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Scan and Pan

Continuing that series of posts and links about contemporary fiction, here’s a piece in Slate about how book sales are measured and ignored:

[Using Bookscan to garner sales numbers] has become popular for a few reasons having to do with the culture of journalism and publishing. In general, the publishing world treats money the way old-line WASPs once did—as a subject that genteel people simply don’t discuss. The only question considered to be more indelicate than how much one was paid to write a book is how many copies it has sold.

Enjoy.

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Hot ticket

Here’s an article from Forbes about the roots of corrupt behavior. It explores the matter via the parking tickets unpaid by UN diplomats in NYC:

Scandinavian countries, which perennially rank among the least corrupt in the corruption index, had the fewest unpaid tickets [between 1998 and 2005]. There were just 12 from the 66 diplomats from Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden. Almost all of these tickets went to one bad Finn.

Chad and Bangladesh, at the bottom of the corruption index, were among the worst scofflaws. They shirked 1,243 and 1,319 tickets, respectively, in spite of the fact that their UN missions were many times smaller than those of the Scandinavians.

The last time I heard about Chad and cars was when they fought with Libya and used Toyota pickups instead of tanks or APCs.

Find out what Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer decided to do about the problem.

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X(cavate)-Men

Oh, sure: Amy & I could have spent Memorial Day at a nice party at Breezy Point, in Brooklyn. But wouldn’t we have even more fun if I spent a second straight day excavating a portion of my backyard? In 88-degree weather?

Okay, we wouldn’t, especially since Amy stayed inside and degreased the stove/grill in the kitchen. But stay home we did, and I actually accomplished my goal of clearing a chunk of land on the corner of our backyard.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take any “Before” pictures, largely because I was convinced I would never finish the job. But I found reservoirs of will to go along with my reservoirs of Patrick Ewing-like sweat. So, all you get are a couple of “After” pictures, here and here.

Doesn’t look like much? Well, it measured out to 23 feet by 24 feet, which comes out to about 550 square feet of yard that hadn’t been cleaned in more than 15 years. The thick layer of rotting leaves was a mixed blessing: a lot of the weeds hadn’t laid down deep roots, but those leaves get awfully heavy when they’ve been left for that long and that much rain.

Then there were the rocks, which sure made things difficult. My idea for this patch is to turn it into some sorta garden or zen-palace, so hauling out a bunch of those suckers is necessary. It wasn’t as bad as some of the small trees I had to rip up, since they did lay down some significant roots.

But you guys know I wouldn’t write about this sort of thing unless something funny happened, or if an ex-girlfriend was involved. Fortunately, it’s the former.

See, my father is genetically incapable of disposing of anything in the conventional manner. A few years ago, when he replaced his water-heater, he called me and said, “We can dump it behind the bank building in Ramsey tonight when it’s closed!” I told him that I’d gotten out of the dump-and-run business, and that we should see when bulk-trash day is in his neighborhood. It turned out to be the next day. We still had fun trying to roll the water-heater down his sloped driveway, nearly losing control of it, which would’ve led to the heater bounding across the street and into the neighbors’ front yard.

Which is to say, I had some trepidation about digging up that section of the backyard. This trepidation was warranted. Over the years, it seems Dad dumped a bunch of crap in that relatively small patch of land.

Airplane cables (from our dog’s run when we were kids), metal pipes and tubing from his old HAM radio tower in the backyard, flowerpots, a Sundae Smiley Saucer from McDonalds, cables, rope, shards of glass, and what appears to be a fuel-tank that was filled with rocks.

You read that last one right. I had to get all the rocks, dirt and rust out before I could haul the tank up to the pile o’ junk.

Now, you’d think that a fuel-tank full of rocks would be the piece de resistance for my excavation, but it’s not. No, that honor goes to this:

What’s that? Oh, it’s a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi from about 18 logos ago. If you check out the back of the bottle, you’ll notice it’s still two-thirds filled.

I hope everyone else had a good Memorial Day. I know I’ll remember this one for quite a while, especially if I get tetanus from that damned fuel-tank. . .

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The varieties of diversity, or something

Timothy Garton Ash on the stultification of Europe:

In the great age of Renaissance Florence, diversity was indeed the dynamo of Europe’s extraordinary creativity. There’s a marvellous book called The European Miracle, by the economic historian EL Jones, that explores why Europe rather than China – scientifically and technologically more advanced than Europe in the 14th century – produced the scientific, agrarian and industrial revolutions that led the world into modernity. In brief, his answer is: Europe’s diversity.

But this was the diversity of a restless, often violent competition between cities, regions, states and empires. Florence and Siena, England and France, Christian Europe and the Ottoman empire – they did not resolve their differences by coalition agreements and endless negotiations in airless committee rooms on the Rue de la Loi in Brussels. To reverse Churchill’s post-1945 adage: they made war-war not jaw-jaw.

Many readers will remember the speech that Orson Welles put into the mouth of the gangster Harry Lime, in the film of Graham Greene’s The Third Man: “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” Has Europe today entered its age of the cuckoo clock?

Sorry to have been so light on the posts, dear reader. I’ve been pretty busy with the magazine. Have a good holiday weekend.

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Market Down

Rachel Donadio at the NYTimes has an article about why literary fiction sucks. Okay, it’s not really about why literary fiction sucks; it’s really about why the market for literary fiction sucks.

It has the dumbest concluding paragraph I’ve read in a while (soon to be topped by the conclusion of my article on disposable components in bioprocessing), despite the promise of this opening:

The pride and joy of publishing, literary fiction has always been wonderfully ill suited to the very industry that sustains it. Like an elegant but impoverished aristocrat married to a nouveau riche spouse, it has long been subsidized by mass-market fiction and by nonfiction ripped from the headlines. One supplies the cachet, the others the cash.

Having run a mini-publishing house of allegedly literary fiction, I’ve taken a somewhat jaundiced view of the relationship between book and marketplace. I’m all for fantastic literary writing, but it’s pretty clear that a market relying on people with my taste is doomed to insignificance. I love great writing and wish it would sell better, but it won’t.

And, despite Jonathan Galassi’s bizarre non-sequitur, it’s not because we’re living in a “post-9/11 world.” Read all about it.

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Big Sleazy

Going into this weekend, I wasn’t sure if the re-election of Ray Nagin as mayor of New Orleans would be tantamount to Marion Barry’s re-election in Washington, DC after being caught smoking crack cocaine.

Then the city’s member of the House of Representatives got caught on video taking $100,000 in cash to facilitate bribing Nigerian officials for an internet venture (evidently not this one), and I thought, “Well, at least Nagin’s not part of the political establishment.”

Will Collier at Vodkapundit has a good take on the need to revamp politics in New Orleans and Louisiana:

Louisianans in general and New Orleanians in particular made too many bad choices for too long. They acquiesced to governmental corruption and incompetence with a shrug and the inevitable, “that’s just Louisiana.” They allowed an unfettered criminal class to fester and thrive, until it literally took over the city. They put too much trust in luck and “the great elsewhere,” as local author Chris Rose puts it, to bail them out when things were at their worst.

And so they lived and died with those choices.

Now it’s time for them to choose again.

Read the whole shebang.

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Big Apple

The new Apple store in Manhattan looks gorgeous. Read the BW article about it, then check out the slideshow.

Of course, tastes change. BW has a neat article today about landmarks that were once reviled, and an accompanying slideshow for that, too. While the Eiffel Tower took a long time to grow on people, I don’t believe the Tour Montparnasse will ever be anything but an eyesore.

Bonus: the landmark article includes the rumor that Francois Mitterand worshipped Satan!

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Let them eat broadband!

If Eliot Spitzer has his way, someday we’ll all be able to download porno, regardless of race, color, creed or economic class. The NY state attorney general believes that universal high-speed internet access is a necessity for NY. (Presumably, this will allow him to utilize the Marshall Law to force phone and cable companies to make a deal to provide this at a loss, causing them to raise rates in other parts of their business.)

As one analyst quoted in the article points out, providing internet access doesn’t mean jack for families that can’t afford a computer:

That’s a much bigger reason for the lack of broadband penetration in low-income households than service accessibility, argues Bruce Liechtman, principal analyst with Liechtman Research Group and a former chair of the editorial board for the Cable & Telecommunications Marketing Assn. journal. “Broadband adoption really correlates directly with household income.” If Spitzer wants to solve the digital divide, Leichtman says, “he should be giving everybody a computer.”

Spitzer tells us that poor kids in NYC have it tough: “If you’re kid growing up in South Korea, your Internet access is 10 times faster at half the price than a kid growing up in the South Bronx,” he said.

On the flip side, kids in the South Bronx don’t share their northern border with a nuclear-armed country filled with bark-eating zombies.