Conversational Reading

The Sacha Zimmerman Challenge

Who wants to take the Sacha Zimmerman challenge? In order to prove a point about how terribly characterized the four leads in Nick Hornby's new novel are, Zimmerman has pulled four quotes--one from each character's interior monologue--and asked you to spot the differences among them.

So can you do it? Can you match suicidal Hornbisian slacker-speak up with the correct suicidal slacker? Your choices are: Martin, J.J., Maureen, and Jess. Here are the excerpts:

1. "What I'd done is I'd pissed my life away. Literally. Well, OK, not literally literally. I hadn't, you know, turned my life into urine and stored it in my bladder and so on and so forth."

2. "The ten minutes I spent talking to Bong made history. Well, not history like 55 B.C. or 1939. Not historical history, unless one of us goes on to invent a time machine or stops Britain from being invaded by Al Qaeda or something."

3. "They could come to one of only two possible conclusions. OK, strictly speaking, there was a third conclusion -- we were telling the truth. We saw an angel that looked like Matt Damon, who for reasons best known to himself told us to get down off the roof."

4. "That's what everything comes down to: ladders. Well, not ladders literally; the Middle East peace process doesn't come down to ladders, and nor do money markets."

Answers at the bottom of this page.

Used Books DON'T Hurt New Book Sales

I can still remember the carping over the ridiculous numbers of used books available at dreaded Amazon.com. "How will we ever sell books any more?" the publishers whined.

Writing in The New York Times, Cal professor Hal Varian has a few answers:

When used books are substituted for new ones, the seller faces competition from the secondhand market, reducing the price it can set for new books. But there's another effect: the presence of a market for used books makes consumers more willing to buy new books, because they can easily dispose of them later. . . .

According to the researchers' calculations, Amazon earns, on average, $5.29 for a new book and about $2.94 on a used book. If each used sale displaced one new sale, this would be a less profitable proposition for Amazon.

But Mr. Bezos is not foolish. Used books, the economists found, are not strong substitutes for new books. An increase of 10 percent in new book prices would raise used sales by less than 1 percent. . . .

All in all, it looks like the used book market creates a lot more value than it destroys.

If you're interested, the study Varian bases much of his analysis on can be found here.

In addition to Varian's economic analysis that suggests Amazon helps publishers, let me point back again to Dan Green's post on "long tails."  Since it's doing business over the internet, Amazon can "stock" deep backlists that most bricks-and-mortar stores simply wouldn't have shelf space for. This, of course, is helping publishers because Amazon is a recognizably easy way to get a hold of that book you haven't been able to find at your local bookstore. According to the information presented in Dan Green's post, those sales are anything but insignificant.

So enough whining about Amazon undermining publishers.

Long Tails

Dan Green points to an article that tells us: "The average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon's book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles." dan glosses this factoid as follows:

Why is it, then, that the struggle to gain attention for books still seems to focus on finding them a suitable place in the bricks-and-mortar bookstores, where unavoidable limitations of space simply preclude displaying the majority of books that potentially could account for a majority of book sales? Isn't the saner approach to emphasize the discussion and dissemination of books via the electronic sources able to take advantage of the Long Tail?

In a word, Yes. Actually, the stat about the lower 130,000 titles reminds me of something about indepent publishers. The fact is that if you add up the revenues of all the indies out there, they dwarf those of the big commercial houses. One could argue that the real mainstream is made up of the indies, which reach more people than the handful of bestsellers that are in the news every year.

But, of course, we don't think like this because "Freakanomics makes the New York Times best-seller list" is a headline, whereas "Various no-name authors sell 1,000 copies apiece, but combined sell a lot" isn't considered nearly as interesting.

In the same way, getting your name up on the New York Times best-seller list is a big, big deal, but selling a fair number of books via several electronic outlets is paltry by comparison. While I don't want to scoff at the accomplishment of making the list, the fact is that it's not exactly a Herculean feat to get up there. The celebrity conferred on authors for making the list is out of proportion to exactly how many copies you need to sell to be on there. But still, authors who make any bestseller list, but especially the New York Times's, are treated like royalty.

I suppose that all this reflects the dominant business-model in commercial publishing right now: Put all your eggs in one basket. Publishers seem to prefer to have one megaseller that saves them from 10 bad investments instead of 10 modest-sellers and 1 bad invesement that doesn't hurt that much. This strikes me as bad business sense, a system that produces books and marketing that are out of whack with what most readers want.

I don't think people want to run like lemmings after the hot book of the moment, and if Dan's post doesn't prove this, it at least provides some evidence for it. I think the reason why people do what they do is that we've created the impression that all there is are these books. That's clearly not the case and maybe if that fact was made known to more people the marketplace would look more inspiring.

Talking Christ

Harper's continues it's strong reportage on what American Christianity is turning into with "The Christian Paradox" in the August issue. They have an excerpt up.

Asking Christians what Christ taught isn’t a trick. When we say we are a Christian nation—and, overwhelmingly, we do—it means something. People who go to church absorb lessons there and make real decisions based on those lessons; increasingly, these lessons inform their politics. (One poll found that 11 percent of U.S. churchgoers were urged by their clergy to vote in a particular way in the 2004 election, up from 6 percent in 2000.) When George Bush says that Jesus Christ is his favorite philosopher, he may or may not be sincere, but he is reflecting the sincere beliefs of the vast majority of Americans.

And therein is the paradox. America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior.

I've got to say that between The New Yorker, Harper's, and the odd Joan Didion article in The New York Review of Books, we've been getting some great insight into the evangelical movement in this country. In the apst six months, I can recall reading articles on the largest Evangelical church in America (in Colorado Springs, CO); the intersection of politics and Christ; an in-depth look at a controversy that occurred when a Bay Area school-teacher crossed the line in including religion in his class; a profile of a college that cherry-picks Evangelical home-schooled teens and then grooms them for positions with Republicans in Washington; the groundwork laid for the Teresa Shiavo farce by Evangelicals; and the rise of evangelical broadcasting and media.

That's the last 6 months, in which interest in this topic has peaked. Looking back a year or more, we can see the Joan Didion was way ahead of everyone on this front with some prescient articles. There's this one about the depth of entwinment between Bush and the Evangelicals (with an especially interesting part about how he signals with key words in speeches) dated Nov. 2003.

Going back even further to what has become in retrospect an amazingly important day--November
2, 2000--we see another article Didion wrote unmasking just what exactly Bush's oft-repeated election year phrase "compassionate conservatism" meant to the Evangelicals who helped him "win" one of the closest presidential races in history.

I urge everyone to check some of this stuff out. There's a whole lot going on here and it's probably not to your liking.

Literary Realism

Wow. James Woods quotes actual blog-related people in his new article "The Blue River of Truth" up at The New Republic.

Here are two recent statements about literary realism, declarations so typical of their age, so finely characteristic, so normative, that a realist novelist would have been very proud to have imagined them into life. The first is by Rick Moody, reviewing J.M. Coetzee's novel Elizabeth Costello in Bookforum: "It's quaint to say so, but the realistic novel still needs a kick in the ass. The genre, with its epiphanies, its rising action, its predictable movement, its conventional humanisms, can still entertain and move us on occasion, but for me it's politically and philosophically dubious and often dull. Therefore, it needs a kick in the ass." And the second is by Patrick Giles, contributing to a long, raucous discussion about fiction, realism, and fictional credibility on a literary blog called "The Elegant Variation": "And the notion that this [the realistic novel] is the supreme genre of the lit tradition is so laughable that I ain't even gonna indulge myself.

I wonder if this has anything to do with Dan & James's brou-hah-hah last week. Who says lit blogs don't have influence?

Our incorrigible and profound revulsion against identity

From Wallace Stegner's potent On Teaching and Writing Fiction:

Of our incorrigible and profound revulsion against identity, I suppose that physical love is the simplest, most immediate, and for many the only expression. Some have their comfort in feeling that they belong to the world of nature . . .some commit themselves to the kingdom of God. There is much in all of them, but for you [the young writer], I imagine, not enough in any. For you it will have to be the kingdom of man, it will have to be art."

This reminds me particularly of the essay Jonathan Lethem wrote in The Disappointment Artist (also excerpted in The New Yorker) about immersing himself in books as a teen after the death of his mother.

It also reminds me more generally of the overarching theme of David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest.

LINKS

1. I see that Michela Wrong, author of the excellent In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz (about the Congo under Mobutu) has written a new book. This one's about Eritrea.

2. Getting dirty in the library, bibliophile-style.

For the record, I have never had sex in the stacks, and -- even after many years of lurking in several major collections -- I have never had to discreetly avoid anyone else in flagrante delicto. But I have had many moments in stacks of great libraries that were almost erotic in their intellectual intensity.

3. Mark Feeney writes an editorial about the proliferation of books with subtitles featuring the phrase "changed the world," or some variation thereof. Gee, wonder why no one else ever thought to write about that.

4. I've read some nasty reviews of John Irving's new book, but this one is the nastiest.

5. Bovine readers all of you! David Milofsky implores you to look past the pretty cardboard stands and stacked book displays at the front of the store.

6. Imagine if you worked for Reuters and were asked to write an article about a Florida mailman who won a Heminway look-alike contest.

Round/Flat

"In a curious twist, the utopian mind has migrated from left to right, and from the academy to the airport bookshop. In the nineteenth century it was political activists and radical social theorists such as Marx who held out the promise that new technology was creating a new world. Today some business gurus have a similar message. There are many books announcing a global economic transformation and suggesting that governments can be reengineered to adapt to it in much the same way as corporations. The World Is Flat is an outstanding example of this genre."

There are several good thoughts in this rebuke to Thomas Friedman.

Read It

Read William Gass's essay on Nietzche in the August Harper's. I don't care if you know everything there is to know about Nietzche--just enjoy the prose.

New Saunders Online

Even though I found the last George Saunders offering (in Harper's) a wee bit too strange, I would be remiss if I did not point out that he has new material (available online) in The New Yorker. (you're welcome, Rake)