Fungible Convictions

Heh. Heh heh heh.

Every time you stay home on election day, God kills a puppy.

This Tuesday:

1. Vote, and remind your friends and family to do the same, offering transportation if needed.
2. Immediately report anything suspicious to the polling center staff or, if warranted, your local party leadership.
3. Participate in exit-polls, the simplest way to indicate a pattern of voting fraud.

On the Florida state elections page, the House 16th district race has a notable omission: despite the elections commission’s being obliged to keep page-solicitor-general Mark Foley on the ballot (Joe Negron will receive his votes), their website lists no Republican candidate.

That ain’t cool. It’s not the ballot itself, of course, but it’s also probably a very illegal oversight.

BoingBoing blogged (here and here) about editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s excellent argument that as much as people think publishing is bestseller-driven, the facts don’t bear it out. Publishing is and has always been “okayseller”-driven:

Bestsellers aren’t the whole of publishing. Every year, we publish a great many okaysellers. You guys buy them because they look interesting, or because a friend has recommended them, or because you liked another book by that author. Marketing push only goes so far.

A quick test: raise your hand if you only buy bestsellers. No? Okay, raise your hand if the majority of your book purchases are current bestsellers. Right. Now raise your hand if your bookbuying decisions are based on marketing buzz. If you still aren’t raising your hand, you’re a normal book-buying reader, and the Wall Street Journal is chin-deep in hogwash on this point.

Nielsen Hayden goes on to suggest that anyone who recycles the best-seller nugget “really needs to get out more.” Hear, hear.

What BoingBoing and all but a couple of Nielsen Hayden’s commenters don’t touch upon is how conventional wisdom has come to be that publishing is a bestseller, winner-take-all industry.

Put plainly, the laws of scarcity mean only a handful of books get mentioned. Five major publishers compete for shelf-space at two major bookstore chains while pushing for reviews in the ever-fewer literary pages of the newspapers owned by ever-fewer owners. And, as on the Internet, conversation is what drives interest, so reviewers review the same books in order to create a dialogue. This is the case, at least, for fiction. People come to believe blockbusters are what drive the publishing industry because blockbusters are all they hear mentioned.

For trade books in general, though, commenter Larry Brennan makes the salient point when he asks, “What’s the correlation between heavy retail book buyers (say 20+ titles per year) and buyers of best-sellers?” Intuition suggests that there is none, that people who buy many books are not the same as those who buy bestsellers; moreover, those who buy one bestseller don’t necessarily buy another bestseller: the pool of buyers is different. As contradictory as it sounds, bestsellers are statistical anomalies. Without an engineered system of scarcity to guarantee a minimum of success, setting out to publish bestsellers would be a disastrous business model.

Success is defined in different ways, of course. By traditional business standards, the publishing industry is probably healthier than it’s ever been. More product than ever, more money moving in and out, and more technological innovation since the invention of the offset press.

But if the ups and downs of the major players are all that get attention, then the industry looks dysfunctional indeed.

Last year I got in trouble amongst the Internets for writing an open letter to business managers to defend so-called Millennials, or, as the AP article at the time called it, the “Entitlement Generation”. I took it down for the sake of self-preservation when I was interviewing for my second job but only after I’d received a lot of supportive comments from folks in their first jobs. The salient points were:

• Millenials earn more-expensive-than-ever undergraduate degrees that get them less-lucrative-than-ever entry-level jobs.
• We lack hands-on business experience but process information, work in groups, and learn lessons faster on average than those older.
• We come to expect flexible hours not because we were coddled but because, in many industries, we get entry-level work done faster than it comes in.
• We could make the computer system run better if someone would ask us.
• Loyalty has eroded not because we’re fidgety but because we get paid very, very little in our first jobs and receive little in the way of mentorship or extended training.
• And to quote the last point directly, because it’s the one I still agree with 100%: “It takes us less than a year to learn your systems, copy your skills, and identify your company’s flaws. 10 million unchallenged, vindictively creative young people will decimate your business.”

I got in trouble for the tone of the original post, but most of the arguments turned out to be an accurate reflection of reality, at least as now described a year later by Atlanta-based business writer and consultant Elizabeth Woodcock, with my comments after the jump. . . .
Continue reading

Okay, this is good. So apparently in 1913 a Washington ten-year-old boy named Granville Dickey ran away from home, hopped a train to Charlottesville where the then-Washington Nationals were practicing, and lived for two days with a UVa. student he befriended at the train station while checking out his beloved baseball players. Dickey even asked manager Clark Griffith if he could be a bat boy. The creepiness of an “attractive” ten year old sleeping in a dorm room with a college student aside, Granville Dickey’s safe return is lauded by the Washington Post as the first recovery of runaway that was aided by the new technology of telephony. Kinda neat.

The Post, in an editorial, also argues that proper punishment for Dickey is to be banned from attending the Nationals’ opening game in Washington, to which my (very) great grandfather wrote:

Editor Post: In your editorial “The Lost Boy Found” in this morning’s Post you end up with the sentence, “He should be kept from the opening game of the baseball season,” referring, of course, to the Dickey boy. Mr. Editor, in all my life I have never yet heard of such downright cruelty, such meanness to a fan, nor do I think that history recalls through all the ages as great a punishment to man, woman, or child as you propose to mete out to young Dickey. My dear sir, if you really want to punish the little fellow, go take him out to Fort Myer and let the cavalry run over his body; if he still lives, burn his little feet, singe his eyebrows, chop off his fingers; but refuse to let him see the opening game—never, never, never!

When you and I are gone, when the Capitol shall have crumbled to dust, when men will be reading newspapers from Mars, our boys will be walking the same path to Charlottesville, their dreams in the spring will be of Charlottesville, and their one great aim in life will be to see the opening game. Young Dickey has taught them the way to this wonderful little town. From now on we shall see a beaten track down in Virginia. Dickey has set a precedent, and nothing short of stopping the youngsters from seeing the opening game will keep their feet off this beaten track in the spring. Yours for the opening game.
IRVING M. GREY.
Washington, March 20.

Thanks to my aunt for digging up another instance of brilliant, public, questionably jokingly hyperbolic family writing. I’m hoping that’s my great grandfather’s sense of humor shining through and not, like, you know, syphilis.

Links to images of WaPo article (image above is page 1):

• Page 1
• Page 2
• Page 3
• Page 4
• Editorial
• Letter to the editor

Free Culture just announced its winners for an anti-DRM video contest. For my mother: DRM, or digital rights management, is a collective term for measures that restrict the use of digital products—everything from the little tab on a VHS tape that keeps you from recording it to another tape, to computer programs embedded in a music file that “phone home” to its manufacturer to determine if the listener is violating its terms of use. DRM can limit the number of times a CD can be copied. It can force a DVD to work on only in a DVD player sold in the United States. It can allow a song file to play on your computer but not in your iPod. It can delete a TV show from your computer after an amount of time you have no control over. Or, if badly executed, can destroy your computer altogether.

DRM was created to combat copyright infringement, which it does, but poorly. Just like popping the tab off that VHS tape, a person can circumvent every kind of DRM with a little creativity and patience. The lucrative arms race to create unbreakable DRM, however, has led content providers to radically redefine what it means to “own” a piece of writing, music, or video, as illustrated in this Free Culture contest-winning video:

In their vigilance to combat copyright infringement, content providers created a cultural regression: for the first time, content that you purchased legally has had some of its fair legal uses stripped away. An example: just as it is legal to record a TV show on your VCR in your living room and watch it later with a VCR in your bedroom, it is legal to buy a song online and burn it to a CD—who wouldn’t want to listen to that same song in their car and not just on that one computer? But with DRM, that’s not possible. In the name of protecting copyright, a fair, legal use of a thing you own has been negated. Content providers are protecting their value in the product at the expense of yours, in some cases breaking your hardware or violating your privacy to do it.

The common response to this situation is, well, the rules of the game have changed in the digital era—yes, the value of the album I bought is lessened, but I’m happy to pay less for it in the first place. That’s how the economy works.

True, but culture doesn’t work that way, nor do the necessities of, you know, being human and needing to express yourself or listen to and share someone else’s expression. The use of DRM presumes that there are content providers and individual consumers (or “end users”). This has never been the case with art. Indeed there are providers—musicians, painters, photographers, and the thousands of varieties of distributors. But the consumer of art is not an individual; it has always been a group. Name a favorite song that you haven’t wanted to share and, doing so, didn’t find immensely more meaningful, more valuable? Subversion of this fact of life is the essence of DRM. It is the artillery in a war on community, a war waged explicitly upon the simple act of sharing. Again, as a Free Culture award-winning video demonstrates:

The History, and Future, of Copyright

What we have is a classic battle over the definition of copyright, one that goes back at least as far as the eighteenth century. My girlfriend just shared an excellent essay with me on the history of copyright (“Literary Property Determined” by Mark Rose) that covers how the English and Scottish created the modern concept of copyright—that creators own the right to produce and profit from their creations for the length of their life plus a number of years (at first thirty). The original English system granted copyright in perpetuity: Shakespeare held the copyright to his own works, for example, and his descendents inherited it, allowing, say, the words to Macbeth to be, in essence, physical property to be passed down or sold.

Meanwhile, in Scotland, upstart printers working under Scottish law were reprinting Shakespeare’s works and selling them back into the English market, like bootlegging movies today, but legal. Scottish law held writing to be common, in the public domain, immediately. Drawn-out court battles ensued, resulting not in a final, logical, immutable decision from the bench but in the compromise we live with today—copyright lasts the life of the work’s creator plus a (theoretically) fixed amount of time. The compromise came about simply because, in the legal system, the argument was intractable. The English and Scots just wanted a decision so they could get back to business.

In other words, copyright has never been something somehow built into natural law, like the rights to life and liberty. Its insoluble nature necessitates a negotiation between interested parties, one that allows profit and culture to coexist, and in fact to drive one another.

It’s Time for a New Compromise

A new compromise would require a major change in the point of view of content producers, namely, to admit that conversation is king, not content. As Cory Doctorow wrote the other day:

If I sent you to a desert island and gave you the choice of taking your friends or your movies, you’d choose your friends — if you chose the movies, we’d call you a sociopath. Conversation is king. Content is just something to talk about.

It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around if your job depends on profiting off discrete things like e-books or iTunes downloads. But profit on cultural goods in the digital era, as it did in years past, depends upon creating a community of users, people enthusiastic about your product, willing it with their money and attention to stick around. One reason the music industry is so fun to watch implode is how little it understands what about music makes people happy. It’s the community. The music industry, including radio, grew huge because it was the only vehicle by which thousands of people could share in the experience of a song. But the music industry, in the long term, is culturally irrelevant. It was always preposterous that someone should expect to make a living off being a pop musician—there’s never been a shortage of good music, just a shortage of ways to distribute it; it’s only now, given the inexpense of acquiring a recording, that music lovers can make that statement clear. Music lovers want 1) music, 2) people to share it with, and 3) the shortest route to 1 and 2. There is no longer a need for the music industry, period.

The same exists for more than the music industry. I went to a Red Sox game this past spring and took a video with my digital camera of fans singing “Sweet Caroline” during the seventh inning stretch. I uploaded it to YouTube that night and e-mailed a bunch of friends to view it. The next day, I had an e-mail in my inbox not from a friend but from YouTube, saying a third-party had notified YouTube that my video was “infringing”. I checked the fine print on my ticket stub, and sure enough, part of the “contract” explicit in buying a ticket is that I will not produce an account of the game. It’s a version of rights management, and Major League Baseball and Red Sox are indeed within their rights to protest my posting of a video of the events at Fenway Park.

But how stupid, or vindictive, or twisted do you have to be to want to remove a free promotion for your product? They would say—and I’ve seen MLB say so elsewhere—that they have to request the video be taken down, that inconsistency in enforcement forfeits their right to enforcement altogether. However, baseball, and all sports leagues, are thoroughly inconsistent in their enforcement of their copyright on “accounts of the game”. Newspaper accounts and box scores are accounts of the game. And do you see ushers confiscating cameras? Do you see parents and kids being shaken down for keeping score? What you do see is enforcement for anyone else’s work that MLB could get a financial piece of, such as when this year they tried to argue (and lost) that fantasy baseball leagues didn’t have the right to use players’ names and statistics, that they should be required to buy a license from MLB. But the finance part is the very point: in the digital era you don’t make more money by restricting access to your content; you make money by making your content available to more people, by making more people more fanatical.

Independent musicians have learned that there’s more money to be made drawing people in to your concerts and merchandising by letting fans listen to music online for free than by charging for it, just like MLB should know that my sharing my video would have resulted in five or six friends being more likely to buy Sox tickets. Digital content is little more than an advertisement to join a community of like-minded people, and that’s where the money is, in the community not in the content.

It’s time for “end users” to consider seriously what they’re willing to pay for and what they’re will to see fade away, industry-wise. As with the English and Scots, usage restrictions, through things like DRM, ultimately freeze business, and the only way forward is with a new understanding on copyright. There’s no doubt that this new understanding will favor consumers, just as the old copyright understanding favored the Scots against the entrenched English. But without an agreeable framework, no one will be happy, and the financial platform for digital works may crumble altogether.

And this makes me happy, in part because Pamuk is the first winner in a while whose work I’ve actually read but also because his novels and essays really are fine.

My favorite writers tends to be “bridgers,” those who connect two or more styles, traditions, or cultures in their writing. It’s cliche to say as much about Pamuk now, but bridging is what he does–traditional to modern, authoritarian to liberal, east to west. How could a writer not, when he lives in Istanbul, the physical nexus of the world’s great cultures and religions? But in his case, I suppose it’s not as much bridging and connecting as it is layering, as if experiences were transparencies lain one atop another.

My Name Is Red was the first of his books I read, doing so for a directed study on eastern European literature. How amazing it was to read Pamuk in the context of Ivo Andric (another Nobel laurreate), Ismail Kadare (likely on this year’s Nobel short list), and other lesser known greats like David Albahari.

Pamuk will likely pass them all, in popular appreciation, given his public face. Despite his efforts to the contrary, Pamuk became a cause célèbre when the Turkish government put him on trial in 2005 for speaking publicly of the Armenian Genocide. Turkey came off looking ridiculous—they wanted to prosecute someone for stating a fact, and they wanted to prosecute him under a law passed after he stated it. The charges were dropped, but it didn’t stop Pamuk, and others in his defense, from writing breathless essays over the course of several months last year about the continued persecution of artists and their right to speak their minds—and in a country, Turkey, up for E.U. membership no less.

No doubt this hubbub aided Pamuk’s Nobel candidacy, but it is his novels and, recently, a memoir that more than justify Stockholm’s decision. And given that Pamuk is only fifty four, we as readers hopefully have much more to look forward to.

There are two ways a book can die: every copy can disappear, or one irreplaceable copy does.

After many brief searches in the last month and one concerted hour-long search this weekend, I finally gave up hope of ever finding my copy of Kenneth Burke’s The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology. Not exactly a heart-pounding title, but the book was central to my religious development from a lapsed Catholic to a faithful Orthodox Christian. I had read traditional introductory books to Orthodoxy by Kalistos Ware and Paul Evdokimov, but the Rhetoric of Religion was a rhetorical studies book, not religious in instruction at all. I’d owned it since a rhetoric class in college, when I’d just skimmed it as required reading. But three years later it became the linchpin to my conversion. I remember coming away from the religiously-disinterested Burke’s work thinking language, religious belief, and human nature were all wrapped up and that Burke’s study of the creation myth and the Fall were imperatives practically built into language, which happens to be a key component to Orthodox Christianity, that belief happens in the realm of language and that deification, to use a laden Orthodox term, happens as we accept that realm’s limitations.

My copy of the Rhetoric of Religion—the chapter on Genesis at least—had a lot of marginalia. It was a record of my thoughts at a key part of my life. Underlines, paragraph-length questions, long bars I use to highlight favorite passages, all of it unique to a week in my life in 2003. And now that I’ve lost the book, I’ve lost the record. I mourn it.

The only physical thing I can compare this to, the only thing that has that combination of other’s thoughts and one’s own time-sensitive interpretation, is the loss of a photograph. I’m reminded of my mother’s story about a roll of photos she took minutes after my birth. Taken minutes after labor, taken by my mother herself with the SLR that’s now mine years later, taken with me all gross and brand-new and not even whisked off yet to the nursery. . . .

The developer lost the roll. All twenty four pictures.

When she talks about this, my mother has this look on her face like she’s remembering someone who died too young, a mix of low-key anger and acceptance that memory is too frail, and would be even without the physical aid. That’s how I feel about my book. It might have been lost in my move last year. I might have accidentally put it in a box of books to give away. Who knows. My life will move forward identically as if it were still on my shelf. But I’d really rather have the book back.

Author Mohsin Hamid has written an extraordinary story, “Focus on the Fundamentals,” that leads off the fall issue of the Paris Review. The story’s broad scope and intimate voice—and its tackling of themes related to immigration, assimilation, and 9/11—not only got me to add Hamid’s upcoming novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist to my wishlist but also convinced me, after some time of resisting, to consider the Paris Review the best literary magazine around.

Others would make the same case, certainly. It’s like saying the New Yorker publishes good profiles or that bears crap in the woods. I had wanted to avoid, though, opening the door to pharisaism or self-serving praise of insiders to the detriment of new or different talent.

But now that I’ve been doing some fiction editing, I’ve started to take measurable editorial success more seriously. But then, what in the very small, very squishy literary field is measurable? To what should an editor or a literary magazine staff in general aspire, particularly in considering the health of the field as a whole?

Here are the measurable attributes, then, as I’ve come to see them. Note that they exclude traditional but misleading descriptors of magazine success, such as circulation or geographic base:

• Age (<5/>5/>15): The years a publication has been publishing regularly.
• Independence (no/partial/full): Is the publication independent? What percentage of its operating costs are paid directly by subscribers? By advertisers? By donors? By how many different donors? By a single patron, such as the university on whose campus the publication operates? This is the hardest to measure but can be done with some research skills.
• Compensation (yes/no): does the publication pay its authors and staff? Find out by reading submission guidelines and analyzing the masthead. Do staff members work elsewhere (almost always yes).
• Timeliness (yes/no): The flexibility or anticipatory talents of a publication’s editors, including the ability to solicit work appropriate to a particular event, anniversary, etc. Does each issue feature something related to the season or month in which it was published?
• Nurturing (yes/partial/no): The prioritizing and active promotion of the literary field through readings, festivals, workshops, scholarships, and outreach.

In finding measurable attributes, I’ve identified four levels of literary magazine success that can be fairly evenly applied across geography, genre, and even size. They should be useful to readers, writers, editors, and donors alike when deciding whom to support or evaluating the growing or waning influence of a publication.

The four levels, from least to most successful:

1. Vanity
2. Immature
3. Established
4. Institution

1. Vanity

A vanity publication may feature two kinds of vanity—and often features both: an editor who is the publication and/or, more commonly, a mission that in effect reads, “We started this magazine because we thought everything else sucked.”

• Age: <5 years old.
• Independence: No. Has 1-5 sponsors, who are often also editors, but no subscribers.
• Compensation: No. Does not compensate its writers.
• Timeliness: No. Irregular publishing schedule makes timeliness difficult.
• Nurturing: No. Does not have the ability to nurture their mission or field outside of their publication.

2. Immature

Immature publications are not necessarily bad publications. They print the bulk of literary writing, if not by totally circulation then by manuscript pages. They are college student literary magazines, most online-only magazines, a large number of niche publications, and even a handful of magazines published by well-respected personalities. A respected example would be the new magazine A Public Space. While edited by a former Paris Review editor and featuring very high-end writing, it still struggles with the business side of magazine publishing, such as when it ran into subscriber fulfillment problems with its second issue. In the immature category would also be a publication like N+1, which publishes excellent political and creative writing from established authors but which recently—and kudos to them for being able to laugh at themselves—lost $3,000 cash to a thief at a fundraiser.

• Age: <5 years old or still/regularly have fulfillment problems.
• Independence: No. Still depend greatly on single-copy sales, rather than subscriber sales. May have a few benefactors.
• Compensation: No. Do not compensate their writers but may hold fee-funded contests. Are volunteer run.
• Timeliness: No. Are usually inflexible, but better run publications can plan ahead well and solicit appropriate pieces.
• Nurturing: No. Consider it an important part of their mission to participate in literary field events but do not yet have the resources (especially time) to manage something themselves.

3. Established

Established publications, such as Tin House, the Missouri Review, the Gettysburg Review, Conjunctions, and McSweeney’s, are where the average reader is most likely to find new, good writing; where the average writer is to find the most competition; and where the average editor and donor are to find the most gratification.

• Age: >5 years old.
• Independence: Partial. Large subscriber base, often a board of trustees, staff member dedicated to fundraising. Breakeven budgets and university sponsorship is common; both make for little peace of mind.
• Compensation: Yes. Compensates writers but may still be all-volunteer run.
• Timeliness: Yes. Tradition of regular publishing cycles allows for advance planning. Strong, long-term relationships with individual writers allows for timely solicitation of needed pieces.
• Nurturing: Partial. Can and does hold readings and release parties in home city and region. Staff runs workshops at parent institutions, with the editor-in-chief often holding a full-time faculty position. No money, however, for festivals or scholarships, unless, in the latter case, a donor provides specific funds.

4. Institution

Institutional publications are very few in the literary field. Granta, the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, the Paris Review . . . are there many others? These are the kinds of publications that, were they to stop publishing tomorrow, would leave a distinct gap in the way the literary world understands itself. Were Ploughshares to move from Boston to Washington, Boston would feel a small twinge of pain; when the Atlantic announced just that, Boston felt punched in the gut, losing an institution with which it had shared so much history.

• Age: >15 years old.
• Independence: Full. Very large subscriber base; a board of active, devoted trustees; full-time professional staff; diverse pool of donors. Financially independent.
• Compensation: Yes. Compensates writers well. Staff compensation rates vary but exists.
• Timeliness: Yes. Planning happens months, sometimes a year or more, in advance. Highly professionalized staff means quick adjustments to events and fast turnaround of everything except fiction submissions, which number in the thousands.
• Nurturing: Yes. Is the beacon to which the literary world looks for worldwide sustenance. Especially with festivals, institutional sponsorship allows people from around the world to share in common literary values. Size sometimes gets in the way of more personal ventures, but institution-publication events are affirmations of the literary life and of the institution itself.

I call these “rankings,” but really they are steps, rather like how athletes play their sport in high school, in college, and professionally, with only a small percentage making it from one level to another. For the here-and-now, it’s useful to know which publication falls where. But let no one forget that there’s another George Plimpton out there somewhere, just waiting to turn his “vanity” publication into the next Paris Review.