The Internet managed to save Anne Frank’s lesbian vagina. Can it save Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants? A mom in the Fond du Lac School District in Wisconsin has requested that six books be removed from the shelves of the middle school attended by her offspring. This, even though the school system already has a process allowing parents to place check-out restrictions on any book in the system. Not good enough for Ann Wentworth, who finds these seven tomes so offensive that she doesn’t want anyone else’s kids reading them, either.
Lordy. At the rate Wentworth is going, by 2025 the only books in the middle school library will be Fun with Dick and Jane and three copies of Going Rogue.
I guess I ought not to be surprised. While universally acclaimed and targeted specifically for readers from grade 6 on up, What My Mother Doesn’t Know by Sonya Sones was the Most Challenged Book of both 2004 and 2005, according to the American Library Association.
The district is considering each of her requests one by one, via public hearing. I haven’t read any of these books, and don’t know Wentworth’s objections to them. But does it matter? Let parents decide for themselves, and use the system that’s already and place. Who died and made Ann Wentworth the boss of everyone else’s children?
I breathed a sigh of relief this morning. The blurb in my inbox declared that publishers yearned to change the $10 price point for eBooks. Finally, I thought in my pre-caffeine naivete: a remedy to overcharging! $10 is a deal if you’re buying John Adams or The Family, which sell for a pretty penny even in paperback. But a Terry Pratchett novel that retails for $7.99 at Barnes & Noble? Yep, $10. Wasn’t the elimination of the printing press supposed to make books cheaper?
Oh, foolish, foolish Jay. Wired reports that publishers think $10 is too low. They want to jack up the price point for select titles – the same ones, I presume, that are already great deals. Not to make more money for themselves, of course. It’s all about paying the poor authors what they deserve. Hachette Book Group’s sound bite about why they want to pressure Amazon and other e-tailers to charge more for their wares is ingenious in its disingenuousness:
“In the long run this will enable Hachette to continue to invest in and nurture authors’ careers — from major blockbusters to new voices. Without this investment in our authors, the diversity of books available to consumers will contract, as will the diversity of retailers, and our literary culture will suffer.”
Spare us. Mainstream publishing doesn’t care about new voices unless they’re blockbusters. The midlist has been perishing for years, prior to the arrival of Internet The Business-Model Slayer. The blockbusters aren’t the next great authors of our generation. They’re trash factories – the Dan Browns and Stephenie Meyers. Publishers are drowning, and gouging consumers is their latest life raft.
Higher price points for eBooks will have one and only one effect: to slow their adoption just as the market is poised to take off. It’s galling when you realize that publishers want these prices, not to sell you a book, but as Cory Doctorow pointed out, to license it to you. You don’t own an eBook; you’re borrowing it for a fee. An Kindle or a Nook is a library fueled by your credit card.
Argh, I sound like a Luddite, I know. Which I’m not. I love the digital age, and I have high hopes that electronic publishing will kill the middleman and bring authors in closer contact with their readers. And we’re so close that we’re thousands of miles away. The adoption of eBooks is retarded by the restrictive licensing models, inability to share, and the cost of the readers. Hell, even I don’t want a Kindle yet. The Seattle Public Library still serves most of my book needs. They even offer some titles electronically. (I’m reading Jeff Sharlet’s The Family in a separate window on my laptop.)
But I’m more pessimistic than I used to be about Internet publishing. Some authors – the Doctorows of the world – will thrive at online promotion and distribution. Many authors will prefer to focus on their writing, and let others handle the messy legwork. As for publishers? They’ll stay fixated on blockbusters, because “the Long Tail” is bullshit. As Anita Elberse demonstrated, media companies continue to make the bulk of their profits off of their hits.
Two years ago, New York Magazine ran a long piece by Boris Kachka on whether the publishing industry is ready for a pine casket. To put it mildly, it’s in deep shit. Sales are down; trash is triumphing over talent; retail outlets are shrinking; employees are miserable. Publishing will live, Kachka concludes, but as a pygmy version of its former Amazonian glory. I think he’s right. Writing and reading will evolve, shaped by the Internet and digital publishing. Publishers will stick around to skin profits off trash and, perhaps, promote the odd genius or two.
Yeah, that’s my best-case scenario. And as the impending eBook price war demonstrates, the power-structure will fight like hell on its way down.
It amazes me that I managed to whittle away my teen years reading the likes of Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, Stephen R. Donaldson, and Douglas Adams, but never once read anything by Terry Pratchett. It’s like living in Manhattan and never visiting the Statue of Liberty. Which I also did, so, bad example. My point remains. No matter how many times I heard the word “Discworld,” I was determined to remain ensconced in sloth. I didn’t pick up the first book in that series until this last September, almost two years after Pratchett was diagnosed with Posterior Cortical Atrophy, a rare form of early Alzheimer’s.I instantly regretted the delay.
Pratchett is brilliant. Yes, he can be wearing; reading too much Discworld in one sitting is like drowning in an ocean of wisecracks. There are times I pity his poor wife for having to live with such a chronic smartass for 42 years. But every time I go back to a Discworld novel, I’m amazed, not just at Pratchett’s taut and humorous writing, but the rambling, frolicking twists of his plots. It may be, like most writers, that Pratchett feels like producing each book is a root canal. But they read like Mardis Gras. Every time I read Pratchett, I fall back under his spell. That I didn’t discover this talent until his struggle with Alzheimer’s strikes me as a cruel and unusual punishment inflicted by life.
Pratchett is making news again by asking that the United Kingdom legalize assisted suicide, and make him the first test case. With his usual wit and wisdom, Pratchett documents what an ordeal it was for him just to compose his Richard Dimbleby lecture, and the slow but inexorable nature of his illness:
You see, the disease moves slowly, but you know it’s there. Imagine that you’re in a very, very slow motion car crash. Nothing much seems to be happening. There’s an occasional little bang, a crunch, a screw pops out and spins across the dashboard as if we’re in Apollo 13. But the radio is still playing, the heater is on and it doesn’t seem all that bad, except for the certain knowledge that sooner or later you will be definitely going headfirst through the windscreen.
Contemplate that. This man may wake up one day to find that he is no longer himself. What’s worse, he may suffer occasional flickers of awareness that he isn’t himself before sinking back into the morass of lost self-identity. The Spanish Inquisition and the Khmer Rouge working together in committee couldn’t devise a more devastating torture for a man of words and imagination.
Pratchett tackles those who claim assisted suicide would be abused and used to kill off the old and infirm, noting that no recorded cases of forced euthanasia exist in the Western world. Just the opposite – relatives insist on keeping their loved ones “alive” even when they are, for all intents and purposes, dead (*cough*Terri Schiavo*cough*). In the West, we’d rather that people suffer than allow them control over their own exits.
Good for Terry Pratchett. Not that I won’t mourn the man’s loss, but it’s his life, and his decision. We’re going to lose him to this disease years before we lose him to the calcareous Reaper. He ought not be forced to fumble through it on his own, enlisting friends and relatives who leave themselves open to prosecution by moral scolds.
Here in Washington state, physician-assisted suicide has been legal since the last election. It was first used befy a woman with pancreatic cancer, a vile and virulent cancer whose late-stage prognosis approaches fatalistic. I only wish all people who are facing a slow, painful and de-humanizing demise had the same freedom.
Mr. Pratchett: you’ll probably never read this, but if you do, be happy to know that after your death, millions of us will continue to celebrate your life.
I could barely endure Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones.
It’s not that the subject drove me away. On the contrary, I couldn’t put the book down. Alice Sebold crafted a work of anguished beauty about Susie Salmon, a young girl whose murder both fractures and unites her family. With taut yet lyrical language, she paints everyone’s struggle over the remainder of the decade to let go of one another – the family of their beloved daughter and sister, and Susie, a soul dwelling in her personal Heaven, of the life that she’ll never finish living. At every step Sebold leads the reader down unanticipated roads, avoiding melodrama and pat resolutions.
Jackson, by contrast, seemed intent on filming the story that Sebold was brave enough not to write. The wretched script hits every sour note of dialogue that I can imagine Sebold red-penning out of her drafts. It compresses the book’s long journey into the span of a single year, demoting critical characters and draining those who remain of any blood. Lindsey Salmon’s love of her big sister, strained by growing up under the shadow of her tombstone? Gone. Buckley Salmon’s fractured boyhood with his broken father and absent mother? Gone. The endurance of Jack and Abigail Salmon’s devotion in the face of murder, loss, flight, and betrayal? Gutted. The endearing friendship of Ray Singh and Ruth Connors? Hollowed out. In place of Sebold’s story is a Hollywood heart-tugger that sacrifices depth for ease, and meaning for coincidence.
The movie ought to have been called (The Lovely Bones) / 2. If not for the final minutes, you could accuse the producers of having read only half the book.
Some of this was inevitable. The Lovely Bones is too rich for all of its emotional content to survive the translation to screen. Still, I’m disappointed. A book that beautiful deserved a better film.
She was the most beautiful woman who had ever knocked on my door. It was 1984, and I was only 11 – but still. That long-flowing blond hair, those gorgeous eyes, that commanding clipboard. The angel gazed down upon me with a beatific smile, and asked in a voice laced with nectar and melody:
“Would your parents be interested in a cable television package?”
These days, I wonder whether she was angel or succubus. Obtaining cable TV in our small upstate New York town at that tender age molded my young mind for both good and ill. I was a pre-teen, which meant my mom’s ability to monitor what I watched was inversely correlated to her bedtime. By age 13, I was taping and memorizing George Carlin concerts verbatim, permanently warping my sense of humor, and providing my family no shortage of cringing as I walked around saying things like, “Have you ever noticed that most of the women who are against abortion are women you wouldn’t wanna fuck in the first place?” I already had Monty Python by way of PBS and rabbit ears, but cable opened up new horizons of British comedy – from the brilliant Blackadder to exquisite garbage like The Young Ones.
TV was (sadly) the outlet for my nascent sexuality. It took my mother several months to wise up and tell the cable company to disable our free previews of The Playboy Channel. Until I learned to shoplift Penthouse from the supermarket, I was reduced to videotaping the scrambled feed and pausing at half-clear segments to catch a glimpse of something titillating between the lines, like some fledgling archaeologist of perversion.
But TV also gave me CNN – live coverage of the Tiananmen Square protest and massacre, the Romanian revolution, and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Back then, I wasn’t aware that pundits like Neil Postman were already denouncing the 24-hour news cycle as infotainment, the analog equivalent of Soma. If I had been aware, I’d have thought them daft. I was a geeky kid in a rural town; my world was small and ignorant. TV expanded my horizons beyond the parochial concerns of apple farming and high school soccer. Discussions of racism – both seriously, on news shows, and vapidly, in sitcoms and soaps – left me cringing in disgust and horror when one of my classmates leaned toward me in gym class one day and, pointing to one of our town’s few African-American students, whispered, “That little n—-r sure can run, can’t he?”
(At least he’d had the decency to whisper. Perhaps he’d watched an episode of The Cosby Show.)
That was then. I’m 36, and raising my kids as self-aware denizens of multicultural Seattle. Maybe TV can widen their world, too. Mostly, I fear it narrows it. They’re growing up in an interactive, always-connected age of digital information- a far cry from my childhood, when TV and shortwave radio were the only off-ramps to a wider world. I’ve always felt queasy about letting them fill their eyes with moving images for x hours daily. Their mom and I have had TV limits in place for years, leaving me to feel at times like the ex-hippie who enrolls his kids in DARE.
Ulp. If my kids are TV addicts, chances are they learned it by watching me.
The thing is, my addiction has waned. Even as a kid, it ebbed and flowed. There were stretches where I would watch hour after hour for days on end. But there were also periods where I’d be so wrapped up in playing bass guitar, or drafting a story or novel, that I’d have no time for the tube. It’s the same now, only weighed more heavily against TV. Gone are the evenings I’d spent zonked out in front of Adult Swim until the wee hours. I have more active interests: I’m writing fiction for the first time in years, and loving it; I exercise regularly – some days, militantly; I define “fun” as solving a complex calculus problem; I’d love to take up the guitar, and resume vocal lessons when I can afford it. These activities fill me with a joy and a sense of accomplishment that nothing on TV can rival. When I consider that, outside of my work and my family, I only have so many spare hours in a week, the latest episode of Heroes – which, honestly, probably sucks anyway – seems less of a priority.
The same thing has happened to my eldest daughter. As she’s matured, and developed more outside interests, her intake of dumb programming has waned. “Waned” doesn’t mean “extinguished.” We cherish our occasional night of intelligent, low-brow entertainment. You can have our Buffy Season 5 box set when you pry it from our cold, dead, Ben-&-Jerry’s-shoveling hands. Point is, we’re not powerless. Television doesn’t have a totalitarian hold on our psyches. Watching TV is what people do when they’re nothing better to do. The antidote? Get busy!
Glorifying one’s own cable-free existence is a popular strain of moral grandstanding. Trash-talking television is cheap and easy. I’d love everyone – from my kids on out – to watch less. But we in the United States would have a better chance of reducing the four hours a day that kids currently consume if, instead of prattling on about how useless TV is, we helped them – and helped ourselves – find better things to do.
The Internet managed to save Anne Frank’s lesbian vagina. Can it save Sisterhood of The Traveling Pants? A mom in the Fond du Lac School District in Wisconsin has requested that six books be removed from the shelves of the middle school attended by her offspring. This, even though the school system already has a process allowing parents to place check-out restrictions on any book in the system. Not good enough for Ann Wentworth, who finds these seven tomes so offensive that she doesn’t want anyone else’s kids reading them, either.
She was the most beautiful woman who had ever knocked on my door. It was 1984, and I was only 11 – but still. That long-flowing blond hair, those gorgeous eyes, that commanding clipboard. The angel gazed down upon me with a beatific smile, and asked in a voice laced with nectar and melody:
Writer and father of four in Seattle, WA. It is my dream to be a professional smartass. Until then, I'm working pro bono.
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