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Monday, January 24
Book-Selling, Yin & Yang
Bringing a meandering and pessimistic essay on the British book industry and Penguin's wharehouse troubles to a close, John Sutherland (banned from writing any more about the Booker, and so presumably looking elsewhere for material) concludes,
After the cyberglobal dust settles it won't be Amazon or any other of the webstores which comes out on top. Despite its web address, Jeff Bezos's outfit functions as an old-fashioned middleman. They add a surcharge of up to 40% for "handling" the product. Web-based publishers can do that themselves, direct-delivering from their warehouse. Two things are necessary: getting their act together and a state-of-the-art mega-sized warehousing system.The Independent, meanwhile, tackles the subject of Amazon.com from another angle: "In the age of Amazon and the chains, the small independent bookshop is at risk. But is this necessarily a bad thing?"
Despite the hiccup, Penguin has thought ahead. In future, he who warehouses best will sell best.
Whitbread, Feeling Left Out, Finds Itself a Controversy
Usually, GC's output lacks any theme less general than "the book industry," or maybe just "books." But today's posts have, somehow, accumulated a clear theme, and, at this point, I'm just going to roll with it.
Contributing to yet another post about often controversial literary honors, the Independent reports that "the Whitbread is under fire after one of the year's best novels, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, turned out to be ineligible."
Contributing to yet another post about often controversial literary honors, the Independent reports that "the Whitbread is under fire after one of the year's best novels, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, turned out to be ineligible."
Whitbread rules dictate that a writer has to have been living in the UK or Ireland for at least six months of each of the previous three years. Mitchell had until recently been living in Japan. Both Salman Rushdie and Martin Amis, who has been writing his new book in Uruguay, would probably find themselves excluded. Last year's Whitbread chair, Joan Bakewell, says it is time to review the rules while Dan Franklin at Jonathan Cape, which publishes Rushdie and Amis, said: "I'm used to the fact that half of our writers aren't eligible. I've just accepted it."So, to rephrase: the Whitbread may soon review its rules and publishers are used to their writers' ineligibility. If I lived on the other side of the pond, maybe I'd see the drama. Either way, the award year isn't over yet for Cloud Atlas, thanks to the decidedly less nationalistic NBCC. (The days of wild betting on Cloud Atlas, though, probably are.)
MacArthurs, Mathematically Unverified (Updated)
Noting my quote-unquote love for quantitative studies (see: "Controversial Books, Mathematically Verified"), Sam -- of the Chicago-based lit blog Golden Rule Jones -- brings an interesting article from today's Crain's Chicago Business to my attention. According to Crain's analysis of past MacArthur Fellowships, 88% of the 31 writers chosen since 1981 as MacArthur Fellows "had already hit their artistic peak." After winning Fellowships, critical recognition (judged by the number of Pulitzers, NBAs, NBCCs, and Pen/Faulkners received), as well as output, declined -- contradicting the MacArthur Program's stated intention -- confirmed by program director Daniel Socolow -- to award Fellowships not as "a reward for past accomplishment, but rather [as] an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential."
The report goes on to paint Socolow as the prize world's Mr Magoo -- amusing for some, unbearable for most:
The report goes on to paint Socolow as the prize world's Mr Magoo -- amusing for some, unbearable for most:
In an interview, [Socolow] was surprised, but not terribly troubled, to hear that creative breakthroughs fall off after winning a MacArthur. The awards come with no strings attached and no real follow-up by the foundation.And, further down in the article:
"I haven't seen anything from anyone that has led me to be disappointed," Mr. Socolow says, "primarily because I haven't followed (the recipients) too closely."
In the early 1990s, the MacArthur Foundation asked Richard Evans, principal of New York-based Emc.Arts, a consulting firm to non-profit arts groups, to review its fellows nomination process. He concluded that the system was "uneven and didn't lead to a consistent approach to discovering writers of talent earlier in their career."Such "lack of curiosity and follow-up," Crain's argues, "flies in the face of current philanthropic practice" -- which has become increasingly reliant on quantifiable results in their efforts to "increase ... effectiveness." (For whatever reason, each time I read that last sentence, I see the words subtitling b&w footage of a Soviet army.)
Mr. Socolow disagrees: "I think the program works fantastically. Can I measure it in quantifiable terms? No."
The Best Cure for Writers' Procastination? Apparently, Writing About It.
If Christopher Booker can assert that all of literature can be reduced to seven discrete and universal plots, why can't GC argue the same for articles about literature? There's the article about literary couples and their unacknowledged jealousy; the article about novice writers and their rude awakening to publishing's realities; the article about the new, breakthrough bestseller from the unknown and self-published/imprisoned/geriatric/ teenaged/autistic writer; and, finally, the article about writers' sweet and sour love for procastinating while working on their novels. The newest addition to that genre: Henry Shukman's "Loitering with intent," a run-down of famous, procastinating writers (two groups which compose a venn diagram that looks a lot like this) for the Guardian.
Shukman's addition, though, is notable for its contributution of a questionable but interesting distinction -- that of procastination (willed) vs writer's block (unsolicited):
Shukman's addition, though, is notable for its contributution of a questionable but interesting distinction -- that of procastination (willed) vs writer's block (unsolicited):
At its worst, procrastination is a form of slow suicide, a kind of stand-off with life. Why act, when we know the end of all endeavour? Days, weeks, months creak past, but still no attempt to advance the work is made. Procrastination is surely worse than writer's block, less involuntary: you see what you need to do, you know you can do it, and yet ... and yet. It is a very pure instance of Poe's human perversity. Or perhaps of Bunyan's despair: I see my error yet what grieves me most is that I cannot muster the effort towards deliverance. The true procrastinator is dicing with death: time waits for no man but will wait for me.(In almost-related news: Queen Latifah and Emma Thompson have been tapped for the cast of Stranger Than Fiction. According to the Hollywood Reporter, "Thompson is in final talks to play the author suffering from writer's block, and Latifah is in final talks to play a book-company employee whose job is to unblock writers." Kind of like Taxi, with more stationary objects.)
Controversial Books, Mathematically Verified
On Thursday, GC mentioned a Dartmouth College news release touting prof Mikhail Gronas's "new avenue of literary study": number-crunching Amazon's customer ratings. Today, the NY Times catches up to the blogging community, rephrasing the press release but also adding this bit of news reporting:
Dartmouth is now in the process of patenting software that will be used to determine the "controversiality index." Alla Kan, the director of Dartmouth's technology transfer office, said the program would "analyze book reviews and come up with ratings based on how controversial or scandalous a book is."I'm not sure that the examples twice cited -- Al Franken's Rush Limbaugh Is a Big Fat Idiot and Rush Limbaugh's The Way Things Ought to Be -- require the help of a computer program in asserting their controversiality. But I look forward, with Borgesian glee, to the absurd inevitability of common sense, in its full range, being translated into 1s and 0s.
The hope is that book companies would use the index to market books. "We all know that the controversial sell well," Professor Gronas said. "This is a way to objectify this knowledge."
Notebook: "Is Doubleday violating Bin Laden's copyright?"
According to Slate's Brendan Koerner, probably not, for a variety of reasons: 1) "the book's contents most likely constitute fair use of the materials," 2) "the publisher could effectively argue that it is important to the national debate for the thoughts of the country's enemies to be widely disseminated," and 3):
In making fair use decisions, courts consider whether the publication will affect the commercial prospects for the original work. Since there are probably few Americans who would buy the original Arabic books, and Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri presumably have no plans to authorize English translations on their own, that factor tilts in Doubleday's favor, too.(Koerner, however, goes on to note that, sometime in the 1930s, Adolf Hitler sued a reporter for copyright infringement when that reporter published a translation of Mein Kampf which, unlike previous English translations to appear in the US, included "its most wicked parts." In the end, "an American judge sided with the dictator and ordered publication stopped.")
The Man Booker Prize, a "World Federation Wrestling Match" for Bookworms and Bookies
For those who credit the Booker Prize's success to its fly-to-shit relationship with controversy, the appointment of John Sutherland to this year's judging panel can leave no room for doubts. Here, a short timeline of Sutherland's most controversial Booker moments: Jan. 21, 2005: The Guardian reports that "members of the hallowed Man Booker advisory committee ... are spitting blood at the appointment of John Sutherland to chair the award panel this year." Called an "appalling choice" by an anonymous committee member, Sutherland previously judged the Prize in 1999, during which time he published numerous "indiscreet" articles about the judging process. According to some, Sutherland turned the Prize "into a circus," irrevocably "diminishing" the Booker's stature. 1999 co-judge Boyd Tonkin sums up the sour feelings in the Independent, where he intones that "Sutherland, an inaccurate and impenitent leaker of our panel discussions, has been rewarded for his imprecisions by elevation to the chairman's role."
The Guardian article, meanwhile, continues:
Asked if Prof Sutherland was a potential liability, [Man Booker administrator Martin Goff] said: "That's the very word I have used to him tonight. I have laid down certain rules."Jan. 20, 2005: Sutherland sounds the bell for the 2005 Booker Prize publicity thump-down, announcing -- as the Guardian reports -- "that the judges are unlikely to read all 130 books in contention" and that his fellow judges are "light on the minorities." Sutherland goes on to liken the judging process to a "world federation wrestling match." No one asks if the simile is meant to emphasize not just the likelihood of literary feuding, but the likelihood of those feuds being staged.
But he said Prof Sutherland was a "brilliant man", adding: "Have you seen his CV?"
The Scotsman, in a later report, says "[Sutherland's] comments provide the Man Booker with its first whiff of controversy of the year."
Oct. 26, 1999: Sutherland, writing in the Guardian, calls the judges' choice of JM Coetzee's Disgrace the "quietest (most boring, some would say) Booker for some years." In later articles, Sutherland's fellow judges object to Sutherland's description of Coetzee's win as an uninpired compromise -- an observation which prompted Sutherland (again, in his Oct. 26 Guardian piece) to denounce the Booker Prize as "a lottery, not a literary competition."
Sep. 22, 1999: Sutherland, having made the Guardian his public diary, comments at length on the Booker's loving relationship to controversy. "... After the winner is announced, will come 'The Scandal,'" he writes. "If it doesn't come, someone will confect it. All in the good cause of clearing 50,000 copies of a hardback novel and getting quality fiction into headlines." He then proceeds to concoct imaginary scandals for each of the nominees (with the exception, however, of Ahdaf Soueif's Map of Love, Sutherland's stated favorite).
Sep. 5, 1999: Commenting on a supposed leak of the Booker longlist, Guardian lit editor Robert McCrum observes that,
Over the years, Goff has proved a master of press management. I think he long ago realised that while the British reading public didn't give two hoots for literary prizes, it was fascinated (if that's not too strong a word) with bookish feuds.Sep. 2, 1999: Sutherland, again writing for the Guardian, denies having been the Booker snitch. Nonetheless, the professor notes that "publicity, even bad publicity, is good for the Booker."
What kills prizes is indifference. Can you name one James Tait Black winner? It's the most venerable fiction prize in Britain. It is run, from Edinburgh University, with exemplary discretion and intellectual scrupulousness. And the prize does sweet Fanny Adams for the sale of books.So there you have it: the play-by-play behind-the-scenes instruction manual for rigging Booker "scandals." (Just remember that, as Roland Barthes said about wrestling: "The public is completely uninterested in knowing whether the contest is rigged or not, and rightly so; it abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle.")
Further Reading:
NBCC Nominees, Part II (W/ Correction)
Field notes from the NBCC shindig, hosted by mediabistro.com at NYC's Housing Works Bookstore:
Proving that both America and consumerism subscribe to ideas of exceptionalism: "Book [review] pages are shrinking," NBCC Board Member John Freeman announced to the audience. "We live in a culture that tells us to buy things instead of think ... [And that's why] we hope you buy the books nominated here tonight."
On TV's continual rise to cultural dominance: Freeman introduced Joyce Johnson, the presentor of the biography/autobiography nominees, as author of the NBCC-winning memoir Desperate Characters. The real name of Johnson's memoir was, and continues to be, Minor Characters.
On poetry-as-a-trivial-pursuit: Following the announcement of Adrienne Rich's nomination for The School Among the Ruins, the audience heard a woman exclaim, "She's still alive?"
Reminding us every family has sibling rivlary:Freeman looked surprised when his introduction of the fiction category as the "big kahuna" drew hissing from the crowd. "The meek and humble fiction catgeory?" Johnathan Lethem, the category's announcer, offered a moment later, to some applause.
Correction: Originally, GC attributed the "big kahuna" comment to Lethem, not Freeman. Please recalibrate your impression of Lethem accordingly.
Correction: Originally, GC attributed the "big kahuna" comment to Lethem, not Freeman. Please recalibrate your impression of Lethem accordingly.
NBCC Nominees, Part I (Updated)
The National Book Critic Circle Nominees:
Fiction
Additional Thoughts:
Several reporters were milling around the nomination announcement party Saturday night, asking industry insiders for soundbites on differences between the NBCC and the NBA. Answers, however, were probably much easier to come by after the fiction nominees were announced; the NBCC's choices read like a list dreamed up by the NBA nay-sayers. Finally: Phillip Roth! You could almost hear the audience's sigh of relief at hearing his name -- the last of the night's many nominations. A better comparison, though, might be illustrated by checking the nominations against GC's "meta best-of list" (which tallied books' appearances on the many year end "best of" lists):
Number of "Best of 2004" Appearances by the NBA Fiction Finalists:
Florida, Christine Schutt 0
The News From Paraguay, Lily Tuck (*winner*) 0
Madeleine Is Sleeping, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum 2
Ideas of Heaven: A Ring of Stories, Joan Silber 2
Our Kind : A Novel in Stories, Kate Walbert 3
Number of "Best of 2004" Appearances by the NBCC Fiction Finalists:
Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker 7
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty 16
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas 14
Marilynne Robinson, Gilead 12
Philip Roth, The Plot Against America 23
(And, just for kicks:)
Number of "Best of 2004" Appearances by the Man Booker Shortlist:
Bitter Fruit, Achmat Dangor 0
The Electric Michelangelo, Sarah Hall 2
I'll Go to Bed at Noon, Gerard Woodward 2
Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell 14
The Line of Beauty Alan Hollinghurst (*winner*) 16
The Master, Colm Toibin 17
In a sense, though, these lists are redundancies; both GC's meta-list and the NBCC's nominations reflect critics' preferences. If the NBCC's fiction nominations fall within the top 16 slots on GC's list, their convergence only means that the NBCC's likely choices are well-documented beforehand. But, as obvious as all this sounds, the NBCC's nominations rephrase some of the more complex ideas put forward during the NBA's fiction nomination controversy. Mainly: both the media and the book industry want the reduncancy offered by the NBCC; such reduncancy is what makes well-selling books sell better. And such reduncancy confirms the media's role as gatekeeper (To what degree were the NY Times' criticisms of Rick Moody et al's choices plain self-defense?); if readers think that brilliant books don't get reviewed, book reviews stand to lose a large cut of their already-questionable relevancy.
Fiction
- Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker (Knopf)
- Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (Bloomsbury)
- David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas (Random House)
- Marilynne Robinson, Gilead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Philip Roth, The Plot Against America (Houghton Mifflin)
- Kevin Boyle, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights and Murder in the Jazz Age (Holt)
- Edward Conlon, Blue Blood (Riverhead)
- Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Reformation: A History (Viking)
- David Shipler, The Working Poor: Invisible in America (Knopf)
- Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story (Crown)
- Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (Penguin Press)
- Bob Dylan, Chronicles Vol. 1(Simon & Schuster)
- Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (Norton)
- John Guy, Queen of Scots: The True Life of Mary Stuart (Houghton Mifflin)
- Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan, De Kooning: An American Master (Knopf)
- Brigit Pegreen Kelly, The Orchard (BOA Editions)
- D.A. Powell, Cocktails (Graywolf)
- Adrienne Rich, The School Among the Ruins (Norton)
- James Richardson, Interglacial (Ausable Press)
- Gary Snyder, Danger on Peaks (Shoemaker & Hoard)
- Richard Howard, Paper Trail: Selected Prose 1965-2003 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
- Patrick Neate, Where You're At: Notes From the Frontline of a Hip-Hop Planet (Riverhead)
- Graham Robb, Strangers: Homosexual Love in the 19th Century (Norton)
- Craig Seligman, Sontag & Kael: Opposites Attract Me (Counterpoint)
- James Wood, The Irresponsible Self: On Laughter and the Novel (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Additional Thoughts:
Several reporters were milling around the nomination announcement party Saturday night, asking industry insiders for soundbites on differences between the NBCC and the NBA. Answers, however, were probably much easier to come by after the fiction nominees were announced; the NBCC's choices read like a list dreamed up by the NBA nay-sayers. Finally: Phillip Roth! You could almost hear the audience's sigh of relief at hearing his name -- the last of the night's many nominations. A better comparison, though, might be illustrated by checking the nominations against GC's "meta best-of list" (which tallied books' appearances on the many year end "best of" lists):
Number of "Best of 2004" Appearances by the NBA Fiction Finalists:
Number of "Best of 2004" Appearances by the NBCC Fiction Finalists:
(And, just for kicks:)
Number of "Best of 2004" Appearances by the Man Booker Shortlist:
In a sense, though, these lists are redundancies; both GC's meta-list and the NBCC's nominations reflect critics' preferences. If the NBCC's fiction nominations fall within the top 16 slots on GC's list, their convergence only means that the NBCC's likely choices are well-documented beforehand. But, as obvious as all this sounds, the NBCC's nominations rephrase some of the more complex ideas put forward during the NBA's fiction nomination controversy. Mainly: both the media and the book industry want the reduncancy offered by the NBCC; such reduncancy is what makes well-selling books sell better. And such reduncancy confirms the media's role as gatekeeper (To what degree were the NY Times' criticisms of Rick Moody et al's choices plain self-defense?); if readers think that brilliant books don't get reviewed, book reviews stand to lose a large cut of their already-questionable relevancy.
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