Bookstore score card for the day:
— Three bookstores in three cities (Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco).
— Three books (Chuang Tzu, Ch’ing dynasty memoir, 19th C. English novel).
— One bumpersticker reading “HOWL if you [heart] City Lights Books”.
What a great vacation.
Carol and I arrived at Davies Symphony Hall. The Philip Glass Ensemble walked onstage at five o’clock and started playing.
1.
oceans fluid seas
2.
The singer stops singing, hurriedly takes a drink of water from the bottle beside her chair, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, pauses just a moment, looks at the music, and begins singing again.
3.
clouds burst of rain sho–
EMTs walk quietly in one of the side doors that lead to the seats just behind the stage. They walk back and forth, someone comes out to meet them. Continue reading
I live in a city which is very, shall we say, traditional. Many people do not bother with computers, unless they have to use them at work. Whereas all my media consumption happens online. Here’s a conversation I had recently:
Other person: So did you watch the inaguration?
Me: Yeah, I watched it on the BBC Web site.
Other person looks at me like I have two heads. Pause. Other person: Oh. So, um, did, you hear Obama’s speech? …obviously assuming I had not…
Me: Oh, yeah, great speech, loved it.
Yet while I spend hours each day online, I never watch broadcast television, I don’t play video games, I don’t go to movies, and I hardly ever listen to the radio. As a result, my media consumption is pretty much out of synch with the surrounding community. Another typical conversation:
Other person: So why don’t you ever print up copies of your sermons?
Me: I put nearly all my sermons up on my Web site.
Other person looks at me like I have two heads.
Me: Um, you can get to them from the church Web site.
Other person looks at me like I have two heads.
Me: Um, just call the church office and tell Linda which sermon you want, and she’ll mail you a copy.
Other person: OK, thanks!
Me, sotto voce: I’m such a geek.
I finally got around to reading the July, 2008, issue of the Independent Book Publisher’s Association newsletter (Carol is a member of IBPA), and read about the Espresso Book Machine, which “starts with a PDF and 15 minutes later produces a finished bound book.” You can buy one from On Demand Books to put into your bookstore or print shop — for about $50K, which is so expensive you’re unlikely to see one in your home town next week.
But I’ll bet the price is going to come down quickly, and I’ll bet that there’s going to be an ongoing demand for paper-based books for quite some time. So here are four possible scenarios: (1) Libraries will start installing one of these next to the copy machines, allowing library patrons to produce paper-based copies of books in the public domain. (2) Bookstores will install these, and they’ll get especially heavy use at author signings, so you can get your favorite author to sign his or her out-of-print books. (3) Colleges and universities will install these, allowing their professors to assign out-of-print books to students, and allowing easier publication of dissertations. (4) A few big megachurches will install these machines, allowing them to print out the latest inspirational tome by their senior pastor, as well as the church cookbook.
So — those of you who are writers, readers, librarians, professors, and ministers — do you think there is a bright future for printing on-demand bound books on-site?
I had to leave Arisia around three this afternoon, because tomorrow is a work day. I attended one particularly thought-provoking panel discussion, “the Changing Face of SF/F Magazines,” on the future of future of paper-based magazines. The panelists included two publishers, one of whom publishes online and the other of whom publishes on paper, and two authors. All the panelists agreed that it’s becoming more difficult, financially speaking, to publish a magazine devoted to short fiction — costs of paper, printing, and distribution keep going up. The consensus among the panelists was that eventually we’re going to see paper-based magazines die out in favor of some sort of Internet-based printing and distribution system.
But the panelists reached no consensus as to what is going to replace paper-based magazines. You can find Web-based science fiction magazines, but they typically don’t have enough money to pay authors well (or at all). There are authors, like the writers’ cabal behind Shadow Unit, who self-publish some of their work online and solicit donations. The panelists agreed that authors now have to worry about “branding” themselves; readers don’t just buy a work of fiction, they tend to buy an author’s “brand.” But no one was willing to predict the future of fiction periodicals; and all the panelists agreed that it was going to become harder to earn a living by writing short fiction.
The discussion broadened beyond paper-based magazines, and turned to books:– paper-based books are facing the same economic realities as paper-based magazines. There was more consensus about the direction books are going in:– books are now being published in multiple formats (e-books, other downloadable files, print-on-demand, and traditional books), and that trend will continue. But the situation is still very much in flux, and no one knows quite how it’s going to turn out.
I wonder if the monks who were scribes had these kinds of conversations among themselves when Gutenberg started printing books on his printing press.
Liveblogging from a science fiction convention
Richard Stallman was a member of a panel discussion called “Copyright: Theory and Practice Today and Tomorrow.” I have never seen him in person before. He is extremely articulate and plays with his long hair when he is not speaking. He said: “Never use a product with DRM [Digital Rights Management] unless — you know how to break the DRM.”
At the same panel discussion, a librarian stood up to speak about orphaned works, that is, works which are covered under copyright law but where the copyright owner can no longer be found. “Librarians want to make orphaned works available,” she said. Librarians, she claimed, want to reach as wide an audience as possible, but under current copyright law it is illegal for them to digitize orphaned works; this limits how libraries can make information available to the people they are trying to serve. She wore a costume that you might see in an 18th C. historical re-enactment: white blouse, bodice, full skirt.
This is one of those conventions where people wear costumes. Earlier, I saw a woman wearing leopard-skin-pattern cloth over most of her body, a wide black belt, and an orange cape passing by a man in black leather pants and a black leather coat and a fuzzy red lobster hat. Just now, a woman walked by wearing a very short latex miniskirt. Now a man just walked by wearing a large grey tri-cornered hat, and a colorful quilt as a cape.
The film series here at Arisia has been excellent so far. Highlights this evening: Our Man Flint, a 1966 parody of the old James Bond films, which is subtler and much funnier than the Austin Powers franchise. We saw it in a 35 mm print that was in poor condition; but even in poor condition, I still prefer film to digital video. Also fascinating was a six-minute film in 16 mm called “Heave Away.” It looked like an amateur film, with bizarre footage of the decommissioning of a NASA spacecraft; the soundtrack was a recording of a sea shanty performed by obscure folk singer Helva Peters. This film represents what people did before YouTube videos. And later this evening, they’ll be showing a new print of Metropolis, with live organ music.
Carol just arrived. “This is fantastic,” she said. This means: Boy, there is unbelievably good people-watching here.
George Brecht died just over a month ago, on December 5, 2008; I’ve finally gotten around to writing a brief appreciation. A conceptual artist, Brecht created “scores” of events to be performed. I am particularly fond of Brecht because most of his scores are simple enough that you can recreate them yourself; yet they are no less beautiful than the art you see in museums. Like this one:
CHAIR EVENT
on a white chair
a grater
tape measure
alphabet
flag
black
and spectral colors
Sometimes you don’t have to do anything to perform one of his scores, you just have to pay attention to beauty that’s already there; as with this one:
TWO DURATIONS
Red
Green
It’s art for the common folk, because you can afford to have one of Brecht’s works in your house (whereas I doubt you could afford any art done by, say, Hockney). Even though he hadn’t done much work in recent years, his death is a real loss.
One last example: here’s my version of Brecht’s “Exhibit.”
The Wall Street Journal reports on the best and worst jobs. The top three jobs are math-related: Mathematician, Actuary, and Statistician. The bottom three are Lumberjack, Dairy Farmer, and Taxi Driver (hi, Craig!). Best jobs are rated according to work environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands, and stress.
I got curious about my own line of work. Somewhere around 1994, I decided to get out of carpentry, and move into church work; now it looks like that was a good choice. Carpenter is rated at #176 (out of 200 jobs rated); whereas Clergy is rated at #70. Better yet, Clergy is rated as the #1 most satisfying job — so while we clergy will never make as much money as the people with math degrees, on average we’ll be happier.
It’s time for the annual Moby-Dick Marathon. The marathon takes place each year on the anniversary of the date that Herman Melville shipped out of New Bedford harbor on board the whaleship Achushnet. Over some twenty-five hours, volunteers read Moby-Dick aloud in its entirety. We live right across the street from where the Marathon takes place, and Carol has spent quite a bit of time at the Marathon already, but the way my schedule worked out I had to write my sermon today. I finally went over at about ten o’clock.
It was the usual late-night Moby-Dick Marathon scene: everyone there was quiet, maybe half the people were following along in their own copy of the book, and a few people were dozing. Not exactly a hopping Saturday night scene, but exactly the kind of scene many of us book sluts wouldn’t mind seeing every Saturday night. Unfortunately, I have to get up early tomorrow morning to go to work, so I left after about half an hour.
