Archive for the 'criticism' Category

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.

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.

Dear Tom: up yours. How’s that for personality?

paperhaus March 10th, 2009

At the online journalism review, Tom Grubitsch writes of Jacket Copy:

But the blog, with its multiple authors, lacks personality.

His other complaints I’ll leave alone, because I’m sure there are those far better than me to discuss how the paper approaches Books online and the high standards set by previous book review editors.

Instead, let me address this personality thing.

First, I haven’t counted lately, but I’m still posting 75% or more of the blog. And I have plenty of personality, Mr. Grubitsch. Right now I would describe it as personality that is, on the whole, grumpy (although sleepy and some other dwarves are in there, too).

Asserting that a blog with multiple authors can’t have personality is just plain wrong. Gawker? Wonkette? LAist, Gothamist, blogging.la? Boing Boing? Many bloggers. Much personality.

I agree with Grubitsch that Jacket Copy and the rest of Books at the LA Times would benefit from more resources. Heck, I would benefit.

But until then I’m happy to be scrappy, literary, contrary and occasionally giddy. The kind of personality you’ll find on Jacket Copy.

the cheese stands alone

paperhaus January 29th, 2009

Back in web 1.0, I worked at a music industry dot-com that, at one point, was the #3 music site on the internet. We grew so fast that they tripled us up in our tiny offices in Encino. From the very day I started there were big meetings about going public, about stock options, and as the months wore on we jostled for friends and family shares so our loved ones could get rich with us. We rented out two floors of a building on Wilshire that had been E!’s. We would have sinage, the execs told us — they were very excited about the sinage.

But those offices were still being designed and prepped when we finally made it to the day of our IPO, so — at least this is how I remember it — the entire staff, too big for any room in our office, gathered instead at Sportsman’s Lodge, an old-school Valley banquet-ish place. Did they have us watching TVs? Or listening to the radio? People stood on chairs, in khakis or polo shirts or with tattoos or carefully tended dreads. We were going to hear our opening price announced, and then we’d listen to it climb. Or maybe that all happened later, the meeting hall and the crowd standing on chairs. When they tried to explain.

Because we went public the day the market tanked.

We didn’t know it at the time; we thought it was, maybe, just a slight dip. The NASDAQ had doubled its value in the year between March 1999 and 2000, going up and up and up and maybe down for a moment before heading up again. Its bigtime high was 18 days before my company went public, and when our IPO hit, the slide was on.

But we continued; we moved into the new space, which despite its fancy design afforded less privacy than sitting in each other’s laps in our old rabbit warren. We tried not to pay attention to stock reports. We went about our business promoting the Backstreet Boys, listened to a wild-eyed SEO expert discuss the tricks for being the top hit for “Britney Spears naked.” We heard lots and lots and lots about the still-in-the-works sinage. And for Christmas — or was it just because? — everyone got a copy of the book Who Moved My Cheese?

It was a horrid little self-help business book about coping with change. It couldn’t reach the end of a sentence without plopping in a couple of exhausted cliches then thumping on ‘em a little. It was an allegory about two mice — one with a can do attitude and another who got disheartened — who are looking for their cheese which, as you might have guessed, has been moved.

Who Moved My Cheese? was supposed to make us all feel better. About the whole dot-com bust thing. About not getting rich. I don’t know a single staff person, besides our deluded, disheartened executives, who found a single thing to like about the horrid condescending platintudinous book.

Except that now I find myself, oddly, remembering it because of the latest news about the Washington Post. The paper will get rid of its stand-alone book section, folding it in to the rest of the paper and keeping it online. Getting rid of the section is shitty, because may mean fewer reviews, because some people still prefer print over online, and lots of people who think about these things think an independent book section is meaningful.

But on the other hand, putting books coverage next to movie coverage might just encourage spillover, might just nudge books further into the slipstream of our multivaried culture. Maybe it’s exactly the right thing to do. Maybe books coverage will be enhanced by online media; maybe being able to Digg a book review wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world.

Mostly, though, the question of whether or not this change is good or tragic is moot. It’s happening. Books coverage is going looking different now than it did five years ago or ten years ago or 113 years ago, when the NY Times Book Review first ran. But that’s to be expected. And expect it’ll look different in 2010, and so on.

A lot of effort has gone into bemoaning book review changes and it’s hard for me not to think that, coming from book critics, it’s both self-serving and a little cheesy. And it’s certainly less interesting than engaging with books.

Hi ho the derry-o.

Wrestling the backlist

paperhaus July 26th, 2008

los angeles

Mark has admitted a penchant for reading the previous work of an author when he’s assigned a review. I think this is a fairly common trait; I can’t imagine any reviewer is willfully uninformed. Me, I got in the completist habit when I was writing about music. It usually took less time and brainpower to listen to a couple of CDs than it would to read and digest the entire Roth canon, sure. But the idea is the same: know your material.

Still, it’s possible to OD — you don’t want to so overfill your brain with earlier books that there isn’t enough room for the new one to get in there and shake around a little bit. I started feeling this when I was reading all of Tom Perrotta’s books in order to review The Abstinence Teacher, and Lydia Millet’s for How the Dead Dream*. When I was drawn to (or less thrilled by) aspects of earlier works, and noticed myself keeping an eye out for those elements in the new novels, I felt I was going down the wrong path. The backlist can inform the new book, of course, but it shouldn’t proscribe it — or a reviewers’ expectations for it. Each book comes between its own covers: it’s an independent artifact, and has to be able to be understood as such.

Every reviewer has undoubtedly figured out how much they want to delve into an author’s backlist versus how much they should stick to the work in question. I suppose it shows I’m new to this (and, might I suggest, that Mark is too) that we’re exposing process on our blogs. Or maybe it shows that I’ve got a new assignment that calls for me doing some serious catch-up. Which I’m off to begin now.

Oh - took the photo in my neighborhood the other day. No relevance. I just like it.

* inexplicably replaced in the LA Times archives by another review I wrote.