Next I blew my entire Amazon gift card balance on — and this is the delicious part — a Kobo Touch eReader. That’s right. Amazon doesn’t handle these directly, of course, but you can spend gift card balances with Amazon merchants, which is how I was able to buy the Kobo. It should arrive in a week and then, as a reader at least, I’ll be Amazon-free.
Now that my book has been delisted — thanks to a contractual dispute between Amazon and IPG — I’m kicking the Amazon habit.
If I were to a) believe in a meta-narrative that predicts the inevitable setting of America’s sun beyond the watery horizon of late-capitalist decadence, and b) set out to invent a cultural phenomenon that perfectly exemplified this setting, then c) I’m sure I could do no better than the bucket list. (#72. Write impossibly convoluted lede. CHECK.)
Today’s column: Against Bucket Lists.
“Although they’re very funny, I can’t stand to watch episodes of The Bob Newhart Show, for example. (The one in Chicago, not Vermont.) Something about the epaulets and the wide collars makes me feel vaguely hopeless — knowing that no matter how we feel now we’re going to look ridiculous in forty years.”
In today’s column, year-end lists and existential crisis.
I’d been enjoying this great story. It had dozens of compelling characters and exhibited an incredible attention to detail. It was a commentary on society with leitmotifs of greed, desperation, and hope. I took in a few chapters at a time, put it down, then picked it back up later. I was near the end and I was kind of bummed about it. The story was so good, I didn’t want it to end.
In today’s column: TV shows based on novels might be trending, as Laura Miller suggests, but can the novel really compete with the second golden age of television?
Like Ami Greko, I’m not exactly sure what the cover of this week’s New Yorker is trying to say. Books are dead? E-books are bad? Old white men are befuddled? In any case, my friend Daniel Radosh long ago taught me the appropriate response to non sequiturs in The New Yorker. That’s right: a caption contest. There is a prize.
You know that salesperson who asks for your name? So they can use it over and over again, in an attempt to engage you? Do you like that? Are you more likely to buy something from them, or less likely? Please. Don’t answer.
Community managers like to ask a lot of questions in order to engage you. I would like them to stop it.
I took last week off from Plus Ça Change to write a longer essay for the Reanimation Library. If you’re not familiar with it, the library is a private collection in Brooklyn that saves discarded and out-of-date books for use by artists and others. Founder Andrew Beccone recently started a featured called “Word Processor,” where he asks writers to consider a volume from the collection. In my essay, I consider the Fourth Edition of Otto Kleppner’s Advertising Procedure an introductory advertising textbook that has been continuously revised since 1925. But “the advertising spiral”—shown here—abides as the centerpiece of the book, all the way to the current edtion. Head over to the library’s site to learn more.
And the winner for best title and best cover design of 1905 is … Miss Nonentity my L.T. Meade. Ms. Meade wrote over 300 (!) books for girls, including “A Gay Charmer, Wild Kitty, Daddy’s Girl, etc.”
I assume that is Ms. N, not the author, there on the cover.
I haven’t done a contest in awhile, so every Friday in November I’m going to give away a copy of my story collection Why They Cried — delivered via Kindle, Kobo, or as a pdf. (Your choice.) Here’s how to enter.
This weekend’s release of The Rum Diary reminded me of the time I tried to give Hunter S. Thompson a call, fifteen years ago or so.
In today’s column: the time I tried to call Hunter S. Thompson.
From the time A. introduced this volume — 1936’s How to Worry Successfully by one David Seabury — into our home, I knew it was the book I had been looking for my whole life. I had worrying down, but was always trying to stop. Maybe I was doing it wrong? From the preface:
Again and again people have asked me: “What do you mean by ‘successful’ worry? Isn’t it always harmful?” And the answer is: “No.”
Unfortunately, that’s as far as I’ve gotten.
Released in 1998 — not coincidentally, about the time Gen Y was hitting 18 — Aeroplane’s un-self-conscious poetry was immediately recognized as an antidote (even when we hadn’t been looking for one) to the quotation-mark-laden Matador catalog, featuring the plausibly deniable plaints of Pavement, Guided By Voices, et. al. These bands were smart, clever, and knowing. Mangum, on the other hand, was smart, guileless, and unknowable. Aeroplane is an album Dave Eggers wished he could have written, if he hadn’t been back there with me — and others — on the other side of the dividing line.
In today’s column: In the Aeroplane over the Sea, revisited.
Should art necessarily be a profession rather than a hobby, and is culture demonstrably better served by the former?
Question of the day: Should art be a profession?
We were no more than the pointed instruments of that life, activated symbols in an allegory whose authors were untold billions. And only they, acting in concert, could alter a line of its text. And the alterations could best be impelled by remaining what we were. Innocence outraged, the sacred defiled, the useful made useless.
Jim Thompson, “This World, then the Fireworks” — in today’s column.
Authors don’t have time for social media, but Dickens sent the equivalent of 81,000 tweets.
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