The Lish effect

The poet M Sarki, long a student of Gordon Lish, continues to “submit” all his work to Lish’s journal The Quarterly, even though it’s been out of business for years:

Gordon and I practice today as if he were still running that magazine and I am still submitting poems for publication in it. And when I make it into his defunct rag I still feel fatly satisfied. I have had a multitude of poems accepted by Gordon for publication.

This is an exercise, of course, one Sarki goes through because this is how he can secure Lish’s opinion of each piece – delivered in a word (“Yes” or “No”) or a couple at most (“So so”). One wonders, has he so internalized Lish’s vision – or have they, together, crafted such a detailed vision for what Sarki’s work should be – that these word-or-two reactions convey everything he needs to know about what makes a poem work, or how he can change it so it works better? Or do they remain, after all these years, oracular and opaque – and does this, in combination with a sense of Lish’s genius, and the knowledge that he can sometimes please Lish, by trying again and again, motivate him better than clear, detailed direction ever could?

“The iPad, like the Kindle, is a portable
cash register.”

Economist Arnold Kling delivers a succinct, powerful explanation of why Apple and Amazon should slash, slash, slash prices on the iPad and the Kindle. Best bit:

The iPad, like the Kindle, is a portable cash register. With a Kindle, wherever you are, you are in a bookstore, with your credit card handy. (…) The only reason not to give the Kindle away for free is that you would wind up putting it in the hands of consumers who are not all that interested in books.

Europe’s alcohol belts

A key determinant is what alcohol-producing fruits and grains can be grown where; make what you will of the effects of what’s done with them. (From Strange Maps)

Apple will drive ebook prices
lower than Amazon would dare

At TechCrunch the other day, Erick Schonfeld posted that Apple, by allowing book publishers to charge what they want for ebooks, is gaining a critical advantage over Amazon in the battle to be the top ebooks retailer. This may well be true, as Apple, by building good relationships with publishers, would be well-positioned to get better terms, i.e. take more per sale, as well as get the chance to sell hot new titles before Amazon can, and so forth.

But will Apple sell more ebooks by letting publishers charge more for them? I highly doubt it. Rupert Murdoch and the lions of print can blather about how Amazon’s pricing strategy “devalues books,” but that strategy is based on a considered recognition of what consumers are willing to pay. Look at book prices – not nominal retail prices, i.e. the sticker on the front of the book, but the prices consumers actually pay. Factoring in returns and remainders, for the vast majority of titles, the average price of each copy printed is far lower than the nominal retail price.

Why don’t book houses simply lower the nominal price, in order to sell more copies, more quickly? They’re pursuing a discriminatory pricing strategy, by getting the “gotta have that book now” people to pay through the nose up front, then, by design or not, allowing the price of the remaining copies to fall, to levels at which other consumers will buy them. (I hope someone at these houses is doing this consciously, balancing the costs of warehousing, dealing with returns, etc., with the money to be made on volume sales, long after publication, at lower prices.)

In effect, by insisting on high ebook prices, publishers might be saying they want the freedom to pursue some similar strategy with ebooks. They could, for example, charge more for new titles, and those older titles in high demand, and lower prices for the rest. But $14.99 (or higher), the figure Macmillan insisted on in negotiating with Amazon, seems far too high a starting point. As Amazon recognizes, new ebook prices can be far lower than those for new print books, because ebook production, storage, and transfer costs essentially nothing, radically reducing the amount publishers invest in each title. Amazon also understands that lower ebook prices will entice readers to move to ebooks, and why wouldn’t that be a good thing for publishers? I don’t know the numbers, but I’m guessing that publishers’ effective margins, on an e-title sold at $9.99, are as high or higher than on the same title, sold in print, at a higher nominal price. So publishers must view the Kindle and the iPad not as a means of reaching more consumers, but as a means of extracting more money from those of their current customers who’ve switched to onscreen bookreading. The problem, of course, is that their strategy is likely to drive many of those folks away from books, and toward cheaper, readily accessible alternatives to much of what’s published in book form – all the free content that’s available on the Web, for example.

Back to Apple and its efforts to make nice with book houses. I share what I think is Schonfeld’s view, that this is aimed at driving Amazon out of the ebook business, or at least reducing its hold on that business. That might work, especially because the iPad, from the look of things, is much more powerful and usable than the Kindle – even if it’s not quite good enough to be anything other than a niche device. But if Apple succeeds in this, do publishers really believe that it won’t use its stranglehold on ebook sales to drive prices down as far as they’ll go? And, in addition, force publishers to offer condensed versions of each title for sale at a bargain rate, and to break up titles for sale on a chapter-by-chapter basis, also at rock-bottom prices? Hello? Whatever Steve Jobs is saying during his “secret” New York meetings with publishers, they should ignore it, and get ready for the era of the 99-cents-per-song strategy, applied to their products.

Not that this will be bad for consumers, or, ultimately, for writers and publishers too. A more sensible pricing strategy should have a huge, positive effect on sales of ebooks, and of other text content, delivered in electronic form. And writers’ and editors’ cut of revenue should be far higher, with far less money spent on production, distribution, and storage – not to mention ineffectual marketing, and pricy midtown Manhattan office space.

Jonathan Yardley on J.D. Salinger

I missed this one when it first came around. Note that Yardley passes up the chance to knock Salinger personally – unlike some other critics, in their teardowns of other writers – while sticking to the business at hand. Which, in this case, is mercilessly, but fairly, ripping to shreds the work at hand:

Why is a book about a spoiled rich kid kicked out of a fancy prep school so widely read by ordinary Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom have limited means and attend, or attended, public schools? Why is Holden Caulfield nearly universally seen as “a symbol of purity and sensitivity” (as “The Oxford Companion to American Literature” puts it) when he’s merely self-regarding and callow? Why do English teachers, whose responsibility is to teach good writing, repeatedly and reflexively require students to read a book as badly written as this one?

Was Stefan Zweig such a supercilious
man, that his writing is bad?

That seems to be the basis of Michael Hoffman’s argument that we should all stop reading Zweig’s work. Though he adds, by way of buttressing his case, that Zweig was a shameless fame-hound and suckup, and among Zweig’s contemporaries, those whom we (presumably) most admire, including Thomas Mann, found Zweig’s work saccharine and pedestrian both.

Hmm… I re-read Letter from an Unknown Woman not long ago, and quite liked it. The story was well-crafted, the characters – the protagonist, and her addressee – appealing and interesting, and the tragedy presented in nicely understated fashion. Was it pompous and over-written, like much of Mann’s work, or obvious and sophomoric, like many of the plays and stories of Brecht, another Zweig-hater cited, approvingly, by Hoffman? No, and for that, it’s aged much better. I loved Mann’s work when I read it in college – indeed, I read nearly everything he wrote, not just because I was a German lit major, but because I was so taken by its combination of ornate style, minutely detailed, pointed descriptions, and air of general importantness. I tried to read Buddenbrooks a while back and couldn’t get ten pages into it, stymied by all the same qualities. Zweig was perhaps a smaller writer, or one whose ambitions – in the sense of the topics he treated – were much smaller. That’s certainly to his benefit now, on the page – which seems not to matter much to Hoffman. So what if he was a twit. I’ll give Beware of Pity a go, and see if I still feel that way after reading it.

Haiti re-colonization watch:
Best of intentions edition

It’s o.k. to recolonize Haiti, according to Little Steven, as long as those doing so have the best of intentions – that is, as long as they seek not to rebuild Haiti, but to “re-imagine” it. And have Jay-Z on their side.

Haiti re-colonization watch

I wrote last week that with big government back in style, the frustrations of aiding post-earthquake Haiti would inevitably lead to calls for the US to establish some sort of colonial authority over the country. I thought this would take a decade – but Senators Dodd and Corker are already saying Haiti should be put into US “receivership.” Meanwhile, as the Canadian government moves to let more Haitians immigrate, so they can make money to send home, to aid rebuilding, the US government doesn’t seem interested in doing likewise. Oi!

The last word on Salinger…

…belongs to Mark Athitakis:

I have no insights to offer regarding the news that J.D. Salinger has died. Scanning my shelves for copies of his books, I discovered something that may be true for you as well. The books aren’t with me; they’re probably tucked in the shelves of the basement of my parents’ house. Salinger was something that meant a lot to me as a teenager, but I didn’t carry him with me into adulthood, and I can no more articulate his literary worth than I can explain my tween affection for The A-Team and Oran “Juice” Jones. Scanning through the short-story archives that the New Yorker has placed online did jog a few memories, though—”For Esme—With Love and Squalor,” for instance, is a reminder of how far a writer can get by making cynicism and precocity collide.

What was JD Salinger writing?

Reading Lillian Ross’s reminiscence of JD Salinger, in this week’s New Yorker, I was struck by her mention of his telling her, over the years – and thus, presumably, long after the appearance of what would be his last published story – that he wrote constantly, working “long and crazy hours.” You’d think, given his litigious nature, that he was working on letters to his lawyer and various judges. But to me, at least, Ross implies that he was writing fiction, and not only for himself – that is, with a view toward getting it published.

What became of this stuff? Had he lost his discipline, in the wake of his huge success with Catcher in the Rye, this success having robbed him of the compulsion to see anything through – to prove that his writing, and the thoughts it conveyed, were worthwhile? Was he like Joseph Mitchell’s Joe Gould – too close to his material, and too wedded to the idea of writing as score-settling, and emotional release, that he needed each line to be too perfect, and too full of rancor, love, and longing, and so never got far enough into anything to feel he had a draft, much less a finished verson? Or did he produce a pile of stories, and perhaps a few novels, but wasn’t happy with any of them?

My bet is on the big pile. His writing is so fluid, suggesting an ease in constructing characters and narratives, and finding graceful ways to convey them, and I can’t believe he lost that after 1965. I’d bet too that he was right not to publish anything that’s in the pile. His work charms because he so perfectly captures the precious-verging-on-fey voice, concerns, and worldview of the precocious, sensitive teenager – this is true even in his stories with adult protagonists. And to the extent his reputation not only survived, but prospered, over the years, that was due to his being read, identified with, and loved by a new set of precocious, sensitive teenagers, each year – and idolized, with ever-more fervor, by adults who’d been in their shoes way back when, and now long for the days before grown-up life’s demands forced them to make all the choices, and thus all the compromises, that Salinger’s characters mock as insincere and phony. His real-life dealings, with everyone outside his adopted home town, suggest that he clung tightly to his characters’ teenage persona to the end of his days – and so presumably couldn’t have written anything from any other point of view. Could this stuff, coming from a 60- or 70-year-old writer, pass the giggle test? Almost certainly not – and even if it had, it could never have meant, to all those millions who worshipped him, anywhere near what Catcher had meant.