What Malcolm Gladwell gets wrong about Free

paperhaus July 2nd, 2009

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Chris Anderson’s Free in this week’s New Yorker — I wrote about the dust-up surrounding uncredited passages in the book and what the implications of Anderson’s error might be in the LA Times, so I was curious. I think Gladwell brings up many good questions about Anderson’s thesis — that as stuff becomes close enough to free to round down, our economy is changing.

He’s correct in saying he that the end cost of a product is only partially the product itself — that distribution, execution and other expenses make up the bulk of the cost.

But he’s not correct in implying, then, that things aren’t free. Just because it’s expensive to produce something — a specialized drug — doesn’t mean that the cost will be passed on to the buyer.

Take, for example, the music industry and journalism, two things I know a bit about. Whether it’s the millions it takes to put Metallica on CD or a couple hundred bucks in home recording, songs can be copied and recirculated for free. And the LA Times can be accessed online for free, no subscription necessary. It’s not that songs or newspapers are free to produce — they’re not — but they are free to acquire.

In Gladwell’s drug example, he concludes, “In this case, information does not want to be free.* It wants to be really, really expensive.” But what information wants is not necessarily what information gets. Metallica does not want you to download their music without buying it. But the expectations of Free aren’t dictated by information, or Metallica, or the producer of a drug — they’re from the um, purchasers — people who know that Free is possible, and will continue to choose it first over notfree.

* The phrase “information wants to be free” came from Stewart Brand in the 1980s. It was remixed a few times, but each time he said or wrote it, it was paired with the idea that information also wants to be expensive. Sometimes, when people argue against “information wants to be free,” they overlook the fact that this free-expensive duality was part of the statement in the first place.

Nietzche in the morning

paperhaus July 1st, 2009

Shortly after getting up I checked my Twitter feed — a weakness, to be sure — and saw that Alain de Botton was Tweeting quotes about anger. Here’s one:

Angry people call poverty on themselves and ruin on their homes, denying they are angry, just as the mad deny their insanity, Seneca -De Ira

de Botton — who is @alaindebotton, if you’re curious — had recently left an angry comment on the blog of Caleb Crain, who (negatively) reviewed de Botton’s book “The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work” in the NY Times. “You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that,” de Botton wrote. “So that’s two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review…. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.”

Which is heated, if not nasty. And it doesn’t fit with the Alain de Botton I saw at the Getty in LA just a few weeks ago, who came across as sweet and patient. He stood for hours on a chilly patio in order to speak to every person who wanted a book signed; it was a long queue at the end of his book tour, but he never got frustrated or exasperated.

So he’s either good at fronting, or Crain really pissed him off.

I’m inclined to think the latter, and I’m glad that de Botton said what he said. Not that I hate the review, am convinced this is de Botton’s best work or am even sure that he’s right about the damage done — but I think expressing anger is OK. Don’t like the review — say something! Such reactions shouldn’t leave reviewers cowering, but get them up on their feet, shouting their opinions, their reasons, their refusals to submit!

There is some kind of play-nice mentality going around that I’m not sure I believe in. Maybe we’ve lost our ability to argue without getting personal, or the skill of expressing anger with eloquence. I think that’s why de Botton was pulling what 140-character quotes he could about anger’s place in our lives.

That said, I’m not sure that going to Nietzche on how to live is ever a good idea.

The emotions of envy, hatred and lust are life-conditioning emotions which must essentially be present in every life - Nietzsche

It’s not untrue, but it feels uneasy, unresolved. Nietzche is good for some things — he’s always thought provoking, if not infuriating — but his ego-driven, brittle intellect didn’t make him much of a life coach.

A preamble of sorts

paperhaus June 30th, 2009

I’ve been puzzled by exactly what to do here on my personal blog. I used to write about books, but now I write about books on Jacket Copy. I write a second blog for the LA Times, which is kind of technology-green-hipster-culture, which covers a lot of stuff of other than books. And I do some other work that, when I began, I was asked not to discuss online.

So if I’m not writing about books (which I love), or contemporary culture (which I like), or the other stuff I’m doing (which is mine), what do I write about? Since I Twitter, what’s the point of blogging, anyway?

Some people use blogs to vent bile. Throw mud. I’m torn. Do I throw mud back at the person who threw it at me last week? Do I point out inaccuracies, exaggerations, and reveal the short and rather pathetic backstory?

Meh.

I will tell you this: in my new rental, which is sandwiched between an apartment building full of gang kids and one of LA’s most beautiful residential streets, I can hear birds singing in the morning, and have tried to to save a fledgling from the neighborhood cats.

People came over to see this new place this weekend. It’s like you, they said. But my last place — a tall 1920s brick apartment building with a chilly pool and a bar on the ground floor was like me, too.

I think I’ve fooled them into thinking any place is like me by filling them all full of books.

Currently reading: a book for review & Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City for fun.

Mister Eric Bogosian

paperhaus May 30th, 2009

The first thing I learned upon meeting Eric Bogosian is that for years I have been mispronouncing his name (it is not boh-goh-zee-ann). Then I learned many other things, after he said something like wouldn’t it be nice if we could have a conversation like people talking for real, which I am mangling because he said it before I turned on the tape recorder.

What he did say, verbatim, is in this feature in today’s LA Times.

While Bogosian was in LA, he did several readings. I made it to two. Above is him at Skylight Books, where he seemed more worn out than he’d been when I saw him at his hotel a few days before. Maybe it was the bookstore, which was kind of an energy suck that night. Maybe Hollywood had been beating him down.

I admit I am charmed when someone who I perceive in one way — in this case, Bogosian as the angry New Yorker — turns out to have other dimensions, especially when they are literary, because I am so fond of books. Bogosian is, in addition to being a tremendous performer, a reader and a writer of the first class. I am grateful that he chatted with me as he did in his hotel suite, as if we were people having a real conversation.

And here I am in New York, after reading his very New York book and talking about his very New York experiences. I will not be here long enough.

Tonight at Vroman’s: Ben Greenman

paperhaus April 28th, 2009

Ben Greenman, who I get to needle and prompt at Vroman’s tonight, is on book tour for his new novel “Please Step Back.”

And to let the world know what a book tour means for Ben Greenman, he penned this Tour Rider that’s up at McSweeney’s.

Bookstore agrees to provide and maintain three (3) backstage preparation rooms. They shall be comfortable, well lit, and entirely free of books other than the Author’s books. Rooms must be climate-controlled to dry heat so that the Author’s reading voice (which will henceforth be referred to as his “instrument”) does not get scratchy or phlegmy. Employees of the Bookstore must never use the word “phlegmy” in the presence of the Author, as it may make him vomit, which would damage his instrument. The same goes for the word “vomit.”

Allrighty them. See you there, my clear-throated friends.

Festival, schmestival. Don’t miss Vroman’s on Tuesday

paperhaus April 23rd, 2009

I love me some LA times festival of books. I’ve been soaking in it all day, and I think the panels will be great, the stages, the crazy big campus, the authors riding on golf carts, the nighttime events, the quiet mornings, great great great.

But then it’s over, and our literary lives in LA must go on. Mine, fortunately, will be going on at Vroman’s, where I’ll be interviewing Ben Greenman at 7pm on Tuesday, April 28.

Greenman — I can’t call him Ben yet, I haven’t met him. Although I will, at the festival, where I’ll be moderating a panel he’s on — hang on, focus. Ok. So. Greenman is an editor at the New Yorker, and he’s the author of a pile of books playing with pop culture and the brilliant booklike project “Correspondences.” I’d call his new book, “Please Step Back,” a kind of musical fable. It follows the path of Rock Foxx and the Foxes, a band which bears no small resemblance to Sly and the Family Stone.

Writing about music is insanely hard — like dancing about architecture or swimming about politics — but Greenman succeeds, I think, using resonant, uncomplicated metaphors and carefully-weighted sentences to bring the pop and soul and funk of the music of the sixties and seventies to life (but it’s WAY more fun than that sounds). It’s all through the world of a regular-enough guy who becomes a brilliant, progressively more fucked-up musician.

After blogging so much for the LA Times, it is inordinantly fun to type the word fuck in a blog post.

Did I mention we might have a boom box at Vroman’s? How can I get it to play my Sly Stone vinyl?

Ok, right, focus. Vroman’s is in Pasadena; we’ll be in the upstairs reading area. The event begins at 7pm on Tuesday night. It’ll be hot fun in the springtime. Come.

Where’s a linguist when you need one?

paperhaus April 14th, 2009

In response to the controversy over de-ranking of more than 57,000 books on its site, Amazon released an unusual statement today.

The online bookseller’s initial response to critics crying #amazonfail had been, well, terse: the problem was a “glitch.” Details were not forthcoming.

But Monday afternoon an official statement was out, and it was in such non-corporate lingo that I couldn’t quite believe that it was the real, on-the-record company response. Yet it was.

This is an embarrassing and ham-fisted cataloging error for a company that prides itself on offering complete selection.

There was more, of course, but I’d like to pause and contemplate this. To apologize for de-ranking titles that appeared to be classified as excessively erotic, Amazon  reaches for a vocabulary word meaning “inept” and came up with “ham-fisted.”

Erotic? Ham-fisted?

Cancel the linguist. Call in a Freudian.

Amazon’s rough Easter

paperhaus April 13th, 2009

While most of the country was knee-deep in Easter baskets, I was home getting a blog post ready and reading twitter and planning a sortie to purchase Cadbury Creme Eggs before they disappeared from shelves.

But something came across Twitter — which is like a combination of passing notes in class and an old-style news ticker — that the journalist Rebecca Skloot was circulating. Something had happened to Amazon’s sales rankings, and it seemed like that something wasn’t good.

Without sales rankings, books can’t appear in Amazon’s bestseller lists. Some — but not all — affected books had been removed from Amazon’s search results completely. To find a book that wasn’t showing up in searches, I discovered, you’d need to search for another title by the same author, or find a used copy of it, and then click on the author’s name for a secondary list of their works and try to dig up the book you really wanted.

The troubling thing about this change was that it seemed, at first blush, to be affecting books with gay and lesbian themes the most (heterosexual erotica and romance were also affected, as were books about sexuality and disabilities). One author/publisher posted a response he’d gotten from Amazon that said his book had been de-ranked because of “adult” content; another pointed out that his book about being a male stripper for men was de-ranked, while Diablo Cody’s book about being a female stripper for men had not.

In the time it took me to write the first post for Jacket Copy at the LA Times, the hashtag #amazonfail had not only popped up on Twitter but climbed to its top spot.

If adult content was the reason for de-ranking, I found, it had been unevenly applied. Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho — which includes a scene in which a starving rat is inserted into the vagina of a live woman and must gnaw its way out — was still ranked. Rubyfruit Jungle, the lesbian coming-of-age novel by Rita Mae Brown, had been de-ranked. In several cases, the same book was both ranked AND de-ranked, in different editions.

Amazon soon responded to Jacket Copy with a message they were sending to everyone: that this was just a “glitch.” Appeals for further detail came up empty. I wrote a follow-up post on Jacket Copy. Talking to my editor, who was leaving for dinner, made me realize I hadn’t had lunch.

By this time, there was a new Twitter hashtag: #glitchmyass.

So far there’s been no more news from Amazon, although there has been plenty of news: 227 reports in the last 16 hours or so, according to Google News (which always misses stuff). I’d say that someone at Amazon — the person who’s got to fix the glitch — is having a pretty rotten Monday.

I eventually had lunch, but those Cadbury Creme Eggs are going to have to wait until next year.

Zombies and Fante

paperhaus April 7th, 2009

Tomorrow is the 100th anniversary of John Fante’s birth, and I wrote an article for the LA Times about how his work — particularly “Ask the Dust”– has survived. I talked to Dan Fante, who, like his dad, is an author, and who is at work on a memoir, and who told me lots of good stuff that makes it into the article.

Zocalo holds a panel on Fante tonight at the Hammer Museum, moderated by tall guy David Kipen. Oh, he’s also NEA guy David Kipen. I can’t be there, but I am going to try to make it to the unofficiall Happy Birthday Drinks for John Fante at a Skid Row bar on Wednesday.

I am not a devoted fan of John Fante — some of Bandini’s struggles are just too juvenile for me — but I do love how he sees Los Angeles, and how it is where his true feelings lie. Like this:

Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.

The pretty town of Los Angeles gave me another recent article, too. Last week, I met up with Seth Grahame-Smith, author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. We shot a photo of him in a casket showroom and then he talked to me for an article that appeared in Saturday’s LA Times. The book has been #10 on Amazon — in all books, including nonfiction — since its release Wednesday.

Now: coffee.

Anybody seen a sweater?

paperhaus March 30th, 2009

On Friday, I was parked for 3 hours in a neighborhood full of wee million-dollar bungalows, surrounded by cars worth a lot more than my 9 year-old Toyota. Why, then, the asshole decided to crash through my back window with a rock is mysterious. The window-smasher didn’t get much: not my stereo, not the emergency five bucks in the glove compartment, not the change or the books.

The take: a 1995 SXSW giveaway canvas bag (my grocery/book bag); a black cardigan sweater that shed its sequins and bled black when it got wet ($5); a cream-colored vintage nightgown coverup with a scary bloodlike stain on the front with fur collar and cuffs ($5).

If there was a logic to the break-in, it must have been that fur. Anyone who’s seen fur collars in thrift stores knows they’re not worth diddly, but I figure the rock-wielder didn’t know any better. I’m bummed, though — I liked wearing those sweaters, and they’re too crummy to be sold and too little to be worn by just about anyone.

And the window cost me just shy of $200 to fix.

I live in a much worse neighborhood; I’ve been mugged here, and last year a homeless guy was burned to death a few blocks away. But never in broad daylight has my car been broken into in Koreatown. Or in the dark, either. It’s immensely frustrating to go to a good neighborhood only to be robbed.

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