X-Mas Present: Everything You Always Wanted to Ask David Gates About Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories…
…and there were a lot of things you wanted to ask, because Gates’s intro is one of if not the best single essays ever written about DB’s work, so you figured he’d probably have done a pretty sweet job on the notes, too, but for some reason it wasn’t in the Gates-prefaced Penguin Classics Edition of Sixty Stories where it should have been, and you knew it was supposed to be posted somewhere on the Penguin website (it says so in the book) but then when you went to the website you couldn’t find it.
If this is you, friend, your troubles end today. Here. Now. I went to the Penguin site, and found the thing–years ago. It’s amazing and enlightening and it’s over 30 pages long. And I had forgotten about it until just now. Everyone should have access to these notes. Rather than try and re-figure out how I found them, I’m just going to post the .pdf myself: The David Gates footnotes to Donald Barthelme’s Sixty Stories. Merry Christmas, all.
Thousands Already Sold
Thousands of what, you ask? Thousands of TweetBookz.
That’s right. It’s exactly what it sounds like.
From the about page:
Our concept for TweetBookz is to bring content as short-lengthed and short-lived as tweets to the “serious” world of books.
($30 a hardcover and $20 a paperback)
The FAQ page is even better:
Is there a minimum number of tweets I need to have? How small can the books be?
You need at least one tweet that we can print and books are printed with a minimum of 20 pages (holding 40 tweets). If you have fewer than 40 tweets we will fill in the rest with nicely designed blank pages.
Shouldn’t that say “nicely designed” blank pages?
Recoup
I have a question.
Here in this video, Sherman Alexie compares digital books to digital music, and says that now, all musicians need to make their money touring instead of by selling records:
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Sherman Alexie | ||||
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Please correct me if I’m wrong here, musicians: most artists never see much money from their recordings. And they didn’t even long before the internet made wide-scale file sharing possible. Because they couldn’t recoup the costs of the recordings they made to their record labels. (Doug Wolk linked to this little post by a member of the band Too Much Joy recently. They still owe nearly $400,000 to Warner before they will ever see a penny of royalties.)
The analogy simply doesn’t hold. If you are making a principled stand based on a false analogy, what then?
Adam Robinson—
Via The Reading Experience, here’s Alan Kaufman’s harebrained essay on the death of the physical book.
Oh man, I’m going to miss bookstores too, but this guy is just a nut. He says, “The book is fast becoming the despised Jew of our culture. Der Jude is now Der Book.”
I used to think snowboarding wasn’t going to last but it’s like 15 years later and people are still doing it and everyone is about the same amount of happiness.
17
eBooks are probably going to pass away within 10 years
There is no way to sustain interest in reading Catch-22 online. But does eBook also refer to handheld readers like the Nook (whick looks to kill the Kindle)? Cuz I dunno but those things might catch on.
Anyway, Jane Friedman, who used to be the head of HarperCollins but got retired, just started a company called Open Road Integrated Media with the guy who made the movies You Can Count on Me and Boys Don’t Cry (fuckin ICK) (JK). They’re like millionaires or whatever and their plan is to release 750-1000 eBooks next year. Their strategy is to use an unnamed platform to promote the titles on blogs and Twitter. Read about it at NYTimes.
Really what they are is a content marketing system. They’re “publishing” old books which are, you know, like already typed up and stuff, and maybe mostly public domain (I dunno), and don’t need to be manufactured etc — so it’s pretty smart of them to recognize the real work is in marketing the titles. Their secret marketing discovery is the real story. They call it a “multi-platform universe.”
And they’re going to offer self-publishing services. So POD is now ePOD. I think what this means is you send them your book as a PDF (designed to their specs) and they’ll plug it into their doohickey and put you out there for consumption. Which seems like a weird doublething, if you try to think of them as a publisher. Which is how I think of people who put out stories by William Styron and Pat Conroy. But then if they also publish my self-published book, either my book isn’t self-published or they aren’t publishers.
Which I guess is why they call themselves a content marketing company.
Which I guess is just another kiss farewell to doing books with editors and junk.
So maybe not in 10 years, but someday we’re all going to die. In the meantime I’m going to go reread Heidegger’s essay “The Thing,” which I’m sure I can find online somewhere.
“It’s moving around for the light”
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DRZeZySKS0
Justin Taylor—
Here’s Cory Doctorow on Boing Boing, introducing this Guardian article about the Kindle. (Link clicks through to the Guardian piece.)
Everything Is Everything
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ym0LaSAn5n8
Man, I sure am loving Mean Week!
happiness hat from Lauren McCarthy on Vimeo.
How about you?
Magic Mouse: In search of the G-spot
I’m probably not the right person to be talking about the G-spot; the only G that I ever found was during Scrabble, and I lost that game to a girl. I suppose men, in general, fare less well in many regards, especially concerning the subconscious manual inadequacies brought upon by Apple’s latest technology. Apple’s genius is making unnecessary things seem imperative. I often feel deprived for not having the internet in my pocket.
As the diagram shows, a man rubs away — perplexed by a complicated system — until he gets a response. This, of course, is a metaphor: our notion of self-worth as mediated by sexual prowess (in adolescence) and consumerist savvy (in adulthood). Someone is always telling us that if we could just do this one thing — fuck, posses (respectively) — then we’d be happy. I’m not against Apple, I just think they propagate an unexamined idea of “efficiency.”
Just look at the line waiting to get in the MAC store before the glass doors open. It’s like church, only more expensive. The men enter looking excited yet pensive, hoping that they’ll know what button does what.