IS THIS THE PARTY TO WHOM I AM EMAILING?

It’s an advantage to be a writer who blogs because every troubling or pesky incident offers plenty of stuff to discuss — and cuss.  The internet alone is a rich inexhaustible problem but I try to stick with what I know, which is my internet “provider” which is 3rivers.net which is a rural telephone cooperative that dates back to the days of crank (the kind with a handle) boxes on the wall that were mounted at a convenient height for men.  My aunt always had to stand on tiptoe and shout to transmit.  

My grandfather derived great amusement from using the bell code that signalled who was being called.  The caller used the crank handle Morse Code fashion, mixing longs and shorts.  My gleeful Irish grandfather would add more longs or shorts so the wrong person answered the phone.  Everyone was on party lines then because it was farm land and only one wire reached out along the road.  Soon everyone on that road was mad at my grandfather.  He used to run for office and wonder why no one voted for him.

Things haven’t changed that much since the old days, esp out in the boonies.  There are people here who haven’t adapted to industrialization, still preferring horses to tractors.  Since this is Indian country, there may still be people who prefer dogs to horses.  The telephone system in Valier is not that much ahead of the days when telephone signals were sometimes sent down fence lines in the actual barbed wire.  My computer internet access is landline copper wire, not optical fiber.  I hear various things about the switching system.  So we’ve got two systems to mesh: the old gradually upgrading telephone and the new webbed mix of satellite, microwave hilltop towers, and various kinds of wires, all with their own requirements and assumptions.

But the hardest part to manage is the “wetware” — the part that’s living humans.  Consider the password conundrum that is supposed to provide more security but simply provides more opportunities to game the system.  I was called at the beginning of the workday (which is for me still sleep time since I do my best writing at three or four AM) to ask me for a new password because of problems with security.  

I cannot think of new passwords when I’m still wandering the labyrinths of dreams.  I’d be hard pressed to remember I had a phone call.  Anyway, I’ve already exhausted the supply of names of pets, favorite teachers, preferred foods, etc.  I’m told that there are software programs that can easily discover one’s passwords.  I may have to get one of those programs. When this craze started I designed a form to put into a 3-ring binder.  There are 25 entries per page and I’ve had to change so many so often that I’ve got six pages of passwords.  At least they’re in chronological order so I can tell which is the most recent.

The dark side of being a writer is that I do a lot of online research, which generates a lot of passwords.  Also, I was an ordained minister (still in good standing) and address taboo subjects, which are the ones needing analysis and consciousness-raising.  (Like the Internet.)  But they set off alarms in the minds of rural folks whose worst sin is picking their noses.

This 3rivers office person (very nice person) who called asked for the new password over the phone.  That’s not very secret.  When weeks ago I lost my password for my 3rivers account (forgot to put it in the binder), they refused to give it to me and said I would have to come up with a new one — over the phone.  So if I were an operative of China, I would get my nephew to work in the phone office and every time someone called in to get a new password, I’d write it in a little notebook and have it handy for accessing that account myself or for sending to some official.

Of course, the techies working on email have the capacity to enter and read any account stream at will.  Management stopped letting outsiders into the work space when they realized visitors could see techies running interesting communication through their screens when times were slow.  In fact, to be helpful, a techie often has to come online with you and sort out the glitches.  So I asked what measures are taken to check out these tech people, not just for skills but for honesty in dealing with confidential material.  I mean, I know that most stuff is just boring household chat, but once in a while there must be materials worth blackmail.

Extortion is also a good way to make money, since there are a thousand companies out there capable of creating a “block list” also called “black list” which means they can shut down one’s account.  This is supposed to be because one’s communication is insecure or otherwise faulty.  Most commonly I get shut down because I typed something into the wrong place in the connection software— or didn’t.  Since I’m a MAC user, the techie I get is sometimes stumped because the majority of the systems are Windows.  They take a moral attitude towards this.  

So I have a friend who lives in a narrow forest valley in Idaho.  The only dependable provider for his internet, which is the basis of his business, is the satellite outfit called Hughes or BlueSky.  They have a bad reputation with Barracuda, who blocks them — sometimes.  

Which brings us to two new problems.  These flows of signal are so easy to modify that they can be adjusted to handle traffic density.  This is why I work in the middle of the night:  at that hour all the features of the programs are generally available because traffic is thin.  When it gets thick, features get dropped out.  Capriciously, from my point of view.  When the traffic is overwhelming enough, there begin to be warnings and then even a shut-down.  Users tend to assume that internet service is there and consistent.  Wrong.  In fact, in rural areas the electricity, water, and gas don’t always flow evenly either.

The other issue is sub-contracting, and strangely the security aspects of email are the ones the company sub-contracts.  The nanny filter meant to keep out porn and SPAM is contracted by 3rivers to Barracuda.  When I was having troubles, I went direct to Barracuda, but their contract with 3rivers is entirely separate from individual contacts.  No one had access to both aspects so they couldn’t tell me if there was interference between the two systems.  I set them as “low” as I can since at 78 I’m unlikely to be shocked

The other service contracted out is the hiring of techies which is done in this case by TrueVision Net.  Their focus is on skills, not on honesty or reliability.  Like telephone help-desk answering businesses, the humans might be anyone.  In fact, one little scandal developed (it didn’t involve any of the companies named here) when it was discovered that a telephone business was using prison help.  Some of them had developed a remarkable ability to remember VISA numbers.

Management level jobs are usually a matter of experience and therefore are older people, so that much of the country’s supervision is still done by people who have little or no experience or ease with computers.  But the “kids” on the first line grew up playing vid games and possibly even hacking for fun.  When I called back the office person at 3rivers this morning, she had given me her extension number but the automated phone answering system was not set up to accept it, so I had to be switched over by the human being the machine-algorithm system assigned.  Using an extension number is an OLD device.  For a telephone company to not install it does not inspire confidence.  It makes me wonder whether some of the lines are still barbed wire running along fences.

But my grandfather would love it.  So many break points, so many chances for mischief.

"SNOW": The Documentary Film

I know, I know.  I should learn how to shrink links down so they would at least fit on twitter.  But I hate having to conform to the technical demands that I spend more and more time figuring out what they want me to do, instead of being able to just use the keyboard to produce print.  I do not WANT to be cheerful, to make my posts beautiful, to be (above all) marketable.

Anyway, consider this link to Aeon, an online “magazine” (I guess) for thoughtful people.  There is a lot of info in this link description, including the idea that they want you to subscribe and therefore are putting out enticing stories.  One of the best things they do is to mine the wonderful endless supply of short videos, nothing at all like Hollywood nor Netflix, but coming from original visions made possible by new technology.

https://aeon.co/videos/rail-workers-battle-winters-worst-in-this-kinetic-oscar-nominated-classic?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=2f835a226f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_01_09&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-2f835a226f-68600437

This one is on the automatic email feed that I get and it is not at all a vid innovation.  Rather it is a classic, beautifully orchestrated, gorgeously imaged, Oscar-nominated “short” from the past.  The Aeon presentation is just THERE, the film to see, but I would love to understand how and why it was made.

To me, it is an essay about industrialism, the technology of pipes, wires, and rails (also canals) that provide infrastructure for our lives.  What is a railroad but a way of “piping” people from one place to another?  It works beautifully in a small country like England, showing up in BBC plots, moving across a patterned connectome of places.  In Montana the picture is much different as it is in all huge intemperate countries like Russia, China, and Australia — as it is in Alaska and the arid prairie.  Those places have had to wait for airplanes — even helicopters.  (Check out the thrilling Aussie rancher series now streaming on Netflix.  “Keeping Up with the Joneses”)

The genre concept I’m feeling around for is how industrial infrastructure (including oil pipelines) conflicts with nature and how, since humans are organic products of nature, we are affected.  So these railroads overcoming deep snow illustrate how we have gone from backbreaking shovel work in order to open a track to sitting comfortably in the dining car while the landscape seems to zoom past us.  

But now, though we still are dependent on industrial-style infrastructure that we have let decay, the newer transition is the one from industrial to technological.  Now the “man” sits in his own home sending paperless documents and Skyping conference calls.  We forget that the internet is still dependent on industrial infrastructure power networks (plus satellite and tower additions, solar and wind energy sources).  We forget that if we don’t have a power source for the computer, it’s a doorstop.  And batteries are a form of pollution and mysterious fires.  And we are using up rare minerals.

And it’s pretty clear that we’re losing social skills.  But many studies suggest that the best evolutionary mutations for survival are the ones that lead toward cooperation and understanding each other directly with other people “present and accounted for”.  We need to learn how to speak eye contact and body language, just as dogs and horses do.  Beyond that, to see how other humans see the world and think about what they are doing.  It’s not an easy or natural skill.  

But that’s all rather obsessive and too alarming to sustain very long.

Going back to this railroad-against-snow subject, in my desire to know more about the film I went to YouTube and discovered that there is a whole genre of snow films.  The snow sports, of course, all that speeding and jumping, but also quiet spans of snowfall without commentary or even a sound track except for a bit of wind and whispering snowflakes.

I did find info about the origins of this short docu.  “Snow is a short documentary film made by Geoffrey Jones for British Transport Films in 1962-1963. The 8-minute-long film shows the efforts of British Railways staff in coping with the 1963 United Kingdom cold wave. An example of "pure cinema", it was nominated for an Academy Award in 1965.

"The film had its origins in primary research for a documentary about the British Railways Board. Jones' test research coincided with one of the coldest winters on record, and Jones approached BTF producer Edgar Anstey with the idea to contrast the comfort of the passengers with the efforts of the railway workmen in keeping trains going in the frozen conditions.” 

I also found a listing of a snow film that seems to draw art into the conversation, but I can’t see it because of some cyber glitch, characteristic of cyber technology. “http://video.nationalgeographic.com/video/short-film-showcase/one-mans-walk-in-the-snow-creates-a-giant-masterpiece?source=relatedvideo  You can see by the url that it is a National Geographic vid.  But “Flash Studio” wants to own it.  Here’s their description.

“Simon Beck is a snow artist who creates huge designs in the snow by simply walking in a pair of snowshoes. He believes that inspiration goes before motivation, and nature's perfect patterns inspire him to create something new every time out. This short documentary follows Beck's preparations for a piece he did in Stryn, Norway, on a day of good snow. Watch and join him as he catches a first glimpse of a masterpiece that, after many steps and calculations, would most likely be covered in two days.”

So now we see the most pervasive and subtle influence of the shift to the “virtual”, the digital, the evanescent.  The industrial paradigm was about stuff, visible, graspable, dominate-able things that could be owned, stored, sources of bankable cash.  No more.  Now it’s all like those photos of starling flocks swirling through the sky.  It’s about ideas, patterns in the head.  Sometimes access is blocked.

Snow.

PASSWORD, DAMMIT.

Picture a little old lady pounding out a daily blog in her back bedroom while trying to keep her cats off the keyboard.  Two open cases with her Internet provider, which is the local telephone cooperative, operating an aging telephone system.  Connection is with DSL, which is not ideal.  It is valuable because it connects 911 quickly (I have needed that service) and because it works when the electricity is off.  (The electricity is owned by a North Dakota corporation and is often “down” — sometimes literally poles and lines on the ground — because of high winds, extreme temps, and long distances that are hard to maintain.)  The phone is in a different room than the computer, which techies don’t grasp.  They only know their own familiar lives.

So I’m 78 and not “up” on current slang let along tech jargon.  I listen slowly because I have to think what is meant.  But when they become condescending and begin to explain basics with boilerplate, it’s worse.  The techies seem to be under thirty, talk really fast, don’t like to move their lips, and are from other parts of the country.  I’m learning to use email contacts with techies instead of the phone, unless it’s an immediate problem.  (It could be worse — I could be a techie trying to explain the new world to a little old lady.)

I have two on-going and evidently insoluble problems.  One is blocklist, sometimes called blacklist, which might just be a mispronunciation or might be something more ominous than “blocking.”  There are more than 800 companies that maintain blocklists, which means that people can’t call in and you can’t call out.  One doesn’t know about that status unless one uses a formal service, which providers are slow to tell you exists.  Providers want you to think that you are safe because of something they are doing directly, not that they are contracting to another business, far away.  I just now learned about whitelists, but can’t use them because I have no password, and unless I have a previous password, I can’t have a new one.

The other issue is related but not the same, and that’s the war over passwords with Google, which insinuated itself into my local internet provider so that I have to use my GooglePlus password to get onto my regular email.  (My local provider doesn’t believe this.  They say it is impossible.)  I want to cancel my account with Google but am afraid it will also cancel my 3rivers account or at least require a different 3rivers password.  So I call my local provider to find out what my password is after I’ve cancelled Gmail.  They won’t tell me.  It’s a secret because of security.  I guess they’re afraid I might send myself SPAM.  So I take a risk and cancel GooglePlus.  I haven’t had an email since, but that’s not unusual on the morning after a holiday while people are clearing their inboxes.

I’m considering asking Putin what my password might be.  Trump claims Putin will know.  (That’s a joke.  I’m finding that people can’t tell jokes from what passes for reality.  But that’s a different problem.)  

Inventing new and more complex passwords for every transaction becomes a time-consuming and imagination-challenging project.  I’ve used all my pets, teachers, favorite books, playmates, and even Blackfeet words, though that’s tricky because it’s an oral language and no one spells them the same way.  (In Canada the word for the tribe — Siksika — is translated as Blackfoot.  Up there Piegan becomes Peigan.)  I designed a form for noting passwords that I keep in a binder alongside the computer and try to keep updated.  It’s 25 websites per page and there are six pages.  I don’t do games, databases, or any other fancy stuff, but I do stream movies all evening.

I’m a writer, so I use the Internet for research, to send queries and to share writing.  My primary venue is blogger.  I do not understand the relationship between blogger and google, so I use tumblr for backup.  I once had an adventure with the spoken word for posts and might renew that.  But basically I just spend the first half of every day composing a thousand word essay to post.  Every day the same thing the same way on the same schedule regardless of holidays.

But techies want bells and whistles, and the front office wants new and exciting features that will appeal to the advertising demographic which is certainly NOT little old ladies who are easily confused when the entire starter page is reconfigured to accommodate new features, like the demand that one make one’s blog post “pretty” and appealing.  I barely figure out how to change the photo in my heading, and they invent some new thing.  Then, when I’ve become dependent on their automatic re-sizing of image feature, they drop it.  (Which is separate from the issue of which images you can use and how to certify they are legal.)

All these services appear to be short on techies and using lesser skilled people all the time, because the ones that really KNOW have moved to San Francisco and are living in someone’s closet while waiting to catch a unicorn.  (This is not a joke.  It is a figure of speech using techie jargon.)  They cannot conceive of an internet user who is not on a cell phone that will convey “texting” and who is not using a handheld device.  They also have no mental image of thin infrastructure support out on the prairies and in the mountains.  Only cities on the coasts count.  (The Lake Michigan coast counts which is lucky for Chicago.)  In tolerable weather people in Valier are often standing on their porches in order to get decent cell service, even though there’s a tower right next to the grain elevator.

But at the same time the sheer numbers of users go up and the variety of kinds and levels of sophistication go up.  The only people who really understand all this are adolescent hackers.

But my Luddite orientation is sometimes lucky.  A few years ago I began to understand how fragile the supposedly invulnerable Internet really is, partly because the original design of World Wide Web has been co-opted by major providers trying to monetize everything by gating (the stinking passwords).  Therefore, since last summer I’ve been spending hours a day downloading and converting to print on paper everything I valued.  Since I sometimes write with another person and consider some of that material invaluable — precious — it was years of chapters and discussion.  As we age, I’ll try to find a reliable archive for the materials in case I die or the house burns down, but I can only hope they won’t re-digitize everything.  The academic world is now as turbulent as all the rest of the planet.  WHAT Ivory Tower?

IF YOU'RE A WRITER, HOW DO YOU "ROLL"?

People write for as many different reasons as there are people who CAN write, and probably more because some people want to write but assume they can’t.  Here is a brainstorm list:

1.  An expansion of correspondence — maybe copies to friends and relatives like a group letter or maybe even a book like the dialogue published as “84 Charing Cross Road” or — to be radical, the letters of Paul to nascent congregations that became the bulk of the New Testament.

2.  A record of descent like the roll of begats in the Old Testament.

3.  A record of laws in print, beginning with the Ten Commandments printed on stone.

4.  A written version of oral stories usually sung by troubadors long ago or maybe happening a whole lot more recently.

5.  Beautiful poetic metaphorical writing to be used for meditation or in a prayer book.  These days they are often “environmental”.

6.  A way of seeing what you think, ordering ideas. 

7.  Political persuasion, polemics offering evidence.

8.  A tool of education, flushing out information that can be and should be shared.

And so on.  Lots more angles and new ones always.

At some point along comes the “novel” which is “immersive,” romantic, sexy, generational, anchored by a place and time, and dynamic — things happen.  Novels sweep the board, dominate everything, become synonymous with books.  Then those split out into genres: mysteries, Westerns, sci-fi, and so on.  And these, made into versions of a “codex” with printed paper between covers, become objects that can make money, reform cultures, defend the stigmatized, become elegant enough to be art objects. 

THEN, overnight, it all goes virtual, online, not necessarily the same manuscript through time.  Alternative endings, fan fiction, prequels, sub-expansions of minor characters, and whatever else people can invent.

Just now on the telephone I was wrestling with my bank which, adding insult to injury, has been charging me $2 a month for sending me a paper accounting and now want to know whether they should hire a collection agency after a one dollar deficit showed up.  They are trying to force me to go online but I keep telling them that in Valier one can’t count on internet, electricity or telephone and anyway EVERYTHING that goes online is public — I don’t care how many passwords a person has. 

I tried to tell her about yesterday’s bank scandal — $30 fee to cash a Canadian check for $29.97.  “I’m a writer,” I said, recklessly.  

“What do you write?” she asked.  

“Books,” I said, suspecting she wouldn’t know a blog if she sat on one.  

“Romance, mysteries or adventure?” she asked.  Those were the only categories she knew.  Nothing about neurology, deep time, or theory of existence.  

She thought for a moment.  “Do you live in Vermont?” she asked, evidently thinking that’s where all writers live.  

“No — Montana.”  She thought for another moment.  

“Why don’t you just drive over to Canada and cash the check?”  It’s a three hour drive to the University of Calgary Press and I don’t have a passport.  You have to have a passport to go to Canada these days.  She didn’t know.  Anything.

I did the monthly laundry yesterday where my fav laundry attendant, a WWII veteran and lifelong railroad man, struggles to understand me.  He can’t figure out how I can have two master’s degrees, have taught school, read a lot, and was married to a famous man — but not have a fame and fortune.  His indicators won’t compute.  He’s not alone.

The people I’m reading are in Aeon, sometimes Edge, not TED; often through specialty groups and mailing lists.  Mostly in Canada, which was an accident and often from aboriginal groups because of following Paul Seseequasis on Twitter.  I follow HIV-AIDS issues.  Outside of that, I read high-powered books and google their bibs.  That often links me into other groups but it’s unusual for those people to be in Montana.

The bottom line is that I write because I’m a print freak and an idea hound and that’s the way I roll.

One of the major book symbioses that I see is between women and novels, and looking at the attendees at book readings here, it dawns on me what’s going on.  They are looking for evidence about managing families and their own lives.  They prefer regional, pioneer and early day stories, but not so much tribal people unless they’re enrolled.  The Hutterite women, who also love novels, always include the dynamic of religion.  Everyone is solving troubled kids’ problems, finding the perfect man or redeeming an existing marriage, and always cherishing the fantasy of writing books themselves. 

This state has some very strong and informed women who take on environmental and political issues, but I don’t get the impression that they read novels or watch TV.  They are addressing real issues and a lot of the time they are cutting trail, but networking.  I admire them, but don’t travel with them.  But THEY travel a lot, which means they listen to audible books while they’re on the road driving the long Montana distances, or if they’re flying to Washington DC or conferences in foreign countries, they take whatever version of Kindle they use, fully loaded with books — maybe not novels.

Kathy, the Valier librarian, goes through her quiet hours (when we’re all snowbound or traveling to a tournament) with a little gleaming tablet that tells stories.  She’s on the main desktop computer to do her work — ordering, database maintenance, filing — or just at the counter laminating covers or stacking books into categories.  If there are patrons reading, she uses earphones.  She calls it her “little buddy” and clearly that’s what it is.  She knows that books are not just what’s on the shelf but also all the peripherals.

Tablet books work here because this has been a radio culture for a hundred years and was an oral culture before that — both whites and tribal people.  But also, they penetrate much farther into local lives than bound books ever would, going along on the tractor or through laundry and kitchen chores.  For people who download rather than buying and shelving books, the saving in space is major.  For people who move among households all the time, including kids, it’s a reassuring source of continuity.

All this is great but there is one big DISCONNECT:  the creation of the materials.  Kids can even make Hollywood-grade films using the computer and they do that.  But who is writing radio scripts?  Who is writing to read into a microphone?  Who is a writer sensitive to sounds and dialogue rhythms, aware of the “beats” of action?  In my grade school, in fourth grade, there were two teachers who specialized.  My teacher’s focus was hand-puppets; the other teacher’s focus was radio.  Anyone doing either now?

We just haven’t gone “wide” enough yet, which means we still don’t know all the reasons to write, which doesn’t have to be in print.

THE WORLD ACCORDING TO SHATZKIN

Published books are second-guess books.  I mean the writer does the best he or she can to achieve a book, and then the second-guess about its quality and goals comes from an editorial committee that knows nothing and cares less about the interests of the writer.  Their purpose is to make money and burnish the reputation of the publisher, but also to keep everyone employed and the institution functioning.

Therefore, publishers are opposed to risk.  Their idea of safety is sort of like someone walking through a field of land-mines: they are careful not to put their feet on untrodden land where no one has already taken the risk of setting off an explosion, usually because of fear of content: someone saying something that’s offensive or that should otherwise be suppressed, like the directions for making a dirty bomb.

I resist any kind of curating or editing because I do not want to be in the position of Raymond Carver or Thomas Wolfe, who are considered great BUT only because of the second guessing of editors who changed the writing, presumably for the better.

Once the issue of content is settled (which can be dismaying and limiting for writers, often destroying talent and censoring what can be written), there is another issue that has reared its head out of the swamp.  Because traditional books are objects for commerce, they are regulated at the points of production, transport, and sales, mediated by agents and salesmen in bookstores.  Copyright is a good example of legal mediation of print book content, which is regulated in large part by interstate commerce law and treaties between nations.  I was disconcerted in the Eighties when I went to preach in Canada, carrying along some denominational books, but they were impounded at the border because they were American.  The law is to protect Canadian writers from American domination.

My book, “Bronze Inside and Out,” is pirated online, evading the University of Calgary Press which is the publisher.  They say there’s little they can do about it.  We’re not TOO disconcerted because it only strips profit — money is a different, if derived, issue than intellectual rights.  Payment by a university press is covertly not about money but rather about credits toward tenure.  Since I’m not an academic, I get almost NO money.  Since the University needs its Press for credibility and to develop scholars, and therefore keeps the lights on and the receptionist paid, they aren’t too worried.  And I am writing books to get information out there that I want people to have, so I’m not too disturbed.  I just won’t do it again.

How much should government intervene in publishing?  The whole scenario has been changed by the creation of the internet.  If the government can’t enforce copyright because national boundaries are erased and bookstores are evaded, if they can’t control the writing or online publishing of anything, if the picture is too big now to censor on the grounds of decency (one man’s tentacle porn is another man’s seafood), and if there is no way to tell how many copies are being observed, downloaded or forwarded, the old pattern of print publishing is forever gone.  

Adept computer people tell us that everything that has ever been online or in a database CANNOT be permanently removed.  Someone somewhere (or a lot of them) have already downloaded and recorded it all in private locations.  I don’t use the Wayback Machine, but other people do.

The ability to monitor the flow of data across the entire world Internet amounts to continuous surveillance of individuals, something we have always blocked government from doing — in theory at least.  Phone tapping is one thing, tracking devices are another, and correspondence — even in-house memos — are still another.  In a time of terrorism and sabotage, the situation is far beyond anything we can even understand, much less control.  Hackers don’t worry about it.

A far more immediate government involvement is being litigated without many readers paying attention.  It is about price fixing.  Because of the many ways to sell print, it’s possible to undersell, to manipulate pricing.  It is rumored that when Amazon tells you the price for a book it factors in how much it thinks you want it by checking your buying history, your location, your level of education, and whatever else some techie thinks should be put into the algorithm.  Such an agreement breaks free trade laws.  I was disconcerted all over again when the price of a book I wanted — nothing special — was listed as costing hundreds of dollars.  A few days later on the library computer, it was bargain basement.  But there is no way to bargain.

It is illegal for the government to access records of what books you checked out from the library, but not the records of what you bought online.  Of course, probably it’s easy to hack local library records.  Library books are often acquired at contract prices that are lower than general prices, because the numbers are great enough to guarantee profit.

There are so few major publishers that if they agree that books should be priced at a certain level, they can make it stick.  If the book is a material object, some of the price has to be the cost of production: paper, printing machine, storage, distribution, promotion.  Since copies sold are the main way the public tries to understand quality, artificially inflating the price can act to impress the public that it is an increase in quality of content.  The New York Times Best Seller list does that.  Since more people mean more copies, more sales, more profit, more reputation, urban venues dominate and stigmatize regional books.

Random House Building

One of the accusations concerns the pricing of ebooks on Amazon.  The smoking gun is an email (!) proposing punishment for Random House because they didn’t agree to the proposal among the major publishing houses to control the price of ebooks.  Pricing ebooks is tricky since they are “virtual”: they have no manufacturing or storage costs, and content is not localized physically, so no transportation.  Content becomes more important because everything else is gone.  But computer techies don’t do content.

One of the most crucial and lucrative ways to profit from print now is databases, esp. personal addresses used for marketing, either sales or research.  This is a secondary profit from doing business online.  Most people seem oblivious to this, which means that Facebook is making zillions by accumulating and selling marketing data.  This is particularly true of books being sold from used book sources or books focused on specific categories of readers, whether they are children’s picture books or porn. 

Mike Shatzkin

Mike Shatzkin is from a book sales family and maintains “The Shatzkin Files” which constantly monitors and analyzes changes in book sales.  Like so many other forms of commerce, esp. in the arts, there has been major uproar which he claims is finally settling down.  From 2010 to the present he has organized the Digital Book World Conference, meant to analyze and get out ahead of change.  Now he has stopped doing that because he feels we are either entering a time of consolidation that will be fairly stable or there may be some change coming that is so unexpected no one can predict what will happen.  

It might be on the scale of a collapse of civilization as we know it.  I don’t think Shatzkin would be surprised and neither would I.  The Internet is completely dependent on power supply and delivery networks that are as virtual as any other coding.  It takes battalions of techies to keep the systems from corroding over time.  Monopolies and abuse by platform companies are as easily developed as international espionage and interference.  They interact.

This post comes from reflection on two main sources:

http://www.storygrid.com/power-to-the-people/

and 

http://www.idealog.com/blog/big-change-era-trade-book-publishing-ended-four-years-ago/

U of Calgary Press

As a bit of added interest, the U of Calgary Press recently issued me a check for my royalties due.  It was for $29.97 in Canadian funds.  I’m on the US side.  My bank called a few hours ago.  They charge $30 to process international funds.  What should they do about the three cents??  I was laughing too hard to think about it.

COMPLEXIFICATION AND "COOL"

There are two issues in this post.  One is complexification and the other is the hard meanness of so many scholars today.

First, complexification.  This is all coming from online conversation about an excellent and provocative article which I posted about in December (12/17/15).  The article in question is “The inhumanity of literary criticism”  by Lisa Ruddick. “Interviews with 70 young English scholars and a survey of papers published in a major journal reveal a troubling side of current literary criticism: academic norms scorn discussion of people’s inner lives, leaving critics hesitant to advocate for anything that smacks of “uncool” human feeling.”    http://thepointmag.com/2015/criticism/when-nothing-is-cool

At first, just after the post, comments were positive and plain spoken, but when a link was made to a specialized blog for psychoanalysts, comments soon went to this kind of thing:  

In contrast to reinvesting one's narcissism or power in the child, what is classically called a masochist, can invest her echoism or her goodness into the child. Her interest for harmony or unity in the world is played out in the child-mother relationship.    

Freud also refers to the baby as the 'erotic plaything of the mother.' This comes from how he pairs the two drives of aggression and affection (1933, p. 120). 

The echoist can fall away from sexual interest and self-assertion (at the phallic stage) and regress back to affectionate impulses. They like sentimental things like cute, fuzzy animals, babies, and want massages, comfort foods, or soothing.

I think what this Freudian is trying to say is that “cool” became a value in order to escape mushy emotion, which finds massages, comfort food and soothing childish.  (Watch this space for a post about “inconsolability” — the rejection of all comforting, which seems widespread.)  What strikes me even more is how devoted many of respondents were to their own particular interpretation of a system that goes far beyond what most people understand about Freud.  Rocket science as applied to the psyche.

In seminary (actually, Ruddick’s U of Chicago) I took a course in “Process Theology” from Chicago Theological Union, an affiliate.  It was soon clear that Process Theology was also dependent on what looked like the schematic of the wiring in a three-stage outer space rocket.  After months of building whiteboard diagrams to explain what was meant to be quantum physics applied to Christianity, the professor admitted that most Process theologians can’t quite figure out how to get Jesus into all this stuff.  So why do they think it’s Christian?

All the “post modern” systems, some of them psychoanalytical, seem to be based on “manning up", hardening for a coming culture war.  Challenging authorities.  I guess that’s what it actually was, but when do we get to the post-post modern phase, the “stand down” and reflection about what was accomplished?  Can’t we sit under a tree in the grass for a little while without being mocked?  And what do we use for reference points now?

Some of Lisa’s respondents confirmed her premise:   “Last year I set out to catch up on the psychological and psychoanalytic Shakespeare criticism of the past 2-3 decades and was appalled by the ideological stridency that has occupied the field.  Of course, the critical works varied a great deal in sophistication, and there were many astute post-modern perspectives.  But the reductive mischaracterizations of the so-called "humanist" critical tradition (of which I am a contributor, as are others who have responded to Lisa's essay) amazed me in their party-line consistency.”

Another laments:  “I have to give a paper based on the theories of Jules Weiss, who asserted that reciprocal love is dangerous to the self, since it compels a regression that threatens mental stability, while frustration and pain re-inforce the reality principle and make for mental stability.”   Even if "reciprocal love" is a delusion that would make a person weak, would we want to live without it?  Why aren’t frustration and pain a challenge to mental stability?

Of course, these are psychoanalysts who have spent their lives learning and elaborating systems of introspection and pathology, only to have it all swept away by happy pills and the new neurology research.  It turns out that much psychoanalytic theory is embroidery on the Emperor’s clothes.   If infusions of ketamine once a week can lift crippling depression, why obsess over your mother’s toilet training strategy? 

Our institutions and laws, our economics and education systems, are not keeping up with the human needs of many people.  Surely the answer is not to get more callous so as to ignore them comfortably, though that might save money in the short run.

But the daily complexification that drives me nuts is the Internet.  Not the big questions about how it affects civilization or mental health or how to guarantee the power supply or whether there is enough capacity. I guess it is a confluence of trying to attract customers by using the doctrine that adding new features will please them.  It’s the conviction that makes the breakfast cereal aisle a head-swirling riot of alternatives.  I was amazed a couple of decades ago when I was in Saskatoon and saw maybe only ten kinds of the stuff.  Same in other categories.

If it were a simple matter of settling on one stable OS, that would be all right, but instead every time I open my screen — not just when I am forced to switch to some new version or else lose my Netflix subscription — there are new bells and whistles, a whole new language, that I must learn in order to produce my daily essay.  It eats hours out of the day to re-locate functions, to establish that they’ve dropped something out that I depended upon, and so on.  Sometimes it means seining through forum websites where people have dozens of other problems.  There are constant impositions of new policies about privacy or connectivity and always the suggestions,  “Why not favorite us on Facebook?”  And worst of all, “Tell us what you want.”  Like a stupid lover who can't pay attention.

We have a circle, a sucking whirlpool, that forms when the tech is more important than the content and the content gets worse and worse because tech stuff drains off all the energy and desire.  So a website like medium.com starts out proclaiming that it will be plain, elegant and intuitive, and ends up playing some kind of three-dimensional chess with their features, until few who seriously write are still posting and Medium has to pay regular writers regular fees in order to have content.  People intent on standing out from the crowd indulge in cruel games of mockery.

The deepest irony in me writing about these harsh, possessive, rigid kinds of thinkers is that here in Montana I’m constantly grumbling about how shallow, middle-class, comfortable, assumed, commodified, predictable, most of the thinking and writing is.  It is so safely smug.  If it isn’t, it won’t sell, it won’t attract people.  That's not theory -- it's fact.  This is why (outside of professional groups that enforce their own internal standards) religion ignores theologians, therapists ignore hard-core psychoanalysis, publishing ignores challenging material, and all the “post” stuff seems of limited usefulness.  Why can’t we find a clear, user-friendly alternative to internet complexity?  There’s no use in expecting the kids to do it — they revel in all that intricate strategy of video-game style.  It takes wisdom to be simple.

* * * * * * * 

Here's a much tougher and ruder version of meanness that is not academic.

http://www.vice.com/read/how-to-raise-the-level-of-online-debate-in-2016?utm_source=vicetwitterus