On Jonathan Franzen’s Stupid Reasons For Not Liking E-Books

E-Books are a great thing, and if you disagree, you probably have really flimsy reasons for doing so.  In my experience, most E-Book haters seem to hate E-Books for sentimental and materialistic reasons- which would be fine, if the haters can admit that their reasons are sentimental and materialistic.  “You don’t get that feeling of holding it, the smell of the paper,” all that kind of crap.  But bottom line: MOST BOOKS BOIL DOWN TO THEIR WORDS AND NOTHING ELSE, UNLESS WE’RE TALKING ABOUT POP-UP BOOKS AND SUCH. 

Now I’ll admit, I can be sentimental and materialistic, and I have a soft spot for the smell of the paper, too.  I still buy paper books, especially by authors I really enjoy.  And I will continue to buy paper books for as long as they exist, which I hope is always.

Which brings me to a very important point: PAPER BOOKS AND E-BOOKS CAN AND WILL CO-EXIST.

Vinyl may no longer be the main form of music media, but it still exists, because there will always be music lovers who want the feel and sound of vinyl.  MP3s have not and will not kill vinyl.  Similarly, E-Books will not kill paper books.  What E-Books will kill is all the wasted space taken up by mass-market paperbacks that people would discard anyway: the Da Vinci Codes, and other assorted airport reading.  For that, lovers of books and trees and physical space should get on their knees and thank E-Books.

And please stop claiming that books are this perfect technology, the way Jonathan Franzen does:

“The technology I like is the American paperback edition of Freedom. I can spill water on it and it would still work! So it’s pretty good technology. And what’s more, it will work great 10 years from now. So no wonder the capitalists hate it. It’s a bad business model,” said Franzen, who famously cuts off all connection to the internet when he is writing.

OK, so paper books can do a thing E-books can’t, which is survive water.  (Sort of.)  But neither could survive a fire.  In 10 years, I’ll be far more likely to need to replace my paperback copy than my non-degradable copy of an E-Book.  But do you know what other things E-Books can do that paper can’t?  With an E-Book you can click on a word you don’t know and look it up in a dictionary already inside your E-Book.  You can also search your E-Book faster than you could possibly search a paper book.  Want to find every reference of “God” in The Brothers Karamazov?  I’ll press a couple buttons on my Nook, and you can go through my paper copy with a highlighter and get back to me in about 93 hours.

Franzen also offers this turd of a complaint:

“Someone worked really hard to make the language just right [in a printed book], just the way they wanted it. They were so sure of it that they printed it in ink, on paper. A screen always feels like we could delete that, change that, move it around. So for a literature-crazed person like me, it’s just not permanent enough.”

I mean, I guess Big Brother could just sneak into my Nook and start moving words around my E-Book of 1984 to make it look like totalitarianism isn’t so bad after all.  Actually no, that’s probably not going to happen.  I think even George Orwell would be like dude, quit being so paranoid.

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The Scintillating Swedish Americana Of The Lion’s Roar

I’m so totally smitten by First Aid Kit’s new album that I gushed all over it at 10listens.com:

There’s something uncanny about The Lion’s Roar from the very beginning, when there’s nothing more than minor-key acoustic guitar and a will-o’-the-wisp flickering between the trees.  A tender yet hardened young woman sets the scene (”The pale morning sings/ of forgotten things”), and the air’s already thick with mythology.  It’s the feeling you get when you look to the west- so beautiful it’s profoundly unsettling, and so profoundly unsettling it’s beautiful.  There’s witchery afoot, and slavery, and plagues.  Can’t blame us too much for being such goddamn cowards and fools, but God damn us anyway.  And while God’s at it, God can damn itself for taking so much of our innocence before we could muster enough courage and wisdom to fill the void.

 

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The Post-Apocalyptic iPod, Part 11: Latyrx’s The Album

(Part 11 of an ongoing series)

For further details, see my review of this album on 10Listens.com:

The year’s 1997, and the future’s just starting to sip its second cup of coffee.  Rock’s still reverberating with the echoes of grunge, but its quantum mechanics are oscillating to a mind-blower called OK Computer.  Pop’s gone back to bubblegum in a big way, thanks to The Spice Girls and The Backstreet Boys.  Over in hip-hop, the zeitgeist has glided into a glammier style of gangsta.  Meanwhile, tucked away in an underground Bay Area scene, rappers Lateef The Truthspeaker and Lyrics Born, collectively known as Latyrx, drop an amazing debut LP simply titled The Album, which manages to sound old-school and avant-garde, very much of its time and yet very much against its time.

The Album wastes little time showing off its progressive ambitions as Latyrx introduce themselves, fittingly, with a track called “Latyrx.”  The smoky, sci-fi beat by album co-producer DJ Shadow is menacing and enticing, like a rabbit-hole that leads to an opium-fueled cyber-orgy.  Then Lateef & Lyrics Born barge in and buck your brain like it’s probably never been bucked before.

Approx. 47 minutes, 14 seconds; 7,832 minutes, 3 seconds left on the iPod

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In Praise Of Robert Anton Wilson, Chief Architect Of My Reality Tunnel

Robert Anton Wilson was my all-time favorite philosopher, probably because I don’t really read philosophy.  All the other philosophers I’ve ever tried to read seemed to take themselves way too seriously, which, if you ask me, is one of the dumbest things you could do.

Various medical authorities swarm in and out of here predicting I have between two days and two months to live. I think they are guessing. I remain cheerful and unimpressed. I look forward without dogmatic optimism but without dread. I love you all and I deeply implore you to keep the lasagna flying.

Please pardon my levity, I don’t see how to take death seriously. It seems absurd.

- Robert Anton Wilson’s final blog post from January 6, 2007, 5 days before his death

Wilson’s books- particularly Prometheus Rising and Cosmic Trigger- were essential in digging my reality tunnel.  His works showed me just how flexible “reality” is; how living in a hall-of-mirrors universe can be far more delightful than disturbing; how refusing to “believe” in anything doesn’t mean you have to be an amoral nihilist- you can still be passionate and optimistic and noble and fun.

From Prometheus Rising, here are some cheeky-yet-potentially-enlightening psychological “exercizes” you might enjoy:

1. Whenever you meet a young male or female, ask yourself consciously, “If it came to hand-to-hand combat, could I beat him/her’ ?” Then try to determine how much of your behavior is based on unconsciously asking and answering that question via pre-verbal “body language.”
2. Get roaring drunk and pound the table, telling everybody in a loud voice just what dumb assholes they all are.¹
3. Get a book on meditation, practice for two fifteen-minute sessions every day for a month, and then go see somebody who always manages to upset you or make you defensive. See if they can still press your territorial retreat buttons.²
4. Spend a week-end at an Encounter Group. During the first half-day, try to intuit which quadrant each participant is coming from. At the end, see if any of them have become less robotized. See if you have become less robotized.
5. Go to the Lion House at the zoo. Study the lions until you feel you really understand their tunnel-reality.
6. Rent a video of the kind of comedy that small children like—the Three Stooges, Abbott & Costello, etc. Observe carefully, and think about what function this humor serves; but don’t neglect to laugh at it yourself.
7. Spend all day Sunday looking at animal shows on TV (getting stoned on weed, if this is permissible to you). Then go into the office the next day and observe the primate pack hierarchy carefully, like a scientist.

¹ Opiates and small does of alcohol seem to trigger neuro-transmitters characteristic of Circuit I breast-fed tranquillity. Large doses of alcohol often reverse this and trigger neuro-transmitters characteristic of territorial struggle. Note the anal vocabulary of hostile drunks as their alcoholic intake increases.
² A good book on Meditation is Undoing Yourself With Energized Meditation & Other Devices, by Christopher S. Hyatt, Ph.D., (New Falcon Publications).

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“More Feminine, But Strong, And Competent, But Not Too Much”

Until recently, what I knew about Fashion was pretty much whatever I learned while watching Project Runway with my lady.  But a couple months ago I took a job doing research for a book on Fashion, which has somewhat broadened my knowledge and appreciation of the subject.

I’ve particularly enjoyed reading Dana Thomas’s Deluxe: How Luxury Lost Its Luster.  Now I can’t say I sympathize too much with the book’s theme, which laments how luxury brands like Louis Vuitton and Dior are no longer as, well, luxurious as they used to be, thanks to media saturation and mass-production driven by profit-obsessed executives.  I tend to agree more with the Socrates quote that Thomas uses to preface one chapter: “Contentment is natural wealth, luxury is artificial poverty.”  I mean, I can certainly appreciate high-quality products.  But I also think there’s a huge difference between appreciating high-quality products and spending tens of thousands of dollars on an anaconda-skin handbag lined with rubies and ostrich feathers, simply because you want people to see how you can afford such a ridiculously ostentatious object.  That said, I can at least sympathize a little with reasonable people who have good taste, and value modest luxury (oxymoron?), and hate to see it diluted.

Yet throughout Deluxe, Thomas adds plenty of irreverence amid the lamentations, which I found highly refreshing.  This particular passage tickled me, where we learn about the asinine marketing-thought that currently lurks over the shoulders of the perfume industry:

…generally, luxury perfume briefs all follow the same script.  “Basically, it’s ‘We want something for women,’” a perfume executive told the New Yorker.  “Okay, which women?  ‘Women!  All women!  It should make them feel more feminine, but strong, and competent, but not too much, and it should work well in Europe and the U.S. and especially in the Asian market, and it should be new but it should be classic, and young women should love it, but older women should love it too.’  If it’s a French house, the brief will also say, ‘And it should be a great and uncompromised work of art,’ and if it’s an American brief it will say, ‘And it should smell like that Armani thing two years ago that did four million dollars in the first two months in Europe but also like the Givenchy that sold so well in China.’”  All of this leaves [Chanel perfumer] Jacques Polge resigned.  “I hear the briefs of brands that declare they want to create a ‘classic,’ like No. 5,” he says with a sigh.  “This is a false notion.  We should try to create a perfume of its time, and perhaps it can become a classic.”

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The Post-Apocalyptic iPod, Part 10: “Roadbull”

(Part 10 of an ongoing series)

Everyone- especially everyone in the Post-Apocalypse- ought to have a special song handy for when shit’s about to get heavy.  In the Post-Apocalypse, shit’s gonna get heavy like at least twice a day.  We’re all gonna need to psych ourselves up (and psych our enemies out) with songs that shout, “This heavy shit can go right back up the ass it plopped out of, as long as I have anything to say about it!”

No doubt a number of unoriginal tools will survive into the Post-Apocalypse, and their Heavy Shit song will be “Eye Of The Tiger.”  Some slightly less toolish individuals will choose Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man,” a totally bad-ass song whose only crime in this case is Grand Obviousness.  Same goes for “Enter Sandman,” “Welcome To The Jungle,” or any other song that has already been the entrance theme for a famous boxer, pro wrestler or relief pitcher.  Cliche can be like kryptonite to intimidation.

I don’t think any athletes or sports entertainers have ever claimed “Roadbull” by The Melvins, so that shall be my Heavy Shit Song.

“Roadbull” starts out feeling like a number of other Heavy Shit Songs, but very quickly, the kinky rhythms and snaky riffs put you on your toes.  Beavis and Butt-head could get down to this tune, but they probably couldn’t memorize the riffs well enough to hum along.  It’s dangerous and spry.  It taps into deep, instinctual fears, and even better, it’s unpredictable.  And that’s exactly what I want my Post-Apocalyptic foes to think I am: fearsome and unpredictable.

“Roadbull” is a savage, brutish caveman, but it’s the craftiest savage, brutish caveman who ever lived.  A savage, brutish caveman so crafty that the other cavemen got jealous and felt threatened, and so they conspired to kill him.  (Eventually they did kill him, but it took about 15 tries, like with Rasputin.)

The lyrics briefly mention prophets and Lords, giving “Roadbull” a vaguely Biblical feel, and that’s also a plus.  Having “Roadbull” as my Heavy Shit Song will be kind of like I have God on my side.  I may be agnostic, even in the Post-Apocalypse, but I’ll still try to convince as many people as possible, myself included, that God is, in fact, on my side.

Best of all, there’s that long coda.  After all the head-banging and pile-driving and Polynesian war dancing, there’s those martial drum-rolls and those melodic, nonchalant whistles.  Like the battle’s over, and it was a bit rough here and there, but in the end we kicked so much ass and triumphed so hard that we’re whistling and marching on.  And this is the key to “Roadbull”‘s power as a Heavy Shit song: it forces the enemy to hear not just the heavy metal juggernaut that’s waiting to kick their ass, but it also treats them to the sound of us whistling victoriously and marching on to the next round of Heavy Shit.  That’s gotta add an extra thick layer of intimidation that most other Heavy Shit songs just don’t have.

Approx. 3 minutes, 26 seconds; 7,879 minutes, 17 seconds left on the iPod

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A Brief, Bewildering History Of Sporting Contests Fought Over McDonald’s Food

If you do things like watch Super Bowls, you probably remember this wacky commercial: Larry Bird’s shooting baskets in a dark, empty arena, because maybe pro basketball players do that sometimes.  Then Michael Jordan just happened to be in the neighborhood I guess, so he strolls in wearing his hideous Cosby-Zubaz street clothes, and he’s got this bag of McDonald’s he just bought, and he takes a courtside seat to eat lunch and watch Larry Bird practice in the dark, empty arena.  Ok then.

None of these things are the most confusing thing about this commercial premise, however.  That distinction goes to the part where Bird challenges Jordan to a game of sudden-death HORSE, with Jordan’s Big Mac and Fries as the prize, and Jordan accepts.

OK, I get that in real life, Michael Jordan is a crazy gambling fiend, and he’d probably accept any wager Bird offered him, even if the prize was a Nerf bat to the nutsack.  But this is not real life Michael Jordan, this is Hero Michael Jordan who has to sell burgers to kids.  I think it’s safe to assume that the Michael Jordan of this commercial is not a crazy gambling fiend, and this ad is not meant to be some sort of sly meta-wink at Jordan’s real life crazy gambling fiendishness.

Therefore, Hero Michael Jordan just accepted a pretty shitty bet.  He already bought the McDonald’s.  It’s not like Bird & Jordan are playing to determine who will buy McDonald’s in the future.  Now if Bird wins, he actually wins something.  But if Jordan wins, he merely “wins” what he already had.  Of course we could conjecture that at some point, perhaps Bird offered to fork over the cash value of the McDonald’s lunch if Jordan won, or some similar arrangement.  But there’s no on-screen indication that Bird ever puts anything at stake.  Basically, it would seem that you don’t have to get up all that early to fool Hero Michael Jordan.  In fact, you can still fool him pretty good right around lunchtime.

A couple years ago, McDonald’s made a dunkier version of this commercial, this time with Dwight Howard bamboozling Lebron James.  And once again they propagated this preposterous idea that the biggest basketball star on Earth will just risk his McDonald’s lunch without the other guy putting up anything of his own.

That was tolerable enough when McDonald’s simply portrayed pro basketball superstars as con men and rubes, but now I’m afraid they’ve gone too far.  They have a new commercial that suggests us ordinary folk are just as dishonest and stupid:

A community rec center, buzzing with people having fun, playing foosball, that kinda junk.

Two Old Ladies are playing ping pong but, evidently because of their advanced ages, they swing their paddles and volley the ball very slowly.

Two Snot-Nosed Kids are eating McDonald’s McNuggets near the ping pong table.  Snot-Nosed Kid #1 loudly mocks the slow-moving, ping-pong-playing Old Ladies.

So Old Lady #1′s like, Oh yeah, how about we play for your McNuggets?  And Snot-Nosed Kid #1, like dumb-ass Jordan and Lebron before him, accepts Old Lady #1′s challenge without her putting anything at stake.

If you haven’t already guessed in the space between that last sentence and this one, Old Lady #1 immediately reveals herself to be a hustler, and gets to work whipping Snot-Nosed Kid #1′s ass in ping pong.

At least this latest riff on the old “Bettin’ McDonald’s” trope has a twist, even if it is equally preposterous.  I’m not talking about the Old Ladies turning out to be hustlers, though, that crap was obviously going to happen.  No, the twistiest twist happens at the very end, after all the gooey food shots and low low prices have been adequately advertised.  In the last shot, the Old Ladies are enjoying their McNugget spoils with a Gentleman Friend.  And with a mischievous smile, Gentleman Friend boasts, “Works every time!”  (Note: this scene is not included in the version above, but it is in the version currently airing on American TV.)

All right, so apparently the Old Ladies and their Gentleman Friend hustle rec center kids out of their McDonald’s fairly often, and with great success.  Yet that only makes me wonder: do they always wait for some Snot-Nosed Kid to mock them?  Or do they have different methods of luring the youngsters into gambling away their lunches?  Do they have a big book of techniques, like 1930s grifters?  Do they have their own slang, like is “Smacking The Sparrow’s Egg” code for “ping pong?”  Do they just bet kids who happen to bring McDonald’s to the rec center, or do they go after all kinds of lunches?  Do they ever play for cold, hard cash?  How many times do you think each hustler has double-crossed the other throughout their long history in the con game?

And if this kind of hustle happens often enough to “work every time,” as Gentleman Friend says, wouldn’t these Old Hustlers be notorious around the rec center by now?  Wouldn’t you think all the kids know not to fuck with Those Old People Who Hustle Kids At Ping Pong Down At The Rec Center?

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