Propter Hoc

We're currently in the midst of the publishing industry's winter-solstice break (roughly 15 December to 10 January). That means that there's very little in the way of news. What news there is seems vaguely filthy. On the one hand, we have additional post hoc "revelations" that Judith Regan had been admonished at work for making antisemitic comments, which does nothing whatsoever to convince me that the real reason she was fired was anything other than her dubious editorial judgment. In short, it's a pretext. (An entirely believable pretext... but given the track record News Corporation (including Fox News, even on-air) has regarding antisemitism,¹ one that I don't credit in these circumstances.) Then, there are Sony's continued legal problems with its ludicrous DRM, which have resulted in (depending upon whom one listens to) from US$4.25 million to US$5.75 million. Schade. And yes, this does apply to the book-publishing industry; remember who makes the latest, greatest e-book reader? Do you really think that the corporate attitude is going to be any different?

But, if I can't talk much about publishing, at least I can point to some interesting items about books. Book reviews per se are usually rather boring. I seldom refer to them on this blawg, primarily because their very blandness makes them less than useful. If a reviewer can't manage to show some passion — favorable or unfavorable — about a book that took several hours to read, and more time to review, then I'm not interested in that reviewer's opinions. Even a dryly factual review can still evoke passion for the underlying subject! In no particular order, here are a few reviews I've found of some interest over the last couple of weeks.

One example of the passionate (if ultimately wrongheaded) review that I find useful appeared in the NYTBR, as one of the occasional, grudgingly printed reviews of speculative fiction works. The biggest problem that I have with David Itzkoff (or, for that matter, his predecessor Gerald Jonas) as a reviewer is that he seems to know very little of the world of literature outside of (a tiny subset of) speculative fiction. That limited perspective seriously mars his review of John Scalzi's latest novel, The Android's Dream. I'm afraid that he really missed the point of the most cogent criticism of Starship Troopers, which is an equally cogent criticism of Scalzi's loose trilogy: The rejection of a professional officer corps. It's one thing to say that we have historically given platoon leaders and company commanders too little training and experience (which is rather ironic in Heinlein's case, as he was a squid — the one part of the military that virtually requires the opposite of its junior officers). It's another thing entirely to equate leadership, tactical direction, administration, and strategic thinking with technical prowess... or to assume that one can never cross the line of battle. Itzkoff's review is still helpful, but it lacks context; that undermines its somewhat tepid display of passion. Unfortunately for Itzkoff, his review is primarily helpful in how it helps define a negative space: The books for which Itzkoff has expressed enthusiasm, or at least the reviews I've caught in which Itzkoff has done so, have uniformly sucked, in direct proportion to his enthusiasm. It's sort of like that friend we all had in high school who invariably enthused about some aspect of "high school being" — and whose enthusiasm was always misguided. Avoiding mistakes can be useful, too.

WaPo Book World is ordinarily a lot better in considering speculative fiction as a part of literature, and as merely an heir to a particular storytelling paradigm than something inherently distinct, than is the NYTBR. Whether that comes from the financial preoccupations of New York or the inherent fantasies inside the Beltway, or some other cause, seems somewhat irrelevant. That's particularly so when WaPoBW reviews scholarly works on the underpinnings of speculative fiction fairly and as if they matter, while the NYTBR seldom reviews such works at all.

Passion, though, isn't always an adequate grounding for a review... especially one that goes on at length. If you want a review that won't fit on the back of the paperback edition, or substitute as catalog copy (perhaps in a catalog of books to avoid, if the reviewer is Michiko Kakutani), avoid the newspapers and "industry" outlets and start with The New York Review of Books. A recent review of Thomas Pynchon's latest novel provides an illustrative — if not entirely salubrious — example. The review alternates between attempts to show how clever the reviewer is and wild misstatements of fact, such as "The flap copy (written, as such things usually are, by the book's author)..." (if you work in publishing, I apologize for — but will not reimburse you for — the damage to your keyboard; I was just quoting the review). It is useful in implicitly demonstrating that Against the Day is a much more complex book than many of the short reviews make it seem; it is also useful in learning about Luc Sante's own approach to reading (if not necessarily all that useful in learning about Against the Day itself).

Cultural iconology is often an interesting subject for both books and book reviews. There's always the Shakespeare industry to consider. It's not that I don't appreciate Shakespeare; it's that I don't think of Shakespeare as the epitome of everything of literary value. Conversely, there's the involvement of government in the arts, either overtly and "positively," as the French practice asserts, or more darkly and ominously, as implied by the rest of European history.

Finally for today, consider the ideology of affirmative action, which seldom gets a searching examination. When it does, as in this book by purported "leftist" Walter Benn Michaels, almost nobody defends it. In the end, it's pretty easy to see why affirmative action as we know it seems indefensible: Affirmative action, like virtually every other "solution" to longstanding barriers to diversity (whether in education or elsewhere), commits the error of using a single factor as a proxy for everything that is "wrong" with the status quo. Class structure is founded on a lot more than race, or religion, or ancestral wealth, or any other single factor. Human behavior is a lot more complicated than quantum physics; the lack of success in developing a unified field theory in physics should be a big hint that there isn't one for human behavior, either. Then, on the other hand, we have all of the post hoc arguments over who was the greatest figure in the war on form-of-bigotry x, and the revisionist biographies (both ways), and the inevitable attempts to, and accusations of attempts to, color those biographies for or against someone's unstated interests.

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1. Remember, "antisemitic" isn't restricted to bigotry against "Zionists," or even the broader classification of "Jews." Palestinians, among others, are Semitic peoples, too. Bigotry is bigotry; it's always unacceptable, which in turn means that we don't get to pick and choose which varieties we ignore in the name of expediency. (Except that, as we'll see a few items below, good-natured French-bashing is always in season around here.)

Holiday Cheer

... which, as the temperature drops, will become more useful.¹

• Mary Louise Parker will probably be taking Weeds to Bellevue for some on-location shooting, since Washington State is now among the top five weedy states. It sort of makes you ponder just what the tobacco-farmer lobby has managed to accomplish over the last century.
• This item in a recent Grauniad² is rather ironic, considering Northern Ireland. On the other hand, considering some of the bigotry around here, it might represent a nice change.
• The old-line-warhorse-playing Philadelphia Orchestra — famed, or perhaps notorious, under its longtime director Eugene Ormandy for never being the first (or second, or third) to record or play anything — is jumping into the digital age. Sort of. The orchestra now has its own online store for buying orchestra recordings. This may demonstrate a potential model for certain kinds of musical artists. The real problem is that finding recordings requires that either one knows the exact English name of what one wants to find, so it can be entered into a search engine, or knows the exact source. Here's a disturbing example: Set a single search for finding that music that Lt Col Kilgore likes to play as he sends in the 1st of the 9th. (Hint: Just using the obvious keyword does not get a single reference to a recording on the first screen of Google, Yahoo, or Dogpile.) Perhaps finding a trusted intermediary is an alternate solution to a brick-and-mortar store;³ the only question is how those trusted intermediaries are, themselves, going to stay in business... and what a change of this nature will do to the editorial function (and its musical-recording equivalents).

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1. For my two non-US regular readers, Cheer is a midrange brand of laundry detergent, whose ad campaigns have long touted its cleaning power in cold water (hence, "All-tempa-Cheer").
2. The paper was nicknamed "Grauniad" a couple of decades ago after a profusion of typographical errors. Can you spot the two in this article? (Hints: One is a missing hyphen, and one is a hyphen that doesn't belong... even under Queen's English standards.)
3. In the long run, probably a better one, given the abyssmal ignorance of most music-store clerks of anything that hasn't been reviewed in Billboard, Spin, Rolling Stone, or the like — and that includes the classical-enthusiast clerks, who are usually more comfortable with stuff that was (or might have been) recorded by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Ormandy.

Shortcomings

Of all government agencies, the FCC is probably my least favorite. On the one hand, it appears to have no concept of antitrust enforcement, since it continually allows large commercial media to gobble up or otherwise force out smaller competitors and has been thoroughly captured by those it regulates. On the other hand, it also worries about boobs on TV (MP3, artist-authorized) (while not worrying at all about heads being blown off on the evening news) under the rubric of regulating "indecent speech" on the "public" airwaves. Sometimes, though, a few of the guerrilla warriors (those who haven't been fired yet) find a way to stick it to the FCC. Ironically, a show owned by a corporation that is also a major defense contractor has a history of pushing the limits... at times.

Saturday Night Live broadcast a bleeped-out Natalie Portman rapping about an alternate-history version of herself (an interesting contrast with her first major film role). More recently, the show included a pop singer making a small gift for his girlfriend. Probably very small, either censored or uncensored. I found both versions of that song pretty limp, but only because they're so [expletive deleted in case this e-mail is ever forwarded to the Pacifica Foundation] obvious. It's actually funnier if one substitutes Victorian/Edwardian euphemisms for the term, like "Manhood in a Box." (But then, my misspent youth included a lit. major, so of course I'd think of something nerdy like that.)

What this really reminds me of, more than anything else, is The Muppet Show. Really. Rudolf Nureyev guest-hosted one episode, and did a wonderful little routine with Sam the Eagle. Sam, as usual, was demanding more decent, wholesome entertainment, such as "a brilliant interpretation of classic ballet"... and Nureyev proceeded to do a music-hall number, much to Sam's disgruntlement. It's also reminiscent of Itzakh Perlman's notorious appearance as a guest on Soundstage (an episode called "Fiddlers Three") with Doug Kershaw, in which Perlman was invited to do some improv along with a couple of other bluegrass "fiddle legends" and blew their socks off with his technical prowess. (But I digress more than usual.)

In short, "indecency" is a matter of cultural preference, while "obscenity" rises closer to a matter of cultural imperative. That we no longer have anything resembling a uniform culture in most mid-sized cities — let alone the country as a whole — should be enough to reject both areas as properly subject to government regulation. The insane Colonel Kurtz (Apocalypse Now!) captured the ridiculous nature of the distinction:

We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won't allow them to write "fuck" on their airplanes because it's obscene!

Personally, I think that the Supreme Court precedent holding that obscenity is not First Amendment speech is wrong; one need only consider Ben Franklin's reputation to see that not all of the Founding Fathers would have agreed... But even within that rubric, there's no justification for "indecent," particularly not on the arbitrary and capricious basis asserted by the FCC.

Mistaken Federalism (Part I of ???)

I'm going to start a series of posts that will probably continue — with interruptions — over the next month or so. They are inspired by, but not limited to, a real matter that is currently being litigated. Do not assume that any fact stated in this series of posts — including minutiae like the sex of any person — represents that specific matter.

Famous Author (you've seen Famous Author's works in school libraries if you grew up in the US) is estranged from his family, and has lived nearly a century. Never having been married or otherwise had children, he Author has no obvious intestate heirs under the law of the state in which he lived for the last decade prior to his death. (It is even probable that whatever living relatives he has do not even know of his death, although the announcement made several national top-end newspapers.)

Famous Author had a local attorney establish a literary holding company, for both tax and other reasons, about fifteen years before death. Famous Author's works registered after that date are credited in the Copyright Office's records to "Famous Author, Inc., by Famous Author as a work made for hire." Those publishing contracts were between Publisher and Famous Author, Inc., not directly with Famous Author. He did not, however, transfer previously registered copyrights to Famous Author, Inc. Just to make things even more fun:

• Famous Author provided creative expression to several series of fictional works. Some of these series were entirely completed before the founding of Famous Author, Inc.; a few of them were entirely completed only after the founding of Famous Author, Inc.; but many of them have split histories, and copyright records show early books as "acFamous Author" and later books as "cFamous Author, Inc., by aFamous Author as a work made for hire."
• As implied by the previous item, Famous Author often — particularly toward the end of life — worked in collaboration with several Less Famous Authors. Some of these collaborators produced works that fall into each of the three categories mentioned in the previous item. To make things even more interesting, some of the collaborations involved more than two natural persons.

Famous Author had another local attorney write a will for him. The will divides his estate among three separate interests:

• Certain low-value specific bequests, and the contents of Famous Author's reference library, go to a trust whose purpose is to provide working space and research materials for authors writing in Famous Author's field. No party objects to these provisions.
• The copyrights in Famous Author's works that are "published posthumously" are to go to Miss X, a nonrelated former business associate. Miss X had no role in creating any of Famous Author's works, nor did Miss X ever have any role with Famous Author, Inc.
• The residuary is to go to Mr Y, a nonrelated person. Mr Y had no role in creating any of Famous Author's works, nor did Mr Y ever have any role with Famous Author, Inc.

As noted above, Famous Author dies. His will therefore must go to probate. And now the fun begins, involving federalism, bad will drafting, bad record-keeping, bad statutory drafting... and probably bad faith. But this is just another pathetic cliffhanger.

In the meantime, though, you should read this entry on writers' wills on Neil Gaiman's blog. (I don't endorse everything in detail — particularly not in the sample document he refers to — but that is as much a matter of opinion and hairsplitting as anything else, and stiffs-and-gifts isn't my primary area anyway.)

Train Wrecks and Scapegoats

So, Judith Regan was fired. This was far from inevitable, but also far from surprising. It's been like watching a train wreck... and all that has happened thus far has been that the locomotive has gone through the hole in the bridge. The rest of the train has yet to go off the tracks, but it's only a matter of time.

On the one hand, this is good news for some sense of editorial integrity in the publishing industry. There is little doubt — make that no doubt — that the book that "justified" firing Judith Regan was inappropriate; there is also no doubt that it would have been a "best-seller."¹ That links disturbingly well into my snarky comments yesterday on celebrity memoirs, overrated books, etc. Sadly, the OJ book was just the latest of a number of projects that never should have resulted in arboreogenocidal acts. Bluntly, Regan's editorial judgment stank. However, like a major-league coach/manager fired after missing the playoffs for the third year in a row — and like the Terminator — she'll be back. Her record for increasing revenues (leaving aside the means employed to do so) is strong enough to ensure that.

On the other hand, we're not going to see a change in the publishing program in question for quite some time. Sure, the imprint "Regan Books" will disappear quickly; it might even disappear from future reprintings of drivel like Ru5h's inane screed. The pipeline is full, however, and HarperCollins is probably the last of the big-five US publishers that can afford the fallout (legally and otherwise) of another round of mass contract cancellations. The last time around, the excuse used was "these books are so late that they're in breach."² (We'll leave aside that the only time lateness seems to matter in the publishing industry is when it's the author; late royalty statements and payments are not just routine, but expected.) What's the potential excuse this time?

• Your book is tainted by association with OJ.
• We're going off in another editorial direction entirely. Never mind the specters of Rupert (and Roger Ailes) behind the curtain — everything is going to be different (not!).
• We're doing a major restructuring of HarperCollins's imprints. No, it really isn't relevant that other major US publishers have done so in the last five years without cancelling contracts; we're different, because we're an integrated media conglomerate, and everything has to fit into the right hole here are NewsCorp.
• Your book is tainted by associated with Judith, even though she was only lukewarm to it and acquired it only to keep your editor happy.

No, I'm not convinced, either. And that means that the remnants of Judith Regan's acquisition policies will be released over the next twelve to eighteen months. It might be harder to spot them once the imprint is dispersed elsewhere. But we can look forward to more porn star guides to sex from Harper Collins for a while yet.

In the meantime, sit back and enjoy the train wreck. The caboose should be going over the cliff in just about ten months; then it's just Wile E. Coyote time.

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1. Of course, this is technically only a conjecture. Unlike music and movies, "bestsellerdom" is an entirely relative and entirely unverifiable measure of sales. There is literally no single source that covers all outlets... except for publishers' royalty statements, which are notoriously inaccurate (and distorted by the returns system). It would be nice to have "gold bookmarks" for sales of 100,000 copies, and "platinum bookmarks" for sales of 250,000 copies, certified by an independent (or even only quasi-independent; the music industry manages) organization. We don't. Only the New York Times knows how many copies it takes to get onto a bestseller list in any given week — and it's not telling, particularly since that number is a statistical projection from sales from a few New York-area bookstores.
2. I don't pretend to know what all of the hundred-odd cancellations were. I find it curious, though, that none of the ones I do know about (it's bigger than a breadbox) were for books from authors who had previously earned a "best seller" designation. Statistically, there should have been at least three in that sample size.

I'm back, sort of. Hopefully, this slight redesign of Scrivener's Error will meet the (few) objections I've received. And no, objections will not result in eliminating the fine print. It wouldn't be a blawg without some fine print, would it? In any event, a few items of dubious interest:

• Publishing isn't well known for its compliance with commercial standards. For example, the industry says that an author has "sold" a book to a publisher, even though in most cases it's a license, not a sale. Similarly, the industry says that it has "sold" books to distributors and bookstores, when in fact (because they are fully returnable for full credit without demonstration of defect, and no money has changed hands) the books have only been consigned to the distributors and bookstores. And finally, when the books finally get into the consumer's hand, they do so a few numbers short of a full deck. And people wonder why profit margins in the publishing industry appear so low...
• Then there's the question of what the publishing industry offers for sale. Too often, it's garbage, like celebrity memoirs. The same thought on why margins are so low comes back.
• On the other hand, many of the "better" books don't get the attention they deserve, especially compared to some overrated books. It's not just a matter of taste, either. Here's an example: Name the last five winners of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. How many of them remain in print in their original editions? How many of them have you actually read, all the way through? Since this isn't exactly a populist blawg, I don't think anyone can claim that I'm trying to substitute popularity for value. Neither "literary" nor "liberal" is a shameful red letter.

Design Change

Scrivener's Error will be quiet(er) for the next few days while I update the design a bit. When I first designed web pages under the underlying paradigm, the 800x600 screen was really just becoming standard. Things have evolved a bit since then, and it's about time to adapt.

The changes will be significant; they should not, however, either make it harder to read or turn this blawg into something that it's not. Think of them more like the two-years-into-life-cycle "facelifts" that Detroit used to give passenger cars. It'll be the same engine and transmission under the hood — I'm not going hybrid — but the interior should be a little more up-to-date. I might even install a built-in cupholder so you've got somewhere to put your coffee before spewing it on the keyboard.

Not Cutting the Mustard

Don't try to find any grand organizing principle here.

• The NYT "editorial" on bibliographies in novels completely misses the litigation-avoidance point of including it. A bibliography is not an immunity shield that prevents someone from filing a claim; it is just a preemptive device that undermines such claims before they're even made. And, given Mr Mailer's works, his novels seem particularly in need of all the preemptive legal help they can get.
• The hardest part of publishing isn't selling books; it isn't editing books; it's determining what books to publish. The industry suffers from an odd mix of nineteenth-century sensibilities, twentieth-century business structures, and twenty-first-century technology. Leaving aside the purported preference for Courier as a standard typeface (I have yet to meet a reputable editor at a commercial publisher who would reject a book-length manuscript because it didn't use Courier), the entire acquisition system would leave Rube Goldberg unable to discern how it works. Things get no better when looking at distribution, particularly in the Internet Age.
• Over in the UK, the Gowers Report (PDF, 700k) on adjusting intellectual property statutes to contemporary concerns bears some careful consideration. On the one hand, the report (rightly, IMNSHO) dismisses recent calls to extend the copyright for sound recordings, which is currently 50 years in the UK. To my mind, a 50-year flat term is about the right copyright term for anything. The vast majority of copyrightable works that continue to have any commercial value 50 years after creation were created by people in their late twenties and older. Changing the entire system to accommodate a few high-value items misconstrues the purpose of copyright, at least under the American rubric: promoting progress in the arts. Note, too, that the loss of copyright in a particular recording does not mean that the copyright holder cannot exploit it at all; it means only that others can, too, without permission or payment (presuming that we ignore droit morale and droit d'auteur, because just about everyone does). There's a very simple way for copyright holders to maintain an income stream: Add value to the piece after its copyright expires. Obsessive fans of Cliff Richard would probably be interested in reading his behind-the-scenes-in-the-studio description of how his greatest hits came to be as part of a reissue-CD insert, and would pay an appropriate premium for such a collection. Whether this is consistent with my notion of "progress" in the arts is beside the point (burning Sir Cliff's master tapes would do better); the market makes a lot of mistakes in promoting "progress."

  On the other hand, means, methods, and motivations for enforcement of copyright get some very thoughtful consideration. I'm still chewing over the Report, but some other actors have already formed their opinions. It seems to me that the real problem with copyright exploitation is the same as that of winning the lottery (or, more topically, the Irish Sweepstakes): The possible magnitude of gain overwhelms rational consideration of the probable total return. Current distribution structures only reinforce that misanalysis. But that's for another time, at much greater length (and with a lot more footnotes).

Catsup

We use mostly salsa and custom-made sauces around here — especially if it's hot enough to bite back — but it's time to catch up on some miscellaneous items of the last few days.

• Once in a great while, the New York Sun fails to resemble its UK namesake: It prints a thoughtful article. This time, it's about the non-demise of the book in favor of the e-book. I'll consider the bare possibility that e-books might begin to even equal the market for paper books when I can safely expect to read an e-book at the beach, in the bath, or wherever... and not have to worry about the bloody battery running out.
• Cultural imperialism is both fun and profitable. Just ask Disney. On the other hand, it may not be quite as insidious as one might think.
• More bloviating on "plagiarism" in the NYT leads to a Marxist sort of question. Is it just barely possible that the relatively recent rise of "that bestseller stole my book" suits in the consciousness of the creative community (and, for that matter, the public) reflects a perceived, or even actual, reaction to unfair income distribution? Exhibit A: The royalty percentage on trade books ordinarily increases after achieving certain copies-sold targets (this is usually called an "escalator" or "sales split"), which seems to favor the bestseller. Economically, it is purportedly justified by the recovery of sunk and other fixed costs in the first few thousand copies sold of a given book... but that's a hyperformalist accounting interpretation reminiscent of Pirandello with little relationship to actual effort put into a given book.
• Speaking of warped publishing economics, consider this book on the subject (I've found Greco's previous work relatively reliable, if too-often dismissive of the niche nature of publishing economics) or this "special report" at Forbes.
• Meanwhile, the form of art (and novels) continues to change. Some commentators either decry or celebrate author-provided bibliographies in novels without stopping to consider the legal function of such a bibliography: By acknowledging influences, an author goes a long way toward deterring the kind of suits mentioned in the previous item. On the one hand, the absence of a purported source from the bibliography is evidence (not proof) that the author did not consult that source, especially if the bibliography appears to be carefully prepared. On the other hand, the presence of a purported source in the bibliography will force both the author and the publisher to take more care in ensuring permission or fair use. (Maybe not enough care, but more than none.)
• Then there's the question of who should be in charge. It appears that the Getty Foundation has decided that its new director should be not a businessperson, but a museum curator. On the other hand, some claim that merely being a great musician isn't enough to be an orchestra member any more (if it ever was). I shudder to think of what would happen if teaching skill were to be expected of authors...

And remember, there are exactly fifty-seven communists in the Department of Defense, and our prospective Secretary of Defense is experienced in dealing with them.

Where One's Nose Belongs

... in a book. It's the silliest season in publishing right now (against some pretty stiff competition). On the one hand, we have the usual premature "best book of the year" lists, almost invariably tilted toward works appearing in August and thereafter. Those in the Washington Post Book World today are all too typical. The "consolidated" list is really no more inclusive, or broadly based, than are either the "top ten" or the personal selections of the (normally far more open-minded) Jonathan Yardley. It's also just past the National Book Award announcements, which frequently include books that have not yet been published… such as this year's winner for fiction, which had not yet hit the street when the award was announced a few weeks back.

On the other hand, the publishing industry (and review industry) really does not help itself very much with its refusal to learn from film (and, to a lesser extent, popular music). Thomas Pynchon's most recent novel, Against the Day, is a paradigmatic example. Complete Review asserts that there seems to be "no consensus" on the book's quality, and evaluates Michoko Kakutani's review as a "D+":

Thomas Pynchon's new novel, Against the Day, reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author's might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

(20 Nov 06, typography corrected). For many reviewers, this would indeed be a "D+" review... but it reminds me more of those train-wreck-awful commercials for Life cereal starring Mikey ("He won't eat it — he hates everything!") than of either a perceptive review or a comparative evaluation. In the broad spectrum of Kakutani's reviews, this is a B, not a D+.

A quick scan of a spectrum of other reviews only confirms that book reviewers are being encouraged more to show their own cleverness and erudition than to assist readers with an actual evaluation of the books. Liesl Schillinger's review in the New York Times Book Review is worded far more positively than is Kakutani's (which appeared in the daily pages of that same paper), but remains a B to B+ review within the (admittedly smaller) sample of Schillinger's reviews. One will end up equally confused after looking at reviews by (in alphabetical order by reviewer) Mark Feeney (Boston Globe), David Gale (Observer), Roger Gathman (American-Statesman), Keith Gessen (New York Magazine), Ludovic Hunter-Tilney (Financial Times), Douglas Kennedy (The Times), Peter Körte (Frankfurter Allgemeine) (auf Deutsch), John Leonard (The Nation), Tim Martin (The Independent), Louis Menand (New Yorker), Steven Moore (Washington Post Book World), and/or Sophie Ratcliffe (Times Literary Supplement). We're left with little more than a file full of personnel reports from disparate departments in a large company, with little understanding that these reports concern the same person/book; the reviews too often concern the person Thomas Pynchon more than they concern his book, but that's an argument for another time. Film criticism at least tends to force reviewers to assign "grades" to each review. One cannot necessarily say that a film awarded four stars by Roger Ebert is necessarily a better film than one awarded three stars by A.O. (Tony) Scott, but one can say that Ebert himself considers a film he awards four stars better than a film he awards three stars. Perhaps part of the problem is that too few reviewers build up a large enough body of work to have a coherent/consistent system; perhaps another part is that the purposes for which one reads books vary more widely than the purposes for which one sees films. Nonetheless, reviews would be more useful — and, therefore, would gain more weight over time — if they closed with a short, evaluative grade on some scale or another. Anything less is, well, silly.

Speaking of silly, though, consider bad writing about sex and its causes. Consider plagiarism and its discontents. Consider bad cover design, bad book design, and some causes of bad book content. Then contrast these thoughts with the unfortunate tendency in the publishing world to celebrate the author instead of reading and evaluating his/her work, to ignore the wonders of smaller works and composite works (let alone assuming that bigger is necessarily better), and the rarity of serious reviews on serious subject.