a ten minute roundup, I’ll give them my RSS feeds and let it work out for themselves. Time is limited. So here goes.
Dan Green on the “marketplace of ideas” nomen. Since I have moved to New York, I have been contending more and more with people who view books as nothing more than a commodity and are not well-read and more taken with scarfing down canapes and free drinks at junkets than engaging with authors and books on even a remotely intellectual level. Even accounting for the reality that publishing is an industry, Dan’s words are well worth considering.
I don’t see anything particularly wrong with the Harvard Classics approach to education, but is five minutes a day really enough time to take in a classic?