Saturday, May 27, 2017

Amazon’s Grip On The Book World

05/25/2017 08:00 am ET

Amazon’s Grip On The Book World Could Silence The Stories That Matter

Publishers weighed in on the behemoth’s latest sales tactics, including its move to brick-and-mortar stores.

This morning, Amazon ― the online bookseller-turned-everything store ― opened the doors to its latest brick-and-mortar outpost in New York City’s Columbus Circle. The company added in-person retail to its arsenal of buying options in 2015, when it opened a store in Seattle. Beginning today, it occupies a space where a Borders once was.

Unlike its competitors ― which mostly include independent bookstores, after the company’s rise lead to the fall of Borders and many Barnes & Noble locations ― Amazon’s physical bookstore relies on sales data to determine which titles will be prominently displayed. At the Columbus Circle location, a table labeled “Highly Rated: 4.8 Stars & Above” sits near the entrance. On it, are such titles as 100 Days of Real Food: Fast & Fabulous: The Easy and Delicious Way to Cut Out Processed Food by Lisa Leake and Cravings: Recipes for All the Food You Want to Eat by Chrissy Teigen.

For publishers, especially those who support the work of emerging authors, disempowered authors or authors whose voices aren’t in chorus with the mainstream, this data-based approach to bookselling is disconcerting.

Michael Reynolds, the editor-in-chief of Europa Editions, told HuffPost that Amazon’s ratings-based system isn’t conducive to discovering writers like the lyrical, wave-making Elena Ferrante, whom Europa publishes.

“Things like Tolstoy are going to have lower ratings than the new book by the new YouTube star.Dennis Johnson, co-publisher of Melville House Books

“While a new bookstore, any new bookstore, is generally good news, I can’t see how Amazon applying its unsatisfactory recommendation engine to a physical space is going to result in the kind of discovery experience a reader has when she enters any good brick-and-mortar store,” Reynolds said. “It is certainly not going to help with bringing about the kind of bibliodiversity that, with authors like Elena Ferrante, Muriel Barbery, Boualem Sansal and Domenico Starnone, we seek to cultivate, and that I think is more important today than ever.”

Dennis Johnson, the co-publisher of Melville House, agreed. “Things like Tolstoy are going to have lower ratings than the new book by the new YouTube star,” he told HuffPost. “Real literature is slowly not going to be available there.”

Caroline Casey, the managing director of Coffee House Press, was more optimistic about readers’ appetite for well-told stories, and the tenacity of indie presses.

“I don’t expect [Amazon’s] experiments to damage independent bookstores, because what people value them for isn’t replicable in the Amazon model,” she told HuffPost. “So those booksellers, who are our very best advocates and sell our books better than I ever could hope to, should be fine. And so will we.”

Coffee House Press describes itself as “committed to diversity and inclusion,” and that mission statement is reflected in the titles it publishes, including Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth, Saeed Jones’s Prelude to Bruise and Jade Sharma’s Problems. Casey says that while a “significant portion” of Coffee Houses’ sales come from Amazon, she doesn’t expect the seller’s physical locations to have either a positive or negative impact. Instead, she expects that indie bookstores will continue to account for most of the press’ in-person sales.

“A good bookstore offers not just curation, but also personality and the opportunity not [just] to find what you want, but to also find out what you want,” Casey said. “Amazon might have a lot of customer data, but it’s not the kind that yields a surprising, joyful bookstore visit.”

The decision to open brick-and-mortar stores isn’t the only recent change Amazon has made to its bookselling approach. Last month, the retailer tweaked its online buying options, so that publishers are no longer automatically granted the right to be listed as the default sellers for their titles. Instead, third-party retailers are now allowed to compete to become a book’s default seller. So, prime real estate on the site is often granted to those with the lowest costs.

Casey declined to comment on this new development. But, Johnson and Reynolds agreed that the move could hurt publishers and, consequently, authors, who aren’t owed a cut of the sale from third-party distributors.

I cannot be anything but concerned by Amazon’s insistence on chipping away at the perceived and actual value of books.Michael Reynolds, Editor-in-Chief of Europa Editions

“The Amazon paradigm sees books as a function of a hyper-competitive market rather than cultural products that create a market, shape it, and at times disrupt it,” Reynolds said. “The most recent development concerning Amazon’s buy box will make it increasingly difficult for authors to be paid adequately for their work when it is sold through Amazon, and for publishers to invest in bringing new and diverse voices to the market and maintaining a robust backlist. As a publisher animated by an abiding belief in the broad and lasting value not only of books but of ‘bibliodiversity,’ I cannot be anything but concerned by Amazon’s insistence on chipping away at the perceived and actual value of books.”

“It’s another instance of Amazon killing the goose that lays the eggs,” Johnson said. “Screwing their partners in the ecosystem that naturally grows around any kind of product. What they’re doing now is something that nobody makes any money from, except Amazon.”

And it’s not just indie presses who could suffer from Amazon’s business decisions. In fact, Johnson said that Melville House ― which only relies on Amazon for around 25 percent of its sales ― will likely fare better than big-five publishers such as Random House, which leans on Amazon to sell classics and other backlist titles.

“This is treacherous for everybody in the business,” Johnson said. “Everybody’s threatened by this.”

“Amazon is nothing if not Trumpian in their behavior,” he continued. “The ruthlessness, the naked capitalism. It’s all there. They’re positively Trumpian. They have that in them.”. The Huffington Post

Rhizomes can help

Stuck on one idea of truth or beauty? Rhizomes can help

Nicholas Tampio

is associate professor of political science at Fordham University in New York. He is the author of Kantian Courage (2012) and Deleuze's Political Vision (2015). He is currently working on his third book, on democracy and national education standards.

FOLLOWNICHOLAS

Edited by Sam Haselby

REPUBLISH

The male fern (Dryopteris filix-mas): fronds and part of rhizome. Colour nature print by A. Auer, c. 1853. <em>Courtesy Wellcome Images</em>

The male fern (Dryopteris filix-mas): fronds and part of rhizome. Colour nature print by A. Auer, c. 1853. Courtesy Wellcome Images

Scholars add to human knowledge and help us to see and understand the world in new ways. To do so, they often invent and use concepts that are not part of ordinary language. This specialised scholarly language is known as jargon, and it can elicit scorn, especially outside the academy. But to criticise jargon as such is tantamount to saying that scholars should not go beyond common sense, which is a betrayal of their vocation. Though scholars might abuse jargon, they often need it to push the borders of thought.

Take Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1980), a source of much jargon in the contemporary humanities and social sciences.

Deleuze began his career writing monographs on philosophers such as David Hume, Friedrich Nietzsche and Baruch Spinoza. Guattari was a practising psychoanalyst when he began to work with Deleuze on their first book, Anti-Oedipus (1972). Eight years later, they published its sequel, A Thousand Plateaus. In the past few decades, academics across the world and in various disciplines have adopted its language of rhizomes, plateaus, abstract machines, concrete assemblages, and fields of immanence.

Why did they invent such strange philosophical concepts as rhizomes? One reason is to help us appreciate the singularity of each thing as well as each thing’s myriad connections to other things. This vision of an interconnected world of singularities, in turn, can change how we act in the world.

According to Deleuze and Guattari, Western thinking and practice has tended to be ‘arborescent’, or tree-like. One quality of trees is that they are born from seeds. Seeds from one tree can impart the same genetic makeup to many other trees. Trees are Platonic insofar as there is one idea and multiple instantiations. ‘Arborescent’ illuminates the Platonic presuppositions that course throughout Western politics, philosophy, science, art and so forth. Platonism reassures us that there is a cosmic order where there is a perfect instantiation of each thing. We often think that there is just one idea of justice or beauty or good health. Common sense of this sort is arborescent.

According to Nietzsche, the task of modern philosophy is to overturn Platonism, to stop looking for eternal blueprints of how things should be, and instead value this world of difference and becoming. Taking up this assignment, Deleuze and Guattari propose that we think in terms of ‘rhizomes’. A rhizome is a plant such as a potato, couch grass or bamboo. Rhizomes do not have seeds or trunks; rather, they shoot out stems and reproduce when a part breaks off and grows again, each one slightly different from its predecessor. A Thousand Plateaus helps us see the distinctiveness and connectivity of multiple things that compose reality. ‘A rhizome,’ they wrote, ‘ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organisations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles.’ The concept of the rhizome helps us to view our lives as assemblages of words, institutions, songs, medicines, social movements, and countless other things that are related but also distinct.

Many scholars, and also architects and artists, have found Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome invaluable at describing how things can often be more complicated and intertwined than common sense recognises.

The political theorist Cristina Beltrán, for instance, uses the concept of the rhizome in her book on Latino politics, The Trouble with Unity (2010). Beltrán takes issue with the reigning conception of Latinidad, the notion that all people from Latin America share the same group identity and cultural consciousness. Beltrán notes that commentators often assume that Latinos are a ‘sleeping giant’ that will wake up to a collective identity and transform US politics. This is arborescent thinking. Unfortunately, arborescent thinking can contribute to Puerto Rican and Chicano movement leaders suppressing feminist demands for the sake of unity. Arborescent politics can be cruel.

Latinidad life and politics, Beltrán shows readers, are actually without a centre, or trunk. They are rhizomatic. Seeing Latinidad society in the US this way is not only closer to reality, it helps us find ‘value in its capacity to be decentred, opportunistic, and expansive’. Rhizomatic Latinidad helps us perceive elements that depart from the norms of Latino identity. Thus, Beltrán spotlights anomalous elements such as Puerto Rican libertarian college students in New Jersey, Chicano environmentalists attending a Morrissey concert in Los Angeles, and ‘queer’ Cuban radicals working on Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. The concept of the rhizome provides a more nuanced, and generous, view of identity politics.

Nearly all political phenomena have arborescent or rhizomatic elements. People often tend to think of political parties as having an ideological centre, but a rhizomatic perspective prompts us to see the fractures and divisions within political parties. For example, there are Republican senators in the US who voted against the confirmation of the secretary of education Betsy DeVos, despite her nomination by a Republican president. There are also Democratic politicians in the US who hold that the country needs more charter schools, a position more popular in the Republican party. This analysis can be pushed further as we consider how rhizomatic offshoots from both political parties coalesce into new assemblages: the anti-Common Core movement. All around the world, for example at a recent Deleuze Studies Conference in India, scholars talk about rhizomes to try to gain a better understanding of politics, philosophy, cinema, design, and urban planning.

True, people can use jargon to intimidate others, to make simple ideas appear complex, or lead themselves into intellectual dead ends. In 1995, Alan D Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University, published a hoax article in an academic journal that includes quotes from Deleuze and Guattari. The Sokal controversy reminds us that scholars can use big words to puff up nonsensical ideas. People can easily use Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology – including the notorious concept of the ‘body without organs’ – in ways that neither convince scholars nor help others understand their ideas.

The wrong lesson of the Sokal controversy, however, is that people in the humanities or social sciences must always use familiar language. In Deleuze and Guattari’s work, technical terms and neologisms almost always have precise etymologies and convey clear images. At its best, their philosophical language helps us to perceive the elusive factors of reality that affect what we can more easily see and measure.

As a general rule, scholars should speak as clearly and as simply as they can, without compromising the integrity of their ideas and enquiries. Few people complain when scientists or mathematicians use a technical vocabulary, and that courtesy should be extended to scholars in the humanities and the social sciences. Many common-sense terms today – such as paradigm shifts and electoral realignments – started off as jargon, and we could anticipate and welcome other scholarly terms making that transition. Rhizomes.

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09 May, 2017

DON’T STOP | If You Want to Write a Book, Write Every Day or Quit Now

DON’T STOP

If You Want to Write a Book, Write Every Day or Quit Now

The key to getting your book written, says Pulitzer Prize-winner Stephen Hunter, isn’t talent or luck or inspiration. It’s the act of sitting down every day and writing.

STEPHEN HUNTER

05.27.17 12:01 AM ET

In a few days or weeks, I’ll start a new novel. I don’t know yet and won’t for years if it’s good, bad, dreary, enchanting, or merely adequate. Moreover, I don’t know if it’ll help or hurt my reputation, make me rich or a fool, or simply pass into oblivion without squeak or moan.

What is certain is that on that same day, whichever one it is, one thousand other people will start their novels. In order to publish mine, it has to be better than theirs. So, forgive me—I pretty much hate them.

But let’s be honest: Of the thousand, 800 won’t cross the infamous Mendoza Line. God love them, God be with them, God show mercy to them, for whatever cruel reason they were not given enough talent or the right mind, or any of a dozen different pathologies to make them capable of writing a publishable book. No amount of labor will alter this reality. For that same reason, I will never throw a touchdown pass in the NFL, no matter how much I may want to.

So that really leaves but 200 to worry about. They are smarter, more talented, better looking, have better teeth, more hair, better bodies, and in most other respects are simply better. If they were writing this piece instead of me, you would like it a lot more. They are more charming, more beguiling, more charismatic, smell (a lot) better, have more polish and manner. They’re fun to be with! You’d be proud to have them as a friend.

I will beat them all, however, and I will do it on one strength they lack, the poor, good-looking devils.

I will finish and they will not.

The two most important words you can write in any manuscript are “the” and “end.” Somewhere along the line my brilliant competitors mosey off. I’m too dumb to mosey off. They’ll lose faith. I’ll never lose faith; it’s the only faith I’ve got. A new lover will come into their lives; I’m not even on speaking terms with my old (and only) lover. They’ll be distracted by so many other dazzling prospects; I have no other dazzling prospects. Their spouses will begin to grouse over undone errands and abandoned socks on the steps, there’ll be just too much research, they’ll grow depressed, sick of their own voice, unable to get themselves buzzed up enough. Their books will die.

I know how books die. A few have perished under my saddle, believe me.

You work every day. You work so hard, you make such progress, you’re such a star that you decide to take a day off. The day after, you feel guilty so you work twice as hard. You set new records, you crash the 3,000-word barrier, you achieve epiphanies you never thought possible! Again you reward yourself with a day off. Then the next day—oh, actually, now it’s the next month—you can’t remember why you started the damned thing anyway and the anxiety of your sloth is crippling, turning you all beast-like and spite-spitting, so you formally surrender and feel a lot better. For a few months. Then, of course, you hate yourself and as the years pass, that hatred metastasizes into a cancer of the soul. If only… And you’re one of the forlorn ones who dies with regrets.

I don’t do regrets. I don’t have to do regrets. I finish. So let me give you some practical advice from a regret-free life.

The most important thing is habit, not will.

If you feel you need will to get to the keyboard, you are in the wrong business. All that energy will leave nothing to work with. You have to make it like brushing your teeth, mundane, regular, boring even. It’s not a thing of effort, of want, of steely, heroic determination. (I wonder who pushed the meme that writing is heroic; it must have been a writer, trying to get laid.) You have to do it numbly, as you brush your teeth. No theater, no drama, no sacrifice, no “It is a far far better thing I do” crap. You do it because it’s time. If you are ordering yourself, burning ergs, issuing sweat, breathing raggedly through nasal channels that feel like Navajo pottery, you’re doing something wrong. Ever consider law? We definitely need more lawyers.

Easily said, I guess. So let’s give it a practical framework of the here’s-how variety: Work every day. Obviously I don’t mean every day. Hyperbole, it’s what we do for a living. So let me clarify and tell you what I really mean: Work every day.

This is because the most difficult test of the author isn’t his mastery of time or dialogue, his gift for action or character, his ability to suggest verisimilitude in a few strokes, but his ability to get back into the book each day. You have to enter its world. It demands a certain level of concentration to do so. You have to train yourself to that concentration. The easier it is to get there, the better off you’ll be, day in and day out. In fact, if you skip a day, much less a week, the anxiety you unload on yourself doesn’t increase arithmetically but exponentially. If it’s hard after one day, it’ll be hard squared, then cubed, ultimately hard infinite-ed. And that’s only by Wednesday!

Maybe think of it as a stairway. To get to your book, to make contact with the characters and situation, to capture the rhythm of the language, the gist of the scene, the way it fits into the larger arc, you have to climb a few steps. You can do it whistling “Dixie” on one foot backwards blindfolded if you’re used to the path, and nothing gets you used to the path like 139 straight days. A day off makes it six steps, two makes it 36, and I can’t multiply well enough to tell you what 36-squared would be. Suddenly effort is required.

Effort is pain. Pain is not your friend, not this kind of pain. Via pain, doubt, fear, self-loathing, stasis, heavy legs, and halitosis enter your life. Your skin hurts, your hair hurts, the little whatever-it-is between your nostrils hurt. You have the energy of a cat on a couch. Inertia is your destiny, your tragedy, your one-way ticket to where you already are. That is why the easy way is the best way. It is easier to work every day than to deal with the load of self-inflicted grief you’ll encounter when you skip one day, four days, or the rest of your life.

Another helpful tip: F--- research! I say this, knowing that my works are thought to be well-researched and I am proud of the research in them. But in research there’s also death and destruction and self-loathing. You can do the research later. You cannot use “more research” as a crutch to justify your sloth. You are selling narrative not background. The most important truths you tell involve what you know about human behavior, not what color the Obersturmbannfuhrer’s epaulets are. If you don’t know it, just bull on through and keep going. Make it up. Jam it with placeholders. It’s OK. At that stage you need momentum, not precision. That’s why it’s a first draft; that’s why there’ll be a second draft.

Next station of the cross: Wait for it to get good. It may not be good at first. Hoo, boy, do I know this one! At one point Point of Impact was 750 pages long, mostly meetings and gunfights. No plot, no caper, no characters. Bob Lee Swagger was a tracing and I had no idea in hell who Nick Memphis was. It was a catastrophe. But because I had such great faith in my—no, actually, I had no great faith in anything. But I kept hacking away, even though I was deep in the slums of suck city because What Else? It was the only book I had. It was that or nothing. And gradually, each bloody step after another, it finally improved until it was at last above the Mendoza Line. It’s baseball, not football—a long season, slumps, errors, humiliations, bad feelings, bad weather, jet lag, all that stuff, and you just grind it out. You believe that in the end, the numbers (whatever they would be in our business) will show that except for that O-for-31 in May, you had a pretty good season.

Finally: Writer, forgive thyself. You may write crap for years, decades, eons before your brain gets tired of being so mediocre. You will never know if that jump is possible if you don’t keep humping, every day. Numbly, you must do the necessary. Keep on slugging. Forward the light brigade. You can always fix it later. But none of this will be doable, understandable, possible, unless you get to the “the” and the “end.”

The cruelest truth of all is that in the end, you may not be good enough. You may not get over the Mendoza Line. But you’ll never know that for sure unless YOU FINISH THE GODDAMNED BOOK.

Stephen Hunter is the author of more than 20 novels, including, most recently, G-Man, published in May. The retired chief film critic for The Washington Post, where he won the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, he has also published two collections of film criticism and a nonfiction work, American Gunfight. His novel Point of Impact was adapted for film as Shooter, starring Mark Wahlberg. He lives in Baltimore, Maryland.

VANTAG galeria

Saturday, May 27, 2017