Farewell, Village Voice

For the last decade or so, I have only occasionally read Village Voice, mostly online, but once upon a time, when I was in my 20s and living in Boston, acquiring a copy of the Voice at one of the news stands there, and perusing it to find out what was happening in New York, was one of the highlights of my week. (Back then I also read the New York Times in print almost every day too.) The Voice provided a trove of news about politics, in New York and beyond, as well as some of the most invigorating criticism about art, entertainment, the broader culture and the world, that you might find anywhere. For me it constantly outmatched Boston's own Phoenix, that city's alternative paper, and was part of a national ecosystem of similar papers that offered fresh, often left-leaning and progressive but always counter-mainstream perspectives on the state of the world. Now, the Voice is gone.

It's where I first learned about New York's legendary Public Theater and its pathblazing directors Joseph Papp and George C. Wolfe; it was one of the mainstream places where I regularly found informative reportage, Andrew Kopkind, Richard Goldstein and others, about about HIV and AIDS. It was a regular-go to learn about the newest and less common films, books, music, theater and performances of all kinds. The Voice also brought to me and countless readers original photography (Sylvia Plachy, C. Carr, etc.), cartoons by Jules Feiffer, Ted Rall, Lynda Barry, Mark Alan Stamaty, and Tom Tomorrow, and literature (I recollect reading a story by the great poet Elizabeth Alexander's there, among other gems). I was enthralled by Greg Tate's, Joan Morgan's and Gary Indiana's criticism, and when my friend Scott Poulson-Bryant (now Dr. Poulson-Bryant, and a professor at Fordham University) secured an internship and then a job there, it seemed like an unimaginably wonderful thing had occurred. Other than Greg Tate, the one columnist I made sure never to miss was Michael Musto, whose tour through NYC's once inimitable queer club scene will probably never be equalled again.

When C and I moved to the New York area, the Voice remained a paper I rarely missed reading. I'd even looked in its ads section in my search for an apartment when heading to NYU. When Annotations appeared, a young writer named Colson Whitehead wrote one of the most insightful, praiseworthy reviews the book received, and it meant everything to me that it appeared in the Voice. When the Voice became free in New York in 1996--which I loved but also figured was a bad sign--I would grab a copy in Manhattan before heading back to New Jersey, where we still had to pay for them. Yet I also paid attention to the labor strife that was wracking the paper in 2005 and 2006, and again in 2013: editors fired or resigning, writers sharing their fears over decreased benefits and the new owners' tunnel vision, and worse. Even as its leadership changed, the Voice remained one of the rare news organs that seemed not to coddle the rich and powerful--I recall Wayne Barrett's extensive  reporting on Rudy Giuliani's administration, and the time it ran an article outing New York's conservative Catholic Cardinal Edward Egan--and continued to employ incisive writers like Steven Thrasher. Yet in the end, its most recent owner, and the shifts in the media industry, ensured its demise.

Established in 1955 by Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher, John Willcock, and Norman Mailer, the Voice was the US's first alternative weekly, and received a wide array of honors over its 63-year existence, including Pulitzer Prizes, National Press, and George Polk awards. It survived a number of owners over the years, until it was sold in October 2015, by its penultimate owner, Voice Media Group, to billionaire heir Peter Barbey. In August 2017, the Voice announced it would cease to exist as a print publication, and its final print issue appeared on September 17, 2015. Although Barbey said that he wanted to save the Voice, and despite his considerable financial reserves, he claimed that financial exigencies required him to shut down the paper, even as he allegedly has been searching for someone to buy it. Yesterday, the electronic edition ceased publication, half the staff were laid off, and those who remain will assist for a limited period in archiving the paper's rich store of articles and materials. Yet the fact remains that one of the once truly vital organs of reportage, investigation and criticism, for New York, the US and the globe, is gone, and with it passes an era--many really--that we will somebody

Happy Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Happy Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

Instead of posting a long write-up, I came across a Salon article by Kali Holloway, originally published in Alternet, that features nine quotes that our US media often overlook when invoking the name and career of Rev. Dr. King Jr. You can find it here.

Here is a small quote from Dr. King Jr.'s 1967 speech "The Three Evils of Society," delivered at the National Conference on New Politics:

Again we have deluded ourselves into believing the myth that Capitalism grew and prospered out of the Protestant ethic of hard work and sacrifice. The fact is that capitalism was built on the exploitation and suffering of black slaves and continues to thrive on the exploitation of the poor – both black and white, both here and abroad.

You can read the entire speech here, and hear him deliver it here.

Also, in light of the forthcoming inauguration of Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, I think the image below offers one way of honoring Rev. Dr. King Jr.'s legacy. It's going to a difficult fight, and a long four years!

Honor King: End Racism! broadside, April 8, 1968. (Gilder Lehrman Collection)

Oscars Whiteout (Again)

Who really cares about the Oscars? Clearly some of us care about the Oscars. Should we care about the Oscars? Should we care about the fact that the #Oscars(Are)SoWhite--again?

For the second year in a row, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that awards out the annual gold-plated Oscar statuettes, considered the pinnacle of the multibillion-dollar American film industry's honors, have nominated an all-white slate of actors in the Best and Supporting categories. Ten slots, ten white women and men, and even in two films, Creed and Straight Outta Compton, with black leading actors, only a white supporting actor and the white scriptwriters respectively received nominations. No leading actors of other races or ethnicities were nominated, nor were any films in which they played the leading roles.

While this might not have drawn much notice fifty years ago in 1966 (which in fact did have an all white roster of nominees) or, in 1936 (unsurprisingly), closer to the Oscars' establishment in 1929, it does stick out in 2016, at a time when the United States is growing increasingly more diverse in racial, ethnic, religious, and other ways, and when industry figures themselves note that 46% of Hollywood movie ticket buyers in 2013 alone were people of color (designated as black, Latinx and "other" in the marketing study linked above), and Latinxs in particular are the most enthusiastic moviegoers. And the Academy has a black woman, Cheryl Boone Isaacs, as its president.

2013 in fact was supposed to be "turning-point year" for black filmmakers. In his The Dissolve article "New study puts numbers to the lack of minority representation in film," Vadim Rizov quotes producer Harvey Weinstein uttering a quintessentially post-racial (and deeply deluded) paean to America's changing political and thus social terrain, noting that the micro-burst of black directed and starred films "signals, with President Obama, a renaissance. He’s erasing racial lines. It is the Obama effect." How wrong he was and is. Hollywood cinematic representations lag behind those on TV, which has certainly improved since the heyday of the 1970s, and those "racial lines" Weinstein spoke of are as present today as they were in 2013 or before.

As it turns out, 2013 was more of a mirage than anything else. The USC Annenberg School for Communications and Journalism study that Rizov cites makes clear, diverse racial and ethnic representation in Hollywood cinema is still a problem:

Examining 500 top-grossing films released in the U.S. from 2007 to 2012, the study considers some 20,000 characters and finds diversity is sorely lacking. “Across 100 top-grossing films of 2012, only 10.8 percent of speaking characters are Black, 4.2 percent are Hispanic, 5 percent are Asian, and 3.6 percent are from other (or mixed race) ethnicities,” the paper notes at the outset. “Just over three-quarters of all speaking characters are White (76.3 percent). These trends are relatively stable, as little deviation is observed across the five-year sample.”

I observe this not only when I catch previews during my increasingly rare visits to see movies in theatrical release but on TV, where film after film appears to reflect a very narrow, usually white, upper-middle-class, coastal perspective. Innumerable stories not just from the present but the past remain offscreen, at least those screens commandeered by Hollywood studios. Non-traditional casting has improved somewhat, but people of color are still relegated to secondary or subsidiary, and often stereotypical roles, and even though blackface performance thankfully is rare to nonexistent in Hollywood these days, whitewashing source characters happens regularly, and yellowface characterizations crop up. Far more frequent, though, are stereotypes.  Quoting Rizov again:

Among the other conclusions reached: “Hispanic females are more likely to be depicted in sexy attire and partially naked than Black or White females. Asian females are far less likely to be sexualized.” While women got assigned the same kind of domestic status regardless of their race or ethnicity, “Hispanic males are more likely to be depicted as fathers and relational partners than males in all other racial/ethnic groups. Black males, on the other hand, are the least likely to be depicted in these roles.”

Some actors of color, like Kevin Hart--who has become the current go-to black sidekick-enabler in comedies--continue to make careers out of this situation. What exacerbates the problem is the lack of diversity behind the camera, with the ratio of white directors dwarfing directors from any other racial background. Thinking intersectionally, given the sexist and ageist challenges women in Hollywood still face (articulated without intersectionality last year by Patricia Arquette and again this year by media darling Jennifer Lawrence), things are even worse for women of color.

Meanwhile certain plotlines, including "white men battling adversity"; an older white man paired with a younger white woman; younger upper-middle-class white people facing relationships hurdles; and all or mostly white historical scenarios characterize a great many of the plots of Hollywood films. Yes, pace Vladimir Propp, there are a limited number of plots out there, but still a far greater array of narrative configurations, inflected by cultural difference, which is to say stories and experiences, in the US and across the globe, that rarely if ever make it through Hollywood's system.

Sylvester Stallone and Michael B. Jordan
in Creed (moviepilot.com)

This imaginative narrowness, which I would only partially chalk up to racism, only magnifies the inequities the Academy members' racial and gender makeup (94% white and 77% male) and voting patterns produce. Fewer and less culturally and narratively diverse film opportunities mean fewer roles in which actors of color appear on screen, whatever their acting skill level. I should also note that most of the black actors who have won Oscars in recent years have usually been honored for performances involving strong elements of abjection and spectacle, which also points to Academy voting biases.

Ultimately it comes back to gatekeepers at all levels of the movie industry who fail to approve and advance scripts and films that might offer a richer portrait of the society, or who tend to view issue of race and ethnicity, religious difference, and so on, through a narrow lens, are one major source of the problem. The revelations emerging from the Sony hack made this very clear. Moviegoers who support the status quo are another, but while it is conceivable that Americans could boycott Hollywood standard offerings (and excuses), films are a global business, circulating from Canada to Argentina, the UK to South Africa, Russia to New Zealand--and China is the largest single market of all. Hollywood's representations are not just a domestic problem.

Actress Jada Pinkett Smith, supported by her husband actor and musician Will Smith, who starred in the film Concussion (which I did not see) and did not garner a nomination this year, has called for a boycott of the Oscars ceremony, as has director Spike Lee. Actor and comedian Chris Rock, the event MC, may be considering boycotting the proceedings as well, though it appears he will show up and, I hope, skewer the debacle. Other actors, including 2013 Academy Award winner Lupita Nyong'o and actor Idris Elba have called out the movie and TV industry's failings, and in the Briton Elba's case, the UK's parallel problems with cinematic and TV racial representations.

April Reign, creator of the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag, has challenged one of the default excuses behind the film industry's ongoing whiteout, male domination and this and the previous year's nominations: "Don't tell me that people of color, women can't fill seats." But Hollywood, which pays attention to the bottom line, apparently isn't as concerned about who fills those seats as it is with endlessly replicating its tiny store of self-regarding visual narratives. It's not about the money, but rather systemic and structural problems that need to be dismantled completely. Perhaps beginning with a boycott of the Oscars this year, and from now on all movies with retrograde casting approaches and stories.

As important, filmmakers, actors and movie audiences must proactively devise ways to build systems to enable domestic filmmakers of color to create, distribute and screen not just more, but better films, and perhaps if people desire an awards system, as in the case in the literary world and other artistic areas, create that as well. The technology is increasingly there, as are the rival film bases Bollywood and Nollywood (whose films I increasingly watch). Given that Hollywood's earnings have taken a dip in recent years, the studios will change--or they'll realize too late that they could have but did not.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr & Eslanda Goode Robeson,
Schomburg Center digital collection

“And one day we must ask the question, ‘Why are there forty million poor people in America? And when you begin to ask that question, you are raising questions about the economic system, about a broader distribution of wealth.’ When you ask that question, you begin to question the capitalistic economy. And I’m simply saying that more and more, we’ve got to begin to ask questions about the whole society…” –Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Speech to Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, Georgia, August 16, 1967.

From "11 Most Anti-Capitalist Quotes from Martin Luther King, Jr.," compiled by Katie Halper at Raw Story.

The Murder of Walter Scott

Here we go again.

In this April 4, 2015, frame from video provided by Attorney L. Chris Stewart representing the family of Walter Lamer Scott, Scott appears to be running away from City Patrolman Michael Thomas Slager, right, in North Charleston, S.C. Slager was charged with murder Tuesday, hours after law enforcement officials viewed the dramatic video that appears to show Slager shooting a fleeing Scott several times in the back. (AP Photo/Courtesy of L. Chris Stewart)

Walter Lamar Scott was murdered in North Charleston, South Carolina, by white cop Michael T. Slager. Slager had pulled Scott over for a traffic violation, a broken tail-light, and when Scott fled, Slager initially tried to Taser him.

When that failed, Slager shot Scott dead, in cold blood, in the back, eight times. 

For a traffic stop. A traffic stop. A traffic stop.

Scott was not armed. Scott was not armed. Walter Scott. Was. Not. Armed.

Slager then apparently handcuffed the corpse of the man he had just killed and attempted to plant his Taser on him, with the apparent assistance of a fellow cop, a black man. Despite his attempted cover-up, a now-surfaced video belies it.

Unlike many cops in his position, he has been fired, and is being charged--though whether he will be prosecuted and convicted remains to be seen--with murder.

Again and again and again this keeps happening, because even though we repeat that "Black Lives Matter," in reality in this country, in this society, on this globe, what we see is that they do not.

As Jason Parham notes on Gawker, last month alone, 36 black people were killed by police, or roughly one every 21 hours. This approximates a slow and almost shameless form of genocide.

More Black Americans were killed by cops in 2014 than the total number of black people who died in the 9/11 attacks.

Like Parham I want to write something more thoughtful, more insightful, something illuminating, but I am exhausted. I really am. I have lived this reality all of my life, now approach 50 years. The foreground changes but the backdrop of racism, white supremacy, black disposability and social death, and state violence allied to elite social and economic interests are the same. Yes, things have improved, always as a result of sustained struggle, since I was a child, and they continue to improve, but we still have a long way to go.

These state murders are occurring as this country warehouses vast numbers of black and brown people in prisons, many of them privatized and providing cheap labor for corporations and earning dividends for investors. Countless black and brown people--children, adolescents, women, men--cycle through the failed penal system and its prison industrial complex annex, sometimes as a prelude to be murdered, at some point in their lives and usually with impunity, by the state, which does everything to protect elite interests, global corporations, and the billionaires who are destroying this country piece by piece.

It has to end. It MUST END.

No amount of telling black people how to behave, whether around officers or otherwise, no amount of "diversity training," no amount of explaining away the disparate ways that black americans (and brown americans who are treated like black americans by this system) are treated by the law and its officers, no amount of appeals to "black on black violence," divorced from the larger social context or not, no rationalizing away or ignoring all the ways in which black people in this society pay extensive social, political and economic taxes just for being black, is going to do it.

What has to happen is that cops have to stop killing unarmed black americans, and when they do they have to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Cops have to stop serving as the shock troops of white supremacy, neo-colonialism, the plutonomy and global capitalism. THEY MUST STOP KILLING US. What has to happen is that the entire foundation and edifice upon which this society has been built and developed has to be addressed, rethought, and remade. This is not an interpersonal issue. It is a systemic and structural problem. And it has to be addressed and redressed.

NOW.

Chomsky on the Death of American Universities

(Copyright © Flickr / WorCehT)

In a recent issue of Jacobin magazine, scholar, theorist, critic and activist Noam Chomsky, whose work needs no introduction, offers one of the most succinct and powerful critiques of the direction of contemporary universities and colleges that I have read in quite some time: "The Death of American Universities." Much of what Chomsky says here, which is an edited transcript (prepared by Robin J. Sowards) of remarks Chomsky delivered in February to members and allies of the Adjunct Faculty Association of the United Steelworkers in Pittsburgh, will be familiar to anyone in higher education, as well as any who have experienced--or closely followed--the travails of students and parents, contingent and permanent faculty, and institutions struggling to deal with budgetary cuts and economically unsustainable cost inflation, narrowing educational goals, the imposition of market-based ideologies, the effects of technological shifts, and various forms of anti-intellectualism, some of very long standing as the late Richard Hofstadter, Susan Jacoby, and others have argued persuasively, that have taken root in our contemporary society.

Perhaps the only area he does not touch upon is athletics, a subject he has commented on in the past. But in every other area what he says applies to every institution in the US, including the richest and most elite--think Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, etc.--though in some areas, such as renewing a focus on the arts and humanities, feeling the pinch of federal and state cuts, and trustees who are more concerned with how the football team does rather than whether students are receiving the highest quality education for the complex world in which we live, a world which they will help to shape and transform, these institutions are still somewhat insulated. 

But even Chomsky's former home base, MIT, is not immune to the critiques he lodges or challenges he describes (the MIT Sloan School of Management is one of the major incubators of high-level business thinking in the US), and as he always does, he makes sure to broaden his discussion to larger issues in the society, noting how the "precariat" is not just an issue for higher education, but central to contemporary asset-based globalized capitalism. You might quibble with some of his assertions, but in general, I think he gets things very right, and I wish more than anything that upper-level university administrators and leaders, legislators and other public officials, college and university trustees, and members of the media would read this piece without blinders or prejudice, whether they ultimately disagree or not. I see up close what he'd talking about; getting those in positions of power to acknowledge and address what's going on is another matter. 

Here are a few quotes, but do read the entire article.

This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. 

At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more.

and

In fact, if you look back farther, it goes even deeper than that. If you go back to the early 1970s when a lot of this began, there was a lot of concern pretty much across the political spectrum over the activism of the 1960s; it’s commonly called “the time of troubles.” It was a “the time of troubles” because the country was getting civilized, and that’s dangerous. People were becoming politically engaged and were trying to gain rights for groups that are called “special interests,” like women, working people, farmers, the young, the old, and so on. That led to a serious backlash, which was pretty overt. 

At the liberal end of the spectrum, there’s a book called The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, Joji Watanuki, produced by the Trilateral Commission, an organization of liberal internationalists. The Carter administration was drawn almost entirely from their ranks. They were concerned with what they called “the crisis of democracy” — namely, that there’s too much democracy.

and

First of all, we should put aside any idea that there was once a “golden age.” Things were different and in some ways better in the past, but far from perfect. The traditional universities were, for example, extremely hierarchical, with very little democratic participation in decision-making. One part of the activism of the 1960s was to try to democratize the universities, to bring in, say, student representatives to faculty committees, to bring in staff to participate. 

These efforts were carried forward under student initiatives, with some degree of success. Most universities now have some degree of student participation in faculty decisions. And I think those are the kinds of things we should be moving towards: a democratic institution, in which the people involved in the institution, whoever they may be (faculty, students, staff), participate in determining the nature of the institution and how it runs; and the same should go for a factory. 

These are not radical ideas, I should say. They come straight out of classical liberalism. So if you read, for example, John Stuart Mill, a major figure in the classical liberal tradition, he took it for granted that workplaces ought to be managed and controlled by the people who work in them — that’s freedom and democracy. We see the same ideas in the United States. Let’s say you go back to the Knights of Labor; one of their stated aims was “To establish co-operative institutions such as will tend to supersede the wage-system, by the introduction of a co-operative industrial system.”

Quote: David Joselit

David Joselit
(Yale University)

"In museums then, art links vast amounts of capital to individual creativity and cultural identity. This particular format performs two profoundly important ideological tasks. First, museums "launder" the assets of elites by transforming their private accumulation of art into public benefits for the "people." In other words, museums appear to democratize the uneven distribution of wealth that results from late capitalism's high-risk finance industries. Museums themselves speculate on art in many ways--based on not only its literal value but also its many derivatives such as real estate investment, the proliferation of satellite museums or galleries, traveling exhibitions, souvenir merchandise, online retailing, expensive in-house restaurants, rights and reproductions, and publishing. Perhaps most profitably, art world institutions depend on art's capacity to attract investment from wealthy individuals and corporations as well as government patronage."

-- Copyright © from David Joselit, After Art, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013, p. 86. All rights reserved.

Labor's Days or, Are Books Dead and Can Authors Survive?

James Baldwin

As I was trying to winnow down the many things I wanted to write about for today, Labor Day, I realized that I could return to something I'd touched upon before, which was to explore the fate of writing as a career in the face of the economic, political, technological, and cultural changes currently underway. After starting a few drafts of what I wanted to say, I thought to myself, this sounds so dreary and such an awful way to start off the week, especially given the recent gloomy news about no new net jobs being created last month; the strong US and European consensus around policies that will only exacerbate the ongoing economic stagnation and unemployment crisis; and the looming "jobs speech" spectacle involving the President we'll see later this week. As a result I told myself that I'd instead post some pro-labor videos, links and so forth.

But in cleaning up some of my bookmarks, I came across one from a few days ago that made me think today would be a very good day to broach an aspect of the larger topic I'd explored in my review of Jaron Lanier's You Are Not a Gadget. One of the main threads in Lanier's book concerns the fate of all industries touched by digitization and, by extension, the fate of careers linked to those industries.  I won't rehearse my reading of Lanier's important tome except to say that I increasingly see what he discusses, and in some cases decries, coming to pass.

To give one example, I think of his concern about the widespread ceding of personal expression to more automated and systematized forms of commentary, and I consider all the bloggers I used to read regularly and would love to continue following, who have ditched even periodic, personalized posts--about all sorts of things--for Facebook and now Google+ entries, Twitter quips, Tumblr reposts, and the like. (I belog to all these services, though I really only frequently post on Twitter.) Many of these linked commentaries offer glimmers of the originality the bloggers once displayed on their own pages, but they are often severely boiled down versions of what they once posted. What they gain in time, and perhaps in readership, we lose in terms of the former depth and richness of their voices. I personally want to hear what they have to say, at some length, rather than just seeing links and "Likes" and short, witty responses, but I know I'm in the minority on this.

Julia Álvarez

Perhaps the larger and most pressing concern of Lanier's book is how digitization is leading to a hollowing out of the middle classes by technoogically and structurally destroying a series of industries. This sounds alarmist, but as he shows, it is occurring no matter how much we might want to deny it.  In considering his arguments, I have been mulling the funding and thus existential crisis the United States Postal Service, a necessary and public good, whatever its flaws, now faces because of the increasing use of digital mail services, from emails to billing.  The Post Office doesn't register in Lanier's book, but its technological challenge underlines and connects to something everyone should be thinking about and trying to address. Last month, at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, as part of a debate on the "End of Books?", writer and critic Ewan Morrison took up this particular thread of Lanier's when he delivered his bracing talk entitled "Are Books Dead, and Can Authors Survive?" and his conclusions, particularly for labor and "writing" as a profession, were quite serious.

I'll recap his talk below, which appeared in abridged form in the Guardian, but first let me say that despite his title Morrison (nor Lanier) is not arguing that "books" in any and all forms are dead; as the swift transition to and rise in publication of e-books shows, the book as a concept, as an artifact, even if only digital and virtual, as a commodity, is not going to disappear. People are still reading, people are still writing, and people will continue to acquire books, for pay or for free, for the foreseeable future.  The likelihood of those dystopias where books are burnt (Fahrenheit 411) or banished (Brave New World) seems increasingly unlikely.  (Though, I will say, and elaborate in a subsequent post, if we vest everything in technologies that require electricity, what happens if the lights go off?) Concerning "cloud" books and technological control, as Amazon now wields it, Lanier has posed some important questions that Morrison doesn't raise at all, among them: who really owns--and has complete access to--not just the rights or content, but what persists of the material aspects--the text itself, in whatever form--of digital works? For, as Amazon has already displayed, it can arbitrarily remove (and thus effectively ban the sales of) books from its site and e-readers at will, but shut down the possibility of lending them out.  You buy the "book," but...who owns it, really?  I'll also note that Morrison does not press the larger argument about contemporary late capitalism and its discontents, the endless corporate push for commoditization and monopolization, and the collusion of the governments and politicians it buys (and owns) to write laws that benefit these "persons," as the US Supreme Court again affirmed they were in their Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission ruling last year.

The common issue that concerns both Lanier and Morrison is whether the economic and cultural ecology developed over the last 100 years with publishing, and in particular literary publishing, is sustainable in light of digitization. Morrison begins his comments by stating that

Yes, absolutely, within 25 years the digital revolution will bring about the end of paper books. But more importantly, ebooks and e-publishing will mean the end of "the writer" as a profession. Ebooks, in the future, will be written by first-timers, by teams, by speciality subject enthusiasts and by those who were already established in the era of the paper book. The digital revolution will not emancipate writers or open up a new era of creativity, it will mean that writers offer up their work for next to nothing or for free. Writing, as a profession, will cease to exist.

Gertrude Stein

As grave as that sounds, his argument unfolds like this: over the last 100 years, a fairly substantial number of writers in the United States, the UK, Canada, and other developed countries could live off writing as a career. Many could live off advances, though increasingly fewer over the last 15 years have been able to do so; they could live off freelance gigs; they could live off jobs in and around the publishing industry that were buoyed by it and related and contiguous fields (journalism, bookselling, etc.).  Perhaps the heyday was the period from the 1950s through the early 1990s, and this occurred despite various global and local economic shocks, conglomeration, the shifts in distribution and bookselling. In other words, a vibrant if ever-shifting publishing industry in the West ensured that many authors at least made something off their work.  Yet as e-books gain ground, however, publishers make less money, so advances have begun to fall and publishing as an industry shrinks.  Morrison notes the moment in 2009 when British publishers, already suffering from weak sales, started cutting author advances by as much as "80%."

One result has been a return of a concern from the late 1990s, which was the fate of "mid-list" authors. When I was lucky enough to enjoy a brief Yaddo residency in the late 1990s, I recall that the New York Times and other publications were issuing dire articles about the fate of mid-list writers, and some of the more senior mid-list writers at Yaddo were concerned about their books in the pipeline and their careers. Harper Collins infamously canceled 106 contracts, many of them by mid-list authors, as part of its brutal restructuring in 1997. But by the early 2000s, this problems appears to have abated. Now, as Morrison argues, it's worsening again. Midlist writers, he points out, have often proved to be "the Research and Development department of publishers in the 20th century."  He cites Don DeLillo, but one could name such authors as the acclaimed Jonathan Franzen, for example, or Terry McMillan, whose early books, while acclaimed, were not best-sellers, but who went on to claim that mantle.

One response has been that mid-list writers have turned to self-publishing e-books or working directly with agents to publish their works, embracing Chris Anderson's "long-tail" approach to sales. In practical and commercial terms, the long tail is "Amazon and iTunes, Netflix, LoveFilm and eBay," or 40%-60% of the market, the bounty of completed works that lay mostly hidden before the appearance of online stores and rental sites like the ones above.  This shift has empowered consumers while consequently blunting, and in some cases destroying, the old hierarchy of publishers and PR firms, working in collusion with booksellers and distributors, in pre-marketing and promotion, mass marketing, and "limited shelf space for 'best-sellers.'" This is not a good thing in some ways, or that industries no longer exist, but they have less impact than they once did, and will decreasingly so, except for those already well-capitalized publishers and authors who can dominate the new online sites.

Yet Morrison makes a crucial point that echoes Lanier: few authors and publishers can survive from earnings alone in the new "long-tail" world. Some will do very well, but most will not. Why? Because of a basic fact about digitization: there remains no way to ensure that digital works can be copy-protected, and thus freely distributed, and in a world in which millions of people increasingly expect digital products to be free or available at very low costs, it will be nearly impossible to protect most digital products, no matter what their content. He cites industry after industry that has fallen by the wayside, not only in terms of the physical product itself, but, I'd argue, the entire apparatus built up around it that provided jobs, from service to white collar.

There's the film and home video industry; even just released films are now often available online for free, no matter how doggedly Hollywood, the US and other governments crack down. The music industry, which has been transformed into a shell of itself; artists now make their money through touring rather than sales, and some once best-selling musicians are lucky if they sell 1,000 or 10,000 digital copies of their work, since they're almost always free online fairly quickly. Some areas like classical music can barely produce albums anymore without subsidies. The porn industry: once a billion-dollar money-maker, pornography of all sorts is also widely free online, with homemade porn and webcams displacing the free paid videos.  The computer game industry; the newspaper industry; the photographic industry; telecommunications; even the Internet itself, which is rife with (seemingly) free services, including this blog's host; though "free" is not exactly the case, as Google/Blogger do track and monetize every byte of information passing through J's Theater and every other service they offer.

Whitman, "The Unexpressed"
(from whitmanarchive)

Publishing, and digital e-books, then, are hardly immune. First, the established publishers must watch as Amazon, Google and Apple become the dominant players. Amazon is the master marketer and merchant; Google is a master quantifier and digitizer; and Apple is the master of proprietary hardware and software. Lawsuits have hardly set any of this trio back. Anyone publishing e-books, as my observation of C's experience has shown, must reckon with each of these three behemoths, and they are steadily making it harder to gain a toehold onto their sites.  Amazon in particular has been awash in self-published texts, as well as "spam books" and pirated works; so great are the numbers that it has had to take steps to control the flow of new "books" uploaded to its site. Apple, on the other, recommends working with "aggregators," or middlemen, to surmount the numerous hurdles you encounter publishing anything on iTunes or in the iBookstore on the iPad desktop.

Besides this there's another issue: a consumer's legal and innocent downloading of copies of digital works she has already purchased means they can unintentionally or intentionally but easily end up circulating electronically, and widely (think shared servers, flash drives, cloud services, sophistical digital recording, ripping and cracking technologies, etc.); filesharing services now traffic not just in the newest songs by hit artists, Hollywood blockbusters, or gangbang videos, but in books, including fairly obscure, scholarly ones.  Writer Daniel Alarcón has written about codex book piracy in Peru and other parts of Latin America, but a far more extensive form of book piracy is already underway.  Not only Google, but anyone with a scanner or access to one can transform a print book into digital form, and upload it as a .pdf, and even the most vigilant publisher is helpless if this ends up on a filesharing service. What Morrison also underlines is that every attempt to legally address the problem of digital piracy has led to drastic lowering of costs, which he says is the "slippery slope" to free content.

Ultimately, Morrison and others see a "race to the bottom" in place now. Apple and publishers have been fighting Amazon over pricing concerns, but overall, e-books sell for far less than hardcover books or trade paperbacks, and they are an increasingly larger share of overall book sales. Moreover, as more and more people move to digital reading--and this is already happening in school systems across the US--and younger people acclimate to reading electronic and digital texts, the market for print books will continue to fall.  So what can we do? Morrison notes some alternatives, like crowd-funding; advertising; and producing apps and paid blogs.  But the feasibility of this over the long term and for as large a group of writers (or people in any of the above fields) as has been the case is small. Exacerbating this is that authors many see great personal and immediate incentive to flee the established publishers, but ultimately it is the presence of a publishing ecology, of writers working with publishers and vice versa, that protects the value of writers' labor, at least to some extent, while also providing the larger network of jobs and opportunities that we think of in relation to publishing, some of which (like working in bookstores, independent, chain or otherwise) are rapidly disappearing.

There is also the possibility of a living wage for cultural producers, including writers, but as we have seen over the last 30 years, state-sponsored socialism, even in democratic socialist countries like the Scandinavian ones, is ever under assault, and there are the numerous real-world histories and examples of what occurs when the state underwrites: it wants a say in what's produced. Sometimes this is benign, but as the example of the Soviet Union demonstrated, it can be the exact opposite.  There is the much older patronage system, which will surely return as well: the rich, though no longer titled, will commission works as they see fit. The aesthetes among them may pay for works of the highest quality; the narcissists may seek works that flatter them most; the philistines may play at shocking their class; the ultramoralists and fanatics will try to bury anything that violates their creed.  We will also see what has already long been under way: children and people of privilege, who need not be concerned with or only tangentially worry about how they'll pay their bills, can choose whatever career they like, while those without a financial base can only play the lottery of career-making and hope some combination of talent, luck, charm, and appeal win them a space.

Murasaki Shikibu
紫式部
ukiyo-e by Suzuki
Harunobu (c.1767)

Morrison believes we have got a "generation" before the "writer" as a profession is completely done with, unless we take the political step of demanding that writers get paid a decent wage for their work. Lanier argues for a more subtle and potentially effective form of monetization. I look at both proposals and wonder how either, even if enacted in parts of Europe and Canada, say, could ever occur here. In a society now deeply suffused with neoliberal and libertarian ideology, no matter how much they've failed in reality, it will be very difficult to get people to consider anything of this sort. But perhaps not impossible. You--we--never know unless we try. The same is true for unions, for regulations in general, for any liberal--other than classical or neoliberal--and progressive approaches to the world around us. That is what I think. My conversations with scholars who attest to how difficult it is to publish their work in book form; with publishers who are quaking at the changes underway; and with fellow creative writers who are endlessly seeking out routes suggest that something is afoot.  In his response to Morrison, soon-to-be-published novelist Lloyd Shepard, disagrees with all of this depressing chatter. Some of what he says is true, and optimism is a better pill than pessimism, even facing what appears to be the worst.  Yet I agree with Morrison and Lanier that digitization will only increase as we go forward, and with it, the world as we've known it, including the world of books, will continue to change too.

He concludes plaintively:

I ask you to take the long view, to look a generation beyond where we are now, and to express concern for the future of the book. I ask you to vote that the end of "the book" as written by professional writers, is imminent; and not to be placated with short-term projections and enthusiasms intended to reduce fear in a confused market. I ask you to leave this place troubled, and to ask yourself and as many others as you can, what you can do if you truly value the work of the people formerly known as writers.

On this Labor Day, this is an important--you could say a crucial, but necessary, utterly necessary--charge. Let's get to it.

Review: Capitalism: A Love Story & Nobel Prize Tips?

On Saturday, C and I went to see Michael Moore's new film, Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), just as we'd caught his last two major releases, the prescient Sicko (2007) and the Academy Award-winning Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), right after they premiered. Like the two prior films, and very much in line with all of his cinematic and TV works, including his début film, Roger and Me (1989), this new film is a passionate, often upsetting and enraging, sometimes muddled, but ultimately very moving attack on the economic and political injustice that plagues this society. Whereas Sicko focused on the broken health care system, and Fahrenheit 911 assayed the Bush administration's misrule and warmongering in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, this film attempts and sometimes succeeds in taking stock of the economic calamity that has befallen us since the waning days of the Bush administration. But Moore expands the window in an attempt to show that last year's collapse, and 2007 initial moment of recession, actually date back to the Reagan years, when fundamental changes in regulation and the economic philosophies that had guided the country shifted, based on politics, to create the toxic brew that has caused a global disaster, and what was nearly the Great Depression 2.0. The film could easily be retitled Capitalism: A Horror Story, since Moore's relentless aim is to show the many depredations that capitalism in its untrammeled US form has wrought, and a series of horrors they are. But he does not, and cannot tie everything together, because he does not address the larger issue of global capitalism and capital flows, or go as far as he appears to want to in terms of the US's situation and propose a solution or alternative, and this, along with his understandably deep faith in Barack Obama's election as a real politically as opposed to symbolically transformational event, ultimately are the film's major weaknesses.

The strongest aspects of Capitalism: A Love Story are the many powerful, disturbing, though sometimes hilarious, set pieces. These include the jaw-droppingly macabre "Dead Peasants"--this is the actual name, not something either he or I thought up--insurance policies corporations take out on their workers; the workers at Chicago's Republic Doors and Windows who refused to accept the horrendous terms of their dismissal, staged a strike, and forced JP Morgan Chase's hand to ensure that they at least got the pittance they were owed before watching their jobs vanish before their eyes; the appalling imprisonment of teenagers with due process in a for-profit private Pennsylvania prison in which two judges overseeing the cases had a financial stake; the "shock doctrine" attempts by former Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, in collusion with the firm he formerly led, Goldman Sachs, to seize control of the entire Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funds, without any legal or legislative oversight, the popular outrage that temporarily stalled the bill, and the Democrats' capitulation and collaboration in making the theft possible only a little while later; and his designating a huge swathe of Wall Street as a crime scene, with police tape, a megaphone, and confrontations with the door people to boot. Other scenes, such as the ones of people being thrown out of their homes, were redolent of Roger and Me, and as Moore noted, many parts of the country were being transformed into versions of his hometown of Flint, Michigan. The set pieces do succeed in provoking your emotions: disgust, rage, awe, and revenge are among the responses, and validly so, since what becomes clear is that the unalloyed pursuit of money to the exclusion of everything else, which has become what American and global capitalism are, has left a trail of destruction in its wake, and our federal and many state and local governments (bought and paid for) and our mainstream corporate media (collaborators) have actively and passively colluded in making it all possible.


Moore interviewing Indiana Congressperson Baron Hill

Around and through these moments, Moore tries to construct a narrative that can offer a cogent account of how corporate and wealthy interests, in cooperation with both the Republican and Democratic parties, rewrote laws, pushed failed economic policies, robbed the country blind, and then, after devastating everything, managed to salvage as much money for themselves as possible. To his credit, he doesn't just slam the GOP nor does he omit the Clinton administration's participation in all of this. Though the country experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth and expansion from 1994-2000, Clinton's economic team also played a central role in gutting the economy's foundations by pushing for the repeal of Glass-Steagall and the imposition of NAFTA, championing outsourcing and the smoke-and-mirrors industrial-structural transformation to a service economy, and generally accepting the false logic of neoliberalism and conservative/supply-side macroeconomics. He only touches upon part of this, though, and he could easily have gone further back than Reagan; in fact, in the period after the US began large-scale industrialization, the fin-de-siècle battles around monopolization, the Gilded Age and go-go laissez-faire capitalism leading up to the 1929 Stock Market crash and Great Depression gave an instructive, unforgettable preview of what we would be facing if we followed the same terrible patterns of the past.

Along the way, the film identifies a few heroes in this horror story, chief among them Ohio Democratic Congressperson Marcy Kaptur, who clearly and defiantly lays out the stakes and makes clear who is really running the country. There are also some liberal-minded clergy people, including a veritable hippy priest, who condemn capitalism as contravening the Gospels. I really wish he'd gone further on this score, and pointed out not only the Christianist hypocrisy of the contemporary right-wing, but the silence of so many people of faith in the face of the growing economic inequalities we witnessed, the rampant unfairness, unethical and immoral behavior, the amorality of destroying others' lives to enrich one's own, and so forth. Where were the bishops, the rabbis, the imams, as W Bush was bleeding us all dry? Not only was the Iraq War a festering debacle, but also those tax cuts and the attendant spending binges and, even worse, insane borrowing, the refinancing and buybacks, the incessant building, and the shell games and Ponzi schemes that have left us trillions of dollars in the hole, and 7 million jobs poorer. The silence of these clergy people also was as "evil," if you accept the term Moore bandies about, as the hazy "capitalism" that he indicts. I take his point, but find the term, and those uttering it, too simplistic, since it shorts out any real discussion about the nature of economic systems and what they can and cannot provide. Yet Moore also suggests that we might have "capitalism" that isn't so out-of-control when he speaks with Socialist-turned-Independent Bernie Sanders of the "gay state" as he cheekily calls it, of Vermont. In fact Sanders calls himself a Democratic Socialist, and Moore points to European models that might offer a better, or at least more economically and socially equitable way. To get it, we may need a revolution, but in reverse from the one we've endured in unbroken form since the Reagan era. Moore however cannot bring himself to go that far--and doesn't much cite our own national history of early 20th century Progressives, American Socialism and Communism, as well as a much more empowered and radical Democratic Party, particularly during the 4-term tenure of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Instead he suggests that "Democracy" is the answer. But that simply doesn't make sense, and I gathered throughout that Moore knows this. But to call for a socialist revolt beyond the ballot box would, unfortunately, be beyond the pale even for a man so vilified by those on the right. He wants--and I think we need--lots of Americans to see this movie. Badly.


Michael Moore callling out the robber barons on Wall Street

Perhaps his most misplaced hope in the film is on Barack Obama's election. On the one hand, it was a remarkable event, and if one were to have vaguely followed Obama's rhetoric during the campaign, he seemed to promise real change. But closer listening showed him to be a pragmatist at best (even if a progressive on some issues at heart), and he has followed his Democratic predecessor in doing little to dismantle many of the worst aspects of the right-wing apparatus he's walked into. In fact, he basically hired the people who helped initiate the economic collapse! Moore does point out that the financial industries showered Obama with cash once he became the nominee and later won the election, but doesn't delve deeply enough into this. We can see the effects with the health care debate; the administration, along with Democrats like Max Baucus, appear to want nothing more than a symbolic bill that would primarily reward their corporate funders. They pay lip service to their constituents, who are overwhelmingly in favor of a more progressive bill, but have done everything they could, as Reagan, HW Bush and W would, to appease the wealthiest and thus most powerful interests. Not even doctors or nurses have had as much input as the insurance, pharmaceutical, hospital, and nursing home industries and their lobbyists, and that input--influence--takes the form of money. I understand Moore's idealism, which is a powerful undertow here, as in all of his films, but more clearsightedness, on Obama as a politician like every other one, would have strengthened the film's overall argument.

Nevertheless, as I said, Capitalism: A Love Story, is a film I hope millions of Americans, especially middle, working-class and poor ones, do get an opportunity to see. I fear not enough of us will see this film; even with its problems, it provokes a great deal of thought and soul-searching, and its revelations, even though many of them are well known, are worth seeing set forth as only Michael Moore can do. As he might say, Thank God for him.

***

I must add a link to three New York Times stories on the private equity industry shell game that has now ensnared institutions like Harvard, Yale and Stanford Universities. Moore did not touch this at all, except tangentially, but as each piece shows, the people who engineer these disasters rarely if ever lose.

Private Equity Industry: Another Horror Story
Profits for Buyout Firms as Company Debt Soars
An Executive Who Ruled from Afar and Walked Away Rich
Videos on private equity industry

===

Congratulations to this year's Nobel Laureates in physiology or medicine, Elizabeth H. Blackburn of the University of California, San Francisco; Carol W. Greider of the Johns Hopkins University Medical School; and Jack W. Szostak of the Harvard University Medical School and Howard Hughes Medical Institute for their "discovery of how chromosomes are protected by telomeres and the enzyme telomerase." According to several reports I've read, their work is central to understanding the biological mechanisms involved in aging, as well as in cancer research. I also saw that their award marks the first time that two women have jointly received the Nobel Prize in this category.

Today's announcement of this year's first Nobel Prizes means that at some point later this week or early next, the Nobel Prize in Literature will be awarded. Every year (or almost) that I've posted this blog, I've offered my speculations about the winners. Usually it's been a miss, though I did include Harold Pinter among my predictions--he was one of a vast cast--the year he won. Like most prognosticators and littérateurs, however, I was caught off guard by last year's award, J. G. M. LeClézio, who, from all that I can tell, remains in obscurity--not that fame or notoriety should ever be qualifications for this award. Still, his selection was surprising (especially over better known, influential French writers including Yves Bonnefoy, Michel Tournier, Anne-Marie Albiach, and Jacques Roubaud), and made me wonder what the committee, whose machinations have involved public uproars during the last decade, was thinking, and what the LeClézio pick might in terms of subsequent years.

In recent years the Swedish Academy, which awards the Nobel Prize in literature, has neglected poetry in favor of fiction; no author primarily writing poetry has received the award since Wyslawa Szymborska in 1996. Only two women have received the award over the last 10 years (Elfriede Jelinek in 2004 and Doris Lessing, two years ago). I'd thought these imbalances would be righted last year, but they were not, and so I believe they will this year. Also, despite Lessing's award in 2007, there have been very few winners from Africa; there has also been very few laureates named from Asia (only two from Japan and one from China), and in recent years almost none from the Middle East, Central America, South America, or the Caribbean. There are many reasons why, not the least being the Academy's European location and slant, another being the ways the global literary system works. Nevertheless, I think this year will be different, and am tipping a woman poet or playwright from South America or the Caribbean, Asia, or Africa, though at theOr another country in North America other than the US. One possibly and great choice, I think, would be Margaret Atwood. I'm not sure if Alice Munro's US links disqualify her, but I she ought to be a top candidate.

Other leading candidates include poets such as Claribel Alegria, Adélia Prado, Vénus Khoury-Ghata, and Shu Ting. Other leading candidates include fiction writers (some of whom write poetry and plays) like Assia Djebar, Hélène Cixous, Luisa Valenzuela, Patricia Grace (who received the 2007 Neustadt International Prize), Duong Thu Huong (above right, http://kobason.spaces.live.com/blog/) Mahasveta Devi, and Andrée Chedid. Despite the heavy Eurocentric cast of recent years, I wonder if it would not have gone to Danish poet Inger Christensen had she not passed away earlier. I also keep in mind that no writer from India, Brazil, Vietnam, Indonesia, New Zealand, Argentina, Thailand, or many other countries, has ever received the award.

Considering male writers, Adonis/Adunis, who would be the first male poet writing in Arabic to win, remains a contender. Other less likely choices that I could foresee include: Wilson Harris, Haruki Murakami, Ko Un, Bei Dao, Antonio Lobo Antunes, Kamau Brathwaite, Jay Wright, Javier Marías, Homero Aridjis, David Malouf, Nuruddin Farah, Philip Roth, Édouard Glissant, and John Ashbery. Most are international known and renowned, some more so than others. Whether they're registering--well, Roth is--on the Swedish Academy's radar is another matter. There are former teachers, colleagues, and even some friends whom I think ought to at least be nominated, but you have to be on the Swedish Academy's hotlist to make that occur.

Reggie sends a link saying that British bookies have tipped Amos Oz, Assia Djebar, Joyce Carol Oates, Roth, and Adonis as their top 5. Oates? Really? (Among Israel writers, I think Aharon Shabtai, David Grossman, Yoel Hoffman, and even Aharon Appelfeld would be stronger candidates.) Among their other picks: Antonio Tabucchi, Claudio Magris, Murakami, Herta Müller, Luis Goytisolo (not Juan?), Pynchon (very unlikely), Ismail Kadare, Un, and Tomas Tranströmer. They put William Gass at 100/1...