WHAT USED TO BE PUBLISHING

Books, paintings, collections, orchestras, theatres -- all used to be human activities in the here and now, quite concrete, specific, local and received through the senses.  When the industrial age, the machinery of standardizing and duplicating, caused all these wonderful things to be accessible to the masses via duplication and repetition (which might be called “publishing”), they prompted the creation of institutions to guide them: museums, galleries, foundries, printing plants, acting companies, movie companies, radio stations, TV stations, newspapers, universities and so on.

This was the state of things when Enzentsberger said “the human mind is reproduced as a social product.”  And then Haacke talked about the system of exchange between museums and corporations and corporate leaders  which I’m constantly grumbling about in terms of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel, which controls books, auctions, personal buyers, websites, and the like throughout that genre.

It was a matter of convenient role specialization.  Artists and authors of the “artesian” kind -- that is, the ones who cannot help but create and who do it on their own terms -- are not well-equipped to be publicizers, sales managers, or even likely to have the necessary capital to sustain a building.  So other people, entrepreneurs, come along who saw the potential and agreed to contribute capital to publicize and record, edit and distribute.  Somehow along the line they, who were at first so grateful and took maybe ten per cent of profits, began to take a third and then half and now under some circumstances they let the artist or writer have less than ten per cent.  And no control.  Today fabrication costs much less.  (Lower quality contributes.)  When the artists and authors began to dry up under this regime, the entrepreneurs went to faux products, processed with the added elements of sex, violence, and crime, or maybe cut-and-paste books assembled out of pirated others.

I’ve watched this in a very ground level way.  In 1961, starting out, Bob Scriver had built a museum and studio.  While I was with him, we built a foundry.  Our product was excellent, our profit was a little more than it would have been if we hadn’t done our own fabrication and sales.  What we lacked was big-time contacts in the Western art world, but that hardly existed yet.  Harold McCracken tells about the Buffalo Bill Historical Center (now called the Smithsonian of the West) being nothing but a huge space where his heels echoed on the terrazzo.  He wondered how he would ever fill it.  So Bob’s career grew with that expansion.  He always kept control.  Even tried to keep control after his death. But now there’s a cowboy artist under every mesquite: young, gifted and building on the older artists like Bob.

Bob’s best friend from childhood, Ace Powell, struggled with alcoholism.  It’s not unlike HIV-AIDS, which was unknown at the time, or TB or polio -- any chronic physical burden.  It made Ace vulnerable to capitalists who could keep him dependent on them.  He produced so much work, in so many circumstances, even after his heart, lungs and liver were nearly shot (which was the only way I ever knew him) that he was never really controlled by anyone, not even himself.  There are plenty of authors like that.  The great irony was that Ace produced so much work that it didn’t seem valuable to the people who think rareness is a marker of value.

In our contemporary world it is the capitalist entrepreneur who is admired and listened to.  Everything is for sale, the prevailing art is the art of negotiation.   The Euro-markers of quality have been exploded by experiments and counter-movements.  

But now everything is changing again.  Now we’ve made a new transition that allows all these created things to be resolved into code.  The internet is like the transporter in Star Trek when a crew member stepped into it and said,  “Beam me up, Scottie!”  Then there were a lot of sparkles and, with luck, the same person was reassembled at the other end (without parts of either Jeff Goldblum or a fly somehow incorporated).  We have learned how to make everything into code: send it, share it, store it, interpret it, mess with it.  Indeed, we know the code for our own bodies and many other species, even ones that no longer exist.  But once things are coded, they can be recreated, pirated, passed around, mashed, morphed, and Photoshopped.

What used to be the physical and mechanical reproduction of something -- which we called publishing -- is now code.   It cannot be contained.   It can be cross-media.  It can transmute under your hand, translate into a different language, shift into another key or instrument or timebeat, swap colors, remove backgrounds, change the names of the characters.  So what does being an artist, a creator, really mean if the consumer has total control over the creation?  (Does God ask this question?)

There is another change, which goes by the awkward name of “globalization.”  Suddenly we have broken through to what is politely called “the developing world.”  Illiterate people. thus not print-dominated.  Unexpectedly the newest and most blow-you-away artists of the American West are Chinese, traditionally trained, newly immigrated and gracefully recovering the hidden history of the Chinese American West -- so entwined with gold, railroads and -- well, admit it -- laundry and food.  In a reciprocal trend, artists of the American West begin to visit China and Russia where the vast grasslands are quite like the prairie and the Mongolians still ride horses.

I “travel” vicariously with another group, young men shoved out to the margin.  In the American West they would have been boys pushed out of families, the original cheap labor called “cow” boys.  They died so much that their bones are scattered in as many places as the bison, though there weren’t that many boys. In those days it was trauma and TB that killed them -- different alphabet disease today. 

So add it up:  boys who create on the Internet, an awakening and immense audience newly gaining access, and a cost so low -- the device, the electricity, and internet access -- and the result is so far different from “publishing” that no one even has the terms to talk about it.  Except that “the human mind is reproduced as a social product.”  It bypasses the system of exchange between museums and corporations and corporate leaders.  These dinosaur institutions are fighting back as hard as they can: making deals with Internet providers and social websites, shaking the old danger rattles (they will take your money, they will kidnap your children), collaborating with governments and military bodies (they will steal your secrets, they will reveal your plans).  All our lives are changed.  But now the energy has gone back to the authors and artists and activists.  And that’s what’s happened to publishing.

THE BOOK EQUIVALENT OF FAT, SUGAR, AND PROCESSING

The long quote below is from a piece by Dan Agin in the Huffington Post last February.  Dan Agin is Emeritus Associate Professor of Molecular Genetics and Cell Biology at the University of Chicago. His latest book is More Than Genes: What Science Can Tell Us About Toxic Chemicals, Development, and the Risk To Our Children. He's also the author of Junk Science: How Politicians, Corporations, and Other Hucksters Betray Us.  He is an expert on autism and Fetal Alcohol Syndrome.

__________

Traditional American publishing is in the process of folding.

From the standpoint of philosophy, everything folds eventually, so what's the big deal?

Well, the fact of folding is usually not as important as the reasons for folding. Looking at reasons, causes, provoking events, often helps us understand how the world works. . . .

After 66 years of watching the American publishing circus and publishing as an "author," my personal views are as follows:

• Most publishers don't read books, they just display them on shelves in their offices.
• Most acquiring editors don't read books, they just acquire them and negotiate contracts.
• Most copy editors don't read books, they use software to locate possible grammar and punctuation problems.
• Most literary agents don't read books, they just read opening chapters or proposals for books and sell books to editors based on the book's apparent "handle", its "take-away", its "feel-good" score.
• Most marketing and publicity people in publishing don't read books, they read blurbs and look at book jackets and attach a book to market demographics.
• Most publishing accountants don't read books, they just add up the profits and losses of the various imprints of a conglomerate.
• Most booksellers don't read books, they sell books the way most people in publishing acquire books -- as physical objects with "handles."

The consequence of this monstrous list is that in American publishing books have for the most part been sold to the public with a focus on the book jacket, the jacket blurbs, the size of the book, the typeface, the timeliness, the fame of the author -- but hardly ever sold to the public because of the words printed on the pages of the book. . . 

The publishing people who believe this are so wrong.

The hundred year focus on packaging rather than on content is the most important cause of the present crisis in American publishing.

The writer Leo Tolstoy once remarked that every time he dipped his pen in the inkwell on his desk, he left some of his blood in the inkwell.

What the public wants (certainly the literate public) is not the book jacket, or the typeface, or the quality of the paper, or the "feel" of a book -- what the public wants is the blood and guts of the author, the contact of the reader's mind with the author's mind -- and the most efficient vehicle for that contact is now the electronic book, the E-book.

Of course, if you just sell books and don't read them, how would you ever know this?

______

My “inner circle,” a sort of kitchen cabinet of women my age, education, and -- in three cases -- more or less my genes (cousins), reads books and has read since they first learned how in the late 1940’s.  They read all kinds of stuff.  What is above is VERY hard for them to grasp, but they feel the change.  I keep trying to explain what has been dark, behind the scenes.

Another way to describe it is to say that publishing, which is the subsidizing and distributing of print in the form of books, was once guided by the informed editors who presumably were people of good taste and judgment, able to recognize good writing.  Recently, since good writing is subjective and requires education of some kind, publishing has given up on “good writing” as the governing principle and gone to “high sales figures” which often key to “the lowest common denominator” in the public.  The quality and kind of books published now is not even determined by general polling of bookstore sales (like the New York Times best-seller list) though such surveys have come to be how we make political decisions (with results to show for it).  

The decision about what to publish is now dependent on those who do the marketing:  what some salesman thinks will sell.  Roughly as helpful as the algorithm Netflix uses to recommend movies for your queue.  Even though publishing is now able to print via “print-on-demand” systems, so that they need not justify the cost of a run of thousands of copies of a book at one time, the saleman still thinks in terms of high sales because one “best seller” is much easier to promote than an array of books, particularly those of various types and subjects.

In the past authors didn’t always make a lot of money, but at least there was some reputation involved.  Now the amount of money IS the reputation.  When the world is commodified, the quants own everything.  What they do has greatly distorted the world of the author.  Ironically, at the same time that they care only for books with high sales regardless of content, one of their sales strategies has been to move the focus to the author, the same way that movies are financed by touting who is in them.  

Publishers have not hesitated to falsify, intensify, inflate, and skew what the author created -- all in the name of sales.  The push-back against this, the cry for false “transparency” in the name of “truth,” then spawns another level of derived writing that proclaims that IT is true. Even academics who should know better get caught up in argument over categories and criteria, distorted by the fact that they themselves are victims of the same kind of commodification.  Education is now “sold” on the basis of the economic viability of graduates and the excitement professors generate in the interest of fund-raising.

What supports and masks this deterioration is a century of in-good-faith reading by people who love books, both as objects and as containers of story and idea.  What jerks the “covers” (whether paper or hardback) off the marketing illusion is the escape of print into cyberspace and, even more radically, the escape of the actual stories and ideas into a host of media, even back to the original human storyteller, though mediated by image.  The most complex scientific molecular reactions can now be conveyed by “cartoons” that illustrate interactions otherwise only describable by mathematics.  

The last barrier, the ability to comfortably read in bed, has been removed by eReaders.  I am interested that my kitchen cabinet, now with aging eyes, has discovered audible books for car trips and while doing small tasks.   It doesn’t take a neuroscientist to understand all this.

SORTING BOOK RUBBLE

Sorting the rubble of the electronic book revolution is a daunting task because it’s clear now that there are a lot of small but crucial aspects that we have to rethink.  Like, how does a library check out ebooks?   Some mechanical way, like on a thumb or DVD?  Or does one simply download from the library’s hard drive by using a password.  Shock waves are now traveling the library world because some publishers are selling access to the library to “loan” ebooks to their customers, but limiting the number of viewings per book.  After two dozen “borrowers,” the access is canceled.  What if the publisher goes broke in the meantime and no longer maintains its hard drive?   A big part of some authors’ income is contracts with publishers to supply the kinds of books that libraries like, including big-print books, on a near-automatic basis.  What happens to big-print books when ebooks can adjust the size of the font?  

What the used book and remainders market discovered was the “long tail,” which means that there will be a few people who are interested in material long after it’s created, whether or not it’s popular in the moment.  I watched a Charlie Rose vid last night on which Charlie remarked that he was amazed how much viewership there was for his old program vids.  Of course, if people are watching his videos, they are leaving behind their internet addresses and creating marketable lists of “the kind of people who watch Charlie Rose.”  I’m getting offers for lists of what the computer thinks might be my customers.  (Pretty coarse-grained at present, but possibly valuable in the future.  Since it's cheap to send emails, one only needs a small proportion of responses.)  

It looks pretty clear that most of the intermediaries (agents, editors, publicists) between authors and readers are going to be evaporated by electronic publishing.  This makes everything cheaper, but also disperses it among a variety of modes: electronic readers, print-on-demand, audible, mixed media (inclusion of music and video) to the extent that most authors will want to hire a new kind of intermediary who can keep track of all this stuff as it develops.  A book keeper sort of person.

In recent years publishers have required authors to do as much personal selling of themselves as is decent.  They call it “platform.”  Or “branding.” This, of course, used to apply to the publisher.  If it doesn’t, who needs ‘em?  As publishers have dropped their identities in order to keep up with sales, they’ve gone to a “whaddya want?” mode and asked for surveys of what is successful or maybe advice from their sales reps, what's left of them.  “Lincoln’s Doctor’s Dog” is an old answer.  Today?  I’m afraid to guess.  “The Sexy Teenaged Robot Vampire?”  It won’t be “literary” in the traditional sense.

Another “sign of the times” is that though I’m small potatoes I’m getting mail from publicity companies wanting to sell me contracts for promotion.  What could a guy in New York City who knows nothing about Western art or bronzes do to promote “Bronze Inside and Out?”  The more specialized the material, the less helpful publicists are unless they inhabit the specialty and most of them don’t.  They’re just in line for author money.  If the authors are doing the "branding," then they have the mailing lists.  And who’s responsible for maintaining author websites?  Many of the ones I visit are outdated and dormant.

I think I’ve already talked about how “peer-reviewed journals” have crashed.  First, because they are too slow when times are moving the way they are now; second, because the previously defined “peers” of defined traditional disciplines are often dinosaurs by now; and, third,  it’s easier to just blog and let the comments roll. Fourth, because when things get into specialties, regions, sub-categories, suddenly there is a small enough group to see who the peer-reviewers are and realize new thinkers are in competition with them -- NOT collaboration in the interest of something objective.

Electronic books seem to be slowing down the trend to “Espresso” instant one-copy print-on-demand, but not printing services online like Lulu, particularly when bulk orders are wanted (for a classroom, or to take on the road and hand sell).  Both the POD printers and eBooks are opening up a great flood of new subjects, new writers, material once below the horizon of ordinary publishers.  Prestige is going up as the original class of vanity writers fall away, but also because the vanity presses are competing with so much free or low-cost service that don't need traditional presses or bindings.  How can they charge someone a LOT of money for a thousand copies of a story that interests only the author’s family -- destined for basement storage -- when the story can be put online at Lulu.com and only printed when someone really wants a copy?  The copies are quite nice.

Or why not just blog the same material?  It’s simply a matter of being indexed on Google instead of Amazon.  There are companies that will make blogs into printed books if someone wants them.  It’s easy enough to download and bind.  Blogging is “publishing” in the sense of making the material available to the general reading public.  It is NOT publishing in the sense of having a book entrepreneur (publisher) investing money in your text in order to print as many copies as they think they can sell.

I noticed when I went to add a post to my blog www.scriverart.blogspot.com it had not had any of the upgrades that www.prairiemary.blogspot.com has enjoyed.  I’m sure this is because my readership for Prairie Mary is over a thousand hits a week and because I post a thousand words every single day.  I haven’t used any of the gimmicks: twitter, Facebook, et al, except that I do repost to enewp.com  when I think the subject is of interest to a national audience.  I have not figured out the global audience.  One day my Blogger stats “hit map” shows Argentina, then it drops Argentina in favor of China.  But Clustrmaps (on my website) shows no readers in China, no one in Madagascar and someone mysteriously floating in the China Sea.  And someone is evidently reading my blog daily to find a "hook" to put on my highest Google entry.

I’m getting email from people who want to post to my blog and then link it to their own.  Often they're selling something.  They’re reacting to advice from people who know how to sell “stuff.”  I do not write “stuff.”  I write the highest quality content I can manage, though I choose topics that might not interest everyone or even appeal to the same people from one day to the next.  I’m convinced that in the end what counts is CONTENT.  That’s always what has counted.  Except that the guide to content used to be tied to the publisher, a business that could deteriorate or simply evaporate.  Now the content is tied to the author.  The new problem is match-making between authors and readers -- directly.  The question is whether one intermediary can serve both authors and readers, which is the “inter” part.  More questions than answers.

FORGET EVERYTHING YOU LEARNED !

By now it’s firmly established in the minds of most of those paying attention that we are going through a paradigm shift, one that was predicted twenty years ago. But we never really thought about the specifics, which are now coming down on our heads daily. So much has changed without our even realizing it.

The one that slaps me upside the head all the time is the change in publishing. It’s FAR beyond the idea of print being presented electronically instead of ink on paper. It’s FAR beyond print of any kind. Now we are out of the books-as-objects biz, a paradigm that treated books like gizmos, making as many as anyone could accurately estimate would sell (after some market research), tarting them up as nicely as possible (design, cover, blurbs), advertising far and wide, then -- in time -- discounting and finally destroying the leftovers to free up warehouse space. With a little luck, reviewers in newspapers, mags and on the air would say nice things. There was a thing called “hand selling,” when clerks in bookstores recommended their favs to customers. Accounting was just a matter of figuring out what was spent for all this and deducting that from the amount made from sales. You prevented the books from shipping across national boundaries and had to pay someone to create a foreign language version. This is still the model in most minds.

But now a book is NOT an object. It might not even be a “book” in the sense we are used to. It might be videos (with music, print text and voice-over). It might be only spoken, with the speaker as much a selling point as the actual prose. (What would “Outlander” be without the elegant Scots accent of Davina Porter?) And then there are the graphic versions, which are drawn in frames: “comic books.” And eventually the movie or even a series on television. How strong must a narrative be to withstand so many morphs? Or will a narrative line even work now?

Many people have finally realized that all these incarnations of "literature" exist, but may have nothing at all to do with fleshly bodies. Not many people have thought about what sort of “literacy” is required to make sense of them, how to create them, or how to read/watch/hear/interpret them. With mags, newspapers, TV reviewers popping like soap bubbles, how do we even know what is out there?

The REAL action is in the chaos of marketing. The internet has no national boundaries, which means that copyright must be totally rethought. No one knows how to do world-wide market research. We have to make up words like “vook” for a video book or “vlog” for a video blog, and what is a series-written tale in blog form anyway? A “blovel”? Anyone could download it and forward it anywhere in any order. What about mash-ups now that everything is code and can throw images, sounds, scenes from movies into one big suggestive stew. What about parody? The kids who act out Jane Austen or Diana Gabaldon, half-mockery and half-fandom? What sort of genre is it when video clips from old movies and BBC series can be cut together to create a rather convincing facsimile of Outlander -- all in the name of encouraging favorite actors to take favorite parts. Most of this is way beneath the radar of formal publishers, who don’t even have the time and resources to look for examples of illegal variants -- much less do anything about them through the cumbersome means of lawsuits.

I watch all this. It's remarkable that I can, sitting here on the prairie. Yesterday I watched “The Edge,” two interviews of Daniel Hillis who is an engineer working in oncology research. (Cross-disciplinary is where it’s at.) He explained that cancer is not a “thing” but a process that ought to be called “cancering.” (That Hopi idea is now mainstream, whether or not it’s accurate in Hopi terms.) Cells with corrupt genetic code are cancer and the body normally pops them. Though this is the same process in every case, we persist in thinking there are as many kinds of cancer as there are different cells in the body. Lung cancer, skin cancer, toe cancer. But the digitalization of the genome has been a revelation, and one of the first things it has revealed is the proteome. (Well, it has revealed the EXISTENCE of the proteome -- there are millions of proteins.) The genome is the template and the parts list: the proteome is the actual molecules made in the body, molecules that “talk” to each other by constantly changed in amount and kind.

Hillis is not even a doctor. He is an engineer. His work is learning to sort and recognize the conversation among the proteomic molecules by designing the “machinery” that will read what’s in the blood at any given time. He displayed a tablet (maybe an iPad) with the “read-outs” of two sets of blood samples on top of each other but color coded so there were three colors: the molecules present in only one sample, the molecules present only in the other, and the molecules present in both samples. This “reading” is so specific that one isotope of carbon can be distinguished from another, along with the changes they cause in the molecule, assuming they do. He says that the most recent research is able to “hear” the conversation inside a single cell, what each molecule is saying to the others. All this is at the outer limits of human perception and conception, made possible only because of computers. Eventually, we will be able to “see” not just cancer cells, but "who" is “saying” the dysfunctional molecules that create them.

Once that paradigm shift is in place and we see all these old familiar things in a new way, it can profoundly change the way we do things. For instance, Danny Hillis repeats again and again that the only way we know to treat cancer now is to administer poison to the patient and try to calibrate it so it kills the aberrant cells but not the healthy ones -- at least not enough of them to kill the patient. Or we can cut or burn the bad cells. But this is wasteful, clumsy, has terrible side-effects and benefits only the pharma people who want to sell a lot of pills, hopefully in a constant regime rather than as a one-time event.

More futuristic is the practice of killing all the cells in bone marrow that are manufacturing rogue cells, and then infusing new bone marrow cells from someone else. Even MORE futuristic is infecting someone with a harmless virus that carries along healthy code and “infects” the molecular assembly line. A proteomic “patch,” to use computer jargon. This will totally upend the pharma industry assembly lines who are dependent on mass-producing pills in a Third-World low-pay environment. They are Exxon in a world going to wind power. The new way is one-on-one-once.

The difficulty is not just in terms of profits and marketing strategy. In my age group, which is seventy and over, I find many many people who simply cannot start DIS-believing what they have learned about the world in the past decades, what their teachers told them long ago. The ones who can accept a new paradigm are the ones who were anthropologists anyway, or who got bumped out of one context into another -- maybe more than once. It’s hard to STOP believing that writing a famous book will make your life worth living. Or even stop believing that there is any such thing as a famous book worthy of being famous, since the marketing is what controls fame -- not the quality. The same problem as political leaders.

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/hillis_master10/hillis_master10_index.html
There are two hour-long talks, but Hillis is very clear and easy to listen to.

"END THE UNIVERSITY AS WE KNOW IT"

People, in particular readers, are so busy obsessing over the aesthetics of reading from an electronic device that they never even inquire about what electronics has done to books. They never had awareness in the first place of how books were published. Books just materialized as objects on a shelf with no history at all, unless you’re talking about the biography of the author. But in fact, the internet has completely remade publishing. One does not print out a manuscript and send it (return postage included but not glued to the return self-addressed envelope) to be stacked in a slush pile. There is no slush pile. Publishers have laid off their editors, who are now agents and acquire possible manuscripts by reading the first three pages of an email submission. Then delete. Actually, a smart agent reads small journals or self-published books with good sales figures, which may or may not be related to the quality of the writing. More likely the drive of the author to sell. Or the recommendation of the marketing department.

There is no warehouse, no shipping dock, no book returns (did you know that bookstores can send back to the publisher all unsold books?), no remainders, no pulping. In fifty years how many used books? Recently the Pentagon bought the entire 10,000-copy first edition of a book critical of them, in order to prevent readers from getting it. But printing that many paper books is old-fashioned. Next time there will be no physical stacks of books to buy. The Pentagon negotiated for a second printing to be made, with the changes they want, which can be easily done since since the type-setting is on the computer. Soon there will be no second or third or fourth printings, but a publisher could supply unique editions of any book to fit any stipulations. One version for the Pentagon, one version for you. Censorship is already preparing to move online.

Universities are also still largely unconscious of the difference the internet makes. If one can get the lectures on YouTube and books on Amazon, why would one want to go pay huge amounts of money to a university? (Of course, my cousins went to university to find prosperous husbands, but online dating services could be made more upscale.)

One could interpret the original colleges as a development of monasteries where books were written out by hand in a community sequestered to concentrate on theology and medicine. Gutenburg was the troublemaker that time, releasing books to the masses. Because books are so transformed by electronic technology, so are all book-based pursuits, particularly theology, medicine, and law.

This is also driven by economics. Universities become more and more burdened with the need for money in order to maintain the status quo, which craves endowment for both expensive buildings and libraries. Rules have been made to protect the professors (tenure) but demographics mean that sometimes there are too many of them and other times there are too few. Emphasis has moved from the classroom to research. Suddenly one must acquire a “quality” education by going profoundly into debt at the same time that the usefulness of the degrees is questioned, the validity of those highly paid occupations is challenged, and the high status has gone through a trapdoor. Science, due to new insights from computer-enabled analysis (DNA, physics, climate) is also quite transformed. Humanities, now required to be global instead of the elevation of British tradition, has become hell-raising as post-this-or-that or hides behind the door of a million footnotes relevant to nothing.

Mark C. Taylor’s Op-Ed in The New York Times on April 27, 2009, gave a quick summary of his newly published book, “Crisis on Campus: A Bold Plan for Reforming our Colleges and Universities.” (You can get it on Kindle.) This man is like Bertrand Russell on steroids, an old-fashioned polymath but internet-hip friend of Derrida (what a troublemaker) who grips things like religion and cuts the crap. He’s the head of his religion department at Columbia and publishes at the U of Chicago Press. Now he’s on my list of people to follow. He’s even handsome!

This too-short list of his ideas, all strike me as absolutely on-target. “Cloning” by requiring students to conform to their advisors and burnish their tenured careers is over. Departments, divvying subjects up in the medieval pigeonholes, are over. Using students as slave labor (in grad school or as adjuncts) is over. Black box research beyond the purview of anyone is over.

Here’s the positive version:

1. Restructure the curriculum so that it is a complex adaptive web, a network that clusters around issues like “the role of religion in society” and has a care for method. (Martin Marty undoubtedly knows this guy.)

2. Departments should have sunset clauses and be renegotiated every seven years, like Old Testament debt. This moves the emphasis from the status quo to process, which makes study far more responsive to actual issues like water in an age of warmiing.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. He seems to mean crossing international boundaries for university partnerships. I can see collaboration between kinds of institutions.

4. “Transform the traditional dissertation.” Publication at present is simply waste and the scholarly certification is a mockery. Why must dissertations be in print? Why can’t they be cross-media?

5. The PhD as teaching certificate is obsolete. What else can you do? Business, NGO’s, art, government?

6. Mandatory retirement with tenure replaced by seven-year contracts.

Bottom line, a quote: “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.”

Terrifying. Necessary. It will happen anyway, even if a gun is held to our heads, because life is a process. There is no tenure in life. There are no books so brilliant that they change lives . . . Hey, wait. There are. The problem is finding them, which is why I’m pointing at this one. Some are not print, but images. After all, if someone is out there who really understands Derrida rather than interpreting him as a weapon of mass destruction, I want to spread the news. (I still don’t understand Derrida myself in spite of a U of Chicago master's degree.)

I used to speak in sermons about “harrowing,” meaning both a frightening experience and the literal ground-breaking that we in Valier know well as the planting of seeds. It’s not comfortable. I wish it weren’t done in such straight lines -- good conservationists know to contour their plow lines to prevent erosion. I wish they didn’t poison out weeds and ground squirrels or use chemical fallow (kill EVERYTHING in the plot so no moisture will be drawn out of the ground). I wish that commercially owned seeds were banned. It was grain that made cities possible, cities that made universities possible, and now the internet has made something entirely new possible. I can sit here in my back bedroom and -- hey, I wonder if Mark C. Taylor is on YouTube!

NOT! What the . . .

SEPTEMBER IS BANNED BOOK MONTH

Because printed bound books are a commodity in a way that ebooks are not -- that is, solid objects -- they are made more or less valuable by scarcity. The scarcity can be produced in several ways: limited editions, controlled access (must be acquired from a certain shop, like MAC products), increased desire to acquire (popularity, status indicators), destruction of unsold or remaindered copies, and high population density. Do I need examples of each? What the contemporary publishers are panicking over is NOT that the books are no longer objects, but the secondary phenomenon: electronic access to books cannot be limited or controlled except by imposed gateways. Even then, they are easily pirated, as the music controllers know.

I want to discuss censorship. There are many kinds and degrees, but all limit access. First the most obvious: book burning. Authorities like the church or the state gather up material the community considers bad for them (obscenity leads to disorder) and burns it. When I was working at animal control, we had a pathology-tissue-level incinerator, the kind used to cremate bodies to ash. The sheriff brought out impounded marijuana, hard drugs, and pornography to burn there. (We were technically a part of the sheriff’s office.) It took a very long time to burn the porn because the attendants felt obligated to read it all before they burned it. Just in case someone had left valuable documents in there by mistake. Actually, there were often bullets included in the drugs because the purveyors knew about the burning, so one wanted to read at a safe distance.

Authorities routinely censor accurate directions to bomb-making, or floorplans of sensitive emplacements, or lists of undercover agents or protected witnesses, so the advent of the Internet has been very much an advantage to terrorists and criminals. This means that the government feels justified in using very harsh measures of suppression, though information always trumps force. Of course, it is always a temptation to censor in the interest of preserving one’s own interests, so authorities often abuse their power. And if censorship itself is valued, keeping a constant war simmering is a good excuse.

More effective is probably socially enforced self-censorship, saying to yourself, “Oh, I’d better not say that or I’ll get into trouble.” This varies from not cussing where your mom can hear, to not portraying certain acts, to not revealing government secrets. The curb may be defined by outside forces (your mother) or it may be developed from within for practical, rational, emotional or ethical reasons. (I try not to say things that will get me punched in the nose.) And since no two people share the same opinion, there will always be those who want to publish information like how to commit suicide while others want to suppress that, believing that if people don’t know how, they won’t do it. There are also people who filter information at the point of intake from authority figures because they believe they are being lied to or that the source is stupid or contaminated. Tattletales find that their transmission of forbidden information become less and less valuable as it becomes more and more contaminated by previous inaccuracy.

Some authority figures will go to the suppression of the actual individuals: why burn the books when you can burn writers? But if you can’t, there are prisons for people like de Sade or Russian dissenters or semi-criminal men of color in the US. Under imprisonment and torture, information becomes increasingly valuable but distorted. Prison rumors may be worth a lot of cigarettes or maybe not. Rivals who do not have the power to imprison each other may resort to social stigma, which can cut off sales, resources, and connections.

During the Native Amerian Literature Renaissance, some people tried to limit the number of NA writers by attacking their tribal credentials. In the end this furor over who was in and who was out made short term gains for some people and long term loss for the whole category. It was too contentious and irrational for anyone to want to mess with it anymore. The whole concept died except for a few persistent outliers. Anyway, the category was ignored by the sort of smart aleck urban self-defined intellectuals who run internet social websites like Wikipedia. They knew nothing about Indians and did not attract those who did (like Indians), so ignorance is also a form of self-censorship, usually unconscious in the now famous phrase of “not knowing what they don’t know” or even that there might be significant things worth knowing visible to others.

Making a whole category of ideas suddenly visible, like scientific knowledge, is bound to escalate efforts at censorship. Religious authorities don’t want anyone to know that the earth goes around the sun, we walked on the moon, or that safe abortion is possible. The self-censorship of morality has had to hustle (so to speak) to catch up. Preserving the comfort of ignorance has become more difficult.

There is another issue here. Remember Jack Nicholson bellowing, “You can’t handle the truth!” Our insistence that we CAN handle the truth and we want transparency is not really demonstrable. Many people nowadays have closed down sources of information via avoidance (newspapers, certain TV channels, some books) because they become so distressed by the death, destruction, injustice, chaos, and suffering on every hand. They do not have the stamina to handle the subject matter by either confronting it or resolving it in their own minds, much less by taking action. Anyway, it’s so much more comforting to believe lies about Obama’s citizenship than to believe a skinny black man with an elite education and a gorgeous black wife can an effective president. To keep from believing that, some people will destroy the country. Even if they have to do it by banning books.

The most efficient means of banning books is to stigmatize a whole category of authors/subjects: street people, rape victims, Mormons, sex workers -- which will result in a backlash making these books more attractive so that people who seem to fit the category find it easier to sell a book. But society objects to this so much that people who speak for the stigmatized may be punished more severely than the authentic excluded person, who has no access to a voice anyway. Censorship, stigmatizing and shunning may be a way to separate people in a group (as the scribes and pharisees did) from people outside the group (criminals and sex workers, whom Jesus included) in order to guarantee loyalty by preventing anyone from learning about the outsiders. Known people become human and likable. Buy only books that "people like us" read. Which can make individuals even more curious about what the outsiders read.

Banning, stigmatizing, shunning and so on make books more valuable in unpredictable and uncontrollable ways. It is amoral strategy regardless of what the goal is purported to be. The motives for such strategies are a whole different story.

PUBLISHING FROM A WRITER'S EYE VIEW

Every writer must have the NEED to write and the WILL to write and the ABILITY to write. A lot of people want to “be” a writer without writing. Forget it. But today “writing” can mean creating narrative or image or spoken words, or a mix -- not necessarily lines of print. Check out Tim Barrus on Facebook for examples. He has been a writer, a photographer, performer and voracious reader for many years. This is deliberately, consciously, short-form visual poetic narrative never possible to publish until recently. Not everyone has the chops for it. There were no major expenses except Tim’s time and talent. He owns the camera and downloads free music. They call it New Media.

To “publish” in the former print sense of the word takes investment capital (money) because it means actually making a big pile of the books. The publisher either thinks there is a way to market the product that will earn a profit or thinks the work is enough of a contribution to the world that it is worth funding as a gift. The printing cost of my book, “Bronze Inside and Out,” was paid by a grant from an organization that supports lifting up people who made a contribution to Alberta. The return on that investment will simply pay the staff’s wages and the expenses of the office. There will be little if any financial return for the writer, because this is an academic press where it is assumed that the author’s reward will be in terms of contributing to his or her career in the academic world. I did not understand any of this.

Facebook publishing does not provide advertising, promotion or any other active agenting. (The agent is the person who acts on behalf of the author to find connections that can lead to profit -- although lately there has been a shift to the agent who looks for writers on behalf of the publisher, almost exclusively from a commercial point of view. My book was suggested to the press by a woman who had a contract to find stories about outstanding people.) The University of Calgary Press listed my book in their catalog, made it available through a wholesaler, bought several ads in “Montana, the Magazine of Montana History,” and distributed many review copies which resulted in two or three reviews, a very nice interview with George Cole on Yellowstone Public Radio (you can find the interview if you Google), and a signing event at the Russell Auction with a dozen other authors. About half the edition of 750 has been sold.

The breakaway editors who have become “agents” have been followed by breakaway businesses that contract to promote books. Otherwise the writer must do it. Some writers with money will pay promoters in addition to what the publisher pays. A Montana publisher once told about an author, an older woman, who was determined to promote her book and was reading at an outdoor microphone on a cold rainy day, shaking with cold, determined to sell her book. He said he admired her so much. I should think so -- essentially she was making money for her publisher! But she thought she was doing what writers are supposed to do because they believe in their work.

Authors are now asked to submit a plan for promotion and an explanation of their platform, tasks previously performed by the publisher or possibly the agent. They are asked to submit an index, illustrations, the necessary permissions to quote, possibly even to format or pay for that specialized job to be done, and to round up flattering quotes for the cover. All of these were once part of the publishers task. Some publishers charge a “reading fee” for accepting manuscripts to their slush pile, usually about equivalent to what it used to cost to mail a paper manuscript. Now, of course, the slush pile is electronic.

Most writers are not very good at “publishing” because they throw every bit of strength and intelligence into the actual writing which is a different skill. It’s a bit like asking a dancer to make the costumes, play the music, and operate the lights as well as dancing. But most writers CAN manage to post their work on the Internet. They will simply have to make their living doing something else -- which means less time and energy for writing. Bob Scriver acted as his own foundry and gallery -- the equivalent of publishing -- which meant he could pay the bills but his work dwindled.

On the internet two immense streams of information and advice are now running in parallel. One is about the actual writing: all sorts of technical advice about how to develop plot, illustrate character, punctuate dialogue, think of images and so on. The other is advice for writers about marketing, either stuff about how to find a publisher (including the self-publishing alternatives) or find an agent or how to do the tasks oneself. The effort now is not to sell writing to the reader, but to sell advice to the WRITER -- because they are the ones with the greater craving.

The bright side of this is that all restrictions are gone. The passive restraints of scairdycat publishers or alleged potential commercial profits are gone. Experiments cost no more or less than tradition and writers doing their own “everything” are pressed into breakthroughs -- like Tim’s video-poems that are drawn from real life happening now. Are they journals, outcries, memoirs-of-just-yesterday, direct expressions of the heart, or something that doesn’t have a name yet? Since they come from the lives of a young multi-lingual community that lives with iPod earbuds dangling next to earrings, there is a lot of music and several languages. They travel so there is a lot of scenery.

People think of blogs as trivia or politics -- something mysterious and sort of dangerous. What I write is long-form daily essays, the same as I used to write as Sunday sermons. They are informal but often structured, sometimes researched, and occasionally illustrated with a photo from family albums or my own camera. It began as a way of organizing Blackfeet history for the tribe itself to read and then branched out into eulogies, theory, religious exploration, memoir, movie and book reviews, and natural history. I’ve made it a point to report on Valier, the village where I live. It’s interesting that people react to reading these blogs in a way they would not if they were in paper books or if the people were listening while sitting together as an audience.

Sometimes the reaction is not to the content at all, but simply to the fact that they exist, as though they were a product of some kind of privilege (being published) that is not justified. I think they are wondering what to think, afraid to have their own reaction, which is why they normally need a publisher, critics, and blurbs on the book jackets. They want to know why I have access and they don’t. (But they DO!) They need me to be authorized by someone. I hope the eventual result is the abandonment of authorization. Just AUTHOR. Why should someone be paid to set limits?

A DIRECTORY TO BOOKS BY MARY SCRIVER

The big puzzle now is how to get any specific printed matter. Never has so much been so available but not since early Gutenburg has it been so hard to find. This is because not only may the actual nature of the print range from paper to pixels, but also the gizmo on which you read may be anything from loose sheets to a cutting edge device requiring batteries, and you may be accessing videos mixed with print or spoken words with sound effects. Then there is the huge range of sources (many languages, beginning with children almost too young to spell, arcane academic works, pirated data, narcissistic chattering, and surreal poetry). The problem becomes not just where to find what you want, but how to conceive of what might be out there, in the famous phrase, “the unknowns you don’t know about.” Have you heard about the “number transmission” on ham radios that are presumably spy communication? Nothing but a detached voice reading a series of numbers.

An additional factor is that marketing systems have been radically -- I mean RADICALLY -- changed by electronics. Amazon, online remainder houses, online used book sources, are systematically wiping out the corner bookstore, but NOT the people in them who were living repositories of knowledge about books. Yet those people are not identifiably online to tell us what they know. They have been replaced by something called an “algorithm” which is a mathematical formula designed to sort information in some way more sophisticated than alphabetically or numerically (ISBN). Factors included are usually gender, age, income, education, what movies you’ve rented, what books you’ve already read or own, whether you have pets, where in the nation you live, whether you are city or country, what kind of food you eat, and so on. Then the factors might be weighted: more importance given to what college you attended (and what department you were in), less to what kind of car you drive. This is entirely from the point of view of the book marketer, whatever kind the book might be.

www.lulu.com , which prints for authors books on demand, produces a thousand books a day. It’s internal sorting is by subject and by staff recommendation. Powell’s, the huge bookstore in Portland, does the same thing. YouTube sorts by subject. Many smaller websites try to capture clients, both producers and consumers, by specializing in educational material or YA books. Sometimes work is grouped: “If you liked this, you might like that.”

Academic publishers have been slow to catch up, partly because codex bound books, adjudicated by peer review, have been an important way of sorting people instead of books. They are indicators for tenure. Also, they deal in journals as much as shelf books. People cling to the status quo because it means their jobs. Catching up with this is the number of websites like TED or The Edge, that present lectures in both video and manuscript. The university itself will be far more deeply affected by all this than they realize at present. It’s an auto-didact’s heaven. And a monopoly-smasher.

In the past small groups of certified elite entities or persons have been able to control publication and scholars’ work. They have sold access (books, lectures) as a way of financing themselves that did not depend on rich patrons who might or might be sympathetic, might or might not interfere with what was written. (No longer dukes and kings -- now international corporations.) This pattern applies both to small local historical societies and to mega-universities of enormous prestige and to Manhattan publishing cabals that have totally sold out to the marketing department, right down to synthesizing authors for ghosted works by hiring people to impersonate an author. Most of the public has not realized any of this, has had no reason to reflect on the consequences in their own lives.

From the point of view of the consumer, most of us would not know how to write an app (application) for an algorithm (though they tell us this is what we need to do) but soon there will be an app for an app that will do that. I will need several because I cruise a number of different categories from fMRI brain research to Blackfeet oil drilling transactions to the highland clearances in Scotland and so on. In the meantime Amazon and Netflix try to make their little “five star” ratings work and there are voluntary aggregators of readers who post their libraries in hopes of finding people with similar collections. (How many books do they have? It would take me a week to enter my books and few have bar codes, let alone ISBN numbers of even Library of Congress designations. And maybe -- like snoopers who want to find out what library books you have read -- some people will be far too interested in what I have.)

More important to me is the “publishing” of my writing, that reciprocal and synthesizing sort of book. I composed the appended list (which doesn’t include works in progress or works in file cabinets) according to what is formally published. Don’t expect anyone to come around to your place to beg you to buy them. Some are free. (The pdf’s about Blackfeet.)


MARY STRACHAN SCRIVER writes in various modes that must be accessed in various ways. She does not aggressively market. You must look for the books. Online is best. I have none of these books at my house. Here is some help:

STANDARD BOOKSTORE: “Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver” was published by the University of Calgary Press. It is acquired from any bookstore that has standard wholesale access or can be acquired from the academic wholesaler at Michigan State University Press. (msupress@msu.edu) If you Google you can find it at Amazon and other sources, sometimes for a discount. I have to buy these books myself.

SELF-PUBLISHED (Sometimes called “Nahpi-Yahki Press,” which means “White Woman Press”) books are available in two modes from www.lulu.com/prairiemary. You can download some pdf’s for free, or you can buy the books conventionally bound through the internet. They will come to you by mail. Since these are printed on demand, I do not have a supply of them. Many of the books are Blackfeet history.

OTHER SMALL PRESSES: A book of my prairie sermons was published by the Edmonton First Unitarian Church dba “Moosemilk Press.” This book, “Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke,” was remaindered. All the copies left are available through Driftwillow Press in Great Falls. http://driftwillowpress.com 725 4th Ave. S. , Great Falls, MT 59405, Phone: 406-453-0685, Fax: 406-453 0276

I write a thousand-word essay every morning for www.prairiemary.blogspot.com
Occasionally I post items of interest to Bob Scriver fans to www.scriverart.blogspot.com.
I write with Tim Barrus, who publishes print and video on Facebook, but what I write with him does not appear on Facebook nor does it show up on Google. It is often poetry.